Descartes Dream Argument Analysis

While there have been many philosophers that have tried to deal with the problem of sense perception, arguably the most popular of them is Descartes. He thought we can often be fooled by our senses and they are not to be trusted. According to Descartes, all we can put faith in is the natural light of reason since our senses can be fooled. He uses a couple of examples to make his point in his meditations. I will look at a few of them and give my personal thoughts on his arguments. The Descartes dream argument is a renowned argument he uses to prove that our senses can be fooled. He claims that in a dream one can sit by a fire in a room and feel the same warmth from the fire and see the same fire flickering in sleep as while awake. It feels the same as in waking life even though there is no fire in his dream. Descartes uses this to argue that we should not trust that fire exists in waking life, because if we can feel heat from a nonexistent fire while asleep why would we trust the …show more content…
He claims that for all we know we may be under the control of an omnipotent being who wants to deceive us in believing the world we live in is not real. This can be more recently referred to as the Matrix argument, as the move the Matrix is based on the premise that the reality we know is only a façade. Therefore, even things that seem obvious, such as math, are only a deception created by the deceiving God. I take issue with this argument as well. Descartes, in later writings, proves the existence of God. He claims that God is a perfect being and since people are flawed the idea of a perfect being must come from God. The only possible cause of perfection in the human mind is generated by the idea of God. Descartes also claims that since God is a perfect being he cannot be a deceiver. Descartes therefore contradicts himself by presenting the idea of a deceiving God and then claiming that God is perfect and would never deceive

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