I’m being pulled into somewhere horrible, sucked into a whirlpool of awful feelings.
I’m lost in the energy of the Swirl.
It’s a frightening space, somehow familiar, but also alienating .
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 ...
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