Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Nature Doesn't Know Everything

I titled the blog an interesting an amusing sentence from today's selection of Descartes. One of his many interesting points. I read this over the course of two days and allowed myself time to digest some of the information presented to me.

What I enjoyed most were the conversations between Doubtful and Hopeful. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the two extremes by one another. Then, to simply dive head first into doubting everything, it was a fascinating process to see how he dealt with his surroundings and how he tried to reason what everything was. This whole selection by him was food for thought and I found myself nodding or shaking my head to his arguments. I even stopped a few times to debate with myself if I agreed with his statements or not.

I felt like I was reading Shakespeare again with the mentioning of being in a dream or being awake. The back and forth arguments of if we're awake or if we're asleep has me perplexed as well as intrigued. How do we perceive if we're awake or asleep? Do we rely solely on our senses? But, as Descartes states, we perceive generally the same when awake and asleep, so it's up to our mind and rational thought to know that we're awake or asleep. The division between the mind and body, natural world, and everything else is vast and easily noted when looking correctly. Descartes has very different views that have me thinking...

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