Wirt writes, obviously intending to upset Descartes,
> However, if Descartes made any mistake, it was in his philosophical
> extrapolations of his empiricisms. His famous aphorism, "Cogito ergo sum (I
> think, therefore I am)," was a derivative of his intense religious desire to
> find a profund distinguishing characteristic, God imposed, between Man and
> the beasts.
>
> Nonetheless, it was a mistake that Descartes should not have made. Descartes
> had all of the information necessary from his researches at his fingertips to
> reject that philosophy. His dissections of the organs of the horse and humans
> demonstrated overwhelmingly to him that they were constructed identically,
> especially so in those most complex of organs, the eye and the brain. Indeed,
> the profundity of this philosophical mistake of his is now such common
> knowledge that it has become folk wisdom. Almost certainly, your mother has
> told you at one time or another: "Never put Descartes before the horse!"

<*groan*>

Nevertheless, I think it worthwhile to put in context Descartes' famous
statement:

    I had long before remarked that, in relation to practice, it is sometimes
    necessary to adopt, as if above doubt, opinions which we discern to be
    highly uncertain, as has been already said; but as I then desired to give
    my attention solely to the search after truth, I thought that a procedure
    exactly the opposite was called for, and that I ought to reject as
    absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least
    ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that there remained
    aught in my belief that was wholly indubitable.  Accordingly, seeing that
    our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there
    existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men
    err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters
    of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other,
    rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for
    demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts
    (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when
    we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed
    that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind
    when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.  But
    immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that
    all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should
    be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am
    (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of
    doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of
    shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the
    first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Sys, Southern Adventist University
          ==========================================================
Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on
delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is
an eternal uproar.
                        -- da Vinci, Leonardo (1452-1519)
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         Deep thoughts to be found at http://www.southern.edu/~ashted