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How do you know you're real?
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It's an obvious question
until you try to answer it,
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but let's take it seriously.
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How do you really know you exist?
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In his "Meditations on First Philosophy,"
René Descartes tried to answer that very question,
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demolishing all his preconceived notions and opinions
to begin again from the foundations.
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All his knowledge had come
from his sensory perceptions of the world.
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Same as you, right?
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You know you're watching this video
with your eyes, hearing it with your ears.
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Your senses show you the world as it is.
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They aren't deceiving you,
but sometimes they do.
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You might mistake a person far away
for someone else,
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or you're sure you're about to catch a flyball,
and it hits the ground in front of you.
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But come on, right here and now,
you know what's right in front of you is real.
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Your eyes, your hands, your body.
That's you.
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Only crazy people would deny that,
and you know you're not crazy.
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Anyone who'd doubt that must be dreaming.
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Oh no, what if you're dreaming?
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Dreams feel real.
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You can believe you're swimming, flying
or fighting off monsters with your bare hands,
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when your real body is lying in bed.
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No, no, no. When you're awake,
you know you're awake.
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Ah! But when you aren't,
you don't know you aren't,
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so you can't prove you aren't dreaming.
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Maybe the body you perceive
yourself to have isn't really there.
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Maybe all of reality,
even its abstract concepts,
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like time, shape, color
and number are false,
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all just deceptions
concocted by an evil genius.
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No, seriously.
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Descartes asks if you can disprove
the idea that an evil genius demon
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has tricked you into
believing reality is real.
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Perhaps this diabolical deceiver
has duped you.
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The world, your preceptions of it,
your very body.
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You can't disprove that they're all just made up,
and how could you exist without them?
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You couldn't! So, you don't.
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Life is but a dream, and I bet you aren't
row, row, rowing the boat merrily at all, are you?
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No, you're rowing it wearily like the duped,
nonexistent doof you are/aren't.
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Do you find that convincing?
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Are you persuaded?
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If you aren't, good;
if you are, even better,
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because by being persuaded,
you would prove that you're a persuaded being.
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You can't be nothing
if you think you're something,
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even if you think
that something is nothing
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because no matter what you think,
you're a thinking thing,
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or as Descartes put it,
"I think, therefore I am,"
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and so are you, really.
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 2/13/2015.