This week I downloaded the great music of
With the exception of this blog my brain has barely been exercised in the interest of anything much during this year and then I learn that we have nearly arrived in a Decade of the Mind (2010-2020) and a conference was held in
As you will know, those who have actually read any of my words, during a good part of late August I had access to the student mind under pressure. To my amazement I learned that there are lots of students who have completed varying degrees of degree with liberally dispensed Ritalin, a drug I always imagined had been designed to aid the less well parented child who suffered from ADHD. Attention deficit is clearly a problem for any student who has shaded a few lectures after nights out and to lean on something like Ritalin at a crucial period in their education actually doesn’t surprise me.
What does surprise me is that pharma companies have geared up a series of mood drugs that can cognitively enhance the brains of those that can afford them, whether prescriptively or commercially. These drugs being described very aptly in last weekend’s Observer Magazine as cosmetic surgery for the brain. Go here for the full story which first appeared in the New Yorker back in April. The writer, Margaret Talbot, really gets into the grey matter and there are no grey areas. People who use this stuff for cognitive enhancement are doing so to give themselves an edge in the workplace and elsewhere and are evidently starting to believe the ultimate miracle of life. That there is no death.
Ms Talbot’s article includes mention of this web site which I strongly recommend. Here you will find young attractive, obviously well off, classy, educated people with “PhDs and great careers” who are clearly onto something; such as everlasting life. At the home of the
The 1hour 45 minute film at Imminst.org is no better than watching any other eccentric sect that inhabits the mediocre minds of over-bred, unblemished, bourgeois white people. And when they talk of everlasting life, saving lives and then requesting donations and building communities, with a backdrop of nice children on swings, it all starts to become clear that behind the cognitive enhancement lies all the insecurities that build mindless religions.
While Imminst offer dreams of eternal life, surgically enhanced bodies and new drugs to underpin their moderate intellects the life span of human beings in parts of
Science will gradually and progressively improve and extend our lives and we may well inhabit space. But science should never advance without good philosophy. The human mind and its lifelong production is arguably immortal but the physical vehicle which bears it through life becomes a little uninteresting
Thanks to the ancient Greeks we can learn of ataraxia. To my mind ataraxia is the intellectual, all knowing, shrug of the shoulders. When I was young, eternal life meant perpetual time with people I wasn’t keen on. The Immortalists can get on with it
The ladies and gentlemen of Decade of the Mind seem to have a more realistic and sociable agenda and
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