Answer my Grandson's question please

[david3103]

I was driving my very nearly 10yr old grandson last week and he asked me this...

"How do we know that we are real, and not just part of someone else's dream?"

[Mohican]

 Cogito ergo sum- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum

[Longines]

Because no one would dream of a 4 hour project review meeting.

[Tal]

I was going to write a long post about how some of the greatest minds in the world believe the reality we see is actually the projection of information from the outer edge of the universe, rather like a hologram on a 1980s fridge magnet that changes as you move your head. It's a kind of extension of string theory in that you can take the entire universe effectively to be two dimensional. This would be to reward your young student for an excellent question.

Then I saw this:

Because no one would dream of a 4 hour project review meeting.

Tell him that. Much better. Welcome to reality, son.

[vegaslover]

Because no one would dream of a 4 hour project review meeting.

Winner^^^

[kukushkin88]

Buy him a copy of Sophie´s World by Jostein Gaarder, I didn´t get to read it as a child but enjoyed it nonetheless and I reckon it´s ideal for a youngster starting to think in this way.

[George2Loose]

More importantly how would your grandson or indeed his grandfather answer these questions?!?

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=64802.0

[Rod]

I was driving my very nearly 10yr old grandson last week and he asked me this...

"How do we know that we are real, and not just part of someone else's dream?"

Awesome question, love philosophy and epistemology:-

We know we are real. We don't know that we are not part of somebody else's dream. At least from my point of view I know I am real (as in I exist), I do not KNOW for a 100% fact excluding all possibility that I am wrong, that anybody else is real (I cannot solve hard solipsism). There is a very very tiny chance that my existence is part of somebodies dream but this makes no difference to me as I am forced to act as I would if this was not the case anyway. It is fair to say it is extremely likely that reality is real and everybody in reality exists, do we know this is the case? Strictly speaking no we don't.

[teddybloat]

Wittegstienn's private language theory can also mount an assault on solopsism.

Basically you cannot invent your own language, language is grounded in community. An internal language would be fleeting and make no sense. If it is the case that the idea of a private language makes no sense then we can infer that there must be minds other than ours. Wittegstien is a wild ride and a few sentences cant do him justice.

Ultimatety extreme solopsism is intellectual masturbation, though,

Tell your grandson that thinking like that will make him go blind.

[Claw75]

Buy him a copy of Sophie´s World by Jostein Gaarder, I didn´t get to read it as a child but enjoyed it nonetheless and I reckon it´s ideal for a youngster starting to think in this way.

big +1 to this