Another A+ load of rambling.

I liked what Descartes had to say about the things our minds invent in dreams. We think that dreams are pure imagination, creating things that don’t exist in waking life. But because waking life (reality, if you want to think of it like that) is all we know and all we have experienced, our dreams have to take elements from waking life in order to exist. These elements might be combined in surprising ways, or be difficult to recognize, but a dream will always contain something that is familiar to us, even if it is only colors or sounds.

            When I was a little kid, I used to have this idea that anything I wasn’t directly looking at right at that moment just turned itself off and didn’t exist until I looked at it again. Maybe I was just a late bloomer in terms of figuring out object permanence because I carried on with this all the way up to pre-operational (up to age seven) when you’re supposed to get it figured out during sensorimotor (birth to two). It was hard to imagine that there could be things going on outside of what I was directly experiencing. I decided that if I couldn’t see someone or something, it / they still existed, paused somehow, waiting for me to come back. When Descartes talks about “neither earth, nor sky, nor anything extended thing, nor figure, nor magnitude, nor place, providing at the same time, however, for the persuasion that these things do not exist otherwise than as I perceive them”, I was reminded of my peculiar childhood philosophy. Maybe God plays a trick on us so that things only exist if we see them and think about them.

Descartes suggests that denying the existence and possession of their own body would classify a person as insane. There’s definitely a psychological disorder that deals with feeling like you and your body aren’t one and the same. If you feel separate from your entire body, it’s dissociative identity disorder. If it’s just a limb, (say, that pesky arm that’s been overly intrusive and in your way since childhood), then it’s known as body integrity identity disorder. Most people who suffer from the latter aren’t crazy in any other way, but they’ll go to the extent of severely damaging the offending limb so that doctors will be forced to amputate it. Abnormal psychology is rad.