December 6, 2005

• Topic: Short thoughts

  
  

  As I’ve often skipped people’s posts because they were too long or dense, I fear I may have done that to myself w/ my last post.  So…I’ll try to make my points shorter and more energetic, instead of trying to make 1000 points on 1000 things.

  
  

  I’m growing a bit more interested in the workings of the mind…something that I’ve always thought about, but after my grandmother’s stroke, it made me think further about the brain, how it works, how it creates consciousness and personality, and how it has created and explained much of the complexities of the world today.

  
  

  I’m less squeamish about many things today, about the human body, about life and death, and wide-ranging social interactions.  Part of my attitudes today involve looking at things for what they are, and listening to things for what people have to say, and substituting some form of rational synthesis and analysis of ideas, rather than emotive judgements.

  
  

  I would like to try to offer my initial thoughts on these various topics that I will hopefully begin to read much about in the coming months.  I’ll start basic, general, and simple.

  
  

  Life is the opposite of death.  In human beings, life is demonstrated through personality, and personality is derived from the brain.  When a person dies, their personality, that which defined their life, is gone forever. 

  
  

  Many animals have personalities.  The most obvious ones to people are our pets.  Dogs and cats clearly have personalities of their own, and their deaths often have affects on us akin to the loss of any other loved one.  As far as I know, what separates human beings from our pets, is that our personalities include self-awareness, or consciousness.  In some way, we have thoughts in our brains that allow us to know, “Hey…we exist.”

  
  

  This brings me to an interesting question…What are the requirements for consciousness and self-awareness?  Without language, how are infants able to recognize that they exist?  To make an analogy of our brains to computers, what kind of hardware do our brains come with, and how have our brains evolved from other primates such that we are now “human,” such that we now are aware of our existence?

  
  

  And…to end this post on a different topic, an antecdote from my grandfather, who was was over for dinner last night and is going to have a fibrulator put into his heart later this week (just upgrading to a newer model, we joked):

  
  

  “It’s not the food that matters, although your mother makes a very good soup.  But…it’s the company joining you at meals.”  Another great comment he made, “I made a promise with my cardiologist that I’m not gonna leave this world until I see all my grandkids get married,” so I tell my grandfather, “Well…it’ll be a while till the youngest (13) gets there, but if I have to, I’ll stay single just to keep you around a little longer.”  Also, this morning I asked him, “what was your favorite period of life?”  He said, “Things were different in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.  There was more respect, respect for cops, for your neighbors, and for parents.  People did more things with families, and within their communities.  The standard of living and wages has certainly gotten better since then, (like most old people…he rattled off prices “the paper was a nickle, a tuna sandwhich and a bowl of soup was 15 cents!” but, with the great diversity of products and services that we have today, we have lost a bit of a cultural identity.  We’ve gone from a time when all families would sit around the radio and listen to the same program, like The Lone Ranger, or watch the same program on tv, like Howdie Doody (think of the scene in Back to the Future when they’re all crowding around the tv in excitement), and now we have 100′s of programs, and most people just choose to not participate.  It’s not that the act of watching tv is bad, it’s that there really is so much junk on their, that the medium has made our culture toxic in some ways.

  
  

  OK…enough.  Your thoughts…

  • 12:35 pm
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