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The nature of the human mind and how it is better than the human body - Descartes


 Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am; I'm sure plenty of you have heard this phrase in passing. It is probably one of the most famous quotes in the realm of philosophy and Descartes comes to this conclusion in the second mediation which I am going to dismantle today.


Just to recap a little, Descartes started this journey of “meditations” to rule out all certainty to arrive at something he is certain of that is unshakable and if in the process he finds no such thing he will be certain that there is no uncertainty.


To achieve certainty he believed it was necessary to excoriate all known truths and believe them to be lies; in doing so he created a sense of inner state that looked at everything with skepticism, anything which had the slightest uncertainty was immediately considered false in that manner he thought of his memories, his body, shape and place to be anything but veritable.


But to arrive at a clear distinction of what may give rise to even the slightest doubt one needed to have prior knowledge of what belonged in which category. Descartes making his own assumptions on what is spurious could make this little experiment of his go south. 


So if he convinces himself that something is false then he undoubtedly exists, similarly even if an evil demon was deceiving him, he must exist for it to deceive. We can conclude one thing here: I am, I exist.


Okay I am, I exist - simple enough right? What is “I” here? What does one think one is? In simple words the thought is the one thing that is truly inseparable from us. As he put it, even when we dream we experience things through our “senses”, senses which we realise didn't even exist until we are awake and thinking about the dream? Does that make sense?


When I was younger and even now when the idea of death came to my mind the only fear I had was the fact that I could no longer think, have feelings or essentially talk to myself in my mind anymore because that is what makes me, me. So if thinking is what makes us, and death is the cease of thoughts then once we die we can no longer think about death or non-existence so it shouldn't bother us.


I said before in my last post about Descartes view on the senses, we’ll be going more into that now. Say you take a piece of wax from a honey comb; in its initial state it will retain the taste of honey, it would be in a definitive shape and form. If you are asked to describe the wax you would probably list out the way it looks externally and that's that. Now in your mind you have a definitive idea that this is what wax is supposed to look like.


If you bring that wax next to fire its shape melts away, the fragrance which helped with its distinction fades away and you are left with something. You know that that is the same wax but you wouldn't be able to affirm that just through your senses: to do so you need some level of mental scrutiny to come to the conclusion. This is what Descartes is trying to say through his famous Wax Argument: the senses can be fooled by changes in an object's appearance. What we perceive through our senses can be misleading about the true nature of the object. 


When do you think we had the most comprehensive understanding of the properties of the wax? When we were restricted to relying on our senses to determine how wax was supposed to be or when we knew that even when melted that wax was wax even when it lost some of the distinct properties that made it evident of what it was?


Obviously, it seems to us almost common sense and logical that even in its melted state the wax was still the same wax because we, through our thinking, analyzed what happened and could comprehend the possibility of the wax melting.


This shows that the mind’s reasoning, not the senses, is what grasps the essence of things

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