The Miracle of Me
I have been a lifelong humanist activist, starting as soon as I graduated from college. During the late 1970’s, I found that humanist materials were appropriate for college students and college graduates, but I was concerned about educating the young children in my new family about my own beliefs. My wife and I worked for two years to make some basic materials for kids. By 1980 I was ready to publish the results, my humanist creed, in the Humanist Magazine.
By this time, I had also written a number of songs, which I self-published in HCSJ’s First Humanist Songbook, also in 1980. During the next decade, I was one of the leaders of the Humanist Community of San Jose, frequently addressing the community on various philosophical issues. During this time, I found the saying of Descartes: “I think, therefore I am,” to be very frustrating due to its incompleteness. One day in 1990, this frustration bubbled to the surface and in about 30 minutes I had written a little poem that I called Me that was my answer to Descartes.
Me
I am.
I think, so I know that I am.
I understand, so I know what I am.
I feel, so I care what I am.
I dream, so I know what I might become.
I act, so I become myself.
By the time I was ready to transition out of hi-tech into philosophy, I would realize that this poem was a key part of my philosophical work. Although I think of this poem as my answer to Descartes, in fact Rene Descartes was very aware of our imaginations. He was so in awe of our mental capacities that he declared there to be mind-body duality. Although he was convinced that everything happens due to the action of natural law, that is, the laws of physics and biology, he could not imagine how these laws could result in what I am happy to call the miracle of me. During the enlightenment, the encyclopedists had declared that Descartes’ metaphysics were a complete failure. For David Hume, a late enlightenment philosopher, the puzzle was how could he reconcile his belief that humans are free to decide whatever they decide, with his belief that the human mind must work as a result of natural law.
By the late 20th century, however, the philosophy of existentialism was well developed, and so I started with a statement of the fact of our existence. There is no doubt that thinking is a very important capacity of human beings, and I wanted to put Descartes’ saying into perspective, which I did in the second line of the poem. After that, however, I wanted to acknowledge several other important activities of the human mind and show how they worked together to form our imaginations and the rest of our mind.
I decided to finish my poem by emphasizing that the whole point of a mind is to cause us to act in the world. Although I was familiar with Douglas Hofstadter‘s Godel, Escher, Bach, I had not fully appreciated what students of the human mind are starting appreciate: that the brain changes itself. As we exercise our capacity for free will, we act in the world, and we learn how we want to live in the world, and change our brains so we will act in the world in the way that we want to act. By living in this way, we are truly altering our beings and causing ourselves to become the unique individuals that we are.
Some 17 years later, Douglas Hofstadter himself was ready to make a similar declaration in his wonderful book I am a Strange Loop.