do i exist? probably not.

words  by  gabrielle  greet

Descartes First Meditation's first edition. 

Rene Descartes.

Opening our minds to the theorems of philosophical content is a skill not enough of us have. I find this inherently important in today's intelligently abstract world. French philosopher, Rene Descartes, argues our entire existence. In the egotistical society we live in, pondering the possibility that our existence may be an illusion is almost a laughing matter. It takes an extremely objective mind to understand and accept Descartes' argument and to truly realise the possibilities he puts forward. He explains his beliefs in his Meditations, first published in 1641.

The First Meditation, subtitled "What can be called into doubt," opens with Descartes reflecting on the number of falsehoods he has believed during his life and on the subsequent faultiness of the body of knowledge he has built up from these falsehoods. He breaks down the 'house' that is his life's knowledge and strips his mind down to almost nothing. He does this in order to begin again, to rebuild his knowledge. He does this because of the doubt he feels for his own opinions. How do we know what we know? What makes you think things are what you think they are? For this reason, all previous knowledge must be extradited and rebuilt. Descartes reasons that he need only find some reason to doubt his present opinions in order to prompt him to seek sturdier foundations for his knowledge. Rather than doubt every one of his opinions individually, he reasons that he might cast them all into doubt if he can doubt the foundations and basic principles upon which his opinions are founded.

Everything that we take as true has been gained through our senses. How do we know exist? Well, I can see myself in the mirror. I can feel my face, my nose, my toes. I hear myself speak. Therefore, I exist. In other words, one's consciousness implies one's existence. In one of Descartes' replies to objections to the book, he summed this up in the phrase, "I think therefore I am". Wrong! Our senses, unfortunately, deceive. Descartes acknowledges this in his first meditation, however, this is not his main argument which he proposes. His vanguard for his beliefs is the Dreaming Argument. Like Galileo, Descartes sought to overturn two-thousand-year-old prejudices injected into the Western tradition by Aristotle. The Aristotelian thought of Descartes' day placed a great weight on the testimony of the senses, suggesting that all knowledge comes from the senses. Descartes realises that he is often convinced when he is dreaming that he is sensing reality. He feels certain that he is awake and sitting by the fire, but reflects that often he has dreamed this very sort of thing and been absolutely convinced by it. Every one of us have experienced the same thing - you are in a dream, and it all seems real. It is only once you wake up that you realise it was not.
Descartes argument is this :
Our dreamt experiences are alike in kind to our waking experiences.
Our senses deceive us, therefore we cannot distinguish whether we are awake or asleep.
Dreams do not constitute knowledge.
Because of this, our waking experiences do not constitute knowledge.
Therefore, we have no knowledge of our external world. This is the basis for External world Scepticism.
Now, as you are reading his argument, you may be regarding his ideas as outlandish. But, once you explore them logically, he makes his argument hard to falsify.

Dreams are alike in kind to our waking experiences. We do not dream about things we could not conceive in our waking state. Although they may be strange and imaginative, every single component of our dreams is possible. Oh, but you had a dream that a half-pigeon-half-merman was flying through a purple forest of pencils? If you deconstruct that dream, each component constitutes normality. A pigeon is real, not something you only imagined in your dream. A merman is part man and part fish, both concepts we understand and know from the real world, and so on. In this way, his first premise is valid.

Our senses deceive us, therefore we cannot distinguish whether we are awake or asleep. Firstly, how do our senses deceive us? We've all experienced a void in the workings of our senses. When you think you hear your name, but it was only someone saying something similar to your name; when something looks black in this room, but blue in that room; when  you think you feel something crawling on your neck, but it was nothing. Because there is room for misleading, you cannot trust your senses at all. Descartes' explains, "I have convinced myself that there is nothing in the world — no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Doesn't it follow that I don't exist? No, surely I must exist if it's me who is convinced of something. But there is a deceiver, supremely powerful and cunning whose aim is to see that I am always deceived. But surely I exist, if I am deceived. Let him deceive me all he can, he will never make it the case that I am nothing while I think that I am something. Thus having fully weighed every consideration, I must finally conclude that the statement "I am, I exist" must be true whenever I state it or mentally consider it." (Descartes, Meditation II: On the Nature of the Human Mind, Which Is Better Known Than the Body). Knowledge that we gain through our senses is called empirical. Therefore, all empirical knowledge can be falsified as it is not reliable enough. Because the only way we know whether we are awake or dreaming is through empirical knowledge, we cannot truly say we 'know' we are awake or asleep.

Dreams do not constitute knowledge. This is obvious. You will never wake up from a dream having learnt something completely new. All ideas in dreams are formulated through waking experiences.
Now, because our dreams do not constitute knowledge, neither do our waking experiences. This is validated through the first premise, that our dreams are akin to our waking experiences. Both are alike in most matters. They mirror each other is content, subsequently mirroring each other in all content. Component that do not appear in waking experiences, will not appear in dreams, and visa-versa. Therefore if something is constituted, or in this case not constituted, in dreams, then they are not constituted in waking experiences. 

Therefore, we have no knowledge of our external world, which leads to external world scepticism.

No one actually 'lives' external world scepticism. We do not revolve our lives around the fact that we believe we do not exist. Western philosophy since Descartes has been largely marked and motivated by an effort to overcome this problem. Descartes was the first to raise the mystifying question of how we can claim to know with certainty anything about the world around us. The idea is not that these doubts are probable, but that their possibility can never be entirely ruled out. And if we can never be certain, how can we claim to know anything? Scepticism cuts straight to the heart of the Western philosophical enterprise and its attempt to provide a certain foundation for our knowledge and understanding of the world.

This topic is open for discussion, of course, as are all philosophical theories. But, Descartes provides us with some thinking to do. It is, to the core, unfalisfiable, because any objections raised to his argument can be diminished in a sentence or two. Give his full Meditations a read and if you feel like challenging this, send me an an email and I'll gladly expand. All objections are welcome. 



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