Friday, November 18, 2005

la, la

Thought 13: I visited a kind of interesting website today: www.imminst.org. While the organization as a whole appears to be devoted to promoting the development of life extending technologies, the actual products fall rather short of what one might expect. For example, an essay contest was recently held for which there were exactly four entries. Surely our own demise is of great enough importance to merit consideration by more people than this?! One of the winning essays (two of the four entries won) explored dualism, or, as the author put it, the psychophysical problem, and attempted to address the notion of some kind of non-physical survival of death. While the author emerged, at length, on the side of matter being a necessary part of the solution, that whatever the solution to our mortal predicament may be will be a physical one (at least in part) is not really ground-breaking. We absolutely need a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the physical and the mental, but we should long since have moved beyond defending ourselves against spiritualists. If philosophy and science do not hold the answer, then the answer is not held. And who really buys privileged access anymore? So many wrong ideas... I don't know- I guess it was just sort of disappointing.

Thought 14: I seem to have mis-placed my keys (ou est ma cle? ou est ma cle?). Bummer.