The Thinker

Shall I offer up small talk until I begin with the meal? I could discuss the weather today, which is fairly decent, for January. I don't much care for sports, so how the team did yesterday I wouldn't know. I only look at the sports section if the comics or Ann Landers is located there. In fact, that's all I read in the paper besides the front page, so the news is out of the question. So then, let us begin.

"I think, therefore I am," says Descartes, and this aphorism begins the basis of all of his philosophy. Cartesian geometry aside, which my students would be happy to do without, perhaps this one statement presumes too much.

Why must we begin anew? Why do we presume that nothing is really real? All is illusion, blows a wind from the East. There is no reality, there is only our perception of it. Look at an object. Is that object there? Or do you only see it as there? Ultimately, it is because you use your senses to perceive this object that you think it is real. But can we trust our perceptions to be true? I, for one, do not trust them in the least. To state it simply, have you ever wondered if what you saw as green someone else saw as red? What colour is it then? Whose perception is more accurate? And if this is applicable to things which are not so important to the world, like the perceived colour of things, how much more does it make life difficult when deciding on the reality and subsequent truth of things like love, salvation and other matter which wars are fought over?
("I refute it thus," says Johnson as he kicks the stone. Of course, his philosophy was more of the common kind, like insulting his Scottish brethren).

Let us come back to Descartes. We can be sure that we exist, because there are thoughts occurring. Some being, regardless of what we can know about that being, is doing the thinking. There cannot be thoughts without someone to think them. This idea is somewhat flawed, as Hume points out. The idea that thoughts come from someone who thinks them is causational. Those familiar with the thinking of Hume know that causation is not something that can be rationally shown to be true. The standard method of showing this is with billiard balls. Imagine a pool table. The white ball hits the coloured ball and the coloured ball moves. We would say that the white ball caused the coloured ball to move. Where, empirically, did we see the causation? We see the white ball move, we see it touch the coloured ball, we see the coloured ball move. We see the thinker, we see the thinking, we see the thought. We assume that the thinker caused the thought to occur.

This to come back to the point made in the last post, is there really a self? Is is possible that the world is just a collective bunch of thoughts without thinkers?