The existence of metaphysical "Pseudo-objects" lacking any property (pure existence) is a primitive myth. Primitive beliefs in inmaterial disembodied spirits date back into pre-history long before  the later weirdness of Platonic realism and the useful fictions of mathematics in which number are often considered as being   realistic in the sense that some hold that mathematical objects (rather than the objects they apply to -  if that is the case)  are really present in the world and  exist, transcendentally, physically, or mentally.

Members of a given human group have usually internalised sufficient anticipatory data ready to attribute some form of predicative description to known spatio-physical objects. Such prevenient description is neurologically stored in order to cognitively instantiate a given ontologically appropriate subject with an antecedently internalised "ready-made" neurologically available predication.

Remembered predication which maps to a descriptive feature considered to be important to an addressor or an addressee is automatically triggered following any mention of a known subject name.

You can try this out for yourself by thinking of the word *cat.*

Whatever springs to your mind is either your own, unique prevenient predication with regard to the subject-name "cat," or it is an alternative name which replaces or adds more information to the generic word "cat."

Thus, if the first thing you think of is "Tiddles," it is usually because you have, or had a cat of this name, or that is/was the name of the cat next door, etc. and in doing so you have also instantiated a complete neurological compendium of all the properties of *catness* or *cathood* because you have individualised the generalised or universal properties or basic or essential attributes as shared by all members of the class of living entities known as cats - and Tiddles is the nominatum ( The nominatum of a proper name is the object itself which is designated thereby) which has enabled you do provide such a comprehensive predication.

If instead  of thinking of Tiddles, the first image you think of is a vague idea of a small, black, furry four-legged creature that meows - then your unique predicative prevenient data for the concept "cat" generates the sentence:

" A cat is a small, black, furry, four-legged creature that meows."

Retrievable and mapable predication is often typical of that spontaneously generated by other members of your human group -  if not - it is some unique personal description of their own.

Thus the ill-formed utterances of truncated, predicationless sentences that end with a terminal: *is* which are purported to be sentences which speak of the simple fact that a given subject simply exists, such as:

1. "God is"...

... triggers the retrieved internalised prevenient predicate... "the creator of the universe."

Thus: "God is the creator of the universe."

or

2. You have triggered and neurologically instantiated and managed to recall selected data from a complete neurologically memorised compendium of all the properties of *Godhood* that you have experientially internalised psychologically incorporated within yourself; and made subjective regarding the word "God." It is useless for me to attempt to guess the nature of your prevenient predication. The activity of your brain is not only inaccessible to me,  your unique prevenient predication is also too long and too complicated for me to guess at anyway.

Only YOU have access to this information and that is why it is unique - because you (like all of us) are a unique human being. God has so many prevenient predicative modalities that to enumerate them would be impossible and unnecessary - that is why so many snappy axioms like; "God is Love" or "God is Good" are created as ready-made" selected predicates - such predicative truths are assumed to be axiomatic and self-evident.

Similarily:

3. "Barack Obama is"

... triggers the retrieved internalised predicate ... "the current President of the United States."

Thus: "Barack Obama is the current President of the United States."

or

4. You have triggered and neurologically instantiated and managed to recall selected data from a complete neurologically memorised compendium of all the properties of *Barack Obama* that you have experientially internalised regarding the word "Barack Obama" Only YOU have access to this information and that is why it is unique - because you (like all of us) are a unique human being.

If a subject name is encountered which does not engender a ready-made predicate - then the subject is an unknown one to the addressee, then a veil of ontological ignorance remains in place, which usually generates a response such as:

"Sorry, what does that mean? Never heard of him/her/it," etc.

Through the ages matheticians have done the same by abstracting the signs that man originally created to signify various collectives of objects (3 goats, 7 camels, 37 bags of grain, etc) which were originally invented to avoid attributing a name to each individual object during personal, mensural, social, inheritance, and trading purposes.

Later even more sophisticated mathematical paraphernalia was invented such as sets, plus additional mathematical signage in addition to the ordinary numeral in order to cater for the concept of quantity involving zero and singularity, or the plurality of units. Even today, many mathematicians believe that numbers were NOT invented by man - but "discovered" by man and that number already existed and were (perhaps) stored in some great emporeum of Platonic abstraction in the sky.

There is a curious Russian religious sect called the Imiaslavie whose beliefs are also referred to as onomatodoxy - it is a splinter-group of the Russian Orthodox Church.  The sect is called: the Name Worshippers: (the Imiaslavie) The Russian  theo-mathematicians Egorov, Luzin and Florensky were members and they maintained that any mathematical objects invented (they would say "discovered") by them automatically existed. They dreamed up the set for infinity and pronounced that it now automatically existed.   (see bibliography).

Florensky was a pupil of Egorov and a classmate of Luzin, and they published together. Florensky published works on the parallels between abstract mathematics and religion: he stated that the mathematics of continuous functions is like rationalism while some concepts, such as transfinite numbers, can be explained only in the framework of the Imiaslavie philosophy, where the Name of God is God Himself. The historians of mathematics Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor have stated that the work of the Russian Mathematics School is still filled with this mysticism while the French Mathematics School is considered to be based on rationalism.(see bibliography).

In order for a name to correctly identify a real, concrete, spatio-temporal object and to be accepted as such, the name must map to something that is entiative, meaning it has a real existence as a corporeal entity.

The name of a named object is a name capable of being the concrete attributant of such an identificatory label. If such a name does NOT map to a concrete, spatially-present object, then the name fails to map to a real-world object and maps instead to a useful fiction.

What is the real name you attribute to yourself when you are in conversation with others? I do not know, and there is no reason why I need to know - but I DO know the pronominal terms you use to self-refer when you talk or write to other people - they are the subjective form *I* and the objective form: *me.*

The pronouns *I* and *me* are both self-referential - they map back to their nominatum - which is the utterer YOU.

You are the unique neurological archiver of all that is predicationally possible about you. You know more about yourself than anyone else on earth. You could write millions of  sententially prevenient predicational accounts of yourself based apon your life-long experiential autobiographical knowledge.  

The very mention of the words *I* or *me* immediately triggers a heightened awareness of yourself and opens neurological pathways to a HUGE compendium of memorised data concerning everthing you have self-learned concerning what you have deemed worth remembering about yourself and the people and the world around you during your life. You are the conceptual curator of a wealth of self-knowledge to which the key  trigger-words *I* and *me* map

What does this tell us? It provides proof that that if we encounter a noun or a pronoun of which we have a priori knowledge then we immediately and automatically provide such a sentential subject with a predicate of some sort which adds to its instantiation as a viable subject of discourse.

What does this tell us about the Cartesean: "Cogito ergo sum."?

It tells us that the whole pseudo-logical rendition of "I think therefore I am" is an unscientific ontological redundancy - for the simple neuro-cognitive generation or utterance of the pronoun *I* (or its semantic equivalent in French or Latin) is sufficient (never mind the "ergo sum" predicate) to automatically instantiate the thinker/utterer as a living, educated Latin speaking human capable of generating and correctly parsing a complicated philosophical statement which (unneccessarily, spuriously and tautologically) confirms him as a a living member of the human race who ALREADY KNEW THAT BEFORE HE UTTERED THE STATEMENT!

If the utterance of the personal pronoun "I" does not automatically map to any known existential concrete English, French or Latin speaking denotatum as the generator of such self-referential pronoun, then nothing further can be said, other than that the utterer is either a brain-damaged human, or the sound is produced by  a parrot or an insentient instrument which mechanically records and reproduces the sound of the human voice

Predicatationally truncated, sententially orphanic verbalisms are meaningless UNLESS the addressor is already in possession, and prior to a specified or implied time be aware of a compendium (however large or small) of biographic, experiential, existential modes which map to the statement "I experience."

One DOES NOT employ such a term unless one is aware of its meaning and the fact that it can be successfully mapped to the state of existing and being alive. This is the ontological lynch-pin which, when withdrawn sends the whole of Descartes' curious assemblage crashing to the ground.

Would anybody meanfully say

"I do not think - therefore I am not."

The contorted dualistic logic of Descartes forces us to believe that it would be a possible sentence for him to construct - for to form the utterance "I think" to a Platonist presupposes that there exists an opposite version (or as Plato would say a  heteron) of  "to think", which is, "not to think."

It is quite possible to remain ignorant of  the scientific rejection of Platonic nonsense. Indeed such is the experience of us all as the grow up in the company of adults.  Such is the veil of nescience that follows us into society and into school, college and university. It is a life-long imprintation that we will experience until we die. But such a condition holds only insofar as we may be subjective listeners to such conversational topics and not lateral thinking contributors.


It would make no difference whatsoever as to which existential modality Descartes had chosen to use in order to confirm the fact that he existed.

"I think, I experience, I have a painful blister on my bottom, I am thirsty therefore I am, I think I am thinking therefore I am, or even the single first person pronoun  - "I".

Any uttered words confirm and carry the same implicature - and what does that implicature delimit? What does the utterance of a human tongue imply? Could it for example be the utterance of a parrot? A computer? A tape recorder? Would a statement "I think therefore I exist" be made by a parrot? Parrots DON'T MAKE STATEMENTS. They imitate sounds - a parrot is incapable of stating a fact or making an assertion which is offered as evidence for any thing at all - never mind that something is true. So, to get back to my question, What does that implicature delimit?

What does the linguistic utterance of a human tongue imply? Well it goes much further than implicature or entailment IT GUARANTEES that whatever makes a existential statement is a human being. We may not know in other words the name of that human being - we may not know WHO that human being is - but we can say with absolute surety and without ANY fear of contradiction that the entity - that English, Latin or French speaking entity is a HUMAN BEING speaking a complicated human language that took millennia to develop and which sets humans apart from parrots and other imitative creatures as well as it separates us from mechanical technology which repeats recorded messages. Souls don't have tongues, mouths or brains wherewith to generated language - unless that is YOU HAVE CONVINCING PROOF THAT THERE ARE SUCH THINGS - AND THEY DO?

We have to assume that Descartes was not moronic and that when he made his ridiculous statement I think therefore I am, that not only was he aware of the (quite complicated intricacies of Latin grammar, that he was educated to a sufficiently informative standard to be able to select the correct first person pronoun I, which presupposes a knowledge of the other pronouns which he deselected in favour of the first person version, that he understood the significance of the word think, together with a general, or at least a sufficient seventeenth century knowledge of the fact that thinking went on in people's heads, and that peoples' heads were normally perched atop a pair of human shoulders, and these shoulders were part of a human body that had two arms and hands, that he would have already used those hands to hold the books that he had studied whilst he was learning French and Latin in order that one day he might learn sufficient of human biology to know what thinking was and where in the soma it took place, so that eventually he would be able to mouth the infamous sentence:

"I think therefore I am."

And make a laughing stock of the cognitively challenged - possibly as an act of revenge against his Jesuit tormentors.

The seemingly obvious, undoubtably concise and (considering the palsied hand of the church on thinking at the time) pertinent statement: I think therefore I am reveals it, on closer examination to be posited on such an unacceptable counterfactual craziness as to render it in many way similar to Wittgenstein's Colourless green ideas sleep furiously which, though it makes grammatical sense, is utterly meaningless and admits of no sense.

Any human demonstrating such linguistic capabilities, would, like any other, have in train a host of intellectual connections, references, relationships both private and personal, not to mention the wealth of emotional a la recherche du temps perdu etc. The whole thing is such a mess of transcendentalist triviality that I am in a state of absolute awe that nobody amongst the transcendentalist  hordes has ever figured this spurious ontological obviousness out before.

Is possible to know that I am without knowing enough about the properties of the referent of 'I' to say what I am. hence, it must be possible to assert that I am without also asserting what I am.

ABSOLUTELY AND DEFINITELY NOT! Even if you were the unknown victim of an alpine climbing accident with dreadful head injuries and had been lying in a coma in a Zurich hospital for thirty years and had suddenly changed to a conscious rather than an unconscious patient. The first question asked of you would probably be: Who are you? (not by the way WHAT are you?) As soon as you opened your lips and answered - (or if you simply lay there and thought out your reply) I am Pierre Blancot or, I do not know, then you would have made it obvious to yourself and every body else concerned that you were the possessor of a sufficient knowledge of Swiss French, or English, or Latin to blow your ontological cover.

Such a revelation would usher in all the other multitudinous properties (existential modalities) which are part and parcel of, concomitant with, and form the essential pre-conditional neurological and physiological structural modes necessary, either to merely think such a complicated thought, or even more so to be capable of physically initialising the existential modes of lung compression, lip, tongue and jaw movement necessary for understanding and communicating such an advanced understanding of the grammar, semantic import and syntax of ANY human language - whatever that language happened to be.

It might be said that someone taking the via negativa may eventually conclude that nothing can be predicated of god (or tao or self or whatever); but, at the end of the road, some will conclude 'and, yet, god is'.

The fact that Descartes speaks excellent English, French, Latin (whatever) and because of all the physio-neurological underpinning that goes with such an extraordinary intellectual feat, it is impossible for you NOT to be aware of the properties, which provide the key to who and what your are, for the employment of the term and yet as a qualifier obviously refers to additional covert information, knowledge about God, Tao or Self or whatever, which satisfies him that indeed in spite of the fact that nothing is known about what are virtually just meaningless names he still believes they exist?

C'mon! If such a person concluded that nothing can be predicated of God in addition to the his/her awareness of the term GOD then he would not (even if he/she were a cretin) be in a position to acknowledge the existence of some thing (a flower, an insect, a drain cover, a sexual disease, a dumpling etc.) for in his ignorance of any modality being attributed to such an unknown term he would be bereft of any existential or instantiational modes to map to any meaningless putative noun.

If such statements are said not to be claims and that there is a property-free-state of some entity; but, are claims that I, this experiencer, can be unaware of those properties --- at least until I acquire more knowledge (which, of course, may or may not happen anytime soon, if at all). are they valid claims?

C'mon, this is outrageous sophistry. What kind of claim is that, that there are people around who, though they admit complete ignorance of some unknown, of which they have only been given a name, and are bereft of any further information, description, category, form, location, or whether it (if it is an it) be animal, vegetable or mineral, is animate or inanimately dead, red, green, or decorated like a barber's pole, sweet, sour or tasting of Cadbury's milk chocolate?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Seifrid. Thomas.The Word Made Self. Russian Writings on Language 1860 - 1930. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2005.

2. Graham. Loren and Kantor. Jean-Michel. Naming Infinity. A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity the Belknap Press of Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.