Jaw-dropping Movie: Inception

Title: Inception
Director: Christopher Nolan
Main actors: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page
Genre: Action, Mystery, ThrillerDate watched: 21 August 2010
Place: Lotte Mart, Phu My Hung, HCMC, Vietnam
Category: Outside of Class

“Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” –Cobb –

“You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe? What do you feel?” –Mal –

Inception is a movie about reality and dreams. Cobb, the main character in this film has a unique skill of stealing secrets using other people’s dreams. Although this skill is very valuable, it has cost him his loved ones—his children and his wife, Mal. However, he is given an opportunity by Saito to have his life back, to see his children again and to be with them again if he could plant an idea into his rival’s mind. To achieve this, he must go into three levels of dreams and come back to reality with a given amount of time. His projections (Mal) act as the obstacles in this “maze” created by the dream architect. This movie questions whether our life is real or if it is all a dream that we are not able to escape from. If it is all a dream, who are the dream-makers, the architects of our dreams? If it is all a dream, who are the projections? Are we in the limbo right now? These are questions that the movie makes us think about. The movie leaves the audience to question whether Cobb is still in a dream, or if he is back to reality.

I think that in the end, Cobb is back to reality. I think this is true because the totem (that allows him to determine whether he is in a dream or reality), had lost its balance and was on the verge of toppling over. However, it may just be my desire for the ending to be the reality that I try and come up with reasons why I think this is true.

Because dreams feel so real when they are happening, I don’t think there is a way of knowing whether our life is a dream or a reality unless we wake up from this big dream. However I come to wonder, ‘What happens when we fall asleep in our life, do we go into another level of dreams? Or do we come back to reality? What is reality itself? How should reality be defined?’ I think the life we are living in is reality, but I don’t think there is any way of knowing this is true. It cannot be proven, because to be proven, we should know the difference between reality and dreams. Identifying this difference would essentially answer the original question of whether our life is a dream or reality. Like Nagal said in his article “How do we know what we know?” it is all a big loop.  Trying to answer the question of reality and dreams is a cycle; a cycle which will not lead to answers, but lead us back to the question itself.

The Mouse Who Ate The Cheese

Title: The Mouse who ate the Cheese and Those Who Believed, Those Who Knew, Those Who Doubted
Author: Dr. Stuart Fowler, Educational Consultant, Penrith, Melbourne, Australia
Class: Theory of Knowledge
Category: In Class



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This article was about a guy at a party (claiming he was not hallucinating or drunk), seeing a mouse eat the cheese. His friends who know what type of person he is, believes him because they do not think he would lie to them and so they trust them. However, the guy hosting the party doubts Bill (the guy who claims to have seen the mouse eat the cheese) and says there are no mouse in his house. All of these characters have their reasons for thinking/believing what they think/believe.

As I read this article, many questions popped into my mind. First of all, how did Bill know he was not hallucinating or that he was not drunk? Most people are not aware of when they are drunk or hallucinating, instead they believe what they claim to see. Here, Bill is doing the same thing. He claims to have seen the mouse eating the cheese but he could have easily been hallucinating or drunk. He does not know he is not hallucinating or that he is not drunk, he believes this to be true.

Another question that came up as I read this article was, how did his friends (Virginia Turner, Adrian Small) know that what Bill had said was reliable? Like I said, he could be hallucinating, or lying, or claiming what he assumed to be true. How did they know he was speaking the truth? Is trust enough to justify one’s belief as being true?

With Bill’s claim, I came to wonder, ‘How does he know that there are no mice in his apartment?’ Does he really know this? Or is he simply trying to convince himself of this being true? He uses experience to justify his thought. He states that he had exterminators come and check his house frequently. He relies on these people to have made sure there are no mice in his house. But then, how does he know his money is being used effectively? The exterminators could have pretended to check cautiously, or could have even pretended to spray toxic liquids in order to kill the mice when it was simply water. These are all possibilities.

All of the characters in this article use different ways of justifying their thoughts and beliefs. Bill uses empirical reasoning (observation) while Virginia and Adrian use rational reasoning (trust) to justify their beliefs. Both of the reasonings are effective and one is not better than the other. Some may argue that empirical is more reliable because we can justify it with what we saw. But then, how do we know what we saw? How do we know we were not hallucinating? We weren’t imagining? We can’t. We just need to believe what we know and from there, we can proceed in learning and believing and questioning and living life.

The Beginner's Mind

Title: The Dancing WuLi Masters, an Overview of the New Physics – Beginner’s Mind
Author: Gary Zukav
Publication Info: Atlanta International School
Class: Theory of Knowledge
Category: In Class



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            The Beginner’s Mind explores the concept of nonsense. It asks us to think about how we classify something as being nonsense. Zukav states that what one person considers as nonsense, is different to what another person thinks is nonsense. Zukav gives an example of a Zen story. Tea is poured into a cup until it overflows and the person continued. The person pouring the cup stated “‘Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’” (Zukav 26). This example shows how we must empty our minds and be open to new ideas, and all possibilities. He also gives an example of a man thinking that he is a football. Zukav argued that this was pure nonsense because he was the only one who viewed himself as a football. However, the man thought everyone else’s thoughts were nonsense because he believed that he truly was a football.

            In the first example, it states that we must destroy all our previous thoughts, assumptions, and perceptions. However, if this was always necessary, how will we know anything? Is the Zen the state of not knowing anything and therefore being open to all possibilities rather than knowing that something is nonsense? Once we learn something new by having the beginner’s mind, we would have to empty our minds again and become a beginner again. Therefore, we wouldn’t have any progression as a learner. Linking the two examples together, if we had the beginner’s mind, would we view and believe the man as being a football because we have no assumptions, no thoughts and no perception? How do we know that he is not a football? Is majority always correct? Not necessarily, the majority previously thought the world was flat but they were not correct. How do we know that we do not believe in something that is nonsense right now? Does it all lead to what we have faith in? If so, what determines what we should believe in, what we should have faith in? If this is all true, does nonsense really exist or is it just what we do not believe in?

How Do We Know Anything?

Author: Nagel, Thomas.

Publication info: What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Oxford UD, 1987.

Class: Theory of Knowledge

Category: In class
 



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                Nagel states that we cannot know whether we are living in the real world because we only know what is inside our brain. We rely on our senses and experience to explain the physical world but we cannot be sure whether we are living in the physical world. Nagel states that everything exists in our mind. We cannot know whether we are living in the physical world because there is a possibility that everything is a dream. It is possible that we are living in a dream right now.



            This article relates to the movie “Inception” in the sense that it brings up a point about our lives possibly being a giant dream. We cannot be sure which is the real world—our dream when we lie in the bed and sleep, or the world we wake up in or neither. How do we know that the physical world is not our dreams? How do we know that when we wake up from the dream, we are now experiencing the physical world? Is there a way to figure this out? Or is it like Nagel said, impossible to figure this out because we only know what’s in our mind?



            It’s sort of frightening to think that we could be living a life full of never-ending dreams. There is a possibility of our lives being as how “Inception” shows us, waking up and dreaming continuously. We could all be confused which world is the “real” world because we cannot really know for sure. We cannot be certain because there are so many possibilities. We believe that the world we wake up from is the real world because we want it to be. We want to have a sense of stability in our lives. Therefore, we’re practicing pragmatic theory. We believe that there is a real world, because it benefits us by giving us a form of stability in our lives, something we can build our lives on.



Personality Test

Title: Know Thyself—gnōthi sauton
Class: Theory of Knowledge
Category: In Class

            We think we know who we are, but do we really? In our theory of knowledge class, we took a personality test from two sites, www.humanmetrics.com and www.kisa.ca/personality/. Before we took these tests, we had to write a short paragraph of who we thought we are. I wrote that I considered myself to be an outgoing and susceptible person, easily influenced by the people I am surrounded by. I find happiness when I know I am of service to other people and consider other’s opinions before mine which works as both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage would be that because of this, I am a caring person but the disadvantage would be that I am susceptible to other people’s judgments and thoughts. People tell me I care too much about what other people think and so I am easily hurt. I know who I am through what other people tell me. For example, because my friends tell me I care too much about what other people think, I know I am a sensitive and susceptible person.

             With this idea of my personality in mind, I took these personality tests. Both of these tests concluded that I had the personality trait of ESFJ. The letters stand for extroverted sensing, feeling and judging. This meant that I was an extrovert, meaning that I was outgoing but I still valued feelings and is the type of person who go by the rules and rely on facts. I am the person who depends on empirical knowledge; I like to see it to believe it or sense it with the other four senses that I have. Because the personality tests matched my understanding of who I am, I believe that I have a clear idea of who I am. However, I still wonder, is this who I really am? Could this personality be a mask that I pretend to be because I’m afraid to show the others who I really am? If this is a mask, have I become too attached to it that I have begun to think that this mask of personality is the true ‘me’? How do I really know? Are these test taking sites reliable? With all these questions in mind, I come to think, ‘so do I really know who I really am? Or do I just think I know?’ Do we ever really know who we are? Or do we just believe in our thoughts?