Descartes: "I Think Therefore I Am"

ThomasT

Our existence is self-evident. Whatever Descartes had to say about it is, imho, superfluous.

Maui

That definition rests on assumptions that Decartes wasn't willing to make(for his argument). So yes, there is some faith involved from his POV.



That would not be rigorous proof by the standards Decartes set.



Not according to latest neuroscience. "I think" carries much less weight(and appears to come after the fact) than "causal deterministic processes determine the brain's thoughts". If one's thoughts are predetermined and resultant from processes over which 'you' have no control, would it make sense to say that the "I am" is implied by the "I think"?

DaveC426913

Then you're in the wrong discussion and possibly the wrong forum.

You'll have to rely on logic here. No evidence is going to be forthcoming. Not the least of reasons because the very discussion is that all evidence is suspect.

DaveC426913

No it isn't.

This is weak and Descartes rejected it. He knows it is a tautology.

So, if I define myself as stinking rich, I am?

Jimmy Snyder

I stink. Therefor I am rich.

daveb

I thought you were Jimmy?

ThomasT

Ok, I think I understand why it's not a tautology. "I am" is a tautology, but "I think" isn't a tautology, and "I am" and "I think" are not equivalent, but "I think" is a subset of "I am", so if I think, then I am, or "I think, therefore I am."

Now I have to go back in the thread and Google/Wiki/Stanford/whatever to understand why "I cook, therefore I am" doesn't work the same way. (As might be evident, I do a lot more cooking than thinking.)

I was thinking that the statement "I am" is self-evidently true because of the conventional usage/meaning of the terms involved. That is, saying that I doubt or can doubt my existence would seem to be a contradiction in terms given what "my being", "my existence", "I am" refer to.

I was saying that "my being" or "my existence" refers to my subjective experience, which I have no doubt about experiencing.

wuliheron

I beg to differ, the argument is about which types of evidence are less suspect then others, including what logical arguments.

Char. Limit

"I think therefore I am" is definitely NOT a tautology. The two statements aren't even equivalent. The converse of "I think therefore I am", "I am therefore I think" is definitely not true for everything.

ThomasT

Yes, I see that now.

It's not necessarily true for anything, is it? That is, no particular mode of being is implied by being. Being doesn't imply thinking.

What I still don't get is why cooking doesn't imply being.

Char. Limit

Well of course "I cook therefore I am" is a valid statement. But, like Descartes had to prove he was thinking, you have to, I guess, prove that you're cooking. Descartes' method of proving he was thinking was to assert that he is doubting, which implies thought.

ThomasT

That's what I thought.

How does one prove an experience?

I still don't get it. Does counting imply thought? Why is doubting special? Why is thinking special? Why not just "I experience, therefore I am"?

ThomasT

What do the words "being" and "existence" refer to? If the referent is our subjective experience, then I don't think that Descartes has proven anything beyond what's already evident.

Ryan_m_b

I'm not sure if he was trying to prove anything, rather he was pointing out that the only thing we can be certain of is our existence. Everything about that existence can be faked but the fact that there is an existence cannot: you can convince an extant being everything but you can't convince a non-existent entity of anything.

It might seem evident but evidently for many it isn't.

wuliheron

I don't believe proving anything new was the point to begin with. Descartes was attempting to create a new philosophical foundation upon which the emerging sciences of the day could distinguish themselves from the church. The issue was how to accomplish that while still working within the accepted cultural biases of the time. Hence, by focusing on the ego he found a way to exploit the dualistic bias of the culture and church to advance the sciences.

DaveC426913

'Evident' is not enough. It's based on an assumption. He rejected assumptions.

Descartes believed that everything was based on assumptions. He set out to prove that nothing could be said at all without basing it on some assumptions that itwas real. In a sense, he set out prove that our existence was a tautology.


Look at it from the other side of the coin. Assume absolutely everything is an illusion, craftily put in front of you. The world, everyone you know, your eyes, even your brain. All these things could be constructs, put in your mind to fool you into thinking they're "evident", as you call it. So we can trust none of them.

It's very Matrix-like.

But what Descartes realized is that, even if everything is an illusion, there is still something experiencing that illusion. Even if you Thomas, are a program in a computer, fed all your sensory input. There is still something that is experiencing that input.

No matter what it looks like, no matter what it's made of, it exists.

He is showing that your statement "I am" is not simply an act of defining something as existing, he can logically show it to be true.

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I think I'm not really adding anything more to this thread except repeating myself.

Perhaps one thing to add:

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These things are evident to us now. One big reason why is because people like Descartes did ground-breaking work that our knowledge is based on.

Perspective in artwork is self-evident in the modern world. We know objects that are farther away are smaller than objects nearby. But that wasn't self-evident before da Vinci and his contemporaries came along and defined it -took the mystery out of it - that it became self-evident after that.

There are other examples in science, such apples falling to the Earth and the correlation between force, mass and acceleration that we wonder how they could not have known them at some time in the past.

wuliheron

Asians covered the subject thousands of years ago and took the opposite approach. Instead of assuming that such self-evident facts require explanation they assumed it is our cultural biases that prevent us from accepting such self-evident facts. Both attacking the same problem from two different directions.