So: Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum includes a meaning of “I think, therefore I am the cognitive filter that takes in information and further filters it into different modes, such as thought and forms, all of which manifests as I am.”
???
noodling around here. Interesting. Hope others think so, too.
There was a bit more to Descartes than that one line. 
But very much no.
Again, take the following with a whole salt shaker as I am not very confident on my Plato and Descartes.
Ideal Platonic Forms are transcendent to space and time and what we experience are metaphorically the mere shadows of them cast on the cave wall. Those transcendent Ideal Forms, archetypes, are what is most real, exist independent of the material world and of our thoughts, are the cause of what we experience, and the search for Truth is the attempt to better understand those Forms by use of our senses. (Further developed by Aristotle.)
Descartes placed only God as transcendent to space and time. Within reality were independent substances of the Mind (with I guess Thought as its Attribute and Ideas as the Modes of that Attribute) and Matter (with Extension as its Attribute). Senses are to Descartes sometimes needed but are discounted in comparison to that which is done by pure intellect and will alone. Pure intellect is where metaphysical principles are determined without the use of the senses at all. Ideas, including Forms, are the stuff that the intellect uses, and exist independent of Matter. To the degree that natural sciences must use the senses, and the senses are needed for practical things, fine, since there is no other choice.
Cogito Ergo Sum was “just” the argument for an independent substance of Mind.
Ah that makes sense I think - thanks.
Thing is that’s more the history of the ideas and the people of them. If we are to understand the ideas it is to some degree unavoidable to have to consider their contexts but maybe we should return to where the ideas stand now. Let’s start with the op itself.
Does The Ideal (Forms) “deserve” a place as an aspect of reality on par with The Physical/Material and the subjective/mental/Information/Thought? Do circles and dodecahedrons and the number “thirteen” or pi deserve their own special place?
Recapping the context Plato felt that level was the source of the other two and exists outside of time and space, Descartes felt that they were part of Thought.
FWIW I place The Ideal/Forms as part of Thought and frame them as abstractions, which can also be thought of as objects of reduced dimensionality in a many dimensioned cognitive/conceptual space that are useful to help us perceive, organize, categorize, file, create, and recreate other objects of various cognitive dimensionalities. (And I believe all concepts can ultimately be defined as n-dimensional geometric objects.) The tendency to utilize and categorize along these specific lines is to some significant degree hard-wired into us and to some degree learned (mostly by exposure to exemplars), inclusive of the influence of culture.
Oh, now you tell me. 
So, yeah, I get that - if all is noise until we filter, then ideal is a subset of Info.
But you capture the essence of this thread, so thank you.
Mangetout - what’s your thinking? Anyone else dialing into this?
It feels like the Strange Loop model would have to discuss having to access the Ideal. I wonder if that’s my next stop.
We could take it all the way and say that actually, the universe is a random sea of noise and the only order is that which finds iteself - physical as well as ideals - it’s a neat way of dealing with the implications of the many-worlds quantum hypothesis.
Most people get the many-worlds thing wrong - they think that two universes are spawned every time there is any decision to be made (cornflakes or Cheerios, for example) - but it’s not that simple.
In the moment when you are deliberating over breakfast cereal, an infinite variation of universes would need to be spawned, for every minute variation of every possible variable - i.e. the one where you chose cornflakes, vs the other one where you chose cornflakes, and blinked, vs the one where you chose cornflakes, blinked and an airborne mote of dust settled on your right shoulder, and so on - all the way down to the smallest variables at subatomic level.
So at every moment, an infinite number of universes is being spawned. Where are they all being stored?
Or… there’s one universe that is full of noise; the appearance of order within that noise is just a viewpoint. The ‘You’ that chooses cornflakes and the ‘you’ that chooses Cheerios both find themselves somewhere in the noise, by virtue of their individual viewpoints.
(This idea badly represented here from one of my favourite SF books - Permutation City by Greg Egan)
Hmm. Interesting.
Yeah, I struggle with the Many Worlds model. It comes from a funky combination of the Anthropic Principle and Quantum Physics: One way for the perfect set of conditions for Humans/Life to form is to allow for every possible universe to exist. Given the ambiguous nature of Quantum Physics, superpositions and the like, it is imaginable. And it helps by not requiring Specialness - we are one of a gazillion realities, which is more explainable scientifically vs. a metaphysical answer involving God or gods.
But damn, the model is so unrealitistically ungraspable. Every “unit” of time and action is splitting off into all possibilities at all times? That is so ungraspable to me as to be useless as I look to use Philosophy tools to engage the reality around me.
I would go back and recommend Jim Holt’s Why does the World Exist? - it discusses the ways we’ve tried to come at Why there is Something and why it supports Us within it: Book: Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
This is so disappointing! The idea of an almost-infinite plethora of “what if” worlds is almost infinitely attractive!
Do they have to be stored in a “where?” They make their own place, just as the Big Bang made its own place. Each new universe goes off in a direction at right angles to all the others.
(Isn’t your question at least a little like “What happened before the Big Bang?”)
I guess they don’t have to be stored, but it somehow doesn’t seem right that the total number of universes is growing by an infinite exponent every moment.
There’s a precedent, of sorts, in the “runaway expansion” model of cosmology. That one, too, posits an almost infinite expansion of space-time (of some sort or other) away “out there” where we can’t ever see it.
I readily concede that I mostly like the infinite multiverse model for philosophical (and aesthetic!) reasons.
(At the Last Judgement, God can judge us, not for what we have done in only one universe, but for the whole vast envelope of all the things “we” have done in all our possible lives! The Army Slogan, “Be All You Can Be” becomes literal!)
There’s actually no answer to the question of how many ‘universes’ are generated by many worlds theories: there’s lots of ways to slice up a wave function, and different ways to slice it up give rise to a different number of worlds—ranging between one and a continuously infinite amount. And of course, the worlds will be very different regarding what decomposition you favour. This is the so-called ‘preferred basis problem’, and variously, you’ll hear claims that it’s solved by decoherence, requiring the locality of macroscopic objects, or ‘centering’ on an observer: all of that is ultimately circular, because all of these approaches need a partitioning of the degrees of freedom of the objects contained in the wave-function (such as a delineation of system and environment in the case of decoherence)—but that’s impossible without specifying a preferred basis.
That’s why I tend not to care much about the Many Worlds model: it is an interesting model, but near as I can tell, can’t be tested for, so it feels ultimately about as scientific as philosophical and religious noodling about metaphysical questions. Fine, but not helpful in an everyday way.
That’s also why I didn’t look to include in the OP of this thread. I don’t look to Many Worlds as a Dimension to position the actions I take, they way I do with Physical and Information/Thoughts and Ideals.
Well, I wouldn’t be too harsh on unobservables; after all, this charge can be brought up against all interpretations of quantum mechanics, but I don’t think that the task of interpreting it is thereby not worthwhile. Consider, for example, special relativity: you can interpret it in terms of a special sort of (‘Lorentz’) ether, or in terms of spacetime, which interpretation is due to Hermann Minkowski. Experimentally, both are completely equivalent—but on the level of theory, the Minkowski view is much more conducive to the development of general relativity, by letting the spacetime manifold it postulates become dynamical. So there’s a way in which unobservable entities may be ‘helpful’ (if perhaps not exactly in an everyday way, except if you count things like GPS as the ultimate outcome of this interpretational move).
Ultimately, however, I wouldn’t want to justify interpretation (or philosophy/metaphysics) in such utilitarian terms. Few things we do are ever really motivated by their utility—that’s really just a kind of justifying gloss we put on things after the fact. But ultimately, we don’t climb mountains because it will be useful to us; we don’t have sex just to create babies; we don’t eat simply for nourishment. What kind of life would we lead if everything we did, we did solely because it’s useful?
So at that point, the wave function of every possible version of me collapses into the best one? In order for you to live forever, you have to do things that will survive that process (so a version of everyone gets through the pearly gates - in the case of [insert stereotypically good person here], the version that survives is close to the one we know in the version of the universe now; in the case of Hitler, most of the version we know is destroyed, because the surviving version comes from the possible universes where he didn’t do the bad stuff he did in ours).
It’s consistent with 1Cor 3:15, sorta.
The boundaries are fuzzy as one goes from observable to unobservable, near as I can tell.
And yes, we noodle about the Big Questions because we can and because we’re Human, etc. Our problem-solving capabilities have evolved to try out things and be creative, etc. so yeah, we do it because it feels good 
I use the personal utility to calibrate and ground my thinking when I Want To Be a Better Person™. When I am noodling, it’s free-range, then I check on practicality periodically or as one check when I am assessing a new model. ???
Or…maybe the “you” who goes to heaven is some vast multi-dimensional composite of all of the possible “yous” there ever were. After all, God is beyond human comprehension…
There’s also the “Ultimate Anthropic Principle” where “you” exist in any universe where it’s possible for you to exist, and thus you will never die so long as the wildest, more hare-brained, extreme possibility remains. Downloaded into a computer is one of the less insane possibilities!
There’s no guarantee you’ll be comfortable in that scenario though, is there?
Grin! Heavens no!
(One is reminded of “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” The narrator will live forever…very, very unpleasantly.)