Maybe I’m just small brained but I’ve never understood this phrase
In: Other
If you didn’t exist, where would the thoughts be coming from? Obviously if there is the ability to consider if one exists then they *must* exist, because if not they wouldn’t have got that far.
It is possible to exist without thinking, but it isn’t possible to think without existing.
It simply means you have a consciousness.
You aren’t just some NPC in the game or someone else’s life.
To semi-quote Jim Jeffries: though anything beyond knowing your own existence is up to interpretation:
That’s from Rene Descartes in formulating, what’s the most basic truth we (as humans, who get nearly all of our “data” from sense perceptions, which can be fooled) can start from in shaping the basis of our reality (free from delusion).
It might be better phrased, “I think, therefore I *exist*.”
You cannot prove that the world around you is not a dream or a simulation. Even your body could be an illusion. There’s no reason to think the world around you isn’t real but… you can’t prove that it’s not.
The only thing you can know with certainty is real is your own mind. The fact that you can have thoughts and are conscious means that *you* are definitely real. Even if your real body is plugged into a Matrix pod somewhere and everything else you’ve ever known is a simulation, your mind and your thoughts are still real.
You think, therefore you exist.
Like the others already pointed out, it means that your thinking is proof that you exist: if you didn’t exist, then who or what is doing the thinking. (Mind that it only proves your existence to yourself. No one else knows that you are thinking the same level that you yourself do.
It is also important to understand the philosophical context of the statement: you can be sure that you exist. because you think. Absolutely everything else, however, is uncertain. The world you experience might be real, or you might be a brain floating in a jar, with a group of scientists stimulating your sensory nerves to simulate a world. Literally nothing you do can tell those two scenarios apart, so you can never really know what is real. Except yourself. Not necessarily your body, or even your brain, but the mind that does the thinking must exist in order to think.
It’s the results of an exercise in extreme skepticism.
For example, let’s ask a very simple question. What color is the sky?
This morning it was blue, but what if it’s changed since the last time I’ve seen it?
People tell me it’s blue, but what if they are all lying to me?
I’m looking at it right now and it seems blue, but what if I’m hallucinating?
In fact, what if every single thing I’ve ever seen and experienced is just a dream or hallucination or simulation?
What if anything can you be certain of?
You can only be certain that you exist. The fact that you are able to think about the question proves that you exist. If not, there would be nothing to think about the question.
The first thing to understand is that Descartes didn’t just come up with this in a vacuum. He was trying to answer a specific question. Suppose that some sort of evil demon was feeding our minds false perceptions of reality -fake sights, sounds, and all the other senses- such that nothing we experience is actually *real*. In modern terms we ask ourselves this same question using The Matrix instead of a demon, but the principles are the same. In the face of this possibility, how can we really be sure that anything we perceive is real? How can we even be sure that we ourselves are real?
Descartes asserts that even if the demon’s tricks are so crafty that we cannot be sure of anything else, we can be sure of our own existence. The proof is in the fact that we have the capacity to doubt what the demon is showing us: it might be able to control everything we see and hear and touch, but even so, it cannot control our thoughts completely: the simple act of wondering about our reality, rather than simply accepting the demon’s illusions as fact, proves that our thoughts are not under the demon’s control, even indirectly. Our thoughts are real, even if nothing else is. And since our thoughts are real, the beings that think them -us- must also be. We exist, even if the things our brain shows us do not.
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.
A big thing around the time Descartes said that was denying that reality was real. That everything was an illusion, including human existence. Descartes’s famous phrase was him realizing while doubting a part of this that if he was doubting something, he had to be thinking about it, and if he was thinking about it, he had to exist in order to have the thought. No existence, no thought, no doubt. If everything was an illusion, if something was playing a trick on him, he had to exist in order to be tricked.
The phrase exists in the context of hyperbolic doubt, which is a philosophical approach that takes absolutely nothing for granted. The starting point is that nothing can be said to exist without proof. Under this approach the thoughts of the thinker serve as proof of their existence
Latest Answers