The Evil Deceiver, Two Minds,
And Super Reality
By Jonathan Mansur
Descartes started his search for truth by trying to find knowledge that could not be doubted, this search for truth lead to his meditations on truth. In Descartes first meditation he was able to doubt everything but the fact that he had doubts and was able to infer the existence of a mind from the existence of his thoughts. However, from here his argument for the existence of reality hinged on a fact that could be doubted, the existence of god, this led to a weaker argument that can still be doubted. The existence of reality is not something I doubt and because of that I wanted to take over and try to rebuild his arguments from the last point that could not be doubted, this being the existence of reality being nothing more then the actions of an Evil Deceiver. The argument for the existence of reality starts with the logical ramifications of an Evil Deceiver followed by the existence of two minds and will conclude with an analysis of the varying degrees of reality.
The evil deceiver according to Descartes is a thing that can deceive an individual into believing a completely different reality (RQ 43) than the one the individual actually exists in. An important part of Descartes meditations in respect to the evil deceiver is missing, this part being what the minimal requirements would be for the evil deceiver to exist. To begin with, all that is given to define the Evil Deceiver is that he can completely deceive any mind into believe a false reality. To do this the Evil Deceiver must at least be able to understand all of the thoughts of the individual’s mind he/she/it is deceiving, in addition to those thoughts the Evil deceiver must also have a set of thoughts of his/her/it’s own that understand the individual’s thoughts. Being able to understand the individual’s thought’s shows an act of generating thoughts of his/her/it’s own shows that through the same method the Descartes used to...