Philosophical precedent: "Descartes should have said: "thinking is occurring." That is, whatever the force of the cogito, Descartes draws too much from it; the

Philosophical precedent: "Descartes should have said: "thinking is occurring." That is, whatever the force of the cogito, Descartes draws too much from it; the existence of a thinking thing, the reference of the "I," is more than the cogito can justify. Friedrich Nietzsche criticized the phrase in that it presupposes that there is an "I", that there is such an activity as "thinking", and that "I" know what "thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks." In other words the "I" in "I think" could be similar to the "It" in "It is raining." David Hume claims that the philosophers who argue for a self that can be found using reason are confusing "similarity" with "identity". This means that the similarity of our thoughts and the continuity of them in this similarity do not mean that we can identify ourselves as a self but that our thoughts are similar." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum#Criticisms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum#Criticisms