Diary: Daffodils in February

[degringolade]

 

Daffodils in February.  It is hard to think of it as a problem

 

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Outside is gray and my mood seems to match that to a certain degree.  Gray isn’t good or bad, gray is just gray and blah.  I have lived north of the 45th parallel in the Pacific Northwest for thirty-seven years now and there are still days that I struggle with it.  Last Monday (9th) through Thursday (12th) were blue sky and sunshine days and I was out and about and soaking in the sun on my front stoop.  On Wednesday, the temp on my stoop reached a balmy 70℉ and I even had to remove my hoodie because I was too warm.  T-shirts in February are a gift.

For the past couple of years I have been coming to grips with the odd social habit that we call retirement.  I am not at all complaining about the habit, but at the same time I realize that the way that it runs right now is an artifact and a cultural bribe that was given to people to leave the working class to make room for others.  I can’t see how it will last as it is currently configured, but you can rest assured I will ride this horse as long as it is still standing.

Why I am bringing this up is that, for me, the current ramshackle plans allows me to dabble in arenas where the academics shudder in horror at my entrance.  I suppose that the physical equivalent would be my attending a black-tie faculty cocktail party at a university while being a retired janitor wearing a set of dungarees and a hoodie.

M and I have been writing back and forth via this marvelous contraption called the internets for a year-plus discussing philosophy and its bastard stepchild neuroscience.  It started out harmless enough almost four years ago with a casual mention of René Girard in an email discussing the where/when of future exploits involving mind altering chemicals.  It has gone quite a way since then.

I suppose that M will be mildly annoyed with me when I say that I do so enjoy these discussions but when I think of them outside of the direct communications I use different terminology.  When M speaks of consciousness, I speak of the soul.  This difference in initial definitions is one of the most significant problems between our  that probably cannot be resolved except in our unique worldviews.  It is not transitive.  It is a question about whether the existence of the soul itself presupposes a connection outside of the individual.`

Big differences in approaches, and in my mind they reflect what Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz identified as the two "labyrinths" of human reason: the problem of free will versus necessity, and the problem of the continuum.  Now, I think that this is great.  I have no hope whatsoever of being “right” about this as I realize that my intellect and understanding just isn’t up to the task, but as a janitor it does keep me interested while I am sweeping the floors and avoiding my supervisor.

 

 

Comments

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[emily07]

...says Lu-Tze and afterwards goes off to tend his bonsai-volcanoe