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THE INCOGNISANT COGITO
We do not need the formulaic self-referential
confirmatory subsumptions Descartes considered
necessary for the recognition and incorporation
of one's humanness under a more general category
of "human."
It is not the utterance of abstract nouns,
verbal frequentatives (like "I think")
and reificative lexical shells which confirm
our existence as homo-sapiens.
We are aware that we exist as human beings
at a much deeper non-lexical neurological
level without the need to articulate the
obvious. We need no verbal formulaic mantras
like: "I think therefore I am"
nor the mouthing of the usefully encoded
first-person personal pronouns: "I"
and "me" to corroborate our manhood
or womanhood.
Our brains are self-registering survivency
organs, evolved to provide continuous feedback
of its own indications at the maxima and
minima of experiential variations. Our brains
provide a ceaseless biologic systems-analysis
backed up by an informative biographic arcanum
of stored stratagems for survival. A brief
consideration of these facts leads us to
reject the motivation, the requirement and
the saneness of any ill-considered ritual
of existential self-confirmation of the type
represented by the spurious Cartesian cogito
pantomime. The exposited content of a pronoun
like "I" makes available an enshelled
or memory-packed abundance of potentially
useful interfacial experiential layers. Such
experiential templates enable the human entity
to interact with the environmental system
in which it finds itself.
Whenever the personal pronouns" I "
or " me " is neurologically and/or
conversationally generated and introduced
the memorising brain makes available a huge
empiric digest, a complete (if somewhat fractured)
personal autobiography and a constantly updated
compendium of one's current , moods, actions,
interests and preoccupations with, particular
reference to the current concerns of
the conscious brain.
I claim that even prior to the use of the
word "I" (or any other word) the
brain relates the first-person pronoun to
the sub-lingual existential language-possessing-entity
itself, which is the utterer of the identity
symbol in the first place.
Therefore human entities do not need
to make
an existential claim - for there is
no alternative
to existing. To exist is a done deal
which
is seen to be done by the resultant
existent.
The very fact of existing is psychosomatically
tantamount to confirming the lack of
any
non-existential alternative.
The whole Cartesian project is rendered a
grossly nonsensical dualistic redundancy
- the historically spurious slow-witted slapstick
claim that a linguistically equipped verifier
who refers to his self needs verification
that he that exists as a verifier - exists.
What could be more ontologically ridiculous
in the annals of metaphysical vaudeville
than a French and Latin-speaking existent
self-referentially asking a French and Latin-speaking
existent to prove that it exists?
What kind of a metaphysicalist muggins
does it take to even suggest that the subjectival
denominatum of such a sentential
denotation having the power of explicitly
denoting or designating (by pronominally
naming itself: "I" and further
predicating of the "I"
that it: "thinks - therefore [it] exists") requires confirmation that "that which is denoted as "I" exists, when, if he was not the denotatum - then he could
not have made the such an ontologically stupid
statement in the first place?
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