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White Raven
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« on: September 12, 2013, 08:13:47 pm »

As some of you know, I have been accepted to Guelph University. I am now studying Anthropology and Philosophy. This is a paper written on the first meditation of Rene Descartes. I am asked to describe why he believes it is important to doubt our senses. (he took a lot of time to completely destroy all his former beliefs, much like erasing personal history or removing the foreign installation) And, Can there be any instances where you can be sure that you senses are not deceiving you? That is can you be absolutely sure that what you are seeing, smelling, feeling, hearing and tasting is real and not an illusion?

Do you guys think I actually answer the question here?

Here is my paper.

1. Descartes believes that it is important to not fully trust our senses because for one we could have adopted ideas from a time in our childhood when we were more impressionable then calculating or reasonable. That the changing of direct perception of sense data could lead us to lunacy. And that some things are more prone to being questioned as true because they don't "care little weather they exist in nature or not".
2. Sense data could be described as raw elements of perception, How the raw elements are perceived and differ from one person to another is one thing, but how that data is transmuted into perception is another. You could say that if one were to believe someone is following them, they would project that falsehood on to them and then perceive any action commited pertaining to that assumption. Every action would tell your senses what is taking place and they would most likely go into a fight or flight response . When in fact on the other hand, someone else could know that they could simply be following them to the same train and are late. What descartes is talking about is having awareness of our core processes, the ones that run in the background. The ones that work between the gathering of information and the thing that takes place when it is turned into information, ideas or thought. I do believe it is possible for these processes to become corrupted. But it also begs the question, If it could be perceived in two different ways, with each person receiving the same sense data, then what constitutes right or wrong perception, and who has control over what mediates it? God, an evil spirit? Or our own ignorance.
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White Raven
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« Reply #1 on: September 12, 2013, 08:37:18 pm »

Revised edition:

1. Sense data could be described as raw elements of perception, How the raw elements are perceived and differ from one person to another is one thing, but how that data is transmuted into perception is another. You could say that if one were to believe someone is following them, they would project that falsehood on to them and then perceive any action committed pertaining to that assumption. Every action would tell your senses what is taking place and they would most likely go into a fight or flight response . When in fact on the other hand, someone else could know that they could simply be following them to the same train and are late. What descartes is talking about is having awareness of our core processes, the ones that run in the background. The ones that work between the gathering of information and the thing that takes place when it is turned into information, ideas or thought. I do believe it is possible for these processes to become corrupted. But it also begs the question, If it could be perceived in two different ways, with each person receiving the same sense data, then what constitutes right or wrong perception, and who has control over what mediates it? God, an evil spirit? Or our own ignorance.

2. Well it depends on weather or not it leads you to any truth. The old human concept of getting something out of what your doing. If your perceptions lead you down a path with no content, or experiences or anything wonderful, then it is not a path. Although you could believe it is, but how do you test it. How would you know. The path of the senses I feel would lead you into an entirely materialistic world. The nature of which would involve not knowing you are indeed trapped in that world. This is the illusion of the sense world. That of basic fulfilment of desires and an almost animalistic state. Whereas that of other worldly things and things of good taste would lead you ultimately to the path of enlightenment or truth.
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« Reply #2 on: September 13, 2013, 03:55:45 am »




http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/meditations/
Quote
Summary

The First Meditation, subtitled "What can be called into doubt," opens with the Meditator 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 has resolved to sweep away all he thinks he knows and to start again from the foundations, building up his knowledge once more on more certain grounds. He has seated himself alone, by the fire, free of all worries so that he can demolish his former opinions with care.

The Meditator 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 the Meditator has accepted as most true he has come to learn from or through his senses. He acknowledges that sometimes the senses can deceive, but only with respect to objects that are very small or far away, and that our sensory knowledge on the whole is quite sturdy. The Meditator acknowledges that insane people might be more deceived, but that he is clearly not one of them and needn't worry himself about that.

However, the Meditator realizes that he is often convinced when he is dreaming that he is sensing real objects. 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 wholly convinced by it. Though his present sensations may be dream images, he suggests that even dream images are drawn from waking experience, much like paintings in that respect. Even when a painter creates an imaginary creature, like a mermaid, the composite parts are drawn from real things--women and fish, in the case of a mermaid. And even when a painter creates something entirely new, at least the colors in the painting are drawn from real experience. Thus, the Meditator concludes, though he can doubt composite things, he cannot doubt the simple and universal parts from which they are constructed like shape, quantity, size, time, etc. While we can doubt studies based on composite things, like medicine, astronomy, or physics, he concludes that we cannot doubt studies based on simple things, like arithmetic and geometry.

On further reflection, the Meditator realizes that even simple things can be doubted. Omnipotent God could make even our conception of mathematics false. One might argue that God is supremely good and would not lead him to believe falsely all these things. But by this reasoning we should think that God would not deceive him with regard to anything, and yet this is clearly not true. If we suppose there is no God, then there is even greater likelihood of being deceived, since our imperfect senses would not have been created by a perfect being.

The Meditator finds it almost impossible to keep his habitual opinions and assumptions out of his head, try as he might. He resolves to pretend that these opinions are totally false and imaginary in order to counter-balance his habitual way of thinking. He supposes that not God, but some evil demon has committed itself to deceiving him so that everything he thinks he knows is false. By doubting everything, he can at least be sure not to be misled into falsehood by this demon.
Analysis

The First Meditation is usually approached in one of two ways. First, it can be read as setting the groundwork for the meditations that follow, where doubt is employed as a powerful tool against Aristotelian philosophy. Second, it can, and often is, read standing on its own as the foundation of modern skepticism. We will briefly discuss these complementary readings in turn.

Descartes saw his Meditations as providing the metaphysical underpinning of his new physics. Like Galileo, he 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. The Meditator's suggestion that all one's most certain knowledge comes from the senses is meant to appeal directly to the Aristotelian philosophers who will be reading the Meditations. The motivation, then, behind the First Meditation is to start in a position the Aristotelian philosophers would agree with and then, subtly, to seduce them away from it. Descartes is aware of how revolutionary his ideas are, and must pay lip service to the orthodox opinions of the day in order to be heeded.

Reading the First Meditation as an effort to coax Aristotelians away from their customary opinions allows us to read different interpretations into the different stages of doubt. For instance, there is some debate as to whether Descartes intended his famous "Dream Argument" to suggest the universal possibility of dreaming--that though there is waking experience, I can never know which moments are dreams and which are waking--or the possibility of a universal dream--that my whole life is a dream and that there is no waking world. If we read Descartes as suggesting the universal possibility of dreaming, we can explain an important distinction between the Dream Argument and the later "Evil Demon Argument." The latter suggests that all we know is false and that we cannot trust the senses one bit. The Dream Argument, if meant to suggest the universal possibility of dreaming, suggests only that the senses are not always and wholly reliable. The Dream Argument questions Aristotelian epistemology, while the Evil Demon Argument does away with it altogether. The "Painter's Analogy," which draws on the Dream Argument, concludes that mathematics and other purely cerebral studies are far more certain than astronomy or physics, which is an important step away from the Aristotelian reliance on the senses and toward Cartesian rationalism.

The Meditations can be seen to follow the model of St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. The first step in the Jesuit exercises is to purge oneself of one's attachment to the material, sinful world. In the First Meditation, Descartes leads us through a similar purgation, though with a different purpose. Here he wants to persuade his Aristotelian readers to purge themselves of their prejudices. He also hopes to lead the mind away from the senses that are so heavily relied upon by the Aristotelians. In the meditations that follow, he will argue that our most certain knowledge comes from the mind unaided by the senses. Lastly, this process of radical doubt will hopefully rule out any doubts from the positive claims Descartes will build up in the next five meditations. Read in the wider context of the Meditations, these skeptical doubts are a means to the end of preparing a resistant audience to the metaphysics Descartes plans to build.

Read on its own, the First Meditation can be seen as presenting skeptical doubts as a subject of study in their own right. Certainly, skepticism is a much discussed and hotly debated topic in philosophy, even today. 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? Skepticism 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. It can even be pushed so far as to be read as a challenge to our very notion of rationality.

No one actually lives skepticism--no one actually doubts whether other people really exist--but it is very difficult to justify a dismissal of skepticism. Western philosophy since Descartes has been largely marked and motivated by an effort to overcome this problem. Particularly interesting responses can be found in Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein.

We should note that Descartes' doubt is a methodological and rational doubt. That is, the Meditator is not just doubting everything at random, but is providing solid reasons for his doubt at each stage. For instance, he rejects the possibility that he might be mad, since that would undercut the rationality that motivates his doubt. Descartes is trying to set up this doubt within a rational framework, and needs to maintain a claim to rationality for his arguments to proceed.


i don't know anything, but i doubt it. (@ descartes: )


how would i know whether my thoughts are acceptable, and in whose (authoritarian) sight?

how is perception generated?

or, what is the substance which is called perception?

has any of the words used to ask and question the "senses" qualified as a reductionist* tool?


\!! 

* http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reductionist


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes





p.s. http://www.wright.edu/~charles.taylor/descartes/synopsis.html

not being able to write equals not being able to think? still living in the must illustrious parts of flat earth.



  

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guest147
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« Reply #3 on: September 13, 2013, 09:35:00 am »

more meditation(s)?

http://www.freeyourmindprojects.com/category/healthy-minds/bipolar-disorder/#.UjMhy38ixvA

was descartes bi-polar? (would he know the question had been asked about god, so no big sweat....)




raven honor!


p.s. would this revolutionize 'western philosophy': http://www.stockholmnews.com/more.aspx?NID=4867

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina,_Queen_of_Sweden
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