Question

In his first meditation Descartes says that he cannot distinguish a state where he is dreaming from a vigil state. This gives him one reason to at least put in doubt the direct corporeal experience of the senses. My doubt is very simple. If he cannot distinguish this two states, how can he even formulate this distinction? I was trying to imagine how I can come up with a concept of Vigil if a cant really distinguish it from a dream. One way to answer your question is to think about how you (and, probably, almost everyone else) learnt to distinguish dream from waking in real life. Many parents will have experienced being woken up by their small child rushing into the bedroom, very upset because there are wolves all round the house, or some similar problem. Parents then persuade the child to recognize that s/he is awake now and that there are no wolves around the house. Sometimes this goes on for a while, but eventually we all learn the difference. We often think we can distinguish dream for sleep while we are asleep but that isn't true. While we are asleep, we are incapable of recognizing a fantasy. That's what it means to be asleep. So there is no cue that will tell us we are awake. We realize we were dreaming when we wake up with impossible memories and recall what a dream is. There are many complications around this in practice, but the principle is clear. Descartes is right to think that there is no cue that will tell us we are dreaming while we are dreaming. After all, in a dream, everything is deceptive. If there were a cue that told you whether you were dreaming, it would be unreliable, because you were dreaming. What Descartes misses is the point that he can wake up, and that's how he knows (later on) that he was dreaming. It is the overall coherence of our lives that tells us we are awake and the incoherence of dreams with our lives is what tells us they are dreams. But we can't recognize the difference while we are asleep and unconscious. Your waking life constitutes a coherent whole; your dreaming life does not. when you go to sleep, you typically wake up in the same place, with the same people around, in the same situation as when you went to sleep. Your experience continues more or less where it left off, in ways that are predictable and coherent. Furthermore, there are predictable and coherent rules of what can and can't happen in waking life. Things don't suddenly appear and disappear, the world doesn't suddenly and inexplicably change around you, and you can't fly. In all of these characteristics, dreams are otherwise. The dreams that you have over your life don't form a single coherent world, but a scattered hodgepodge of many different worlds, none of which individually forms a reliable and predictable stage on which to act. If you had a series of dreams that work like real life, where every time you started this particular dream, it left off where the previous ended, where the situation usually changed only gradually, in a regular and predictable way like real life, a dream that over years formed a progressing coherent world like waking life, with real consequences to your actions, then you would have reason to believe that in that dream you are accessing another world similar to the waking world. There have been fantasy stories that work with this premise. What is Descartes' initial concern in the first meditation?

a. Distinguishing between various states of consciousness
b. Exploring the nature of dreaming
c. Investigating the reliability of corporeal experiences
d. Analyzing the coherence of waking life

Answer 1

Descartes' initial concern in the first meditation is investigating the reliability of corporeal experiences.

Step-by-step explanation:

Descartes' initial concern in the first meditation is investigating the reliability of corporeal experiences.

In the first meditation, Descartes raises doubts about the direct corporeal experiences of the senses. He ponders whether he can trust his senses to accurately represent reality and wonders if there is a possibility that he is being deceived by an evil demon or simply dreaming. Descartes argues that because he cannot distinguish between dreaming and being awake, he should put in doubt the direct corporeal experience of the senses.

While Descartes acknowledges this difficulty in distinguishing between dreaming and being awake, he is able to formulate the distinction based on the overall coherence of our lives. In waking life, our experiences form a coherent whole, with consistent rules and predictable outcomes. In dreams, on the other hand, our experiences are often disjointed, inconsistent, and unpredictable. Descartes recognizes that he can distinguish between dreaming and being awake based on the coherence and predictability of his experiences.