Is 'I think therefore I am' a tautology?
A while back on another forum I tried to ask whether 'I think therefore I am' was a tautology, and I found out that the subject was so controversial for the moderators that it was only a short time before they decided to close the thread and prevent any more posts to it. Since then I have tried to be careful about speaking too much about it.
However, since then, there have been many threads about truth on this forum, so I thought it might be a good time to bring this topic up again and see what other people have to say about it -
before I add anything, and potentially bring down the wrath of people who are against me talking about it.
However, since then, there have been many threads about truth on this forum, so I thought it might be a good time to bring this topic up again and see what other people have to say about it -
before I add anything, and potentially bring down the wrath of people who are against me talking about it.
Comments (50)
It is somewhat tautology. A bachelor is a man, but a man may not be a bachelor because he can be married making him not a bachelor. If I where to have to say whether it is or isn't tautology, I would have to say it is because bachelor is a synonym for man and nearly any time you declare a synonym is the same thing as the word it is a synonym of I believe it to be a kind of tautology; even if the words are somewhat different.
Even if a statement is potentially informative (such as " A bachelor is a man") it can still be tautology because it is merely true because we say it is true and/or merely true syntactically.
Words are synonyms of other words they are like because that is how we label such things, however whether two real world object we think are synonyms with each other is an entirely different ball of wax as far as I know of.
For example "I think" is a declaration of that one is a thing that thinks, "therefore I am" is a statement that supposedly shows if one thinks they exist; however there is no real explanation as why this is so. The explanation is obfuscated in that it has to be derived from the initial statement "I think". "I" is obviously some kind of object (perhaps either mental or physical depending on context) and "think" is an attribute/aspect of this object.
When combined it ,along with the context it is used in, means some kind of "thinking thing" but it also mean thinking thing for a first person/ or narrator's perspective. Whenever we are talking about a first person/ or narrator's perspective, it is pretty much a given that the narrator/ writer/ first person perspective is a real thing even if everything else is imaginary in their story just as it is assumed that the person reading a story is real (at least in regards to themselves) even if everything else they are reading is fiction.
Because of this ":I think" really means "I'm a thinking object that it is a given that it exist" and "I am" expanded means "therefore I am an thinking object that it is a given must exist". Descartes's argument I believe is tautology because there is nothing to explain "how or why we exist" other than the fact that it is a given the first person or person speaking from a narrator's perspective is assumed to exist; regardless of the how or why it is.
One can even 'flip' the argument by saying the outside world must also exist in some state because it is something 'other' than ourselves that we can (or more likely forced to) take notice of. Even if it was merely all an illusion, there would have to be something creating the illusion (just as there has to be something allowing us to be or creating an illusion of ourselves) of the 'other' thing than ourselves. Even if one wanted to argue that the outside world could be merely a figment of our imagination, it couldn't be any more of a figment of our imagination than our imagination makes of our own existence. In the end it is obvious that the outside/'other' is as real as the thinking thing we associate with ourselves , even if in Western culture it is a given that the latter that is considered more important and not the former.
There is of course a sense in which 'I think' requires one to exist in order for it to be true – but to criticize the argument on this point is I think to misunderstand. There is no problem with arguing from the stronger case to the weaker, if somehow the stronger case can be directly known. For example, 'Porky is a pig, therefore there is a pig' does the same thing, but it's a good argument, and pointing out that Porky is a pig might very well be a good way to show that pigs exist. In the same way, pointing out that one thinks may be a good way to demonstrate that one exists.
"Bachelor" isn't a synonym for "man".
being is not always thinking
What if it someone's argument is using circular reasoning?
Perhaps you can give an example of what you are saying is or is not an example of tautology so I know where you are coming from on it.
being is not always thinking
—Cavacava
And you know this how? While not living things 'think' as we do, it is a gray area as to at what threshold allows something to be classified as a 'living thing', and from there at what level it has some self awareness, and after that sentience. Whether or not a non-living thing is a being like a living being is other question that really has no answer. While it is kind of safe to assume that something you see exists, I'm unaware of anything of any argument that state that it is a given that the thing-in-and-of-itself exists as we perceive it to exist. Or at least I'm unaware of any good argument that states this.
As far as I know, we do not the attributes that are required to allow something to think nor do we really understand which attributes are required for something to be. While for the sake of simplicity we can make certain assumptions, but it isn't a given that such assumptions are true under all conditions.
As in, "I don't think" is a performative contradiction.
—The Great Whatever
I think you may be just trying to split hairs here since if an argument for some reason commits one fallacy instead of another, technically that itself could be an issue but in the larger picture of whether there is a fallacy or not is the more important problem at hand.
To be honest I not as concern as to which fallacy happens to be as long as there is an actual fallacy or not is determined as as long as the fallacy that is first choose is close enough to what it may be. I have been in too many debates where I've have to argue over nomenclature/ verbiage/ etc that I have grow tried of it even if it sometimes increase my vocabulary.
If you can agree as to whether or not there is a fallacy I guess I'm willing to correct the issue of whether I have chosen the right fallacy for it to be, but if you don't believe there is even a fallacy to begin with then whether or not it is tautology is pretty moot.
—Pneumenon
Exactly! :D
I wish my wordage was as clear as yours, but at any rate you have summed up the issue in a way that if someone reading it understands what your saying they can decide for themselves whether Descartes was correct in that one can at least hang their hat on the fact that they at least they know that they exist ....or they can choose to think like me that there is something fishy with his position. Also it should be noted that even if one "knows that they exist", it is a given that this doesn't really mean anything. We don't know if we ate merely a brain in a vat, if the 'reality' we perceive is merely a illusion. or even what we are really referring to when we utter the words 'I' or 'exist'.
My personal belief is that Descartes is guilty of using similar logic as Thomas Aquinas when he created his Cosmological Argument, which supposed proves that "God exists" even if we have no real idea of what we are talking about when we are talking about "God".
At any rate I know that it is likely that more people will believe that Descartes knows what he is talking about than me. but my hope is that at least some people will think like you do and realize that it is a problem that is at least debatable with rational discourse from either side.
I am no Latin scholar but I note that the Latin original 'cogito ergo sum' contains no pronouns. Literally it seems to say something like 'thinks therefore exists'. Usually, as in other pronoun-drop languages like Italian, a pronoun is implied. But just because a pronoun is usually implied in a sentence with this type of grammatic structure, does not mean it is always implied. Just because the sentence would seem to make sense with the pronoun inserted (in Italian the 'I' pronoun would be Io. I don't know what it would be in Latin), that doesn't mean that Descartes intended to imply one. Perhaps it was intended for there to be no pronoun, implied or otherwise, and - in a pronoun-drop language - one cannot distinguish between a sentence in which an implied pronoun was intended and one in which it was not.
If Descartes did not mean to imply a pronoun, we could expand on the statement to be something like
'thinking is happening, therefore existence is happening'
This form of the statement does not necessitate the existence of a stable self, which would please Buddhist philosophers and David Hume.
Thus 'if X is a bachelor then X is a man' is not a tautology because if we interpret 'bachelor' to mean 'dog' and 'man' to mean 'cat', it is false. Note that the words 'if' and 'then' are logical words so we are not allowed to change their meaning.
TGW gave an example of a tautology, which is an implicative statement where the antecedent and consequent are the same. For instance:
'if X is a bachelor then X is a bachelor'
is a tautology, because whatever we interpret 'bachelor' to mean, it remains true.
It's not a tautology: it's LD-valid, which means it can't be uttered in a context by an agent without being true. But the proposition that it expresses, that the speaker exists, is contingent.
The Latin pronoun is ego, which can be added, but even without it the cogito and sum are inflected for the first person singular, so the sentence means the same with or without the overt pronoun.
I am unfamiliar with the term "LD-valid," but the concept sounds interesting; I've previously given some thought to such statements, but never knew that they had a specific designation. Off the top of my head, perhaps a few other LD-valid statements (i.e. those statements which cannot be uttered without being true, and the truth of which is contingent) would be (1) I have uttered at least one statement, and (2) I have uttered at least one falsehood, (3) I have uttered at least one truth or at least one falsehood.
— The Great Whatever
Ok, I think I understand what you mean now how "I think therefore I am", not being tautology since the statement doesn't really equate to 'A' equal to 'A' the same why as the statement " I am what I am" ( I think Popeye says that) does. If that is what you were saying then you are right, I was wrong and I sort of get what you where trying to argue; at least I hope I do.
I guess if a statement is ACTUAL tautology (as in the logically sound type they teach in 101 Logic in high school or college) then technically it can not be wrong, grammatically speaking at least, because it conforms to laws that we impose on logic. However since "I think therefore, I am" isn't tautology then it doesn't even do that so that fact that it isn't tautology doesn't really hurt my argument since it is still possible for it to be a fallacy of some sort.
Which brings me to my question for you; you mention the liar's paradox which I personally think the statement is neither a lie nor a truth since the statement the speaker is referring to doesn't exist. Sort of like having a dangling memory pointer in C programming language not referring to any ACTUAL memory address and therefore the no-existent memory can not even be tested if used to tested when checking a True/False condition and instead would throw an error.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that "I think therefore, I am" has the same problem with all epistemology questions/problems in that it can not overcome the Münchhausen trilemma where we have to assume something that may not actually be a given. As you said if the speaker for some reason just appears out of nowhere and utters the statement (and then disappears the next second of something) then the statement may not be true in the typical sense we think of when we think of as 'here'.
Münchhausen trilemma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
In my thought experiment I like to use a cluster of advance tech high powered servers running multiple instances Artificial Intelligent agent programs each sharing time space on the same various machines. If once of these programs happen to think to itself (either in it's own simulation or some other circumstance) "I think, therefore I am", it wouldn't necessarily be the same as if we said or thought the same thing ourselves. For one thing the concept of "I" in such a situation is pretty convoluted enough say there is an actual "I" beyond the illusion that is created for the AI, and the idea of it "existing" is merely an illusion as well since it is plausible that during 99.9999% of the time it was trying to utter the statement the program it resides on was sitting doing nothing other than waiting for other processes to finish. I know saying all this is a bit anal retentive, but it is something that most people studying philosophy (or at least the one's that eventually become skeptics, which I think are the majority) already know and that is that the simple 'truths' we accept and use in our day to day lives (such as the sun rising and setting every day) are more or less true almost in every condition, but even the most simple most obvious 'truths' that we accept are real are themselves contingent on various knows, known unknowns, or even unknown unknowns and because of that it is more realistic to just accept that nearly nothing is a given when it comes to real life; not even death or taxes.
As per Gassendi, really all that's determined (deductively), is that there's cognitive activity.
That is, while thinking you can conclude thoughts exist (with certainty).
I'm still fairly confident that I exist, though. :D
The short road to that argument is to point out that Descartes quite happily, in the second meditation, points out that he is nothing more than this thinking, such that if the thinking should stop, then he would cease to exist as well. This is how he get's around the objection that it hasn't been established that the thinking belongs to him (he could just be tuned into some radio frequency). He identifies the "I" with thought, saying they are the same thing.
He then goes on to define thought in such a way that nothing escapes its definition: thinking (in language), perceiving, feeling, willing, denying, refuting, accepting..... Basically, anything that can be taken as self-presently existing - the "given" as such. He needs to define thought in this hungry way to avoid making a conceptual determination (that could always be doubted - how do you "know" thought is such and such, and how do you know that this such and such is an instance of thought, defined thusly?), which was Nietzsche's third criticism.
So, if there is "something" then this something is called thought. If there is thought, then there is an "I". The "I" arises via the transitive property from the simple fact of existence, showing it to be a complex tautology.
Ah, got it. Thanks for the info.
Perhaps some may suffer from liar-like problems. Let's take another look:
(1) I have uttered at least one statement, and
(2) I have uttered at least one falsehood,
(3) I have uttered at least one truth or at least one falsehood.
(1) would seem uncontroversially true, regardless of how the tense is construed. Assuming that I have never uttered a statement until uttering (1), it would seem to be no less true, despite the fact that in that case it would seem to be self-referential (unless one takes the position that self-referential statements are problematic tout court).
Re: (2), let us assume, as you say, that it's the first thing I have uttered. In that case, (2) is true just in case it is false (as it could be the only potential truthmaker of its own truth). And it is false just in case it is true.
So, you may be right that (2) could be infected by liar-like problems under certain circumstances. I will give this more thought when I have time...perhaps these are a case of a sort of contingent liar-like paradoxes? After all, the liar is paradoxical (or otherwise problematic, depending upon exactly how we diagnose what is the problem with it) under any and all circumstances, regardless of the context in which it's uttered, which is not the case for (2)-type statements.
The short road to that argument is to point out that Descartes quite happily, in the second meditation, points out that he is nothing more than this thinking, such that if the thinking should stop, then he would cease to exist as well. This is how he get's around the objection that it hasn't been established that the thinking belongs to him (he could just be tuned into some radio frequency). He identifies the "I" with thought, saying they are the same thing.
He then goes on to define thought in such a way that nothing escapes its definition: thinking (in language), perceiving, feeling, willing, denying, refuting, accepting..... Basically, anything that can be taken as self-presently existing - the "given" as such. He needs to define thought in this hungry way to avoid making a conceptual determination (that could always be doubted - how do you "know" thought is such and such, and how do you know that this such and such is an instance of thought, defined thusly?), which was Nietzsche's third criticism.
So, if there is "something" then this something is called thought. If there is thought, then there is an "I". The "I" arises via the transitive property from the simple fact of existence, showing it to be a complex tautology." —John Brady
Since Descartes was around before Kant, and Kant was foolish enough to think that the "Categorical Imperative" was anything more than non-sense on stilts (or I should say the people of his time thought it was worthy of any serious consideration), I'm not that surprised that he felt "I think therefore I am" was real philosophy. Also to show how well he was thinking that day, he also believed that coming up with that thought somehow proved that there was a "God", even if he was more likely than not well aware of the fact that he, and everyone else has no idea of what God is as well as the impossibility of proving something exists if one knows nothing about it.
I believing thinking proves there is a definite plausibility of existence (since we are unable to reason HOW something can think without some kind of physical thing in one form or another) but the problem of WHAT existence is or what form "I" take is left unresolved so I might as well be reading the phrase "I think therefore I am' out of a book and imagine the author who wrote it imagining that they believe that they exist when the passage could have been from my own imagination.
Probably even bothering to take notice of this stuff is moot in of itself since it is probable that many people reading it (even those who consider themselves as some one who studies philosophy) have no clue as to what I'm talking about. For me it is only worth mentioning as to how bad Western ideology is if we keep using as an example of 'good' philosophy/critical thinking when it should be obvious how badly flawed it is.
Oh, and I tip my hat to you for bothering to read Nietzsche's work and to use his thoughts on the subject in your post. I remember several years ago having one of his books and reading various parts of it when I traveled when I was a little bored. Two of my favorite passages (which also happen to be in the Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks—those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, for they are those who cross over.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra",
Ok, so maybe using quotes I know from video games isn't that impressive, but what he believes and talks about is closer to the truth than almost all of the philosophers that came before him and still better than most of those who have come after. If it was possible for more people like him to know what he knew without it driving him absolutely crazy maybe the world wouldn't be as messed up as it is.
As per Gassendi, really all that's determined (deductively), is that there's cognitive activity.
That is, while thinking you can conclude thoughts exist (with certainty).
I'm still fairly confident that I exist, though. :D"
—jorndoe
As I mentioned in last post, it seems reasonable to accept that it is plausible that in order for something to 'think' or process information it requires some physical form. This is part of the reason I believe that mind (and/or "spirit") requires a physical form in one shape or another. However the fact that thought requires some form doesn't make it a given that this 'physical form' is anything really like we assume it to be.
For example, if you are a brain in a vat and you where interacting with a virtual/illusionary world there really wouldn't be a 'you' in any shape or form that you currently assume there to be and it would be hard to determin how your actions and efforts where anything more than being completely moot. In effect if one was really in such a situation (or more accurately could be called a prison if they know nothing of it) then the 'you' you assume to exist would be more or less really non-existent. While one might assume that if all their life was a dream and they where stuck in such a dream that there could be something to it which would allow them to call it some kind of "existence", it is almost a given that such an existence couldn't and wouldn't be any better than that of a character in a video game who only exists in that virtual world and has zero significance outside of it. IMHO the only reason I imagine someone would choose to say such an existence could have some importance would be to avoid the existential problem of what to do if one is trapped in such prison and/or how their own life is really not that different that already.
In a nutshell, the form/characteristics/attributes/etc of one's existence is as important or perhaps even more important than merely if one exists at all. Knowing the former but not really knowing the later is pretty worthless in my opinion.
You don't need pronouns in Latin. It means, "I think, therefore I am." Which is the source of the problem, because what it should say is "dubio ergo sum," and the basis of the argument is that one cannot doubt that one is doubting, therefore one must exist.
The possible flaw is the NEXT statement, which is that doubt is the same as other activities of the human mind, SUCH AS experience of sensation, thinking, and feeling. When I was younger I would have agreed the flaw undermines the argument, but more recently I tend to agree Descartes was actually right about that.
You may try to say "I cannot doubt that I am doubting" is circular, but according to formal logic, it is not. According to current theory, AFTER you make the statement, you seek empirical evidence, by asking the question, "was I doubting?" to evaluate the proposition. At that time, the referent is to an activity in the past, and therefore the argument is not cyclic, but rather, a valid reference to a past state.
The problem with this is that 'cogito ergo sum' is only supposedly only valid in the present tense and with the person both saying it and evaluating it, not in the past tense and/or another person evaluating the statement. A normal human being can not ever be sure another person is merely an illusion, nor can they be completely sure that any of their past memories are an illusion as well. Your argument that it isn't a circular argument is flawed because being able to NOT DOUBT that one is doubting only works in the present tense not in the past tense. When it is in the past, it is a lot easier for a supposed thinker to question whether it was they who was doing the actual doubting.
Part of my own personal reasons for doubting the whole 'cogito ergo sum' thing is BECAUSE of all of the exceptions,issues,nuances, etc with it which tells me that it only works if it fools us into thinking it is telling us something that it really does not. If there was some 'truth' behind it it would neither have so many hiccups nor would it be so moot of a truth (ie truths are SUPPOSEDLY something more than a moot point, otherwise they are not even worth knowing) in the first place.
whatever, I don't argue with informal opinions about standard philosophy based on people's own intuition, its a waste of time.
—ernestm
Then why did you bother to post YOUR OWN INFORMAL OPINION if you believed it doing so would be a waste of time for you and the other people reading it?
I imagine you believe that your opinion may not be as much of a waste of time as the opinions of others, but obviously if that is how you feel it would be a bit of a double standard as it would mean only your opinions mattered and not any others.
Also since the majority of philosophical topics revolve around what people think about them more than what can be proven you would be neglecting many topics even if you were willing to discuss who said what regarding some subject but nothing beyond that as some academics sometimes try to do when they are supposedly 'experts' in such subjects.
I could be wrong, but I imagine your response with 'whatever' is more likely merely a means to avoid dealing with a potential issue with that I have pointed out a fallacy than your unwillingness to consider 'opinions' in regarding various issues in standard philosophy. While I can understand such a method of dealing with such a problem (were you may or may not be willing to think about an issue at a later time), might I suggest another and that is to either not give a rat's backside about making errors and/or have it one of your goals while studying philosophy to find out you are in error in one way or another.
The reasoning for doing this is simple, in philosophy (at least in this kind of setting) there are no grades, no metrics or anything else to really prove one thing or another so actually being 'wrong' from time to time is pretty moot. The only goals I can think of is either to learn yourself, to teach others, or sometimes merely do a sanity check if one has been doing this for awhile. For me I realize I spend enough time merely shooting from the hip instead of worrying about what I'm saying to be overly paranoid about being wrong and/or worrying about what others might think. Also if anyone on a forum believes your position is weaker due to making a mistake every so often, then it is likely they are new to philosophy and/or are too full of themselves anyways so their opinion is moot either way.
IMHO, the almost all the topics in philosophy that DO MATTER are the ones where people have to use their opinions (and overcome biases) in order to better understand the issue at hand. The issues that only require someone to recite text or cook book stuff like it is some kind of scripture too simple because the questions and answers are in the format used mostly in high school and/or college where as many real world problems require the kind of critical thinking were there are no black or white solutions to certain questions and problems.
Sorry ernestm, I didn't realize I was talking to you. :D
We have butted heads enough on similar topics that you can disregard the last post I made. The issue I pointed out is merely a nuance and merely something I pointed out to try and make my point. However since I have troubled you enough in the past, I don't want to cause you any more headaches than necessary.
Let me ask you, how could you not know this? My desk is very reticent.
You want to say there are ambiguities, but how did we get on to life anyhow? You backtracking or compounding the issue?
"
I read something just this morning which bears, in an interesting way, on your question. It suggests that what is expressed in the 'cogito' is a synthetic a priori understanding, and not merely an analytic tautology. It is from Deleuze's Difference and Repetition as quoted in Kant and Spinozism Beth Lord page 145:
[b][i]The entire Kantian critique amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined. The determination (‘I think’) obviously implies some-thing undetermined (‘I am’), but nothing so far tells us how it is that this undetermined is determinable by the ‘I think’. … Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the determinable, or rather the form in which the undetermined is determinable (by the determination).
This third value suffices to make logic a transcendental instance. It amounts to the discovery of Difference – no longer in the form of an empirical difference between two determinations, but in the form of a transcendental Difference between the Determination as such and what it determines; no longer in the form of an external difference which separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes an a priori relation between thought and being.
(DR 85–6)[/i][/b]
That's something that Buddhism refers to as the infinite sphere of the knowable unknown around the finite sphere of the knowable in which we live -- and outside both of those, the equally infinite unknowable unknown. At some point in such infinite regressions I end up turning away from Western empiricism as being at all useful in the comprehension, until sometimes Kant pulls me back with a reminder that his idea is transcendental; and those who are cynical of Kant then seem somehow even less comprehensible than Kant, however much any of them delve into obscurantist ideas.
"I think, therefore I am a tautology."
Which I will now defend as the only correct understanding. That I think is a fact about the world, to the extent that I am part of the world. However "I think" is a thought, and by the first anti-magical proposition of unenlightenment, a thought cannot oblige the world to be thus and not so. So that I think 'I think' cannot entail that I am part of the world. But this is exactly what a tautology and only a tautology refrains from - saying anything about the world.
Therefore I am a tautology.
What do you mean by "correct", some people think cogito sum is a performative statement which is only 'correct' when it is actually thought.
Wow! So you do't have any problem with 'I am a tautology'?
The performance can be described as I think, 'I think' and 'therefore I am'.
But the implication is that I am identified as being, not the performance, but the thought. As in, I am the thought, 'I think', rather than the performance, I think, 'I think' and 'therefore I am.'
So I program my computer to print out 'I print therefore I am.' every now and then. While I don't doubt the existence of my computer, I am unconvinced that its performance has any great significance. A statement has been made, therefore there is a statement.
What do I mean by 'correct', though? I think I mean that I am right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. No, that just says correct means right. I mean, understanding the implications of the cogito, and the rather sharp limitations of them. I mean more specifically that the existence that is demonstrated by the performance is not much of an existence. It is the existence of the thought of existence and no more.
Sounds like you are getting all knotted up. Descartes masin task in the Meditations is epistemological certainty not ontological, what is correct is therefore important to his goal. I have already stated that I don't think 'cogito sum' is tautologous.
Fair enough, I think our opinions on this are similar enough to not have to argue against you.
One small nuance is that I think it is 'ok' for debatable philosophical issues to sometimes delve into real world things like psychology, nuclear physics, etc. as long as the issue isn't too much more in the domain of the specialist in that field than the people who study philosophy.
For example one of the topics that seems to be between the middle of psychology and philosophy is something I refer to as the 'human condition'. It can be thought of basically as the various quirks and odd nuances that human beings have to deal with going about in their day to day life, but it can be used as a catch-all phrase to also refer to a lot of the ..not so small issues such as the many, many non-trivial problems we have never been able to solve (and perhaps never will be) and the toll it takes on us in our lives being limited by such a thing.
While there be some nuances that are better left for psychologist to deal with, the issues of the human condition is a problem that I believe is best addressed in both philosophy and psychology.
A knot of thought is quite a good description of the cogito and indeed the self, but If there is certainty that is not ontological, how can it be anything but tautological?
It has been awhile since I read stuff about Kant's work on the subject you are talking about, but I remember liking what he wrote and his analyse on thought to be very good for the time he came up with them, and even pretty valid for today. I may be wrong but I remember his methods where more about how thought works, how it is organized, etc. and how visualize and/or create models to better understand issues involving such things. It is kind of reminiscent of classed in programming languages or database management are taught where someone has to be taught to understand some abstract concepts pretty well, but yet may not be able to have the time to understand every detail of the underlining system or code.
I guess part of my frustration in dealing with philosophy is similar to my problems in IT where people would often have issues dealing with dealing with the difference between how they thought it worked and how it actually could work. And people such as myself and other IT staff would get caught in the middle.
Because thinking is active, it's the realization of being, but what is, what exists is passive because it does not necessarily think.
In this case, it is a tautology in a general sense.
However, I take issue with this statement on a different level, since it supposes that thought is proof of existence; in other words if I do not think, I cannot prove to myself that I exist. It avoids asking what the 'I' actually is, and merely observes that this mysterious 'I' tends to think.
But doesn't the term "I" require that it is a given that there be some OTHER thing that EXISTS in order for there to be an "I" in the first place. Everything we know about how things come into being is through other things that allow them to be and even if our world was merely a virtual/illusionary world it is pretty much accepted that it to would require something other then the individual itself to exist in order to create the world they live in or to create an illusion of one at least.
I guess one could try to argue that it is plausible for us to be trapped in an illusionary world created by the individual themselves, but if one was trapped in such an illusion the part of themselves creating the illusion would not be thought of as themselves since it is highly unlikely one would want to be trapped in an illusion; even if it is of their own making. Why it is also plausible for some sentient being to happen to be in control of the ENTIRE universe (ie. "God") so that they and the world around them are one and the same, this is NOT a situation that any normal human being would have any experience in nor is it a given that it is even possible.
So in a nutshell, it is a moot point that an individual can consider themselves to exist (even if they may have no idea what they are referring to when they say "I" or "exist") , because we already know that SOME kind of existence is required to create a "thinking-thing" (whether it is a machine or living thing) but it is also a given that this "thinking -thing" will ALSO require something to support i and/or allow it to exist so the external reality outside of the thinking-thing has to be just as REAL as the existence that allows the "I" to exist.
'I think' has the form Gx. I am has the form EF(Fx).
If x has the predicate G then there is a predicate F such that x has that predicate, is tautologous.