Summary Of Descartes 'Meditations On First Philosophy'

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“it is this same ‘I’ who senses or who is cognizant of bodily things as if through the sense. For example, I now see a light, I hear a noise, I feel heat. These things are false, since I am asleep. Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear, and feel warmth. This cannot be false .”
Motif: the ability of the senses to tell a person if they are dreaming or awake.
The senses are an important tool for the human mind. In Meditations on First Philosophy , Descartes explains the significance of the senses in determining if a person is dreaming or awake. They gather information from the world, share it with the brain, and allow the mind to process and understand the world around it. The senses are important for recognizing events, they are perhaps supplied in dreams by past dreams, or perhaps the senses control how well information is gathered. The senses are the primary method of …show more content…

With the senses, it is believed that the experiences before have been stored away in the mind while the person was awake, only to be recollected when the person is asleep. When Descartes addresses this, he states that it “seemed to have sensed in my dreams many things that I later realized I did not sense .” It is hard to tell which experience was caused by the individual, whether directly or not. According to Descartes, there are senses that, when experienced in dreams, are not directly caused by the person. However, the senses can tell if a person is awake by the way they feel when they are recollected. During the dreams, the senses are faded, because the senses are merely memories at this point, ghosts of what they had been at the time of conception. If the senses were real, it feels as if a wire is stuck inside your mind. If the person pays enough attention, he/she can actually feel the brain registering the sensation. Lastly, the senses, when gathered, control the understanding of

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