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“I Think, Therefore I Am” – Pursuit for Real Truth

  ~In Reference to Rene Descartes’ First Meditation~

By ShadowSoul720, 15th May 2015

 Descartes states “I think, therefore I am”. However if we are consciously dreaming about ourselves being a Pokémon, are we indeed a Pokémon? This essay will discuss truths, logic and reasoning in reference to Descartes, in order to help develop articulate thoughts about the true knowledge throughout the universe. Descartes declares that he had accepted from youth, many false opinions for true. His philosophical meditation is concerned with being free of error and biases. He proposes several steps in order to accomplish this, including: to become sceptical and doubt everything; and rebuilding beliefs on firm foundations using logic, reasoning and the senses. I will attempt to relate all of this and consider his perception of logic and reasoning, to reach arguable conclusions.

Descartes (1619) started out with his meditation by first doubting everything around him. He had been deceived before and wanted to search for truth. Not just any truth, but real truth and pure knowledge, which cannot possibly be false. Because he had been deceived in the past, he knew that the foundations for his existing knowledge may have been corrupted by false information. Knowing this, he states “I was convinced to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted”. He searched for a fresh start with only true knowledge. The first problem Descartes meditated on was; how truthful knowledge should be defined. Being a sceptic and doubting the truth in everything around you is definitely a good start in my opinion, and I think this helped Descartes define his thoughts more easily later on. However if you keep resetting all of your existing knowledge to find truth, you will never have a solid foundation to start on. Sometimes starting at a specific experienced point is needed, in order to discover deeper key thoughts/ideas, not distinguishable by earlier philosophers. Philosophy is a good example, because even though we could very well accept an answer to a question (for example, that Kant was smarter than Descartes), many of us would rather search out the answer ourselves, rather than limit our own creative intelligent potential. There was a very good example of this that Ingo Farin (2015) spoke of, which was; “if God held out his hands and gave you a choice of either knowledge, or the journey, which one would you choose?”. Many people would choose the journey, and the reason for this I believe, is that instant knowledge has no real experience, hardships, emotions or memory factor. The contrast answer being the journey, can give you a lifetime of experience and all those other factors associated with living. This is why I think that it is important not to continually start over, because although you enlarge the experience of the journey, the end goal is to pursue the answer. I would rather live a successful satisfying life, rather than a never-ending unfulfilling one. However I could see Descartes saying that we need a base for truth first, before we attempt knowledge seeking, which is understandable as he doubts his ‘true’ knowledge sources. Perhaps a reason for which we feel so comfortable with our information now, is only because of how standardised the foundations set by Descartes and other philosophers have become.

Descartes’ skepticism leads him to wonder if our senses can lead us astray, and if this is a plausible reason for which our beliefs can be doubted. “All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.” Descartes is aware that his knowledge so far is derived from the senses and that they are our only methods of acquiring knowledge. He has learnt that the senses can deceive us and considers that if anything can deceive you once, then it is not wise to trust it in all circumstances. Further defined as: not trustworthy as a fact or a perfect truth. I somewhat disagree with Descartes, I believe that the senses can deceive us from the truth, but only from the truth found through other senses. Let me elaborate on this further. For example if you closed one eye, tried to catch a ball and missed, even though you were 100% sure you were going to catch it, this is your sight deceiving you. However that fact is only true because your skin didn’t feel the ball and vice versa; you could feel a ball with your eyes closed and proceedingly open your eyes to find a doll head. In this situation your sense of touch was deceiving you in contrast to your eyes. Our senses try to work together to make sense of the world around us, it may not be that they lie, but give false information in contrast to another sense. So I agree with Descartes, however I would say that our senses hold some truth to them, or at least enough to be content with.

Occasionally our sensory information can deceive us through external influences which affect the way in which our internal senses effect our perception. For example sickness or drugs such as: ‘hallucinations’ due to fever, mental illness and pain killers like morphine, can all have an impact on your bodily senses. It is because the information comes through our senses, which then gets processed in our brains, and occasionally our brains don’t process the information properly. Our senses can be correct, but when the information travels from our sensory organs to our brains, our brains can make the mistake. This is very well documented. Early philosophers, not having the scientific knowledge about how brains process information, that modern-day scientists now have, would not know about this common knowledge, hindering their sensory theories.

At first glance our experience of true knowledge links to everything that we perceive through the senses, but what would happen if you took them all away? If you were blind, deaf and unable to feel anything within your body, everything would be eternal darkness, eternal silence and there would be no proof that you were even alive. Based on the five senses, many people would wonder where taste and smell come into this. I believe that if our tongues and noses cannot interact physically (touch) with external properties (i.e. such as smells), then they would also cease along with touch. Again giving the impression that a person within that state would not have any sensory experience, limiting any signs of being alive. Descartes says that if the “body, figure, extension, motion, and place are merely fictions of my mind. What is there, then, that can be esteemed true?” …and if that’s the case should we simply give up believing that we can know anything at all? Our senses may lie but there is no other way to perceive the truth. We can find truth in statements such as maths problems (for example 2+2=4), but we would never be able to figure out such logic without the knowledge gained through sensory experience.

Towards the end of Descartes’ meditation, after doubting sensory information, Descartes is lead to believe that the only true knowledge you can gain is through the application of pure reason alone. He believes that if we are/were cut off from our senses which can mislead us, it would be best to trust our thoughts and logical thinking in order to seek truths. I think that both senses and reason are important for understanding the world around us. However I would put more emphasis on empirical evidence (experience) derived from the senses as it is unwise to doubt our only way to perceive the world. The simplest way to combat sensory deceit is to consider and be aware that our senses ‘can’ mislead us. If we do not have the senses, the only thing that we have left is to think and have subconscious thought. In this situation Descartes, without a doubt, would still believe that he thinks, therefore he is. My consideration to Descartes would be; if we are able to think in that senseless state, without ever having access to experience through the senses, how do we have subconscious and conscious thought? What do we dream about? Sigmund Freud and other philosophers/psychologists state that our dreams are our subconscious thoughts. My way of thinking is quite Freudian to an extent, and I believe that this is the case. I also believe that our subconscious thoughts are based on our real life experiences. Without any real life experiences… Do we even dream, do we even think? And would we even be able to distinguish between sleep and waking cycles? I do not believe we do. Every time I try to imagine it, I cannot describe it and nothing comes to mind, because there is nothing there. Every time we are thinking to ourselves, we always talk in our own language to ourselves or use imagery to describe something, and it is rarely very lucid (clear). I think that if we were put in that state again, it would be just like birth. We would have no memories and nothing to compare to. Except unlike childbirth, where we learn to develop our senses in conjunction with memory, we would never learn, and we would be devoid of all knowledge. Except possibly, I am me. We would never know what we are, or if we were even a thing, but possibly we would just know as individuals that I am me. I feel as though Descartes would be happy enough with that answer, especially if he was cultured in such a way that we had been. By cultured I mean to have been raised within a similar society, community and upbringing as modern people, such as ourselves. This does not mean that I am undermining Descartes work, but that he did not have access to more modern-age knowledge, nor the support to help develop his learning, such as present like-minded individuals, i.e.: recent role-models, peers and teachers. Descartes has given us the wisdom and experience needed to create a solid foundation. Only time will tell if it will become a foundation that grows and reaches new heights, or helps proceed to build a better foundation which incorporates the old detail as a learning model. I believe that his starting base will both proceed to new heights and will be newly adapted for newer theories and stems like a tree that branches out, rather than a skyscraper which grows or gets demolished. Just like a tree planting seeds, Descartes theories from meditation one help us understand the logic and reasoning needed to understand these future truths and foundations. Thanks to him, many more philosophers (such as myself) are able to have a much greater grasp on real truths and are able to recreate their own theories entangling his, into the world. Descartes did a good thing. I liked his ideas, they were very logical for a timeworn philosopher and stay very true to this day. I put some ideas into perspective and challenged his main argument that he was most known for (“I think, therefore I am”). After putting it into the most extreme of conditions (lack of experience), his phrase stayed true. That even though you may know nothing about anything, one who knows nothing, can still call themselves something.

In our regular sensory experience state our minds never stop working, even whilst asleep our brains are continually reflecting/thinking about what they have observed recently through our bodily sensations. According to the meditations Descartes understands that dreams are derived from real life events/objects and that even if you dream of something “new” this is no more than a collaboration of the inspiration found in our world. For example if you dreamed about owning rocket boots, the object in the dream would just be a cognitive re-construction of real world properties and pre-defined representations of items, such as rocket propulsion and shoes. The concept of Occam’s Razor states that the simplest answer is the correct one, devoid of many intricate overly-complicated possible answers. Using Occam’s Razor, we can deduce that it is safer to assume that we are merely sleeping in our beds, reflecting on aspects of our lives. Keeping it simple helps our argument also state that without senses, we cannot continue receiving information through those senses. I feel as though Descartes would not accept Occam’s Razor as a means to obtain real truths however, as Descartes typically starts out from a position of doubt, and these two idealists are completely contrasting of one another. Simply put; Occam accepts everything as it is and Descartes doubts everything as it is.

Descartes doubts existence so much that he begins his evil demon argument. Contemplating the possibility that there is an evil demon (or modern day mad scientist), who has all of our minds in metaphorical jars and has control over everything that we experience. This point is to show that the body can be deceived. The idea of this is similar to that of the movie The Matrix, which runs through the idea that human brains are controlled by alien computers and that their environment is controlled through a digital universe. This is a good modern example of this theory. I believe that Descartes had a good point with his evil demon argument and I accept the possibility that this could be a reality. Descartes makes the argument because if he does not have a body, then he is being told lies through his senses, deceiving him from true knowledge. However I debate that in an example such as an individual’s online presence in the matrix, people can still obtain truth from that. Even though an online world can be considered ‘fake’, I still consider the time spent there and any sort of social interaction, a real conceptual experience. You may not be able to say that it was even a real person that you were talking to, but the truth is that the experience was still there. The truth of the matter is if an evil demon were controlling your thoughts, emotions and predicting your actions for you, the most important thing and most realistic truth there is, is that you went through that experience yourself. I believe at that point the motto changes from “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes, 1619), to “I experience, therefore I am me” (ShadowSoul720, 2015) One might argue that if you had amnesia the phrase wouldn’t be true, because you couldn’t remember your experience. I would argue that every time you are acting or thinking, you are indeed experiencing. True, memories of events fade over time. I don’t have any evidence, but I believe that truths will stay forever in a timeline regardless. Just because you don’t remember, doesn’t mean that you are not currently experiencing. The same goes for the evil demon, just because everything is pre-determined, doesn’t mean that you’re not enjoying the ride and experiencing life’s journey.

I think that truth is subjective, and in a way always will be. There’s no real difference of truth between worlds (whether physical, virtual or imaginary), just different ways to experience life. Descartes says that sensory truths can deceive you and that reason is the real truth. I agree that senses can deceive and that there is truth within reason, however I find that reason does not exist without experience, making experience more important as it is the only way that we can perceive the world around us. Pure truth for me, is something that cannot possibly be false, as stated in the second paragraph. This is the same definition for Descartes. However he considered external/events outside of his control (evil demon) as false, whereas I considered events and moments in time as real truths. Although memories eventually fade with time, truths are a phenomenon that last forever throughout time. In fact, anything experienced throughout time is a pure fact. Even though we forget, we create new memories, and if we strive to live our lives to the fullest and enjoy the journey, then when we reach the end, we will know that we got there, and can find some comfort in that truth. This is the goal of all humans, to find and live within moments of space and time, understanding that currently, they have found the truth.

 References

Descartes: Meditation 1 (1619)

Farin, I. (2015). Ingo Farin - School of Humanities - University of Tasmania, Australia. [online] Utas.edu.au. Available at: http://www.utas.edu.au/humanities/people/philosophy-profiles/Ingo-Farin [Accessed 14 May 2015].

ShadowSoul720, (2015). ShadowSoul720. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYG1Pa92CtaVzarCUPrrsKw [Accessed 14 May 2015].

Sparknotes.com, (2015). SparkNotes: René Descartes (1596–1650): Themes, Arguments, and Ideas. [online] Available at: http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/descartes/themes.html [Accessed 14 May 2015].