Thinking? Um... therefore?

The Richard Rorty book, by the way, is so far just fascinating. I won't know till I've finished it whether I completely agree with everything he has to say, but it sure is making me think, and I find myself really enjoying it. He's quite radical in his rejection of both objective reality and the self as the ultimate location of truth. Check this out, e.g.:

"As long as we think that there is some relation called 'fitting the world' or 'expressing the real nature of the self' which can be possessed or lacked by vocabularies-as-wholes we shall continue the traditional philosophical search for a criterion to tell us which vocabularies have this desirable feature. But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences."

I know, right? Maybe it's because I went to sleep reading such heady, abstract stuff right after my last blog post that when I woke up I knew all at once, as deeply as you can possibly know something, the ultimate refutation of Descartes's Cogito ergo sum.

Here's what happened. I was lying on the couch, having unintentionally fallen asleep and therefore completely unconscious in that dead-to-the-world way that only happens when sleep grabs you by force. I don't really know how long I'd been like that, but the phone rang and woke me up. Except that even though I was awake, I found that I had no idea not only where or who I was, but even whether I was. Sometimes you wake up to a phone ringing and at first think, "What is that noise?" or "What am I supposed to do now?" or something vaguely panicked along those lines. This went way beyond that. Even the questions "Am I conscious? Does the world exist? Do I even exist?" don't adequately describe the state, because those questions would immediately be countered by the Cartesian-smart-alecky "Who wants to know?" No, the only way I can express the ultimate doubt I experienced in that moment, which included my own very being in its scope, is as a profound and unanswerable "Huh?" I find myself sort of wondering now whether maybe I actually didn't exist for a brief period of time...

It was Jeff on the phone. He was calling to say he'd be meeting up with us later. Sorry, Jeff, that I didn't answer, but thanks for the very interesting and mind-expanding experience.