I am sure that I am

It might sound funny talking about how we think as it is a system analyzing the way it analyzes things. Actually, it is what that makes this talk so interesting for me. I highly believe in relativism. I mean about everything not just only moral principles. I know! It sounds complex or maybe scary.

It was much easier if we had something fixed, something we knew for sure. But it is hard to name it. We always start with axioms, and build the rest of our knowledge over this foundation. We say a dot is something with no dimension and then define line and shapes based on that and create geometry. There must be a starting point.

I love the sentence “I think, therefore I am” and think that it is a perfect start. It doesn't want to emphasize the importance of thinking. It seeks the starting point. Some might say that it is not that brilliant. Descartes had been stuck in this relativism and he tried to escape from it by defining a fixed fact. However, why “I”?

I like this as it matches my point of view perfectly. Imagine a man holding an apple in his hand. Let’s call this combination “Manapple”. We would use this word if it was handy for us. Both man and apple are created of some elements like Carbon and Helium. We generalize things and put them in categories. We extract patterns like apple and man from world and put names on them and memorize their characteristics. Whenever we see an instance of a known category, we use our knowledge to estimate its behavior and properties using this knowledge. Essentially, knowledge is nothing more than this. All abstract.

Of course, as we see men and apples usually separated, the word “Manapple” does not exist in our vocabularies. “Apple” is the name of a category, a pattern of “elements” we recognized. What are “elements”? I guess different patterns of particles like neutrons and protons. But what are them? They are not concrete too. Nothing is. Even if one day we found an undividable particle, something dead concrete, we still would call apples “apples”. This is the way we understand the world. Creating abstract classes based on signals we get from the environment (I guess). The level of abstraction of our point of view is related to the detail that we are looking at. All these categories are created by just abstract boundaries that we define. All related to the way we see the world: A Manapple as one entity or a man holding an apple as two or all as zillions of atoms.

There must be something fixed, something that you cannot get rid of. What about “I”? It is the boundary that defines our identity. All this words must come from somewhere or something. It is years that I call that entity “I”. I guess the first entity that we recognize in our life and draw a boundary around it. This boundary divides the whole universe into “I” and the rest. This is the thing that you cannot get rid of. You can clear all other boundaries but this. Descartes says:

“But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I, too, do not exist? No. If I convinced myself of something [or thought anything at all], then I certainly existed.” (AT VII 25; CSM II 16–17)

Then, of course I start from “I” as generalization and things we call thinking happens here, in me. “I” am the thing which is creating these boundaries. That is the most certain thing I can say about what “I” am? That is me for sure. Not my body, not even my mind. I am the system who can generate these classes, put names on them and use these words as references to classes which “I” guess you use for the same concepts. “I” am the thing that made these boundaries, these thoughts. “I” know for sure that, “I think, therefore I am”


Pouya Bisadi