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Suppose we freeze time for a second, you're transported to and stuck in a multigalactically large room for countably infinite minutes (or until you're done, also you're temporarily immortal) with all the paper and binding materials you need, and some reference books that together constitute a full description of someone's atomic state and immediate environment, as that person is about to start thinking about the Cogito for a few minutes. There are a few trillion atoms described, so it takes you a long time, but you spend your infinite minutes (or as long as you need) working through the various states, starting with time t=0 based on the reference books, and then for infinite minutes you just simply dilligently work through the state of the person and immediate environment, i.e. continue to model the atoms using the laws of physics, working it out manually, as a human calculator, and writing down all of your work. It is incredibly boring. About ten hours into it you ask for a pill to let you forget that you've already been doing this for ten hours, because it was only interesting for maybe half that time and there is no way you can do this for almost infinite time. Okay, you get a supply of those pills as well, and take one every ten hours. This leaves you all set to spend practically infinite time writing out all this meticulous description. Now, once you're FINALLY done, and have done up through t=10minutes, which really practically takes you infinite time, you bind up all of your work and put the volumes in a row in multigalactically large bookshelf. Trillions of volumes. Then you're transported back to Earth and time resumes. Okay, for having trillions of volumes, ten hours (that you remember) wasn't too bad. And now we know there are a series of volumes of books (that you've prepared by hand). At first (in the first few volumes) they describe an initial state of mind, and, due to the moment that was chosen (someone entertaining a train of thought regarding the Cogito) as you go through the volumes you are reading through someone's thoughts, i.e. the thoughts that this person exists. But do they exist? Of course not: they are just a character in a book. That they think, "I think" does not cause them to exist, and a few volumes later they are done having that thought. The volumes are all there from volume 1 up till x trillion trillion. You could, if you wanted to, read through them all. Do the characters inside exist? No. So, the Cogito does not prove physical or metaphysical existence. |
Let's say the character does not exist, this means there is no character going through the Cogito. Descartes' statement holds no meaning in this situation.
let's say the character does exist, it is going through the Cogito, which according to Descartes means there is some object that has to exist for these thoughts to arise. And there is! The books that you have painstakingly written exist somewhere to describe the thoughts of the character exist somewhere in the physical world (or whatever hypothetical world or universe you have theorised).
Is this not exactly Descartes' point? If we interpet it broadly: Whenever thought arises, this thought must materialise from some existing state or presence, thus proving the existance of 'something'. To give this object the identity of oneself is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but one could argue that if this state or presence creates these thoughts it can usually be associated with 'self' in whatever way you want to define it.