Ruminating on an illusion

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Kierkegaard
Is one of the abject aspects of old age, of retirement, a re-evaluating of one's past? Ruminating on a life lived professionally in an environment that subsequently appears a fundamental mistake leads to what? Freedom, despair? If the response is freedom, is it a real freedom? Might that be an illusion?

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There is a moving essay on the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in a recent New Yorker. It's by Joshua Rothman. This excerpt is near the end: "Then, late last year, my mother had a catastrophic stroke. It devastated the left side of her brain, wrecking her parietal and temporal lobes and Broca’s area—parts of the brain that are involved in the emotions, the senses, memory, and speech. My mother now appears to be living in an eternal present. She can say only two words, “water” and “time.” She is present in the room—she looks me in the eye—but is capable of only fleeting recognition; she knows only that I am someone she should recognize. She grasps the world, but lightly. As I spent time with my mother, I found that my intuitions were shifting to Dennett’s side of the field. It seems natural to say that she “sort of” thinks, knows, cares, remembers, and understands, and that she is “sort of” conscious. It seems obvious that there is no “light switch” for consciousness: she is ...

The brain

The brain has become everyone's subject, perhaps because evidence for an afterlife or a godlike creator stubbornly refuses to reveal itself. (and perhaps Psychoanalysis is another god that failed ) The human brain is now thought to contain the answers we have failed to find elsewhere. Neuroscience will explain our emotional responses as well as our problem solving abilities and our indefatigablecuriosity. Purpose, however, may remain the domain of philosophy. Eagelman emphasises the unconscious functioning which determines most of our actions and decisions, and acknowledges Freud's insight that much of behaviour is a product of unseen mental processes. The concept of extended mind, whereby external stimuli and exchanges with other minds enables broader conceptualising capacity and creativity that an isolated human could not achieve, may in turn be extended by AI into some new more complex form of mind. One can choose to greet this news with optimism, as heralding a leap f...

Mind

Is consciousness just an illusion? Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett believes the human brain might not be that special. Is the human brain really just a collection of complex machines? http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39482345

Chaos breeds Conflict

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