David Hume's Inception Essay

While many rationalists such as René Descartes support the notion that the concept of Inception is not possible, empiricists such as David Hume may think differently. Hume was an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher known for his system of radical and philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. In one of his works, Hume stated that one cannot create completely new ideas without either prior knowledge of those ideas, or experiencing those ideas. Put differently, he believed that the ideas of an individual are derived or inspired by other ideas that the individual has observed, because there is no such thing as an “original idea.” Taking Hume’s theory into account, in the movie Inception, the protagonist Dom Cobb teaches his new architect, Ariadne, how dreaming works. In their shared dream, Ariadne comes across Dom’s wife, Mal. While this
. . [Cobb] realized that [they] needed to escape, but [Mal] locked away her knowledge of the unreality of [their dream] . . . [Cobb gave] her the slightest little idea . . . that her world was not real” (Nolan, 2010, p.88). However, when they return to reality, Mal still believes that they are in a dream, and jumps off a ledge and to her death in a vain attempt to “wake up.” Hence, if Cobb had not told Mal that they were dreaming, Mal would most likely never come across this same idea as well, and would most likely never commit suicide. The reason behind this is because the two have different experiences that shape their ideas, and Cobb’s experiences just so happened to remind him that they were dreaming, while Mal’s made her forget. Looking back at Hume’s unoriginal idea theory and comparing it to the events that happened in Inception, such as those of characters gaining ideas that would otherwise not have occurred to them on their own without someone else interfering with their dreams, it is safe to say that the main focus of Inception is indeed