The question:
Rene Descartes is known for one incredibly famous and important philosophical question. What, if anything, can we be certain of?
The method:
His method was to doubt everything that can possibly be doubted, and to accept only those things that cannot be doubted.
The conclusion:
He concluded that “I think, therefore I am” is the single indubitable statement, the foundation on which all future philosophy could and should be constructed. Precisely in the moment of thinking, it is impossible to doubt that one is thinking.
“I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.”
That quote is from Meditation II, in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The Meditations is a very short and surprisingly readable bit of philosophy. Here’s a free pdf download, in case you’re interested.
Buddhists fundamentally disagree with Descartes’ conclusion
In Buddhist meditation, you pay attention to your breath, over and over again. In so doing, you become aware of many things. One of the things you become most aware of is … precisely how unaware you are, most of the time.
If you yourself ever decide to take up meditation, one thing will become very obvious, very quickly: it’s hard to meditate! Keeping your attention on the breath is difficult. Your mind wanders, and when it wanders … it’s gone! Buddhists often call this the problem of “monkey mind”: the mind jumps around like a monkey, refusing to sit still.
Eventually, suddenly, you come back to yourself. With a start, you remember that you were supposed to be meditating! In that moment, you realize you have no idea how long you were thinking instead of meditating. You realize, often, that you have no idea what you’ve been thinking about. You realize that you had no sense, while lost in thought, that you existed at all. You forgot all about your existence, where you were, what you were doing. (If you had remembered you existed, you would have remembered to go back to meditating!)
This lesson of Buddhist meditation is learned very quickly: the moments when we are thinking are precisely when we most easily lose track of our own existence.
The exact same thing happens to yours truly, the only practicing Beddhist in the world. When I’m lying in bed, trying to feel my feelings, I very often realize that my mind has been wandering for some time … how long? … and I have completely forgotten who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. It’s especially funny when I realize my mind has been hard at work composing some new ideas for this substack … usually some variation on how important it is to pay attention to your feelings. (Ha! Easier said than done.)
For Buddhists, self-awareness happens precisely when the mind stops with its constant firing. The cure for monkey mind is calm awareness, which is reached through meditation. It goes like this. You’re paying attention to your breathing … in, out, in out. When your mind goes into monkey mode, you notice that this has happened. (This noticing takes quite a while, at first, but the time required dwindles over time.) Then you calmly bring your mind back, returning attention to your breath. When you become an exerienced meditator, monkey mind eventually … slowly … stops happening.
I got far enough in my own meditation practice, back in 2018-19, to learn that calm awareness, with the monkey mind gone, is really quite nice. In this state, I became deeply aware that I existed (much more aware than normal) and at the same time, I became aware that I was not thinking.
Thinking is not necessary to self-awareness — if anything, the thinking mind is less self-aware.
Descartes doesn’t seem to understand the Buddhist position at all
I mean, the guy never encountered Buddhism, probably, so in a sense it’s not a fair complaint. But that doesn’t excuse the rest of us.
Here’s Descartes:
I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist. I do not now admit anything which is not necessarily true: to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing and really exist; but what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks.
Stop thinking and you might stop existing! I’ve had a lot of existential worries in my life, but never this one.
To me, it’s fascinating that Descartes calls this book his Meditations. The results could not be more different from the results of Buddhist meditation.
What should we say about this? Do different types of meditation just produce different results? Well, maybe. Or maybe Descartes wasn’t meditating so much as, you know, thinking. In particular, he was part of the western philosophical tradition that goes back to Aristotle and Plato (and beyond), in which the definition of humanity, over against “mere animals,” has always been rationality. If self-awareness and indubitability could be derived from sensations, then animals might have them too, and that’s just not an acceptable conclusion.
Is Descartes just wrong, then? If he’d just tried Buddhist meditation a time or two, and maybe learned some things that modern science has taught us about how similar we are to other mammals, then perhaps he could have been disabused of his foolishness? I want to say yes, but I’m not 100% sure. In Meditation II, just a few paragraphs later than the previous quote, Descartes writes the following:
But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.
“Feels”! That’s a shock! Is Descartes saying that feeling is part of thinking? But that can’t be right, can it? Most of the time, in the modern world, we contrast thinking with feeling. Thinking is rational and sensible; feeling is irrational and emotional. This distinction is pretty fundamental to most of modern philosophy. Does Descartes really disagree?
I don’t think he does. Probably not, at least. Read this bit, from just a few paragraphs earlier, where he’s trying to figure out what sorts of thing cannot be doubted:
Let us pass to the attributes of soul and see if there is any one which is in me? What of nutrition or walking [the first mentioned]? But if it is so that I have no body it is also true that I can neither walk nor take nourishment. Another attribute is sensation. But one cannot feel without body, and besides I have thought I perceived many things during sleep that I recognized in my waking moments as not having been experienced at all. What of thinking? I find here that thought is an attribute that belongs to me; it alone cannot be separated from me. (emphasis added)
The existence of sensations can be doubted, for Descartes: sensation requires body, and we can doubt that our bodies exist.1 The activity of the mind, by contrast, cannot be doubted. Thinking is clearly separate from, other than, feeling.
To sum up the problem. In one place Descartes says that “a thing which thinks” is “a thing which … feels.” But just a few paragraphs earlier, he says that sensations are not thoughts, and in fact are fundamentally different sorts of things from thoughts. How do we resolve this problem?
I’m guessing that Descartes is just confused. When he says “and feels” at the end of that sentence, we should take that as a very strange little two-word hiccup that doesn’t make sense with the rest of what he tells us. That’s my best guess.
But I don’t want this to turn into an essay on how to read Descartes! The important thing is the heritage that Descartes has passed down to all of us in the modern west … you and me included. In that heritage, we are told that we are primarily minds. We are things that think, and that’s all that we are. Our emotions and sensations and bodies are not part of what we really, truly are.
It is my claim that Descartes is fundamentally mistaken. We do not become aware of ourselves in our thinking. we are not, fundamentally, “things that think.” These two huge mistakes have mis-shapen western thought for enough centuries, and it’s time to reject them.
Where does Descartes go astray?
I think we can start right at the beginning of the Meditations. Here’s a very famous sentence, which is also the third paragraph of the first Meditation, in which he’s thinking about what sorts of things can give us actual certainty:
All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to anything by which we have once been deceived.
The senses have been known to deceive us, so we shouldn’t trust them! Sounds reasonable, right? But, well, the mind has also been known to deceive us! In fact, that’s the starting point of his entire philosophical project. If we can’t trust the senses, we also can’t trust the mind. Why does he not draw this incredibly obvous parallel conclusion?
Something is clearly strange here. Let’s back up and start over.
Let’s take as a hypothesis that sensations are extremely important. (That’s my starting point for everything.) With this hypothesis in mind, let’s take up Descartes’ question, and his method, and see if we might not come to a different conclusion.
So the question. What, if anything, cannot be doubted?
The method. Doubt everything that we can possibly doubt.
I am sitting here at my computer. I tell myself to doubt everything. Doubt doubt doubt. I am a person who believes that sensations are extremely important, and that philosophers have historically overlooked their importance. So as I sit here doubting, the very first thing that comes to my mind is this.
Is doubt itself a sensation?
What sort of thing is doubt? Descartes takes for granted that it is intellectual, in the mind. But is it? Is that all that it is? I look into myself. How do I know that I am doubting something?
What is it to doubt?
Here’s a hypothesis at to the nature of doubt. (I think it’s true, but what I really want is for you to tell me if you think it’s true.)
The linguistic centers of the brain, no doubt working in an incredibly complex process that involves other parts of the prefrontal cortex, produces an idea, which coalesces into a thought. This thought is expressed in language and forms a sentence. This sentence runs through my conscious mind, and I may speak it aloud if I wish. During the time in which the sentence is in my mind, and/or being spoken, I can experience various sensations. If I pay careful attention — and this is not always easy — I can often distinguish the sensations from the content of the thought.
It’s easiest to do when the sensations are very strong, which often occurs when the subject is something that seems important, such as politics or religion. So, as a political liberal living in the United States in 2023, I may entertain the following thoughts: “Donald Trump won the 2020 election; it was stolen from him by unscrupulous liberals; the media has been conspiring against him; he is in fact the true president, working behind the scenes; in fact he controls everything that’s going on; also the economy is terrible and this is Joe Biden’s fault; also liberals are pedophiles who murder children and drink their blood; also some of them are lizard people.” The sensations in my body as I run through these thoughts becomes ever more difficult to ignore, starting with exasperation, progressing to anger, running through incredulity that anyone could possibly be so stupid, ending in laughter and a sense of hopelessness as I realize that some people, in fact, manage to believe all of these things.
So we can distinguish two things: (1) the intellectual/verbal content of a sentence, expressed in language, and (2) the attitude toward that content, expressed in (or, better, felt as) a set of sensations.
Our attitudes toward our own sentences — our emotions/sensations — can include belief, disbelief, want-to-believe, want-to-disbelieve, hope, worry, stress, anger, and probably dozens of others. Doubt is one of the most common sensations. It’s somewhere between belief and disbelief, right? We all know what it feels like.
What’s the capital of Australia? If you don’t know the answer, you will find yourself running through various sentences: “Melbourne is the capital of Australia…?” “Sydney is the capital of Australia…?” “Brisbane is the capital of Australia…?” And with each sentence that runs through your mind comes a specific sensation, which we call doubt. “I’m not sure …? Is it maybe …?”
Now I’m definitely not saying that doubt is only a sensation. Doubt is also an intellectual attitude that we take toward things we are not certain about. It is an intellectual virtue, at least in some circumstances, to be willing to notice that we are not certain about something — to withhold our assent to things that are doubtful. In trying political times, it may be an important moral virtue as well. Sometimes it’s important to refuse to be sucked into the certainty-of-the-day that those-OTHER-people-are-bad-and-wrong.
But doubt does its intellectual work precisely by being a sensation. If you can’t conjure up the sensation, you can’t doubt. (This is a weird thing to say in the history of the western intellectual tradition, which separates intellectual from emotional processes. But that’s part of my point.)
The same is true, I think, about belief, and disbelief, and all the other attitudes we can take toward a sentence. We need the emotional reality, the felt reality, the sensation itself, in order to be able to take up these attitudes.
Here’s a common thing for some of us to say. “I don’t believe in God. I’ve tried to believe — I wish I believed — but I can’t.” What are we saying? We’re saying, I think, that the feeling of belief won’t come to us. That specific sensation just won’t happen.
So. Doubt is a sensation.
Descartes’ method is to doubt everything, and to look for something we cannot doubt. Well, what’s the obvious thing that we cannot doubt?
We cannot doubt, while we are doubting, that we are doubting.
Now … that’s just obviously true! Isn’t it? It’s almost too perfect.
Why didn’t Descartes realize it?
Why didn’t he notice that his doubt was a sensation, and then notice that the single most obvious thing that cannot be doubted is the reality of doubt itself?
Why didn’t he realize that self-awareness resides in sensations? That thought, if anything, reduces self-awareness?
What would the western world be like, if he had?
“I think therefore I am”? I say no, that’s wrong.
I doubt, therefore I am. That’s closer.
Even better: I feel, therefore I am. I have sensations, therefore I am.
“To be human it to be a thing that thinks.” Again, I say no. To be human is to be a thing that feels. Thinking
Lie down for a while. Relax. Stop your mind, as much as you can, and let your feelings wash over you. Pay attention to the sensations in your body as they rise and fall.
And then put on your Descartes hat and ask yourself, in all seriousness: is there any chance that these sensations are not real things? That your consciousness of these sensations is not an actual reality?
I say no. I say that if anything is real, it is these sensations, this consciousness of sensation.
Ask yourself the follow-up question. Was it in thinking that you came to this self-awareness?
Again, I say no. Having to stop and think about the intellectual question actually takes me away from the bare moment of self-realization, the self-being-present-to-itself. The realization-of-self-as-real occurs in sensation, not thought. The process occurs much deeper in the brain than our language or our rationality.
At least some animals have this bare self-awareness. Because of course they do! They have sensations. If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you whap me across the nose, do I not whine? If you scritch me, do I not purr?
Computers do not have self-awareness. Because of course they don’t. Computers cannot doubt things. Computers cannot believe things. Computers cannot desire things. They don’t have sensations, they don’t have bodies, they don’t have the equipment for any of it. I wrote about all of this a few weeks ago. Here’s what I’d like to add today.
You can tell a computer to output the sentence “I think, therefore I am.” Using the new chatbots, you can even get the computer to output a really nice explanation of the meaning of this sentence, the historical context in which Descartes wrote it, and some philosophical arguments about it. And yet nobody thinks that the sentence “I think, therefore I am” applies to the computer itself! The computer is not self-aware! It’s not, in the requisite sense, a “being” at all. It doesn’t have experiences.
The computer thinks … right? at least sort of? … and yet it “is” not.
What’s missing? I say: sensations.
Sensations are prior to thought.
We are our truest, deepest selves precisely in our sensations, generated in our limbic systems, felt in our bodies.
The entire western philosophical tradition, which insists on the centrality of rationality to the essence of the human, is seriously wrong.
The AI Doomers, and the transhumanists — these people also believe that we are our minds, our rationality — that our sensations and our bodies are just a waste of space. These people dream of someday uploading their consciousness into an immortal machine. They’re also seriously wrong, and for the same reason. If they ever get their wish, and upload themselves into a machine that has no sensations, they will never again have a moment of self-awareness. They will be literally lost in thought, gone from themselves and their own felt reality, forever. (That’s my guess, at least! What do you think? Am I nuts?)
Thanks for reading! Any and all comments welcome, as always.
Do notice — which Descartes does not! — that his sentence “one cannot feel without body” is not one of the things that he doubts! The existence of body can be doubted, sure. But if you’re doubting the existence of your own body, then you also need to doubt that your sensations require a body! You definitely need a better argument if you want to conclude that your sensations can be doubted.
Descarates’ argument is something like this. “I seem to see a fireplace, but in fact I am dreaming and there is no fireplace there; once I wake up and realize that I have been misled, I should doubt my sensations henceforth.” And, yes, absolutely, you can and should doubt the truth of the information about the exterior world being provided by your senses. Maybe the fireplace isn’t there. Or maybe it’s just a photo of a fireplace. On these matters, yes, doubt away. But it is not possible to doubt that you are having the experience called “seeming to see the fireplace.” In this respect, thinking is not superior to the senses, and it’s very strange that Descartes didn’t realize this.