How do you know you're not dreaming right now?

[Gadarene]

However I disagree with you completely when you say, and I quote: "one assertion is no more valuble than another"....

I think I might have meant to say valid.

This is clearly false. In doing this, you make an assertion to be by necessity, synonymous with an unprovable, opinion. This leap simply is not justifiable. You do this to support your view, but in doing so, you have not shot yourself in the foot, but in the head.

Implicitly defining a term is an unjustifiable leap?

Talk about shooting the entirety of discourse in the head, Elioenai.

Why? Because your whole argument is an "assertion", and a most unqualified assertion at that!

Both of us are making assertions! That was my point.

Value of assertion is determined by how close an assertion corresponds to truth. Now.... only one of two possibilities is applicable here....

1. Either we are all dreaming right now.

or...

2. We are not.

I assert we are not dreaming. I also assert that my assertion is of more value than its negation. I have already supplied various reasons to support my assertion and I still await your presentation of any undercutting or rebutting defeater of my assertion.....

In conclusion......

In the absence of some undercutting defeater, we are to maintain that we are indeed conscious and awake, not unconscious and abiding in some "dream state". The burden of proof is on you to convince us that we should doubt our conscious awareness of the world around us.

Where have I said we should doubt it? I only said that it cannot be absolutely proven that this layer of reality is the real one. That doesn't mean I see any reason to doubt it.

If you're talking about specific layers of reality, then yes - one can sometimes distinguish between dreaming and not-dreaming. If we're talking more broadly, there is no sure way of knowing that this reality isn't just a layer of existence external to another, and we haven't gone through its equivalent of "waking up" yet.

Maybe I'm not being literal enough.