Author: Fix
Editors: Chickes the Alphaest, Fool the Skibdididi alpha sigma mix (fixie's lil kouhai>.<)
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I was the sigmaist of all the sigmas in the clan
Yet, there was one who was never afraid of my aura.
Oh… how I loved my omega…mmmmm yummy omega…
Wait, wrong genre…
…cough, cough, there's nothing for y'all to see here.
PLEASE STOP!
Anyways, where was I again?
Ah, yes! A Honkai Star Rail fanfic.
Below is the real story, lol.
G-GAH!! What's the big long thing in my pants???!!!
~~~
Distracting myself from thoughts of writing a HSR fanfic, I turned back to the lecture notes that I was writing up.
"Cogito ergo sum, wax body, formal reality…"
Muttering to myself as I organized the teachings that I would be going through with my first batch of students ever, I quickly found my thoughts drifting again.
"It's been 6 years, hasn't it?"
I had received the exact same series of lectures during my Freshman year of college, and it had been the defining moment in my life.
Setting me on the path of earning my doctorate in both Philosophy and Mathematics.
And now, here I was, in my third year of graduate school, getting ready to bestow my teachings upon them just as my teacher had done so all those years ago.
Standing up from my desk, pen and papers in hand, I headed towards the site of my first ever class.
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(A/N: I do truly feel like the next part of the chapter is needed for a deeper understanding of the main character and his thought process.
Thus, here are a few statements about the next part of the chapter. To preface, you don't need to believe anything Descartes states, nor do you have to take it on face value, heck, even I don't believe the majority of the following proof. There are many counterexamples to the argument presented and there are many counterexamples to those counterexamples. Descartes' proof is THE foundational text of modern philosophy, and all philosophers that came after have based their trains of thought off of his in this paper to a certain extent. If you ever take more than one philosophy class in college, I'd bet my left nut that you'd learn about this text.
So, with that out of the way, first, the trigger warnings: I will be discussing Descartes' proof that A(singular, non conforming) god exists. Yet, he also makes several completely blasphemous claims during the earlier meditations to end up with the proof. So, please read the following at your own discretion.
I've tried my best to make it so that even a layman off the street could understand the arguments, and I've also tried to make it as interesting as possible for the average WN reader.
For those who are disinterested in learning about Descartes' proof of a god, or for those who get easily triggered by online discussions about religion, please only read the BOLDED text.
As for the rest of y'all who would find a proof of god interesting or are just bored enough to read, please read everything before going to the comments and making a big fuss. It's a philosophical text, so it is inevitable that it will incite some form of a discussion. Just please, keep it civil if you actually feel the need to post in the comments about it. As a philosophy major myself, I'd love to view everyone's views (heck, we spent two months of classes just discussing this text as a class). Again, this is your last warning, please don't read the entirety of the following text if you are either type of person I have mentioned above.)
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Day 1: An Intro to Philosophical Thought
"Good morning, please refer to me as Mr. Schapiro, and welcome to my course on Early Modern Philosophy…"
Day 2: Descartes' First Meditation (A/N: If you're going to be taking away anything, take this)
"Good morning class. Today, we'll be going over Descartes' First Meditation from your reading."
"First thought, can any of you tell me the reason why he is writing these six meditations in the first place?"
"Yes, you there, what's your name?"
"Jonathan Sir. And he wrote it to appease the clergy as a catholic philosopher."
"Good, very good…"
I then continued on with how Descartes sets up the meditation.
"To begin the meditation, Descartes imagines himself to be sitting in front of his fireplace in his house in Amsterdam, as he watches the sky and people outside from the second story of his house."
"He then wonders, "What if none of this is real?'"
"To find out the core truths of the world, he first must find the universal truths that can be proven wrong, in other words, these truths "made clear by the natural light" must be true 100% of the time."
"So, he begins to doubt all of his beliefs, and what is the foundation for all of one's non-mathematical, non-logical beliefs? Our senses."
"Thus, Descartes first conjectures that his senses are deceiving him, as sometimes, your senses deceive you like when you hear your name but it was only the wind."
"But, he finds this "attack" at his beliefs to be too weak, so he then conjectures that we are living in a dream right now. He further backs this up by stating that we experience realistic dreams, and that we only know that we were dreaming due to the fact that we wake up afterwards."
"So, what if we were living in an eternal dream?"
"Descartes then goes on to attempt to completely destroy his beliefs. Herein, he asks, "What if an evil genius (he calls it a genius instead of a god because it'd be blasphemy) is always deceiving me, and so no information that my senses sense are real?'"
"He now realizes that at this point, nothing in the world is real anymore. The world isn't real, his family isn't real, heck, his body isn't even real."
"Thus, he is now left completely in a state of doubt, and he believes in nothing in the world."
I looked around the class, at the stunned, silent, pondering faces of my students.
"That is where the first meditation leaves off. Tomorrow, we'll discuss the method that we use to leave this state of absolute doubt."
It is only after I have left that I hear the familiar sound of students packing up.
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A/N: The next chapter will cover the second, third, and fourth meditations. I'll skip the following meditations after that as they aren't really relevant and the two proofs of a god are in the third and fourth meditations respectively.