No! He’s not saying his existence is contingent on thinking, such that if he were stop thinking he would cease to exist, or that all things that don’t think don’t exist. It’s not the world he’s talking about. It’s our map of it, and the maps veracity. It is his knowledge that he exists which is contingent on thinking, but not his existence. A rock cannot know that it exists, if it doesn’t at least think, yet D’s not arguing it will vanish into nothingness because it doesn’t think. It’s only knowledge of what exists that’s at stake, not existence itself.
With that said, it is true Descartes takes it for granted that it is a mind, his mind, that causes and possesses the thought which he cannot doubt, but really, you can’t fault him for it. He was making great big strides on fresh philosophical ground.
If this thread was meant to be a discussion of Descartes and how the “I exist” argument fits into the rest of his philosophy, I will concede all points and leave. However, if this thread was meant to be an elaboration of cogito that paid lip service to it’s formulator Descartes, only to move on and discuss it a modern relevant to us way, then I think I outlined a serious problem with the way apaosha is considering things.
Or put another way, I think we’re talking past each other.
What he wanted (his motivation): To find something HE can be (absolutely) certain (that can be used as basis, the solid ground to construct theories).
His logical dependency chain :
Existence (of HIM or “I”) “Therefor I am”
<<< depending on <<< Thought (observed by HIM or “I”) “I think”
<<< depending on <<< GOD (that allows HIM or “I” to observe) "Thank God! "
If so, it’s very similar to “Christian logic”.
In other words, I don’t think it’s very rational as he isn’t examining the elements such as “Thought”, “HIM (or his self)”, “GOD”. Without (absolute) certainty on these elements, he cannot logically obtain (absolute) certainty of the result.
Maybe he should have written like this to be precise:
“Thanks to God I can think and thus I can be (absolutely and at least) certain that I exist.”
Yes… this is a language thing, nothing major or revolutionary… That the existence of the pronoun, separate from the verb may cause certain minds to assume that thought is conducted in a manner which it is not.
The only reason I mentioned Descartes was because of the quote in the OP.
If you bring up causality, then how is any effect demonstrably separate from it’s cause? All is a constant process…
But this is my point, after all; the “I” is the thought, not the cause of the thought. To assume otherwise is to assume a manner of causality in which the causal points on the chain are distinct Forms, eg:
cause–>effect
… when in reality, these are simply labels an observer applies to what is perceived; abstractions, projections. But in this manner, one can assume that each point inh the chain is distinct and separate, or could come about in a different way, as each is a separate point and therefore not wholly dependent on the chain itself.
But this, as I’ve said, is illogical and wrong since there are not chains of events in causality, but that causality is a process, a flow.
My entire premise here is predicated on interpreting reaity without looking through the lens of language and it’s presuppositions, such as Thingness when applied to the concept of Thought and its supposed distinction with a Thinker who “does” it…
So, if you begin from the assumption that the “I” causes thought and is thus distinct from thought… you are assuming the premise. The “I” exists because it, supposedly, causes thought; thought exists because the “I” causes it.
That seems circular and self referential to me.
Whereas I start from the point of not assuming this dichotomy, but stating that language uses such things as pronouns to designate the Actor and verbs to designate the activity of the Actor… but that there is no such distinction between the Thing and it’s activity in reality because they both refer to the same phenomena; consciousness.
In this case -my- consciousness, because language demands an identifier.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying.
The difficulty here is in communicating this idea via english… which is constructed in such a way as to almost force one to describe the opposite.
Other languages don’t always use the pronoun, like japanese. I have no idea whether it would be an easier concept to communicate in that language, though.
There are no Things, as this implies boundaries that do not exist.
Anything that can be perceived is a process, or a manifestation of a process; I hesitate to use the word “part” as this also implies boundaries…
In this case, the pronoun “I” is applied to the consciousness which is identifying itself.
Obviously.
This consciousness is not composed of thought, it is not a construct of thought, it is thought; otherwise you make up more distinctions. It is an awareness which turns on itself and is expressing an awareness of itself in relation to the other.
But it is not an ultimately distinct noumenon in the sense of the pronoun “I”.
Yes, this is fine, as long as you acknowledge the mechanics of language which are involved.
It’s just semantic quibbling on my part, as above.
Unless, one could create a word that combined the pronoun and the verb… which would be interesting.
Or perhaps even more misleading…
“Am” is already an exclusive verb form. English is fairly unusual in Indo-European languages for having so little variation in conjugation (and declension, for that matter).
In any case, Descartes wrote in Latin, not English, and Latin combines pronoun into the verb form. Cogito ergo sum: your suggestion is where it all starts from!
The existence of an “I” as an entity of some sort which is separate from its thoughts is just as intuitive as the existence of things in themselves which are separate from their properties. We navigate and manipulate the world based on these abstractions. But I think most of us give more importance to these abstractions than they deserve. We freeze the “I” into some sort of permanent entity for instance. We take it to be unchanging, uncompounded. We think we are the same person from day to day. We think we’re some sort of independent thing. But an “I” such as that cannot be found, either empirically or logically. It is simply assumed, and the assumption causes suffering because it is an assumption that is not in accord with reality. I agree with apaosha that the “I” is a product of thought. Though I can observe my own thoughts, without thought, no “I” is observable. The subject and the object can only arise together.
By ‘Thought therefore existence’ (which isn’t grammatical, as I’m sure you’re aware), do you mean ‘A thought exists, therefore something exists’? And is your claim that ‘A thought exists’, though it entails ‘Something exists’, doesn’t entail ‘A subject of a thought exists’? If so, your claim is one that was made many times when phenomenalism was all the rage.
I’ve just checked The Problems of Philosophy, and there Russell argued that ‘I am’ goes too far because ‘I’ suggests something relatively permanent. But he still maintained that thoughts require subjects of some sort, even if they exist for only as long as the thoughts themselves.
I’ll check Language, Truth and Logic when I get home, because I’m certain Ayer had something to say about this.
Personally, I am not troubled by this problem, because Descartes has much more serious deficiencies and because I am a “nonepistemologist”. I do agree with Russell that “thinking” is coherent only when someone is doing it.
Where I intersect with apaosha is that the object/event dichotomy is useful at times, but ultimately a matter of convenience.
Maybe “I” is a program that observes and acts, and is adjusted by will .In that case although the program is constantly changing it is still the same thing linked by events.The “I” isn’t the events themselves, but rather the program that links the events.
Here’s the relevant quotation from Language, Truth and Logic (which I’ve pulled together from a couple of websites, so sorry for any inaccuracies):
Bearing in mind that Ayer defined the self in terms of relations between thoughts/sense-experiences, his point here seems to be the same as Russell’s: that ‘I’ suggests relative permanence, which ‘There is a thought now’ doesn’t warrant positing.
I think this is a rather weak critique, however. I agree with Nah here:
This is clearly what Descartes meant. God is the missing premise - in other words, Descartes doesn’t have an argument with the Cogito alone. And he knows it.
Descartes had one foot in the Modern Era and one in the Middle Ages. Thus his epistemology rests upon metaphysical grounds, as all epistemology does.
We may feel the “I” without thought.
Many people can be simply aware (and perceive things) without having any thought.
It’s quiet when we don’t have thought.
Possibly, Descartes didn’t have such experiences and he identified his self with thought.
People who can be aware without though may identify themselves with awareness, rather than thought.
(But it’s totally possible that they identify themselves with something else, like emotion, physical sensation, etc…)
But even the simple awareness requires lots of things.
It probably requires incoming information and storage (memory), both short term and longer term.
The short term memory seems to be used to compare current state against previous state to detect the changes in the state of awareness. This seems to enable us to see if we were aware or not.
The long term memory hold classified information and perform pattern matching to identify “objects” (or set of information) and compare/evaluate them.
It’s also possible that people who use a language with only one pronoun for first-person singular (English, French, etc) may have harder time to observe and analyze the components of “I” compared to people who speak many language and thus familiar with many form of personal pronouns or speaker of a language that have many pronouns rather than just one (like Japanese, as someone mentioned).
I seem to be able to maintain two trains of thought at the same time, so if that's a consequence of what I'm saying, it's not one that bothers me. But I don't think I have to go that far. What I'd say is that, in the present as a thought is happening, there's such a thing as 'what the thought is like'. Maybe it's something like mental words, or an impression, or a 'ping'. We've all had thoughts that manifest in that way.
To take your presentation, it would be impossible to have a reflection on past thoughts, if there was no awareness of what the thoughts were like [i]at the time they happened[/i]. What else is memory? So it seems to me that even if you're right that all reflection of thought is a before/after relationship, at the point of thinking there's still an awareness there.
And I don't think I've presupposed the dichotomy so much as I have pointed out why it seems to be there on reflection.
Then you know that programs need a programmer, and that like all great philosophers Descartes was ahead of his time.Such things (programs) don’t just come into being, they have to be consciously intended.