The concept I have to play around with today is the internet, the world wide web, and as usual my head spins wildly, grappling with the tails and tendrils, up-sides and down-sides of my subject, in this case, the biggest thing in human history.

The internet is the ultimate in the democratization of information(among other things of course, but in this article I will stick with the informational aspect of the beast.) Thanks to Google and the virtually limitless supply of wikis out there, anyone can be informed to varying extents about pretty much anything. At this stage of its the development the internet has become a yawning chasm, assimilating the world’s knowledge and regurgitating it on demand for our collective and individual edification, and, by and large, I think its great.

But not simply great. The role of information in our lives is enormous, and the way we acquire, evaluate and relate it to each other are fundamental considerations in our individual lives, as well as in our collective destiny. Something like the internet, which is irrevocably transforming all aspects of our relationship with information, is not something to be wandered blindly into, as most of the world appears to be doing. Internet is the new television, for many, even the majority of, people an excuse to refuse to do something meaningful with their lives, by engaging a socially acceptable addiction which bears a passing resemblance to reality. Social networking, to use a convenient example, can in some cases be a form of social onanism, people engrossed in relationships with entities as unreal as any soap personality, while taking comfort in the fact that they are not alone. Unlike t.v., one doesn’t even have to wait for tomorrow’s water cooler conversation to be reassured of the normality of one’s behaviour. Electronic heroin would be a nicely melodramatic name for it-but an apt one too, they resemble each other right down to the withdrawal.

Information is everything of which we are conscious. It’s not just the words on this page, or the bytes that make up an mp3, but also the sensation of your fingers on the mouse, the sound of the cooling fan in your ears and the smell of coffee in your nose. The internet supplies us with information from the most basic sensational level, to the highest echelons of our cognition. In terms of the acquisition of the information, the internet has only one advantage-ease of use. The volume of information on the internet found during a ten minute surf pales in comparison to that which we acquire during a ten minute outdoor walk. The internet really specialises in highly developed realms of information-the printed word, music, video. Here it comes into its own. It disseminates these media faster and more efficiently than any other tool. It also allows for their retrieval easier than could be imagined in a pre-Google world. Luddite that I am, I have two problems with this.

First of all it doesn’t allow for the accidental discovery of unexpected information. An internet search is done on specific terms-one doesn’t catch a glimpse of a book with an interesting title, or an article on an exotic subject while whacking the words ‘biodiversified haystacks’ into Google. As we move further from newspapers and libraries into blogs and portals we lose the breadth of knowledge that differentiates a wise person from an informed one. The onus will be on the individual to do this for themselves, and as incidental information becomes harder to find, less people will choose to do so. The kind of knowledge that our fathers and grandfathers had, a holistic wisdom with its emphasis on breadth rather than depth, may well end in this generation. In more practical terms, this will leave experts without the kind of context that gives real meaning to their work-a physicist for example, without any understanding of the philosophy that underpins his method, or a lawyer who fails to understand the sociological impact of his profession. The more powerful the web becomes, the less opportunity there will be for the minor epiphanies that spring from the discovery of a hitherto unknown interest. We will all be poorer for it.

Secondly, activities that were previously restricted to a location where certain documents, records etc were accessible, are now limitlessly mobile. Research can be done in bed, one can work on a tan and on accounts on the same hotel balcony-all that’s needed is a laptop and a wireless modem. We can work anywhere, but does this mean we should work everywhere? From my own limited experience, certain environments are designed for certain activities. I could easily do all my reading for college at home-just pull my materials out of databases instead of from musty shelves-but there is a genius loci (look it up, you’ll be glad you did)in the Trinity library that simply cannot be replicated in my own house(despite, or perhaps because of, the ready supply of tea and cushions.) In Trinity the shape of the building, the muffling of sound by the physical presence of so much knowledge, even the manual searching for each individual volume, all these have contributed to insights I could have found nowhere else. Which I’m sure is precisely what the architect intended…but what kind of buildings would he invent if their uses were as manifold as those of the internet itself? Could such a space be made? Would it even be wise to do so? Our buildings aren’t just a space for our bodies, but also for our minds(a rational explanation for the effect of feng shui) and the dissolution of barriers between where we play, learn and work will have a very definite and unpredictable effect on this.

It’s tempting to allow this article go sprawling away, like its subject, but restraint is always the preferred option in these circumstances. The problems with evaluation and relation of information are interlinked and already well documented-self-diagnosis based on unregulated sources being a prime example. I don’t want to deal with such practicalities. Instead I just wanted to look at some of the questions that spring from the fundamental idea of(to resurrect a defunct phrase) the information superhighway.

The internet is great. I would go as far as to say that without it, the challenges of climate change, energy crises, pandemics, loss of biodiversity and general global insecurity, would prove too great for the human race to overcome. Without such a pooling of our collective knowledge, the end of our species would be an even greater certainty. But it comes with dangers, and to embrace every stage of its development without question, would be a grave error. Already it has become an organic system, its growth, and the growth of its role in human affairs, is inexorably massive. There remains only each individual’s control over their own interactions with it. I would counsel caution, and advise anybody who has had the misfortune to read what I consider a very dry article to its end(seriously, not one flash of biting wit, I must getting soft) that the answer to the real question of our existence is unlikely to be the internet.

PS To paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I am aware of the irony of the internet being my only means of promulgating this article to any meaningful extent.

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Spontaneous creative expression is the ultimate in intuitive improvisation. It is also the riskiest. How well will the message be projected? How well will it be received, if it ever is? Such a spontaneous moment where genius is born, or another asshole is unleashed upon the world… visionaries blossom or fools are spawned. The old adage, “think before you speak”, comes to mind. But then with pause comes risk management. What is now the agenda behind the message and who gets to deliver it? Enter the proactive edit. Enter censorship.

Art is weaponry, technique and craftsmanship the launch pad and vision the missile. It is the armament shielding against the prevailing validity and reaffirmation. It is first strike and it is reciprocation via escalation. It is an insurgent release of the comedic, the tragic. It can be censored, but it cannot be quelled.

In the Cape region of South Africa, I was dumbfounded by the lack of rage in their street art. Maybe it is more prevalent farther north; yet, after ages of subjugation, oppression, and now repression?—I would think a new found democracy with uncovered atrocities would lend to an art renaissance. Yet this release I could not find. As I wondered through shop, gallery, street fair, and by graffiti-ed wall, I found minimal expression of former anguish, current emancipation, and fear of uncertain futures. From my eyes, their art was purely decorative, tribal, and expressionless of the pain of injustice and the salvation of freedom. Is there still an imbedded fear of reprisal? Have they yet to learn from so many oppressed centuries, how to piss at the wind? Or is the message so subtle, I just can’t see it.

How do they vent their rage beyond violent acts of revenge? I sensed impending danger, like knowing a friend who for too long bottles up so much and then explodes in a rage befitting an equal or greater negative response from any or all affected. I fear more than a self inflicted ear lopping.

           I’ve always been drawn to artists who evoke an emotional response or even just a raised eyebrow, a single moment of questioning in the eye of the beholder. The more fringe the more fitting, but I think that had to do with youth rather than the message. My friends are Guerilla artists, social pranksters who can insert a disruptive micro-moment into the flow, a hiccup in the continuum, insidiously subliminal or shockingly insurgent; the disruptive effects ranging from the minimally amusing to the most prosecutable with the common purpose to jar awakening in the moment, a reversal of the collective mental environment… consciousness. Adbusters out of Vancouver, BC is the most organized in this aspect, an anti-media medium whose sole goal is to break a hypnotic meme by fighting fire with fire, gloss over gloss. I can’t tell if it’s working on the collective consumer consciousness or they are just preaching to the anti-choir. I do know it only matters that they exist and are determined not to be silenced.

           A friend, small in stature but not in fortitude, is a metal sculptor and the epitome of the minimal subliminal. She takes on quite large installations and yet sees them as too small. Ladders, bucket trucks, cranes, and spark of torch are her tools; grinded, polished, welded scrap-metal her medium. Formerly an oil tanker captain, yet with humble Buddhist footprints, her expressions to the receptive eye are profound. She envisions her monoliths erected throughout the valley in receding farm fields desperately warding off the poisons of over-development. She sees monuments of purpose with labeled titles of ‘Frustration’, ‘Anger’, ‘Denial’, and ‘Punishment’, all physical manifestations of her feelings toward war, intolerance, indifference, and injustice. If the farmers only see a free artsy-fartsy tourist draw, and the tourist only sees an anomaly worth investigation, then mission accomplished. A layer has been penetrated. A different type of seed has been planted in tired soil.

It’s enlightening to take time to smell a different rose. I’m always looking for and applying the original spontaneous, the intuitive off-the-cuff, sketches, paintings, graphics, art, writings, poetry, whatever and wherever contrary dissent oriented; anything that encourages an underlying undermining mental environment that is contrary to the perceived absolutes of the prevailing one… the one that’s purpose is solely for the pursuit of pure profit regardless of the human condition. Why? Because Lord Acton’s epic warning that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is no more obvious than it is today. I’m also quite a curmudgeonly contrarian. And remember, rarely does anyone get paid for this passionate form of expression, so occasionally invite them to dinner. More than likely, they are a little gaunt.

Peace

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Right, let’s take a controversial topic today. Religion. The world’s great spiritual traditions. And militant atheism.
The pope is in Turkey today, as a head of state, as a source of encouragement for the country’s beleaguered Catholic population and most importantly, it would seem, as an agent of dialogue between religions- in this case, the Greek Orthodox Church and the colossus that is Islam.
I am myself a severely lapsed Catholic. I went cold turkey several years ago, when I first heard Jeffrey Lewis sing:

“God is just a story someone made up long ago
Before they had books and t.v. shows
I don’t believe in him and I ain’t afraid to say so…”

I’m currently chugging along on rationality and some vaguely utopian ideals, but again as the great songwriter said “It’s hard not to be superstitious, despite all you know.” That pretty much sums up my position. Sometimes I get so thankful, and sometimes I get so scared and other times so concerned, that I positively need to unload my hopes and fears and joy into something inconceivably bigger than myself. And I need to believe he’s listening.

There’s also the question of rationality, which in itself has no rational basis(at least I think that was the gist of Bertrand Russell’s writing-there were large tracts of his books I didn’t understand.) There is always the possibility that God really is just messing with our heads, or in the Buddhist tradition, we are messing with our heads. There are monotheists in all faiths who believe everything just occurs through the will of God, and at a certain fundamental point, this is as rational a position as holding that the universe runs according to certain immutable laws that can be determined through reason and observation.

The problem is that we’re all starting from different points of view. Two people who look at a wafer of bread in the hand of a priest will see very different things depending on whether they believe at the most fundamental level in pure reason, in God’s message as communicated by his incarnate son, or in God’s message as communicated in our heart of hearts, but only when we stand on our heads in genuine faith and squawk like a chicken. There is no real objective way to decide which of these beliefs is the truest. At a certain point, everything is faith.

This is why, when on my frequent and aimless trawls through cyberspace, I find some asinine group with a name like The Rationale Police or The Society for the Prevention of Intelligently-Designed Anti-Theism, I get all annoyed and write vaguely offensive gobbledegook like this sentence. It is utterly, utterly pointless and stupid to go about trying to destroy religion, or even convince others of its untruth. I have no problem with people ridiculing intelligent design or being generally insulting when religious groups try to go toe-to-toe with scientists on their own turf, but when you try to dispute their beliefs from first principles, you’re guilty of the same mistake.

The worst thing about this whole ‘science v religion’ debate/fiasco, is that really most of the people are on the same damn side. There are no substantive ideological differences between any middle-class western people. None. Do you think that people that support abortion believe that aborting a fetus is the same as killing a child? Or that those against it think they aren’t acting in the woman’s best interests? Each side believes they’re acting in the best interests of the child, the mother and society. Yet with these acres of common ground, there is no dialogue between the two sides. So we bicker over our petty differences while crime spirals out of control, adolescents kill themselves and the world begins to broil…

Frankly, I admire all the religious men in the world who have peace as their aim, whether they are protestant ministers, Roman Catholic priests or Muslim Imams(I hope thats the right word, I really am not au fait enough with the Muslim religion.) I particularly admire the pope when he calls for tolerance and dialogue between religion(it’s a little known fact that this was the subject of the speech he with that medieval quotation in it, the one that sparked those riots all over the middle east.) This tolerance and dialogue must extend further however, to encompass all ideas and philosophies. The only means through which the human race will have a future is if the battle of ideals is moved to a plane where everyone will suspend their preconceptions and actually figure out where the hell the ship is going.

And that means scientists too.

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“We have no trouble getting universities for exchanges. They like us because we’re old and have cobblestones”

Jimi Hendrix roars from my computer and I’m briefly dislocated from my musings, part of which includes the above statement. My German tutor said it a few weeks ago, in a context that is now useless to try and recall. I’m always stunned at how modern Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix sound, especially live, without even whatever rudimentary sound technology they had in the sixties.
So anyway what I have to discuss and think about is a disembodied statement, which as usual I’m gonna play with and turn around in my head until the light shines on it just the right way, until what it really means can be spelt out. Other universities don’t like Trinity College because it’s old and has cobblestones. I like it because does. I feel secure walking over the cobblestones because they’ve been underfoot for 300 years, far longer than I’ve had feet to walk them. Bram Stoker walked on them, as did Oscar Wilde, Robert Emmett and Jonathan Swift. It’s a link, and a very definite one. After I graduate(if I graduate) and go on to something notorious and worthwhile, I’ll be considered to be one of their brethren.

The strange part, however, that I already consider them my brothers, by virtue of our being Irish. I’m sure people from other nations would share this view-”You’re Irish! Like Oscar Wilde!” This raises some questions in my mind however-as they were an entirely different breed of Irishman than I am. They were part of a Protestant Ascendancy, a ruling class when my antecedents were attending barren farms in the remote west of the country. Forty years earlier, in what was an essentially theocratic Ireland, I would have needed special permission from a bishop to attend the institution at all. We’re different-separated not only by time but also by culture and tradition.

I love tradition, and so I am a member of the Phil. The Philosophical Society is the world’s oldest student society, a paper reading and debating society. And during its debates any points of information are offered with one hand stretched out to the speaker and the other on one’s head. On one’s head that is, because to keep it at one’s side would render it a little too close to a vestigial sword for the speaker’s comfort. But no one has a sword anymore and without it what’s the point? Most of the guests to the Phil probably wouldn’t understand the significance, they’d be somewhat outside the joke so to speak. But more importantly, if Oscar Wilde wasn’t entirely decomposed, if his corpse was suddenly vitalised and he appeared on a Thursday night at the Graduates Memorial Building, he would recognise it instantly. And right there we have another layer of meaning of the seemingly innocuous phrase-”We’re old…” We are old, and what’s more-we’re still here.

Tradition isn’t only a great unifier of disparate generations. It also divides the people who live side by side in the same slice of time. Like forty years ago, the Provost, Fellows and Scholars living and studying within the walls of Trinity and the Catholic majority sitting without. This aspect of tradition troubles me-I don’t think there’s any justification for it. It is the same as was the tradition of white supremacy in the Southern United States and the tradition of imperialism in the former British Empire. It had (and continues to have) division as its objective and hatred as its inspiration, yet it serves the same purpose as the great western traditions of democracy and fundamental rights-it binds humanity through history. I can only suggest that such traditions, those that thrive on fear, are in some way repugnant to something deep within the human psyche, and certainly that is how it seems so far. At all times in human history injustice has only survived in cultures of ignorance and oppression. When people are equipped with freedom and sufficient education to distinguish vice and virtue, virtue has always triumphed. And I can only hope that it continues to do so. Tradition is that which we consider worthy in enough to be preserved. When it isn’t worthy it eventually breaks under the weight of its own tyranny, as it did with slavery and imperialism, and as it is doing in the case of economic oppression in the developing world. (Ed. Note: see The Economic Hit Men and Exploitation) It is essential to remember, however, that there has never been any guarantee that it will continue to do so. Faith should always tempered with doubt. My faith in the noble traditions of the world is always tempered by the doubt that they might just be as temperamental as those that have collapsed in the craven pit of their own ignominy. The onus is on all of us to ensure that the traditions we observe tie us to our living neighbours, as much as our dead relatives.

The music on my laptop has slid gently into the softer side of Smashing Pumpkins. And I have gradually come to the conclusion that other universities like Trinity because the real traditions have survived, and survived for centuries. People sharing the ideals of learning and fraternity have trod the cobblestones through the centuries And thus the traditions tie us to places like Bremen and Passau in this century…Trite it may be, but also true. We love the same things really…

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What is Consciousness? Where is it?

Dualism:

It is customary (at least in my experience) to start with an explanation of dualism. One very influential version of this theory was put forward by René Descartes. In it he described consciousness (the mind) to be separate from the body. In such a way that the mind was not extended in space, and was in fact no part of the material world, or its laws; meanwhile the body was indeed extended in space and was most assuredly part of the material world and bound by its laws. Through this thesis he was describing two separate existences: a material existence and a mental one, which only the mind inhabited. Problems with this conception of the mind/body interaction were so inextricable that it became apparent a new approach to the issue was necessary.

Materialism:

Dualism has been all but expunged from philosophy of mind discourse (not to downplay its importance in illuminating all sides of the discussion). This has become the case for many reasons, but most significantly, it is due to science’s tremendous successes at penetrating the mysteries of the universe. Materialistic (physicalist) accounts of reality have become the basis for our understanding of all but theological questions, and events beyond the grasp of scientific understanding. Some would argue that consciousness has been one of the phenomenons that existed outside of scientific inquiry. It is my opinion that there has been scientific inquiry into consciousness since we acquired self-awareness in some form. But I digress. With the advent of modern imaging technologies we have gained experimental evidence that brain activity changes in a predictable manor when the appropriate behaviour is elicited.

These experiments are without a doubt scientific and add to our understanding of the brain, increasing our abilities to perform medical operations and control disorders. More importantly, they are part of a scientific framework that draws from multiple disciplines, allowing us to understand consciousness without requiring supernatural forces. In the past fifty years many physicalist theories have been proposed: the mind-body identity thesis, functionalism, eliminative materialism, and non-reductive physicalism.

Considering:

As many of the most modern theories concerning consciousness attempt to explain it in great detail, they all draw upon multiple disciplines. Even with the huge boom in interest surrounding the scientific community about consciousness, there is still a plethora of opinions as to where consciousness falls metaphysically (what role it plays in the natural order of physical laws), and epistemologically (whether or not we can even know certain things about consciousness, such as qualia). We have reached a point where our scientific paradigm is broad enough to encompass a concept as complex as consciousness (for another example of a problem as expansive: The Theory of Everything). There are those that would disagree and say consciousness can be broken into basic functions and with those build artificial entities. Of course this is possible, but it would not be human type consciousness. It would be but a close approximation. It would take a fraction of all the elements necessary to create our phenomenal experience. Consciousness seems to be a problem ripe with discoveries just waiting to be enjoyed and I plan on nibbling on it a bit myself.

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In the winter of 2001, my wife and I journeyed to Beijing to stand on The Great Wall; a barrier long ago conquered, broken into segments by the erosion of time and neglect. We wandered in awe through majestic ancient courtyards of a former royal extravagance, sipping tea at the Summer Palace and Forbidden City; excessive testaments to reasons why servitude revolts exponentially violent to such displays of indifference. We walked the length of Tiananmen Square several times; another tourist attraction promoting bronzed sculptured heroes of The State that inconspicuously doubles as a place where authority and brute force once melded like the perfect fit it is.

We had our expectations, our preconceived notions tweaked by our own culturally biased talking heads and the usual promoted fear and loathing of ill-informed idealist as to why ‘those’ people are the way they are, why we are better, and how careful we needed to be. It wasn’t until conversation took place outside the professional drivel of others’ most likely paid perceptions, that we found glimpses of truth and via a medium neither printed nor broadcasted. This truth was transmitted by the presentation of food; food harvested, procured, and prepared with the delight of a sharing host, and eaten with the delight of gratitude of a guest. Sustenance, the ultimate ancient pursuit to negotiate for, to war over, to leverage, and now it is something else; oil, market share, maybe the ego of influence. This enlightenment was our spontaneous moment of collective consciousness. This was our awareness. This was our stone soup.

As we ate, we found a lust for conversational English at each pause, our suspicions heightened as our personal space was constantly bombarded. That was our problem. We found a transformation of minimal survivalist mercantilism towards a burgeoning middleclass and streets full of the art of the dicker where we bartered as ugly Americans do, looking for that trophy buy and bragging rights to our prowess for getting something for nothing. That was our arrogance. We found a six-foot genetically suspect Mongolian guard complete with an automatic weapon standing stoically emotionless in a packed MacDonald’s. We found jazz. We found a young idealist who thought North Korea is the epitome of a pure socialist state. We blinked. He argued that Tiananmen was nothing but a protest against bureaucratic corruption and now all is well. We smiled. We found a dancing midget in eighteenth century garb promoting geisha-looking escorts in front of a suspect looking bath house. We found Starbucks.

We discovered an old woman living in a soon to be dismantled ghetto called a Houton, a place where capitalistic momentums were needing space for concrete and steel expansion and we asked her questions, knowing she had survived the communist and cultural revolutions, periods of mass starvation, the social cleansings and re-education. She replied that the reason her skin was so smooth at the age of seventy-three was because she only washed her face with cold water. She said she liked Americans, but feared our country because we have no one but our nuclear powerful selves to hold us accountable.

Our stay was all too short. We left Beijing with understanding, many of the dots connected, and yet quite fearful of environmental, economic, and thus politically charged reactions to a massive populace awakening with explosive consumption. Governments lie and manipulate. Institutions sell an agenda whether product or ideal twisting verbiage and history, elevating themselves at others’ expense. We folk, our global brothers and sisters, can choose to be shepherds or sheep at any given emotionally vulnerable moment. We can choose to be collectively manipulated by fear and loathing or irrational exuberance. Or we can transcend all of this by something as simple as the creative expression of sharing versus summits of positioning. We can break bread and teach our leaders to do the same. We just need to get out more often.

Â
Peace.

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It has taken a brief and bitter struggle with myself but, now at one a.m. of a new day I am going to write. I could have left myself in the comfort zone and tomorrow, rested, record today’s events as a coherent and pretty whole. But that would hardly be an accurate picture. No, this must be presented as the shattered, multi-faceted image it is. I’m playing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the background, partially in the hopes that the literary spirit of the great HST will give me some semblance of inspiration, partially to heighten the sense of lost sanity I find a day begun at the other side of the country, with an extra hour squeezed in where no one wants and no one expects it to be.

I awoke in Salthill, in Galway city, the Atlantic Ocean barking at me a stones throw from my window…actually that’s just poetic licence, I didn’t really have a window, just the living room floor of a friend’s apartment. Its window wasn’t mine, and it faced in the opposite direction to the sea, onto the back yard of a rather unappealing bar. But the sea was audible and I knew it was there.

The friend I had visited had changed since I last saw him, in that most meaningful of ways, where your tolerance for him has been decimated. One incident is all that’s required to illustrate this.

[Setting: Nighttime, ext. Brendan and Paul sit on a wet rock beside the Corrib river and a canal. Brendan drinks Belgian beer, Paul a bottle of mixed berry cider]
Brendan: Do you know what’s nice? Having someone to love.
Paul: Yeah…Not to sound like a prick, but how often do you think about how you feel about her?
Brendan: Well, not constantly, but every now and then it intrudes into my thoughts like…
Paul:[sharp intake of breath] That’s not a good sign.

I reckon he’d have came up with that, even if I’d said something along the lines of “I ponder my feelings for my girlfriend constantly, and refine my concept of how I feel about her on an hourly basis.” Paul moved from his home and university to be with his girlfriend, but that wasn’t the beginning of his marking out a monopoly on romantic understanding. In all the years I knew him in Dublin he was always locked in some long term relationship or other, which took up most of his time and, all the more irritating, parts of his conversation. And now after two months without seeing him, these comments stung fresh. Their subject was closer to my heart than before, and my recollection of them blunted. He was rarely correct in his statements, but there was always the chance I could be wrong in mine. I haven’t laboured the point. But I think I love my girlfriend, and every now and then something she’s done or said intrudes into my thoughts and I know.

Paul’s brother Kevin had come to Galway with me, and returned with me today. Kev and I are also good friends, and play in a band together. Unlike me however, Kev has taken the jump and immersed himself in music, studying performance and music technology, while I’ve taken the surer path and chosen law. It’s about now that the band is building momentum, and unless something drastic happens our paths will undergo a jagged schism - my band will no longer be mine, and I’ll just be a barrister who plays drums and classical percussion - which I can live with, but all the same, it’s sad. Today was the first time we talked about it, the unhappy details about the point at which I’ll have to take my final leap from the whole flaming vehicle and how we’ll get a replacement to clamber on. Taking a bus across a country is different to taking it across a city - you step out the other side a different person.
When on the first day of college I looked for words of wisdom from my tutor through a beer tinted haze, he said something I thought unlikely.

“You’ll probably find you’ll make new friends at college” he said “And the people you hitherto thought to be your friends were really just people you were hanging around with.” He was right in the first sentence, and about the implied fading away of my old friends, but unfortunately, he was about the ‘just’ part. They were and are the people I love and slowly, slowly they are going away. Our paths our set to split and I shall miss them.

On that note, dear readers, I shall sleep.

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Consciousness is a favorite subject of mine. It tickles my brain and I can’t help but be aware of how important it is to understand what consciousness is. The more we know how it is involved in our phenomenal experience, the more we are able to control our environment (including the environment we are encased in, eg. bodies). Most people are, to some degree, both intent on their survival and aware that their continued survival requires an assortment of things: other individuals, a reliable food supply, reliable water, a safe environment, and many other basics that too many go without. Our list gets updated as new information is added to our awareness and not everyone shares the same things on their lists. For instance, global warming is beginning to become a concern for a large number of people. It’s an agreement of disparate positions, but the general consensus seems to be that it is indeed happening and whomever is to blame, it needs our global attention. Carl Jung started to talk of a Collective Consciousness near the end of his life, many years after writing about the Collective Unconscious. As information starts to move globally we are beginning to witness a pattern that could be considered a collective consciousness. Not only will understanding our private phenomenal conscious experiences help us control ourselves, it will also give us explanatory tools to probe complex information systems such as social networks. This is reciprocal, as theories on information systems and related fields help us understand consciousness.

Besides the common sense understanding of consciousness as self-awareness, there are many other theories that diverge drastically from one another and more that differ only slightly. Since I want to start talking about how to define consciousness I will refer to other theories and draw from various sources to piece together a coherent, and theoretically useful description of consciousness. In my readings I have come across many who have helped refine my description of consciousness, whether my concept of consciousness was congruent or not. I’ll begin by describing some of the contemporary theories while introducing some consciousness jargon here and there in this series.

The view of consciousness that I wish to propose cannot be summed up in a single sentence, but there is, what I consider, a totipotent form of consciousness. I’ll try and explain how information is a fundamental property for any form of consciousness to be able to exist. This idea of consciousness I’m describing is strongly panpsychist with elements of neutral monism. Most don’t lay out their basic metaphysics right off the bat, as both these terms have a wide range of views within and overlap in various ways, while often leading to confusion in the long run. Also, by so defining my metaphysics there are expectations and assumptions that can be made with regards to how consciousness should be described. But it’s my experience that a great many views have something important to say about how to describe consciousness. Some idea’s I will cover are:

• Functionalism
• Identity Theory
• Quantum Theories concerning consciousness
• Panpsychism
• Property Dualism
• and Neutral Monism to list a few.

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While on a bike ride at the canal, i started looking around. Dodge a person here, dodge one there. It was like an old Nintendo game. There was nothing better! Inside this game, i had my thoughts about the various interesting people in my life. How the wind whistles through your golden hair on a beautiful, warm day. Those two over there look interesting. I “quacked” in their general direction as they pondered the extent of what wholeness means. Where mist blew across the wet path a small rainbow formed at 42 degree to the sun. Not only that but it moved as i tried to pass it.

There is nothing more pleasant than being near water. It is the infinity that humans can understand. My Affinity. Any infinite is one thing: everything together. All inseparable.

So many little dogs waddling their owners along. The runners, joggers, walkers, and vagabonds not quite comfortable with the status quo. We always look, and we always find. But we question whether now is that better tomorrow. And we look. What must be done has already been decided just not revealed. The known becoming infinite, the easier to find. You will know and we will always find.

A man wanted to join me in his run and with a supernova we were side by side. 1..2..3..4…..42..43. He’s done this before. The exhilaration of speeding to get that glimpse of what matters and that is all. The freedom of connecting the lowercase whole experience. There is always more to find and explore just around that corner. The expressed fact that we are even capable of such a thing is utterly astounding. This knowledge of what we do can bring together all things.

The umbra canal path was more in the air. It did not keep its distance. I am one with the wind. Then the water, the sun, and lastly the earth. I have never felt more complete.

As the mutual energy of my last relationship drained to their respective decanters my eyes opened once again. Found in Indianapolis, on a canal, dodging the fledgelings, a man found happiness in wholeness. You will understand when you know nothing to pi.

Basking on the grass next to the sculpture, a couple rubbed each others arms. They lazily watched the acrobat in the sky. The man pulled right and it twirled counter clockwise four times. The man pulled left to narrowly avoid a death as the Red Baron had had.

They sat, pondered, walked, watched, jogged, focused, biked, felt, roller bladed, read, flew kites, relaxed, and threw the baseball… into the canal. All on the edge of danger. The ball, a super hero, was impervious to wind. It received the sun and we shall go to the moon. Post eclipse a reality is revealed and it is to grow, seek, and find the wisdom. The process may come to you but when you come to it then does it click.

I have found the me that I am now.

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(The Dublin Bus: Bus of the Ford of Hurdles)

Of all the popular myths you know about Ireland, it is unfortunate that the most irritating and banal of them all, is also the most true. It rains. It rains in a way that robs your sight of colour and mind of mirth. It’s raining right now, and so, instead of an enjoyable cycle through the crisp october air, I’m sitting in a bus, blinded by condensation, and wholeheartedly enjoying the anonymity and indifference of my fellow passengers.

Back when Ireland was a gloriously impoverished nation, ie. the 80s (yeah that’s right, while you were discovering gyms and the Walkman, we were emigrating… and then discovering the gym and Walkmans in other countries-perhaps the reasons weren’t purely economic…), before we were wealthy, the bus, like every other place where more than two people congregated, was a social amenity. People -strangers that is- talked on the bus. Being a child of the 90s, and young adult of (may the FSM forgive me for using this word),noughties (seriously WTF is the noughties?-what’s the acronym-00s? can’t we go even a decade without abbreviations?), this seems as distant a concept as hara-kiri. How does it come about? What do strangers have to talk about? Perhaps there were only a few set topics of conversation in less materialistic times- perhaps we’re all just that bit more sophisticated. I mean we have divorce in this country now, and high paid, high commitment, high technology jobs . Surely, this not talking with hitherto unknown people can’t be a retrograde step?

And then immediately to my right, a man starts talking to his friend about law; which is my subject/major in university. He’s a student, which means that he probably goes to the same college as me. We have the same lecturers, the same classes, and both of us think what we’re doing is pretty interesting. But naturally(or unnaturally as the case may be) I’m too scared of making an ass of myself to strike up a conversation, I just keep typing, writing for people I may never see, to make a connection half a world away, a connection that could be just a metre to my right… And now they get off the bus.

I do talk to strangers, but only in situations where it’s acceptable, where it happens all the time, like in college, in societies, at gigs. How in this space of ten or twenty years did the bus become unacceptable ? It’s not like the physical space between us has been increased, quite the opposite, modern buses provide about as much leg room as the glove box of a Mini Cooper, and considerably less air. So why do I not have the wherewithal to turn to whatever individual has been jammed into me in a vaguely intimate and entirely embarrassing way and say “Buses kind of suck, don’t they?” But i have come to my stop, just in time to miss half my first lecture, and my musings end here.

My impromptu verdict: I blame society, because otherwise I would have to blame myself.

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