DESCARTES AND THE DEMON
Descartes declares in part one of his Meditations Descartes declares that we cannot believe in our senses. One of the reasons that he says we can not believe in our senses is that we do not know that we are being deceived or not. He says that there is a possibility that we are being deceived by a demon into to believing the world that we are seeing. This is an interesting statement that he has made, but I do not think that something so out of this world is necessary to call all our sense into doubt. All we need to realize is that our knowledge is limited.
Here someone might say "How do we know that our knowledge is limited?" The answer to this is that if we knew everything, there would not be any need for experiments and methods of analysis. But they are there. One could say it is the realization of our ignorance that has lead to the advancement of the many fields of knowledge, for if we did not realize our ignorance and believed that we already knew all, we would not even think of making the endevour towards advancement of knowledge.
Taking this into consideration, lets analyze one proposition that we hold dear: That our universe (including everything in it, like galaxies, stars, space, all matter, all antimatter, etc.) is the all there is. We like to think that. This is supported by the observations we make, which are just an extrapolation of our senses. Yet , if we take into consideration that we are do not possess knowledge of all, we can realize that our sense how our universe is all that can be mistaken. It is possible that it is wrong, and that in reality our galaxy is one single atom of one single object that that itself exists in a universe quite different from ours.
2 comments:
Isn't it just as logical for there to be an angel protecting us from such a demon as there is for the demon to be deceiving us? Our senses have to at least have a hint of truth, and since the universe is constantly in flux what we know has to change also. We can never know everything, and the reason for this might be that what we once had known has to be changed to adjust for the flux of the universe.
That's not the point. The point is that there is a possiblity of what we percieve as reaity that it is not such and that we need to be analytic when we say these things.
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