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Comment count is 8
The God of Biscuits - 2011-06-30

Although I found this entire series to be really good, this video was by far my least favorite.


La Loco - 2011-06-30

I wish I could get my parents to watch this series.


simon666 - 2011-06-30

Descartes does not purge himself of all beliefs. He continues to believe at the very least there is a thing called dreaming, that dreaming is different than other human experience, and that he in fact knows that he dreams such that he cannot know whether his putative knowledge derived from the senses is actually the case.

All this knowledge about dreams when he cannot in fact reliably distinguish between being awake and dreaming.

I get that intuitively we should grant Descartes dreaming, but if one says they cannot reliably distinguish A from B, how are we to believe there is in fact an A and B where A does not equal B?


Cena_mark - 2011-06-30

Most people here know how I feel about philiosophy and I hate philosophy like Descartes the most. I'm real, you're real, the spoon is real, this is not a dream you dream when you sleep, get over yourself.


simon666 - 2011-06-30

Are you saying I get over myself or others should get over themselves? Because I was offering a critique of Descartes.


Yhanthlei - 2011-07-01

To be fair to Descartes' ideas, one could say that given that we encounter multiple accounts of reality that are mutually contradictory, then we know that at least some of these accounts must not be true (assuming that reality is internally consistent). This would allow us to make a reality/dreaming distinction, although the term dreaming is loaded and imprecise for the definition we would be using. However, there is nothing within this argument that would provide us a means to to determine which account is true and which is false, which would lead to Descartes' claim that he can't tell which is which. Showing such a means would require a separate counterargument. So, we can distinguish A from B, as they are mutually exclusive, we just can't tell which is which. Of course, this runs into problems when you start using an actually practical definition of reality,

Being fair to Descartes isn't terribly easy. Metaphysical philosophy of reality and properties tends to be the bullshittiest of philosophy, and gives the rest a bad reputation.


memedumpster - 2011-06-30

I actually fell asleep watching this and woke up to the part where it says if I watched it again I would see things I didn't remember.


dancingshadow - 2011-06-30

The series is really well done; he should probably wrap it up soon.


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