 Okay, so today we're starting modern philosophy and we're not going to get a lot of this during the semester because I kind of front-loaded a lot of ancient and medieval philosophy into your class. And the way some people would teach this class, they'd be doing a bit of ancient hardly any medieval and a ton of modern philosophy. The reason that they would do that is because a lot of interesting things happened in the modern period. And this guy, René Descartes, that we're going to look at for the next three class sessions, he was right at the center of it. He is considered to be one of the fathers of modern philosophy and the sort of life that we live now. We're not really in the modern world anymore. We're not in what they call the postmodern or late modern world. René Descartes is one of the people who's responsible for that. One of many people, but he is one of the founding fathers, you might say. So we're going to look at a lot of material today. Because of the way that the semester has gone, I've collapsed a lot of Descartes into three days. Normally, we might take one day each for each of the meditations, but we just don't have that time. So we're going to pass over stuff pretty quickly. And I'm going to point out a lot of parallels to things that you have seen or thought about movies in particular, actually. But it's sort of up to you to connect the dots on these. And where I want to start actually, before I go into his biography or anything like that, I want to think about something. All of you have had the experience many times in your life of being tricked, or fooled, or deceived, right? What are some examples of that? Okay, good. So did any of you go on like haunted hay rides this Halloween? Or anything like that? Or go to a haunted house? None of you did anything like that? So what's going on with that? I mean, you know, going in there, it's not a monster, right? No, you know, I mean, when I took my little daughter through the first time, I think she may have thought that there were monsters in the haunted house, because she wanted to get out of there right away. But why do we go there? We're going, we're paying people to deceive us, right? And better they deceive us, the more we pay them. So you know, costumes, how else do we get to see people lie to you? That's that's not that much fun. Yeah, okay. Magic. There's like a special name for that. But I can't recall it on hand. There's slight of hand. And then there's there's something more involved in that as well. So slight of hand tricks. How else have you been fooled? Have you ever seen a mirage? Like, you know, you're driving along and you see that it looks like water on the on the highway, but it's not really water because it's some sort of strange thing because of the air and the refraction and all that. So there are there are visual illusions. Oh, yeah, magic and illusionist, right? That's what they specialize in. Where have you made mistakes? We thought something was one way but turned out to be a different way. Let's say about one that I did. And then maybe this will call things to mind. If you ever walked into a window, you know, they've got those glass doors, and then there'll be like a window next to it. And if it's been really recently cleaned, it kind of looks like a doorway, because it's really wide. Remember, when I was, I probably was 16, I walked right into one, actually busted up my nose a little bit, because I was moving pretty fast. What else do we get mixed up about? Do we get deceived about? Or just being fooled? Where do we see things that aren't there? Or hear things that aren't there? If I were to call you on my phone and put that phone up to your ear, am I in your ear? Not nobody here actually thinks there's like a little me inside the box, I hope, right? You go look down your contacts list. These are all the people inside your phone. No, you don't think that, right? There's something going on there. Your senses are telling you one thing, and what's telling you something else? Because your senses are telling you, my friend, my parent, my son, so they're right here. What's telling you otherwise? You can fool a dog with that sort of stuff, can't you? Do tricks on dogs and cats, make them think that somebody's there when they're not there. How come you can't be fooled that way? What advantage do you have other than that massive brain compared to theirs? How do you see through things? Well, let me put it to a different way. Are there any, are there any things where you were fooled before, now you're not fooled? Like when you were a kid, you got mixed up about things? But now you don't, right? Why not? Yeah. Oh, that's a good example, yeah. And then, you know, of course, the leprechauns, you know, if they come for St. Patrick's Day and the Tooth Fairy, you have any other things like that? Santa Claus. Yeah, you know, my dad used to mess with the neighbor kids. He would tell them that he was gonna let the dog out. We had a ferocious dog, and he said, I'm gonna let the dog out, and the dog's gonna get the Easter Bunny, and the kids would get very upset. And they were getting upset over nothing, right? Because there isn't any Easter Bunny. Who's the Easter Bunny? Hopefully this video won't be seen by any kids. That's mom and dad, or, you know, whoever. So you were fooled by that once, but then later on you weren't. Have any of you ever had any hallucinations? Anything? Something went wrong? Upstairs? Can happen if you're overtired. When I used to work these late night security jobs, I'd be walking along, and you'd see, your mind wants to see order in things. So you see a bush, and you think it's a deer. And you almost, you know, until you look at it carefully, you think there's actually a deer there, or you look down, there's a stick, and you think it's a snake. You can almost see it move. There's other ways to have hallucinations, you know, if you're very sick, if you're taking certain kinds of drugs, there's wires crossing your brain, you know, you get brain damage, you can have hallucinations. Those aren't real, right? There's an even more common way, almost every night, most of us. What's that? Exactly. How many of you dream? All of you dream? There are some people who don't, or they don't remember their dreams. You've woken up from a dream, it was a good dream, and you're mad because whatever it was that you were doing, you're no longer able to do it, you're stuck in bed in your dorm room, or you know, wherever. Now there's other dreams you wake up from, and you're really happy the dream is over. Have any of you ever had a dream within a dream? Like, you wake up, and you think that, well, we were going to talk about an assumption in a couple minutes. But have any of you ever had a dream where you have a dream, and then you wake up, and you think that you're done, because now you get up, you like maybe brush your teeth, or take a shower, or whatever you do in the morning, and then you go about your day, and then you find out that was a dream, too. Have any of you ever had that? It's kind of rare, yeah. Isn't that frustrating? The worst part is if you like go to work, and you put in a full day, and then you don't get paid. I've had a dream, you know, I used to work a lot, I would have dreams like that, and it would frustrate me so much. So dreams are another way in which we get full. We're going to talk about some of these movies, like Inception, fairly recent, The Matrix. You've all seen The Matrix, I think? Probably the whole trilogy. How many of you have seen Dark City? Nobody's seen Dark City? How about the 13th floor? I mean, have any of you ever seen that? Something else that would be kind of like that would be the game. It was in the 90s with Michael Douglas. And there's other movies along these lines. Inception is probably the most recent movie of that sort. Vanilla Sky would be, did I ever see Vanilla Sky? It would be sort of like that. Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, couple other stars. Well, all of this ties in with René Descartes, and all this ties in with Meditation 1 and 2, and all this ties in with the beginning of modern philosophy. You might say, what does all this have to do with the things that we've been looking at so far? Well, think about the history of philosophy and think about what we've been doing in this class so far. On any given topic, like does God exist or not? Or what is the good? Or how should society be organized? Was there only one answer that you got during the spot? See some head shaking. You got multiple answers, right? Sometimes even in the same book, like remember Socrates and Thrasymachus and Holmarcus and all these other guys are arguing with each other about, you know, whether it's this way or that way. So what do we see in the history of philosophy? If you pick a given topic and you ask about it, you ask questions about it, you'll get a range of different philosophical answers. Remember in metaphysics book one Aristotle was laid out, this is what some people think is the cause, this is what other people, this is what other people. He laid about 15 different positions out that you guys plowed your way through. So that's one part. Now the other part is, what if philosophers actually use? What's their tool for figuring all these things out? They're not just going by feeling, right? They're using the human mind. What part of the human mind or what part of the human being are they supposed to be using? Think back to your Plato. We have the appetites. Then we have the spirited part of the soul. And then what was the other higher part? You remember? Plato thought it was what is most you. Epictetus thought that too. Starts with an honor. Rational is the adjective for it. And what's the noun? Rational. You're just changing the, what are we called, the accent of the rational rationale. Rational comes from reason, right? Yeah. A rationale is a type of reason. And philosophers are supposed to be using reason. And you know, the thing that's supposed to be so great about reason is if we're all being rational, we should all more or less arrive at the same point. It shouldn't be affected by our emotions or our interests or desires or things like that. So on the one hand, philosophy, you ask a philosophical question, you get about eight different answers from philosophers. On the other hand, shouldn't they all be on the same page if they are really rational? So there's kind of a problem there, isn't there? So if you look at the history of philosophy, if you're Descartes, you're looking back and saying, all right, we've got all these guys before me, but they don't agree on things. Now, what could you do in a case like that? What would you do if you had a bunch of friends? And they're all jabbering at you and they're all telling you to do contradictory things. How would you deal with that? Have any of you ever been in a situation where you have a whole bunch of friends and they're all giving you different stories? How could you deal with something like that? What would be your options? Okay, so ignore all of them, do what you want to do. Maybe pick the one that sounds the best to you. That's one way to do it. What else? We're still bugging you while you're doing that, though. What else could you do? Maybe you try to sit down with them and say, well, let's take a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of this. That's what they call eclecticism. You could also just say, all of you, shut up. I don't want to hear any more out of all of you. I'm going to figure this out on my own, because clearly none of you can actually arrive at the conclusions that would convince anybody else. That's what Descartes does. He's saying a big shut up to the history of philosophy. He's, in effect, saying, let's start over. But let's take everybody else out of the room. As a matter of fact, you know, in those first two meditations, it's just him in the room, isn't it? Him and maybe God or a demon or something like that, you know, and a stove that he's in front of and fireplace and no other people telling him what to do. It's him on his own. That's what it means to meditate, to go off by yourself, and to think about something. And so that's what he's doing. Now, the reason I've got this picture up here, about a tree, not a very good tree, but you get the idea, right? Here's the roots, and here's the trunk, and here's the branches, there's the leaves and all that sort of stuff. This is a metaphor that Descartes used to describe what he wanted to do in philosophy. And he thought that metaphysics you got to get the metaphysics right. You got to figure out what actually exists. And then you build up your students out of that. And then from that is going to come three things that will revolutionize the world. They will put everything on a firm basis and fix things. One is mechanics. And if you think about it, your entire, your entire environment that you live in is the product of all sorts of mechanical processes, everything you're wearing right now, unless you wove it by yourself, was fabricated by machines. Human run machines, but machines anyway, that's, that wasn't around at Descartes' time. That's a product of having certain knowledge about how to make things work the way they do. Your body has been modified in countless ways. I'm sure all of you were inoculated against diseases. When you're little babies, you don't remember it, right? Maybe you do. I don't know. And if you weren't inoculated against those, probably some of you would be dead by now. You wouldn't exist. Any of you who have anything like orthopedics, or you have braces, you took medicine for something, and you don't have to do it now, or if you wear glasses, or maybe you wore glasses at one time, but now your eyes are better, or you wear contacts. All of that is part of mechanics and part of medicine. Those things change the world. And Descartes thought, how are you going to establish that? Well, those are essentially physical things. If you get your physical life, you can make those things happen. And you'll do it by introducing the scientific method and mathematics into everything possible. And then finally, you thought that even morals or ethics could be made into something like a science. He never got around to that part. Descartes did a lot of experiments. He did a lot of dissecting animals and trying to figure out how they worked and looking at bodies as sort of like mechanical processes. And he actually did go to the university and studied some of these things. But what he's concerned with here is metaphysics, figuring out what's ultimately real. What can you put a basis on? What can you say is this way or that way? And you can be 100% certain number. What's left out of this is actually another field of philosophy we call epistemology. Remember, what's epistemology about? A lot of you did pretty well on the midterm exam when I asked you about this. What is epistemology? You remember? It's not dealing with right and wrong. It's ethics. Yeah. Yeah, it's dealing with knowledge. How do you know, for example, that I know what I'm talking about? How do you know I'm not just making this crap up as I go along, right? Coming in here and, and taking Marist dollars and just giving you some sort of spiel about Descartes, you know, next week, it's going to be con. And you know, we'll do kindergarten. How do you know that? That's an epistemological question, isn't it? How would you figure out whether I know what I'm talking about? I hope I hope that you do think that what I'm talking about. And that you feel relatively secure that. But I hope that you actually have good reason to believe that I know, what's your basis? See, asking that's asking an epistemological question. You have a degree. The school won't have hired you. You don't know about that, you know, I've known places where people lied about their degrees, got hired. And then I get fired afterwards when people found out usually because students complain. How do those students know that this professor didn't know what they were talking about? They would read the book. And they'd say, this doesn't sound even remotely like Descartes, as I've read Descartes. I don't think this person actually knows what they're doing. And then they start digging into it. But if you're able to judge whether somebody else knows something, you have to have some sort of basis for that. Remember, this goes all the way back to Socrates and wanting to know who's wise and who's ignorant. And then how do you tell whether they're wise or ignorant? It's the same thing for your own knowledge. How do you know what you know? Well, let's take a couple of things. What do you think that you know? I'm not trying to be flip here. And I'm not trying to be, you know, challenge you or make you put you down or anything like that. Really, what are some things that you do know? Because you actually do know a ton of stuff. You just don't realize it. All of you know how to dress yourselves. Otherwise, somebody would be in here and their pants would be on their head like a jester's hat or, you know, socks on their ears or something like that. What are some more important things that you know? That got you here in Marist? Like math? Like how to add these to dress? That's pretty important stuff. You know, a lot of people in the world don't know how to do that. And throughout history, didn't know how to do that. A lot of them don't know how to write. You know how to write. You guys, you guys have these facilities that you developed as children and then you've kept on using and you don't realize how smart you are compared to everybody else throughout history. You know, the level of education that you guys have at this point is higher than most people throughout history. So yeah, mathematics, writing, what else? Dressing yourself, that's important. Yeah. Yeah. That's very often that's a generational thing, right? They have a special cell phone for old people called the jitterbug. Many of you have seen this. It's got really big buttons and it doesn't have a lot of features, because they don't want to be overloaded. But you can give somebody your age, unless they, you know, like, deliberately don't want to deal with technology, you can throw them a cell phone and they can figure out what to do with it fairly quickly. And that's a very complex set of operations that you guys take for granted. All of you drive, I'm guessing, right? Well, those of you who do drive, you learn something pretty complicated. You know, you're managing a ton of metal, hurtling around at speeds that people throughout history could only dream of. In a whole herd of other people all doing the same, and you don't crash it. That's pretty good. That's actually some some knowledge there. What do you know about yourself? Or personal types of knowledge? You all know your own histories, right? None of you woke up this morning like in a science fiction thing, not knowing exactly who you are, finding a briefcase next to your bed, a couple documents in it, you got a piece together, you're passed out of that. That's not, not the case for you, right? Hopefully not. Or have any of you ever seen that movie, My Mental? No? But that's a good movie. I may show that in our philosophy classes. This guy has no capacity to form long term memories after a certain point. So he has to tattoo all this information on himself. So that when he wakes up, he doesn't freak out. So he knows, you know, some rudiments of who he is and what he's up to. Because somebody killed his wife, he's trying to track down the killer. You're not in cases like that. What do you know about yourself? Holder, you guys. 18? Maybe some are 19? You know, what else? Are you from Uganda? Or People's Republic of China? Or where are you guys from? Why are there any foreign exchange students? This is trivial stuff, right? But this is actually things that you think you know about yourself. How do you know that you're right? How do you know, for example, this isn't just one big dream? You're not some, some poor kid in Ethiopia, who got high on cut, and it's hallucinating, and thinks that, you know, you're so and so in America, they're saying, this is such a great dream. I hope it never ends. You know, how do you know? That's an epistemological question. That's the sort of thing that Descartes is introducing us to. So let's actually look at what Descartes says about this. He begins by saying, I decided, and this is he was about 30 years old, when he's talking about doing this, that once and for all in my life, I should get rid of all my former opinions, and then try to build everything back up. And people do this pretty rarely in their lives, most people just keep going on with, you know, fairly secure in the knowledge that they have. Descartes is trying to throw everything away and then rebuild everything. The only time that you see people doing this deliberately, unless they're philosophers tends to be if there's some sort of crisis in their life. Their whole world is broken apart, and now they have to piece it back together. Descartes is doing this deliberately, because he wants to acquire knowledge, he wants to remake philosophy, he wants to be the philosopher, he wants to get rid of all the past and begin anew. And I think it's probably something you can relate to. Some of you, at least at this point, and later on in your life, you'll be able to relate to that as well, because there come times where you eventually want to say something like what I said earlier, all of you shut up, I don't want to hear any more of this stuff. I want to start again on my own, so I actually know what I'm doing here. That's what Descartes is trying to do. So what does he start with? He starts with the things that I asked you about, you know, have you ever been sieved in your life? Sure. Descartes was too. Sometimes he dreams that he's sitting sitting in front of the fire, but he's not actually in his bed. And you know, if you look at a round or you look at a square tower from a distance, it looks round. And if you put a stick in the water, what happens to it? Does it bend? Looks bent, though, right? So there's all different ways in which we can be deceived. And you know, not only physical things, sometimes people lie to us. Sometimes people put on shows and deludas. We actually, as Americans, in the late, you know, we deliberately fool ourselves a good portion of the day. I mean, right now you're half of you are on computers, and you're looking at computer generated images that have become extremely sophisticated. You know, you look at some screens and they look like they're actually wood or paper or all that sort of stuff. That's actually deception, though, isn't it? And when you're watching a show on TV, what shows are, what shows do you know right off the bat are fake? sitcoms? You know, when Charlie Sheen took his crazy nose dive into Looney Land, and he got canned from two and a half men, they killed his character, I think, right? But does that mean Charlie Sheen is actually dead? He's out there still doing what he does, whatever that is. And they brought in somebody else to replace our actors really like the characters they portray. Some actors seem to be really nice and their characters on their total jerks. Others, you know, are always playing bad guys, but they're actually quite nice people. So those are fake. What else is fake? In your experience, reality shows. I mean, the parts of them have to be real, right? There's actual people. Some of them are, the real parts are actually kind of dismaying, like any of you watch the Orders show. And then you see, you know, what happens with those people are, or, I don't like to watch it. But I don't people like to watch Hell's Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay. And he's got two shows. Is that the one where he goes in, restaurants are screwed up and then he tries to get him to fix a restaurant? No, it's Kitchen Nightmares. And there's real stuff there. There's a real grill. They're filming it. People have actual breakdowns and fights. If the meat is rotten, you can actually see it on that show. But there's also something kind of think about it too, isn't there? I mean, first off, you're not there in that kitchen in New Orleans or, you know, San Antonio or anything like that. You're up here in the Hudson Valley at Marist. Or whoever's watching this is wherever they are in the world. They're not in our classroom, are they? We're creating a deception in a way right now by filming this. And we take this for granted. Now, in Descartes time, they didn't have all that technology to do that. We're a bit more sophisticated about that. But it raises certain problems. How do you know that the information that you're getting is actually true? The information that you're relying on? Can you ever be 100% sure? Let's start with Descartes. He starts with physical things. Can you be sure right now that you're not in a dream? Sometimes when people teach Descartes, there'll be like one student in the class who gets freaked out and the class and now they can't tell whether they're in a dream or not. It's like their whole world is falling apart. And it really upsets them. Hopefully none of you are that student, right? But you get the idea that you can't. Could you actually, you know, could you prove that this isn't a dream? Could I just be a figment of your imagination right now? That's possible. How would you know? Are there any marks, any tells that you can use to figure out that this, this isn't a dream? I mean, you can like poke me, get a pad and poke me, but I don't know, I have dreams where I'm fighting people. It seems pretty real to me. Thankfully, not so much anymore. You just have terrible dreams where you have to fight these people and no matter what you did, they just keep coming at you. Break their arms and legs and they just keep coming, trying to get you. When I first started teaching, everybody I think has a dream where you show up and they run up in your pants. You don't have that dream? No? No. That's a bad dream. But when I first started teaching the dream that I would have was I would be going into this huge lecture hall and I would have, you know, like four different classes that I'd be teaching at the time. I'd go into this giant lecture hall, like 200 students or so and they'd all be kind of watching me as I come in and I would get to the podium and I would realize I have no idea what class this is or where we are in the semester. And, you know, you don't want to ask anybody because then they lose confidence in you as a teacher, right? What would you do if your professor actually asked you, what class is this? What would you think? So, you know what I do in that dream where I did is I just kind of hem and haw around and say really general things and kind of ask, you know, Socratic questions and try to get a sense of what class this could possibly be. Because I used to teach like, you know, a whole range of classes. I actually ended up teaching something like 19 different classes when I was teaching in that prison. And students don't help me out at all. And I go for the entire hour, not knowing what we're actually talking about. Just sweating, you know, and I can, I can always feel like I'm just like one step away from the whole thing falling down and everything, you know, going to ruin. That was pretty real. And I'd wake up from it and I would be, I'd be so relieved. How can you tell that you're not in a dream right now? Let's let's put that one off for a moment. What are, what would the hallucination or what would the thing be about? All of this stuff is about what we perceive through our senses. Right? If I think that I'm in a massive classroom with 200 students who won't give me, you know, the title of the class or anything like that, I'm visually hallucinating. I'm auditory hallucinating. There may be or a olfactory, gustatory, tactile hallucinations, spatial hallucinations. You know, I move around and I, you know, I'm not actually moving in bed, but I think that my body actually is, right? If this is actually some sort of hallucination right now or a dream that somebody is having or a computer generated thing like the matrix that we're all stuck in. If I move over here, you think I'm actually moving in space, right? You think that you're sitting in a desk. In reality, you might be laying in bed. You might have just been hit by a car and things are going haywire in your brain. You might be stuck like in, you've all seen the matrix, you've all seen those things that the human beings were stuck in with all the tubes on them so they could act like batteries. That could be the case. If that's really the case, then your senses are deceiving it. So you really shouldn't put a lot of credence in what your senses tell you until you figure out how to tell what's true and what's false. So we can doubt our senses. Is there anything else we can doubt? When you're dreaming, is two plus two still equal to four? The laws of mathematics and logic still hold? Is the triangle still have three sides? Yeah, I mean, I suppose you can make it up the triangle's four sides. Yeah, then you've actually got a square. Now, let's say, let's say we broadened it. This is where we get to what we call hyperbolic doubt. This is a term that's worth knowing when it comes to the current. What is hyperbole? Does anybody know that term off hand? Yeah. And graduation? Very good. So if I say, it's a little bit warm in here right now, if I say, oh, my God, it's so hot in here, I'm sweating bullets or something like that, I'm being hyperbolic, right? Or if I say, you're the worst class of students I've ever had, or you're the best class of students I've ever had, I'm probably being hyperbolic, right? Being hyperbolic is going extra, going over, doing more than you need to do to try to stress a point. Now, there's some things you should doubt, like your, as Dick Hart says, your senses. It would be kind of strange to doubt whether you actually have a body, though, wouldn't it? That's hyperbolic. But why is he doubting things like that? Well, he wants to, again, wipe away everything so that we can build on absolutely clear, distinct, undisputable foundations. And if you want to go even further with this, we can doubt the, let's call them the laws of mathematics. Mathematics or logic, right? So, if A is equal to B, B is equal to C. A is equal to B, and B is equal to C, A is equal to C, right? That's the, what do they call it, the transitive? Yeah, that's the transitive property, I think, isn't it? It's been a long time since I've done any logic or math along those lines. But that's basically a law of logic, right? Could that be false? Could it be that, that God designed things in such a way that every time that, like Dick Hart said, every time that I add two and two, it's actually equal to five, but I go wrong and I think that it's four? Is that possible? It's possible, isn't it? Could you imagine a universe in which that's the case, in which we're systematically deluded over and over again about things? Think about the physical world that you know about. It seems pretty solid, right? Even this seems pretty solid, my body, solid? What do you know from physics class? Is this really solid? Mostly space, isn't it? Empty space. So, the way in which we're thinking about things, the way in which we're perceiving things, is not reflective of the underlying reality of things. This air is slightly more space than this, this body is. So, maybe we could doubt these. Maybe we could doubt everything. Maybe, like Dick Hart says, maybe I have no body. Maybe there's no exterior world. Maybe all of these things are just sort of thoughts put into my head and they can be put into my head a couple different ways. He's got an argument for God's existence, which I'm going to pass over in the first meditation because we don't have a lot of time. But then he brings up this idea of an evil genius or evil demon. It's translated different ways. Molly and Jamie is the French for it. And he says it could be that there's some sort of, let's call it an evil demon, right? There's a demon that deceives me with all this stuff. So, what you're experiencing right now, you're Dick Hart, this is all false. These are all just ideas that have been put into your head by an all-powerful, not-good, God-like creature. Well, you'd be fooled about just about everything, wouldn't you? What couldn't you be fooled about? Was there anything that you couldn't be fooled about? That you're 18 years old wearing flat pants? That could be false. You might not have any legs or anything. You might have come into existence yesterday. Your memories could all be false. They could have been put into your head. Maybe somebody's just out there messing around with you, like those creatures in Dark City or in the Matrix, where everything is actually computer-generated. And none of the life that you've lived is really true. You've just been in a, what would you call it, like a bucket, a cell or something like that your whole life, you know, sparking up the machine. Or an inception, I haven't actually seen an inception. What's the story there? You're in a dream, right? Who's seen an inception? So what is the story in an inception? Where's the deception there? It's a dream world, right? So it's not real. Can you die in it? In the dream world? No? Okay. Where are the actual people? What's that? Not a plane? Like they're sleeping on a plane. Okay. I'll see that though. Don't get around to seeing many movies these days. What couldn't you be fooled about? I mean, this guy over here might not actually be Mr. Davis. He might actually be Ms. Moriarty. Maybe, maybe all of their qualities got somehow swapped. And, you know, all of her memories got downloaded into him and all of his memories got downloaded into her and now they think that they're they're different people. They could be wrong about the content. What couldn't they be wrong about? This is where we get to the famous code, they call it the Cartesian Kojito. At one time, I heard Kojito, Ergo, so in history class, humanities class, or something like that. This means, I think, therefore, I am or I exist. You could be deceived about everything. The one thing that you could not be deceived about is the fact that you actually do exist. Somebody can try to convince you that you're not real. Right? Like, if we're in one big hallucination, maybe if I'm kind of a jerk, I tell you, I think you're all just figments of my imagination. You don't have any real existence on your own. But you could say to me, I think, therefore I am. As soon as you say, I think you have to be existing. Who's doing the thinking? If you are deceived by some evil genius, you exist. That's a bare fact that can't be taken away. That can't be stripped away, or you can't be swindled out of, you might say. Descartes doesn't actually say it quite like this in the meditations, but this is good enough for where we are. He says, if I'm deceived, I have to exist. And what am I then? I'm not my body. What could I possibly be? Let's think back to Plato. Plato said you're not your body, right? What are you? It's kind of similar to the Christian, traditional Christian notion of it. You're not just your body. What are you? Exactly. You're a soul. Descartes doesn't use the language of the soul all the time. He more often talks about mind. So if your body is not actually real, if this stuff that you're experiencing could be doubted, this could in fact be a dream, or a hallucination, or whatever. What do you know is real? This, I think. The human being is what Descartes calls a thinking substance, or a mind, or a soul. You have a body, maybe. We'll see as we go through the other meditations, whether you can have good grounds for saying that. Let's just say for the time being you have a body. Your body's not you. Your body is just a bunch of meat that happens to be inhabited by a mind which makes it do all the things that it does. All the conscious things. It doesn't make you breathe. That's purely mechanical. That's automatic. As a matter of fact, your mind is not even your brain. Your brain is physical. Your mind is non-physical. It's spiritual, Descartes would say. And this introduces us already to what's often called the mind-body problem, which is, okay, you've got these two parts. How exactly do they fit together? Yeah? Well, since the brain's part of your body, isn't your brain produced with thoughts? Well, that's... You wouldn't really have the thoughts of the brain because you'd be dead. Descartes doesn't think so. Descartes is what we call a dualist. So he thinks there's two kinds of substance. There's minds and then there's bodies and he has a kind of weird way of explaining how it is that your mind actually interacts with your brain that nobody accepts these days. He thought it was the pineal gland that gets kind of bounced around sort of like, you know, almost like a tonsil or something like that. That's kind of silly, but the general idea is that somehow this non-physical thing makes things happen in the brain, so that the brain is not just where everything's taking place, independent on itself. The brain is sort of like, think of it like machinery, right? Now they didn't have the same conceptions of the brain that we do now. They didn't know it was full of electrical impulses or neurons or anything like that. They thought of it more in terms of like springs and wheels, you know, very mechanical, but they were working with, you know, the best biology and physics that they had at the time. They thought of nerves as almost being sort of like strings that would pull, and we know now they're, you know, electrical conduits. But the basic idea that we're not reducible to our bodies, that's the important thing to take away from this, that we are more something disengaged from our bodies. We're more our intellect, or our will, or our imagination, than we are this meat and bones that we're in, sort of like Descartes says, a pilot in a ship. The pilot, you know, the pilot gets off the ship every once in a while, and the ship is just there for the pilot, right? The ship is not something that has importance by itself. It's kind of handy to have if you want to get from point A to point B. Let's think instead of a ship and a pilot, think of you and a car. The car and the driver. Does the car exist for the driver, or the driver exists for the car? The car exists for the driver. It doesn't matter what car you have, unless you're really vain about, I have to have a Porsche or something like that, right? It doesn't really matter what body you have. What matters is what's actually in your mind. And so what does your mind do? Well, he talks about all these different things, all these different mental operations. He says, I have a thing that doubts. Your doubting is not something you're doing bodily. Doubting is something that your mind does. Understanding? Again, you know, your brain could maybe like mimic the structure of what is your understanding. Some brain scientists think that, you know, we have like this set of neurons for coffee cup, and this set of neurons for iPhone, and this set of neurons for ball cap, and you know that's the way it works. I don't know if that's actually the case. Maybe more complicated than that. But that's just sort of like a big storage device. The actual understanding that's done by your mind is not done through your body. It's done independent of your body. Yeah, do you agree with this? Oh, it's a good question. Do I agree with it? Because like, if you think about it, certain parts of the brain are damaged, then you lose certain functions of your body. Yeah. So you have to think that the brain, which part of the body, has to do something with it. Yeah, do I personally agree with that? Which I usually tend not to bring up, because I'm just trying to get you guys to understand it first. I'm not a Cartesian dualist. I'm a person who believes that we do have bodies, or you know, in some ways we are bodies, and I do believe that we have souls that we're not reducible to our body, but I believe that the body and the soul are sort of fused together. I'm sort of more Aristotelian. Aristotle said that the soul is the form of the body. It's that which gives the body animation and its meaning and that sort of thing. There's some problems with that view, too. I mean, this is kind of a convenient view if you really don't care about bodies much, or you want to see bodies as just purely mechanical. And that's pretty good if you're like, you know, into certain types of medicine. You know, you see the body is just a bunch of mechanical processes. That's helpful sometimes. What else do we do? We will things. That is, we say, I'm going to do this, I'm not going to do this, like right now I'm willing to walk across the room. I'm unwilling to leave the room right now, because class isn't done. I affirm things, I deny them. Again, all this is done through the mind. It's not done through the body. So, you know, that evil genius, that evil demon, looks like the scope of what it actually has control over is smaller than we thought. It can fool us about sense perception. Maybe it can even fool us about, you know, whether 2 plus 2 equals 4. But it can't fool us about all this other stuff. Provided we use our minds rightly. Now, it does take hard to actually think that there is, you know, some sort of evil demon fooling us or we're just in a dream. He doesn't actually think that. But let's, you know, as we finish up class, let's think about some movies where that's the case. Let's think about the Matrix, because I've actually seen that one. What's going on in the Matrix? The first one. Not all the other sequels and all that, because that gets really complicated. You got this guy, Neo. Remember him, right? That's where sunglasses a lot. Pretty fit. He's got a dead-end job. What happens to him? Anyone remember how it starts? The red pill on the blue pill? What's going on there? Yeah. Someone finds you and asks you if you want to take the red pill or the blue pill, and one of them wins and wakes up and not remember what happened and the other one will see something. Yeah, like going down the rabbit hole, you called it. So red pill is go back to reality just as the way it seems. Keep on going out with the illusion. Blue pill takes you down the rabbit hole and what's at the end of the rabbit hole? The truth about things. And the truth about things is who's actually in charge? Not the human beings anymore, but the sentinels are a type of what? A type of program or machine. And the machines are in charge of the world, right? They've gone wild. You know, we shouldn't have created such smart machines. We have this sort of fantasy of creating creatures that destroy us. What do they turn human beings into? Yeah. We generate electrical charge and we generate electrical charge better when we're just laying there vegetating or when what? When we're irritated, when we're thinking that we're doing things, when we're being flooded with sense data and we think that we're actually in an office working nine to five, getting off, going out to the bar, meeting somebody, taking them back home, kicking them out later, pick whatever you want, right? All this drama generates better electricity and that's not much of a way to live, is it? And I think all of you remember that big scene where you see like acre after acre of human beings and vats, this panoramic view? Do you remember your feeling when you saw that? Probably felt a little repulsed at this thought of all these people just laying there, vegetables and vats being deceived constantly. Then there's that gross scene where they get them out and they pull all the hoses off of them and he's got holes in his back and he's coughing up all this stuff that they have them breathe while they're in the things and it's kind of gross. And now what where is he? He's in the real world. He's no longer just in the matrix in the imaginary world. He's no longer being deceived by the evil genius. This doesn't map exactly because then you know who tries to kill them all the time these uh what do they call those? The agents, very good yeah. Yeah these agents of their programs so I guess they're still kind of in the matrix but kind of not they they tap into it. They can also be killed in real life and think about all the things that they do with them. You know they download into his imaginary body all these kung fu moves that now you can do you know like dodging bullets you know they're flying past him and all this kicking and punching and all that sort of stuff. They can't really modify what his mind is because his mind is independent of his his bodily existence. Is there something sort of like that an inception? Some sort of who makes the imaginary world an inception? Again who's who's seen the movie? So who made the imaginary world or is there no explanation for that? Where's the machines again? Okay so like you might think it up and then I'm in the world that you've thought up that's a that's a different take. You would be like the evil genius in that case right? There's another movie that is kind of in some ways posing the same kind of issues I don't know if you've seen it at the Blade Runner many of you have seen the Blade Runner. You have these fake human beings I call them replicants and they're very similar to human beings except of course they're stronger faster in some way smarter. They're grown in laboratories and in order to try to keep them from going crazy they give them false memories. If you watch the movie carefully there's one replicant in it that of course the main character falls in love with because it always has to happen and she saves his life and then she realizes that she's actually she doesn't know at the start that she's a replicant that all of her memories are fake. Her entire past is a fiction. She's only several years old and then she finds it out and that's kind of devastating isn't it? To find out that you have been deceived that you've been systematically lied to it's like getting kicked in the guts ontologically existential. And then there's actually some hints in the book that it's based on that the main character himself might actually be a replicant. And when these things are done really really well they suggest to you that maybe it's not all science fiction maybe this could in fact be the way things are. And Descartes in a way prefigures all of this. Descartes thinking these problems out 400 years before they hit the big screen because it's the same basic problem. How do you know things about yourself? What can you actually be kind of through your body? What about this physical looking at you right now? I can see you hear you say something I could you know go up to you if I think you're a ghost and you know poke you and you're solid you know back way or you smack me or something like that. Don't do that. There's interaction but how do I know you're not actually just a robot of some sort? How do you know I'm not? At this point in Descartes' meditations we don't. We don't actually know the truth of things as they are in themselves. He has this example of the piece of wax you're reading through meditation to. What happens to it? It's got certain qualities right? You pick up the piece of wax it's got a certain shape and you can smell it. It smells like the honey from the comb. What happens to it when you eat it? What happens to the hardness of the wax we eat it? It melts. Things that are melted or soft right? That smell of the honeycomb it goes away. Before you could tap it and it made a sound. What happens when you're tapping something that's liquid? I guess it makes a sound a little bit right? Does it look the same? What's still the same? What is that piece of wax? It's not those properties it's not those things that we detected through the senses. It's actually what you understand it with your mind. Really what you understand it to be some sort of extended substance that has or at least you thought had certain characteristics. If you're a chemist you'd probably get the chemical formula for wax. Which I don't know. Maybe some of you do. It's been a long time since I've been a chemist for a while. Well that's the way the external world is for us. We can know things about our own selves and about our minds much more clearly than we can about anything outside of our mind. So how are we going to get a world that we can believe in then? That's where we're going to leave off because he doesn't he doesn't resolve that in meditation too. He's going to resolve that with what we're going to look at in meditation three and meditation four. And we're going to do kind of what looks like a detour in all this proof about God's existence and all that. Think about to yourself why is he bothering talking about God when what we're really interested in is an external world? That's where I'm going to leave you for this class. And we'll pick up again with this on