Descartes says we should doubt everything as much as “possible”. The most extreme version of this doubt is provided by way of the malevolant demon thought expirement; Essentially this argument runs like so:
Sometimes I am deceived
It is possible (due to the possibility of an evil demon) that I am always deceived.
But a similar argument could be made from the following:
An art collector discovers one of his paintings to be a fake, and says “I shall never collect another painting since, they could all be fakes”.
The second seems odd, since a fake implies a genuine painting exists, it must be a fake of something and if everything was an illusion then there would be no distinction and we would just call it reality.
Okay with that down, my question is this do you think that the concept ‘of a genuine / illusionary distinction’ could come about without the existence of anything genuine? I mean if it is all an illusion isn’t it just reality anyway.
P.s. since I took the time to write a well thought out thread i’d appreciate some on topic responses.[/u]
Have you ever had a dream that you thought was so real? What if you couldn’t wake up from this dream? How could you tell the difference between the real world and the dream world? Follow the white rabbit.
well, first you couldn’t have the “genuine/illusory distinction” without both concepts exisiting, BUT…forgoing that thought, if everything is an we perceive is an “illusion,” there has to be a reality of some sort underlying the illusion, otherwise the idea of an illusion wouldn’t exist. you can’t have one without the other. kind of a yin yang thing. so your final line, “if it is all an illusion, isn’t it just reality anyway?” rings true.
