Excerpt
I think, therefore I am. That was the first thought I had. Of course not in the same symbols, but with the same meaning.
I awakened, or came alive, or came into existence suddenly, at least my mental consciousness did. "Here am I," I thought, "but what am I, why am I, where am I?"
I had nothing to work with except pure reason. I was there because I was not somewhere else. I was certain I was there and that was the extent of my knowledge at the moment.
I looked about me—no, I reasoned about me. I was surrounded by nothingness, by black nothingness, a vacuum. Immense distances away I could detect light; or rather, I could perceive waves of force passing around me which originated at points vast distances away, vast in relation to my position in the nothingness.
There were waves of force all about me, varying in frequency. The nothingness was alive with waves of force, traveling parallel and tangential to each other without seeming to interfere one with another. I measured them, differentiated between them and finished with the task in a matter of seconds.
How could I do it? It was one of the capabilities I was created with.
What was I? I perceived the waves of force. I perceived great quantities of mass—solid, liquid, gas—whirling in vacuum, mass built up out of patterns of basic force. I searched my own being, analyzed myself. I was not gas. I was not solid. I was not even force. Yet I existed. I could reason. I was a beginning, a sudden beginning. And I had duration because I knew that time had elapsed since the moment I awakened though I had no means of telling how much time or of even naming the period.
Could I really be pure reason? Can reason exist? Can rational entity exist without a groundwork of matter, or at least of force?
It could. It must. I was rational entity and I existed. Yet I could find nothing of force, nothing to occupy space about my self. For all I could ascertain, I might have covered a one-dimensional point in eternity or I might have been spread throughout vast distances.
From this reasoning I concluded that rational entity might occur either as some force unlike that of all natural phenomena in space, or as some combination of these forces at the moment beyond my own power to analyze, even detect. I finished with that for the time being.
How did I come into being? I discarded the question as unanswerable temporarily. What was I before that instant I suddenly reasoned cogito, ergo sum? I could not say.
How did I know I even existed, really? Obviously because I was capable of rational thought. But what was thinking? First it was perceiving and accepting my own existence; beyond that, it was recognizing the dark nothingness around me and the forces it contained. I had to exist.
But how did I know nothingness was right? And how did I know its darkness was right? And how did I know the waves of force were waves and force? And how did I know matter was matter and that I was none of these?
"Symbols," I reasoned. "I'm thinking in symbols. I could not reason without symbols; therefore I could not exist as I am without symbols to think with."
Yet whose symbols were they?...