Descartes ignored all he believed to be true. He believed that if any belief can be doubted it is not certain, making it unusable as a foundation. Descartes jettisons any information, knowledge, or truths that are based on his senses. He applied the “Dream Argument,” (19) where he stated that based on the senses alone, there is no definite way of proving that you are dreaming or awake. Therefore, any truths based upon the senses are unreliable and doubtful. Descartes turned to why and how his senses were deceivable.
Descartes spent Meditation One attempting to disprove his fundamental beliefs. First, Descartes doubts that he is able to trust his senses because they are occasionally wrong. An example of this is a longed haired person that may look like a woman from a distance, but as you get closer you realize that it is really a man. The dream argument dealt with telling if one is asleep or awake. According to Descartes, there is no way for one to tell whether he or she is awake or not. We decide what is real and what we can sense. The problem is that your brain can trick your senses. What you believe is there may not in reality really be there. Dreams can many times feel quite realistic in nature. Since one cannot trust his or her senses, one can conclude that there is no way to determine whether he or she is awake or asleep. However, he admitted that there were certain “truths” that were consistent with whether he was awake or asleep. Mathematics and logic are ideas that hold true regardless of the situation For example, two plus three equals five and a square has four equal sides. These beliefs remained constant in all states of living.
In regard to dreams, Descartes spoke of what he called the “Evil Demon”. His “Evil Demon” argument was that one is being tricked by an outside source. This outside source has the ability to control all of one’s senses. One has no power at all to stop this evil demon from putting ideas into your head. If the evil demon can control all of one’s senses, nothing one senses or believes is present. Due to this, is it possible that a person has not done anything? What are you truly doing? There is a possibility that I dreamed writing this entire paper. My senses told me that I physically typed this paper. Was this all a dream? There were various background noises that distracted me while I was compiling this paper. Did I actua...
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...mething that is all-powerful has control over every thought, belief, and idea that we have. If Descartes believed this then he must believe that this deceiving God was putting the idea in his brain that if he ignores his senses he will obtain truth. If his God was deceiving and all-powerful then he will never discover truth. Descartes tries an alternative way to look at reality, the initial idea and the concept as a whole. Descartes constantly contradicted himself in his explanation and his points seem to work against themselves, as opposed to supporting his hypothesis. At the end of the First Meditation the one thing that remained certain is that we all have the same perception, but existence is our own perception. Nothing in the external world is certain. Descartes could not think outside of the “box”.
Descartes is a very wordy self-examining style of writing. It is often difficult to understand, and the concepts that he is trying to explain could be stated in a clearer and more coherent matter. His arguments were good, but they were written in a circular argument. It would have been much easier to understand if he hadn’t written in circles and if he didn’t contradict himself.
In “Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and the Experience Machine: Philosophy and the Matrix”, Christopher Grau explains Rene Descartes argument in Meditation. What one may interpret as reality may not be more than a figment of one’s imagination. One argument that Grau points out in Descartes essay is how one knows that what one think is an everyday experience awake is not all a part of a hallucination. He uses the example of dreams to draw a conclusion about is claim based on experiences one would experience with dreaming. He asserts that there are times when one wake up from a dream that seems to be “vivid and realistic” however soon finds that it was not. The experience of reality in the dream was all a part of the mind. If dreams seem to be reality and one would not have any concept that one is dreaming how does one know that one is not dreaming now? Descartes point is that one cannot justify reality in the sense that one could be dreaming right at this moment and not know therefore one cannot trust the brain as an indicator of what is reality.
John Steinbeck was perhaps the best author of all time. He was the winner of a Nobel Prize, and among other accomplishments, Steinbeck published nineteen novels and made many movies during his lifetime. All of his experience and knowledge are shown through his novels. A reader can tell, just in reading a novel by Steinbeck, that he had been through a lot throughout his life. Also, Steinbeck worked very hard to accomplish everything that he did during his lifetime. Nothing came very easily to him, and he had to earn everything he owned. This helped him in his writing, because he was able to write about real people and real experiences. John Steinbeck got his inspiration from life experiences, people he knew, and places he had gone.
According to Descartes, “because our senses sometimes deceive us, I wanted to suppose that nothing was exactly as they led us to imagine (Descartes 18).” In order to extinguish his uncertainty and find incontrovertible truth, he chooses to “raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations (Descartes 59).” This foundation, which Descartes is certain to be the absolute truth, is “I think, therefore I am (Descartes 18).” Descartes argues that truth and proof of reality lies in the human mind, rather than the senses. In other words, he claims that the existence of material objects are not based on the senses because of human imperfection. In fact, he argues that humans, similarly to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, are incapable of sensing the true essence or existence of material objects. However, what makes an object real is human thought and the idea of that object, thus paving the way for Descartes’ proof of God’s existence. Because the senses are easily deceived and because Descartes understands that the senses can be deceived, Descartes is aware of his own imperfection. He
In the second meditation, Descartes is searching for an Archimedian point on which to seed a pearl of certainty. By doubting everything in his first meditation, Descartes consequently doubts his own existence. It is here that a certainty is unearthed: “If I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed”(17). However, Descartes “does not deduce existence from thought by means of syllogism, but recognizes it as something self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind,” or in other words, by natural light (Second Replies:68).
One of Rene Descartes’s most famous arguments, from his not only from his first meditation but all of the meditations, is his Dream Argument. Descartes believes that there is no way to be able to distinguish being in awake from being in a state of dreaming. In fact you could actually be in a dream right now. Rene Descartes’s theory that one is unable distinguish being awake from dreaming, as interesting as it is, can be at times a little farfetched, along with a few contradictions to himself, Descartes’s dream argument does not entitle himself to any sort of claim.
Not only did Descartes set aside all of his previous knowledge, but he also set aside all knowledge he had gained, and that he continued to gain from his five senses. He would not believe what his eyes saw, or what his hand felt, because he could not yet determine his senses as giving him knowledge that could be turned into certainties. He did not have any reason to believe that he could rely on his senses. Descartes doubting of his senses also caused him to reject any knowledge that he had gained through life experience. Most of the knowl...
"John Steinbeck - Biography on Bio." The Biography Channel. AETN UK, n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2013.
In the Third Meditation, Descartes forms a proof for the existence of God. He begins by laying down a foundation for what he claims to know and then offers an explanation for why he previously accepted various ideas but is no longer certain of them. Before he arrives at the concept of God, Descartes categorizes ideas and the possible sources that they originate from. He then distinguishes between the varying degrees of reality that an idea can possess, as well as the cause of an idea. Descartes proceeds to investigate the idea of an infinite being, or God, and how he came to acquire such an idea with more objective reality than he himself has. By ruling out the possibility of this idea being invented or adventitious, Descartes concludes that the idea must be innate. Therefore, God necessarily exists and is responsible for his perception of a thing beyond a finite being.
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr was born in Salinas, California on February 27, 1902. He grew up on ranches around the Salinas Valley, learning many skills and also witnessing the harsh lives of the ranch workers during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended Stanford University for five years until 1925 when he left without a degree for New York City. He survived off odd jobs and tried to write books, which never were published. He then moved back to California and lived in Tahoe City where he met his first wife Carol Henning. It was here in Lake Tahoe where he finished his first novel Cup of Gold, which followed the infamous privateer Henry Morgan and his adventures in the Caribbean. Stei...
...ent most people, including him, were in. The Salinas Valley of California, with its fertile soil and beautiful landscapes, was the place that John Steinbeck called home. He developed a strong connection to nature, and in his books, describing the scene and nature was almost as important as the plot itself. John Steinbeck may have had inspiration from the people and the scenery around him during his adult years, but one of his key influences, in fact most people’s key influences, was his parents. His parents taught him a sense of community and involvement that rings in the background of all his novels. The things he experienced in his lifetime, from the nature of the Salinas Valley to the nurture his parents gave him, and the hardships faced by people around him during the Great Depression all contributed to the themes, motifs, characters, and settings of his novels.
Descartes was incorrect and made mistakes in his philosophical analysis concerning understanding the Soul and the foundation of knowledge. Yes, he coined the famous phrase, “I think therefore I am,” but the rest of his philosophical conclusions fail to be as solid (Meditation 4; 32). Descartes knew that if he has a mind and is thinking thoughts then he must be something that has the ability to think. While he did prove that he is a thinking thing that thinks (Meditation 3; 28), he was unable to formulate correct and true philosophical arguments and claims. For instance, his argument for faith that a non-deceiving God exists and allows us to clearly reason and perceive was a circular argument. Another issue with Descartes' philosophy is that he wanted to reconcile scientific and religious views, which is wrong since the two maintain completely different foundational beliefs and they should exist exclusively- without relation to the other. Thirdly, he believed that the mind was the Self and the Soul, failing to recognize that humans have bodies and the outside world exists, and through which we gain our knowledgeable. Lastly, Descartes argues that ideas are all innate while they actually are not- we gain knowledge through experience.
With Descartes’ ideology of the senses and how they allow for deception of the individual, how are we supposed to be able to differentiate between when we are in a dream or when we are actually in reality? When we are in a dream as well as in reality, the senses seem real and we believe that what we experience is true; however, according to Descartes, the only way to determine whether or not an individual is experiencing a dream is through the use of their thought processing. Within reality, there are certain aspects that allow one to realize that they are presently living in reality. These two main aspects are routine and patterns that are performed on the daily basis such as, going to work, eating breakfast, or even brushing your
This lead to Descartes saying that he cannot use his sensory perception to interpret his belief because he is not able to tell if the senses are dreams or
In Meditations, Descartes brings doubt to everything he believes because it is human nature to believe that which is false. He states that most of what he believes comes from the senses and that a lot of times those senses can be deceived. His conclusion of doubting everything is based on his example of a basket of apples. It goes as follows; you have a basket of apples but you fear that some apples have gone bad and you don't want them to rot the others, so you throw all the apples out of the basket. Now that the basket is empty you examine each apple carefully and return the good apples to the basket. This is what he does with his beliefs, he follows and keeps only those beliefs of which he is sure of. Our beliefs as a whole must be discarded and then each individual belief must be looked at carefully before we can accept it. We must only accept those beliefs we feel are good.
Descartes is clearing away all knowledge that can be called into doubt. By doing this he hopes to create something real and lasting in the sciences, a foundation to build on. This indisputable fact will become the starting point or origin of all other true knowledge he can build upon it. He starts the first argument by attacking the very beginning of knowledge, human senses. Descartes states, "Surely whatever I had admitte...