Reason & Intuition:

I asked my friend the Descartes expert (actually, he's an Early Modern expert, not particularly Descartes, as he was quick to point out), and he writes:

'In the third Rule of Reasoning, Descartes writes about intuition that it "is the conception formed by an attentive mind so clear and distinct that it admits of no doubt: or what amounts to the same thing, it is the clear conception of a sound and attentive mind, the product of unaided reason." So, I am not entirely sure it is right to say of intuition that it is a faculty. Rather, it seem for Descartes to be a type of (extremely trustworthy) output of (the faculty) of reason. (It may often seem like a [distinct] faculty because it is easy to talk that way.)'

By way of translation, a "faculty" is sort of a distinct operation or mental mode. Imagination is in this sense a faculty: literally the mode in which your mind creates images for itself. Reason is a faculty (and, as my friend writes, something between deductive logic and reckoning).

== pj karafiol

Even though I have heard of similar concepts to the false memories in "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", I thought that they were more convincing in it than in any other stories about false memory that I know of. But more than that, I thought that the concept of Quail's repressed fantasy seemed very familiar. I have had cases where I have felt like my memory was wrong, but I never seemed really poignant. However, I have often had a feeling like something very significant I my mind was repressed, and even though I can’t tell what it is, I feel like I am very close to it- almost like my mind is somehow stifled. Has anyone else ever had this kind of feeling? It seems so “realistic” to me that I think that Dick must have. In a way, I think that their world, at least before the very end of the story, is an ultimate utopia and an ultimate dystopia. You can find, and fulfill, your ultimate fantasy, but you can never really know any kind of “real” truth.

Even more than that, though, I thought end of the story showed how we can never rely on any evidance- just those last few paragraphs change any thing. More than that, it made me think of something else- what if all of these illusions form an infinite loop- if so, there is really no such thing as reality. However, even if there is one level that is “real”, does that matter? If not, maybe reality is a meaningless concept, and only ideas have any of the significance that we attach to what we see as real. As I saw with how the end through me off, reality (as within the story) can be extremely arbitrary. But then again, what if our conception of logic itself is some sort of illusion- for example, if this is just a simulation on different rules of logic in some alien supercomputer. And I think that we can't just say logic is “fundimental” and the same to any possible reality, because we already have a counterargument to that type of reasoning- time. We cannot, for the most part, think of time as anything but fundimental to whatever could possibly exist, but we know now that it is just a dimention of our universe, and that it is possible that there are other universes. Some scientists have suggusted that universes can even generate each other, and that a universe could even generate itself, or its own “mother”. So, if time is not universally true, then maybe logic isn’t either, so we can't even reason with any confidence, and maybe there is no such thing as truth.

Although the ideas presented in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale certainly weren't new ones--Eternal Sunshine and yes, Vanilla Sky came to my mind also--the story somehow prompted me to think about memory differently. Every so often I get this feeling of remembering an image I'm experiencing having happened earlier; I guess it's like deja vu but I don't think about it the same way because I distinctly remember it. It's like this image appears to me in a dream, just a flash like a photograph of one situation.
The most recent one was when I was taking my language & comp final: I was sitting in St. Joe's at one of those tiny desks writing an essay comparing two descriptions of Hiroshima. As I was writing a sentence I realized that I'd dreamed exactly that image a month or so ago, but at the time had dismissed it because I couldn't understand why I would be writing about bombs. The images are usually of situations that two months prior to the actual event, I can't imagine ever being in. This has happened many, many times and it always freaks me out because it makes me feel like my life is predetermined and I'm seeing things that will happen to me in the future. Does this happen to anyone else? And I'm sure that it's not me conjuring up memories, because it's that deep-seated memory feeling...it's all too strange to worry about, I guess. Excuse the rather personal reflection, but the more general things have been said.

p.s. Another great movie about this sort of thing was Memento, in case anyone hasn't seen it.

Philip K. Dick is certainly a scary writer, but when I think of the movie adaption of this into Total Recall, I can't help but laugh as I recall the sight of Arnold Schwarzenegger's eyes just ready to burst open when he was thrown into the airless atmosphere of Mars. Poor quality science fiction films aside, one of the most interesting features of this writing and this particular branch of doubting the real is the fact that it really incorporates the world of the philosophical and the biological. If we do believe that our memory is nothing more than electrical or chemical impulses sent into our brains, then there really can be considerable doubt about the thing we remember doing having ever actually happened. Memory has always seemed for myself to be something with considerably more importance. Memories are things that my mind has chosen to plant upon itself from actual things I've done. It seems dirty if well, they aren't necessarily based upon reality. But few things in science fiction are, eh?

Science fiction has a funny way of running through with the cinematic world. We Can Remember It For You Wholesale reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which posed this similar question in a reverse situation. Here, they wouldn't be adding new memories to your brain, but rather, removing specific painful ones. The result, as you can imagine, is that reality really starts to fall apart when you come into contact with things that remind you of the memories that were erased. It suggests that our minds are resilient to change through scientific processes, which is pretty relieving if you're in my boat and feel totally violated by the concept of having your memory erased.

Vis a vis Descartes - how are we certain that God is not a deceiver? All sorts of weird and unexplainable things happen to us day to day - things that don't feel real. I'm still not certain that well, I can be certain of certainty.

We need some definitions, and I for one say we dust off the old Oxford tomorrow morning.

The purpose of the story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” is to question our own memories. As we know already, the only thing we can truly trust is what we ourselves have personally perceived, because it is this one part of our existence that we can accept as true. Of course we store all of this knowledge that we have learned in our memories, so to imagine that our own memories are not trustworthy is possibly one of the most frightening things possible. Not only does this mean that our lives that we know are false, but also that all of the knowledge that we have compiled (which we have until this point assumed as impossible to be false) has been falsified as well. This means that we are now left with nothing to believe other than what we can perceive at this moment. Though this is difficult. I may believe to know for certain that I wrote that previous line, in fact I can not truly trust my memory because I am not absolutely positive that I truly did write that line, I only assume that I did based on a possibly falsified memory.
Now this means that our existence could be falsified like in “They”. However, this is to a new level, where we do not even know if what we believe is real really is real. Our very minds cannot be trusted because you can never know when your thoughts are truly yours or in fact just planed by another person. For all we know we just came into existence this very moment with an entire lifetime of false memories and emotions and thoughts and opinion in out minds. Our identities are not ours anymore but belong to someone else who can make people whatever he wants them to be, destroying all free will. It may not be logical to say that we just came into existence with so much “proof” in the world to say otherwise. However, if we truly did just come into existence then any “proof” that may exist would have been planted by those who fitted us with our memories, and our “logic” would only be the logic that those who implanted our thoughts wanted us to have in order to blind us from the truth. We cannot truly know what is real based on our own perception any more because even when we think we are certain of “reality” it is always possible that it is in fact just the “reality” that has been imposed on us.

Here's a query: Can you imagine a situation or person whom you would describe as "doubting his own existence", but who does not (did not at that moment) actually exist?

In what circumstances might this make sense?

p.s. just cruisin the dictionary today:

probabilism, n
the doctrine that probability is a sufficient basis for belief and action, since certainty in knowledge is unattainable.

God, etc.

I agree completely with one thing Cory said: "Personally, I never feel I can gain much by starting along this path of thought as I know I will never be able to answer the question." There is, of course, absolutely no way to really ever know, so we have to be content with proposing many ideas without choosing one. I like that Descartes's piece spelled out for us all those ideas and the questions that naturally arise.
Philosophy and religion are inextricably related. I think everyone can agree with that--philosophy involves answering the greater questions, which all somehow lead back to our creation, purpose, etc. Whenever I begin to seriously think about those greater questions, I always find myself arriving at the same conclusion: God exists. I don't arrive at this conclusion through logical deduction, fact, whatever; it's just a necessary decision in order to keep myself sane. The only reason those questions don't take over my entire life, the only reason I'm not consumed by pursuing their answers, is that I have decided to believe that someday I'll find out. I have this image of myself dying, going wherever it is that we go, and basically being handed a list of the answers. Yes, it's ridiculous, but to think that I'll really never be able to know is too maddening to accept.

On a somewhat-though-not-entirely-related note, one idea I found particularly interesting was presented on page 60 of I, Robot:

"The other dragged at his mustache bitterly. 'He's a skeptic,' was the bitter response. 'He doesn't believe we made him or that Earth exists or space or stars.'"

Out of context, you could easily assume that the creator and skeptic of these three sentences are mean to be God and a human rather than an engineer and a robot. That idea puts a particularly interesting spin on the whole story: as observers, we know that Cutie was indeed created by these two engineers and we realize that his interpretation of his existence is both naive and self-important. Asimov is suggesting that humans who doubt that God created them are just as deceived.

The purpose of the story “They” is to question reality. It makes the reader wonder whether the world that they know is actually what we think it is. In this case the world that the nameless man lives in is all a “stage” to a point, all created with fake people (it is hinted at that they are machines) and all made for the purpose of keeping him captive for some unknown reason. The idea that we could be imprisoned within a physical world seems unrealistic, however, Heinlein uses one fact to his advantage that appears to be undeniable. We are all “alone” in a sense in the world. Throughout life all of our knowledge is gained through two ways: what we are told by others and what we observe for ourselves. What we are told by others is not always reliable (if it is ever, assuming that the world in Heinlein’s story is reality), and if you think about it, we only truly know what we have personally experienced. So, if it turns out that everything we have been told throughout our lives is a lie, then our entire reality would be completely different, other than the observations made by ourselves personally.
We all accept whatever reality we live in, so if in reality we are being lied to, we would be powerless in finding the truth. I can only speak from the perspective of a teenage boy, so I can say that I have never died or had many other experiences. Since we only have other people to rely on to inform us on what we do not know, then those experiences could in fact be completely different that we had thought, if they existed at all in the first place or were just “performed” for the sake of the one person who is trapped in Heinlein’s world. One that Heinlein brought up was death. Since I can say that no one has ever died (and can still talk about it) we, as individuals do not definitely know anything about it. For all we know, death itself could be completely non-existent, and the other “fake” people around I the world are not truly dieing, but just “acting” in order to create a false sense of purpose for the trapped man. Since we have never experienced death, we cannot say that we will ever die. It seems that in the end of the story, the world is being “reorganized” as if the man is being placed into a new reality to relive his life now that he has discovered the true reality around him.
If we can never die, then it brings up questions about humanity. If we do not know that humans are immortal, then there could be other things about humanity that we do not know. There are endless possibilities about what we can do as humans and it could only be a matter of recognizing these abilities before truly being able to utilize them (like Neo in the Matrix, who only had to realize that he had the power to alter the matrix before he could actually do so).
Also, if the world we live in is a lie, then how do we know that it is even physically what we believed it to be? Personally, I have never been outside of the United States (not that I can remember, at least), so there is a chance that the entire world that I believed existed is all made up, like it’s history. My life could theoretically exist of nothing more than a few states with false stories of things occurring in lands that “exist” only to create a more believable and complex world and take the focus off of the true nature of “reality”. Basically the world around us is reality as far as we can tell. We can have speculations such as the ones that this story brings up, but so long as we stay oblivious to what reality truly is then it could be argued that what we perceive to be reality is reality. Since the only ones who can perceive the world is ourselves ("i think therefore I am". We don't know if anyone else is "real" in the sense that they have a "spirit"), what we know is reality. As I said at the beginning of the essay, the only thing we can accept as reality is what we can perceive, so our world is everything we can perceive it as. If we never come into contact with anything that would suggest that reality is not exactly as we think it is then for all we know reality is exactly whatever we want it to be. This is just like Cutie, who, though he lived in a world where he was created to serve humans, believed whole-heartedly that he was the highest life form whose roll was to serve “the master”. Unable to perceive anything other than what he knew, Cutie was living in a world where he served “the master” as far as he knew.