Originally Posted by Oneironaut
It's a reasonable question but, in the end, it's pretty much the same as asking:
How do you know that you're consciously experiencing control of your real life, and not just an automated perception of what is really the illusion of control?
The illusion of control that you are talking about is called Epiphenominalism, and it is quite intriguing. In short it says that consciousness & freewill are in fact just by products of our physical brain, and it is incredibly persuasive. The idea that we have a non-physical mind connotes dualism, which is plagued with problems. How does a thought (non-physical) interact with a neuron (physical) ect... In short, It is incredibly likely that our freewill is completely an illusion, as it seems freewill would imply a non-physical mind. But that is beside the point.
In the end, we can never know, but you can't ignore the question in one instance, and analyze it in another.
Sure one day we will know the truth behind consciousness. People have claimed throughout history to KNOW that we will never discover this or that.
But, to bring it down into terms of "what we know": When you are in a nightmare and you realize that it's just a nightmare and you beg, plead and demand for yourself to wake up - and you're able to do that - what evidence do you have that that awareness you experienced, while dreaming, was false?
If you do this over a period of time, and you're able to exact it to a science to where, whenever you are in a scenario that you realize is a nightmare, you can will yourself awake - and remember the exact thought process that brought you through the nightmare and out of it - what evidence do you have that what you've experienced was illusory awareness?
I am not 100% sure what means. That the nightmare you did not really happen? The fact that you could just wake up seems to be pretty good evidence. 'Real' experiences do not afford the luxury of altering them view thoughts. That is how Berkley ultimately determined the difference between Dream States and reality. You cannot walk into a room and change it with you mind, but you can in a dream.
If you mean that dreams are not real experiences, I would say they are. They may be be experiences in reality, but the fact that you imagine what you do is an experience none the less.
If you go to sleep listening to an album and, while dreaming, you hear the music playing, realize you're dreaming, wake yourself up, and the sound carries over seamlessly from your dream into the waking world, what evidence do you have that your hearing the song - and realizing it was playing through your head because you were in a dream - was an "illusion of awareness"?
But this seems to spark retro-selective dream experience. Many people argue that dreams are only forged upon waking up. That it is simply the projection of parallel images and thoughts that happened while sleeping pieced together.
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