I don't remember much coherent of my dreams last night. I think I was in a differential equations class at one point. Hm.
Seems like the best thing Wikipedia is good for is odd technical terms that sort of make you go "oh, so there's actually a WORD for that?" and smile. There's something vaguely egotistical about that feeling one gets, isn't there? That happiness when you find out that you've actually been thinking about something that's a major concept in philosophy or science or whatever, then to suddenly find out that what you've been thinking of (all on your own) is famous... and more importantly, has a name.
Just yesterday, I was originally researching something semi-boring on Wikipedia when I happened to get caught on a "WikiTangent!" and go off and browse interesting articles. One such was Philosophy (another fun thing to do on Wikipedia: search for a humorously broad topic, such as "Water" or "Life" or "Thought" or, well, "Philosophy" and see just how long the article spans), which led on to the Regress Problem. The Regress Problem basically states that there is nothing that can be definitively proved as true knowledge from a purely philosophical standpoint, since, to count as knowledge, it would have to be justified. Well, how do you justify it? The justificatory argument must be true, i.e. it has to be justified as well. But that means you need a third argument to justify THAT argument, and so on, without end.
There are two main workarounds to this.
- Just decide that something is true without proof, than work from there (e.g. "I doubt, therefore I think; I think, therefore I am"). This is Foundationalism.
- Coherentism: seek sets of arguments that are consistent, with the "end" argument justifying the "beginning" argument. This is considered reasonable if there are enough intervening arguments in between to make it unlikely for it to be consistent, yet false. If there are too few arguments in between, that's circular reasoning (badbadbad).
I personally think the first is a little inelegant, though the second carries some risk of arbitrariness as well, I suppose, if one doesn't pick sufficiently large sets.
Reality check. Philosophy sometimes does pop up in dreams, after all.

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