Is anything we experience real?

It’s a cool Tuesday morning in October. I’m seated at my wooden desk, enveloped in the smells of perfectly steeped tea and a burning lavender candle. I stare at my empty screen, waiting for inspiration to strike when suddenly, I’m back in my bed. The warmth of my duvet tangled in my legs, the cool smell of the Autumn air in the room. Should I expect that this is reality, or will I soon wake up again? With my dream feeling so undoubtedly real, how can I determine that my conscious reality is not also a dream? What if I am no more than a mind living a dream, being convinced that what I’m sensing is real? René Decartes’ Dream Argument states that it is impossible to tell with certainty that any experience we may have is not a dream. While we may perceive them to be true, it is not wise to trust our human senses, as they tend to fail us.

René Descartes (1596-1650) was one of the leading critical thinkers of the scientific revolution. Among other scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers of his time, he was encouraged to seek new knowledge through the skepticism of the information that their generation had been told to be true. Descartes was particularly good at this. He used his keen talent to doubt the reality around him to provide arguments for the existence of God and that nothing we think we know can be taken with complete certainty. Descartes spends much of his life accepting his given knowledge at face value, quietly doubting this information in the back of his mind until one day, as an older man, he finally caves to explore this doubt.

He comes to argue that our senses are unreliable tools for gaining knowledge and that reality is nothing more than an illusion. “I consider that I possess no senses… What, then, can be esteemed as true? Perhaps nothing at all” (Descartes, 1637). To determine what is the most reliable source of knowledge, Descartes spent most of his life questioning everything he was taught. He doubted all information that had been accepted by his community. By doing so, he was able to dig deeper into the less thought-of possibilities of how humankind gains knowledge and what is truly factual.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, he introduces his Dream Argument. Descartes concludes that our human senses are unreliable. In an example he dreamt, he is certain that he is seated in front of a fire in his home. He feels the warmth on his skin. Similar to my scenario of sitting at my desk, it becomes impossible to distinguish a dream’s perceptions from those of waking life. He quickly dismisses the certainty of this idea since he has been so often deceived by his dreams in the past. ‘How can I know that I am not now dreaming?’ is the resulting renowned question Descartes asks himself (Springett, 2019).

The act of dreaming is a phenomenon that has bewildered scientists, philosophers, and other experts for centuries. Dreams act as substantial evidence for the argument that everything we believe to be true could be a false reality generated by a dream or a hallucination. However, still, much remains unknown about dreams. They are, by nature, nearly impossible to study effectively. They take place entirely within the mind of an individual who is asleep and unable to communicate. With no way to record or view the dreams being studied, research relies on a dreamer’s memories which, as we all know, is not a reliable resource. After waking, the recollections of a dream can completely vanish within seconds. However, when one is experiencing a dream, it can feel indistinguishable from waking life. Therefore, Descartes argues, there is no way to substantiate that our waking life is any more than just another dream.

However, Descartes’ Dream Argument has received plenty of counterarguments, some from Descartes himself. He says to himself; surely, some part of this illusion must be real. Perhaps not everything perceived is real, but indisputably, each component as an individual must be true. Perhaps I am not sitting at my desk, but some properties of the illusion must be real. The shape of the desk, rectangular, exists; the quantity of my candle, one, must exist; and these sensations I am feeling exist. The mind during dreams can create absurdity using different sensible properties from waking life. If these components did not exist, the mind would be unable to pull them from memory and use them in a dream. These simple entities, such as a rectangle, must exist, for the mind would be unable to visualize a rectangle if it did not exist.

Later, Descartes adopts the position that the distinction between dreams and reality can be quite obvious. Contrary to his previous assertions, he states that his dreams are never linked with his memories of waking life, whereas his consciousness is. However, just because the things we experience in our dreams are not connected to our waking life, does not disprove the reality of dreams. I have woken up from a dream with the sensations fading into thin air within seconds. The next night I could fall into the very same scenario as though my subconscious is returning to the dreaming world. The dreaming world could simply be a second reality that functions differently from our waking life. Who is to say which reality is the most real? Descartes later introduces the ‘Evil-Demon argument,’ which states that he is being deceived by some omnipotent being. In this case, René argues that he is no more than a mind being fed illusions by this evil demon. Descartes’ intention with this argument is simply to prove that our human senses are unreliable and have the possibility of being deceived.

This radical notion that our senses are not to be trusted changed the way Descartes and his followers gained knowledge. The scientific revolution was led by thinkers who claimed that the only way of gaining knowledge was through our human senses. However, Descartes’ argument positions that accurate understanding of the universe comes only through the application of pure reason. So, in conclusion, there really is no conclusion to René Descartes’ position considering the fluidity in which he presents his arguments. The only thing we can know with confidence is that there are no tangible means by which humans can know anything undoubtedly. It’s simply impossible to disprove the impossible.