My mind

One quick comment on my last post. We seem to live in an era of privatization. Here in NYC the mayor believes in privatizing and so does Joel Klein. There is this mantra that private is better. I think that the Iraq war is the first privatized war. I think that history will show that it was one of the most inefficient corrupt wars ever conducted. I would hope that private contractors will eventually be held accountable. We also are faced with making some serious decisions regarding health care. No candidate seems to want to propose a government run health care system. This is despite the fact that the feds spend 3% of medicare money on administration and the private sector spends 15%. Privatization can work sometimes, but I think we need to be careful when we assume it is always better.

I am reading this book entitled "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. The book is about the mind and in particular what I means. Hofstadter wrote the book after his wife died suddenly. I think he is arguing against what he calls the Cartesian version of I. That is you are who you are only in terms of what body you are in and where that body is located. He makes an argument that all of the I's in the world are somehow connected. Therefore the I that was his wife lives on in some small way inside him and his kids. He sees the I as something that exists beyond the physical and chemical makeup of an individual.

I am not really going to go into explaining what was in this book, because I know that I often read books and then distort them to fit into something inside me. I am not a good reporter of books. I use books to change my thinking but not always in the way that an author intended. I am "famous" in my family for doing this.

This is the point I want to make about this book. I am who I am because of the books I have read, the people I have loved and the experiences I have had. But I do not feel that I retain any of this. I feel that I have taken all of this in and so modified it and distorted it as to make it unrecognizable.

Hofestader really wants to feel that the I that was his wife became a part of him, he wants to feel that he knew her in a profound way. I look at the people I know really well, my wife, my kids and I feel that in a really serious way I have no idea who they are. I have gotten better at guessing what they are thinking or what they want or like, but this is just a skill I have acquired. This skill is similar to getting better at hitting a baseball. When you are little you miss all of the time, but if you practice you learn to make small adjustment that allow you to occasionally hit the ball. You are never able to hit it every time and you are never really aware of where the ball is. You just become better at reacting and reading visual cues.

Of course the study of I can also be the study of the soul. If you are religious this is the easy term. Hofstadter uses another term élan mental which I like a lot. While I believe in élan mental I do not believe that it survives or is transfered in any meaningful way. My father was a major figure in my life. But even thought he affected me and even though some outside people might say I have some of his habits or thought processes I do not believe that any of his soul still exists.