Maybe I’m just small brained but I’ve never understood this phrase
In: Other
OK, so there’s this French guy Rene’. And he’s living in a *wild* time in history, where a ton of ideas and principles that everyone knew and everyone thought were right were getting proven wrong. Like, really big stuff and serious philosophers are suddenly being proven wrong.
This is a big deal for Rene’. Like, imaging going to college, getting a degree, and suddenly it’s like “whoops, your whole education actually isn’t valid, and the means that your idols used to figure things out weren’t actually good at all”. Rene is **shook**.
So he sits down and starts writing out his thoughts. If he could be wrong about all that stuff, what else could he be wrong about? So he starts asking questions like ‘what do I know to be true?’ and then he follows up by coming up with scenarios where he could be wrong. And he does this for *hours*. He’s deep into the small hours of the night because he’s found ways he could be totally wrong about everything. “I know what direction down is in, right?” “But what if your brain has a flaw that makes you think down is up and up is down, how would you know?” Like, he’s going through these possibilities like your buddy who ate two pot brownies four hours ago and suddenly everything is up for debate, except, you know, Rene isn’t stoned, he’s just opened up a can of worms.
Anyway, sometime before dawn, he just gives up. He literally cannot think of a single thing that he knows to be true that couldn’t be false under some set of circumstances. And this bums him out. He is in despair, so he does what anyone would do after sitting up all night asking himself increasingly unsettling questions. He takes a nap.
When he wakes up, he looks over his notes, refreshing his arguments, and he notices something. All his counter-arguments against doubt have a common theme. “What if my mind was damaged?” and “what if a demon was altering my senses?” and “what if I just imagined all of reality?” all share a common assumption. Do you see it?
Every single doubting challenge Rene comes up with involves there being a thinker, an entity, a thing-that-is-doubting-and-asking-questions. No matter what else he can argue could be false, there has to be something that exists to ask these questions. **That**, Rene’ realizes, has to be true. And if that’s true, and we can know its true from deduction, then that’s a foundation that can be used to know other things to be true.
“I think, therefore I am” is both the conclusion of his first meditation *and* the very beginning of him building a system for knowing other things to be true.
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