Reality

1.Russell Shorto said that Descartes works went against the church and came to the conclusion that Descartes contribution to modern philosophy was to vouch for Reason against Faith. Something which was unique at the time. I believe this severely limits to what Descartes truly accomplished. Descartes works do not just stop at faith versus reason. Descartes works go well beyond creating an argument against the faith of the church. Rather, Descartes works do not just doubt faith, but doubts every single thing known to man, and experienced by the individual.



2.The main points of Descartes cogito ergo sum argument are as follows. 1) Everything can be doubted except cogito ergo sum. Since all knowledge can be doubted since they come from deceiving sensory experiences, if there are any thoughts or ideas that are not from the sensory experiences then they must be true. This leads him to 2) innate ideas. Which leads to the innate ideas of sameness and perfection. He uses the wax example to explain how he believes sameness and perfection are innate. 3) This leads to the belief that since he can conceive of an innate idea that is perfection then there must exist a perfect being, such as God. 4) With this he concludes that since God is perfect, then he does not deceive, and the reality that he beholds is the truth, as God has shown him.

3.Cartesian Dualism deals with the state of two existences in reality, one that deals with the mind/body/soul and everything that comes from it, and the other from the body, which are the tactile things of the world. The argument for it can be presented by a clone scenario, where an exact copy of you can be made of you, that even fires the same neurons of you, but not be you, not in the mysterious inside kind of way. The mind body problem is how can an immaterial but real existence of the mind affect the material body? Descartes solution was the pinpointing of the sacred temple point of the human body that connects the ethereal to the body, the pineal gland. It does not work for how can a gland a physical matter convert spiritual information into atomic firing neurons. A bit like throwing a brick into a pool of water and hoping it will dissolve, or a wave crashing into a pool, and naked fairies appearing out of thin air.


4.Berkeley views that existence apart from the filter of our senses is impossible to perceive. He explains that when we talk about certain things such as matter, and objects concretely we do not really know what we are talking about for all matter is filtered through our fives senses of vision, taste, touch, smell, and hearing. Just because one may sense an object to be this way in his mind, does not mean that that is actually the case in perception reality. He uses optics and the argument of perception to back up his arguments such as seeing an object from close and far away. Our perception is a slave towards our own subjectivity. Since he argues that only what we perceive exists to our experience of reality, he concludes that nothing can exist if it is not being perceived by the mind. This brings him towards another predicament which is how does the universe exist if it were not being actively perceived by the human mind. Or how does a room exist if there is no living thing to perceive it. We can’t prove or disprove if the room disappears from existence the moment we walk out and re appears once someone walks in. So Berkeley proposes that God is the mind that perceives reality when no one is looking so that everything stays in existence. I think that what Berkeley is saying makes perfect sense, in that our touch with reality only exists in our minds. If we did not perceive then the universe or reality is as good as dead. The continual state of a reality is lost, and we are in no position to say that there exists a reality apart from our minds for what is in our minds is all that we know. The only reality we will ever know is in us, even if a reality apart from that or separated from “existed” to us, that would not even be a reality. Well at least not ours anyway. Then I believe Berkeley goes off on a tangent and answers the question, then how can empty houses and the most distant quasars on the far side of an obscure universe exist if and when there is no mind to perceive of it? To which he provides the answer of [God]. [God] is the mind that perceives all. Since he see’s all, all things stay within the plane of existence at all times so one not need to worry if his Ferrari slips into limbo the moment the door closes behind him. My critique of this tangent is that first it is unneeded and a bit contradictory towards his whole stance of a reality existing outside of the perceiving mind does not exist or even if it did, it may as well not exist. For even if [God] kept everything in his mind for us to keep things real we never perceive of it, so following the rule of his stance, it may not even exist, and it is definitely not our reality, for it is not in our own perception. So in a way Ockham may want to sever this part of the argument and throw it into a trash bin and send it to Quasar M807. But back to Berkeley’s original insight that reality exists solely in our minds, and by our perception we hold reality together, I just think its kind of ignorant to dismiss the possibilities just because you can’t know or can’t perceive, and egotistical to label the true state of reality as to how humans experience it. What about the ants on the sandy trail, or the bird flying in the sky? Through their own perception they have created their own realities unto themselves, but neither of them can ever conceive what a tennis shoe is. To an ant, he may perceive it to be a supernatural random disaster, or just as warning…warning…WARNING, but never what it actually is. So what is reality and whose reality is the true reality. Only human minds can perceive what a tennis shoe is in reality for we created it for our own purpose, so logically a humans perception of the tennis shoe is the ultimatum, but when we apply perception and the state of reality through the eyes of beings who had not created their own beings, how can we say our take on reality is the final say, or even the true one at best if our hands did not play a part in its creation or bangationexplodation? I can’t wait until I can see a million more colors, or a feeling more consuming then love if somehow my atoms can get there, but if there was a higher being, and only my highest senses could come towards relation towards ambiguous, I’d say love, love which empowers all of my senses and mind and life in a supernatural way, which I can explain my best and still make absolutely no sense, I believe ambiguous would understand that mystery better than I.