Re: KuJomu - the writing
| From: | Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, November 9, 2002, 10:42 |
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On Saturday 09 November 2002 12:59 am, you wrote:
<snip>
> As for the original quote, it never contained 'ergo'. The original thing
> Descartes wrote is "cogito, sum", translated in French as "je pense, je
> suis": "I think, I am" (note the comma). The whole point is that my own
> existence is not a logical consequence (like what 'ergo' would imply) of my
> thinking. It *is* my thinking! In Descartes's philosophy, thinking and
> being are equivalent for the 'ego', the one doing the thinking.
IMHO, he missed out on an important point, one that Theravada Buddhism managed
to agree with the likes of Marvin Minsky, on.
His point
> is that if you begin to doubt about everything your senses make you feel,
> there will always be something you cannot doubt about, it being the fact
> that you are doubting.
Ie: What is the "you" doing the doubting, the thinking? Theravada Buddhism
postulated that the "psyche" the "soul" had separate strands making it up,
and following death, those strands separated and went their individual way -
or at least one set of Theravada Buddhists did, and I've even managed to read
some of the Pali text! Marvin Minsky, of MIT Artificial Intelligence Labs,
postulated that human intelligence was organized in modules of interacting
sections of the brain. As far as I know - and I stopped reading neuroscience
textbooks about 1989, as soon as I regarded myself as "sufficiently
recovered" from my TBI - inaccurate self-diagnosis! <;^( - that is
precisely how the brain is recognised as functioning by modern
neuroscientists.
Whatever far you go, you can never deny that you are
> doing the doubting, and thus the thinking (well, some do, but it makes it a
> bit contradictory to deny what you are doing yourself ;))) ). And thus you
> cannot deny your own existence, for without existence you wouldn't be
> thinking.
But if the "you" the identity that is doing the thinking, the doubting, is a
conglomerate of interacting processes, and there is some core
neurophysiological damage, or some inequal distribution of essential
neurophysical chemistry, then surely the core identity can come unstuck. In
those cases, it's not so much a denial of existence, it is a denial of the
validity of decisions and conclusions that that factured identity may come
to.
And as for the nature of this existence, you at that point know
> only one thing: you exist as a thinking being. Thus in this process the
> equivalence between thinking and being becomes clear.
Fine, except of course, what about the amoeba? "If a tree falls in the forest
without a listener, does it make a sound?" "If a man is alone in the forest
when he says something, is he still wrong?"
It's the only firm
> thing Cartesianism is based on (well, kind of. To go further, Descartes has
> to bring up the existence of God, and his argument for that one is rather
> weak in my opinion).
>
> So the quote of Descartes "cogito, sum" is not a logical consequence (>)
> but a logical equivalence (=). It gives quite a different light on his
> philosophy than what people usually think of it :)) .
>
> Christophe.
Always good to discuss philosophy! Bon appetit!
Wesley Parish
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."
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