Guarding Your Handprints - Essay Example

NUMBER: PAPER: Guarding your handprints At a young and tender age, one of the first words a child can learn is “hands”. The main reason behind this is that the mother keeps on repeating the word in various instances such as “wash your hands”. Then the word “hand” becomes the ultimate noun to describe the terminal part of the human arm. However, as Descartes offers, a man or a woman would not believe if he or she has a hand because, first, one does not know if he/she is dreaming or not. In his meditation he starts with uncertainty so as to come up with what is certain. For example, we are prone to doubt opinion, belief and assumptions. For the case of the dream doubt, we are prone to doubt our dreams, why? Because dreams are an assumption of what the reality would be to us rather than a certainty of what it really is. For instance, one uses his/her hands to grab something in real life and dream; therefore, it is hard to tell when we are imagining and we are not.REM is the stage where dreams occur and in eight hours of sleep there is about three cycle of REM stage. The first is close to 15 minutes then the rest are 40 to 60 minutes long. Because we are not dreaming for few minutes like we remember when we wake up from a dream, we cannot really prove if we woke up from a real life and continuing to dream or woke up from a dream and continuing the real life. If hands were unmovable items, it would be harder to believe they are not real. That is why when we wake up we find that in was just a brief assumption and not a reality. We need to discover that we cannot know something at the same period and doubt it. One comes first. We need to doubt to believe. That is why when we dream we are using our hand we are believing in a different perspective as opposed to waking up from our dream to find out that reality is far much bigger that the dream, thus we seek to doubt the dream. Thus the dream and reality all refer to the uncertain and certain analytical point of view. As Descartes puts it, dreams have a double – effect “They are on the one hand experiences of the ordinary, healthy mind, experiences with which no one could plausibly deny an acquaintance, and yet, on the other hand, they are comparable, in their extravagance and deceptiveness, to the delusions of insanity the narrator has just been considering.” Lack of insight and Descartes puts it is “…the result of sense-perception and dreams having—or potentially having— the same content.” This can be plainly put as the knowledge of perception of senses. Why? … I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep. The result is that I begin to feel dazed, and this very feeling only reinforces the notion that I may be asleep. If someone without hands can dream that they have hands and they are working with their hands and even feeling them, but in reality they are dreaming and imagining. Descartes had to find certainty and through this certainty arouse doubt. He gives the example of sitting next to the fire and feeling the warmth of it while he was dreaming. This is a thought in his dream and since the same scene can happen in reality, it leads to no argument that any thought having while asleep can also be realized in reality. Thus our internal senses reflect nothing related to our external senses and this can be put as independent occurrence of our internal and external feelings. Thus Descartes has to be certain in order to be uncertain about anything as reflected in our sensing of internal and external feelings. I can ascertain that in order to oppose that we do not have hands; we have to believe that we have hands. We can also put the hands to test such that if they do not work as supposed we can be able to doubt that we do have hands. As I mentioned earlier, at a young age parents teach their children common words to help them communicate easier with one another. Due to cultural norms, people label items and body parts to differ from one another and which helps us explain what we are talking about. For instance, if I want to say my hand is hurting, “hand” is the universal word that helps us identify that we are talking about“hand” without showing body parts or instead of saying ‘the body parts that has five fingers’. In other words, because I have learned at a young age that hand is the end part of the arm, and because I see others with a similar shaped body part, I can tell I have hands. Again I have used the hand in reality to believe that it is not just a feeling in my dream. I am certain that it exists and I do not have doubt about it. After reading Descartes point of view of real and fake hand, indeed my opinion about it has changed. It is easy to believe we have hands just like it would be easy to believe that I have hands in my dreams. Let us take another instance between real and fake hands are by comparing them. The real and fake hands do have the same shape, of course, one can be bigger or thinner than the other one, but overall they both consist of five fingers and are the end part of one’s arm. However, the shape of the hand does not distinguish a real hand from a fake hand. Nowadays, a person can even feel a prosthetic arm like it is their own real; therefore, one cannot even distinguish a real hand from a fake one through senses. I believe it is the function of the hands that distinguish not only a real hand from a fake but also human beings from one another. Nevertheless, I think the function of the hands comes from a power or a force. In biopsychology, we learn that it is because of neural communication that we feel and move our body parts. When a neuron gets excited by the input it receives from another neuron, action potential fires. Moreover, our sensory neurons help us sense or feel our body parts and motor neurons tell us to move our body parts. However, I do not think a human’s hands are moving nor doing certain things because of neural communication only. Most of the times, when we are using are hands; it is not really us using it. For instance, when a hairstylist cuts, colors or styles someone’s hair, he/she is always using his or her hands to do so. The hairstylist is not doing it for fun; he/she is doing to earn money. On the other hand, the hairstylist sometimes is using his/her hands since most hairstylist like their job and they’re excited to style the customer’s hair differently depending on their mood. Every stylist cuts or styles a hair differently and since the work of a stylist’s hand is what distinguish them from one another, then one can believe that humans have hands. Knowledge should be based on a complete certainty where there should not be a single doubt. Descartes does assume knowledge demands certainty since he says “knowledge is conviction based on a reason so strong that it can never be shaken by any stronger reason”. In other words, to say we know something, we have to be so sure that no other opinion or belief will leave us questioned. I do think knowledge demands certainty because one has to be certain about something to call it knowledge. Moreover, he shares that “I see that the certainty of all other things depends on this [knowledge of God], so that without it nothing can ever be perfectly known… [I]f I did not possess knowledge of God … I should thus never have true and certain knowledge about anything, but only shifting and changeable opinions”. Assuming I have a hand is not enough, I should know it and in order to know I have to be certain and have enough evidence to prove that I know I have hands. Because we do not have enough knowledge of God, it is hard to have certain knowledge about anything on earth. He doesn’t think that we need hands to write our response because our hands are not the one writing, it’s our mind. Because we do not have enough knowledge of God, who created the earth and us, I cannot have any sort of evidence that my picture of the world is accurate because my beliefs does not satisfy the certainty that knowledge desires. Another aspect Descartes portrays is that despite the dreaming sensation, there is a subconscious part of our mind not interrupted by the aspect of dreaming. … whether I am awake or asleep, two and three added together are five, and a square has no more than four sides. It seems impossible that such transparent truths should incur any suspicion of being false. What does this portray? The reasoning behind it is that we tend to dream of what is a reality but independents. As I mentioned earlier our internal senses are totally different than our external senses. Such that the brain as described as intellect has the ability to distinguish the truth from what is not. For example if I dream I have a hand it is because I have seen it there and its functioning that is why I dream of its existence. Descartes related dreams to imaginations. This is “Because the imagination is treated as having the same characteristics and limits as sense-experience, the two are potentially indistinguishable.” Thus as related to the introduction of a mother telling the child the word “hand” is much related to believing it exists because it is not an imagination as she has put the hand to test and seen that it really works and it is not a mere imagination because our brain can clearly distinguish reality from dreams as a result of that part of our brain not affected by sleep (dreams). In conclusion I can strongly suggest that “Dreams are a flow of constantly shifting and transient impressions. Such content cripples one’s capacity for reflection on one’s current state and therefore one experiences dream without the knowledge that one is dreaming. We are therefore left agreeing with the asymmetry of insight pointed to by Hobbes’. The fact that I am not aware I am dreaming during a dream does not mean that now, in my reflective state, I may not be aware I am awake.” As I mentioned earlier, the hand theorem is basically as plain as it is portrayed. This is because when we dream of having a hand or not it’s just our mind shifting between reality and non reality. As Descartes laid it down straight, it is purely shifting between certainty and uncertainty. Our brain is much aware of this shift and that is why we have the subconscious mind to portray what is true or not and it’s our option to choose what whether the hand exists or not in the dream or basically the difference between the dream and the reality. This leads to the notion that dreams and reality are far much different as dreams lack insight and are faced with the challenge of absurdity as we have the capacity to wake up from a dream and realize that the hand is real and not fake. “…dreams are Protean, having a limitless ability to shape themselves into any waking situation. Perhaps we should call this the philosopher’s concept of a dream: a capacity to replicate any scenario, feeling or thought. Armed with this concept, Descartes’ narrator is able to fend off all challengers to the sceptical argument.” This can be described as the ability of a dream to look like a reality. In the sense you can think you have a hand and you don’t have or you don’t have a hand and you have one. Thus we ought to believe that a dream seeks to copy a real life situation, feeling or even a thought. Thus all doubts we have of the existence of the hand in our dreams lie in the subconscious mind. Works Cited Hill, James. Descartes’ Dreaming Argument. " Richmond Journal of Philosophy 8. (Winter 2004) : 2. Hill, James. Descartes’ Dreaming Argument. " Richmond Journal of Philosophy 8. (Winter 2004) : 4. Read More