Rene Descartes Dreaming Argument Essay

Although Descartes argument seems plausible decades ago, now there are ways to weaken is argument. In the science of psychology which focuses on the brain one can find that there are ways of knowing one is dreaming or sleep. Descartes even contradicts himself when he asserts “that even if all of our sensory experience is but a dream, we can still conclude that we have some knowledge of the nature of reality”. I believe that Descartes knows that he is not dreaming in a constant state of dream but that there is a sense of reality that one experiences. What one experiences are senses such as smell and touch that one cannot perform in a dream world. Being able to touch and have the sensation of touching an item such as a table in a dream does not happen. The sensation of pain is also an indicator of a reality that does not exist in the reaffirms that one is not in reality.

Descartes first presents this idea with the statement "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 the fireplace -- when in fact I am lying undressed in bed!" (Descartes 490). By using an experience of his own, Descartes shows how dreams can be asymptotic to reality. Descartes implies that he often sits next to his fireplace, clothed in his dressing gown, so his dream that he is doing so is very believable. In conclusion, one cannot distinguish between a dream and reality because the gradient between them is so finitely small at times.

According to Descartes’, “As I think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.” This is the fundamental principle of the Dreaming Argument. The scenarios in which we experience whilst we are asleep are comparable to the scenarios we experience whilst we are awake. Often, we struggle to tell from our own perspective where our experiences are derived from; it is difficult to differentiate whether our experiences stem from reality or our dreams. The issue with this is that our unconscious

Descartes’ Dreaming Argument comes from his thinking that there is no way of knowing if you are sleeping or if you are awake. To know something is to have no doubt of a fact, it must be a justified true belief. To be justified it must hold logical reason, you cannot state something is true without evidence. In order for it to be true it is not enough to justify it, but it must be justified with true facts. Finally, you must believe it, in order to know something it must be true in your mind. As a result Descartes doubts his consciousness as he cannot truly know that he is awake. This spurs Descartes to question if any perceived knowledge of reality is really true. Descartes calls his senses into questions as he notes, “it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once” and therefore concludes that as a result it is prudent, never to trust his sense. In

How do we know we are not dreaming some particular experience we are having, or we are not dreaming all our experience of this world? When we dream we imagine things happening often with the same sense of reality as we do when we are awake. In Descartes dream argument, he states there are no reliable signs distinguishing sleeping from waking. In his dream argument, he is not saying we are merely dreaming all of what we experience, nor, is he saying we can distinguish dreaming from being awake. I think his point is we cannot be for sure what we experience as being real in this world is actually real.

Descartes dreaming argument suggests that perhaps our senses cannot be fully trusted because we cannot be certain we are not dreaming, and this means we therefore cannot be certain of anything. His evil demon argument is similar but uses the idea of an evil demon deceiving you instead of your senses. These sceptical arguments mean that we cannot be certain of anything at all for it may be happening whilst we are dreaming, or we are being tricked into thinking it is happening. I do not agree with Descartes because I feel that I can be certain I am not dreaming, and I do not believe that other supernatural creatures; such as an evil demon exists.

The dreaming argument was based upon the idea that both waking and sleeping (dreaming) experiences can be very similar, and that distinguishing between the two may not be possible. This led to Descartes doubting that waking experiences are actually infact waking experiences and not dreams. Descartes developed this argument and claimed that in order to be certain of any experiences, we have to be certain that we are not dreaming. However, Descartes continued and

Many different interpretations of Descartes’ dream argument could derive from his theory. In lecture we interpreted Descartes’ Dream Argument as follows:

One of Rene Descartes’s most famous arguments, from his not only from his first meditation but all of the meditations, is his Dream Argument. Descartes believes that there is no way to be able to distinguish being in awake from being in a state of dreaming. In fact you could actually be in a dream right now. Rene Descartes’s theory that one is unable distinguish being awake from dreaming, as interesting as it is, can be at times a little farfetched, along with a few contradictions to himself, Descartes’s dream argument does not entitle himself to any sort of claim.

The Dreaming argument first showed up in Descartes First Meditation, where he focusses on the task to educate himself on his own doubt. When meditating he starts to think about how he has a hard time distinguishing himself from being asleep and awaking. This is how the dreaming argument came forth. The Dreaming Argument easily said is “If I am certain of anything, then I have to be certain that

In the excerpt of Certainty, Moore provides a series of arguments against the Dream Argument. In this paper, I will present Moore’s claims and focus on analyzing his reasoning for why the skeptic’s hypothesis is inconsistent. Throughout the essay, I will argue that Moore’s inconsistency approach is unable to disprove the Dream Argument by showing how his explanation does not reject the main premises of the argument.

The Indigenous Australian imagination perceives the way of the world and all that exists as not the result of a singular force or mind, but, rather, the result of powerful totemic ancestral beings who once roamed the land. This ontological tradition, known as “The Dreaming”, serves as an infinite link between past and present, people and place, and both the natural and spiritual world. “The Dreaming,” then, asserts that all of humanity and nature in its entirety is alive and connected. In his ethnographic account titled, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, Fred Myers examines the importance of The Dreaming to Pintupi society and its centrality in the constitution of their lived world. Descriptions of what happened in The Dreaming underlie Pintupi social relationships and constructions of “country.” It is through this mythological construct that the Pintupi Aboriginal people mediate their relationships with the land and negotiate aspects of personhood and identity.

Dream Skepticism has been debated largely since Descartes’ projection of those ideas. Descartes believed many irrational thoughts in relation to dreaming, which proposed ideas that nobody at his time had ever seen before. Descartes’ challenging of the traditional ideas and proposing new ones in which challenged the minds of the individuals, as well as trying to convince the masses that dreaming had some sort of value for an individual that would carry on into his conscious world. Throughout these different ideas lied his main notion: the dreams produced in the human brain while unconscious are not false or fiction, rather, they present the truths that lie in our very minds and therefor should hold value to the dreamer himself. Descartes believed

I mentioned Rene Descartes earlier in my writing and want to unpack his thinking a little more. In “Meditation on the First Philosophy,” Descartes starts to question whether he can really tell the difference between being asleep and being awake. He says the following: “Let us then suppose* that we are dreaming, and that these particular things (that we have our eyes open, are moving our head, stretching out our hands) are not true; and that perhaps we do not even have hands or the rest of a body like what we see. It must nonetheless be admitted that the things we see in sleep are, so to speak, painted

The Thirteenth Floor, a 1999 science-fiction thriller, examines the possibility of alternate universes that are stimulated by computers where the inhabitants only believe that they are real. Three different kinds of existences were depicted. We are first presented with the world in the 1990’s. Characters that were in this world include: Jane, Douglas Hall, Whitney, Hannon Fuller, and the detective. Life in the 1990’s was fairly normal; there was the working class, romantic interests, and hobbies like basketball.