René Descartes - Meditation #3 - A Cosmological Proof of God's Existence

All ideas are about things, but things in the world, typically, most of them aren't about anything at all. The moon isn't about something else. The Great Wall of China isn't about something else. It's just a wall. Today we're talking about René Descartes' third meditation. But let's start with just a quick, quick recap of meditations number one and two. So, meditation one is about the method of doubt. Descartes spends that meditation, you know, seeing if he can doubt all of the things that he previously believed. If he can doubt them, then he's going to stop believing them. And that's what he does. He wipes the slate clean, stops believing everything. That's meditation one. At the beginning of meditation two, Descartes is looking for one thing, one belief that he knows for certain is true. And he finds it, and that's the claim that he exists. And then he also, in meditation two, asks, well, what kind of thing am I? I know for sure that I exist because I have to be here in order to be deceived or be here in order to doubt. Okay, so he exists. What kind of a thing is he? He's a thinking thing. All right, so at the start of meditation three, what we have is Descartes knowing that he exists and knowing that he's a thinker, that he's a mind or an intellect, as he says. So he is behind what philosophers sometimes call the veil of ideas or the veil of perceptions. Right, a veil is a piece of clothing that hides something. It's something, you know, that gets in between stuff. It's a barrier or a border or something like that. The idea is that Descartes knows that he has a mind and that he has all of these thoughts. He has all of these ideas in his mind, and he has all of these experiences, these perceptions. Like it seems to him like he has a hand. It looks like he has a hand. He's having a visual experience, for example, of his own hand, and a tactile experience of his own hand from the inside and from the outside, all that sort of thing. And then the question is, how is he going to get past the veil? That is, how is he going to know that he really and truly has a hand? That's the task of meditation three. What Descartes does in this meditation is he argues that there is one thing that he can know for certain must exist outside of his own mind, and that thing, Descartes thinks, is God. So what we get in this meditation is a proof for the existence of God. It's a specific type of proof called a cosmological proof. Descartes doesn't use the term cosmological. Cosmological is a general philosophical label for a certain type of proof. It's a type of proof for the existence of God that takes something in the cosmos, something in the universe. In this case, the something is going to be an idea in Descartes' mind. That's going to be a thing in the universe. It starts from the existence of that thing and demonstrates that if that thing exists, this particular idea in Descartes' mind, which we will get to in a bit, if that idea exists, then God must also exist. There's no other way to explain the existence of that thing in the cosmos. So it's a cosmological proof for the existence of God, and if it works, it's supposed to prove that God exists and get us, as it were, out from behind the veil of ideas or the veil of perceptions. But if we're going to understand this proof, we need to dwell just a little bit longer on the distinction between ideas that one can have in one's mind and the objects of those ideas. So the ideas are, well, we can think of them mostly for Descartes as sort of like pictures in your mind, mental images, like, for example, e.g., for example, the mental image of, I'm abbreviating the Great Wall of China. Okay, so there's the wall, and then there's the picture of the wall in your mind, maybe because you've been there or because you've seen photographs of it, and so then you have, you know, a memory of what those photographs look like and an idea of what the actual wall looks like. And there's a difference between the idea of the wall in your mind and the wall itself, the actual Great Wall of China. The important term that we need to understand here is object. The object of an idea is the thing that the idea is an idea of. My idea of the Great Wall of China, I've never seen it in person, my idea of the Great Wall of China is located somewhere in here, maybe. If it's anywhere in space, it's in between here. I have the idea of it in my mind, and then there's the actual wall. The object of my idea is the thing that the idea is about. It's the thing that the idea points towards. In the real world, that's the actual wall in China. Here's the important thing to understand. Ideas are about something. All ideas, you might think, are ideas of something else. The idea of the Great Wall of China is about the Great Wall of China. But not everything in the world is about something else. For example, the moon. What's the moon about? The moon is not about anything. The moon is just there, chilling, going around the Earth, orbiting the Earth, rotating around its axis. Does it rotate? Yeah, it rotates around its axis. It's just tidally locked. So it does rotate, but it rotates at such a speed that we, the same side always faces us, I think. I'll check on this before I edit this video. Anyway, my idea of the moon, my idea of the Great Wall of China, all ideas are about things. But things in the world, typically, most of them aren't about anything at all. The moon isn't about something else. The Great Wall of China isn't about something else. It's just a wall. It's just there. Because most things aren't about anything, most things don't have objects. Ideas have objects because ideas are about something. But the moon doesn't have an object. What's the object of the moon? Nothing. The moon's not about anything. Okay, this is going to be very important if we're going to understand the proof of the existence of God. What's the object of my idea of a forest? Well, it's the forest. The forest is the object of my idea of a forest. And what's the object of a tree in the forest? Nothing. The tree is just a tree. It's not about anything. So the tree doesn't have an object and the forest doesn't have an object. But my idea of the tree has an object and my idea of the forest has an object. Okay, the proof starts on page 8040. But before we get to that, we need a whole bunch of distinctions and concepts and that sort of thing. The first one is the distinction between, and these are weird technical terms from modern philosophy and modern meaning 17th and 18th century European philosophy. But it's the distinction between substances and modes. Actually, I should clarify, the substance-mode distinction actually goes all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy and Descartes is slightly adapting Aristotle's understanding of this distinction. But let's start by going through it. A substance is a bearer of properties, right? It's a thing that has properties. So, for example, this marker is a substance. It's a thing. It has certain properties. A mode is a modification of that thing, of the substance. Specifically, it's a contingent modification or a contingent property of the thing. Contingent, by the way, just means it doesn't necessarily have to be the way it is. It just happens to be the way it is. So, for example, this is a marker or let's just do the cap of the marker. The cap of the marker is a substance. It's a thing. And it has certain qualities or features or properties. One of the properties of this marker cap is that it's pink. The pinkness is a mode. It's a contingent property of this marker cap. This marker cap just happens to be pink. But if they had put a different dye into the plastic mold or whatever, I don't really understand how plastic works, then this marker cap could be blue or green or yellow or whatever. You've got the thing, the marker cap, that's the substance. And then you've got the property of the thing, that's the mode. All right, so this distinction goes back to Aristotle. Descartes adds something crucial to this distinction. He adds this third bit right down here, that substances need nothing else to exist. This is going to be really important to the proof of the existence of God that Descartes gives us in this meditation. The idea is actually somewhat intuitive if you think about it. The marker cap, like, it's just existing. Of course, it was created by something else, by like a marker cap factory worker or whatever. But now that it's existing, it's just there, existing all by itself. And it doesn't really require anything else to keep it in existence, this substance. But the pinkness of the marker cap, the pinkness, that's a mode, relies on the cap in order to stay in existence or something like that. If you got rid of the cap, if you destroyed the cap, then the pinkness would be destroyed as well. The mode sort of relies on the substance for its existence, but the substance doesn't really rely on anything else for its existence. Okay, I guess that sounds kind of true or true-ish or whatever. This is going to play a big role in the proof for the existence of God because Descartes is going to think that things that need nothing else to exist, they're sort of more perfect or, as he also sort of puts it, they're more real than the things that rely on other things for their existence. Okay, then we need to go through these examples because one of these examples is very important for understanding the proof of the existence of God. Right, so some substances, a cat is a substance, it's a thing, and then the furriness of the cat is a mode of that cat. It's just a contingent fact that the cat has the property of being furry. Okay, so you've got cat, that's a substance, and furriness, that's a mode. You've got a ball, right? The ball is a substance, and then you've got the greenness of the ball, let's say it's a green ball, right? That's a mode. And then minds. A mind is also a substance, it's a thing in the world. Indeed, at the beginning of Meditation 3, Descartes only knows of the existence of one substance, and it's one mind. It's a mind, it's his mind. That's the only thing that he knows for certain exists at the beginning of Meditation 3. And then Descartes thinks that ideas are modifications of a mind. They're modes too. The mental image that I have in my mind of the Great Wall of China, that mental image, that idea, it's not its own thing. It's just sort of the way my mind is arranged right now. The way my mind is arranged is such that there's an image of the Great Wall of China in my mind. So Descartes thinks that ideas are really just modifications of minds. So ideas are modes. This is going to be really, really important for the proof of the existence of God. It sort of fits, though, with the idea that substances need nothing else to exist, and ideas, or modes, rely for their existence on the substances, right, that they inhere in, or whatever, right? Like, you've got the mind. The mind doesn't rely on anything else for its existence, but the ideas in the mind, they can't exist without the mind there. So the ideas, it sort of makes sense that they would be in the mode category because they rely on the mind for their existence, but the mind doesn't seem to rely on anything else for its existence. This all happens, by the way, on pages 8044 and 8045. That's where Descartes explains this distinction. He adds this extra feature of substances that's going to play a big role in the proof for the existence of God. Now, before we can get to the proof, we need to really get a clear grasp on the idea of different degrees of reality, or different degrees of perfection, or whatever. Descartes, and I know this is a little weird, he thinks of things as having different degrees of reality. Some things are more real than other things. This idea makes more sense, or seems more intuitive at least, to contemporary readers when we think of it in terms of perfection. Like, some things are more perfect than other things. Anyway, for Descartes, there's basically three levels, right? And I've diagrammed them here in, well, in descending order. But, so the degrees of perfection go up, right? First, there's the maximum level of reality or perfection. And that's substances, right? So substances, because substances need nothing else to exist, they're going to always be above modes. Modes is all the way at the bottom, at the minimum level. The things with the most reality are infinite substances. It's going to turn out later in the meditation that Descartes thinks that there's only one infinite substance, and it's God. At the medium level of the degrees of reality, right, you have finite substances. These are ordinary substances, like all the examples we had before. I have here a human body, a cat, a mind, those sorts of things. And it actually makes sense that Descartes separates these sort of, because there's a sense in which substances don't need anything else to exist, but if you're a thinker like Descartes, then you think that, well, these things mostly don't need anything else to exist. But they kind of rely on God for existence, maybe. And God definitely, if God exists, then God definitely doesn't need anything else to exist. So, okay, God is more real, has a greater degree of reality, is an infinite substance than finite substances like a human body or a cat or a mind. And then at the lowest level are modes, like green, furry, or ideas, right, greenness or furriness or ideas. These are contingent properties of something. Now things are about to get more complicated, because so far we've been talking in terms of what Descartes calls, this is his term, formal reality. And Descartes distinguishes formal reality from what he calls, and this is a very tricky term, so make sure you understand exactly what this means, don't just sort of guess, objective reality. Something's formal reality, or as Descartes also calls it on AT40, it's actual reality, is the regular degree of reality that something has when you put it in this chart, right? So the formal reality of this marker is, well, where does it go? Where, what level, which of these three levels does this marker go on? Pause the video, figure it out, say it out loud, this is a test, maybe we'll do more tests. The answer is medium, right? Because this marker is a finite substance. Okay, that's its degree of formal reality, regular old reality of the thing. Then there's this other thing that Descartes calls objective reality. The objective reality of something is the degree of formal reality of its object. That's important, let's write that down. The level of objective reality of an idea is the level of formal reality of its object. Take, for example, the idea of the Great Wall of China that we were talking about before. Well, what's the degree of objective reality of that idea? Well, to figure that out, you don't look at the idea itself, you look at the object of that idea. The object of the idea of the Great Wall of China is a wall. So, we figure out where wall goes on here. A wall is a finite substance, so the level of objective reality of the idea of the Great Wall of China is medium. Because the level of regular old formal reality of the wall itself is medium. The level of objective reality of an idea is the level of formal reality of its object. But remember, only ideas have objects. So, only ideas have any level at all of objective reality. Objective reality, this is a weird technical term that Descartes just made up, objective reality is only something had by ideas because ideas are the only kinds of things that have objects. I wrote it down because it was important. Only ideas have objective reality because only ideas have objects. There, there's a period. Okay, write these things down. If you're going to understand, we're still not at the proof for the existence of God, if you're going to understand this proof, then you really need to be comfortable with the idea of degrees of reality and formal reality and objective reality and all this stuff. So, let's do a little bit of a quiz right now. We're going to fill out this chart, that's the quiz. Let's start with the idea of a cat. We want to know what its level or degree of formal reality is, and what its level or degree of objective reality is. There's only three choices, so right here we're going to fill in one of the choices, and right here we're going to fill in one of them, and there's only three, there's maximum, medium, or minimum. Answer this for yourself. You should really try to answer this at home or whatever. Don't just wait for me to tell you the answer. Take control of your life, you know, take control. What is the level of formal reality of the idea of a cat? Yeah, you said something? Yeah. Just pick one of these. Well, what kind of a thing is the idea of a cat? Well, it's an idea, right? The idea of a cat is an idea, and so it's a mode, and so the answer is minimum, because it's an idea. I didn't write cat up here. I wrote idea of cat, and an idea of a cat is not a cat. It's an idea. So the level of formal reality is minimum. It's got the lowest level of formal reality, the idea of a cat. Okay, and what's its level of objective reality? Write something. Answer something. Go. Do it. Okay, to figure this out, right, we think of, well, the idea of a cat has an object. What's its object? Well, that's the cat. And what level of reality does a cat have? Well, damn, it's already, it's written up here. It's one of the examples. A cat is a finite substance, and so medium. The degree of reality of a cat, the degree of formal reality of a cat, is medium. So the degree of objective reality of the idea of a cat is medium, right? You want to figure out what degree of objective reality something has. Look to that thing's object, because objective reality has to do with the object of the thing. At this point, do you understand why I've written these two things there? If you think to yourself, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, he's right. That's got to be minimum, and that's got to be medium. Yeah. If that's what you're thinking, good. Keep watching this video. If not, if you're like, oh, yeah, he says it's minimum and medium, but I don't really understand why it fits into those categories or whatever. If that's what you're thinking, just stop watching the video, go back to the beginning, and start over. That's okay. Start over. Your time's not that valuable. Let's do this. Next example. The idea of green. What's its level of formal reality? Well, the answer is minimum also, because the idea of green or greenness or whatever is an idea, just like the idea of a cat is an idea. So the answer here is minimum. Okay. What's its level of objective reality? What goes here for the idea of green? The answer there is also minimum, because greenness is a mode. There. What's even on here? Greenness is a mode, and so the level of formal reality of greenness is minimum, and so that's the level of objective reality of the idea of greenness. So this is minimum also. Again, don't just let me tell you the answers. You have to listen to my explanations of why these all fit into these weird categories and think to yourself, oh, yeah, these are weird categories, but I get it. I get why that's supposed to go there on this system. If you don't understand that, you're just not going to understand the attempted proof for the existence of God that's coming in, like, hopefully a minute. Next example. Moon. The moon. What's its level of formal reality? Medium, right? Because the moon is a finite substance. So medium. Unlike the idea of a cat or the idea of green, which are both minimum because they're ideas, the moon is a substance. It's a finite substance. It's not God, but it's a thing. So it's at the medium level of formal reality. Okay, here's a hard one. Make sure you get this. What is the level of objective reality of the moon? The answer is no. The moon doesn't have any objective reality. The question doesn't even really make sense. The moon is not an idea, so the moon doesn't have an object. The moon isn't about something else. It's just the moon chilling out there in space. Only ideas have objective reality. Or at least only things that are about other things. Only things with objects have objective reality. So the moon doesn't have any objective reality. Do you understand why these things go in the places they go? All right. This is all essential to understanding the proof for God's existence. It's coming. Green. Greenness. The characteristic of being green. What's its level of formal reality? Minimum. It's got the minimum level of formal reality because greenness is a mode. And modes rely for their existence on substances. So modes are at the minimum level. So green gets minimum level of formal reality. What is the level of objective reality of green or greenness or whatever? You got it? You said something out loud? Alone in your room or your closet or your car or wherever you're watching this? Right? Okay. You're committed to something? The answer is no. No answer. Green doesn't have any objective reality because green is not an idea. Green isn't about something else. It's just green. It's just a color that some things are green and some things aren't. Greenness doesn't have an object. It's not about anything. So greenness doesn't have any degree at all of objective reality. No. Null. That's what I've written here. Next up, God. What's God's level of formal reality? Look up God. God's right there. So? Max. God has the maximum level of formal reality. Okay. Ready? What's God's level of objective reality? Got it? Nothing. God doesn't have objective reality because God isn't an idea. If there exists a God, then God is like an all-powerful, all-perfect creature. So, not an idea. God isn't about something. God is just chilling, doing his thing, just like the moon is chilling or greenness or whatever. These are just things in the world. They're not ideas. They're not about other things. And so God doesn't have a degree of objective reality. That's different from the next thing on our list, which is the idea of God. Okay. What is the level of formal reality of the idea of God? What goes here? Got it? Minimum. The idea of God is an idea. So, it's got the minimum level of formal reality because ideas are modes. And modes have the lowest level of reality. Formal reality. Okay. What is the level of objective reality of the idea of God? Max. The maximum level. Because, remember, to figure out the level of objective reality of something, that thing's first got to be an idea, and then you look at the object of that idea. What's the object of the idea of God? It's God. And what level of formal reality does God have? Well, it's just right up here on the line above on this chart or whatever. It's max. So, a level of objective reality of the idea of God is maximum. One more, just to sort of test your understanding, see if you've really got what's going on. Here's another example. The idea of the idea of a cat. Here, we're talking about the idea of an idea. Right? So, like, I tell you that I have an idea in my mind of a cat. There, I'm picturing the cat. It's brown or whatever. It's a brown cat that I'm picturing in my mind. I have an idea of a brown cat. I'm telling you about my idea. So, you have in your mind the idea of my idea of the cat. You're thinking to yourself, yeah, this guy in the video, he's got an idea of a cat in his mind. Okay, so you have the idea of an idea of a cat. Alright, so, what is the level of formal reality of the idea of the idea of a cat? What goes here? Minimum. The idea of the idea of a cat is an idea. So, it's got the minimum level of formal reality. What's its level of objective reality? You got it? It's also minimum. What's the object of the idea of the idea of a cat? Well, the idea of the idea of a cat has as its object the idea of a cat. Right? This is an idea about an idea of a cat. So, its object is an idea. And ideas have the minimum level of formal reality. So, its level of objective reality is minimum. Right? I mean, you could have figured that out, as it were. In the same way that you figured out that the idea of God has the maximum level of objective reality, by just looking at the formal reality of the object, God, so, too, you figure out the objective reality of the idea of a cat by looking at the regular formal reality of the object, the idea of a cat. It says minimum here, so it better say minimum here. It says maximum here, so it better say maximum there. It says minimum here, so it better say minimum here. Got it? Is all of this clear? You can't just live your life pretending, nodding along, saying, yeah, I kind of get it, whatever, just move on. No, no, no. Don't just move on. You need to get this if you're going to understand the proof for the existence of God that Descartes is giving in Meditation 3. So, rewind and redo this if you need to. Take your time. That's okay. This is new stuff. Now we're ready for the proof. Descartes lays out the key outline or the central idea of the proof for the existence of God on AT42. Here's what he says. If the objective reality of any of my ideas turns out to be so great that I am sure the same reality does not reside in me, either formally or eminently, forget eminently. I'm not explaining that right now. I explained it in the notes for the reading, but it's too much, so just ignore the word eminently. Don't worry about it. Okay. Let me start over. If the objective reality of any of my ideas turns out to be so great that I am sure the same reality does not reside in me, formally, and hence that I myself cannot be its cause, it will necessarily follow that I am not alone in the world, but that some other thing, which is the cause of this idea, also exists. That's Descartes' sort of outline of the proof. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to summarize the proof for you in like premise-premise conclusion form. I'm going to write it out right here. I'll erase this and write out my own summary of the proof. It's long. It has many steps. We're going to go through it, and then we're going to return to that quote, and I'm going to read it again, and we're going to understand what he was getting at there on AT42. Okay. Here it is. This is my summary of the cosmological proof for God's existence that appears in Meditation 3. This happens, by the way, between pages AT40 and AT45, about. We get most of these steps made explicitly. The first step, by the way, everything has a cause. Descartes never says that. That's just implicit. It needs to be there to make the argument work, and it seems right. Everything has a cause. Okay. All right. First step, everything has a cause. Two, the level of reality of a cause must be, this means greater than or equal to, the level of reality of the effect. This happens, by the way, on AT40, I think is where Descartes says this. The idea is that, well, look, something can't be created by something that's got less reality juice in it, or less perfection, or whatever. That's the idea. Something like, I don't know, greenness. Greenness can't create me, because I'm a substance, for goodness sakes. Greenness can't do stuff like make me, but I can make greenness, like I can paint something green, or I can mix up some colors to make green out of, what makes green blue and yellow, right? Then step three, this is a controversial application of step two. The level of formal reality of a cause must be greater than the level of objective reality of the effect. This happens, by the way, on AT41, is where Descartes states this. The idea is that this claim made in premise number two, it applies even where the effect, where the thing created has just a lot of objective reality. I can create the idea, I can make up the ideas of things with just as much reality as me, but I couldn't even produce, because I'm only, I'm a finite substance, so I'm at the medium level of formal reality, I can't even produce ideas, even though ideas have the minimum level of formal reality, some ideas I can't produce. They're the ones with so much objective reality that they have more objective reality than I have formal reality. So I couldn't produce, this is sort of skipping ahead, but I couldn't produce the idea of God, because the idea of God has the maximum level of objective reality. Okay, that's going to be the central move in the proof for the existence of God, but anyway, this is controversial, but that's step three, that's how the argument works, or is meant to work. Step four, the idea of God exists in my mind. Like Descartes, you know, he knows at the beginning of Meditation 3, Descartes knows that he exists, that he's a thinking thing, and he has all these ideas. And one of the ideas that he happens to have is the idea of God. This happens, by the way, on AT44, I think is where he says this. And he just sort of gives the definition of God that he's working with, which is an all-perfect being. Step five, this idea, the idea of God, has infinite objective reality, or maximum objective reality. Yeah, okay, that's like how he understands this whole formal reality, objective reality, degrees of reality thing, is that the idea of God has the maximum level of objective reality. That's what he says, that's step five. Okay, six, therefore, these three dots, by the way, are a symbol that's often used for therefore, and so I'm using it because I don't want to write out the whole word therefore, so when you see these three dots in a triangle, they happen elsewhere, it just means therefore. Six, therefore, this idea, the idea of God, has a cause with infinite formal reality. This comes from steps five and three, right? From three and five, we get the conclusion that this idea, the idea of God, because it has infinite objective reality, and because the cause of something must have as much formal reality as that idea has objective reality, so therefore, whatever created the idea of God needs to have the maximum level, the infinite level of formal reality, otherwise it couldn't have created the idea of God. That's step six. The crucial move in this argument has already happened. Now we just have to, you know, work our way to the end where we get the existence of God. Seven, I do not have infinite or maximum formal reality. Right, okay, that makes sense, right? Because Descartes is a finite substance, like the moon, and so his level of formal reality is medium, right? He's a mind, at least at the beginning of Meditation 3, and minds are finite substances. They have the medium level of formal reality. So that's seven. I do not have infinite formal reality. Eight, therefore, I am not the cause of my idea of God. Put these two together. Put together six and seven. This idea needs to have been caused by something with the maximum or infinite level of formal reality. I don't have that, so I'm not the cause of it. The idea has to come from something other than Descartes. Well, that's what nine says, actually. Nine, therefore, something distinct from me, something with infinite formal reality, exists. It has to exist because there's this idea of God. The idea of God has to have been created, Descartes thinks, by something with the maximum level of formal reality. I don't have the maximum level of formal reality, so there's got to be something else other than me that exists, and that thing has to exist in order to explain the idea of God, because something had to cause, had to create this idea of God. So already, we're only at step nine, right? We've already done sort of the main task of meditation three, which is proving that there's something other than Descartes' own mind and his ideas that exist. He's, by this step in the argument, he's broken through the veil of ideas or the veil of perceptions, because he's demonstrated that there's got to be something other than him that exists. There's got to be something outside of his mind that exists. Nine, by the way, you know, maybe you've taken intro logic, you know, nine is going to come from one, four, and eight. You put those three together, and you get nine. Okay, ten, the only thing with infinite formal reality is God. It's the only infinite substance, and so it's the only thing with infinite formal reality, all right? Eleven, therefore, God exists. This comes from nine and ten. Put nine and ten together, and you get eleven, right? There's got to be something that exists with infinite formal reality. There's only one such potential thing, God. That's ten. Put nine and ten together, so God must exist. That's Descartes' cosmological proof for the existence of God that appears in meditation three. We did it. We made it through the proof. The meditation, by the way, doesn't end on page 8045. That, you know, that's the sort of end of the presentation of the proof, but then he spends the rest of the meditation sort of responding to potential objections to this proof, but now we've done it, right? In meditation one, Descartes wiped away all of his uncertain beliefs. In meditation two, he brought back the belief in his own existence. He demonstrated so he thinks that that belief is certain, guaranteed to be true, and then in meditation three, he demonstrates that there's something else that exists in addition to him, in addition to his own mind, and that's God. Just before we end, let's return to that short quote on page 8042 where Descartes, you know, explained his plan for the proof, and now that we understand the proof, we can sort of understand what he was saying back then. If the objective reality of any of my ideas turns out to be so great that I am sure the same reality does not reside in me, that is, if I can find one of my ideas and it seems like, whoa, I don't have enough reality, formal reality, to explain the objective reality of that thing, and hence that I myself cannot be its cause, then I won't be the creator of that idea. If I can find some idea with so much objective reality that I couldn't have created it because I only have a limited amount of formal reality, then, he says, it will necessarily follow that I am not alone in the world, but that some other thing, which is the cause of this idea, also exists. Then I will have proven that there's something other than me. That's what Descartes said back on 1842, and that's what this proof is supposed to do, and the thing is supposed to be Descartes thinks God. One last thing before ending, and this is, I don't know how helpful this will be, but, you know, one natural reaction to this is just to think that formal reality and objective reality and the whole idea that things have different degrees of reality, that's just really weird and bizarre, and I'm very sympathetic to that. Ultimately, I think that this proof doesn't work because I think that all this, well, I think that these premises up here don't work, like the level of reality of causes and effects, that's all, that doesn't really work, but what I want to point out is this. If this proof doesn't work, then Descartes, you know, overarching project of the meditations, in the end, doesn't work, but the failure of this proof does not demonstrate that God does not exist, right? This is just one attempted way to show that God exists. If this doesn't work, there might be some other way to prove that God exists, because there's this distinction between a claim and a potential argument in favor of that claim, right? An argument could fail, but the claim could still be true, there could be some other argument that demonstrates the truth of that claim, or indeed, something can be true and there's just no way to prove that it's true, but it is true anyway. I have another video about that, maybe I'll put a link in the description, that is about the difference between an argument and a claim. All right, we're done, meditation three is over, next time, meditation four.