A Thinking, Feeling, Empathetic Machine!

I tune into the radio early this morning, brewing coffee, getting ready for the day, and a Scientist is on the waves telling me that I'm just a "mechanism." A collection of moving parts, a machine, an organism made up of little machines.

I am a thinking and feeling machine. Even if my thoughts and feelings are sort of illusory. I choose to let those thoughts and feelings guide me, lead me through a life. This might just be a sort of shell game, where I fool myself. But it's a game that I have chosen to play.

Isn't that how it goes? We decide to play like a good machine. A machine that has empathy for others, that follows the golden rule, that tries to love. Because it's a choice doesn't make anything less real, but maybe more real.

I am the kind of mechanism that chooses to pretend I'm not really a mechanism. A machine that lives, and laughs and cries and has empathy for the other beings on the planet. A machine that tries to live up to being a fully formed, human being, even if that is a sort of fiction.