Descartes Meditations

Descartes’ Meditations revolve around the philosopher trying to find a truth about existence by making a clean slate of all of his current beliefs and build a new world view around this newly discovered “truth”. In the first Meditation, Descartes goes about demolishing his beliefs about existence by trying to find strong, unequivocal reasons to doubt everything. One of his doubts includes the possibility that he is dreaming and that his current perspective of reality might actually only be a dream. The Dreaming Doubt came about by Descartes questioning his senses. He questioned them because according to him, “occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.”1 He

According to Descartes when we dream we all have similar experiences that we have in real life and even have some feelings or movements while we do so. As a result it wouldn’t be improbable that what we experience in a supposed waking state is actually a dream. He also compares dreams to paintings which are often made using elements from real life. Even if I am dreaming about typing this report, the subject of hands, computers, letters, even the sound of the keyboard clicking had to come from somewhere or something real so there must be some form of existence somewhere even if we do not currently have access to it. Even though the person might actually be dreaming and the bodies we ourselves have might not be our own, Descartes says that there are certain constants in both reality and the dream world that will always remain “true”. These basic truths are mathematical and geometric properties. According to Descartes whether we dream or are wide awake, 2+2 will always equal 4. A square will always have 4

It’s possible that if the senses could be fooled in one instant (ex. A magic trick) they could be continuously fooled into believing that a dream is actually reality and vice versa. My feelings have been fooled in dreams where I experienced stressful events like being chased by a serial killer or even witnessing the death of my mother. In both instances I woke up sweating with a raised heartbeat and tears in my eyes. This gives strength to the Dreaming Doubt because if our emotions and bodily systems can be fooled by subconscious thoughts and feelings it’s also possible that they can be manipulated in other ways. From Descartes point of view, dreams continually manipulate the senses similar to the examples described above so it opens the possibility that we might be being influenced right now as we read the words of this paper. This doubt depends on the fact that it speaks about the possibility that were are dreaming right now, not as an absolute fact. If there’s even the slightest possibility that our current perspective is being falsified by a dream state then according to Descartes our perception of reality isn’t stable enough to be kept around and we have to find a truer worldview. In Descartes’ mind, once there is a chance that our reality might not be real the “truth” will have to be found. It is Descartes’ way of thinking