Thursday Thoughts: It's Complicated

“The "mind-brain problem" is the deep philosophical and scientific question of how our subjective mental experiences (thoughts, feelings, consciousness) arise from or relate to the physical matter and electrical activity of the brain, essentially asking if the intangible mind is just the brain's function or something separate. It grapples with the "hard problem of consciousness" — how physical neurons create qualitative feelings like the redness of red — with perspectives ranging from physicalism (mind is brain activity) to dualism (mind and brain are distinct).

Key Aspects of the Problem

• The "What It's Like" Factor: 

How does brain activity translate into the private, first-person experience of being you (e.g., the feeling of sadness, the taste of coffee?).

• Causation: 

When you decide to move your arm, does your immaterial "mind" cause the brain's physical action, or is it all just brain processes?

• Subjectivity vs. Objectivity: 

Brains can be studied objectively (neurons firing), but subjective experiences remain private and inaccessible to external observation.

Main Philosophical Stances

• Physicalism/Materialism: 

The mind is entirely a product of the brain; mental states are brain states (neurons, synapses, chemicals).

• Dualism: 

Mind and body (brain) are fundamentally different substances—one physical, the other non-physical (like a soul).

• Idealism: 

Reality is ultimately mental; the physical world, including the brain, is a manifestation of mind.

Why It Matters

• Medicine & Psychiatry: Impacts understanding mental health, trauma, and disorders, as noted in psychiatric journals.
• Artificial Intelligence: Challenges whether true consciousness can ever be replicated in machines.
• Human Nature: Shapes our understanding of self, free will, and our place in the physical universe.

In essence, the mind-brain problem highlights the gap between the measurable physical world of the brain and the felt, lived world of conscious experience, a mystery scientists and philosophers continue to explore." - AI Summation

Where Does Your Mind Actually Exist?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_GyGXW-gAs

 

Thursday Thoughts: Isn't October Bad Enough? It Should Be Good

Yesterday was not a good day for me. I was all ready to enjoy it. New month, fresh start. I already had a few books on order, the first in months. A load of groceries coming in the cool morning air. I’d done all my morning things, prayers, Bible, penitential act, glucose reading, weight, blood pressure, cartoons on MeTV to lift my spirits. But then I remembered to tear the page off the calendar, and here my woes began.

I saw I had an upcoming appointment next week with Dr. Nash. The doctor is my leg guy, and he had made me this appointment back in January. I had been thinking that October would be free from this sort of thing (I’d just seen my regular doctor and my foot guy). I had, as it were, completely forgotten about Nash. I was supposed to be working on losing weight in preparation for a possible knee replacement, and while I have lost some weight, I know it is not as much as it would be if I had applied myself more consistently.

Not only did I have a sudden schedule, but I also suddenly had a bit of a weaselly scramble. Should I postpone the appointment? Would that do any good in the long run? Probably if I went now, he’d just tell me to do what I’d want to do with the postponement, try to lose some more weight, come for another appointment. Probably best to just face the music and fess up. Either way, though, it’s a bit of a headache.

Still, I hate to look – weak? inadequate? – in front of a doctor. Even if that’s what I am. He’s a man with a job, a business, a degree. It’s like going in front of a teacher when you haven’t done your homework. At my age there aren’t too many people who can call you on the carpet, but a doctor (no matter the age) is one of them. At least that’s the way I feel.

Besides these anxiety woes, I had to carry my groceries in by myself. Andy will usually lend me a hand, but today he had to go out on a record call. And this time I had tried to buy enough to last two weeks, so the load was particularly large. It left me with an aching knee all day.

I was also reminded there were some dark anniversaries coming up.

I tried to distract myself with my usual shows on YouTube, but it was all bad news and none of it held my attention. “I asked her for some happy news, but she just smiled and turned away.” And it just got worse as the day wore on. Even the good news was bad news. Probably the climax was learning that Jane Goodall had passed away. Not unexpected, but depressing. I had been hearing about her since at least middle school. I was kind of surprised to hear she had still been alive. It was a final flip on the nose.

One thing I was glad I had done and that consoled me was my Script for the day. That was before the bad day had started, of course; I just hope I feel up to the next bit. It’s at a rather dark point of the story; I don’t think it will cheer me up any, but maybe I can take some satisfaction in the process. Of having it done. If I can get it done.

Moan over. I do have good things to look forward to if I just keep them in mind. Tomorrow is another day; oh wait, it’s already tomorrow. Well, we’ll see how things look in the morning light. “And I don’t want to hear any bad news!”

 

Thursday Thoughts: Loss As Gain

Today I am feeling strangely light. It might just be because the morning has been milder than it has been for many a month; perhaps it's because I finally gave my head a buzz, which I'd been meaning to do for nearly two weeks (though now I look rather like a shaved rat); maybe it's because I was at last able to pay an outstanding bill from 2023. But maybe it's because of something that I first thought of as disastrous. Last night, just after I finished my diary entry, the document where I was saving it converted into a temporary file, which I can neither open nor restore. At first it caused me a lot of anxiety; I had lost my history from May 18 to September 3 this year. But then I shrugged and started a new diary segment. Perhaps in time I would be able to recover the file, and until then, what had I really lost? The record of when and how much I had pooped? In the meanwhile I can live "unburdened by what has been," to borrow a phrase. I haven't lost any unreproduceable creative writing, and most personal things (like getting new books) are recorded here. 'On with the dance; let joy be unconfined.' Also, I'm not so urpy. A chunk of my recent time goes as unrecorded as more than five decades before it; big difference.

Thursday Thoughts: The Tale of a Tiger?

I was taking the local A.R.T. bus to HEB to pick up some stuff from the pharmacy (a trek I make every three or four weeks, usually because at the end of the month I don't have the funds for a delivery), a voyage that takes me about 2 1/2 hours to complete. It used to be driven by the genial Mr. Wade, but he has been more or less phased out after a heart attack, and now the cheerful Ms. Chantel has taken over the route. Now Wade had a stuffed tiger in the window of the bus as sort of a mascot, rather sun-faded from the years, and it remains faithfully in the window. Now it's been months since the changeover, and I'd never thought about the stuffed animal before, but on this round I happened to be thinking about the fact. Suddenly, just at the moment the thought occurred to me, another bus regular, an elderly man I'll call Bob, piped up, making small talk with the bus-driver as he does, and mentioned out of nowhere, "That tiger belonged to Wade."

Now I wasn't particularly focused on the toy, and it hadn't moved or done anything to draw attention to it. Just coincidence? Thought transference? The AI universe just kicking up an ad? I was a little ... well, I won't say stunned or amazed, but certainly surprised and momentarily intrigued. Than I almost immediately forgot it. After all, as significant as they sometimes seem, what do such phenomena mean and what can you do with them? It may be some sort of natural power, but it seems a rather stupid and pointless power. But it again leaves one with the feeling that things are stranger than can be explained. Sometimes this seems a world of small wonders.

Thursday Thoughts

I guess the existential question that periodically plagues me, "Am I a writer?", has been answered for me once and for all. That is because I am on an engaging writing project that seems to haunt my hours, even when not sitting down at the computer. It keeps chaining me to the desk. And this in the heat of a Texas August, which hardly lends itself to power expended on even the most basic tasks. Now the only questions that plague me are "Am I a good, or even an adequate, writer?" and "Can I stick to and finish this project?"

I forbear to speak much about it, because experience teaches me that, if I do, I run the risk of 'talking it out' too much rather than 'working it out.' I'm only sharing it with my brother John at the moment, who inspired the idea and the form it would take. You can probably figure out something about it from yesterday's post, but that's as far as I'm going.

The preliminary concept has prompted an unexpected burst of creativity. Notes lead to outlines lead to actual writing, which lead to John and me pinging ideas back and forth, reviving and adapting old concepts from other projects, thinking up homages to our childhood enthusiasms, and even, to a certain extent, merchandizing (just to keep the project on a boil). We have a pretty good idea of our main characters, and we know where the pilot 'episode' is going; now we just need a string of ideas to carry the concept along. A large part of this effort is making a list of the aims and ambitions of our characters and figuring out interesting trials to test and illuminate them. No more just 'one damn thing after another.' Unless the 'filler' is thrilling enough.

Anyway, that's all for now about that. "I'll say no more, till I have a drink." (of diet sody, for me) There's about an hour in the morning and an hour in the late afternoon (the sun's only down about 8:20 PM these days) that I really feel the urge and get any real writing done. But I'm thinking, thinking, about it all day. I can't help it. And that's a Thursday Thought.

Thursday Thoughts

Overlaying, as it were, the transparencies of The Broadsheet and The Savage Sword of Conan on top of one another evoked kind of dimensional portrait of a time and a mental state from, say, 1979 – 1983. Or you could say their sudden close proximity sparked old mental pathways and memories, stuff that would normally be tucked away in the equivalent of their own mental bins, with the side-effect of irritating my present mind with metaphorical old dust and dry decaying paper.

It's not that I would want to lose any of my old memories, and indeed there is an undeniable pleasure in reviving them, but it is a kind of a shock to be confronted with the old emotions that brain chemistry seems to surge awake, like plugging a chancy old piece of cobwebby electronics into a live outlet.

It does seem to have blown a few fuses or at least tripped a circuit or two. I found myself unable to get back into reading Eusebius’ History of the Early Church for a bit; I had been making healthy inroads and getting to the end. Tolkien Tuesday was derailed and shunted aside. Even Wideo Wednesday has been a bit perfunctory compared to the chunky lists of videos I’ve made in the past. I’ve been ‘cast into those time passages.’

It will take me a bit to shake my head and clear my mind, to wake up from dreams of the past. One good present-time accomplishment has come out of it all, though. I’ve finally catalogued my comics (or graphic magazines, if you will), a task that has been impending for me and the Niche but hanging fire for years. The house is a little cleaner, the Archives a little more organized.

While the blazing hot days of August are clearly the peak of summer, they are getting a little crispy around the edges, especially in the mornings and evenings. In those hours, as you relax, you can begin to feel hints, intimations of Autumn. "Gather your nuts, little squirrel. Winter is coming."

'Preserved in the Documents of the Time'

I’m sorry, but I still have a few things I want to say about The Broadsheet. “Full of broken thoughts/ That I cannot repair.” I’ll do one more post and then probably drop the subject for another thirty years. Unless I want to put in one of my old Book Reviews, or something.

One of the things that struck me is that I wondered if any of my contributors even remembered their stuff from forty years ago. I mean, probably Alan Peschke does, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had his own file box on the subject somewhere. Wylie Reeves has passed away. Does Kathleen Moore remember Pegasus? Does John have any more than general memories about The Goblin? There may be some things that I think even Peschke would rather forget.  I know there’s some work I did that I would. But we were all so much younger then, struggling to find our way. And memory gets overwritten.

What strikes me now is how cocky I was, so ready to lay down the law about ‘my’ genre. While many of the positive book reviews covered classic books and established masters, the reviews of the more contemporary, low-level Fantasy that I was more or less forced to read by circumstances were gleeful occasions to let loose my bile and spout my own theories about art and life, not considering judging them on the level of mere entertainments. Or even as journeyman works. Dennis L. McKiernan, whose The Iron Tower Trilogy (TIT) drew the worst of my ire, went on to have a long and improved career with works that are now generally critically approved and he himself considered 'a Master of High Fantasy.' Not that that makes the Trilogy any better.

But what looking back on The Broadsheet does for me personally is that it helps me remember the mindset of the Early Young Me. I mean I still have memories of myself, but time tends to edit and bury the ‘scabby, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented’ conditional self of the time. There, in The Broadsheet, I can see the shyly vain and show-offy guy I was at the time, and to some extent still am. But that exact version of Me remains, visible perhaps only to my eyes, stuck in the amber of those pages. In some ways it’s better than a photograph.

 

Thursday Thoughts: Well, I Don't Know About That ...

AGNOSTIC'S PRAYER

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you [the dead person]  be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen. – Roger Zelazny, Creatures of Light and Darkness

 

Creed of St. Euthanasia
(Commonly called the Atheneum Creed)

I believe in man, maker of himself and inventor of all science. And in myself, his manifestation, and captain of my psyche; and that I should not suffer anything painful or unpleasant.

And in a vague, evolving deity, the future-begotten child of man; conceived by the spirit of progress, born of emergent variants; who shall kick down the ladder by which he rose and tell history to go to hell.

Who shall some day take off from earth and be jet-propelled into the heavens; and sit exalted above all worlds, man the master almighty.

And I believe in the spirit of progress, who spake by Shaw and the Fabians; and in a modern, administrative, ethical, and social organization; in the isolation of saints, the treatment of complexes, joy through health, and destruction of the body by cremation (with music while it burns), and then I’ve had it.

 

-         Dorothy L. Sayers, 1954.

 

“If once we [devils] can produce our perfect work-the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"-then the end of the war will be in sight.”  - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Thursday Thoughts: What Am I Supposed to Do with All This Paella?

 

Having just ordered a couple more books, the thought struck me again (as it has many times before, even when I was much younger) of what would become of my library once I was gone. It always seems to me a living, growing thing, united and animated by a single force (me) and that once that organizing principle had gone, it would go flying apart, like planets bereft of their sun. And that seems a shame to me.

But what do I expect to happen? That my books would always remain together, either as a shrine to my memory, available to whoever might want to access them, or dumped wholesale on a single ‘heir’ who would delightedly assume curatorship? In the first place I would not wish such a burden on my folks, nor do I believe that anyone would or could accept it. In the second place, although I think there are elements in my library that several people would gladly accept, there is no single person in sight, no Mini-me as it were, to assume the whole ragtag assemblage.

It would be selfish of me to assume there would be. The least selfish element of that thought is that I would be passing on a legacy to someone who would appreciate the gift as much as I would have at any point in my life. The most selfish is that it would go to some sort of clone of myself, that my will would go on existing as a ghoulish parasite in another person. I shudder at the thought.

There are certainly parts of my library that could be easily bestowed. My brother John would no doubt enjoy the Complete Peanuts Collection and the set of Gold Key Comic Digests. My nephew Kameron has expressed interest in the volumes of The Absolute Sandman, among other things. I am sure there are Tolkien books (not to mention toys, music and other ephemera like calendars) that would appeal to many in the family, but here it seems especially a shame to have to break up the collection. But what about G. K. Chesterton? What of James Branch Cabell? What of James P. Blaylock? What about Robertson Davies? Excellent authors all, and I have many of their books, but niche interests to most at the moment. Who would take them?

Which brings up another concern. Would my executors even know the worth of what they were disposing of? Or would they just throw everything in a garage sale? That would be easiest, but there are things that would be worth much more on the market. The complete Storisende Edition of the Works of James Branch Cabell could bring in at least $300; each separate McBride edition of Cabell, illustrated by Frank C. Pape, goes for nearly $50. What look like grotty old paperbacks, hardly worth a quarter, are collectible volumes in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, that can fetch at least $20, and in some cases more. And so on, and on. I have many signed editions, quite a few by James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers; their value is subjective, of course, but a few, like The Man in the Moon, are also rare and so probably worth a bit more. There are many ordinary books that would be fine in a garage sale, but who would have the patience (besides a fanatic like me) to go through three thousand books and assess them all?

No good trying to dispose of them at a used bookstore and letting them assay them. We’ve seen the pennies such sales bring.

But what really grinds my gears is that there is another generation a-blooming who might very much want many of my books, in time. Who knows what my grandnephew (now just a toddler) might find interesting, or his sibling on the way? A legacy from a granduncle might very well be a welcome surprise; it almost sounds like the start of a fantasy adventure. Indeed, such a hope sounds like an idle fantasy itself. But I can speculate. What will most likely happen even if they do grow up to share my interests is that my library will be long dispersed by then, memorialized only in this blog, a subject, perhaps, of wonder and regret.

But I will be dead then, and, one way or the other, way past caring. “You can keep my things, they’ve come to take me home.” But, on the other hand, “Who will take care of my little boots?" I can't help but think about it sometimes.