"... perhaps I am dreaming, as I recently objected against myself, in other words, that everything I am now thinking of is no truer that what occurs to someone who is asleep? Be that as it may, this changes nothing; for certainly, even if I were dreaming, if anything is evident to my intellect, then it is entirely true." - 71
"... the hyperbolic doubts of the last few days ought to be rejected as ludicrous. This goes especially for the chief reason for doubting, which dealth with my failure to distinguish being asleep from being awake. For I now notice that there is a considerable difference between these two; dreams are never joined by th ememory with all the other actions of life, as is the case with those actions that occur when one is awake." - 89
Are these two quotes convincing? Does Descartes fairly address dreams and matrix-esque illusions? Or does he gloss over this difficulty? I think we definitely might have trouble with the second quote. If I understand him correctly, Descartes is basically arguing that while he's awake, he can remember both his dreams and his waking life, whereas while he's asleep, his memories are bounded by the dream. But isn't this exactly the problem? If Descartes is dreaming his entire life, as he knows it, then wouldn't he be "bounded by the dream" and not remember his true, waking life? Or perhaps he has no memories of another life and has always lived within the dream. In either case, I don't see that he has solved this particular difficulty.
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