Descartes' Meditations—Evil Demon & The Original Red Pill (Part 1)

The Red Pill

If you’ve seen The Matrix—the part Neo chooses the Red Pill of doubt instead of the Blue Pill of normality—you’re already familiar with what is called the Radical Skeptical Hypothesis which can be traced back to René Descartes’ Meditations On First Philosophy.

In The Matrix, Neo takes the Red Pill and promptly finds out that all of his life—all his experiences that he has always depended on—has been a lie. For all this time, he has been suspended in a tube and connected to a super computer that has been feeding him all of his experiences.

Even now you could be just a brain connected to a computer that is feeding you the sensory experiences of reading this on your screen. You might not even have a screen to hold or hands or eyes. Everything might be just input being fed directly into your neural system.

The problem with this wild hypothesis is that no matter how ridiculous it sounds, there is no means by which we can distinguish between this computer fed information and actual real life experiences.

The interesting thing about this is that it can be traced back to René Descartes—the French philosopher standing toward the top of the staircase of modern western philosophy—who was distinctly not a skeptic. Descartes’ Meditations forms a significant part of western philosophy and a precursor to several contemporary theories—including those about the nature to mind and mental representations. But one of his most interesting contributions has been the Evil Demon Argument—a primitive version of the Brain In Vat thought experiment.

Brain In A Vat

The Brain in a Vat thought experiment challenges our belief that we can certainly believe everything about the external world that is presented to us by our senses and even our mind.

It forces us to imagine the possibility that we might be simply brains suspended in a tube connected to a computer that gives us the sensory stimulus of several experiences. All emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and so on are simply generated by the stimulation of the corresponding neural networks.

Mediation 1

This wild hypothesis has its conception in Descartes’ Meditation 1 ‘On What Can Be Called Into Doubt’. His doubt is a method he uses to separate uncertain knowledge from that which is completely indubitable. After having so many of his beliefs proven incorrect with the new advances in science and technology, Descartes began to grow increasingly motivated to separate the false from the true.

When you have a basket full of apples, some of which are rotten and others fresh, what do you do to separate the rotten ones? You take all the apples out and then one by one put only the fresh ones back inside. All of our knowledge and belief is this basket of apples and in order to throw the rotten apples of false knowledge away, we must first doubt everything and then only believe that knowledge that is found to be true. This is the method he uses to separate falsehoods from truth.

He goes on to upend this proverbial apple basket by means of three fundamental arguments. These are the Deceiving Sense Argument, the Dream Argument and the Evil Demon Argument.

The Deceiving Sense Argument brings into doubt whatever is presented to us through our senses. Descartes gives the example of how we cannot be certain of the sensory data of far away and small things. Seeing a group of people approaching from a large distance, we might not be sure of the number of people coming. We might think that there are only three while they might turn out to to be four. Besides, it is not just distant or small object that we sometimes wrongly perceive, it is also those like the straight iron rod placed inside a glass of water which then appears bent due to refraction. We cannot put ultimate faith on the senses.

The argument can be put like this:

We cannot trust what has deceived us even once.

There are several instances of the senses deceiving us in cases of distant and small objects.

Therefore, we cannot trust the senses.

Now then, you might say that even though we cannot trust the senses in cases of far away and small objects, but what about the things kept near us. We cannot surely doubt that our eyes deceive us when we see this screen on the chair we sit on or the clothes we wear.

Descartes would answer this with the Dream Argument. He claims that we all know that we have the same experiences in our dreams as we do in the waking state, and most of the times we are not even aware that it is a dream. How then can we know now that we are not simply dreaming of this screen and this chair?

This argument claims that since there is no way that we can distinguish between dream experiences and waking experiences form the inside, there is no way we can be sure that we are not dreaming right now.

This experience—of me writing and you reading—could just as easily be a dream and there would be no way to know otherwise. But then, even dream experiences could not be wrong about some fundamental truth such as 2+3=5 or that a triangle has three angles. Even this, Descartes says, could be doubted with enough motivation.

He uses the Evil Demon Argument to suggest the possibility of some sort of malicious demon like being that is feeding deceptive thoughts such 2+3=5 in our mind. In reality, maybe 2 and 3 do not make 5.

We would never know unless we can conclusively reject the possibility of such a demon. If we can’t believe even these basic, fundamental truths such as 2+3=5, then what is it that we can believe? Is there anything at all? Let us go to the second meditation to find out.

Meditation 2

“Doubtless then that I exist since I am convinced.”
René Descartes, Mediations on first philosophy

Even thought the famous phrase Cogito Ergo Sum is not explicitly states in this work, it is in Meditations that Descartes established the Res Cogitans or the thinking thing. He begins by setting out his quest to find—much like Archimedes—just one fundamental truth he could build the foundation of his belief upon.

Even when he is deceived, whether it be because of his own mind or because of some evil demon, he must necessarily be something. Someone must exist who is deceived, or convinced. Someone to affirm and deny and be willing and unwilling, all of which are attributes of thought.

To think is to do all of these and since we clearly do, it is certain that we think. And from this it is evident that we exist. We exist as thinking things. You might not have a body of this screen you are holding, even the sky and the earth might be mere illusion, but you can be sure in this—that you exist as a mind.

Thus the title of the second Meditation—’The Nature Of The Mind And How It Is Better Known Than The Body’.

The second part of this title, Descartes shows by means of the famous Wax Example. He takes a wax and notes its properties—whiteness, scent, that it is solid. But when he puts it near a flame, he discovers that it loses all its properties—it loses its color, its scent, it becomes fluid instead of solid. And yet we know that it is the same wax as it was before. Even though the characteristics of the objects around us change all the time, we still realize that they are the same object because their essence remains the same.

This essence, Descartes claims, is not perceived by the senses but is instead judged by the intellect. In this way, by knowing properties of objects by means of judgment of the mind, we know more about our mind. We know that our mind has the capacity for judging whiteness, solidity and so on. In this sense, the mind is always better known than the body.

Descartes’ methodical doubt has led him here, to the conclusive and certain existence of a mind, a thinking thing. From this central, foundational point, he arrives at everything else that he has yet found doubtful. The rest of the Meditations is Descartes’ attempt to put the fresh, not rotten apples back into the basket of knowledge after having checked them thoroughly.

Hegel put the idea thus: when we survey the history of ancient and medieval philosophy up to Descartes, we feel like a sailor on a storm-tossed sea who is finally able to shout “Land ahoy!,” for Cartesian doubt is not doubt about this or that particular matter, but a wholesale doubt in which the human mind, rejecting the authority of nature and God, sets out to be its own guide and to make a new, “absolute” beginning.
Larmore C. The First Meditation:: skeptical doubt and certainty. In: Cunning D, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes’ Meditations.

This is only the beginning to how Descartes uses the Res Cogitans as a building block to arrive at everything else—the body, the sky, the earth, other people.

To be continued in Part 2…