A viable stand-in for every free-form poem

He fired an electric beagle at her.

Oh no!  Cumulus hairballs in a Tycho lace hack!

It was too late to return the pancakes.

Sentio Ergo Sum

My friend and current boss, Al Shalloway, has been talking with be about cogito ergo sum for a little while, now.

While I think the ergo sum part is the critical insight - the recognition that your knowledge is limited to your own existence - he's been debating the cogito part.

The assertion I think he's making is that you don't think.  I don't know if I agree but I definitely have become convinced that you don't know you think.

You do, however, know that you experience.  At least, I know that I do.  Moreover, I don't know anything else.

So I wonder if the sentio ergo sum is a more appropriate declaration.  It still contains the essential assertion underpinning all reason: that we basically don't know anything.  It's actually a stronger statement of that fact.

Cogito Ergo Sum

First, I'll Rant About How Crazy People Are...

If you're one of those people who is insane but can't face it so you call my ideas nuts, you might want to skip this section.  You know who you are (but can't admit it).

When I learned about Descartes's discovery.  I learned from someone who understood what it really meant.

I'm referring, of course, to the discovery he made that mattered most, not all his contributions to mathematics.  His mathematical contributions were great but, next to his philosophical contributions, they are a mouse fart on the Yellowstone Caldera.

It has come to my attention that there are some insane people who have interpreted "cogito ergo sum" as the foundation of all knowledge.  This is false.  That discovery is the root of all doubt.

The fact that the only knowledge you truly have is that there is an observing thing doing something you call "thinking" that you call "I" means that everything else you call "knowledge" is actually just a well-supported guess.

It doesn't matter if this was his intent.  This is the correct interpretation of his findings and it is why he won philosophy regardless of what he meant.

It sure looks to me like he meant the right thing but there's no point in arguing with someone over what a dead guy meant.  If you don't believe me just go count up all the Christians who think they can use the words of the most world's most famous pacifist to justify war.  So I'll just say that the right interpretation is the right interpretation and move on to my real point.

Doubt as an Exploratory Tool

The tool Descartes used, as I recall it, to arrive at his critical discovery is a powerful tool and I don't think it's done all the work it can.

First, let me introduce a similar tool I first heard of by reading the Heath brothers book, Decisive.  One of the thought-tools they suggest for widening your options is a mental game called "the vanishing-options genie."  In this game, you pretend that you have a reverse genie following you around taking away options (rather than granting wishes).

I've seen this tool help people break out of narrow-frames of reference when making decision.  It's very effective.

That got me thinking, can we use a great Deceiver to do the same thing with our analyses?  So often, I find that humans (myself included) want to stick to what they know.

We start with a thought and say "Is this true?"  Sometimes we say "How might this be wrong?"  Either way, we're starting with a point-of-reference that shapes subsequent thoughts and actions.

One tool that helps me is to use Descartes's omnipotent deceiver as a stand-in for the vanishing-options genie; instead of being a vanishing-options genie, it's a vanishing-assumptions genie.

Basically, when you are trying to understand why something works the way it does, take something you know to be true and assume it's actually one of the Deceiver's illusions.

I find this helps me branch out and consider alternative interpretations more readily.

Implementation

In case my previous suggestion was too abstract, I'll throw some examples in here.  The examples of knowledge to abandon are just placeholders; you'll need to pick stuff relevant to whatever you are considering.  The examples of kinds of replacements are probably reusable.

One way to do this is to replace the "illusion" with a "truth" - an alternate reason why something works the way it does.  For instance, you could say "it's not going faster than the speed of light, it's just going back in time."  Or, if you're one of the nutjobs who already believes that kind of crap, flip it around and see what happens.

Another option is to replace the "illusion" with an admission of ignorance.  Instead of "pull works because it aligns the efforts of many people toward a single goal and organizes their work in a delay-minimizing order toward achieving that goal."  You can just say "I don't know why pull works."

A third option is to replace an "illusion" with an assertion of illusion.  Replace "gas makes the car go" with "gas doesn't make the car go, something else does" and see what happens.

Try It...Or Don't

It works for me and it works for other people.  Try it and see what happens.  You know...or don't try it and don't see what happens.