Inception and Philosophy

357 Pages·2011·1.94 MB·English

by  Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Table of Contents

Title Page
Who’s Putting Ideas in Your Head?

Level 1 - Come Back to Reality, Please
Chapter 1 - How to Keep Track of Reality
Inception’s Dream Theory
Diagrams of Reality
A Dream Shared by Soldiers, Architects, and Thieves
Dreaming in the Classroom
Dreams-within-Dreams
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
A Matter of Time
Keeping Track of Reality
Are Dreams Less Real than Waking Life?
The Butterfly Who Dreamt He Was a Philosopher
(How) Can We Know When We’re Dreaming?
How Can We Establish Whether We’re Awake or Dreaming?
The Stolen Totem
Follow the Red Thread
(How) Can We Know whether Our World Is Real?
Cave Men
Shadows of Ideas
Job Description for Philosophers
Know that You Know Nothing
I Doubt, therefore I Am
Dreams and Other Forms of Virtual Reality
Filmosophy
Dreaming Brains-in-a-Vat
The Virtue of Curiosity
Maybe We Don’t Really Exist?
Damn You, Nolan!
Damn You, Plato!
Why I Won’t Commit Suicide (and You Shouldn’t Either)
Happy Ending
Chapter 2 - The Mad Neuroscience of Inception
The Dream Narrative
Dream and Reality Are Not Symmetrical
Manipulating the Content of Dreams
Entering Other Peoples’ Dreams
Embedded Dreams
Legal and Not So Legal Forms of Inception
Chapter 3 - Inception and Deception
Chris Nolan’s Obsessions
Whose Thoughts Are These Anyway?
Inception 101: How to Deliver Ideas
Self and Others
Doubt versus Trust
Cobb and Mal in Limbo
How Do Totems Work?
Does the Top Fall? Does It Matter in the End?
Chapter 4 - Plugging in to the Experience Machine
Choosing a Real Life over a Dream Life
Making the Dream Real
But Is Berkeley Right?
The Power of Choice

Level 2 - We’re Not in Your Dream
Chapter 5 - You Have No Idea
The Feeling of Free Will vs. the Real Thing
All Experience Is Inception
Group Will
Chapter 6 - The Business of Inception
This Isn’t the Usual Corporate Espionage
You Know the Corporation Who Hired Us Won’t Accept
Failure
We Want the Heir to a Major Corporation to Break Up His
Father’s Empire
The World Needs Robert Fischer to Change His Mind
Cobol’s Backyard
Chapter 7 - Mental Burglary
The Defenseless Mind
Losing Autonomy
Stealing Thoughts
Invisibility or Honesty
Chapter 8 - Right and Wrong in Dreams
The Shared Dream
Do Projections Matter?
The Un-Shared Dream
Does This Matter?

Level 3 - The Infinite Staircase
Chapter 9 - Ariadne’s Clue to Life, the Universe, and
Everything
Am I Dreaming Now?
Who Is Ariadne?
Is Architecture Necessary?
Can I Wake Up?
Do We Have to Talk about Death?
How Many Times Do We Have to Die?
So, More Than Forty-Two?
Can We Figure It Out?
Do You Have Your Ticket to Mombasa?
Do We Give Shakespeare the Last Word?
Chapter 10 - Once Upon a Time
Just Because We’re Paranoid . . .
. . . Doesn’t Mean They’re Not After Us
Claim Your Own Baggage
Training Day?
Sharing the Dream
Better Living through Electro-Chemistry
The Ghost in the Machine
Once upon a Time
Castles in the Air
Whose Dream Is This, Anyway?
A Pinwheel and a Picture
Do You Doubt Me?
Proceed to Carousel One
Day Residue
Chapter 11 - The Story of Reality
Dreams as Realities
Memories and Desires as the Fabric of Reality
The Story-Making of Reality
Striving for Positive Logic
Films as Dreams
Leap of Faith
Chapter 12 - Butterfly and Spinning Top
Dream in Daoism
Zhuangzi’s Dream versus the Story of Inception
The Non-forgettable Self
Dreams as Narrative
The Codes
Structure versus Structurelessness
The Lack of the Whole
The End?

Level 4 - The Most Resilient Parasite
Chapter 13 - Dream Bigger, Darling
Reality—the World of Inception
The First Dream—The Existential Heist
The Second Dream—Film Theory
The Third Dream—Dreaming Itself
The Fourth Dream—a Theory of Mind
The Kick—Back to ‘Reality’
Chapter 14 - Shared Dreams in Virtual Worlds
Do Gamers Dream of Electric Sheep?
Communal Dreamscapes in MMORPGs
Architecture of the Imagination
Shadows of the World
A Butterfly, Dreaming . . .
Sleeping to Awake
A Dream within a Dream
ATTENTION: You’re Already Living in Virtual Reality
Spinning Tops and Lotus Eaters
Unweaving a Tangled Web
An Old Man, Filled with Regret . . .
Chapter 15 - The Movie as a Thinking Machine
A Dream in a Dream
Cognition and Psychoanalysis
Film as a Thinking Machine
Second Life and Third World
Architecture and the Dream Machine
Chapter 16 - Where Time Stands Still
Slow Time
Timeless Sleep
Perception and Time
The Reality of Time
Eternity in Time
Mind, Eternity, Limbo
Dreaming Timelessness
Mental Time and Real Time
Eternal Iteration

Level 5 - Downwards Is the Only Way Forwards
Chapter 17 - Dreams, Mourning, and Desire
Desire and Counter-Desire
A Way toward Redemption
The Choice of Mourning
The Question of the Body
Epilog
Chapter 18 - The Undiscovered Country Called Experience
Inception as Phenomenological Philosophy
What Do You Mean It’s Only Been Fifteen Minutes?
To Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound
Learning How Not to Wet the Bed
Guilt Can be a Real Bitch