PHI 2010 The Mathematical and Logical Understanding of Nature Essay

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Assignment : Write a Meditation in which you attempt to verify the truth of one of your beliefs by connecting it back through math and logic to the indubitable truth “I think, therefore I am.”

This belief needs to be Scientifically proven, and It has to be analyzed as a meditation, just like Descartes Meditations.

My belief is:  The sky is blue. 

Certainty and Doubt: Descartes is seeking for certainty, he wants knowledge not belief, a guarantee that the ideas he is accepting are definitely true. So, he says, the only way to be sure is not to accept anything than I’m not actually certain of. He resolves not to accept anything that he can find any reason to doubt. He thus considers reasons for doubting his various kinds of belief. 

Knowledge= Representation:  having a ‘picture’ of things in our minds that matches the way things are outside our minds.  Naively, we believe that we are directly accessing things as they are in themselves through our senses.  But then we could never make mistakes about how things are.  We might also want to believe that, although we are representing things in our minds, rather than directly accessing them through our senses, these representations are basically accurate because the senses provide access to the things as they are in themselves, provided we make sure nothing is interfering with our access.  But Descartes thinks even this is a false picture of what is going on.  Our senses translate and interpret the data of the outside world so that the experience our senses provide is a translation and interpretation of how things are and not a simple copy.  With math and logic, however, we are able to represent how things really are in themselves without translating them through the senses. Things are present out there in the external world beyond our minds

Mathematical and Logical Proof: The discovery that, of all my various thoughts and beliefs, the idea that I exist is self-demonstrating, and thus irrefutable, provides a foundation of certainty on which to build knowledge of the truth. (Of course, properly speaking, all knowledge is knowledge of the truth.) With the ‘I think, I am’ Descartes discovers an idea in his head that necessarily matches the world outside his head. His mind itself really exists. He has found a bridge from being trapped in his own mind to reality, and his mind itself is that bridge. But knowing that he exists as a mind isn’t much knowledge at all. Still, it allows him to know that his thoughts exist, even if they are false. So he analyzes his thoughts in search of more truth.

End: Science

So what is the goal of this process of doubt and proof? The goal is to have certain knowledge and, failing that, highly probable beliefs about the world. Math and logic are certain and this certainty can be used to give more secure ideas about the nature of external reality. The mathematical and logical understanding of nature is called the sciences. The goal of all this philosophical investigation is scientific knowledge about the external world.

True Self: Cogito  – The attempt to doubt that our minds exist proves to each of us that our own minds have to be real. Thus, what we really are is our minds. After all, when we say or think “I” it our minds, not our bodies, thinking it. It is thus an error of naïve realism to think that we are our bodies. We are our minds, our minds are just in our bodies.

Conclution example: before examining this point more carefully and investigating other truths that may be derived from it, I want to pause here and spend some time contemplating God; to reflect on his attributes and to gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty of this immense light, so far as the eye of my darkened intellect can bear it. For just as we believe through faith that the supreme happiness of the next life consists in contemplating the divine majesty, so experience tells us that this same contemplation, though much less perfect, provides the greatest joy we can have in this life.