Rene Descartes Dream Argument

In Rene Descartes’ first meditation “Concerning Those Things That Can Be Called into Doubt,” he presents the dream argument, which claims that our senses are not a trustworthy source of our knowledge of our external world because they can at times be deceitful. In this paper I will show that Descartes’ argument is successful because there is no way we can know for certain what our state is at any given time (if we are awake or if we are asleep). After Descartes introduces his argument he goes on to say that he cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep at that moment. He does this by introducing the experiences of a madman, which can never be certain since its brains are always deceiving him, and comparing himself to the madman. How does he know that his senses are not making him believe that he is completely dressed next to the fireplace when the truth may be that he is in bed without clothing (as he points out in one of his examples).

At the moment when he is writing this paper he thinks he is awake as he looks to the paper and can feel that his eyes are wide awake, but then again there is no certainty that his senses are not deceiving him. Which leads him to believe that he might be asleep at any given time. He thinks of times that his dreams are so vivid that make him believe that he is awake and there are also times when he has lucid dreams when he can tell that they dreams. How can he be sure that he is actually dreaming rather than being