Shifting with the sands

What if it’s all a dream? What if my some of my most strongly-held beliefs are based on unreliable evidence? Descartes provides the questions in his First Meditation; here are two possible responses.

One option is to shrug off the scepticism. So what if we can be certain of very little? Certain or not, the beliefs Descartes has us doubt are pretty essential to everyday life; we’re hardly going to ditch them just because of some crazy notion that we may be dreaming. Stop believing you have a body and you might well end up dead. More the stuff of nightmares. Even if this is all a dream, for most of us it’s a damn good one. Let’s just get on with it and leave Descartes to wile away his life in an armchair for fear of entertaining unfounded beliefs.

Sensible as that may be, the second option gives me more comfort. Having read a bit of philosophy, most of us are comfortable to distance ourselves from the unsettling arguments we come across. This works out fine most of the time, but if you’re like me – and Descartes – the shadows are too persistent to be kept constantly at bay. They linger at the back of your mind, clouding forward when there’s space. Idle moments start to fill with niggling thoughts.

The sands may be shifting, but if we’re dreaming we’re shifting with them; from our perspective, they’re flat and solid. They can give us stability relative to their movement; certainty relative to their uncertainty. Dreaming too. When I ask if I have two hands, I’m not asking some deep question involving their existence in four-dimensional space, or whatever. All I want to know is whether there are hands – lumps of flesh and bone with five protrusions – attached to my body; the ‘are’ in the question needn’t have any heavy ontological import. Dream or not, if there are hands attached to what I nomally take to be my body, I’m happy. Believing that there is a desk in front of me just means that I have a bunch of other conditional beliefs, like that if I slam my fist down on top of it, I’ll get hurt while the desk won’t.

Since the belief that we might be dreaming isn’t usually at the forefront of our mind, the content of our other beliefs remains predominantly unaffected. Our belief that there’s a fire in the grate can be true even if we are dreaming it; all we standardly mean by our belief is that there’s something burning over there in that metal enclosure. It’s only when we begin considering the possibility that we’re dreaming that the very meaning of our belief alters. ‘Is’ starts to get all deep on us.

So long as we keep shifting with the sands, there is no obstacle to stability. We can have much more faith in our beliefs than Descartes supposes, since the majority of these beliefs are nothing more than claims relative to whatever situation God might have thrust us into. Only when we start to worry that the sand we’re on might be shifting do the claims stop being relative to our position and start being relative to another, hypothesised yet inaccessible vantage point. If you want certainty, shift with the sands and the rest will follow.