Descartes was a professional mercenary and during an extended stay in Bavaria he had an opportunity to use a sauna a lot. Evidently it was a kind of stove that one could get in and bake during the colder winters of the time. In such a peaceful environment he naturally experienced a kind of detachment and could let his mind wander and settle back to first principles of thought.
So he wondered in that sauna how he could be certain of his existence. Without mind and its thought he would not exist. That is his existence would be as uniformed as that of a log or a stone. He encountered the problems of dynamic subjectivism-he thinks therefore he exists, yet the existence is a phenomenon itself and like the Zen scholar he would need to wonder if it means anything at all.
Today the pragmatist side of popular political philosophy can sing that 'there is no such thing as the real world, I am invincible' and so forth. Jean Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness takes Descartes' French rationalism and describes direct experience without making metaphysical judgments about it.
Sartre was a French rationalist describing the phenomenon of mind and thought. Science or knowledge is a product of thought and intelligence. Intellect has a foundation in mass and energy, and W.V.O. Quine too assented to mind within a framework of philosophical physicalism. That leaves the question of what matter is really comprised of aside. One rationalist tradition builds on Descartres' method of critical analysis.
One cannot organize knowledge, provide an easy way to find all the prime numbers to infinity or form good science without thought.
post-script on body-mind dualism
The context is that thought exists in addition to things physically experienced such as the body.
There obviously are numerous philosophical opinions about the nature of reality that thought experiences. Roderick Chilsom wrote a nice little book named 'The Problem of the Criterion' the title of which encapsulates a little of the paradox of finding some ultimate thing to base reality upon. One has Lao Tzu's man or a butterfly and Bishop Berkley's Three Dialogues and also Membrane Theory with a potentially infinite number of dimensions of which a few are selected.
There isn't even an ultimate particle or field to base anything from, and so Christians and physicists tend to offer the same opinion that the eternal preceded the temporal in some form. It isn't necessary to get to bound down in the objects vs. mind paradigm since no one can say more than relatively what either/or are made of.
Vedral's book on reality as information akin to holograms I suppose that are entangled probabilities from a quantum field that isn't actually the Higgs Field is interesting. One cannot point to this or that cosmological theory or abnegation of exteriority and mass energy-for itself and base speculate persuasively that either the mind or matter are not actual.
I had a unusual experience a year ago with a balance and consciousness fade out at the same time. It was worse than sea-sickness (I had that a couple times when first I went out to sea) and generally I like to forget about it.
I wondered what caused the experience of my mind seaming to break up into quarter sections, spin and dissolve like going down a drain before I fell over to the left and nearly but not quite became unconscious before slowly recovering on the ground. I think I ate to many chocolate donuts and chocolate bars and that in some way I developed a chocolate toxic reaction. I quit eating chocolate for good and the problem went away.
Yet chocolate may not have been to blame, for it turned out that I had an abscessed tooth that made a passage into my nasal cavity, and I think that is in some way connected to the eustachian tubes in the inner ear. These medical issues and a lung/airway issue that lasted a more than a year camping in Anchorage Alaska provided a little experience with the temporality of mind and its relation to the body. Certainly I am convinced that the mind is a nice experience reliant upon the body.
Keeping one's body and mind in good shape is a good idea.
post-script on body-mind dualism
The context is that thought exists in addition to things physically experienced such as the body.
There obviously are numerous philosophical opinions about the nature of reality that thought experiences. Roderick Chilsom wrote a nice little book named 'The Problem of the Criterion' the title of which encapsulates a little of the paradox of finding some ultimate thing to base reality upon. One has Lao Tzu's man or a butterfly and Bishop Berkley's Three Dialogues and also Membrane Theory with a potentially infinite number of dimensions of which a few are selected.
There isn't even an ultimate particle or field to base anything from, and so Christians and physicists tend to offer the same opinion that the eternal preceded the temporal in some form. It isn't necessary to get to bound down in the objects vs. mind paradigm since no one can say more than relatively what either/or are made of.
Vedral's book on reality as information akin to holograms I suppose that are entangled probabilities from a quantum field that isn't actually the Higgs Field is interesting. One cannot point to this or that cosmological theory or abnegation of exteriority and mass energy-for itself and base speculate persuasively that either the mind or matter are not actual.
I had a unusual experience a year ago with a balance and consciousness fade out at the same time. It was worse than sea-sickness (I had that a couple times when first I went out to sea) and generally I like to forget about it.
I wondered what caused the experience of my mind seaming to break up into quarter sections, spin and dissolve like going down a drain before I fell over to the left and nearly but not quite became unconscious before slowly recovering on the ground. I think I ate to many chocolate donuts and chocolate bars and that in some way I developed a chocolate toxic reaction. I quit eating chocolate for good and the problem went away.
Yet chocolate may not have been to blame, for it turned out that I had an abscessed tooth that made a passage into my nasal cavity, and I think that is in some way connected to the eustachian tubes in the inner ear. These medical issues and a lung/airway issue that lasted a more than a year camping in Anchorage Alaska provided a little experience with the temporality of mind and its relation to the body. Certainly I am convinced that the mind is a nice experience reliant upon the body.
Keeping one's body and mind in good shape is a good idea.
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