PRESENTATIONGROUP N3T

Subject: Philosophy 101Lecturer: Mr. GulvinMembers: Nguyen Minh Nguyen Nguyen Quang Tuan Tran Thi Thanh Tam Truong Ngoc Lan Thanh

INTRODUCTION

CHARACTERS:• Cobb - orchestrates everything• Ariadne - designs the dreams• Saito - bankrolls the whole thing,

buys the whole airline instead of just buying first class

• Arthur - organizes everything• Eames - puts on characters• Yusuf, who has the technical

savvy• Fischer - the mark• Mal – Cobb’s wife

CONTENT:• Inception is about dreams and

deceptions.• Dominic Cobb is an extraction

agent, someone who can steal your ideas. But he is hired by a multi-millionaire to perform inception - to plant an idea in someone's mind, without them knowing. To accomplish this, Cobb (and his team) use something called “shared dreaming.”

INTRODUCTION

Inception’s End: Did the Spinning Top Fall?

At the end of the film, when he returns to his children, Cobb spins his top one

final time to see if he is awake—but his kids distract him, and the film cuts to

black before we see whether or not it fall.

Whether the top falls or not doesn't matter!

• Consider how totems work • Cobb is not the only one who knows how his totem

works• Think about How do tops behave in the real world?

-> Cobb's totem is backwards

IT WAS ALL A DREAM?

Cobb could be dreaming at the end, but, truth be told, he

could have been dreaming the whole time. Might the entire

movie have been a dream?

IT WAS ALL A DREAM?

• The chase scene in Mombasa, has many dream-like qualities.

• Consider where Mal sits as she threatens suicide.

• The song the dreamers use to herald the end of a dream is 2 minutes and 28 seconds. Inception is, exactly, 2 hours and 28 minutes.

=> Christopher Nolan seems to have left multiple clues that suggest Cobb is dreaming the entire movie, even when he is supposed to be in the real world.

LIFE IS A DREAM?

This is a classic philosophical problem:• First hinted at by Plato

• Clearly articulated by Descartes

PLATO’S CAVE AND INCEPTION

In the Republic (ca. 380 B.C.E), Plato gives us the allegory of the cave. Plato'smessage is that there is something intrinsically valuable about knowledge,about knowing the way the world really is. And that makes knowledgepreferable to blissful ignorance, even when the truth is uncomfortable.

PLATO’S CAVE AND INCEPTION• A group of prisoners, forced to watch

shadows on the wall of a cave since birth. The shadows are all they have ever known; they think the shadows are the highest reality and are perfectly happy living a life of "shadow games.“

• But when one of the prisoners breaks loose and learns about the real world outside the cave he looks back at his former life and pities those still stuck in it.

• There is something intrinsically valuable about knowledge – about knowing the way the world really is. And that makes knowledge preferable to blissful ignorance, even when the truth is uncomfortable.

• Projection of the shadows on the cave wall

• The shadows were projected onto the walls

• As the people in the cave believe they are in the real world, and will fight to stay there, the main characters of Inception has the world that they believe to be real.

• “You are just a shade of my real life.” Cobb admits while talking to Mal of the dream world that she is only a shadow of reality.

• Mal is uncomfortable living in the world which is believed is the real world by Cobb. Over time, she doesn't know which world is reality anymore. She becomes trapped within the dream world completely, and kills herself to stay in that world – the world she’s comfortable living with.

• Creating dreamscapes• They presented specific skewed ideas

to dreamers

DESCARTES’ PIT OF SKEPTICISM AND INCEPTION

• Is Cobb in a dream or reality? And perhaps, can he know whether or not he’s dreaming?

• Descartes pondered the same question back in 1641 in his Meditations on First Philosophy. He argued essentially that because we can’t know whether or not we’re dreaming, knowledge is impossible.

DESCARTES’ PIT OF SKEPTICISM AND INCEPTION

• René Descartes, in 1639, worried that all of reality might be a dream. What distinguishes dream from reality?

• Descartes tell us that we cannot dream what we have not experienced

• It is impossible to consider within a dream that you might be dreaming is what proves for Descartes that you’re awake, then in the movie it’s impossible to tell whether you’re dreaming or not.

• Whenever Cobb is unsure about whether he’s dreaming or not, he spins his totems. In fact, he’s been wondering all the time.

• Dreamers who create the worlds or ‘levels’ of the dreams always use pieces of places that are familiar to them

• Even when Cobb’s dreaming in the movie, he’s aware of the possibility that he might be dreaming. Inception ends in doubt over whether Cobb is still dreaming or awake

GROUP N3T

THANK YOU

FOR LISTENING AND CONSIDERATION!