Ok, let us continue with this idea of I.
So from what I’ve read (and of course we need to question the validity of what I’ve read too, but one thing at a time) and from what I observed when you Dana where a little child. The idea of I develops slowly. We are not born thinking of ourselves as separate (I don’t know what we think, probably we simply don’t think about it at all) but at some point we all develop an idea of an individual self (interesting wording, “develop an idea“) I guess you could say also (if you were committed to preserve the I) become aware of the existence of I (interestingly, these two approaches would take us to completely different conclusions.
Let us assume the idea position first. This means that somehow we are convinced or end up believing that I exists. One explanation is that everybody tells us that I exist, they refer to us by our individual name, talk about our individual needs, treat us like an individual entity (since everybody believe we are individual entities) and we ended up believing. If my tummy hurts, that means that I is hungry, for example. Usually children begin by referring to themselves in a third person (not I am hungry, but “Dana” is hungry). So it could be a learned concept, just like time and past-present-future are abstractions. Do animals think in terms of time and past-future? I don’t know but does not seem to be the case. Do animal think of themselves as individual beings? I don’t know, I believe I read some research where they put a dot of paint on the chest of some birds and then show them a mirror and apparently they were able to recognize themselves (but of course we don’t know, we can only assume based on what we see).
How can I prove the existence of I? So far it seems like the cogito is not such a great way since it presupposes the conclusion it tries to prove. In terms of a syllogism maybe? Can I come up with such? I can try but I am not philosopher (at least not yet)… I cannot come up with a good one! Hehehe, that should teach me not to be so presumptuous. But I digress.
I am stuck. How can we prove anything if we cannot even prove that we the one perceiving things exists for sure? Clearly our senses can be mistaken. I’ve seen enough examples of illusions to agree that the senses can be triked to see what is not there or not simply not see what is there. Stage magic is based on it, it is fun to watch, but scary to think about its implications, basically that reality -whatever that means and we don’t know yet- can be manipulated, that our own senses, the very tools we use to make sense of the world are not reliable tools. Is that good news (liberating) or bad news (not certainty).
So the traditional way of proving the existence of something is first through the senses, but we know that the senses can be tricked (dreams, hypnosis, tricks, illusions, magic all mess up our senses). The second could be by rational thinking but that is also tricky because for thinking to be reliable we would need valid incontrovertible assumptions first, and as a psychotherapist I see over and over how assumptions are always partial, incomplete and mostly unquestioned (they come from our childhood, we concluded them when our thinking tool was not fully developed and since then they color everything we do). Transpersonal thinkers would say that there is a third (and probably many more) way of knowing, through direct experience (doesn’t that takes us back to the senses?).
There you have it. Stuck again. If we cannot trust our senses and cannot trust our thinking, what can we trust? Can we go by not trusting anything? Of course that is the purpose of these writings, question everything (Leary’s advice “Think for yourselves and question authority” come to mind).
This is a somewhat uncomfortable place to stop, but let’s be in the unknown and hope for something to emerge…
