I think, therefore I am.

Name	René Descartes
Life	1596 - 1650
Country	France
Category	Idealism
Wikipedia	>>

"Je pense, donc je suis." "Cogito, ergo sum." This is the most influential stupidity ever formulated by a thinking man. Why stupid? Because it splits body from soul, man from animal and, worse, man from man. It is also, scientifically, plain wrong. Right is "famesco, ergo sum". Why influential? Because man is a dangerously vain animal. He loves to think himself superior to both other animals and other men, to say nothing about women. The old quip by the doctor who said: "I have dissected hundreds of bodies and never seen a trace of a soul", is still valid. Body and soul, the title of a beautiful old song, as well as body and mind, consciousness and intelligence are one. To split them into a phony "dualism" is nonsense! To some 98 percent, as already said, man is made of the same DNA-building blocks as the chimpanzees. His cultural existence, some 10,000 years, is but one day in an existence of at least 3,650,000 years as a bipedal animal. On 364 days of that megayear, we continued to live in essentially the same way as the chimps, subject to the normal laws of evolution. Only on New Years Eve of that megayear did we start to use our thinking capacity in a more refined way. That doesn't, however, make us into a "higher" animal, only into a "different" one. In no way does it justify our cruel treatment and near-extinction of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, the gorillas and the orangutans. Worse yet, some differences in thinking capacity between man and man do exist. Combined with our enormous vanity, they easily lead to a treatment of our fellowmen like that of the big apes. Those with a somewhat higher abstract thinking capacity, also called intelligence

or IQ, love to imagine themselves "superior" to those with a lower. Inside the eternal power game, this is dangerous, as the former may feel justified to treat the latter as animals, slaves or as inferior "unemployables". Descartes's thinking is also scientifically wrong, doubly so. It is surely not thinking that makes us exist. A much more correct expression would be "famesco, ergo sum", that is, "I am hungry, thus I exist." That phrase might, however, not have pleased those who burned Giordano Bruno on Campo di Fiori in Rome when Descartes was only four years old. It is hunger, as Euripides said, with too many people on too small a land, that drives us to warfare. It is war, as Heraclitus knew, that stimulates our thinking into that creative activity that is "the father of all things", the father of all new cultural artifacts, of new technology as well as of better organizations. Descartes is wrong on another point as well. We do know a lot about the brain. We are starting to understand how a few hundred thousand different proteins are combining into billions of neurons, brain cells, and perhaps into a trillion connections between them, called synapses. Yet, we do not know how all these combine into soul, consciousness, mind or intelligence. Such ignorance, however, is in no way a proof that hungry man is different from hungry animals, or that he is a God-like creation by a higher Being. Such beliefs must still rest upon pure faith. What we have every reason to believe is that every man, woman and child must be given the same human value. Otherwise mankind will, again, easily fall into new forms of barbarism.