Descartes’ Dream World Worry Descartes has a very important plan in mind for his Meditations on First Philosophy and part of this plan involves bringing everything we know into question and finding what it is that we can know about the world around us and about ourselves. He wants to do this in order to find a solid base of what we certainly know, so he can build up what we can know onto that certainty. In these meditations he brings to light some problems with knowing things that we perceive, the problems include his sanity, an evil-genius, and the possibility that anything beyond ourselves is just a dream, a simulated world within our minds. This last one, the dream world problem is the one we will concern ourselves with here. Through these
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In the very last paragraph of his meditations he sprinkles a handful of ideas out in attempt to finish his defeat of worries he has yet to vanquish appropriately. This includes our worry concerned here in. His final attack on this problem is a problem of continuity, memory, and intellect. The main difference between dreams and being awake is the continuity of perceptions. He uses a thought experiment involving a man who appears out of nowhere and how within a dream this would not seem odd but surely would if one was awake. (Descartes 89) The connections between things that have happened and things that are happening is something that is not necessary within a dream but it is our idea of reality. The argument in premise, conclusion format would be as …show more content…
Hume agrees that we cannot connect our perceptions to any external objects (Hume XII:I) and goes on to argue “For here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive scepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it” (Hume XII:II) that this kind of questioning, what he refers to as excessive scepticism, does nothing for us. Hume argues that this questioning is not something that we can base our lives on. That our morality and principles are not based on reasoning but on sentiment. (Hume XII:III) How we live our life is based on our principles and it is not within us to reason out things such as existence and morals, but that we should create these of our sentiments. And he shows that whether our external world is an ultimate reality or not, it does not matter to our actually morality and lives. As one can see Descartes sets up a problem and in its defeat he hopes to solidify his future position on knowledge but unfortunately he is unable to truly vanquish his dream world worry in a satisfactory way. Unfortunately for him this defeat is essential to his overall goal to argue what it is that we can know. Though the dream world worry may not be a large problem in our day to day lives, its persistence undermines Descartes overall goal of proving what we can know and proving
In the very last paragraph of his meditations he sprinkles a handful of ideas out in attempt to finish his defeat of worries he has yet to vanquish appropriately. This includes our worry concerned here in. His final attack on this problem is a problem of continuity, memory, and intellect. The main difference between dreams and being awake is the continuity of perceptions. He uses a thought experiment involving a man who appears out of nowhere and how within a dream this would not seem odd but surely would if one was awake. (Descartes 89) The connections between things that have happened and things that are happening is something that is not necessary within a dream but it is our idea of reality. The argument in premise, conclusion format would be as …show more content…
Hume agrees that we cannot connect our perceptions to any external objects (Hume XII:I) and goes on to argue “For here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive scepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it” (Hume XII:II) that this kind of questioning, what he refers to as excessive scepticism, does nothing for us. Hume argues that this questioning is not something that we can base our lives on. That our morality and principles are not based on reasoning but on sentiment. (Hume XII:III) How we live our life is based on our principles and it is not within us to reason out things such as existence and morals, but that we should create these of our sentiments. And he shows that whether our external world is an ultimate reality or not, it does not matter to our actually morality and lives. As one can see Descartes sets up a problem and in its defeat he hopes to solidify his future position on knowledge but unfortunately he is unable to truly vanquish his dream world worry in a satisfactory way. Unfortunately for him this defeat is essential to his overall goal to argue what it is that we can know. Though the dream world worry may not be a large problem in our day to day lives, its persistence undermines Descartes overall goal of proving what we can know and proving