Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Illusions and Reality
Descartes was skeptical of what we could ever really be sure of. He took away and invalidated things one by one until he determined that he could only be sure that he existed as a thinking thing. I really disliked what he had to say, in my mind I had judged him to be a nutbar with some good written communication skills and that was it. However, after taking a second look at what he wrote, I found myself letting go of my previous judgment. His idea was so far fetched that I couldn't accept it. Now I'm thinking about it, surely there are times when our reality is an illusion. Say you have a really high fever, or get knocked in the head. You can see stars, your vision might blur, you could even have hallucinations. At the point that your mind is altered you still are a thinking thing, even without full use of your scenes. While I don't agree that everything could be an illusion, there is something very real about the physical world, I think Descartes managed to bring humanity to its core. By nature (or design if that's your belief) humans are thinking things. That why are able to create so much in this world, we think all the time.
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You many think Descartes is going off the deep end here. Few of us have trouble figuring out whether we've dreamt something or actually lived it. However vivid kind of dreaming called "lucid dreaming" in which the experience is in many ways indistinguishable from ordinary waking experience. So it is possible that if we were having a lucid dream, we might at first mistake it for being awake. There are also drug induced hallucinations that seems real to the people having them.
ReplyDeleteAnd to further the confusion of our thinking, what about Freud's defense mechanisms? For example, one where we choose denial instead of open thinking and acceptence. That can often cause one to forget experiences, or traumas entirely. Carl Jung said something about the abused can become the abuser if they do not recognize and deal with what has happend to them.
ReplyDeleteAll we have is our thughts, I would say.
Who we are is what and how we think.
None of what Descartes said was nutty. It made perfect logical sense. It could be that this is all a dream because there is no way of distinguishing that our reality is not a dream. And if our reality is a dream, IF it was as such, then we cannot know if anything we experience is real. That argument is enough to validate philosophical skepticism as a realistic concept.
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