A Fictional Anti-Descartes

Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637) argued that he could have absolute and foundational certainty of his own existence via his famous “Cogito ergo sum,”  “I think, therefore I am.” He later, in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1640), refined the argument. He decided that his existence was not a matter of therefore, that is of inference, at all. Instead, it was an immediate, indubitable realization. “I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.”

A recent Netflix series is to the contrary.

Why Aren’t We Afraid to Go to Sleep?

Some people, of course, are afraid of going to sleep, and for good reason: sufferers from sleep terrors, nightmares, sleep walking, apnea, and other maladies of sleep. Then there is the aversion to bedtime of small and not so small children. Maybe some of this is fear of sleep; more is probably because being awake is more fun. Eventually, it is outgrown. In any event, I am not addressing these groups. I also exclude from the “We” people who never remember their dreams.

My question is why those of us who are beyond childhood, not subject to sleep maladies, and remember some of our dreams are so blasé about going to sleep, indeed often positively relishing the prospect.

Descartes and Knowing One is Awake

Descartes maintained that our experience never permits us to judge with certainty that we are awake: “[T]here are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep.” So I would be unjustified in judging that I am now, in fact, awake with a computer screen in front of me. 

(At the end of the day, of course, Descartes did think I could be so justified, but before that day’s end I would have to traverse through his cogito, taxonomy of mental contents, clear and distinct ideas, ontological argument, and his argument that God is trustworthy. Not being able to negotiate that entire journey, I want to see where we end up on dreams if we decline to go beyond Descartes’s First Meditation.)

Time, Relativity, and the Mayfly Self

The Physics of Time

 

Even before Einstein, physics was never really supportive of our common-sense ideas about time. Humankind has long believed that the past and the future are very different, the one over, done with, fixed, the other ahead, open, malleable. The past keeps gaining new territory from the future across the boundary of the present. The calendar date of tomorrow becomes that of today, then of yesterday. All this seems to force upon us the conclusion that now is something that moves. 

Science, with physics at its base, has been a great success in explaining the phenomena of our world: thunder, billiards, fire, elevators, airplanes, the ability of fish to swim and viruses to infect. What did Newtonian physics have to tell us about this moving now? Nothing. The equations of physics contain variables for time, t₁, t₂, even t₀, but no “now.” 

With Einstein, physics stopped being unhelpful regarding our shared sense that the now moves, and became hostile, or at least unfriendly.

God, The Source of Morality, and the Source of Logic

Many theists argue that God is the source of morality and its essential and defining source. As a matter of intellectual consistency should these same theists hold that God is in the same way the source of logic?

A Short Story, Philosophical Only at the Edges

This represents most of the fiction, at least what I knew at the time to be fiction, that I have authored. Comments appreciated, including where, if anywhere, I might get it into print.