Blog post #3: Descartes gets us into some metaphysical trouble

Descartes asks some great questions. The beginning of Meditations starts with a radical pursuit of knowledge: Descartes throws out all he "thinks" he knows and seeks to start over from a coherent building of logical premises. Next, he brings forward the famous "I think, therefore I am" conjecture. Few can argue with this basic premise. Clearly, being able to conceptualize oneself is indicative of existence in some sense. What that sense is though, and whether it is what we think it is, is another questions all together. Our modern view would say we need to collect data and make observations to arrive at a consensus about what exists beyond oneself. If we resign ourselves to Descartes's methods, we can use circular logic to get us anywhere we want. Moreover, if we ever encounter evidence that shakes one of our building blocks of reality, we will be unable to reconcile it with our worldview.

Another question that Descartes doesn't answer is: does it really matter if reality as we understand it isn't real? Will this change our enjoyment of our lives, our goals, our morality? The best modern example I can think of for a modern Cartesian perspective is the Simulation Hypothesis popularized by Nick Bostrom in the early 2000s (can be read at https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html). Bostrom contends that either 1) humans will not reach a post-human state (basically a singularity), 2) humanity has no interest in running simulations of itself, or 3) the probability that we are living in a computer simulation is nearly 100%. The paper lays out very logically why one of these propositions must be true.  None of the propositions directly point to "why" people would be simulating the past, but one doesn't have to think very hard to see why this could be useful. Imagine if we could simulate a human history many many times. We could come as close to possible to perfecting economics and any other social science. We could dramatically expand inventive potential. Someone could even argue that simulating sentient humans is inherently good since these "people" can now participate in the human experience. So if the reader follows the arguments and rules out propositions 1 & 2, you're left with the realization that there is a very real chance that we live in a computer program.

So if you buy Bostrom's arguments, which make much more sense than Descartes's brain in the vat exercise, you're still not much further than where you started. Even if your reality isn't real ("base reality") you are still you. You still have goals, desires, and you still have to pay your rent. You will not start killing people and being indecent (unless you are truly unstable). All of this is to say that individual inquiry is important, but we cannot use it alone to discover truth. Furthermore, I wanted to stress that the question "Am I / my experience real?" (whatever that even means) is almost completely unrelated from the more important question of "How should I live?"