Ctrl Alt Delete

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed today and I am very distracted – it is probably just the overload associated with all the little tasks and projects that I want to complete, work, the legal situation, home life, the holiday (and holiday travel) and family. There are also a few things going on in my personal life that I can not write about here, that also add to the processing load. When my computer gets frozen up like this, I simply press ctl – alt – delete and the task manager comes up (I am still using a computer that runs Windows 95). I click on “end task” and the highlighted application ceases any and all operations, and kind of ceases to exist. I sometimes wish that my mind had an “end task” button, or at the very least a disk defragmentation program.

The human mind is a very strange thing and its esoteric workings are something I think often about. This is of course an exercise in futility. It is akin to looking through a window or a telescope in order to understand how glass is made or a lens is ground or the principles of refraction; or, to not mix metaphors, using a computer in order to understand its inner workings. One can gain some insights, but I doubt that anyone who is merely proficient (or even very proficient) using Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer could build a computer or modify the underlying code to perform some functions that it was not intended for.

The metaphor starts to get fuzzy when we consider the role of feelings and emotions. Some of these, such as euphoria or contentment, have the effect of improving the mind’s performance, for which no analog in the realm of computing occurs to me. Others, such as depression, despair or grief function like viruses eroding the very code, data or functionality of the system. Finally, there are emotions/feelings such as worry, anxiety and love that act like spyware, using enormous processing capacity to perform functions that may not be the intention of, or even in the best interests of, the system.

So what is the role of faith? Is it the spiritual version of McAfee or Norton? The phrase "cogito ergo sum" has come to a large extent to define faith for me. It is widely misunderstood, however. Although generally attributed to Descartes, many predecessors offered similar arguments, particularly St. Augustine of Hippo (in the early 5th century) in De Civitate Dei, who also anticipated modern refutations of the concept. Descartes does not even use the phrase in his most important work, the Meditations on First Philosophy, but the term "the cogito" is often confusingly used to refer to an argument from it. Descartes felt that this phrase, which he had used in his earlier Discourse, had been misleading in its implication that he was appealing to an inference, so he changed it to "I am, I exist" in order to avoid the term "cogito".

What Descartes was really doing was examining his own beliefs to see if they survived the ultimate doubt (most did not). He found it was impossible to doubt that he exists. Even if there were a deceiving god or an evil demon (the tool he used to stop himself from falling back into ungrounded beliefs), his belief in his own existence would be secure, for how could one be deceived about one’s own existence unless one existed for the purpose of being deceived (an idea that he rejected)? This is faith.

Descartes considered science and mathematics to be justified to the extent that their proposals are established on a similar immediate clarity, distinctiveness and self-evidence that present itself to the mind - faith. The originality of Descartes’ thinking, therefore, was using the cogito as a demonstration of the most fundamental epistemological principle, that science and mathematics are justified by relying on clarity, distinctiveness, and self-evidence – faith.

So how would old Rene react to a system crash, a fatal system error causing the irretrievable loss of weeks of work or the Sony battery of his laptop catching fire? And what would he say to an inbox with 127 emails, a 70-hour work-week with a three hour train ride back and forth to Brooklyn, an orange alert from the DHS, maxed-out credit cards, global warming and LaGuardia traffic and lines on Thanksgiving day? I think, therefore I think I am screwed, I think…maybe? Faith!