Philosophy’s Most Famous Argument (And Why It's Wrong)

kogito ergo sum I think therefore I am these are perhaps the most famous words in all of philosophy but we rarely stop to consider what they actually mean and whether it is a good argument in the first place after all what could be more obvious than our own existence but as we shall see the matter is far more complicated than it might first appear and even the father of modern philosophy is capable of logical error get ready to learn why an evil demon might be controlling all of your thoughts and perceptions how dayart doesn't care

how many limbs I have and how the most well-known argument in philosophy can challenge our very sense of self before we begin remember that there is a vast literature on this topic far more than I know and far more than I can cover here so encourage you to absorb these ideas critically but first who came up with this argument and why did they feel the need to prove something that was so obvious well it is all to do with doubt one I doubt therefore I panic one day in the mid 17th century French philosopher mathematician

and scientist Renee deart sat down by the fire and decided he was going to systematically doubt every one of his beliefs and rebuild his knowledge from the ground up in order to see what human reason could really do his motives for this are somewhat philosophical and somewhat theological and I won't quite get into them here but he wanted to create a certain foundation for human knowledge including human knowledge of God so he begins this Grand project by imagining all the possible scenarios where he might be wrong about things at first he reflects that sometimes his

physical senses deceive him making him see one thing when another actually exists next he points out that when he is dreaming he never realizes he's in a dream until he wakes up so perhaps he is dreaming all the time and simply doesn't realize it but finally he concedes the possibility of an omnipotent evil demon that could be deceiving his senses at all times replacing every true belief with a false one and every accurate perception with an inaccurate one he reflects that such a demon could also deceive his reason so that he could think that 2

+ 2 equals 4 when it actually equals 5 that a triangle has three sides when it actually has seven and so on the upshot is this every one of our beliefs every one of our perceptions they can all be theoretically doubted undermining any hope for a certain foundation for human knowledge this scenario makes dayart incredibly distressed and it throws him into a philosophical Panic can he really be certain of none of his beliefs such an idea seems intolerable to him and so he searches for some small crumb of certainty hoping that he can build outwards

from there to reconstruct his entire belief system eventually he reasons that if he is doubting all of his beliefs then doubts must exist and furthermore there must be something to doubt I.E a doubter and that that doubter must be him thus he concludes that whether he knows anything else he knows that he exists this is indubitable that is he cannot doubt it this argument is first found in the meditations and is later clarified in his principles of philosophy if we were being philosophically precise then we could formulate this argument into three premises and a conclusion

I have based mine here on Bertram Russell's own work with the argument one there is my doubt two if there is doubt there must exist a doubter three that doubter is referred to as I conclusion I exist this argument is normally referred to as the coito argument or I think therefore I am but if we look carefully it's actually slightly subtler than this presentation makes it appear deart is attempting to combat his own radical doubt and the strength of this argument hinges on the fact that you can doubt that doubt exists since the moment you

begin to doubt it you refute yourself it is like saying I am speechless if it were true then you could not say it and since dayart thinks that doubt is a species of thinking he says that we must exist as thinkers now there are a number of different formulations and interpretations of this argument this is just one of them one debate is over whether deot meant this to be a strictly logical argument or rather something more Primal a sort of philosophical intuition I won't discuss this particular dispute here as Alex okona already has a video

on it that I will link in the description i instead want to discuss what this argument actually proves is it sound and does it actually place our own existence Beyond any doubt or show that it's true which as we will see are two separate things so let's dive into the nuts and bolts of the argument and see if it holds water but first if you want to help me make more videos like this consider subscribing to my Channel or my email list or my patreon if you're feeling very generous the links are in the description

two I think therefore what let's revisit the argument that deot presents in full again as we can see in this formulation we have three premises and a conclusion the first premise seems pretty strong it is presupposed by the very issue dayart is trying to solve that of him doubting all of his beliefs so if doubts did not exist there would be no problem in the first place and we can forget the whole issue we could all just Retreat back into philosophical contentment so I'm going to label the first premise as very defensible and the third

premise is somewhat solid as well it seems part of the meaning of the indexical symbol I that it refers to the speaker so if the argument is being presented by the person doubting then it seems to hold firm there are arguments against this most famously from ber and Russell but I'll set those aside for now and just assume this premise but it is in the second premise that we see a real weak point in decart's argument if we are throwing all of our beliefs into question can we really say that doubt cannot exist without a

doubter could we not imagine a world where doubt exists by itself without any need for someone doubting we actually use this sort of wording in our everyday speech when we say there are doubts about something rather than referring to specific doubters so is this where day Cut's argument begins to fall apart this is the point where many people will cry out but that's just ridiculous we know that doubt doesn't exist without someone to doubt that is surely true but remember that dayart is trying to create certain knowledge so he cannot appeal to the fallible observation

that doubts and doubters actually exist together in the real world he must prove from first principles that doubt and doubters cannot even conceptually be separated so at first glance it seems that dayart has not shown that we exist but rather simply that doubt exists if this is true then despite all appearances there is a possibility that you watching this video yes you right now actually don't exist but in my opinion this criticism only works if we take a very particular view on dut's argument namely that he is trying to show that the statement I exist

must be true via logical argumentation but this may be a misunderstanding of what the great French mathematician was aiming for in meditations he actually does not say that he's looking for a belief that is true but rather one that he simply cannot doubt this might seem at first to be a trivial distinction but in this context it really matters after all we can imagine something that's possibly false but for some reason we simply cannot disbelieve it some people have proposed the existence of other Minds to be just one example of this it is a theoretical

possibility that other people do not have thoughts feelings perceptions or ideas and are in fact unconscious automater but nonetheless I cannot bring myself to believe this it is something I cannot seem to doubt in practice but nonetheless may be false it could be that dayart is not saying I exist must be true but rather that I exist cannot be doubted by its speaker Alex okon's video also touches upon this point but I want to explore it further here if we take this interpretation of dayart we might reformulate his argument like this one the existence of

my own doubts cannot be doubted two if I cannot doubt the existence of my doubt then I also cannot doubt the existence of a doubter three I call this doubter I conclusion I cannot doubt that I exist I see this as a more robust version of dut's argument for two reasons the first is that it is couched in psychological terms making it much easier to verify you could make a positive argument that actually you cannot doubt that a doubter exists if you cannot doubt that a doubt exists that is that the two concepts are so

inextricably linked in your head that you cannot prize them apart and the second is that in avoiding the notion of Truth it also fits much more comfortably into a world where we are actually being deceived by an evil demon it allows us to say I could not exist but I cannot doubt that I exist this might come across as a bit confusing but in my opinion it's actually a much more defensible position and it's closer to the actual persuasive force of I think therefore I am the thing that makes this argument convincing for so many

people is that it seems impossible to think the phrase I think without the I referring back to a speaker namely the person thinking it and bringing them into existence as a presupposition of course it's worth noting here that if the third premise of the original argument is false then we cannot make this move but I will leave you to debate this in the comments this formulation also brings the skeptical challenge that all our beliefs might be false a bit more down to earth surely what makes a skeptical scenario genuinely distressing is the idea that we

can doubt all our beliefs in the same practical way that we can think that we've misheard someone's speech or misremembered someone's face but if dayart has shown that we cannot doubt all our beliefs in this manner then he's gone some way to responding to the skeptical challenge but whatever you think of decart's argument let's examine its consequences if it is sound and foremost among those consequences is the picture it paints of the human mind three I think therefore existence is fleeting if we carefully consider dut's argument we can see that it actually only proves a

certain kind of existence that is existence while we are thinking as a thinking thing as I said before one perspective on dut's argument is that it constructs a self-verifying sentence at any moment you are thinking you can say I exist and it will verify itself if you did not exist you could not formulate the thought that you do exist and as a result Your Existence is verified at the very same moment the statement is thought the trouble with this is it only actually secures Your Existence while you are actively thinking that is if you were

to stop thinking even for a millisecond then dut's argument would no longer hold and your existence would be thrown into question question again if we follow decart's philosophy further the situation is actually much more dire than this deart infers from his Kito argument that if we exist we must do so fundamentally as thinking things this makes sense from his perspective he wants to show that the human soul is Immortal and separable from the body and defining it by thinking makes his task much easier as well as this it is the only kind of existence that

is guaranteed by a successful cogito argument but this also makes the problem we just discussed much worse then when we stop thinking we actually do cease to exist we lose the very thing that defines us dayart may have demonstrated our existence at some point in time but if we take his definition of a person seriously if we ever stop thinking we will just pop out of existence and there is also another key way in which the kogito argument would only prove a very limited version of existence when people invoke this argument they're often attempting to

show that they exist with all of their ordinary qualities that is if I were to invoke the argument I would be proving that I exist as someone called Joe who enjoys philosophy writing and sometimes makes mistakes in his re resarch but dart's argument fails to show this at all none of my wants desires mental Properties or even preferences are shown to exist it is simply me as I think I may not even be correct about the contents of my thoughts I may think that I'm thinking about dayart right now but I'm actually thinking about a

man called Ted who lives in Sunderland the literal only thing that dut's argument shows if it is successful is the existence of me as something that is thinking no other properties could be inferred from a successful coito argument and this is not by by any means a criticism of dayart as he would probably agree with this the Kito argument for him is just a stepping stone to a series of arguments about the nature of our existence the accuracy of our other beliefs and the properties of God but it is an important caveat to how the

Kito argument is used in practice we must bear in mind that its scope is actually very limited we don't even gain privileged access to the contents of our own mind merely a reassurance that it exists in some way at first this renders decart's argument a lot less impactful than it initially seemed it gave the impression that it would Safeguard our existence us as our minds with all their usual properties but on closer inspection it can only rescue a very impoverished version of who we are this makes perfect sense in the context of decart's overall projects

but it is far less than most people hope for from this argument I have sometimes seen this painted as a knockdown argument for the kogito that decart has tried to prove something substantial and has failed rescuing only a sliver of what constitutes personal existence but I want to propose the slightly controversial view that this is is only right and proper contrary to popular opinion we don't have infallible access to the contents of our own minds that is I may think that I am thinking one thing but I'm actually thinking another I may misperceive my own

perceptions and misfeasance you could obviously do so it appears self-evident that you cannot be mistaken that what you are picturing is actually a blue elephant on first examination it seems that whatever doubts we have about the external world we cannot be wrong about the contents of our own minds and the contents of our own perceptions even dayart is convinced on this point we could imagine an argument structurally very similar to the Kito argument to support this if an evil demon were deceiving us we would nonetheless have to have an accurate view on the contents of

those deceptions otherwise the deceptions just might not work if a demon made it so that every time I saw an apple my sense perceptions were Twisted so that I perceived an orange instead I would still be right about the contents of my own perceptions whatever was going on in the real world if I said I am perceiving an orange I would be correct it is a sort of I am deceived therefore I perceive But Eric schitz Gable raises a series of counter examples to this seemingly obvious point and shows that we can make mistakes about

the contents of our own minds first he points to our emotional states is it really so inconceivable that I could be wrong about what I am feel it an old acquaintance of mine studied many years to become a licensed therapist and something she says she's helped multiple clients with is their inability to perceive their own emotional states or to misperceive them they might mistake sadness for anger or anger for fear no evil demon is needed to show that we can be wrong about the contents of our emotional states it happens all the time it's not

even that uncommon to hear people say I don't know how I feel especially in romantic contexts so is it really that far-fetched to think that while we know that we exist we can make numerous errors in judgment as to who we actually are remember we are looking for indubitable knowledge and it seems like we don't have it here but perhaps you think emotions are a special case surely we can't be wrong about the contents of our own perceptions but unfortunately even they are not immune to self-deception if you ask most people offhandedly to estimate how

much of their Vision they think is clear then provided that they have no major sight impairment they will tend to say that all but the very edges of their vision is crystal clear but you can test whether this is the case right now in this video keep your eyes focused on one spot on the screen and try to bring your attention to the world around that spot without moving your eyes you will find that a few degrees from the center of your vision it will immediately start to blur I once did this demonstration during a

presentation when I was at Cambridge and it was amazing to see how it dawned on the audience how their Vision was so much less clear than they initially thought they knew what peripheral vision was of course but the speed at which the clarity of your site decays as you leave the center of your view left many of them genuinely astonished they were mistaken about the contents of their own perceptions two points to the skeptic zero points to introspective privilege and this is not to mention all of the different psychological and psychoanalytic theories that show how

we could be mistaken about all manner of aspects of our inner experience from Notions of repressed trauma to unconsciously motivated behaviors there are a Litany of psychological theories that paint us as fundamentally mistaken about the contents of our own minds even if you're skeptical of some of them invoking infallible introspective knowledge would require rejecting all of them which is a much more difficult task so perhaps dayart has done only what is possible within the bounds of logic a successful Kito arguments may only show that we exist or our existence is beyond doubt in a very

limited way but it seems that any attempt to establish infallible knowledge of ourselves Beyond this would be Highly Questionable after all we didn't even have to invoke thought experiments we have here three everyday examples of deceived introspection and we were only just getting started in some ways this is a defense of both dayart and the skeptic the skeptic has gained some important territory we have conceded that even our introspection is fallible but in some ways we've given a defense of the scope of decart's original argument it is not fair to criticize someone for achieving what

is likely impossible given our counter examples so to say that decart's Kito argument has fallen short of demonstrating a substantial notion of the self is accurate but that is hardly our fine French mathematician's fault it is simply the limits of what logic can do but I want to end this video by exploring an argument that runs almost directly parallel to day Cuts formulated by monks hundreds of years before he existed and with almost the exact opposite conclusion five I think therefore I'm not it is Central to the tradition which dayart came from that the self

remains undivided if the self could be fragmented into pieces then maybe the soul could as well and Theological chaos would ensue but if we let go of this position then we can uncover another perspective on how our ability to think relates to the self one that comes from early Buddhist thinkers and argues that our thinking is fantastic evidence that in fact we do not exist at least not as one undivided entity as decart would like I will be using an edited and simplified version of a much grander argument made by many Buddhist philosophers but I

will link the passage of philosophy that I'm referring to in the description this new argument starts with the observation that our thoughts undergo momentto moment change one minutes they might dwell on the blue elephant and the next what we had for dinner and then some deep-seated anxiety and then right back to the blue elephant again at no point do we see any single thread that links these thoughts together into one permanent object that we could call the self or the soul there are only a series of disperate Parts the same goes for our feelings one

moment we might feel happy the next we might feel sad then we might feel angry with no permanent emotional through line that we can identify a permanent unchanging self with we can even apply the same arguments to our memories our memories change over time they are edited when we recall them and they fade out of existence if they go unused so even our memories are not unchanging or permanent but are instead just another example of an Ever altering string of disconnected objects that we call with the same label merely for convenience's sake of course if

we did not have mental operations then things would not be that much better we would still underg go physical changes and the idea that inanimate objects can have a self or a soul seems much less plausible than when we apply it to thinking things though some have argued that seemingly inanimate objects are actually conscious in some way I'll link an article on pans psychism in the description for those interested slightly mad and deeply admirable viewers so it seems that either way we cut it the standard notion of I that we present to the world is

under dire threat I love this argument because it starts with the same general premises as dayut that we are thinking things yet it arrives as an entirely different conclusion that there is no such thing as an undivided permanent self of course there are ways we can respond to this argument we could appeal to an idea of continuity between our perceptions or of our memories or introduce the self as a concept to explain why all of these disperate states seem so connected I'm not suggesting that we should all immediately abandon any notion of the self but

I bring this argument up because it illustrates an interesting point about decart's own perspective dart's argument aims to show that we exist in a very particular way that is as an undiv Ed thinking thing and in some ways this conception of who we are is the most interesting part of the argument it places our thoughts at the very center of what makes us human this idea was inherited from Plato and Aristotle and it moves through the ages to touch us here today most of us identify very strongly with our thoughts and our inner World usually

far more so than anything physical like the shape of our bodies or the color of our hair and the World Views hidden in arguments like this fascinate me because it makes me think about all of the philosophy that has shaped our ideas of ourselves and society that we aren't even aware of before reading Aristotle Plato dayart and Kant I had no idea where I had inherited this idea that humans were fundamentally thinking creatures and before reading someone like nature I hadn't had these ideas challenged in such a profound way and I think this is part

of what makes philosophy so impactful it can shape the assumptions that we don't even know we have perhaps we are a thinking thing perhaps we were an impermanent self perhaps we never existed after all but whatever is actually the case we owe a lot of how we conceive of ourselves to the philosophical traditions that have been around long before us and will remain long after we are gone and I think that's really quite beautiful if you want more perspectives on personhood click here to learn how Jean Paul satra thought our minds were influenced by the

judgments of others and stick around for more on thinking to improve your life