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How do you know you're real?
-
It's an obvious question
until you try to answer it,
-
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,"
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René Descartes tried to answer
that very question,
-
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,
-
or you're sure you're about
to catch a flyball,
-
and it hits the ground in front of you.
-
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.
-
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
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or fighting off monsters
with your bare hands,
-
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,
-
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,
-
like time, shape, color
and number are false,
-
all just deceptions concocted
-
by an evil genius!
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No, seriously.
-
Descartes asks if you can disprove
the idea that an evil genius demon
-
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 perceptions
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,
-
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,
-
even if you think
that something is nothing
-
because no matter what you think,
you're a thinking thing,
-
or as Descartes put it,
"I think, therefore I am,"
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and so are you, really.
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(Airplane engine)
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 2/13/2015.