(P - shoulder) on 03-14-2007 at 06:30 PM said:
Also, the famous idea "I think, therfore I am," falls into trouble because it is a reflexive determination, leading to circular logic. The "I" is playing the parts of both subject and object.
Jaric partially addressed your issues on this point, but he missed the central problem with this statement. It is a miss quote.
He never summed it up in a single phrase, but if he did it would be "I doubt, therefore
I am.
Again, Jaric explained his argument, but it appears not to have sunk in, so i'll go into more detail.
Descarte was trying to answer the question concerning the nature and existence of reality.
One could argue that reality had to exist and that our senses showed us what that reality was.
If this perspective was true, then reality must exist independently of the observer.
Descartes asked if this perspective was true. The only way you know anything about the world outside of your consciousness is from what your senses tell you.
How do you know that what they tell you is real?
After all, you can have a dream that seems as real as being awake, yet it is not "real".
So you have no way of proving that the world your senses tells you exists actually exists, since your only way of interacting with that world is through your senses.
It is a logical conundrum for which there is no solution.
He then took the question to the next logical step, if I cannot know if the world is real, how do I know that I am real?
His solution was to consider the doubt that the question raised.
Where does this doubt come from? "Who" is asking this question?
If the self does not exist, then who is doubting the existence of the self?
The argument appears circular in the same sense that the
Anthropic Principle seems circular. That is the solution is what it is because any other solution would mean the question would never be asked.
If there is no self, then how can there be any doubt about the existence of the self? The existence of the question demonstrates that there is a consciousness to ask the question.
If there was a "non-self" to ask the question about the existence of the self, then this non-self would have all the properties of a self and thus not be a non-self, but a self.
dchester on 03-14-2007 at 06:50 PM said:
I once took a philosophy class, and though it was the biggest waste of time I ever spent. About the only thing I can remember form it is, "I think therefore I am". You obviously got a lot more out of philosophy than I did. Maybe you had a better teacher, or maybe you're just smarter than me.
I stumbled into taking philosophy classes when I went to UCONN. I majored in Physics and since that was in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I was required to take a minimum number of classes in a variety of different categories to cover the original "seven liberal arts".
Philosophy was a wild card that could be counted towards any category, so I took a few.
Once I took a couple of them, I realized something about them that made me take enough to minor in Philosophy.
The thing I got out of Philosophy courses was to learn
how to think. Anytime someone thinks about a subject, they have unstated assumptions and preconceived notions about things that are their starting point for how they then address an issue.
For the vast majority of people, they aren't consciously aware of these boundaries and starting points for their ideas. It isn't unusual for these assumptions to be wrong or inappropriate for a specific situation and if you are not aware of them, you'll never be able to figure out why what you thought was right is wrong.
My Philosophy courses taught me how to take a step back and look at the assumptions and preconceived notions and ask if these were appropriate for the present situation.
I found that this way of thinking complemented my Physics training since it approached the problems I was solving in Physics from the opposite direction.
Of course, since the original name for Physics was "Natural Philosophy", this shouldn't be too surprising.
