PHL 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Evil Demon, Experience Machine
11 Oct 2016
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He tries to show that in the evil demon scenario, we are not actually deceived. Contrary to what descartes assumed, in such a world all of our ordinary beliefs are still true. Demon vs. tom round 1: paper world. While tom sleeps, the demon replaces everything in the world with paper. Tom, though fooled (visually) at first, is easily able to uncover the illusion by using his other senses. Bouwsma draws two lessons from this case. An illusion is something that looks like or sounds like, so much like, something else that you either mistake it for something else, or you can easily understand how someone might come to do this . Second, and illusion requires that the deceives can tell the difference between illusion and reality (paper world vs. actual world) While tom sleeps, the demon destroys everything besides tom and makes it so that tom will continue to think that everything is just as it was yesterday.
