Logical fallacies hurt this "philosophical" film

Rating: 5/10 (18 July 2010)

I know Nolan is a director, not a scientist.
However, as a person who relies on logic and reason to understand the world, I need at least some plausibility with my science fiction films in order to immerse myself into the experience.
I've had lucid dreams before, at least I think I have. I remember that I've done things in dreams to try to discern if I am indeed dreaming, but I don't necessarily remember how I existed as a conscious entity in those dreams. I might have sort of been just a third person omniscent, invisible "thing" floating around observing myself walking around. I think I may have fluctuated between first person and third person consciousness, where I would somehow start distorting everything around "me" once the idea occurred that I may not be in reality. Then, when everything becomes a huge, entropic mess, I would wake up. Of course this experience may be unique to me, but it seems that the fluid nature of dreams lends itself to something much more complex than a simple duplication of reality from a person's awake state. Nolan completely ignored this aspect, and I feel it detracted from the overall strength of the film.
Furthermore, I don't even remember why I tried to figure out I was in a dream, and I also don't remember recalling the need to question if things make sense from a Newtonian physics standpoint. Newtonian physics is undoubtedly "intuitive", but because consciousness itself is such an opaque field, I don't see why something such as a spinning top would convince any reasonable person that they are dreaming or in "reality". How could Cobb be certain the top was accurately representing reality or a dream anyway, since it is nothing but his projection of what he thinks will happen in his dream. That is, how could the top transcend the laws of the new world created by the architect, and behave strictly by Cobb's current, conscious interpretation?
Also, the transplantation of consciousness from an awake state to a dream state is also independent of a transplantation of memories. It seems to me that Nolan practically invoked the transmission of "souls" into the movie, and may have in the process confused the concepts of souls and consciousness.
It seems like these characters completely neglected what it means to actually dream and what it means to live in a dream-like world. Sure, perhaps this is not relevant to the movie itself, but in addition to other disappointments such as static characters and shallow dialogue, I can say that it kind of turned me off to the film's main grab: its philosophical implications (which, granted, may not be too deep anyway, considering the crux of the whole film just seems to be that there is no way to distinguish what is "real" and what isn't. Essentially, the age-old the whole perception vs. reality argument).
Overall, better than anything this year, but it falls short.