I attach relevance and importance to the fact that I experienced exactly the same thing both dreaming and awake. — javi2541997

It's impossible to experience anything twice with exactitude. With respect to a person's perceptual habits/expectations much of what is potentially new to a re-experience may be rendered negligible by habitual perception. We tune out most of the information available to us for good reason.

The people you perceive are no more constitutive of what is real than the people you imagine as an artifact of past perception. Though we can ponder this to impractical consequence. We ought to know the use value of determining what constitutes the many kinds of things that could be said to exist, whether abstract or concrete.

We do imagine and produce simulacra of humans at the level of disembodied, abstract, internal, private illusions. We do this here in the forum by language alone, to assist the projection of mixtures, amalgamations, explorations of ideas by reading others representations of their thought.

We are dreaming now, to the extent we participate in a communal dream of shared reality. The brain is blind, subject to the projection of its own representations of the world it has indirect access to. Many minds are projecting upon another, merely abstractions, which necessarily tune out and simplify the horrendously complex empirical world.

The map is not the territory.

The perceived person is not to be confused with the actual/empirical person.

Yet the contrary position also holds:

The map becomes the territory, insofar as it remakes/refies the territory.

The perceived person stands in for the person, even in their absence, as a memory mediated figure. The expectation holds they resemble themselves predictably. Javi resembles Javi enough to affirm: Javi is Javi.

There is a horrendous video of a Korean(?) mother who lost her child, who was enabled by AI to bring back an interactive simulacra of said child. Something inside me recoils against this, yet if the mother could just dream the same scenario, on command, and it was possible to be made public, would I have the same reaction. Probably not.

Whereas I may not completely agree with your take... I know that what you experience in a dream has very real consequences upon your own muscle memory even while awake. To not take dreams seriously is mostly a failure of self awareness. They don't fit into the rigid Dawgma of the Bruh who beholds and subsequently denies them.

Interesting thoughts and post. It is late here, and I am tired as hell, so my brain is a bit off. I need to rest and sleep to heal my mind. I did a lot of things today. I promise I will answer you with a more elaborate reply tomorrow morning. Furthermore, I want to think about it more deeply before answering.

As a forethought, I will explore and discuss your perspective on why the people in real life differ from the people that appear in my dreams. I think it is plausible that I can experience the same thing twice in both living and dreaming. But I am sleepy, and I can't elaborate on this for now. Until tomorrow! :wink:

@Nils Loc

First, I ended up with the conclusion that, for the reasons you expressed above, there are differences between yourself here, in reality, and then yourself in my dreams. It seems that the latter is like a hologram or a figure in a mirror that I should not trust in.

I can't agree with that. The fact that my mind may cheat me in my dreams is somehow true, but it is not always the case. As I said in the OP, the dreams were just an exact reproduction of myself interacting with you in TPF. I thought it was very real until I woke up, and I realised that I was dreaming. That it was a dream and now I am in "the real world".

Nonetheless, I tried to think of it more deeply. It is important to begin with the observer: Javi, me.

I understand that the Cogito has always received criticism from many philosophers after Descartes posed this point. Yet I think it was actually a good example. I think in both reality and dreams; therefore, I am. Then, I exist.

Now that we are at this point, it is important to ask ourselves if everything around us exists as well. I don't want to jump in the rabbit hole of whether the external world is mind-created or exists with independence from us.

My point is that I think you exist because in different mental states you caused certain experiences and feelings in me. I think this is more than necessary to prove your existence. I don't care if you're real or a figment of my imagination; your source of existence is clear: experience.

Then if the observer gives as existent the perceived. Why do we need more to prove someone else's existence?

My point is that I think you exist because in different mental states you caused certain experiences and feelings in me. I think this is more than necessary to prove your existence. — javi2541997

But we don't need and can't use private dream content for the proof of any existence as it stands in contrast with what really confers that proof: the waking life of enduring reality. Though we can equivocate here for the sake charity/fun that dreaming together is constitutive of the possibility of any experience of each other. Paradoxically in this equivocation, dreaming together also requires us to be awake, to share our visions/perspectives as we are doing so here.

Secondarily maybe you are conveying there are certain TPF members who you enjoy exchanges with, time after time, and their appearance in your dream signals a deeper kind of acknowledgement/value of their being/existence.

We could strip Berkeley's dictum "To be is to be perceived" of its metaphysical weight about foundations and consider it as just a dictum about existential/social relevance.

We could strip Berkeley's dictum "To be is to be perceived" of its metaphysical weight about foundations and consider it as just a dictum about existential/social relevance. — Nils Loc

Kafka gets that part. We are the dice in the game.

Kafka gets that part. — Paine

Care to expand?

Between the man who has long turned to dust and the posthumous reception of his works, where is this being that is Kafka? Kafka is just a memorial reconstitution, the interpolation of his stories/biography, piecemeal ideas searching for context, in the theater of our heads, an arising and falling away. We always want to understand what defies understanding, as if narrowing to a subject with careful reading/analysis we arrive somewhere. Reading Kafka might make us gloomy and nauseous, in which case the Dr. recommends abstinence.

In Kafka's reflections and maxims, there is provided a glimpse of how to proceed in a dark world. Maybe it could be described as a kind of stoic or gnostic vision. Contact with it requires meeting it on its own terms. So, a failure of description is accepted as description.

The stories are sharply different from each other. The one's depicting an account given by a person do not match what is given purely through the third person. It all gives the impression of an epistemology just out of reach.

My point is not to justify your existence, but that you exist at least for me. — javi2541997

This is where the problem is. How do you justify this dichotomy of "someone exists objectively" vs. "someone exists at least for me"?