Descartes Malignant Demon Hypothesis

999 Words4 Pages
Descartes is a French philosopher who wrote, Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641. Descartes introduces three hypotheses, senses hypothesis (how we should be skeptical about the information our senses give us), dream hypothesis, and Malignant Demon hypothesis. In this piece, he describes how his dreams seem much like reality and differentiate between the two. For example, “This would be all well and good, were I not a man who is accustomed to sleeping at night, and to experiencing in my dreams the very same things, or now and then even less plausible ones, as these insane people do when they are awake. How often does my evening slumber persuade me of such ordinary things as these: that I am here, clothed in my dressing gown, seated next to my fireplace...As I consider these matters more carefully, I see so plainly that there are no definitive signs by which to distinguish being awake from being asleep” (60-61). Descartes is skeptical about his dreams and describes them…show more content…
Also, dreams do not use senses. Our dreams fool us, for example, if a dream about a shark attacking me, I will not feel the pain of the shark biting me because there is a disconnect with dreams and the pain we feel. As well as lacking pain in a dream state, we also lack the ability to be conscious and understand the environment around us. Unlike reality where we understand and interact with the environment around us. When dreaming we do not fully understand how to interact with the environment around us. We don’t understand the depth, solidity of objects, or laws of physics, all of the concepts (depth, solidity, laws of physics) we understand when we are a wake disappear when we dream. We have no concept of what is around us (environment wise), we have tunnel vision in

    More about Descartes Malignant Demon Hypothesis

      Open Document