Solipsism then they must be identical, as in indistinguishable from each other and therefore one and the same thing. Dualists then attempt to identify attributes of mind that are lacked by matter (such as privacy or intentionality) or vice versa (such as having a certain temperature or electrical charge). One notable application of the identity of indiscernibles was by René Descartes in his "Meditations on First Philosophy". Descartes concluded that he could not doubt the existence of "himself" (the famous "cogito ergo sum" argument), but that he "could" doubt the (separate) existence of "his" body. From this, he inferred that the
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