Posted on 11/04/2002 7:52:21 AM PST by thinktwice
Descartes was a geometrician. He found only in mathematics and geometry the certainty that he required. Therefore, he used the methods of geometry to think about the world. Now, in geometry, one begins with a search for axioms, simple undeniable truths – for example, the axiom that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. On the foundations of such “self-evident” propositions, whole geometrical systems can be built.
Following his geometrical model, Descartes proceeds to doubt everything – de onmibus dubitandum. He will suspend belief in the knowledge he learned from childhood, all those things “which I allowed myself in youth to be persuaded without having inquired into their truth.” Doubt will be his method, a deliberate strategy for proceeding toward certainty. (Descartes is a doubter not by nature, but by necessity. What he really wants is secure understanding so he can stop doubting.)
Descartes finds that he has no trouble doubting the existence of real objects/events – our senses too easily deceive us. And we can doubt the existence of a supernatural realm of reality – figments and fantasies are too often conjured by our native imaginations. But now his geometrical model pays off: in trying to doubt everything, he discovers something that he can’t doubt. What he can’t doubt is that he is doubting. Obviously, I exist if I doubt that I exist. My doubt that I exist proves that I exist, for I have to exist to be able to doubt. Therefore I can’t doubt that I exist. Hence, there is at least one fact in the universe that is beyond doubt. “I am, I exist is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.
Descartes thus becomes the author of the most famous phrase in Western philosophy: Cognito ergo sum, or, in his original French, Je pense, donc je suis. – I think, therefore I exist. With roots in St. Augustine, this is certainly one of the catchiest ideas yet created by the human mind.
So do I.
You have me beat in the Aristotle department.
My exposure was the Ethics, Poetics, and a general touch on the rest of it; that plus reading a fine biography on Alexander that was written by an archaeologist. That, plus I did spend some time in Greece and Turkey before going to college and minoring in ... things Greek.
ROFLMAO!
Norman Malcolm's Critique of Descartes' Skepticismby Rebecca Pastor
Norman Malcolm 's Dreaming and Skepticism (1956) is a direct response to Descartes' First Meditation. In his famous work, Descartes says that on many occasions he has, in sleep been deceived by illusions, and he concludes from this that there are no certain marks distinguishing waking from sleep. Malcolm disagrees, and in Dreaming and Skepticism he explains how and why. Malcolm is very careful in the development of his argument, as well he should be; after all, arguing against Descartes is tantamount to, well, arguing against Descartes; Malcolm has a very detailed and specific argument, and he anticipates objections to it and deals with them.
Malcolm's argument is this: If you are thinking, perceiving, feeling, drawing conclusions, making connections, etc, then you may be certain that you are awake; thus, if you are awake, you are not sound asleep, thus, you can tell the difference between waking and sleeping. This is in opposition to Descartes, who states that when we are asleep the same kinds of mental states and mental occurrences are present in us as when we are awake; the difference according to Descartes is that, as a general rule, our minds don't work as well when we are asleep. Descartes conceives of dreams as being a part of a continuous mental life; Malcolm does not. Descartes says that the identical thoughts and sensations that you have when you are wide awake could occur to you while you are asleep--the content of a dream and of a waking episode could be the same. From this it logically follows that there is no way to tell the difference between sleep and waking.
Malcolm is careful to first make the distinction between sound asleep and half asleep. He does this by defining both and then establishing criteria by which to determine if a person is in one of these states. He does this because, as he points out, one may think and perceive while he is half asleep, but he may not while he is sound asleep; this distinction, then, is vital to his argument. To define the terms, and to set up a semantic game, he makes a distinction between is sound asleep and was sound asleep and is half-asleep and was half-asleep. If someone is sound asleep then he meets the following criteria: his eyes are closed, his body inert, his breathing rhythmic, and he is unresponsive to questions, commands, and stimuli of moderate intensity. If someone was asleep, this state can be verified only when he is awake. We wait for him to be awake and then we ask him if he has any recollection of what occurred in his vicinity while he was asleep, and if he has none, then indeed he was sound asleep. Malcolm says that the criteria of someone's being half asleep would seem to fall into the same two categories of present tense and past tense.
Malcolm goes on to point out the absurdity of the statement "I am sound asleep." If a person claims that he is sound asleep, then he is not, for claiming, asserting, stating, etc., are functions of the waking state of consciousness. Furthermore, Malcolm states, one cannot merely afflrm in his rnind that he is sound asleep, for if he does, he is not sound asleep. The assertion "I am sound asleep," even if asserted non-verbally in one's mind, is self-contradictory because in a sound sleep, one does not assert anything. Nor does one wonder, conjecture, realize, affirm or doubt. In a sound sleep, one does not realize or know that he is sound asleep; if he does, he is not sound asleep. A person can drearn that he is sound asleep, and he can dream that he knows it. In this case, the person "knew in his dream that he was sound asleep," but Malcolm states that knowing-in-your-dream that you are asleep is not the same as knowing that you are asleep. You may know something in your dream, but you cannot go on to apply that to your waking life, you cannot make connections between your sleep world and your waking one. Quite simply, if a person is in any state of consciousness, it logically follows that he is not sound asleep. One cannot have thoughts while sound asleep, and from this it follows that one cannot be deceived while sound asleep. Malcolm goes on to say that, furthermore, while a man may tell us his dream, it is impossible to verify this report; there is nothing to verify or report, for it is another language game at work. That a man had a dream and that a man is under the impression that he had one are really the same thing, for there is no criterion for distinguishing the two. This is also true in the case of remembering a dream correctly and seeming to oneself to remember it.
Malcolm questions the idea of a dream as an occurrence; he says that it is not an occurrence during sleep in the same way that breathing is. Nor do we have any way of determining when a dream "occurred" or how long it lasted. He says that some psychologists have conjectured that dreams occur not in sleep during during the awakening from sleep. It is now known that in face dreams do occur within the mind of the soundly sleeping person. As well, dreams have physiological evidences, that is, brain waves can be tracked and REM recorded, thus making it possible to determine exactly when a dream begins and ends. In defense of Malcolm it must be pointed out that not only was he living under Descartes paradigm of dualism (under which a mental experience had nothing to do with the body), but he was also living in a time when brain waves weren't monitored and perhaps people's eyeballs were not scrutinized as they slept. And most importantly, these modern discoveries do not change Malcolm's argument, because his argument hinges entirely upon the content of a dream and the inferences which may be made from that dream content; although he states that drearning is purely a mental experience and he says that there is no way to detemmine when or how long a dream occurred, he is not at all concemed with the process of dreaming and so this does not affect his argument. Also, it must be pointed out that sleep-talking is not a mental process the way claiming something is. Malcolm does not deal with the issue of sleep-talking when he says that we cannot claim something in our sleep for the reason that sleep-talking is merely random uttering which does not involve mental cognition.
In part six Malcolm says that, contrary to Descartes, one can never be deceived while in sound sleep, because if one is, then, as already established by Malcolm, he is not really sound asleep. So then, Descartes is simply wrong in claiming that sleep is indistinguishable from waking. That is to say, in Wittgensteins' temms, we use the language game differently in talking about the two states. The experience of, for example, thinking your bed is on fire, and being sound asleep and thinking in your dream that you bed is on fire, are "experiences" in different senses of the world; nothing is really "experienced" while one is sound asleep, and dreams differ from waking life in that you cannot perceive, think, feel, etc., while sound asleep.
Malcolm concludes by saying that in the notion of the dream of sound sleep, there is no foothold for philosophical skepticism, for it is an error to say that one cannot tell whether he is awake or sound asleep. That is because it is impossible for one to think that he was wide awake and really be asleep, because one does not think while one is asleep. If one thinks that he may be sound asleep but really is aware or just half-asleep, then all he needs to do is open his eyes and have a look around to verify that he is not asleep. Throughout his argument Malcolm he supported this thesis in several different ways, and in doing so he has shown that Descartes' inference from the dream state to the waking state is illegitimate.
The Roman Church's suppression of thought ... is it still going on?
"I think therefore I am"
I think I am.
I am.
am
I still have dreams where I get ready for work and head out the door. Then I wake up and have to do it all over again. Bummer.
With: If so, you would -- apparently -- hold that Hitler's idea to eradicate Jews emanated from a Source beyond our human perception.
No. Intelligence emantes from a Source beyond our human perception. Hitler's idea was clearly not a manifestation of intelligence. 'Two plus two equals five' does not come from mathematics - it is a mistake. Hitler's idea did not come from our Source, it was a mistake.
In this human experience all evil derives from the belief/faith in the reality and power of a false perception of existence. Humans used to believe that the world was flat - because that was how it appeared. That belief was just one of many false "realities" which influence human thought and activity. It is quite logical that reality is still not as it appears to limited human consciousness.
Reason tells me that the essense of existence is perfecton, based upon One Source. For example, it has been said that there is no darkness (complete absense of light). There is light (energy) in some magnitude everywhere - we are just not able to perceive it beyond a certain level. What appears dark to us is just a lower level of light, not its absense. So what appears to be two distinct states (light and darkness) turns out to be only one: all is light - in its infinite forms and magnitudes. Likewise, all is God's good and perfect creation; but viewed from a limited and ignorant perspective, life appears to be a constant conflict between the light and darkness of good and evil. Once human consciousness evolved to the point of realizing that the world was not a limited flat secton of earth and that its nature was much more unlimited, human activity expanded beyond its old boundries. The same will be true as human consciousness overcomes the illusion of two opposing powers (good and evil) and recognizes the unifing Principle of the universe which is only Life with no death, only Good with no evil, only Love with no hate, only Light with no darkness. Right now we see existence in a relative manner; as we get closer to understanding the absolute nature of existence we will experience more of the true perfection of God's Universe.
And that was bad because?
...and that his work dealing with physics, "The World," was withheld from publication when he was told of the Inquisition's persecution of Galileo for supporting the Copernican theory.
Galileo insisted that the Church teach his theory. Science is not a matter for Church teaching except where it ventures into the realm of faith and morals. Don't forget too that several Cardinals funded Copernicus' research.
The Roman Church's suppression of thought ... is it still going on?
People should be very careful with what they read. Bad ideas have caused untold damage in world history, in case you haven't noticed. Would the world have been better off had Marx' books been suppressed? I have no problem with an index of prohibited books. I'm not an intellectual relativist. There is truth, error, and the uncertain.
It may "appear" that the human mind creates ideas but it may be that just like a computer does not create ideas, our bio-computers do not create ideas but just manifest intelligence emanating from a Source beyond our human perception ...
clearly suggests that ALL human ideas -- Hitler's included -- might be manifestations of intelligence from a higher source.
The fact that one thinks is proof in itself. Your own argument proves you wrong, because the concept of "demonstration" is only applicaple to a thinking entity...
Mysticism is belief and faith in things occult -- false perceptions of existence.
Becasue, it shows that the Roman Church doesn't stand for freedom of speech.
Galileo insisted that the Church teach his theory.
That's news -- suspicious news -- to me.
Bad ideas have caused untold damage in world history,
Altruism; the ethics of communism, facism, and socialism: for example?
Not per se, no. Why is unrestricted speech good?
Galileo insisted that the Church teach his theory. That's news -- suspicious news -- to me.
Question textbook orthodoxy.
[Copernicus'] great work, "De Revolutionibus orblure coelestium", was published at the earnest solicitation of two distinguished churchmen, Cardinal Schömberg and Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Culm. It was dedicated by permission to Pope Paul III in order, as Copernicus explained, that it might be thus protected from the attacks which it was sure to encounter on the part of the "mathematicians" (i.e. philosophers) for its apparent contradiction of the evidence of our senses, and even of common sense.
Bad ideas have caused untold damage in world history,
Altruism; the ethics of communism, facism, and socialism: for example?
I wouldn't lump "altruism" in with the others but otherwise, yes.
Altruism IS the ethics of communism, facism, and socialism.
When speech is "controlled," the controlling authority acts first to protect its self; thereby killing what could be good, necessary, innovative ideas and accomplishments -- along with (usually) the people generating those ideas and accomplishments.
As indicated in my post #12, we are in agreement.
First, being aware and thinking are not the same thing. My cat is aware, but does not think. Second, thinking requires a thinker. You may call the thinker anything you like, but the usual concept for the one doing the thinking is "I".
Descarte was mistaken. Before one can doubt, one must first know something, such as what a doubt is, what an assertion is, so that it might be doubted, and so on. Descarte assumes existense, his own for example, as well as a lot of his faculties, such as his mind and perception. Then procedes to use those assumptions to doubt them, counter hypothesis.
Descarte was good at analytic geomety, but lousy at philosophy. But he's fooled a lot of people.
Hank
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