How Do You Know You Exist?
“I Think, Therefore I am”
Rene Descartes is the man credited to these few words. The simple meaning of the phrase is that thinking about one’s existence proves—in and of itself—that an “I” exists to do the thinking; or, as Descartes explains, “We cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt … .”
Yeah, that is so… philosophical. But how do you know you’re real? Is existence all just a big dream? Has some mad scientist duped us into simply believing that we exist?
James Zucker investigates all of these questions (and more) in this mind-boggling tribute to René Descartes’s “Meditations on First Philosophy.”