Abstract

The demon is, in the thinker,s words, "supremely powerful and clever", and it is only the combination of these two traits with the demon's incessant deception that empowers Descartes to stage the radical doubt that will terminate in his attempted proofs of God and the material world. The reason the demon is necessary is that the thinker cannot prove that it would be wrong for God to allow us to be deceived occasionally. Thus, Descartes needed, methodologically and rhetorically, something more than just an imperfect God or a lack of God altogether; he needed a being with exactly as much power as God but without God's goodness. In short, one should utilize philosophy for the everyday analogue to lucid dreaming. For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, lucid dreaming involves training oneself, by a simple concentration exercise performed before falling asleep, to be able to become conscious of being in a dream while still in it and without thereby ending it.