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[Your *existence* is real, *has* to be real; it can not be illusory.]

There are several ways in which this can be seen as a weak claim.

I disagree.

For example, to an evolutionist pondering the fact that you are made up of cells whose ancestors used to be freemoving, one celled cowboys, before the communist tyranny of multicellularity came along and fenced in the ranges. "You" are just a bio-chemical/bio-electical conglomeration whose ponderings are meaningless to the cells you are made of, whose existence is far more tangibly demonstrable than your maudlin arrogance about "being" because you are "thinking"--which merely amounts to a silly attempt to pretend there is meaning in a few fleeting congeries of electical impulses between cells.

This is just goofy. First, I don't know why you're foisting off this reductio ad absurdum onto "evolutionists". I don't know a single evolutionist who holds such a ridiculously reductionist view as the one you're spinning here.

Second, the fact remains that no matter how much you try to hand-wave it away, there *is* pondering going on, that pondering *is* taking place, and its substrate (whatever it may or may not be) therefore *does* exist. Decartes is vindicated yet again.

Or, consider the atoms that make up your cells--with their vast empty spaces occupied by entities whose existence at any given point or time is highly probabilistic and fleeting--and cells have the arrogance to suppose that they exist just because their happen to be an fleeting accidental conjugation of these entities in atoms whose existence is so evanescent as to be virtually non-existent.

And yet, there they are. Decartes wins again.

Or, for one more, consider the inversion of the usual way of looking at Descartes argument: Your self-detected visceral existence, however pursuasive you might find it, is a far cry from high on the heirarchy of what we commonly take for objective evidence. A proof, or a refereed scientific article about an experiment I can duplicate, if I want, or, just an ordinary chair, which more than one human can stub his toe on, and then get together to share notes with other chair-victims about. All of these things take priority over your self-awareness, as objective evidence.

Totally irrelevant to Decartes' observation.

All of which brings me around to my question: I think humans are, more than any other creatures we know about, defined by their existence as part of a community. We observe that those of us cut off from effective participation in our community go bonkers, become unhealthy, and meet untimely ends at a very high rate. I therefore suggest that, while Descartes formulation might be a very good one for, say, a muledeer, it will be rather deficient for a human: If all you do is think about what you are, you will shortly cease to be, however, if you suppress your philosophical misgivings, and you continue to work at being, as I aver you are supposed to, you may very well become something worth thinking exists.

I submit that you don't understand Decartes' point. It has nothing to do with "a life worth living" or however you'd like to sum up your alleged point in the prior paragraph. It has to do with the fundamental matter of existence or non-existence, and how much we can or can't know about it.

Well, I thought I was making an extended joke, but, what the heck.

yea? Prove it. There is no scientific evidence that I am aware of that there is "pondering" going on outside of physical behaviors that give the appearance that they can ultimately be accounted for as the summation of physical processes engaged in by individual cells.

There is only objective evidence that your cells are "pondering"; yours and Descartes claims are unverifiable personal revelations, proffering no more a categorically reliable basis than that of a Holy Roller that God has touched his tongue, or a witch that she has had congress with the Devil.

I submit that you don't understand Decartes' point.

Oh, I expect I do understand it well enough. It is just an unverifiable claim of no significant practical merit, other than that it has keep wordy philosophers busy and out of the way of of people trying to get things done, and scientists trying to understand things of a bit more of a material nature.

It has nothing to do with "a life worth living" or however you'd like to sum up your alleged point in the prior paragraph. It has to do with the fundamental matter of existence or non-existence, and how much we can or can't know about it.

...according to Cartesians. According to many others, it is airy hogwash and a pointless waste of ergs, trying to imagine that there's a powerful reality-solvent dwelling mysteriously somewhere within you.

All this myasmic indwelling foo-foraw is in aid of the Cartesian Project: trying to imagine that Newton and/or Euclid have paved the way for a formally closed, logically demonstrable universe, and that like Spinoza, Descarte is going to be going on from "I think, therefore I am" for a Principia of Morality.

I'm sure Descarte was a nice guy, but "I think, Therefore I am", is an utterly useless, uninformative, and rather doubtful construct in aid of a useless, if not dangerous task.

Descarte isn't in the least vindicated. Even if you could prove your "pondering" exists, which you can't, why is there any particular reason to believe it is your pondering? Why can't all the manifestations of your pondering that you find so manifestly proving your existence, be the result of some superior being who dreamed you up, complete with your conviction that it must be you who exist, because of your illusion that you are thinking stuff up.

Since you are willing to accept your pondering's supposed existence without proof, why should I regard the notion that some being thought you and your ponderings (or me and my ponderings) up as any less reliable?

Descartes announced a tautology, not a predication for existence.

Technically, it is correct to say "doubts exist," nothing more. the "I doubt" is slipped in under the door and is not realized.

Further, even if you DO recognize Cartesian self-awareness as a beginning point for knowledge, there is no escape from solipsism with Descartes. He himself recognized that, and acknowldeged that one had to posit a benificent God who had ordered the cosmos to be congruent with our brains (and vice versa) in order to make meaningful statements about ANYTHING other than our own existence.

It is clear you don't understand Descartes. That is not an insult. I don't understand him either. But it is not wise to swing a club at someone unless you are aware that that very club will wind up taking your own head clean off when you swing it. You need another stick, bubba. DesCartes is NOT your solution.

Now, would you like to remind me why an empiricist treats the sesory inputs from a cosmos that is uncertain and ordered by a neural ganglia of which he is also uncertain into "knowledge" of which he is certain? Is it because some red lights flash on a machine (designed by processes in that uncertain ganglia), or is it because his perceptions of that data are grouped into categories by that same neural gangila and you assume therefore that this has some "real" relationship to the cosmos out there? On what basis do posit such crap?

Glass houses and stones.