Descartes’ goal is to find a sturdy foundation for which all knowledge can be based, he has found himself to believe in many falsehoods and seeks to restructure his way of thinking.

Descartes begins by discarding all that we think we know about existence and goes on to assert that we cannot trust what our senses tell us. Descartes explains how our senses can be deceived and we cannot always trust them. He ascertains that it is impossible to tell when we cannot rely on our senses, and that there is no reliable way to tell if we are dreaming or not. As we cannot always rely on our senses, it does not make sense to use them as a base for our knowledge. That which relies on observation cannot be known to be indubitably true.

Thus, if our senses are not to be trusted as a foundation for knowledge, we must find that which is undoubtable to base all that we know upon. Descartes finds that facts which rely not upon the physical world such as math and geometry are certainly true, however finds the most undoubtable piece of knowledge to be that he exists, as if he is able to think and reason then there much be someone doing the thinking and reasoning, which must be himself. This is captured in his famous phrase: “I think therefore I am.”

I do most agree with what Descartes has to say about knowledge and what is knowable. That which is known through mind and logic alone and can be proven is indubitable and infallible.

Mathematics is a field devised entirely from logic that is separate from anything else and independent of the physical reality. It is hotly contested but it is my belief that math is discovered, not invented and that the way we describe and represent math is just a possible way of expressing that which is universally constant, I.e. math is the universal language. As a result, no matter how hard you try you will never find math to be ‘wrong’ only that our understanding of it is wrong.

My belief in this indubitability is firmly displayed in my rigid belief in math, logic, and computational sciences. Science is well known for being falsifiable, because it is a field based entirely on observation it is possible for it to be wrong and corrections must be made upon the way. Descartes and I fully agree on this. This however does not mean that science cannot be trusted, just that it is not necessarily always true.