The Behaviour Effect

When trying to think of everything that was false Descarte it struck him that the fact that he was thinking proved that he was ’something’.  A truth.  Those who know a little about philosophy will understand that importance of the ‘truth’ debate.  This thought produced the most famous and influential philosophical quotes in the history of Western Philosophy.  The well known Latin form “Cognito ergo sum” or the traditional English translation “I think, therefore I am”.

I was reading about how Descarte came upon this thought when I noticed that the English translation is not in fact how Descarte meant it to be understood.  Being french, he unsurprisingly would have written in french…with the first work that mentions this thought being Discourse on the Method (1637).  The quote – “je pence, donc je suis”, in English “I am thinking, therefore I exist”.

My french is appallingly poor but I read that the quote in french utilises the continuous present tense.  And it is only in this tense that the force of his argument is brought out.

Now, why am I talking about this?  What on earth has this to do with anything that matters in our practical real life?

Descartes was saying that when we are in the process of doing something that we truly exist because in order to do that something, we must ‘be’.   It made me think about how we perceive ourselves and how we describe our behaviour.  To use the tense of the first quote, we have no urgency, no movement…no action.  Whereas in the continuous present tense we are actively progressing towards our goals, involved in life or living in the moment.

It struck me that the latter provides more opportunity for satisfaction and if we concentrated on doing and thinking we would glean benefits.  How many of us when asked what we like to do in our spare time tell others something that we used to do….perhaps still desire to do…maybe even still believe we do….but in actual fact, it’s been a very long time since we did.  Read? Cooked from scratch? Me, I used to paint…and really want to be able to say, ‘In my spare time I am painting a picture’.  I recently bought an easel, some canvas and paints with the intention to become fully absorbed but have not yet gotten around to doing anything.  I could say ” I paint” because I have painted but I cannot say “I am painting” because I have not done so in years and have no half finished painting upstairs… and for the  nit-pickers amongst you…yes I am currently (and in the present tense) writing this post.

How important then is it for us to think in the present tense, the continuous present tense…so we motivate ourselves to be doing things now and in the future.  I wonder what tense we typically use and if it impacts on our accomplishments??

Discussing relatively recently with a local poet, a compromise of conversation was highlighted to me.  Having delivered some vibrant and thought provoking poetry he explained that he uses poetry to protray his thoughts and observations about life.  Out conversation swayed into the topic of relativity and how generalisations can never be taken as fact as all things are relative.  Happiness, success, good bad, all things are varying shades of grey.

I fervently agreed and we chatted about human nature, Richard Dawkins, life atheists (as opposed to religious ones) and Robert Anton Wilson’s desire to remove the word ‘is’ from the English Language.  It was an interesting and engaging conversation.  It was when he said, due to the extreme nature of his views, he now found it almost impossible to engage in one-to-one conversation because he could not accept generalisations.  That made me double check my own view point.

Without generalisations and probabilities, we would be unable to have reasoned, intelligent debate.  We would be unable to make decisions or maintain some control over our surroundings.  Without a ‘flexible’ understanding we would lose the ability to engage in many of our normal conversations.  Ok, we need to ensure that we understand a particular word or emotion the way the person delivering it intends. But we also need to use probability to gage what is likely to happen, in order to plan and engage.

So, I accept that to understand behaviour we must assign probability…all things being relative, of course!