Tags
Cogito ergo sum.
Rene Descartes originally wrote, “Je pense donc je suis,” in his native French in Discourse on Method (1637). He later uses a Latin version including “Cogito ergo sum” in the Principles of Philosophy (1644).
I think therefore I am.
I’ve been thinking about this phrase a lot lately. It has been used and misused many times, paraphrased to make completely different points on other occasions, but largely, I fear, ignored.
I wonder sometimes how much most of us think. We seem so intent to go through life doing what we always do, even when we’ve been complaining that we don’t want to do it that way anymore. We parrot talking points without stopping to think if there is any veracity to the point being parroted. Worse, we parrot them even when they have been proven to be false. Still worse, we parrot them even when they make absolutely zero sense, logically or in any other way.
In other words, we don’t think.
By now some of the people who started reading have lost interest and clicked away. This to a large degree supports my thesis. They simply do not want to think. Thinking is hard, and requires taking responsibility for our actions, our decisions, and our words.
There are others who are on the verge of labeling this as the pedantic musings of a self-absorbed intellectual elitist. I thank them for getting this far and ask that they stay a little longer and take to heart the point that I’m hoping to get across.
My point, of course, is that I am deeply concerned that we appear to have decided that thinking is a bad thing; that we appear to take pride in ignorance. Think for a second. What is ignorance? It’s not so much the lack of knowledge because we can never know everything. Rather it is the willful refusal to acquire new knowledge. The more information we have, the more we can evaluate, assimilate, and integrate it into our thinking. And yet, the more we know the harder it is to think through the information, and the harder it is to make an informed decision. In this era of instant access to millions of inputs, knowledge can become overwhelming.
Herein lies the problem. We all have our daily lives…our work, our family, our faith, our priorities…and it is easier to simply go with the flow. Changing our routines, built over years of rote learning, can be disruptive. More information takes more time to assimilate, so we avoid more information. It’s too hard to think. It takes too much time.
Which is why the “sound bite” generation has taken hold. We “don’t have the time” to watch an entire interview, so we seek a sound bite to latch on to as “representative information.” Unfortunately, single lines taken out of context can easily be misinterpreted. And since new information may lead down a different path than that we are predisposed to take, assimilating it can cause internal conflict. New information often requires us to rethink our previous conceptions. It requires us to think. Therefore, we tend to focus on those sound bites that appear to support our predetermined view, and the networks dutifully feed us the sound bites we want to hear.
And we accept them without thinking.
The trick, of course, is to stop long enough to think. Social writing sites prevalent on the internet now allow people to create their own sound bites. Most blog articles are short and superficial because people tend not to focus long enough to read through the more informative ones. Comments are often short as well, and too often they reflect the predetermined opinions, biases, and even prejudices of the commenter and have nothing to do with the article itself. Often the commenters don’t read the article, including the short ones; we prefer to parrot our favorite rehearsed talking point without thinking.
Needless to say I thank anyone who has read this far. I suspect that only a few people would be curious enough at the foreign title to click on the article in the first place. And of those who did come here, I suspect only a small percentage will read the entire post.
I’ll conclude with a plea for all of us to think a little more. Let us break away from the sound bite mentality. Let us stop…long enough to question what we see and hear and read. Don’t take everything (or perhaps anything) at face value. Think about what the question meant – was it a “gotcha” question like “Do you still beat your wife?” in which no answer can be made? Think about the answer – was it a simple parroting of the talking point – or did it show that the person understood the multiple viewpoints and deeper ramifications of the issue?
Let us all take just a little bit of time to think.
I think therefore I am.
[The above is a somewhat revised version of a piece I wrote for a social writing site in 2008. Contrary to my expectations the post actually received more than 1100 views (average views by other posters was <100 views).]
David J. Kent is a science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity (2013) and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (2016) and two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
Check out my Goodreads author page. While you’re at it, “Like” my Facebook author page for more updates!
Hot White Snow 
David, this is well said. Me, I talk to myself, therefore I must be.
LikeLike
You definitely must be. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sharon told me you like the name, Cuddles. That took some thinking.
LikeLike
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
LikeLike
Sharon put up a contest on FB to name the missing bedbug on Gather’s front page. Blush, you probably aren’t the only David K, but you came to mind. I found out what she was up on on WP, here: http://slpsharon.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/gathers-dream-on-monday-link-what-makes-you-happy/#comment-125
LikeLike
Ah, got it now. That was her name for it. I don’t have a habit of naming things I would rather don’t exist. Nice to see that it is gone. I also noticed that the “My Home” (first on drop down menu under My Gather) had updated, so we can find articles directly instead of wading through the comment feed spammers on the main page. Still takes multiple tries to get to pages though. It would be nice to get back some of the basic functionality so we can find things. That said, perhaps we could start up another version of what Connie was doing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think I want to, but if you do, I’ll come visit. I still have no belief that Gather will ever improve—maybe change things to fool us, but I don’t go there much anymore.
BTW, Cuddles was my name for it. I don’t think Sharon gave it a name.
LikeLike
Argh, your name for it, not hers. [Mind fogs over again; reminder, replace asap].
As for Gather, it was a great venue and could be again if they fix access issues. Until then it is a place for me to share what I’m writing here. Maybe. It’s up to them.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I thought; therefore, I reply…
“What is ignorance? It’s not so much the lack of knowledge because we can never know everything. Rather it is the willful refusal to acquire new knowledge.” That’s a profound statement! However, I think it’s also something far more difficult to achieve in actual practice than one might think. In fact, it’s the idea at the crux of my own recent post here.
In the Buddhist Kalama Sutta, the idea of knowledge is addressed as a personal endeavor. In effect, it says that one should only believe that which one can prove to herself. A parallel in science might be the idea of “repeatability” — that valid results of one experiment should be verifiable as first-hand results by another. But it’s the interpretations of results that can be problematic. Summarily excluding the “absurd” can sometimes obscure better explanations.
The Cornell University Library maintained arXive is a legitimate attempt to address this though an open approach to publication, and looking through its contents (particularly the physics section) is like taking a dive into the chaotic reality of what is considered “knowledge.” Some of its articles probably reveal more about the psychological instabilities of authors than much else. But most are serious attempts at academics, often rather mundane, but sometimes asking questions that I think are ignored simply due to conviction to a paradigm.
A recent example is here: The authors of this article propose a quantitatively definitive experiment to determine whether or not linear-polarized photons are real, or if they are actually manifestations of paired, circular-polarized photons. Current science accepts the existence of linear-polarized photons due to statistically-derived experimental results, and a massive aggregation of single-photon experiments consequently have their own results based in an acceptance of this evidence. Accordingly, the proposal has been much maligned in the academic physics community as a sort of heresy. But I don’t think such serious attempts to ask questions that other scientists might consider closed to further evidence serves the practice of science in the long-run.
James Cronin and Val Fitch asked such a question, whether or not subatomic particles behave symmetrically through time — that is, whether the universe runs backward in the same way that it runs forward. And up until their experiments, it had always been assumed that it does. However, their results, heretical for the time, would ultimately justify a Nobel Prize in Physics.
LikeLike
The arXiv publication I was discussing can be found here – arxiv.org/abs/1407.2605
LikeLike
Thanks for your very thoughtful response. A couple of thoughts of my own.
First, the arXive idea has good motives, though obviously inherently fraught with the problem of receiving loonyisms from, as you say, folks with psychological instabilities (reminds me of Gather). This makes it difficult, often impossible, to find the gems of thinking amid the garbage. But perhaps sometimes a valid but otherwise previously undiscovered idea rises to the surface. If that happens it’s a valuable exercise.
Second, your example represents what is good about science. Sure, there was push back against the new idea. That’s not unexpected (for a variety of reasons) and actually warranted. For the new idea to displace “current science” it must be demonstrated through a robust scientific process, just as the original idea was in its time. If the new idea can stand the test of scrutiny, perhaps it will supersede the current understanding. Happens all the time. It’s how science works. [Which, though admittedly a messy process, does indeed work in the long run]
In larger sense, however, is the arXive really all that important? Scientists are always coming up with alternatives to the conventional wisdom (defined in this discussion as conclusions reached after significant scientific experimentation). Anything really ground-breaking will get push back but if further investigation supports the new idea it will eventually demonstrate its own veracity.
The crux really is what you noted in your second paragraph “Summarily excluding the “absurd” can sometimes obscure better explanations.” In short, are we too quick to write off what seems ridiculous? Perhaps that has happened many times over the decades/centuries and we’ve lost a lot of time when we could have had the answer long ago. There is no way to know. But this desire to “hear out” even fringe ideas has its dangers as well, as alluded to in my paragraphs above. The good ideas get lost in the cacophony of silliness that ensues with any open forum in this instant-self-declared-expert internet age. As Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote in their book Unscientific America, you can find tons of information on the internet, but most of it is crap.
This latter point is especially of concern because there are people out there who intentionally misrepresent the science because they are paid to do so (e.g., fossil fuel lobbyists on global warming). This misinformation is then widely spread by those who don’t care about whether it has any scientific veracity at all. So the problem becomes not whether scientists will unfairly dismiss absurd ideas out of protectiveness of their own, but protecting the scientific process itself from unfair attacks. To me that is a much more serious problem than whether scientists might miss “the big breakthrough.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Likewise David, thank you for your own very well thought-out and clearly stated reply. Please forgive the new thread — they seem to get terribly skinny after awhile!
I suspect that we’re largely in agreement. Admittedly, some of my own opinions regarding the veracity of statements of “truth” are derived from my own, personal experiences. I’ve seen first-hand how various influences can color the process, and not necessarily due to any unethical intent.
I do, however, see approaches such as arXiv as moves in the right direction. I believe sincerely that claims to knowledge should be in the public domain, open to public scrutiny and publicly debatable. Restricting access also restricts criticisms, which at best gives the appearance of elitism. But more destructively, it can also leave the broader aggregate of sound works in unnecessary defense against the image of insincerity generated by those less common cases of problematic works that were able hide themselves within the system.
As I see it, the sorting of “garbage” from genuine discipline should be within the domain of judgment for a healthy society. Institutionalized ignorance is the adversary of that willingness to stop and think that you mention, and that’s the real problem. What concerns me most is that it should ever be acceptable to simply follow without the cognitive skills even to discern between the “loonies” and that which at least lies within the realm of possibilities. To quote Dilbert, “When did ignorance become a point-of-view?”
However, if we are to be a society that values the results of rational thought, then we must also never concede to disallowing challenges to the status-quo. Skepticism and ignorance are not the same things; the “Gettier problem” illustrates that even justified true belief is not always the same as “knowledge.” And even a result that makes no change to current thought works to strengthen all associated propositions — the arXiv proposal I cited being an excellent example. So I think the real challenge is to dismiss the idea of “infallibility” without also dismissing the rational thought processes that keep us closest to the truth.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, I do believe we largely agree. I have absolutely no problem, and in fact encourage, critical thinking and constructive criticism. It’s part of what I’ve been doing for my entire scientific career. It’s part of science. My complaint is solely against those who intentionally misrepresent the science for political/lobbying purposes, or in the case of places like social networking pages, due to ignorance and the desperate need to self-validate one’s ego.
On real science sites, including arXiv but also the more scientific blogs, most of the discussion remains scientific and helpful for working through issues, as well as introducing new thoughts that may either complement or conflict with the discussion. The trolls and willfully ignorant usually don’t pollute such sites due to a combination of “can’t keep up with the discussion” and “comment moderation to exclude repeated offenders.” Remove the ignorant and the legitimate criticisms get a chance to be heard.
So I’m not particularly worried about losing constructive introspection (or extrospection, if that is a word) among scientists. While scientists, like all humans, can develop tribe mentalities or have a desire to protect “their” research, there are plenty of other scientists who are happy to provide contradictory evidence. And that’s the key – the evidence must be scientific, not simply a repetition of many-times debunked hogwash.
In fact, when trolls and lobbyists are dissuaded from polluting the scientific discussion, scientists are more likely to check each others work and find errors or faulty conclusions.
That said, I’m strongly in favor of scientists being more open with their research and providing not just access to data but a layman’s explanation of what it means. If scientists don’t communicate the science to the public there are vested interests who will communicate it – often miscommunicate it – for them. My goal now that I’ve dumped my very nice professional salary is to find ways to get science out to the public in ways they can understand. I’m seeing progress, but there is still a long way to go.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, apparently WordPress will at least allow me to “Like” a comment. Great response, and I indeed wish you well in your efforts to present some real science to the public in general. Scientific illiteracy is a serious societal handicap, and I really don’t believe it has to be that way.
“The more information we have, the more we can evaluate, assimilate, and integrate it into our thinking.” I couldn’t possibly agree more.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have taken the time to read the entire post – have been thinking on what you have said – and although my response may be short – this does not disqualify it as being valid.
A society of non-thinkers? Easy answer – the “dumbing down of (insert country of choice here). Information overload? Definitely. But let’s go back further than this: it starts much earlier – when people and parents and teachers rely on a system that informs and teaches young people NOT to question. To question is to reason is to think – independently – to reason in response. And then to perhaps act – with responsibility for choices, consequences and decisions.
This is a much lost “art and science.”
The quote: “Ours is not to question why, ours is to not let them die” – too late – the irony – taken out of context – is the perfect Catch 22.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Pat. One question about your statement that we’re reliant on a system that teaches young people not to question. Can you provide an example? After all, our system of teaching used to be extremely fact based – memorize dates, facts, and how things are done. I can see arguing that the system taught people not to think. But now, and for some years/decades, our system teaches kids to think more, work with others more, and memorize fewer facts. So would you go back to the old way of teaching, which essentially taught conformance? I’m curious as to how you think our system today teaches. I’m not questioning your statement, just trying to understand what you are thinking more clearly.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, if I think about your reply, I would agree – to a certain degree – there is definitely more liberties and advancements with regards to allowing for less dictated rules and systems. I suggest this comes from the immediate and instant access to so much innovative technology. And this isn’t a bad thing – at all – but, like so much that offers seemingly “too good to be true’ at lightning speed – do we stop to think – and question it enough?
Certainly, allowing for more open and interactive means of learning – where communication, and dialogues are exchanged is vitally important – but when essential basics are cast aside, in favor of the “new advances” then is something vital not lost?
How many young people today are able to properly write – in basic grounded grammar – or spell – without the aid of a spellchecker? And what about basic math – most have always relied on calculators and now, thousands of apps that do just about everything under the sun.
This affects not only younger children, as well as teens and young adults, but there is also a generation of people in their 30s to early 40s who also can’t possibly cover basics – like map reading – without having to rely on using an app or GPS.
I’m rather liberal minded – and no, I would consider it a terrible throwback to consider a school system that returns to outdated methods – there is nothing worse than being force-fed too much that is nothing short of awful – but technology should be used in ways that make the basics fun – easier to grasp and learn – but without having to rely on them solely.
Learning – constantly – is life – and it is through human interactions and experiences – and thinking and being – and doing – that we are the most fully engaged. It’s just a little troublesome to note that for many, now, of all ages – this is something we do less and less.
Does this help clarify my thoughts?
LikeLike
I would certainly agree that basic knowledge and skills must be a necessary part of our educational system. As you note, much of what we used to have to learn by rote is now simpler and faster to get through technology, so it’s understandable that kids don’t bother learning it. In some ways that’s fine because, after all, part of learning (and thinking, which is what we both agree is crucial) is knowing where and/or how to find information. With so much information now available there is no way to memorize it all, so clearly we need the skills to find it.
Which presents a dilemma. As I mentioned in one of my comments above (July 29, 2014 at 9:52 am), you can find tons of information on the internet, but most of it is crap. With so much information there is a tendency to filter out anything that doesn’t fit your preconceived opinion. It’s the biggest reason why Fox News is the most watched cable news network despite the fact that it is dishonest in its reporting. People listen to what they want to hear.
So everything that I’ve said, and the points that you and other commenters have added, get us back to the fundamental problem – people don’t take the time to think about the information and make honest judgments. The scary part is that I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree with you – and part of the problem lies – hah – pardon the pun – in knowing how to research and find information – but when it comes to mass media and the news – at the rate of the onslaught of information that is so easily accessible now, it has – unfortunately become a competition to provide the content – reliably sourced or not – before the others.
As you’ve said – people – and it has always been this way – but now so, more than ever – will always search out and be accepting of what it is they want and need to hear – in the moment. No more no less.
It’s rare people will take the time to really examine issues – because that means taking the time to really know oneself and to be willing to dig for truths. And who has time for that?
LOL – okay – it’s not a funny “hah hah” issue – but there are still those who choose otherwise – thankfully.
Interesting post and interesting comments and ideas offered here.
Have a great day 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
The title piqued my interest.
In response to your question to Pat:
“One question about your statement that we’re reliant on a system that teaches young people not to question. Can you provide an example?”
Religions teach children not to question.
LikeLike
I suppose that’s true, Susan. Religion, by definition, is taking what you’re told on faith. Facts aren’t particularly relevant; you either believe or don’t believe.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Verbal Confirmation | Blogged With Words
Hi. I click as you said because of the title : a French idiom now… Descartes wrote his theories in French at first due to his will to vulgarise them and push educated readers to think more efficient.
I think that there are two ways of thinking. The harder way is like tactics and strategies which organize our lives and responsability. The second way is the easier like taking pleasure, or babbling. This one is the most superficial.
My case is like the late : thinking superficial so much and I turn crazy (like a hamster in its wheel) not to put my finger on the most relevant thoughts. So I write; but I don’t know if it’s more efficient…
And at last, ignorance for me now has a new definition that is a great amount of information in which I don’t be able to select.
So thanks, because your post makes me think (a little ^^,) and find new writting ideas.
LikeLike
I think we often just go through our lives dealing with the immediate without thinking much at all about the bigger picture. I don’t know if that is a real problem or not. What is problematic, and to which I was referring, is the willingness to be ignorant when doing so is either self-fulfilling or serves our political beliefs. We can’t process all the stimuli, but we can choose not to ignore the true ones.
LikeLike
“I think therefore I am” has everything to do with human potential…and yet so many squander theirs for so long.
LikeLike
Unfortunately, so true.
LikeLike
What? You cheated. You didn’t write a new piece for today? Good points. My current phrase is “grow through life”.
LikeLike
Pingback: NaPoWriMo – Day 7 – “The Endless Beauty Of An Authentic Voice” by David Ellis | toofulltowrite (I've started so I'll finish)
Pingback: Diane Rehm, Political Correctness, and Abraham Lincoln | Hot White Snow