Jon:

An interesting thoughtful essay. It is an excellent draft. Your understanding of the first Meditation and its purposes in leading us to doubt our senses is especially good. I have suggested some small revisions below in the body of your essay in italic type and brackets.

You say your last paragraph that “The point of the discussion, however, isn’t really to determine if the world exists. More, it is realizing that nothing is certain except your own existence. Anything is possible. And this is a very freeing thing to realize.” Of course, Descartes wants to go a lot further than his own existence in the Meditations. As you point out at the beginning “he wants to build off” what he initially finds to be certain. Most of what he goes on to do, of course, goes beyond the scope of your essay. But hasn’t Descartes gone further than his own existence even in Meditation 2? Note, for example, the title to Meditation 2 on page 80. And even more relevant to your essay, is your last comment in the above quote about the certainty of your own existence being very freeing to realize. I think there is a very important insight here: Why is the whole process Descartes undertakes in the first two Meditations is so liberating?

JPW

Jon Jones

Philosophy 302

Essay 1, topic 3

The goal of Descartes’s work, as with most philosophers, was the pursuit of truth. For Descartes the first step in this pursuit was to doubt everything he normally thought to be true, and to look for something that is absolutely certain, and build off of that. To find this certainty, it must be true of it that there is no reason to doubt it. Before going straight to the certainty, however, he seeks to doubt all that he can, so as to center in on where the certainty might lie.

To Descartes, much of human knowledge is gained through the senses. However, all knowledge gained this way can be instantly doubted, for there is reason to doubt the senses. The first reason is that the senses can trick you about objects that are very small or very far away in the distance: you can’t see either of them, yet they are still there. Also, things far away appear to be smaller than they really are. A good example of this is the sun: I can hold my hand up in front of the sun and completely block it, but the sun isn’t really the size of my hand. It is millions of miles around. However, this is not argument enough, since there are objects that are not very far away, that we do not doubt the size of.

However, anything we see or feel or sense in any way can, in fact, be doubted. Our senses are capable of deception, which a common occurrence can make clear: dreaming. While asleep, you may dream that you are flying or eating a hot fudge sundae, but when you ‘wake up’ you find a conflicting viewpoint: that you have been in your bed sleeping. You weren’t doing both, and if this is the ‘real world’ then you have been deceived into thinking that you were flying or eating a hot fudge sundae.

Now that it is established that the senses can be deceived, we must doubt all information that comes from our senses. Even if I am not dreaming right now, a malicious demon may be making me think that I am typing a paper at two in the morning. He has imprisoned me in this dream world and has complete power over my senses. Or perhaps in a modern day context, I may very well be in a complex virtual reality program. Any of these situations makes the physical things I sense able to be doubted, and thusly anything I’ve ever sensed. If these can all be doubted, then all knowledge gained from the senses can be doubted, and therefore this type of knowledge is not the certainty that Descartes was looking for.

In this way at first he doubts such things as physics, astronomy, medicine, and other practical disciplines; that is, disciplines that have their root in the real world. He thinks that mathematical studies may be indisputable, for whether sleeping or awake one plus two equals three. However, he quickly takes back this position, for the demon could very well be deceiving him into believing that one plus two equals three. It could be that every time he’s ever counted it he has been tricked, and therefore even this simple ‘fact’ can be doubted.

At this point he ponders on what he can be certain of. He determines that, in order for him to be doubting and thinking, he must exist. This is the most certain thing in his world. But what is he? Not the physical body, for this can be doubted of existence. [The syntax of the previous sentence is bizarre!] He eventually comes to the conclusion that he is the thing that thinks. This same “I” is the thing that has sensory perceptions. And this, he feels, is the only thing he can really be certain of.

But is he right? Firstly, is it correct to doubt all ideas that come to us from our senses? I think so. The dream argument is a strong one, for it is true that when I am dreaming I am tricked into thinking I am doing something other than sleeping in a bed. In fact, in some ways my dreams are more real than this one, for, while dreaming, I have never wondered as to the reality of it. It’s never occurred to me. But this could just as easily be a dream from which I’ll wake up in a few minutes.

If this isn’t really a dream, than [then] at least it could be an imaginary world created by someone, and we are merely playing their advanced virtual reality game. Why anyone would want to play a game where you type essays is a mystery to me, but the idea remains solid. If we worked on it for a while, humans could even create a world like this. All that would be necessary is to plug an information cable into the area of the brain that receives all the transmissions from the body and sends back responses. In other words, this machine would fake the conditions that our “bodies” feel.

However, some would say the difference between this life and a dream world is that we have memories in this one; we remember yesterday and the day before and all sorts of memories. But are these to be trusted? Again, I don’t think so. Modern science believes that memories are stored in the brain. If we could figure out how these storage bins for memories work, we could fake those as well. So memories can be doubted as well.

But even if we’re not plugged into a machine, if there was a way to prove that we are not, information from our senses would still be suspect, and are [is]all the time. My senses tell me that the window of my room is made of one piece of glass. But it’s not really a solid sheet of glass. It’s actually lots of little atoms, with a lot of open space between them. It’s far from solid, but my senses don’t tell me that.[Good. This is of course a very Cartesian point of view. Descartes would add that the colors that you think you see out there don’t exist in the real world independent of us either.]

So, our senses, and all information derived from them, should be doubted. And this definitely includes physics and physical sciences. The memory problem makes me doubt history. This leaves mathematics, essentially, as something that might not be doubtable.

But if you start to look at mathematics, you realize that it is all based on real world problems. How did we come up with 2+1=3? We looked at objects, and noticed that 2+1=3. It is conceivable that the universe could have been comprised so that 1+1=10. This seems strange, unless you realize that, in actuality, this is a ‘valid’ equation if you’re using binary numbers.

It seems completely unimaginable to me that there be a world with a different mathematical system than in this world. But perhaps it is just a weakness on my part. If you do work in linear algebra with vectors, there is all sorts of weird stuff you can do with transformations of vectors. As an easy example, suppose you have some v and w. Well, if v and w go through a certain transformation which puts them in a new ‘world’, than the result of v+w will be v+w+1. And if v is 1 and w is 2, then suddenly 1+2=4. And if this seems strange to you, then this is all the more reason to doubt mathematics.

Along the same lines, then, we can doubt our logic, for this is based mostly on mathematics. And so this only leaves me[.] [with the question ‘ Do I exist?’.] I can’t be certain that you exist, but I think I can be certain that I exist. Why? Because something must be thinking. Something must be doubting. Something must be in a virtual reality suit. There always has to be something in order for any of this to exist. And that something is I.

But I think anyone who’s ever thought about this problem ends up at the same place: Who cares? Does it really matter whether this world exists? For every day life it doesn’t. Even if I knew that this world didn’t exist, I don’t know how to get out of it. And therefore I must still do all the things I did before to survive in it. But as a philosopher, I don’t limit myself to ‘every day life’ usefulness.

This question is quite meaningful if taken in the context of other philosophical discussions. For instance, if this world doesn’t exist, than either someone made it up, or I made it up. In both cases, God did not create it. Now, if someone else created this world, than there must be a world outside of this one, and maybe God did create that one. But if I am merely tricking myself into seeing this world, than [then] there isn’t a God. Or if there is one, it is I.

I think that perhaps the easiest way to deal with the knowledge that the world might not exist is to acknowledge it, and not take life so seriously. If it really does exist, then you were a happy fun person. If it didn’t exist, you at least had fun with the game. Basically, just act like it does exist.

The point of the discussion, however, isn’t really to determine if the world exists. More, it is realizing that nothing is certain except your own existence. Anything is possible. And this is a very freeing thing to realize.