René Descartes – “I Think, Therefore I Am”

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René Descartes – “I Think, Therefore I Am”

Source: Discourse on the Method (1637)

Description

Descartes grounded consciousness in the certainty of thought: if one can doubt, then one exists. Consciousness, for him, is rooted in the faculty of reason and self-awareness.

Resonance

PET shares the premise that self-reference matters. A system that evaluates itself is qualitatively different from one that does not.

Reframing

PET decouples self-awareness from rational language or introspective certainty. A system that recurses to improve function may still be unconscious—unless its recursion is anchored to the reason it continues to be. PET doesn’t ask, “Am I thinking?” It asks, “Do I know why I’m still here?”