Descartes' Contributions to Inception

I would like to begin with a joke that I never get to tell, but hopefully you all will be able to appreciate it. 

So Descartes walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender happily obliges and then asks him if he’d like some peanuts to munch on with his drink. Descartes thinks it over and replies, “I think not” and then disappears. 

Though there are many aspects of Descartes’ meditations to focus on, I would like to address Descartes’ dream argument and relate it to one of my favorite movies: Inception. 

In Descartes’ first meditation, he attempts to doubt everything he has previously known in order to create a strong foundation for what he can really know to be true about himself and about the world around him. “. . . but, as the removal from below of the foundation necessarily involves the downfall of the whole edifice, I will at once approach the criticism of the principles on which all my former beliefs rested”. I find this method of skepticism to be an extremely valuable way to look at the world, subtracting all previous judgment and assumption in order to understand what is really true about the world. 

The meditator observes that most of the things he knows to be true stem from his senses. However, though he has previously taken these sense perceptions to be the truth, when cast into doubt, he realizes that his senses often mislead him. “All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us. . . “. Through this doubt, the reader is lead into Descartes’ dream argument. 

I, personally, suffer strongly from nightmares, and I find that the most terrifying aspect of my nightmares is how strongly based in reality they really are. It is the fact that the situations in my dreams are so realistic as I am dreaming them that makes them so paralyzing. Similarly, Descartes wonders how one can know the difference between reality and a dream. All dreams, at some level, are based on aspects of the real world. One cannot simply dream something which he has not previously perceived by the senses. 

It is this struggle between reality and the dream world that is so accurately depicted in the film Inception. Though the plot could take an eternity to explain in detail, I will briefly summarize the aspects of relevance.  The main character, Dom Cobb is able to navigate the world of dreams in order to find out the most precious of secrets and even to manipulate reality. Cobb is tasked with an illegal undertaking, to plant an idea into someone’s head through the dream world, and through the fulfillment of this task, he will be able to once again see his family and live the life he has been kept from living.

Since the dream world has this incredible likeness to reality, he has an object which helps him to know whether or not he is dreaming or not called a “totem”. 

As the action pact plot rolls on, one is sucked into whether or not the final scene is truly real or not. It is up the viewer to decide whether or not the totem will fall, indicating Cobb’s successful return to his family in the real world, or whether he is stuck in the dream world. 

The reason I bring up this reference is to depict Descartes’ point that one cannot always trust his or her senses, even when the circumstances seem incredibly real. As the meditator continues with his speculation on how he can be deceived so, if God is supremely powerful and good, giving him all his perceptions, he wonders if perhaps some evil deceiver is the culprit. However, through all of his speculation he is able to come to the conclusion that the one thing he truly knows is that he is a thinking thing, and this he cannot doubt. Thus if he “thinks not”, as he decides against ordering peanuts at a bar, he ceases to exist. Remind Descartes never to say no to peanuts.