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The Dream of Human Life, by unknown artist, based on Michelangelo’s drawing The Dream, c. 1533. The dream argument is the postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore, any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and ...
A dream could be considered a type of simulation capable of fooling someone who is asleep. As a result, Bertrand Russell has argued that the "dream hypothesis" is not a logical impossibility, but that common sense as well as considerations of simplicity and inference to the best explanation rule against it. [50]
Boltzmann brain. The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a brain to spontaneously form in space, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did. Physicists use the Boltzmann brain thought ...
Activation-synthesis hypothesis. The activation-synthesis hypothesis, proposed by Harvard University psychiatrists John Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, is a neurobiological theory of dreams first published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in December 1977. The differences in neuronal activity of the brainstem during waking and REM sleep ...
e. Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument advanced by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian. [1] This argument posits that individuals essentially engage in a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God. Pascal contends that a rational person ...
The Epimenides paradox is usually classified as a variation on the liar paradox, and sometimes the two are not distinguished. The study of self-reference led to important developments in logic and mathematics in the twentieth century. In other words, it is not a paradox once one realizes "All Cretans are liars" being untrue only means "Not all ...
The problem of evil is the philosophical question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God. [1][2][3] There are currently differing definitions of these concepts. The best known presentation of the problem is attributed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
The capacity to have lucid dreams is a trainable cognitive skill. [1] During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of volitional control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment, although this control of dream content is not the salient feature of lucid dreaming. [2][3][4][5] An important distinction is that lucid dreaming ...