How would you explain this passage in Descartes work?

Question

I am! I exist—this is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking; for perhaps it could also come to pass that if I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist.

Answer 1

Be careful about taking things out of context. It is very easy to make someone seem to say the exact opposite of what he is after in this way.

Take, for example, the VERY NEXT LINE after your quoted portion: "At present I am not admitting anything except what is necessarily true."

We can see, then, that he is not seriously proposing that by not thinking he will not exist. What he is doing is trying to stay open to alternatives, and he does this by proposing something so ridiculous and contrary to our experience that we will know how open he is.

Everybody is aware that not thinking will not cause you to not be. Nobody would expect a person to wink out of existance if you administered a drug which prevented any kind of cognitive thought. Even infants learn that objects have permanence - they exist even when you cannot see them and when they appear to have no effect on their surroundings. The idea that 'you' simply vanish (even as a mental construct) in any instant when you are not thinking only to be spontanously and identically reborn in the next instant (even as a mental contruct) is just one that he is bringing up simply to discard.

There is a reason, after all, that Descartes kept trying to prevent people from saying, "I think THEREFORE I am"... he never said this. Thinking is evidence of existance, but it is not a CAUSE of existance any more than not-thinking causes nonexistance.

Answer 2

It's pretty much the one basic truth all of us know.

We exist because we can think. The fact that we can mull this over in our heads proves that to ourselves at least, we are real.

And basically perhaps when we stop thinking, we will cease to exist. But there's no way to know for sure, since to the best of our knowledge, we haven't experienced that yet.

The idea of souls is a comforting thought but it makes sense to me that when our minds stop working we'll be gone.

Answer 3

Beliefs such as this are responsible for the constant chatter that people hear in their head. Those who can engage in inner silence, have a different belief.

Each time we stop thinking, the "I" does die. Except it is reborn each time we begin to think again. Stop thinking for 5 minutes and then start again, you'll find that you didn't utterly die. The ego or awareness may have stopped for a short period.

Answer 4

He is linking awareness to existence in terms of mind. Since our consciousness is defined by awareness then our only clue to existence is our awareness of ourselves. When we cease to be aware, we cease to exist.
Read the argument from dreaming before you ask about what happens when we sleep.

Answer 5

He was ragging on all the religious type people who want someone else to think for them. Do they exist? Or are they just puppets?