Because I don’t know for sure that anyone else thinks, I can’t conclude that there must be some entity (that I am referring to as ‘you’) doing the thinking. I don’t know that the world doesn’t disappear every time I close my eyes. I could be the only conscious creature in the whole world – the rest of the world’s population the imagining of the demon or produced by the computer simulation. I don’t know that the past existed, or that the future will exist.4 All I know is that to feel requires subjectivity, and therefore a subject must exist to feel them.Īnother misunderstanding is that I cannot say, “you think, therefore you are.” I don’t know that you think – you only appear to me to think. I don’t know for sure that this blog exists, or that I am not asleep in some vivid dream, or that I am not a conscious imagining of a more intellectually-capable being. I am not necessarily the author of this blog post, I just think that I am. It doesn’t mean who you think you are – all of that could be a lie told to you by this demon. One is a quite forgiveable misconception about the meaning of ‘I’ in this context.
Though it is a relatively simple idea, I’ve seen some misunderstandings I’d like to address. I do not, however, know for certain anything about the nature of myself, except that what I call ‘I’ is an entity that is, in some sense, experiencing. All of these require subjectivity, therefore there must be a subject (‘me’). So, strictly speaking, cogito ergo sum is not the only truth that can be known we can also know about the existence of thoughts and feelings: I know that at least one feeling exists because I feel it I know that at least one thought exists because there is one in my mind I know that certain sensations exist because I am sensing them, etc. Another way to put it is that if we know a subject is performing an action, then we know that the subject must exist (or else they could not be performing the action).2 Think, or rather, experience, feel, etc., are the only actions we know are happening, and they must involve a subject – us (or, more precisely, me and maybe you as well). The only thing a person thinking about knowledge can know exists, Descartes concluded, is that they themselves exist, or else there would be no thinking. A modern equivalent would be the Matrix or being in a computer simulation.1 Today, the term for being sceptical about all things except one’s own existence is known as ‘Cartesian doubt’, an eponymous tribute to Descartes.Ĭogito ergo sum was Descartes’ answer to his question of what could be said to be definitively true. He imagined a scenario involving a demon playing a trick on the senses – that the world might not really exist, and the demon was magicking up an illusion for him.
He had a tough time of it, finding that almost everything he could think of was subject to at least some degree of uncertainty.
When concluding cogito ergo sum, Descartes was attempting to determine what truths, if any, could be truly known beyond all doubt. I’ve noticed that it often seems to be misunderstood this post is a brief outline of the idea and some of my thoughts on it. Cogito ergo sum, or its translation, “I think, therefore I am,” is a frequently-quoted line from well-known mathematician and philosopher René Descartes.
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