Yoshinori Ueeda: Safe Dreams

2024/07/09

If you write the same character over and over again, eventually it stops being a character and starts looking like a mere pattern without meaning. This phenomenon is called Gestaltzerfall (Gestalt collapse). In this case, the meaning and sound peel away from the character, leaving only a strange two-dimensional pattern. Similarly (though it requires a bit of practice), if you cause the landscape before you to undergo Gestaltzerfall, its reality peels away from the actual world, leaving only sensory qualities. In the world of philosophy, from ancient times to the present, these sensory qualities have been called representational images, phenomena, or qualia, and have been the subject of research.

In everyday life, sensory qualities are considered to convey the appearance of the world as it is. However, the quality of "redness" does not exist in the real world independently of a specific visual system. The color red is a representation created within the human mind by the human visual system. Setting aside for now the extremely difficult question of how the mind can create representations, how can we link these representations to reality?

This problem is similar to the question of how two people seeing two separate dreams can relate them to each other. While it might seem impossible, surprisingly, we are actually succeeding in linking reality and representation. The fact that we can live together shows that humanity has already succeeded in relating these "two dreams."

Unless we believe that no matter how many human consciousnesses there are, they are all independent and each person is merely dreaming a long, grand dream called life (solipsism), or that the contents of each consciousness are adjusted by God to be in harmony (pre-established harmony), our representational world is linked to the real world. But how exactly?

It is dangerous to regard a dream as reality. However, there is no problem with regarding a representation as reality. In a sense, we are dreaming a "safe dream," but by what mechanism and how did we acquire such safety? I hope to contribute from the field of philosophy to help humanity solve this mystery.