meditation 6 - dreams

"dreams are never joined by the memory with all the other actions of life, as is the case with those actions that occur when one is awake," (Descartes, 103)

I think that D is making it known that he feels like dreams dont come from your memories. I happen to believe that dreams come from various parts of the brain being stimulated. Back in descartes day these guys didn't have the type of knowledge that we have know about our mind.

Meditation 6 "Dreams"

"...dreams are never joined by the memory with all the other actions of life, as is the case with those actions that occur when one is awake," (Descartes 103).

I'm not sure if I'm understanding what he is saying here but to me "D" is saying that our dreams are never caused by memories. How can that be true? We all have dreams that have something in it that we have seen in the past or present. Yes, sometimes we have dreams about things we have never seen but I think our dreams are somewhat our memories.

Meditation 6 "Senses"

"The first was that everything I ever thought I sensed while awake I could believe I also sometimes senses while asleep, and since I do not believe that what I seem to sense in my dreams comes to come from things external to me, I saw no reason why I should hold this belief about those things I seem to be sensing while awake," (Descartes 95).

This is really interesting. It also goes with my previous post for "Body and Mind." When you're dreaming your senses come from your mind like when you're awake, not external things. Even though you're sleeping you still sense the pain you're having. Your dreams come from your mind and imagination not things external from you.

Meditations Six

I find it interesting how Descartes jumps around in this section. He begins by completely relying on his senses and believing they just came with him as a natural part of life, to completely losing faith in his senses, and back to relying on them again. He's somewhat contradicting himself based on his previous ideas on truth and doubt. That's where the issue of God comes in. I don't quite understand Descartes true position on God yet because he's so inconsistent with his thoughts, but it is almost as if he is using God as the basis for everything he has doubt it. By that I mean whatever he doesn't understand or he can't completely prove true, he uses God almost as a backup for his doubt. He wants to believe certain things are attainable, but really has no way to make sure of it. So his belief in God allows him the benefit of the doubt. I'm not sure if thats going to make complete sense to anyone else or not.

Meditations Part VI

In Part VI, i feel like a main obsession of Des Cartes is believing that mind and body begin to exist as one.

"D" begins to feel many things such as his apetite and excitement,and pleasure. He also begins to sense things such as light ,colors,odors, What i feel is happening is that D doesnot know what we know in todays times.... We know that the brain is made up of sections that have electrical impulsesthroughout to tell us what to do and when to do it. The brain tells how sense things and how to touch and what to feel.
"D" thinks that these things that he is feeling have something to with God. He thinks God has something to do with all these senses and feelings. "D" doesnt realize about the functions of the brain yet.

please comment if you feel like i misintreperted this passage or if you have anything to add.

Meditation 6 "Mind and Body"

"But I had sometimes heard it said by people whose leg or arm had been amputated that it seemed to them that they still occasionally sensed pain in the very limb they had lost." -(Descartes 95)

I think this goes back to whether are we a mind, brain or both. In my psychology class I learned that Descartes believed in Dualism. A Dualist is believing that we have a mind and brain and they work together. I think when people lose limbs, their brain thinks there should be something there but your mind knows that there isn't. The brain senses something is wrong and that is where the pain comes from.

Meditation 6 "Nature"

"I call hunger, warn me to have something to eat, or why should dryness in the the throat warn me to take something to drink, and so on? I plainly had no explanation other than that I had been taught this way be nature." - (Descartes 95)


This is an interesting thing "D" talks about. It made me think of when we are babies and how we cried when we were hungry. How did we know how to do that at a such a young age, is it instinct? But then I started thinking our parents were taught that when we cried to feed us. So maybe we put them together and then learned that is how we got fed.

Discourse 2

"I thought that it was necessary for me first of all to try to establish some there and that, this being the most important thing in the world, and the thing in which hasty judgment and prejudice were most to feared, I should not try to accomplish that objective until I had reached a much more mature age than that of merely twenty three..."

I think this goes for a lot of things in life. We shouldn't start to try and figure out things at a immature age. At a young age our minds are still developing our full opinions and judgments on any matter. Think about it, is your mindset still the same as it was in your middle school days? Same goes for "D" trying to figure out the truth in all the information he has put into his mind over the years.

Rob Blank- part Dos

Descartes believed in four very disntinctive ideas. I saw him as kind of a stubborn man but he was honest.

He never believed anything unless he was the one who could prove it on his own. He also learned how to reduce anything he faced to the simplest of parts. He would use those ideas in simplest to hardest as he created a chain of reasoning and based his theories on that.

He said that his learning of science was terrible because of his understanding that many different men created the ideas he was ssuppose to follow.

Part 2 - Jen Bea

• Going off what Rosie had said above, Descartes believes that your own opinions alone are better then combining thoughts with others. When you start to bring your thoughts together with other people, your opinions get changed. When you work with others you have to compromise and twist your opinions around. At the end of coming to an agreement with everyone, your original idea is probably only a little part of the end result.
  
• He then talks about how all our opinions are off of others. We have learned off our parents, teachers, elders and so on. If you think about it, all of our thoughts have come from other people. We hear someone's opinion and then we break off of it. We add our own opinions and make it our own. If we did start off with just our own thoughts and weren't influenced by others, I do believe we would be different people.
• The four rules he made up to follow by are essential to his new way of thinking. He didn't want to throw out everything he learned in the past because some of it had truth behind it.