The Mind: Aristotle Kant And Socrates :: essays research papers

&65279Daniel C. Dennet said in A Glorious Accident that, "our minds--if you like-- argon just asreal as our dreams"(Kayzer, 37). The implications of this statement be substantial, for if this istrue--if our minds and our consciousness are just dreams or the constructs of our brain, what weperceive, our memories, and our sense of reality are nothing more than colors. Not only is thisscientifically a valid statement, but it forces us to interrogative who we are, and what we know . It isthe latter that is of interest at this moment. What I wish to do in this essay is to tie together thisconcept of perception and the mind with what we excite read in Text and Critics, as well as todiscuss the need for science to find "reality" and "knowledge."     But, first, we must understand what Dennet means by our minds being as real as ourdreams. Dennets point is profound and a point that should not be dismissed as a whim of aphilosopher but, inste ad, a scientific reality-- not the construct of a mans innate mind. One isled to believe that the best way to describe the mind as an illusion is to describe it in terms ofdreams. When we sleep, our external sensory(a) input is shut down. However, our minds, when wedream, are not in a very different state than when we are awake, other than as said before that ourexternal sensory input is shut down. Thus, we can conclude that, our waking state is just as unreal as our dreams, though with supplementary external sources of information. When dreaming, we obviously receive sensory input that enables our minds to create dreams with sights,sounds, touch, taste, emotions, experience, and sometimes even smell. If there is no externalsensory input, we must logically imply that it is coming from internal sources in the brain, themost obvious one being memory. Immediately, we can agree that memory is a subjective sourceof reality, as we can see in the ease in which memory fills in its missing gaps with often incorrect information (often influenced by our in-person bias) as well as the ease in which memorycan be altered or repressed and false memory can be created. So, immediately, by looking at                                                   S. Brown 2dreams, we can see that one source of our perception is subject to all sorts of editing by the brain. time the subjectivity of the memories is most evident during the dream state, our memory is