Rene Descartes's Argument On The True Nature Of Reality

1. What do you think Chalmers means by “fundamental reality,” and how does it relate to the idea of “multiple aspects of reality?”

Descartes is considering that all of his experiences could be false and that everything is just the invention of a powerful being. This resulted in this argument:

Recalling his previous thoughts in Meditation Two, the Meditator supposes that what he sees does not exist, that his memory is faulty, that he has no senses and no body, and that extension, movement and place are mistaken notions. Perhaps, he remarks, the only certain thing remaining is that there is no certainty. Although this argument often seems logical and fully-developed, Descartes uses this meditation to as inspiration prove that perhaps there is one thing that is absolutely certain in the universe: his existence.

Reality is often contrasted with what is imaginary, delusional, (only) in the mind, dreams, what is false, what is

He finds it plausible that we are all living in a dream and we have never experienced reality. He can no longer give any credence to his senses and finds himself in a place of complete uncertainty. Descartes comes to the conclusion that nothing can be perceived more easily and more evidently than his own mind. He has discovered that even bodies are not accurately perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination, and are only accurately being perceived by the intellect. He also realizes that they are not distinguished through being touched, smelled, or tasted, but by being understood alone. (An apple is an apple because our mind tells us that it is an apple.) It is the faculty of reason that gives the knowledge and lets the mind know the truths and essences of objects. Descartes assumes that all of us can be decided by our senses, someone can see something far away, and then discover that is not what we thought it was. Or even a oar when is immerse half in water attempt to be bent, but instead is straight. Descartes think that we cannot always be sure of what we sense, and gives the example of himself seated by the fire.

Our senses can be doubted and we cannot trust it as a source of knowledge. Similarly, dreams do not equal perception; seeing an external reality that is through our imagination and is beyond basic truths. Then there is our malicious demon, which is the cause for deceptions and misleading as it can so greatly deceive us and is used to cloud Descartes’ judgment. All his beliefs in the world are doubtful and cannot serve as a foundation for the sciences. The fact that Descartes has that self doubt and reasoning indicates his

Descartes' meditations are created in pursuit of certainty, or true knowledge. He cannot assume that what he has learned is necessarily true, because he is unsure of the accuracy of its initial source. In order to purge himself of all information that is possibly wrong, he subjects his knowledge to methodic doubt. This results in a (theoretical) doubt of everything he knows. Anything, he reasons, that can sustain such serious doubt must be unquestionable truth, and knowledge can then be built from that base. Eventually, Descartes doubts everything. But by doubting, he must exist, hence his "Cogito ergo sum".

In the First Meditation, Descartes invites us to think skeptically. He entices us with familiar occasions of error, such as how the size of a distant tower can be mistaken. Next, an even more profound reflection on how dreams and reality are indistinguishable provides suitable justification to abandon all that he previously perceived as being truth. (18, 19) By discarding all familiarity and assumptions, Descartes hopes to eliminate all possible errors in locating new foundations of knowledge. An inescapable consequence of doubting senses and prior beliefs

Does Descartes succeed in showing he exists? While it may seem at first glance absurd that someone should doubt their own existence, Descartes’ reasons for doing so are well justified in his Meditations. He describes how he comes to realise just how fallible his beliefs about the world around him can be. His mistakes range from seeing an object off in the distance and being mistaken about its size or shape, through to the occasions when he has been convinced that a dream he is having while asleep is in fact real . Descartes comes to the conclusion that he has so often been mistaken that he cannot rely on any of his past experiences or the knowledge he has gained from them, and decides to throw the wheat out with the chaff; he comes to decide

Rene Descartes was a French philosopher in the 17th century who flirted with the idea that everything that in the world was false. The concept of everything being somewhat unreliable with no real certainty attached is the basis of skepticism. Throughout his studies, Descartes introduced an idea that helped justify his argument of everything being fake. This idea is that there may be an all powerful evil being whose goal is to deceive one from reality.

Descartes validates this notion in his famous practice of methodological skepticism. Descartes uses a thought experiment to systematically strip out all inconsistencies of his experience due to

Then Descartes arrives at the conclusion that he himself exists. He believes that possessing the ability to harness pure thought, he must exist. He affirms, “I think, therefore I am”(Descartes, 18) In it’s simplest form, Descartes believes that existence relies on the capacity to think. The fact that he doubts his own existence proves that he exists because he thinks about his existence as factual, and not as a figment of his imagination.

These preconceived notions keep us from “the knowledge of the truth” (Descartes 193). In order to access the truth, we must doubt everything. Doubting everything will lead to the distinction between mind and body. Once you recognize that distinction, you will recognize that “neither extension nor shape nor local motion, nor anything of this kind which is attributable to a body, belongs to our nature, but that thought alone belongs to us” (195). This thought that we have produces ideas, and these ideas are given to us by God, they are innate. Since God gave us this “faculty for knowledge […], it can never encompass any object which is not true” (203). For we are able to see the truth clearly and distinctly this way. Descartes argues that God would be a deceiver if what he gave us was able to be distorted and that we can mistake what is false as true. This is not the case, because God is not a deceiver. Some would argue that people do believe things to be true when in fact they are false. This, however, is not the doing of God, it is of our own free will, and it is what Descartes calls “errors.” Errors do not rely on our intellect, but rather on our own will. Ultimately, doubting will lead to deductive reasoning, or a series of logical statements eventually

One of the most fundamental questions in philosophy is the one of appearance vs. reality. We find ourselves asking the question of what is genuinely “real,” and what is viewed merely as just an “appearance,” and not real? It becomes difficult when we assume there is a difference in the two to determine which is which. Generally, what we label as “real” is regarded as external

Firstly, Descartes deals with the issue of empiricism- the theory that our knowledge is derived from our sensory experiences. Since we know from everyday errors that our senses have the ability to deceive us fairly often so making our perceptions to be something that it is not. For example, there are lots of examples of optical illusions and the fact that the train tracks may appear to converge from a distance. Consequently, we ought to