Illusion Vs. Reality In Rene Descartes Meditation

Rene Descartes was a French mathematician and philosopher from the 1600s who created the Cartesian plane and is the author of “Meditations.” In “Meditations,” he mentioned his goal was to want certain knowledge to be firm and lasting, or undoubtable as he explained there are already many things that are deceiving us such as sense data (e.g. optical illusions) and dreams. Thus, he suggested that everyone should doubt old beliefs, old habits, seemingly obvious truths such as 2+3=5, and anything that has deceived people once by doubting the foundational beliefs and by imagining an evil deceiver. He underwent a revelation early in his life and shortly afterwards threw everything he ever knew out the window. He did not even believe the simplest obvious …show more content…
When I am no longer dreaming and in reality, I can see clear differences between a dream and reality. Based on my experiences, when I am in a dream, unreal things can happen. I recall flying in some of my dreams in the past and seeing people fly too as one particular example. However, when I am in a dream, I never think about whether I am in a dream or not, so I can never realize I am in a dream and not in reality when unreal things happen. Obviously, after I wake up from a dream, I can tell I just had a dream. Sometimes, I wake up surprised that the dream was not reality when the dream consisted of normal things that can happen in reality. Another difference I see between dreams and reality is that I act differently in the two worlds. When I am in a dream, I feel like I am missing a part of my brain and lost some of my knowledge that I have from reality. In one dream, I was taking a test on multiplication and I completely forgot how to do it, so I ended up failing the test, but I had the memory from reality while taking the test that I learned how to do it when I was in the third