Cogito, ergo sum (See CSMK III 159, 161.) Another predecessor was Avicenna's "Floating Man" thought experiment on human self-awareness and self-consciousness. The 8th century Hindu philosopher Adi Shankara wrote in a similar fashion, No one thinks, 'I am not', arguing that one's existence cannot be doubted, as there must be someone there to doubt. The central idea of "cogito, ergo sum" is also the topic of Mandukya Upanishad. Spanish philosopher Gómez Pereira in his 1554 work "De Inmortalitate Animae", published in 1749, wrote ""nosco me aliquid noscere, & quidquid noscit, est, ergo ego sum"" ("I know that I know something, anyone who knows
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