ygolo
My termites win
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2007
- Messages
- 6,001
The objective cause of thoughts is God.
It seems this thread has come back to life, so I want to make sure I understood. Is it that you believe that since existence is due to God's thoughts, the fact that we exist means we are God's thoughts, and that is what you meant by "I think" in the statement "I am therefore I think"?
Hmm. Not sure that you could ever demonstrate that in any meaningful way.
Apparently not over the internet at least
i am therefore i think
I'm having deja vu.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
We had one person say that God's thoughts created everything, which lead to this belief. Is this what you believe too?
Thinking maybe isn't necessary for awareness (depending on how we define awareness). You can probably catch a ball or something without thinking about it.
Your body does all kinds of stuff that require awareness yet you don't really think about it, like orienting yourself in space, but there's different kinds of awareness.
There's awareness that you are aware of, as in looking at something and knowing that you see it.
There's focus, which is being aware of what you want to be aware of and consciously causing yourself to focus on that thing.
There's subconscious awareness. You're taking stuff in, and it registers, like walking through a crowd - you know it's a crowd without having to take in all the people individually and discern it. Something might also come out of the background and demand your conscious attention, like noticing a clown among 1,000 people wearing business suits.
When I made this thread, I used a very matter-of-fact use of the word thinking...that is having thoughts....the ones we consciously notice. But people have been far more creative in their interpretation that I would have anticipated. Note however, that Descartes only need the very rudimentary and surface observation of his own conscious thoughts to be aware of his own existence.
It is clear (to me, at least), that existence does not require having conscious thoughts.
If my thoughts are God's and my existence is God's thoughts, well we are using the words very differently from the way people usually talk about thoughts. Perhaps it is true that the common usage of "thinking" illustrates an illusion. But, I believed, my original statement, based on the use of "thinking" in it's common meaning, was fairly self-evident.