What Descartes Got Wrong

Non-Cartesian Meditations

"I think therefore I am"? - not quite.  After one doubts everything, there is indeed one truth remaining, but "I think therefore I am" ain't it.  It is clear that, even if everything is an illusion, nonetheless, this illusion is being perceived.  But this proves nothing that about the perceiver, or even that there is one, and not several.  

To update Descartes' metaphors a bit, we could imagine that everything we're aware of is part of a simulation.  To make the metaphors a little too contemporary, we could imagine that everything is part of some kind of virtual reality game.  (I'm sure that vocabulary will sound hokey and old fashioned in a few years.)  

But I want to be very clear, up front, and specify: do I think that the universe is an illusion, and we (or rather I) am merely living in a simulation?  No, I do not.  I think the universe is real.  I do not think I'm in a simulation.  All I'm saying here is that logically, we could imagine that everything we experience could be part of a simulation.  (Is that really plausible?  Maybe not.  I've seen some compelling arguments that the technology required to make a truly convincing simulation of a universe is impractical and essentially impossible.  Of course those arguments could just be part of the simulation!)  The point here is not that I am arguing that I, or you, actually live in a simulation.  The point is merely that if we consider this logical possibility, it highlights some interesting and salient points about the nature of experience.  So let's imagine, just for the sake of argument, that everything you have ever experienced is part of a simulation, a kind of "game".  (The fact that we are merely imagining this, for the sake of argument, should be implied in all of the statements that follow for the rest of this essay, but I'm not going to bother writing it every single time, and so if someone excerpted a passage below, they might think that I really live in a simulation, which I don't.)

But who, or what, is "playing" this "virtual reality" "game"?  Are you... you?  There's no way of knowing.  Perhaps there's a single "player".  Or maybe there are multiple "players".  (Think of the movie "Being John Malkovich," in which Dr. Lester and his fellow travelers are all capable of entering the portal and being John Malkovich at the same time.  Of course this sounds bizarre, but there is no a priori logical reason to say that it is impossible.  Maybe there are several consciousnesses experiencing your experiences right now.  Maybe billions, or quintillions.  Maybe the number of consciousnesses experiencing your experiences is not a whole number: let's say, 6.7 consciousnesses.)  Then again, maybe the "game" is running with no one inside of it.  The lights are on, but no one's home.

We cannot, without making assumptions, rationally determine that "I am."  Let's start with the "I think" part.  "Thinking" shouldn't be the focus here.  Nor is it "doubting."  People only confuse the matter further when they rephrase Descartes' dictum as "I doubt therefore I am."  We are especially wrongheaded if we conceive of this in terms of language.  After all, I could easily program a computer (in BASIC, in a program only a couple lines long) to print out the words "I think therefore I am."  But that wouldn't tell us anything particularly interesting.  The computer would have the words, "I think therefore I am," but they wouldn't mean anything to the computer, or at least they wouldn't mean the same thing they mean to us. 

The real issue is consciousness.  A book contains words.  It may contain thoughts, and even doubts.  It may even, like the Meditations of Descartes, contain "I think therefore I am."  But a book is not conscious - at least, not in any way that we know about.  (Of course, there is the possibility of panpsychism - the possibility that literally everything is conscious - a possibility that I take very seriously.  But even in that case, a book is not conscious because it has words in it.  Plenty of things that do not contain words are also conscious.)  

The problem with thoughts is that thoughts, too, could be part of the simulation.  Every thought I've ever had, or will have, could be pre-programmed, part of the movie that is playing for me, beyond my ability to control it.  Maybe I only doubt because I'm programmed to doubt.  And if I think that I have control over my own thoughts, that illusion of control, too, could be part of the simulation.  I think I should get up and do my laundry, and then I do indeed get up and do my laundry.  But are these events causally connected?  Or has the simulation been designed in such a way that these preprogrammed events, interior and exterior, roughly coincide?  

Even if we expand our understanding of "thoughts" beyond linguistic constructs, to include the images, imagined movies, dreams, ineffible feelings, deep intuitions, and so on within our minds, that may all be part of the simulation.  My memories might be simulated, my emotions might be simulated, my pain, my pleasure, my unconscious motivations - all of that could be part of the simulation.  My identity, my sense of self could be part of the simulation.  

And yet!  Although all of that could be unreal, nonetheless, there is something undeniably real, which is that the experience of all of that is happening.  

"I think therefore I am" is a bad way of putting it.  How can we put it better?  "Consciousness exists, therefore something is."  But I'm not even sure of that "is," or that "exists".  Let's leave being out of it.   How about "Experience is happening, therefore... experience is happening."  (Note that this does not specify to whom it is happening.)  But this is a tautology.  Let's just leave it at "Experience happens."  That's what we can be certain of.  Perhaps we could rephrase it as "Experience is happening," so long as we merely understand the "is" in that sentence as a helping verb of "to happen," indicating the present continuous tense, not imply any kind of "being."

I like this formulation, for several reasons. All we are asserting is that experience is happening right now - this is no guarantee that experience has happened before, or that it will continue to happen.  (Of course, memory of the past is a part of present experience, as is protension of the future.)  I also like it that experience is "in the driver's seat," as it were, in this sentence.  Consciousness is the "to whom" of experience.  Does consciousness exist?  Well, what do you mean by consciousness?  It's hard to say.  If we simply define consciousness as "that to which experience happens," - whatever that might be - then, sure, why not - whether consciousness is one thing, or many things, or nothing.  

When I speak about the possibility that consciousness is "nothing," what I mean is that in this possible scenario, consciousness has no positive content apart from an abstract passive role, the mere "output" of experience - that consciousness would be nothing without the experience that is happening to it.  If that's the case, then we could say that consciousness exists in the same sense that we can say that the sky exists, without specifying what the sky may or may not be: it's everything visible from a planet's surface, other than the planet itself.  The term "sky" would be meaningless, without reference to a ground.  Or we can talk about the existence of the exterior of a circle, which would be meaningless, if there were no circle.  

Now, of course, that is just a possibility, not a certainty.  It may very well be that consciousness is something, or many things - that it has some kind of positive content or meaning, apart from its experience.  What that could be, I have no idea.  But the possibility that consciousness is, so to speak, "nothing"- that is, that it has no existence apart from experience itself, is another way of saying Husserl's famous dictum that "Consciousness is consciousness of something."  But that is mere dogmatism on Husserl's part.  It may very well turn out that there could be such a thing as consciousness that does have some kind of existence apart from its experience - that is to say, I cannot automatically and dogmatically rule out the possibility that there could be consciousness that is conscious of nothing, or, to put it better, consciousness that is not conscious of anything.  Some Buddhists seem to claim that this is possible, if I understand them correctly - that there is a state in which one is conscious of nothing, in which one has truly cleared one's mind of all experience.  Who is right?  Husserl or the Buddhists?  I don't pretend to know.  More importantly, there is no a priori logical proof in either direction, and so if we are to doubt everything, as Descartes says, this will be left unresolved.

I must say that, personally, my intuition leans in the direction away from Husserl in this controversy.  And this brings up a larger point: the word "consciousness" is, of course, ambiguous.  Sometimes people use the word "conscious" to mean "awake," as opposed to "asleep".  But that's not how I'm using the word, here.  When I speak about consciousness, I'm including sleep.  I would say that when I am dreaming, I am conscious of my dream.  I have gotten into conversations with people on this topic, and this became a stumbling block, preventing effective communication, but, first of all, I believe that language is stipulative.  As Humpty Dumpty said, "Words are our servants, not our masters."  We can, for the sake of a conversation, stipulate that a word means whatever we want it to.  But also, in this case, I just want to throw my hands in the air, and say Of Course!  Of course I am conscious of my dreams.  In fact, when I'm asleep, my dream is nothing other than that which I am conscious of.  Could anyone really meaningfully claim that they are not conscious of their dreams?  (I mean, sure, afterwards, you might not remember them.  But during them, you must be conscious of them - or else can you say the dream even happened?)

And what about dreamless sleep?  Am I conscious then, too?  Yes.  By the definition of consciousness that I am using, or at least gesturing towards, as best I can, there's never been a time in my life that I wasn't conscious (as far as I know).  When I am experiencing dreamless sleep, I am experiencing dreamless sleep. And since consciousness is that to which experience happens, there is consciousness, even in dreamless sleep.  

I also believe that it's possible to experience cessation of thought, and I think I have experienced this, but only briefly.  I'm not talking about Buddhist enlightenment here, although that may very well also be possible.  But I've certainly had more mundane experiences, such as thinking, and being in the middle of an activity, and suddenly I lose the train of my thoughts, or forget what I was doing, and my mind suddenly goes blank.  For a second or two, I'm just thinking nothing.  Does that mean I cease to be a conscious being?  Of course not.  Consciousness goes on, without thought.

I've discussed the cessation of thought, dreams and dreamless sleep - but what about deeper levels?  It is generally believed by many people, including some scientists, that a patient becomes truly unconscious during general anaesthesia (for instance, while being prepped for surgery).  Is that really true?  Do you actually cease to be a conscious being?  Are you like a rock?  I'll admit that I don't know, but I have to say I doubt it.  And I'm not alone.  Here's a scientific, medical paper suggesting that consciousness actually does not simply disappear when a patient is anaesthetized.  I feel similarly about comas and so on, though again I will admit that I don't know.  For one thing, I would say that it seems perfectly possible that one could be conscious of something, without forming a lasting memory of it.  And indeed, I think I do this all the time, every time I experience something in a dream and then forget about it upon awakening (or, for all I know, earlier).

It seems perfectly possible to me that consciousness could persist without thought, belief, feeling, memory, sensation, or a sense of self.   (This is the distinction between ego and consciousness: ego could be part of the simulation, but not consciousness.  See my thoughts on the ego here.)  Could consciousness persist even without a concept of space, or the sense of the passage of time?  I'm going again to buck against Husserl, who insisted upon the fundamental ground of "internal time consciousness" and say that my intuition says yes, it could.  Or at least I don't see any a priori logical reason why it couldn't.  Again, it seems possible to me that one could truly be conscious of nothing, and yet, nonetheless, be conscious.  Or, to put it better, experience could be happening, even if that experience was the absence of experience.