Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

Our beliefs about the brain and its role in generating conscious experience are beliefs about the way the world works.

You can become aware of your own experiences, but never, it seems, aware of the ‘I’ that is the subject of those experiences.

I cannot doubt that I exist. I can doubt whether things extended in space (‘bodies’) exist. Therefore, I am not a body.

Descartes is not entitled to an ‘I’ that is thinking. All he can properly claim is that ‘there is a thought going on’.