Maybe I’m just small brained but I’ve never understood this phrase
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Here’s a more modern variation on the same thing. This happens in the original Jumanji movie. If you haven’t seen it it’s about a boardgame with deadly consequences for its players.
> _Alan gets startled by a clock and drops the dice he was holding. Automatically, his game piece moves forward by the rolled amount on the dropped dice._.
> Alan: “I didn’t roll, the game thinks I rolled those dice.”
> Sarah: “What do you mean, the game _thinks_?”
> _Ominous silence as Alan and Sarah stare at each other and then at the board game in fear of what’s to come._
The key point that Sarah is getting across here is that the game clearly made a judgment call that what happened to the dice constitutes a player taking their turn, which implies that the game has both awareness of its surroundings (to observe the dice and who rolled them) and the ability to have thoughts (i.e. to decide whether that was a roll by the right player whose turn it is). This implies that the game is a living entity and not just a wooden board.
The movie later establishes that the game really does judge these things: it punishes someone who manipulates the roll, it refuses to budge when one of the players isn’t present (and it’s their turn), the game allows a roll made by the right player spitting the dice out their mouth, and the game allows the final roll even though the two dice were rolled separately with a long time inbetween, and went _well_ beyond the direct vicinity of the game board.
Descartes is saying the same thing more tersely. He has thoughts, therefore he must have the capacity to reason, which in turn is proof that he is a living entity, not just a meat puppet controlled by external impulses. He can choose to act differently, not because the external impulses are different, but because something within him makes him capable of thinking and deciding.
Descartes wasn’t writing in English and I don’t think this is a great translation. My preferred translation is
> I think, therefore something is thinking.
As others have said, it’s an answer to the question, what do you know 100% infallibly to be the case, that couldn’t possibly be anything except the way it is?
And that’s his answer. Something is thinking. And I know it because I am thinking.
Everything else can be subject to skepticism.
Ooh! Ooh! I can actually answer this!
So… We have two brains – our mind and our heart. Totally true. Smart people discovered our hearts also have feelings and can think like our mind does. It’s absolutely CRAZY!
So, our brain and our mind talk all the time. What we think, our brain hears. What we say, our heart hears. And when the mind and heart talk and agree, guess what?
Our mind and heart control our actions, and our actions decide what kind of person we are. So, saying “I think, therefore I am” means that when we think and say something enough times, it turns us into either a person who hurts or gossips or is mean or sad.
I hope that makes sense.
The point of the statement is existential in nature. Others have explained, but the ELI5 is that the statement means “I know I am thinking, therefore I know that I exist.” There is also the implication that this is the only thing we can be absolutely sure of, in case our minds are being tricked by demons or Matrix-style computer simulation.
How do you prove your own existence?
It’s circular logic but if you can think about whether or not you exist that in itself is proof that you do exists
If you were magically turned into a stone, you would be dead, because a stone has no “experiences,” meaning a stone does not feel or think anything. If you were magically turned into another mentally-uninjured human, you would still be alive because a mentally-uninjured human has “experiences.”
Example: we know ChatGPT is not alive because it is using complicated math to predict text. This is not an “experience.” A truly conscious machine, whatever form that would take, would be alive in the sense that it thinks, therefore it is.
This is where the concept of the “philosophical zombie” comes in, which is a hypothetical creature that seems to be human, you could talk to it and it would talk back, convincing you it was alive, but in fact it is not thinking, it would merely be following instructions to simulate conversation. It does not think, therefore it “is not.”
See also: the Chinese Room Argument. Imagine you are in a room with books of instructions on how to answer any question in Chinese. Under the door, papers are slipped in, written in Chinese. You can answer any question by looking up the proper response in your instruction books, writing the response down, and slipping the paper back under the door. The person outside thinks they are conversing with someone who understands Chinese fluently. But you aren’t; all you’re doing is following instructions. You don’t actually understand Chinese.
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