How do we know the External World is Real?

Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. This philosophical statement was used by René Descartes, and became a fundamental element of Western philosophy. The simple meaning of the phrase is that if someone is wondering whether or not they exist, that is in and of itself proof that they do exist (because, at the very least, there is an "I" who is doing the thinking). This seventeenth century philosopher also, while sitting in front of a crackling fire in his office, questioned the idea of reality itself. If he was sitting in his chair, feeling the warmth from the fire on his face, he surely existed. “Is the table in front of you real?” Your immediate answer would of course be yes, for you can sense it. You can touch it, if you drop your pen on it you can hear it, you can smell it, if you were to deprave yourself you could taste it, and the most obvious one is of course that you can see it. But is all this enough? Could we be being tricked into believing something real. A phrase which is often used without thinking is “I couldn’t believe my own eyes”. But what if there is truth behind this. If all we sense is lies, how can we exist?

In order to be able to answer this question, it is important to define what real is. Is real being able to touch something or hear something. Is something real if you are told that it is. Do you need to have personal experience of something in order for it to be real. Bishop Berkley raised this very question. He argued that you can only know something if you have sensed it yourself. You can not guarantee that something is real until you have perceived it. This is, in effect, destroying the idea of trust, faith and belief. No one has had personal experience of God, so how can he exist? If your parents tell you something, does that make it true?

Whether we do or don’t exist, does it really matter? For me, I can have fun, I can learn, I can experience, so whatever a philosopher says, my life is real for me. There is no more proof than by me writing this essay in the first place. Maybe, these questions, are meant to stay unanswered, as if they were finally answered, and we found out we didn’t exist, would life be worth living.