For a human to be physio-neurologically capable of generating the pronoun "I"  (rather than a meaningless thought or sound) is to be neurologically aware of its own human centrality, rather than to be (perhaps) like other animals, which may not have a sense of what we call "a self" but may be merely sensorially aware and lack the neurological awareness of their own existential centrality.  This remains and open question and many claims have been made recently by animal biologists that certain of the higher primates may be capable of  existing with a  less developed version of human self-awareness.

Uttering the Pronoun "I."

As every utterer of the "I" word is aware, "I" is a referential term which derives its reference from antecedency, or the thinking, flesh and blood state or condition of being physically and neurologically antecedent . Thus, in the total absence of a referential antecedent, the word "I" would be neuro-linguistically inaccessible to an entity which was no longer capable of total recall and the word "I" would be rendered meaningless to the user - for there would be no self or experiential biography or unique humanness to act as an available referential denotatum.

The first person pronoun "I" is the most powerful referent in any language. "I" conveys the utmost informational recall as to personal identity, self knowledge and understanding of an individual's history, beliefs, goals, abilities and occurrent realisation of his or her current state of connectedness with the surrounding environment.

Any person who upon uttering the pronoun "I" seriously claims that they do not know who, or what they are, and appear bereft of the cognitive processes whereby their experience is remembered, or persists in stating that they remain incognisant of his or her identity - must be judged to be either temporarily or permanently brain damaged, or at least profoundly neurologically disturbed, or traumatised to such an extent that their engrammic memory traces - the biochemical changes encoded in their neural tissue that represent what we call memory is no longer

I stand by my choice of anaphora. My whole logomachy revolves around the necessity of grasping one's biographical antecedency in order that the pronoun "I" may even be lexically retrieved and uttered meaningfully. The sentential alternative would be to generate an illeistic1 sentence such as:

"Rene Descartes thinks - therefore he exists."

Though I doubt if someone who is neurologically incapable of retrieving and employing the first-person pronoun "I" would be capable of constructing another string which included the third-person pronoun "he" either.

It is quite possible that an amnesiac could employ the word "I" but be incapable of utilising that word in its usual role of a self- referencing linguistic device for calling up the citational biography or radically distinctive unique human qualities of his historical self.

The referent "I" is a word which can only be used by someone who is already aware of his existential state as a human equipped with a neuro-linguistic heritage capable of communicating the significance of the pronoun "I" - in that it is a function word that is used in place of a proper noun representing a unique entity such as: Rene, .

Note.
1. illeistic. illeism is the act of referring to oneself in the third person.

My whole logomachy revolves around the necessity of grasping one's biographical antecedency in order that the pronoun I and its referential contents may be lexically retrieved and uttered. The referent I is a word which can only be used effectively in the ontological sense by someone who is already aware of his existential state as a human equipped with a neuro-linguistic heritage capable of communicating the significance of the pronoun I - in that it is a identicative function word that is used in place of a noun such as: Joe, Rene, Gwladys, Adolf , Martin or The Palace of Westminster.

It is quite possible that an amnesiac could employ the word I but be incapable of utilising that word in its usual role of a self- referencing linguistic device. However we are not overly concerned with the sometimes bizarre behaviour of accident victims in a hospital's A & E department, but rather the eccentric "philosophical" behaviour and lack of any rigorous analytical propensity on the behalf of an apparently healthy person like Descartes, who (for the purposes of some spurious transcendentalist "research") entered into a pretence that he didn't know who he was and/or what he was in the pursuit of a distorted form of "ontological investigation."

We mention those unfortunate accident victims because a neurologically traumatised person is the only paradigm of the human condition which could possibly provide the model for the existential state of self-referential ignorance and identity-unawareness that the imaginary protagonist in the Cartesian philosophical parlour-game could portray.

Descartes discounted, or was obviously ignorant of the nature of the reflexive role of the pronominal discourse referent I. Its function is that of self-referential specificity (the quality of particularising one's own self - rather than generalising the other.) From the perspective of a participant in an act of speech or writing I is anaphorically linked to and is capable of initiating and selectively instantiating a vast multitude of data from the immense complexity of a human's stored experiential biography and the linguistically- based, antecedally composed, neurological chronicle of his or her life.

I stand by my choice of anaphoric I for the only sentential alternative available would be to generate an illeistic sentence such as:

Rene Descartes thinks - therefore he exists.

Though I doubt if someone who is rendered neurologically incapable of retrieving and employing the first-person pronoun I would be capable of constructing another string in which he contrived to refer to himself in third person either.

Thus in his illocutionary attempt to create a basic existential ontological proof or axiom, his choice of the pronominal first person singular referent I for inclusion in his spurious sentence:

"I think - therefore I am,"  was probably the worst possible word he could have chosen as a head word in his ill judged cogito.

I Think - Therefore God and I Exist.

The Cartesian sense of I the cogito is a crude attempt at the reification of the soul, for otherwise he could of quite as easily declared:

"I sit before the fire watching beeswax melt - therefore I exist"

Such an equally absurd ontological tautologic redundancy would have also worked to fool the less enlightened elements within philosophical community into viewing it as: a profound remark.

His choice of positing: a thinking I as existing, rather than: a sitting, watching I that is existing, is informative and pregnant with meaning. Even a merely tenuous reference to a body (which sitting and watching implies, would have introduced the corporeal concept of a human soma into the formulation aimed at confirming an existence of the I which would immediately exclude the reification of the apparently en-souled version of I which was the whole purpose of his theologically motivated thingification of an existing dualistic mind.

As to the precise nature of his theologically motivated thingification, we have Richard Sansom to thank for providing Damasio's observation, that the speaking of the cogito may also have served the clever purpose of accommodating religious pressures of which Descartes was keenly aware, and that the latter is a possibility, but there is no way of finding out for sure. [12] (Damasio. 1994)

For me an understanding of the errors at the heart of the Cartesian system, (which we will see in a moment) lies in Descartes's discussion of the equivocal theory of substance.

The Cartesian reification of his theological version of existence can be extrapolated from the I think - therefore I am formulaic rendering of the cogito as follows:

I think - therefore God and I exist

This conforms to his statement which claims to establish God as the only one substance which can be understood to depend upon no other thing whatsoever, and that in the case of all other substances, he perceives that they can only exist with the help of God's concurrence.

Ergo - of him and God existing at the same time.

He expresses his definition of substance thus:

In the case of those items which we regard as things or modes of things, it is worthwhile examining each of them separately. By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence. And there is only one substance which can be understood to depend on no other thing whatsoever, namely God. In the case of all other substances, we perceive that they can exist only with the help of God's concurrence. Hence the term substance does not apply univocally, as they say in the Schools, to God and to other things; that is, there is no distinctly intelligible meaning of the term which is common to God and his creatures. [13] (Descartes. 1984.)

This means that in Descartes employing the device of the cogito to establish the existence of the I and at the same time attempting to confirm the synchronal existence of God without which no other substance can exist, for to invoke the insubstantial human mental I was to invoke it as a substance and is a classical example of the reification, which is to regard something abstract as if it were a concrete material thing As again Richard Sansom points out, Descartes claimed to have seen an apparition of The Virgin Mary. Furthermore, according to Descartes' Dream,[2] Descartes was so bewildered by all this that he began to pray. He assumed his dreams had a supernatural origin. He vowed he would put his life under the protection of the Blessed Virgin and go on a pilgrimage from Venice to Notre Dame de Lorette, travelling by foot and wearing the humblest-looking clothes he could find. Does this bizarre behaviour reassure us in any way that when Descartes strayed from the narrow confines of mathematics and geometry he could be trusted to think rationally? [14] (Descartes. 2005.)

I is simply a pseudonym of a consciousness of one's own identity. It is a reference to the catalogue of self-referential neologisms that mankind has created as synonyms for the primitive belief of early man that objects, including man himself, contain a spirit - an incorporeal, supernatural vital principle or animating force or fundamental emotional and activating principle determining one's character variously referred to as: the self, ego, psyche, soul, mind, nous, noesis, cognitive content, episteme, anima, spirit, etc. which are characteristic terminology of the object-action dualist. Such philosophical foolishness reminds me of the Trobriand Islander (today officially known as the Kiriwina Islands) who traipsed around the beach clutching an empty coca cola bottle. The old man and the empty bottle were inseparable. When asked why he carried it about endlessly, day after day, the old fellow replied that the spirit of his grandfather had taken up residence therein.

Apart from the different spiritual venue involved or the alternative localisation of the liberated soul (residence in a putative heaven rather than in a coca cola bottle) humanities'perception of the occult dimension don't seemed to have changed much over the millennia between the more affluent and better educated societies Western world and the beach-dwellers of the Indian Ocean? Ah well! It's a question of horses for courses I suppose? But this is yet another kettle of fish.

Questions regarding the neuro-physical structure of humans are a matter for the many experts that study such matters, such as: biologists, anaesthesiologists, biochemists, cardiovascular specialists, general physicians, genetic counsellors, immunologists, kinesiotherapists, neurologists, etc. If you are female and your structure is undergoing change in the stomache-area you visit an obstetrician or a gynaecologist. If your limbs are failing you make an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon. If he cuts your leg off - you turn to a prosthetist who assists patients with disabling conditions of limbs and spine, or with partial or total absence of limb, by fitting and preparing orthopaedic braces or prostheses.

In such circumstances one does NOT turn to some metaphysicalist dreamer who does not even know who he is or what he is.

The words pretend/pretence in relation to Descartes' counterfactual cogito have a variety of meanings. It is wrong to select a version of the word pretend which gives the impression that Descartes constructed his counterfactual scenario with the intent to deceive. Let's pretend that... blah, blah, blah. or Let's imagine that... blah, blah, blah is technique that continues to be used in some of the rooms which lead off from the corridors of shame, which is described by critics of many forms of Continental thought as: Let's Pretend Philosophy." Every human on earth who is neurologically capable of self-identification (knowing who he is) is automatically aware of his humanness and of being a member of the order of homo sapienses - the only surviving hominid; a species to which modern man belongs; being a bipedal primate having language and ability to make and use complex tools. Humans don't ask what they are - they KNOW what they are and that the well-known specifications of what it means to be human apply to them personally. What follows is that we AUTOMATICALLY self-recognisably associate ourselves as being species-specific to that classification of mammals and don't ask Cartesian-style interrogative redundancies.

As every utterer of the I word is aware, I is a referential term which derives its reference from antecedency, or the thinking, flesh and blood state or condition of being physically and neurologically antecedent . Thus, in the absence of a referential antecedent the word I would be neuro-linguistically inaccessible to an entity which was no longer extant. The first person pronoun I is the most powerful referent in any language. I conveys the utmost informational recall as to personal identity, self knowledge and understanding of an individual's history, beliefs, goals, abilities and occurrent realisation of his or her current state of connectedness with the surrounding environment.

Any person who upon uttering the pronoun I seriously claims that they do not know who, or what they are, and appear bereft of the cognitive processes whereby their experience is remembered, or persists in stating that they remain incognisant of his or her identity - must be judged to be either temporarily or permanently brain damaged, or at least profoundly neurologically disturbed, or traumatised to such an extent that their engrammic memory traces - the biochemical changes encoded in their neural tissue that represent what we call memory is no longer accessible.

I believe that Descartes' cogito: I think therefore I am is a useless would-be syllogistic statement and a classical example which shows deductive reasoning at its worst. Its misleading conclusion is derived from two premises which are inherently established a priori, via the nature of the content and the particular linguistic form in which the redundancy itself is brought to the eye of the reader.

Descartes decided that he (like all humans) is a res cogitans. ("Sum res cogitans" or "I am a thing that thinks.) In an impressive display of philosophical reasoning, executed in perfect French - Latin he drives his existential point home forcibly.



(a) "There is a contradiction in conceiving that that which thinks does not at the same time as it thinks, exist."

Later, referring to the intrinsic or indispensable properties that serve to characterize or identify something, which he calls his essence he states:

(b) "Nothing without which a thing can still exist is comprised in its essence" [15] (Descartes. AT VII, 219; HR II, 97)

It follows therefore that whilst he was far from being a brain in a vat, he may well have been lying there in his armchair in front of the fire thinking without any arms, legs, hair or teeth, but in such circumstances he at least would have existed with the essential properties he specified as being essentially required for thinking, i. e., a head with a functioning brain that generated perfect formulations of a language often described as the flower of western culture, together with the organs necessary to sustain his human thinker's thinking brain in thought.

Thus it is that as a human thinking thing ("Sum res cogitans" or "I am a thing that thinks") the activities of a thinking human thing are not restricted even to the other meanings of thinking as mental acts and data: will, feeling, judgement, perception, etc., and so on as specified by Koyre who claims that the verb cogitare was traditionally very wide in its meaning "It embraced not only thought, but all mental acts and data. [xx] (Koyre details here. )

Descartes, as we shall see in a moment, goes much, much, further than that in his definition of thinking and in his description of a res cogitans which includes

Suppose I say I see or I am walking, therefore I exist. If I take this to refer to vision or walking as corporeal action, the conclusion is not absolutely certain; for, as often happens during sleep I may think I am seeing though I do not open my eyes or think that I am walking although I do not change my place; and it may even be that I have no body.

But if I take it to refer to actual sensation of awareness [sensu sive conscientia] of seeing or walking, then it is quite certain; for in that case it has regard to the mind, and it is the mind alone th at has sense or thought [sentit sive cogitat] of itself seeing or walking. [16] ( Descartes. Principia 1, 9.)

Finally it is I who have sensations, or who perceive corporeal objects as it were by the senses. Thus I am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. These things are false it may be said for I am asleep; but at least I seem to see, to hear, to be warmed. This cannot be false; and this is what is properly called my sensation; further, sensation, precisely so regarded is nothing but thinking. [cogitare] [17] (Hintikka. 1975. p. 178)

So where does that statement take us as far as the cogito is concerned? It means that following Descartes' practice of spelling out the inclusive features of the verb to think we have no alternative but to reformulate his cogito and show it in its full existential expanse and implications. Here is the cogito recast into its fuller and more correct form:

I think, sense, perceive, see, hear noise, feel heat, sleep, walk, therefore I exist

So now we discover that it was not the case as the mind-body dualists like to boast, that Descartes dared to think, as no one had ever dared think before. The term think as he conceived of it included a catalogue of human modalic behaviours which included the physiological prerequisites needed to sustain them. Such essential essences automatically imply the existence of an alert, educated human being - a human being who, under normal circumstances would certainly never even dream of questioning such an existential auto-justifying, axiomatic, in-your-face human apodeicity.

Therefore, in spite of his devil seeking to deceive his senses and his conspicuous introductory use of perfectly phrased linguistic argumentative over-kill, he shoots himself down in flames the minute he utters the words I think and renders the whole ontological exercise a tautologic squandering of time. He could have spent his day more profitably working on his math sums rather than his ergo sums, for anyone on earth could have come up with an formalised, systematic existential questioning commonplace like that - not that any person in their right mind would of course - most people have more commonsense.

So exactly why was he foolish in asking such a silly question? Because HE was the one who characterised humans as re cogitans, and the minute he thinks he immediately swamps the cogito project with the thousands of other existential modalities, manners, behavioural characteristics and prerequisite physiological particularities implicatively required is his specification of the corporeal necessities required in order to be able to think as an all dancing all singing res cogitans. His act of thinking turns the whole thing into a farce, for as a thinking thing he would have already BEEN ANTECEDALLY AWARE of his humanity which included the necessarily required essences and their neurological and physiological appurtanences and what that proprietarily entailed as corollaries of any thinking thing as so defined by him in his definition of the thing called a human res cogitans.

Did he REALLY believe that ANYONE in the world doesn't ALREADY understand the crucial fact that the ability to think - to speak - to have language - is an essential part of being human, and is the feature that separates us from animals incapable of speech? Did he not realise that ordinary folk would have discovered this for themselves, when, millennia ago, they tried to engage their cat or their dog or their donkey in conversation and all they got in reply was a mew, a bark or a bray? Humans have known since they first became self-referentially recognisably human tens of thousands of years ago that animals cannot speak - and we can.

First of all Descartes decides to draw upon his previously learned, antecedently acquired concept of what thinking and existence is, and then he puts it into words in the language he acquired at home and at school to create his tautologous or coterminous phase. which proves that HE IS ALREADY EXISTING AND HAS BEEN FOR A CONSIDERABLE TIME as a living, breathing, concept understanding, language enabled HUMAN BEING and to make such statement is completely unnecessary and a redundancy.

It would make no difference whatsoever as to which existential modality Descartes chose to use in order to confirm the fact that you exist.

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 am!

Any 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 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 minar birds and other imitative creature as well as it separates us from mechanical technology which repeats recorded messages. Souls don't have tongues, mouths or brains wherewith to generate language - unless that is A PERSON HAS CONVINCING PROOF THAT THERE ARE SUCH THINGS - AND THEY DO?

Before going on to discuss another form of ontological entertainment - Shakespeare's Hamlet, we leave knowing that like the bard's great play with its inevitably tragic ending there was only one way that Descarte's little armchair ontological burlesque could have turned out anyway. He could never have discovered that he didn't actually exist, or the wicked stage devil had successfully deceived him, nor could and have managed to inform or convince us of such a fact if it were true. If Descartes had discovered himself not to have existed in his cogito cameo role in the Theatre of the Ontologically Absurd of Yesteryear we would never have known about the cogito, and probably only have heard of Descartes via his admirable contributions to mathematics.