Christopher Nolan’s science fiction movie Inception is largely Cartesian in how it explores the metaphysical dilemma of distinguishing dreams from reality. The protagonists are dream thieves who steal or plant ideas to the unaware target by weaving spatial elements into a false reality. The following premises in Inception raise counterarguments to Descartes’ reasoning on reality beyond any doubt.
In his book Meditations of First Philosophy, Descartes doubts the assurance of knowing whether one is awake or dreaming. In the First Meditation, he notes that “there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.” Descartes argued that one cannot know whether one is dreaming, thus knowledge is impossible. In fact, because “composite elements” from dreams are indistinguishable from reality, it follows that all one’s experiences could simply be a dream, thus one’s supposed knowledge of the world is false. Descartes metaphysically solved this problem by establishing the one undisputable truth through the cogito— “I think, therefore I am.” Still, in order to have any knowledge beyond one’s own existence, one needs to be able to distinguish dreams from reality which follows from the senses.
In the movie, Cobb (Leonardo Di Caprio) enters the subconscious minds of his targets using a two-level dream strategy to extract information. He and the others carry totems whose behaviors are unpredictable and known only by the specific owner. Unlike Descartes, who asserted that thinking is the one thing that cannot be artificed, Cobb and the others rely on composite objects that ultimately require sense perceptions to recognize and justify their existence. When Cobb is dreaming in the movie, he is also cognizant of the possibility that he might be dreaming. However, Descartes argues that it’s impossible for someone in a dream to know they’re dreaming. In fact, Descartes likens dreaming and sense perception to both be faulty and unjustifiable ways of knowing, and thus cannot be trusted. As such, Cobb not only needs to be awake in order to consider the possibility that he is dreaming, but he cannot know if he’s ever awake. Here, Nolan’s original premise is a rejection of Descartes’ explanation.
While Nolan throws many intricate details to differentiate dreams from reality, the characters’ totems- or the fundamental basis for their reality- are flawed because they are dependent on one’s sense perception. Descartes’s argument debunks Nolan’s premise in the following reasoning: if one’s “senses…. can deceive us even once”, it can “deceive us again.” Therefore, there is no foundational proof in Inception to distinguish dreams from reality, regardless of the totem’s uniqueness. And since Descartes asserts the possibility of knowing the dream state only during the waking state, yet even then one may not know if one might still be dreaming, then it’s impossible to tell in Nolan’s movie whether one is dreaming or not. If one can also know that one is in a dream during the dream state, then one must have been using reasoning to do so—a form of critical thinking and insight. However, this follows into Descartes’s next argument: one cannot do critical thinking asleep. And yet Cobb and the others are noted to spot anomalies and transitions (e.g. the faulty carpet) that do not exist in their version of reality. Provided that all these realizations pass through the senses, these claims are therefore unreliable as established above. The only true and justifiable claim the characters can posit (from level 1 of reality to limbo stage) is that they exist because they can think. Thought cannot be separated from their being and does not depend on the details of whatever “reality” they come from.