Fantasy In Miniature

“Do you know the story of Zhuangzi and the butterfly?” I asked her one day.

“You mean the one about how he invented peanut butter?” she replied.

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’?” she asked.

“I asked if you know the story of Zhuangzi and the butterfly,” I said.

“Uh, yeah,” she said. “And I asked if you mean the one about how he invented peanut butter. It’s a simple enough question.”

“I’m talking about the story where the man has a dream where he’s a butterfly, and then when he wakes up he doesn’t know if he’s a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming that he’s a man,” I said.

“That’s stupid,” she said.

“Okay, maybe it seems a little simplistic, but it’s got a sound point at its core,” I said. “If you can’t always tell that you’re dreaming when you are… and conversely, if it’s possible to mistakenly think you might be dreaming when you’re awake… then how can we ever know for certain that we’ve awakened to true reality? Is there any level of being ’sure’ at which our confidence is justified? Really, at its core, it’s just taking the Socratic maxim that the only true knowledge is knowing one knows nothing to its logical endpoint, that we cannot be sure of any reality that depends on our flawed senses and fallible reasoning to detect.”

“Well, sure,” she said. “But it’s still stupid.”

“How?” I asked.

“The story acts like those are the only two possibilities,” she said. “For instance, he could be a gorilla who dreamed he was a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. Or he could have been a man who misremembers a dream about being a fish.”

“You’re kind of just proving the point of the story,” I said.

“The point that I’m awesome and Zhuangzi can suck it?” she asked.

“Just for the sake of my own personal reference… did you think peanut butter was invented by an ancient Taoist thinker, or by a butterfly?” I asked her.

“If he can’t tell the difference, neither can I.”