PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

I often come across concerns on social media and elsewhere that we may be living in a simulation generated by a malevolent being of some kind. I recently had a conversation in which someone claimed such a being may be so powerful, indeed all powerful, making our chances of detecting and escaping our simulated predicament zero. This is a troubling thought and, while I don’t have a knock down argument against it, some ideas came to mind from the French philosopher and polymath René Descartes (1596-1650) that offer some hope.

In his classic work Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) Descartes invents a method, which has come to be called the method of doubt, in order to find an absolutely certain belief or a belief beyond rational doubt (that is, a doubt that doesn’t entail a contradiction). This method states that if one can rationally doubt a belief then the belief will be considered false. The hope is that anything which can survive this extreme method will be certain. The most memorable application of the method comes in the beginning of Meditation Two when he applies the method to his own doubting and, in doing so, realizes that the proposition “I am, I exist” is certain every time he utters it. After all, he cannot doubt if doesn’t exist. So Descartes has found a proposition which is proven in the very act of doubting it. He can, at least, be assured that his existence is certain.

But another memorable application of the method comes in Meditation One and is known as the evil demon hypothesis. This hypothesis is used to raise a rational doubt about the apparent certainty of mathematics. He argues that it is possible there is an all powerful yet evil being that could make it seem that 2+2=4 when really it equals 5. And, being evil, this being would deceive us in this fashion. This scenario is, of course, not plausible. But it appears to be non-contradictory and thus possible. And this possibility of a rational doubt is all he needs to successfully apply the method of doubt.

Descartes

Now, if such a powerful evil demon can deceive us about basic mathematics then presumably it can deceive us about the rest of the world as well and we have our present day concern about living in a simulation. However, at the end of Meditation Three, after he has made an effort to prove God’s existence as perfect being, he observes that “it is sufficiently manifest that God cannot be a deceiver, since it is a dictate of the natural light that all fraud and deception spring from some defect.” And early in the Meditation Four he writes: “For, in the first place, I discover that it is impossible for him ever to deceive me, for in all fraud and deceit there is a certain imperfection: and although it may seem that the ability to deceive is a mark of subtlety or power, yet the will testifies without doubt of malice and weakness; and such, accordingly, cannot be found in God.”

Here we see that Descartes subscribes to the privation theory of evil which holds that evil is a privation or a lack of of a good which, by nature, should be present. And this theory allows him to deduce that the evil demon, while perhaps powerful, cannot be all powerful since can easily imagine a being greater than one that is deceptive since deception must come from an imperfect and therefore fallible source.

This is good news for those who worry about being inescapably caught in a simulation by a malevolent being. For any such being will, because it is deceptive, be necessarily fallible and therefore we have a hope of seeing through its machinations. To say there is no hope appears to be incoherent since this would imply something Descartes thinks is impossible, namely, an all powerful yet deceptive being or a perfect being with imperfections. And if we add to two other things from his work, namely, that we can be certain of our own existence as thinking beings and that genuine doubting proves the existence of free will, then we can also hope to have the free agency we need to take advantage of our deceiver’s fallibility and escape from the matrix.

For my three-post series on the privation theory of evil, go here.

For my post on Descartes’ dualism, go here.

For my argument in defense of a kind of Cartesian substance dualism, go here.

For my posts on free will, go here.

For my argument for God’s existence, go here.