Damn nobody read my post?
I refers to an activity, always, never to a thing.
To sum it up:
0) For anything to be proven, all conceivable alternatives must be invalid.
Conceivable alternatives;
1) I do not know who I truly am and thus do not know who is really thinking.
2) A single mind could possibly be thinking for all people wherein each person is merely an unaware application program.
3) A conclusion cannot be logically drawn from merely a single premise or assertion. Every logical statement is an “If A and B, then C” or “A and B are true, therefore C is true”.
If any of the above assertions are true, the conclusion, “I think, therefore I am”, is invalid.
IF (0) and [(1), (2), or (3)] are valid, THEN “I think, therefore I am”, is invalid.
That is not to say that I don’t exist. It is merely saying that the proposed syllogism is invalid.
But since (1) is true, the proposed syllogism is actually false. Every supposed “I” doesn’t exist.
Who is really thinking? God?
When you think that you think, what do you then think about the question “who is really thinking”? 
A vague, somewhat mysterious entity with me that gives rise to what we call “consciousness” and “I”.
Who does the thinking for a nation? Who does the thinking for Congress? You are but a nation within a human body, equally as demon possessed as Congress and the nation.
It is a somehow mysterious might. The following picture somehow fits:
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I thought this might be a good thread to pose this question, since it seems to be along the lines of what you are all after…
I am having some serious problems with the philosophy of monism vs. dualism… I understand the arguments against dualism, that what we know, how we know it, and how what we know becomes translated to action, is dependent on physicalities (matter external to us, our brain, sensory organs and so forth).
The problem I’m having, and perhaps I’ve created a convolution where there should be none in which case hopefully someone will iron this out for me, is how exactly can physical phenomena become translated into a non-physical experience. I understand that our experience is always the experience-of something physical, whether it be the direct experience of a physical sensation or a memory of one… I’m just wondering, and I can’t seem to be able to find an explanation of how the physical processes of the brain interacting with the physical world through the sensory organs translates into the experience of knowing.
If we measured perception, we would measure the physical processes taking place in the brain, which show us that it is there and I believe by induction we reason what the perception is of… But it seems to me, that though we understand that perception or “knowing” is a result of a physical process, seeing the physical process doesn’t tell us what an experience is, which we only know by a sort of sympathy of having experienced experience ourselves and so relating it in others and connecting it to the physical phenomena which creates it.
Can anyone give me an idea of where I’m going wrong here?
Edit:
I might have come to my own understanding of this after some contemplation… it was when contemplating what I said above about always being aware-of something… I began to contemplate what would we be aware of (what would we experience, be conscious of) without sensory organs… not sure why I missed this… I don’t think I was paying enough attention to the limits of pure reason, this was actually causing me some problems with my conception of Being, which hopefully I will come to sort out now…
The Artful Pauper,
Well, for one thing, I suspect that you might need to understand the distinction in two kinds of “experience”, “mechanical” and “evaluative”.
Mechanical Experience
A bowling balls approaches a bowling pin, strikes the pin, and the pin goes bouncing into other pins and falls into a hole in the back. End of story. If you could speak to the pin, asking it what it experienced, it would tell you merely those “mechanical” facts. It would know of nothing else.
Evaluative Experience
A bowling ball approaches a bowling pin that is a small human wrapped in plastic who can see the ball coming. The human-pin ponders if he is going to get hit by the ball this time. In anticipation, he gets excited as he hopes for the ball to miss and fears the ball will hit. His serotonin levels spike up and down. He feels concern and worry as he thinks about what might happen. He little mind is trying to figure out what to do about the situation.
Then when the ball is seen to be certain to strike, he grits his teeth, holds his breath, and prays to live through it all. Then SMACK!! The ball strikes the little human-pin, “Oh Shit!!” Out of control tumbling through the other pins, he feels his doom and fate. He very briefly gets a sense of depression in not being able to have any control over what appears to be his destiny of falling into that forbidden hole that leads to who knows where.
There is a considerable difference in the two types of experience because the pin anticipates nothing and has no concern as to what happens. It doesn’t think. But the human-pin is very actively involved in PHT, Perceived Hopes and Threats. Thus his little brain/mind is on a roller coaster of sensations that are entirely self-produced. The human experienced some thing more significant that the bowling pin did, all because the human is guided by his senses of concern, entirely derived from within himself. The human anticipates, hopes, and fears.
…the collective “I’s” which run those or any institutions which is also the reason why there is so little agreement as each of the I’s would have it whether they be demons or humans. It’s often hard to tell them apart!
There cannot be any difference of experience between the two if there is only ONE entity in the comparison that can experience anything. This makes your parable a paradox. It attempts a congruity by means of comparison between that which is completely incongruous with absolutely no relation to the other.
A “mechanical” experience within a human vis-a-vis a bowling pin can be defined more as an instinctual reaction to an event or impending event. A bowling pin is an infinity away from the spontaneity of even a single living cell. But if that cell is dead it might as well be a bowling ball or pin!
If the I cannot exist because it cannot be sensed what then is the act of sensing itself? Not what is sensed but it’s appearance. Is it merely an occurrence, an event? Is everything merely an event? Not something that actually happens but rather the appearance of what happens. I am eating this food but no food was eaten by I. Seeing occurred but I did not see. Thinking occurred, therefore thinking is.
Physical phenomenon mirroring non-physical experiences seems like a good place to go, but it’s really not what matters. What matters, is that there’s a 1:1 correlation between brain states and mental states such that for any mental state we want to describe, we can do so by referencing the brain. Someone called it a supervenient relationship. Another guy says that you should use some identity theory in order to reduce the mind to the brain. What they both mean is that in the end, it doesn’t really matter if there’s a mind/body dualism, so long as we can describe one with reference to the other all the time. All we wanna do as philosophers is come up with the simplest way to say everything that can be said, and if anytime someone says they had a feeling about something, we could point to the brain and say, “look, there’s the brain state that always accompanies that feeling”, then the simplest way to explain both is to just point to the brain and pretend like the arguments that there’s a separate mind aren’t even there. In the end, Descartes didn’t prove there was anything independent of the brain. He just made an argument that’s kind of like, “you can’t prove that there isn’t something other than the brain”. And of course, those kinds of arguments are bullshit. I can’t prove there aren’t purple unicorns in outer space, but of course, there’s no reason to assume there are.
A good thought
But the crux… “I think therefore I am not”… seems to me to be an ends to be justified after the fact
Well, as I stated in further explanation, one cannot validly merely state a premise followed by a conclusion. “A therefore B” is not a valid syllogism. So of course, “A therefore B-not” is also invalid.
The real point was in the proceeding explanation of how one arrives at “B-not”.
You are not who you think you are. 