Assuming that "there is just a dream, and not even a dreamer" and that our notion of "we" is just a rebellion within the dream, against the idea that there is only a dream, and assuming that your eventual conclusion from that is correct, (i.e., that your "keyboard is a sentient being, or (a part of) multiple sentient beings") uhhh. what might be useful from pondering this notion?
It seems to me that the "dream" would become rather bland if "we" all acquiesced ... oh forget it, this is all too silly.
I'm not assuming any of that. What I mean is that the view that there's just a dream, and not even a dreamer, is the most parsimonious view possible with our concepts. But whether our notion of "we" be correct or not, our limitedness leads me to the conclusion, not that my keyboard
is (a) (part of) sentient being(s), but that we can only
suppose that it is. I mean, we can suppose that it's not, that we cannot possibly imagine what it's like to be (part) (of) (a) keyboard, but then we can never really understand or explain it at all; we can only
describe it. And that's actually all (modern) science does.
"Science itself is the simple realization that whatever is experienced--a self, a world, the law of contradiction, a god or anything else--is nothing apart from its being experienced. Science's reality is nothing but empty experiences, impressions as Hume called them. From a scientific point of view everything high or low, including the distinction between high and low, becomes a way of experiencing, a point of view, an interpretation, a method, a discipline of thinking or perceiving. [... S]cience is not a cooperative enterprise in which scientists work for each other and with each other, building on previous scientific findings. Science neither progresses nor regresses. It requires no complicated equipment nor intricate specialization. Its beginning and end is realization of life's nihilism. Once that is realized scientists can, to pass the time, champion any 'scientific' theory or moral-political cause. So long as they exempt nothing from reality's nihilism, they can promote war or peace, evolution or creation, a stationary or a mobile earth, dictatorship or anarchy--or anything else. However they never forget that these philosophic-propagandistic conflicts between mankind's moralities have nothing to do with science, genuine knowledge of reality.
[...] Philosophy springs from common sense or what Nietzsche, more nihilistically, called the herd instinct. The herd instinct's essence is its being common or communal, an instinct which makes political sense out of life. This instinct inspires the faith that one has an identity distinguishing one from other things in a universe shared with them. It creates the illusion that reality is a coherent, intelligible world, not merely a chaos of empty reveries or experiences.
Although it obviously is impossible to experience anything but experiences, herd instinct faith makes men believe that they grasp things which exist as more than mere experience. However much the herd instinct may vary in different bestial and human herds, it never is democratic. For it always inculcates one chief care in all herd members. That care is to get what is good for oneself, to live the good life. This care is informed by the moral-political orthodoxies of one's herd. Unlike unphilosophic herd members, philosophic herd members turn this care into a question whose answer is not self-evident. [...] It is not a serious question for scientists, but then, what can be serious in life's nihilism! Nothing apart from arbitrary willfulness, the tyrannic resolve to force seriousness on nihilism's indifference. In a book aptly titled Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes philosophy as the most tyrannic form of this will to overpower reality's nihilism." (Harry Neumann, "Political Philosophy or Nihilist Science?")
Unphilosophic herd members have always regarded philosophy--
actual philosophy, not philosophy's politic guises--as useless and silly
at best. But the modern herd with its opinion that honesty or intellectual probity be most virtuous--something of which this--
humanist!--Center For Inquiry is a clear expression--is asking for what it also allows: the flaunting of philosophy's essential nature as the supreme vindication of being, of wannabeing. Nietzschean philosophy openly
wants the world, including man, to be the will to power and nothing besides.
If there is an experienced behind the experience, then the philosopher wants it to be an experiencer as well.
::
A line I heard: "I'm a solipsist and I don't understand why everyone else isn't."
LL
Either other people really exist and hold the true--though not necessarily justified--belief that other people really exist; or other people
don't really exist and the solipsist is in a dream in which there are other people who believe that other people really exist.