Descartes, I think therefore I am. The culmination of what he thought to be doubtless. What is doubtless? What is least doubtless?
rene didn’t doubt enough
-Imp
What is doubtless is not a function of what is true. Some people might not be capable of doubting that their mother loves them.
Doubt implies belief - absolute sceptism is a cul de sac of thought
kp
Descartes wanted to believe at least in existence, I guess.
i think it’s the belief that creates the dead end, pigeon-hole, narrowed perspective.
I guess we can say that the absolute doubt is the starting point of thought without any limitation.
Descartes didn’t doubt enough and he was stack in his (desired) beliefs.
How does doubt imply skepticism?
What is doubtless is not a function of what is true. Some people might not be capable of doubting that their mother loves them.-xyc
If their mother doesn’t love them how can they know? From what reference point can you establish love, hate or indifference. And can the results not be doubted?
My point is that the capacity to doubt or to not doubt something does not necessarily have a link with what is true and what isn’t true. It is possible for someone to doubt a true thing. It is also possible to not be able to doubt something that is false. Doubt depends on psychology, on the person. Some person might not be capable of doubting their belief that their mother loves them because doubting it would cause them great psychological pain; their capacity to doubt then becomes a defense mechanism, sort of like how some people’s minds don’t allow them to remember some very traumatic event because remembering would cause pain. The same goes for certainty. It’s a psychological thing. It is not necessarily linked to the truth.
I don’t know. I guess you can look at the way someone behaves towards you. What they say, what they do, and on the basis of that make a judgment. You can always be wrong, which some people think means you can’t know.
How does Descartes know that thinking = existence?
Yes, but the question is whether you can ever know whether you are right. That is even if you find that you are mistaken with a judgement can you know that you were mistaken initially? I like Descartes thinks that any doubting creature will never know truth. If however we can extinguish any uncertainty I think that truth has then been known. In fact I think that we can say that there is only truth in the mind of the individual even if that individual is insane. So with no objective truth the only way to get to truth is within the individual. In the end I think that truth can only be called a state of mind. Lets say that the individual finds out that their mother doesn’t love them. But before they thought that she did. Are they right now or before? In both cases they were almost certain of something. So truth is just certainty. A state of the mind that is. Can anything doubted be morally called truth? I think that there should be another word for absolute certainty just because of the way in which the word truth is abused in society. People use it everyday. It has lost meaning in conversation and is just a way to convince people you are right. So I guess it has some meaning. If winning an argument is meaningful.
I don’t know what he was thinking but he claims he was certain that he could know this one thing. His argument is that if there were an evil genius that was screwing with his mind then he could know that at least his mind was being tampered with by this evil genius. I guess in the end he must have trusted the logical thought that if the evil genius was messing with his mind then he could know that although he was being deceived he must exist if he were being deceived because there would be nothing to deceive if he didn’t exist. However, I admit that using this sort of logical thinking doesn’t make much sense after he threw out math and apparently logic. Most likely I think he just couldn’t take the ego shock of not knowing that he couldn’t know anything and went insane and scribbled something down. Anxiety is a common result of not knowing that you can’t know anything and not even knowing this. It drives the best of us insane.
What are you believing if you are doubting everything?
It seems to me like doubt leads to a pigeon-hole perspective as well. If you doubt everything this
puts you into the pigeon-hole of looking at the world by doubting everything. It seems that doubting
everything however might free you up to experiment with absurd things like hopping if front of cars.
Yes, doubt can be a very powerful thing.
This is it in a nut shell and Descarte’s way out - if you doubt then there is a you that doubts so everything isn’t up for doubt.
Absolute scepticism means no you - no doubting subject (unless “you” are some weird totally non-independent artificial entity the demon has constructed in his own head for his own amusement!) - So no staring point from which to doubt.
There are minimal basis’s you need from which to doubt.
Absolute annihilating doubt is impossible because the doubter herself is in doubt.
Before doubt comes belief.
(Wittingstein’s slightly generalised version of Descarte’s way out)
kp
When you say absolute annihilating doubt is impossible because the doubter is in doubt. Are you referring to the doubt that one can absolutely doubt ones
existence while at the same time doubting ones existence? If this is the case I think you can doubt both. When you say before doubt comes belief are you
saying that if one is to doubt something that one can not invariability be doubting something else? For example, one can not doubt ones existence and at the same time doubt that one can doubt ones own existence because that leads to no one particular focus of doubt and thus to no conclusion. I don’t think that one needs to believe something before they can doubt something if all of this is the case. One need not believe that one can doubt ones own existence in order to doubt ones own existence, they just need to carry out the function of doubting. Could you explain what you mean by before doubt comes belief?
Yes. 
Each doubt IS a pigeon hole, as the questioning is usually done in certain perspective.
But saturated doubt produces the dead end situation, and your perspective may (sort of) pop out from the pigeon-hole tendency.
Total doubt produces total uncertainty, which is similar to the uncertainty produced by the understanding of relativity of any notion/logic/thought.
Usually, people cling on something (religion, hope, value, moral, hobby, whatever they can cling) and get out of the situation, and whatever they used will define their life and their pigeon hole they will defend.
But some of us stay and experience the popping out (or the perspective reversal, so to say). And this has the effect of loosing the stickiness of doubt and pigeon hole tendency in us.
I think that this popping out is a result of tension in the individual resulting from a loss of grounding in their life. Humans need to feel grounded in something they think to be true. Most humans do not go through their entire lives doubting everything. They get involved in life to the point where they are often unaware of the beliefs that they hold and just take them for granted until someone challenges them. Opposition to their beliefs does not seem to have an effect either. Pierce talks about how people wish to retain beliefs in The fixation of Belief. He thinks that people want to retain their beliefs in order to stay content with their lives. So I think that the need for belief is deeply rooted in human nature.
Well, the kind of popping I’m talking about doesn’t cause more tension.
On the contrary, it releases the tension or it comes at the time tension is gone.
(But there can be remaining and new tension, too. It depends on the type and intensity/level o the doubt, I think.)
And in the popped perspective, being groundless is a natural and normal state and comfortable, too.
I think this desire for the grounding or certainty is the common feature among creatures. In human, i think we have it in the mental desire as well for the absolute certainty.
Also, it comes from the effort we have to invest in biped walking.
We have strong fear of falling and this increases our desire to be well grounded, I’d say.
The state of absolute doubt would be seen as being sick. most probably. I don;t think we can stay in this state very long. Maybe maximum of several months. But we may stay longer if the level of doubt isn’t very high.
Usually, most people deny the questioning/doubt well before it reaches maximum level. That’s how most human become an “adult”, someone who denied own doubt.
If one pushed far enough, one’s mind breaks and often strange experiences follows. These experiences tend to be positively flavored, and some would mistake it for “enlightenment”, “meeting with god/angel”, and so on, depending on their core fantasy/beliefs prior to the state of concentrated doubt. And people around may mistake the person to be saint, holly person, etc, too, creating mini-religion/sect.
I’m not so sure. I’ve met people who can live with uncertainty. It’s probably less than 3% of population at most, though.
Some of them seem to be born like that. Others have gone through popping out via total doubt. Yet some of us had popping-out without total doubt.
So, is the general idea that doubting leads to insanity and can not lead to truth because that truth could then be doubted? So if doubting is basically a dead end way of thinking about the world, is it worth it to construct systems of thought based upon things that can be doubted? Obviously for practical matters this is helpful but where can philosophy move if everything can be doubted? Don’t the philosophers of religion, science and ethics need to realize this obvious point? Is it not crucial?For a=a can be doubted where can philosophy go? It seems as though it has reached a wall. An insurmountable wall of doubt. All of the rest of philosophy seems to loose any power in terms of absolute truth. It seems as though philosophers want to philosophize even if they don’t have the answer to that which can not be doubted?