Sandy Rizzo-Part 4 of Discourse- Senses

In part 4 of Discourse, Descartes discusses how he feels that our senses are not reliable and that we can easily be deceived by them. He says that because of this, virtually everything that we've experienced or know through our senses can be doubted. If we doubt everything we know by our senses, we basically doubt everything in the world, which would mean there is no proof that anything exists. This is Descartes main point of this particular argument. He is saying that since our senses are unreliable, we can not trust that any type of knowledge we have received through them can possibly be true. I think a lot of people have a problem with this argument because we rely so heavily on our senses to tell us about the world, so when we can no longer trust them we are completely lost on how to gain knowledge about the world around us. I think that his argument has some good points and some bad ones. There are times when our senses deceive us, like when a rod is put in water and it appears to be bent, but that doesn't mean that all our senses can't be trusted. It is our senses that also tell us that the rod being bent under water is an optical illusion. I think we need to rely on our senses to an extent because we would go completely insane trying to figure out the world if we abandoned them.