I don't think that's a philosophical or scientific statement. It's merely something an ostensibly self-aware creature cognizant of its awareness making a subjective statement.
It's a relatively famous (maybe the most famous?) quote by a relatively famous philosopher[1]. Insofar as anything can be a philosophical utterance, I think it qualifies :-)
Of course I know the source of the statement. It's not a philosophical statement. Please define think, and am, first. Remember, Descartes spent a lot of time positing that the mind and the brain were distinct, and that the mind was non-corporeal, non-physical, non-matter. Not super-convincing to me (whereas I think what he had to say about the Great Deceiver poses a huge challenge to those who believe that humans can truly state with any certainty that they have free will or even agency)
Put better, I think the statement would be "There appears to be an entity, embedded within my body, which creates a sensation of subjective thought, and I infer from that, without a great deal of additional data, that others have that same kind of subjective thought, and further, that subjective thought likely demonstrates the existence of a brain which has agency and free will, which can be applied to attempt to understand the true nature of the universe in an objective way and to do so is not futile. But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless."
Does it really say that? I thought the point was more -- there definitely is an entity which observes subjective experience, the "I" in I think therefore I am, and... that's about all I can say. That everyone else experiences some sort of internal reality is wild speculation.
And while my experience may be entirely artificial (that is, maybe I'm a brain in a vat being fed signals), I still must exist to be experiencing it.
And what follows more practically is that even if we are all brains in a vat, it doesn't matter. Because it can’t.
I’m somewhat surprised this discussion got so philosophical in the first place. Sure we can question the nature of sentience and argue about its definition all we want, but the unsettling problem is that we can’t prove anything. As time goes on, we are only going to encounter more, definitely sentient, people who, like Lemoine, are absolutely convinced they are communicating with another sentient being (whether Lemoine is or is not acting faithfully here, in this instance, is besides the point). What do we do?
> But I also accept that my experience may be an entirely artificial experience, like a movie projected on a screen, or that my brain might not be capable of comprehending the objective nature of the universe, or that even the concept of 'I' in this entire statement may in fact be objectively meaningless.
This is the content of the second meditation. Because you can be deceived, you are a thinking thing. In other words: there is no meaningful sense in which the concept of "deception" could be applied to you, were you not a thing ("a thinking thing") that could be wrong about your sense-experience, the universe, even your sense of "I".
That's what makes it a philosophical statement. You of course don't have to agree with the truth-value of it, but it's not clear that you've deflated the status of the statement itself.
Descartes describes the capacity for deception as a necessary condition for a thinking thing, not a sufficient one. In particular, a thinking thing must also doubt and affirm, deny and will, have sense, and contain the capacity for mental images, among other conditions.
The problem with that is the he's not just describing- he's defining. In that sense it's almost tautological. Everything you describe falls under subjective experience. The entire point of this whole argument about what Blake thought is that we can't actually empirically define deception, doubt, affirmation, will, sense, mental theater, or any of the other conditions. And I would argue (without extensive data) that if you built a sufficiently complex ML and trained it with a rich enough corpus, it would probably demonstrate those behaviors.
We're really not that far from building such a system and from what I can tell of several leading projects in this space, we should have a system that an expert human would have a hard time distinguishing from a real human (at least, in a video chat) in about 5-10 years minus 3 plus 50 years.
The whole point is that Descartes was trying to discover that which is tautological.
He begins by discarding all beliefs which depend on anything else in order to determine that which is both true and does not depend on any thing else for its truth value.
As the poster above posits, he eventually works towards what he argues is the only fundamental and tautological logical statement, cogito ergo sum.
He then attempts to demonstrate what else must be true using deductive logic stemming from that single axiom, with greater or lesser success.
I find the meditations interesting and compelling up to cogito ergo sum, and thereafter less so. It's clear like many modern western philosophers he has the aim of connecting his thinking in some way to the sensibilities of Christian theology. A fascinating rhetorical exercise but a less principled attempt at a priori reasoning. It seems like you agree with this last point.
> It's not a philosophical statement. Please define think, and am, first.
I imagine that whatever definitions were given for these they would involve other terms for which you would demand the definition, ad infinitum. If this is the criteria for a philosophical statement, then no such statement has ever or ever will be made.
Is Lemoine a Cartesian? I thought this conversation was about Descartes and whether his utterance was philosophical, not the held positions of Blake Lemoine.
I actually accept your claim: I genuinely believe that it's possible that we'll create something that's indistinguishable from a Cartesian agent. But I'm not a Cartesian; I put much stronger restrictions on agency than Descartes does.
