Cartesian Starting Point

Epistemic status: provisional until I read Descartes.

Not having read Descartes, I will use his statement "I think, therefore I am."

I don't know about you, but if I doubt everything, one thing I can't doubt is my own existence. The past might not exist, the future might not. Other people may only be apparitions without souls, and I might be in a dream. But I exist. Since I am able to doubt, I know that I exist. Only existing things can doubt. Whatever goes into doubt is part of "I think", so emotions and sense perceptions are included.

The Cartesian starting point is this starting point of you, in the moment, as an experiencing subject. This is the most certain starting point for knowledge. Stories of God creating the world or evolution leading up to us are both distant from this starting point. Thoughts of the transhumanist or millennial future are also far away and unreal. The explanations given by science or the Bible are far away. It's not as though we can't cross the distance from here to all those distant things, but we have to start where we start.

When I think about "I think (/ experience) therefore I am" (and maybe it's the same for you), I see immediately in myself an I who is thinking. I am an immediate source of knowledge to myself. No matter what argument about personal identity might confuse me about the existence of me, I immediately know myself to exist in the moment, as a person. So we start off by knowing that reality is personal, and we have to do work if we want to try to claim it's anything else. (Reality is personal, and it is also experienced.)

Starting from this point, I can be an empiricist. I exist, and my experiences exist, and I can say what I see. From this, I can build up knowledge.