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Rene Descartes Dreams Can Deceive Us

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Descartes uses the dream experience and the idea of an evil genius to explain that our senses can deceive us. Descartes talks about systematic doubt which means our sense experiences can deceive us. Descartes explains his dream argument in the First Mediation that there is no way to distinguish whether the experiences in your dreams from those when you are awake. While one is dreaming, one usually do not know that they are dreaming unless they are in a lucid a dream, which means they do realize they are dreaming. An example on how dreams can deceive us is the experiencing of a visual sensation. Let’s imagine you are dreaming of a house, a garden, and a white picket fence. Despite the realism of the dream, this visual sensation is false even if they visually look real. Descartes go on to explain that, this visual sensation from our dreams must have been caused by external objects. Therefore, dreams can and do deceive us because the question “How do we know if we’re not dreaming now?” comes into play. Dreams visually deceive us. …show more content…

Because God is perfect and therefore hence, “good,” He does not deceive us and would not be a deceiver. This concept was created with the idea that God is powerful enough to deceive everyone about everything including math and geometry. So if God can not deceive us, who does? As a result, Descartes then created the Evil Genius who is being similar God. The Evil Genius and God are both really powerful and really smart, however, the Evil Genius is not good, he is bad and therefore he can deceive us. This Evil Genius argument gave Descartes a reason to doubt contingent truths and necessary truths

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