Cartesian Other Cartesian Other In philosophy, the Cartesian Other, part of a thought experiment, is any other than the mind of the individual thinking about the experiment. The Other includes the individual's own body. According to the philosopher Descartes, there is a divide intrinsic to consciousness, such that you cannot ever bridge the space between your own consciousness and that of another. This "other" is in essence theoretical, since one cannot ever be empirically shown such an "other." Put differently, Descartes concluded "cogito ergo sum", "I think, therefore I am," that is, that the presence of a self of which to speak
Cogito, ergo sum and that "I" know what "thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks" wherein the "it" could be an impersonal subject as in the sentence "It is raining." The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard calls the phrase a tautology in his "Concluding Unscientific Postscript". He argues that the "cogito" already presupposes the existence of "I", and therefore concluding with existence is logically trivial. Kierkegaard's argument can be made clearer if one extracts the premise "I think" into the premises "'x' thinks" and "I am that 'x'", where "x" is used as a placeholder in order to disambiguate