I think therefore I am

I thought the best place to begin a conversation on this subject would be the famous statement from the French philosopher, Rene Descartes, I think therefore I am. If you would humor me, we are going to dive into the some elementary pop philosophy for bit. On a random night, probably bored because he didn’t have a smart phone to waste his brain away, Descartes took on this monumental feat according to his own words:

“I am here quite alone and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.”

It’s sounds like a ridiculous undertaking because we live in a world that is driven by opinions and not necessarily the pursuit of truth. But because Descartes was a mathematician, he worried that if the foundations of knowledge were not completely solid, anything built upon them would eventually collapse. From there he went down the rabbit hole of what philosophers call epistemology or what we would call the theory of knowledge. Epistemology attempts to answer the question of what is a justifiable belief versus what is simply an opinion.

What troubled Descartes so much was the fact that he had held so many false beliefs in his life but at the time he believed them to be absolutely true. I’m not sure if this troubles our post-modern generation especially those of us who grew up with Seinfeld telling us that if we believe in a lie long enough, it becomes the truth. But for Descartes, he hoped to find a way to ensure that he was living by a set of true beliefs.