OOM, jmh: I was just reading that one! I’m going through all the Watch ones in order. Except Snuff, which is dumb.
What’s cool about Descartes’s point of view, to me at least, is that according to him, as jmh pointed out, it doesn’t matter whether you truly “exist” or not. As long as you feel like you exist, and you’re able to think about it, meaning that you have a consciousness, from his perspective, nothing else matters- you could be living as an experiment in a lab with everyone else fake to see how you react, or by yourself with everyone else as hallucinations, and it doesn’t matter, because realistically speaking we can only understand what is in our realm of experience. If we feel like we exist, then we exist, because something is doing the thinking, and that something thinks that what it is doing is existing.
Why do I feel like the entire above paragraph was a waste of virtual paper?
I guess it doesn’t matter, though, as long as my fingers burned calories writing it :).