Psychosocial wanderings

In 2014-5 we combined a lot of our themes in a new site:

Ageing

Are we in danger of being sucked into a very destructive space? We are being pulled into somewhere horrible, sucked into a whirlpool of awful feelings. We are lost in the hostile energy of denial. It's a frightening space, somehow familiar, but also alienating.
This website explores these frightening feelings and the social and political context that gives rise to them.
Our new theme was ageing. This was linked to our other themes, death and dying and yet again, swirls.
We laid out our themes on the site:

Ageing

In death's waiting room. My experience is of my mental and physical sytems failing.

Loneliness

My internal world is a landscape of desolation. I have no connection with others.
We live as we dream - alone...... (Joseph Conrad)

Despair

I am often in emotional distress and despair of ever being hopeful again.

Shame

"I want to disappear through a hole in the floor." Feeling ashamed is wanting to be suddenly small and invisible, and the opposite of feeling pride. We are disgusted with ourselves, and want to hide.

Alienation

What is outside of me and what is inside seems alien. I am not at home anywhere.

Swirls

A swirl is our term for disturbed and distressed states of mind.
It can be disorienting and stop us from thinking, so we are left with a paralysing heaviness.

Once done, we moved on. Again.

Comments

Sort of

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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