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Cogito
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Many philosophers have poked holes in Rene Descates’ famous pronouncement, cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), but none has done so as succinctly as Ambrose Bierce. Bierce was an American journalist and short-story writer, not a philosopher. Perhaps as a result he was able to get straight to the point, adding just two words to Descartes’ formulation to make it cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (“I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”). Bierce’s contribution to the philosophy of mind came in a collection of tongue-in-cheek definitions published as The Devil’s Dictionary early in the last century. He did not elaborate on his take-down of Descartes, although elsewhere in the volume he defined “brain” as “an apparatus with which we think we think.” His entry on “mind” noted that “its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.”
Tongue in cheek or not, Bierce has put his finger on the main difficulty of understanding the workings of the human mind, particularly recursive thinking – not simply the ability to think but the ability to think about thinking. Studying the brain is one thing; that can be done using the objective tools of science. But the mind is inherently subjective and can only be studied from the inside, which means that findings can never be the subject of peer review.
Descartes’ cogito was not intended as a stand-alone statement but as the culmination of a logical argument that began with his quest for philosophical certainty. He reasoned that he could not rely on the evidence of his own senses, since he might be deceived by an evil demon. Even his own body might be a mirage. But his thoughts were another matter. He could doubt just about everything, but he could not doubt that he doubted. And so his thoughts became the basis for affirming the truth of his own existence. It is not clear, however, why an evil demon couldn’t put thoughts in Descartes’ head as easily as he could conjure up a body. There are plenty of people in insane asylums who insist the CIA or aliens have planted thoughts in their heads. If a demon wanted to be really sneaky, he could plant thoughts in the first-person singular, such as, “I think, therefore I am.”
We can reasonably assume that a thought has occurred, but we can’t really say for sure where it originated or who it belongs to. I can hear tunes on my IPod that sound like they are inside my head, but they are really piped in through ear pods connected to an electronic device. Presumably I could listen to a recording of my own voice making statements in the first-person singular that would be indistinguishable from a real thought. And exactly who is this ”I” who claims authorship of the thought? We never actually catch sight of the author at work. All we have to go on is the thought itself in the first-person singular. It may be a bit of a stretch even to say, “I think that I think.” Certainly that’s what I think, assuming there is indeed a self doing the thinking. But the only proof of that is a thought with an “I” attached to it.
Can there be thought without a thinker? Buddhists may be comfortable with the idea. But for most of us, the notion is unthinkable. Literally. And yet, if you look behind the thought, “I think,” there appears to be nothing there. At best, we will find another thought just like it, as in, “I think that I think.” We are still a long way from philosophical certainty. We are left with Ambrose Bierce philosophizing, “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.” So if there is no thinker behind the thought, who is having all these thoughts and feelings I fondly think of as me? Assuming it is not aliens or the CIA beaming thoughts into my head, I’ll go with the Buddhists. It’s nobody.
Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method
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