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Descartes and Meditations on Philosophy


            Rene Descartes once proposed a tedious accusation about dreaming, and how our senses that we use to perceive what is considered reality should not be trusted fully. In the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes attempts to convey the fascinating illusion of always being in a dream without a certain ability to distinguish what is actually reality or what is a dream, or at bare minimum prove that there are no certain marks to prove otherwise. He states, "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. The result is that I begin to feel dazed, and this very feeling only reinforces the notion that I may be asleep" (First Meditation). In my attempts to contrast what Descartes argument was comprised of and what certain illusions made him feel this way about our perception of physical existence. I turned my attention to his famous dream argument originally brought forth in his Mediation on First Philosophy, and will be using different ideologies between a John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, two famous English philosophers who have attempted to refute Rene Descartes's dream argument by providing useful and insightful situations to further explain against the idea, as well as provide my own insight in concluding that we are not dreaming right now. .
             It should be noted that within the context of Meditations, which is atypical from traditional philosophical text, the narrator is considered 'I' and is intended to be a fictional character by Descartes. This invites any thinker in a search for inevitability to be able to relate. It should also be noted that what set the argument in motion, and what was seemingly the cornerstone of the idea itself, was in the deficiency of comprehending the state of mind whilst in a dream. Descartes treats the absence of understanding as the result of our perception and that dreams are potentially made of the same content.


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