What is Consciousness One of the things that came to mind when I read Ennead I was Alzheimer disease. I’ve heard some say that advanced Alzheimer disease makes life not worth living, and that people afflicted with this disease have become less than human. Although I strongly rejected this opinion, I did it intuitively and on emotional grounds, but failed to make any strong counter-arguments. Plotinus wrote some of his […]
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“What is Life? Mind And Matter” by Erwin Schrödinger
The Character of Life Watson and Crick, in their respective accounts of the discovery of the structure of DNA, both cited “What is Life” as their source of inspiration. It’s amazing how a physicist’s insights triggered a breakthrough in molecular biology. Schrödinger, based on the principles of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics and very limited experimental data, deduced with amazing accuracy the size and character of the genetic material, later known […]
Read more“In Search of Memory” by Eric Kandel
A Good Mystery Novel Kandel tells the story of how fascination with memory has led him to a life-long search for the biological underpinning of memory and consciousness. It’s part autobiography and part textbook, but reads like a good mystery novel. I could hardly put it down until I finished it. His writing is very fluid and concise, and he inserts figures at just the right junctures to illustrate and […]
Read more“The Nature of Order: The Luminous Ground” by Christopher Alexander
From the Ground Up A mind-boggling work. I don’t know of any other works that provide a more coherent and meaningful worldview framework in which questions about matter, space, beauty, inspiration, value and even life itself are answered, or at least can be discussed. Ever the architect-builder, Alexander dug deep to reach the Ground on which he was able to build a framework that bridges the gaps between science, art, […]
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