What does it mean Does anythi... free essay sample

What does it mean? Does anything truly exist? Is the world something we have made up? All valid questions of doubt we tend to believe anything that is put in frint of us. Most of us dont think beyond the white pickett fence. Nagel makes us think and question reality in a sense. He explains everything as a question and it is your choice to believe what he is saying or doubt his reasons. It is all our choice to think and believe in what we choose to. We must do soul searching to come across all the things we may have never even began to think of in this life. In the second chapter, Nagel states that the world around us is the reality because we can study it and substantiate it, and similarly all the constituents of the world and all the theories are true only if they can be studied and substantiated for their content. We will write a custom essay sample on What does it mean? Does anythi or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Thomas Nagel poses the question How do we know anything? and begins his argument by introducing the possibility that there is nothing beyond our own consciousness and that the real world that we perceive with our 5 senses is nothing but an illusion. He compares this to a kind of dream-state. Nagel does not want us to forget everything we know but to change our thinking. Open our eyes to something different we have yet to think about.Is The World We Live in Real If there is truly nothing in existence outside of your own consciousness, then your actions and decisions affect no one but yourself, because nothing else exists. It would throw almost all conceptions of ethics completely out the window. However, the problem that we always come back around to we come to is the fact that we cannot possibly know for certain whether the world around us does or does not. What then are we to do? Will we assume, as the few Solipsists do, that the world does not exist, and live solely for our own enjoyment, or peace of mind? Will we, since there is no evidence to the contrary, assume that it does, and just go on living our lives as if we had never asked ourselves the question? Skepticism is the idea of doubting something other people believe to be true. For example, Nagel has a skeptic v iew towards the reality of the actual world. He believes that even though we can sense everything around us it may not be necessarily the truth. Everything we sense is due to our minds. Our minds are the one that allows us to sense and believe there is a real world but it does not necessarily prove there is a real world. Nagel goes on communicating this view throughout the entire chapter and shares a more radical view, solipsism. This is view is that the only real thing that exists is the mind.If we die in our dream we wake up and we cant perceive what happens after we die but we dies so what comes after death in real life we could wake up in the world that we never knew was here the whole time.He believes that even though we can sense everything around us it may not be necessarily the truth. Everything we sense is due to our minds. Our minds are the one that allows us to sense and believe there is a real world but it does not necessarily prove there is a real world. Nagel goes on communicating this view throughout the entire chapter and shares a more radical view, solipsism. This is view is that the only real thing that exists is the mind. If something cannot be proven it does not mean it cannot be true or that it does not exist. For example, the idea of a higher power known as God. God is something you cannot see or touched but, people believe there is a God. There is no real evidence of a God. Although there is no real way to know if God is real, then why do people believe in God? The answer is simple, sometimes we do not need all our doubts to be answer. Greedy or Free Will Nagel argues upon the free will that we exercise and whether or not our will actually is independent and if it is of any actual significance. Nagel begins to talk about free will by giving us an example of cake and peach. He starts off by saying that you are in a cafeteria line and you chose a piece of cake instead of peach. In your mind you already made up your mind on which item you were going to choose, you were open to have both but you chose to indulge yourself in a piece of cake.