Descartes famously wrote the line, "I think, therefore I am", yet, in his attempt to be the absolute minimalist, it is quite possible that he took too much for granted.

What is “I”?  The following essay attempts to examine the notion both through the findings of scientific inquiries (which are, admittedly, limited by potential lack of reality based on Cartesian dualism), and through exercises in logic (which are perhaps less methodical, but are the exact means by which Descartes formulated his own hypotheses)

For the purpose of such an essay, let’s first establish what “I” is.  “I” is the first person perspective, the basis of what is generally called ‘self awareness’.  Self awareness is an odd term at that anyway because frankly, we only have enough concept of self to make us value such an entity.  We are hardly aware because we barely know what the being we call ‘self’ is.

In common usage, “I” is what human beings use to differentiate themselves from others.  Yet, it is a far less significant concept than it is made out to be.  It is actually merely the inevitable result of a high enough degree of cognitive ability isolated from other such sources via physical barriers.  The fact that cognition is the result of a physical complexity that can only adhere to its own perception is the fact of the matter as far as one’s “I” is concerned

The function of our conception of “I” is very easily illustrated through basic cognitive exercise: take a logarithm with an AI level comparable to the cognitive abilities of a human being.  Place it within a system so that it has 5 senses contingent only upon the aforementioned cognitive capability.  This machine would inevitable develop a comparable concept of “I” to differentiate from the things around it.  Alan Turing himself observed that consciousness was not tied exclusively to human beings when he designed his famous test for logarithmic-based thinking machines.

“I” is an easy concept to manipulate.  Those experienced in meditation are amazingly capable of retarding their first-person perspective, an event that is termed sometimes as ‘being at one with the universe’.  Other research has shown the instability of perspective, with Swiss researchers managing to alter a patient’s personal spatial awareness by stimulating the angular gyrus.

However, the savvy reader at this point will have recognized that the aforementioned arguments are hindered by Cartesian dualism, and thus philosophically speaking, are next to irrelevant.  What is philosophically relevant, however is the temporal limitations to thought itself.  To explain, Descartes insisted that the information behind certain thought; what was actually being perceived, could very well be false.  Therefore, memories of perceptions from the outside world would also be false.  One must wonder, at this point, could the information held in memories that seemed to have stemmed from the mind itself also be false?  In other words, could one’s memories of their own prior thoughts be memories of that which was/is not real as well?  This breaks the concept of “I” down into the mere thought in occurrence at a given time.  All else is no longer self evident.

Now that “I” has been effectively removed from conglomerate status, the story gets weirder still. “I” being the thought of a single instant, could the very information that asserts the thought itself be false?  One would be hard pressed to find an indisputably axiomatic argument otherwise.  What is this information then?  The intrinsic limit of what may be a representative falsehood?  The perception of an unknown perceiver? The subject of some extraneous portion of existence?

The list can continue, but perhaps the closest philosophy can come to a statement of self-evidence is that perhaps nothing truly is.

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