Freefall: DOGGY!

[GloatingSwine]

And I thought the meaning of Descartes "Cogito Ergo Sum" was him saying "I'm thinking, which means there's something that needs to be thinking, and therefore I exist, so I can think. If I didn't exist, there wouldn't be anything to think, and so I wouldn't be thinking."

He was essentially talking about what he could state that he knew to be true.

He hypothesised the existence of an all powerful deceiver who could fully control his senses, meaning that everything he saw, felt, heard, tasted, or smelled were actually false information, in that context he could not state that anything about the external world was true because he could only access it by his senses, but the fact that he can doubt the existence of truths about the external world means that there must be something seperate from the senses which was able to doubt them, and that thing was internally producing information (thinking) because it was doubting, and that that thing could therefore be known to exist in spite of the full deception of the senses.

"Cogito, ergo sum" would be more fully expressed as "Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum".

As noted though, he was kinda wrong, the I doing the thinking is comprised of the senses not seperate from them and complicit in their self-deception.

[Rockphed]

Nevertheless, his conclusion still stands. Even though all the information fed him by his senses is garbled with garbage, he cannot doubt his own existence.

[halfeye]

Nevertheless, his conclusion still stands. Even though all the information fed him by his senses is garbled with garbage, he cannot doubt his own existence.

That's true, but we can certainly doubt anything he derived from it, where those derivatives were questionable, which they all were.

[Rockphed]

That's true, but we can certainly doubt anything he derived from it, where those derivatives were questionable, which they all were.

Shoddy methodology does not destroy accurate conclusions! Accurate conclusions do not excuse shoddy methodology.