Blindsight: Graham Young Is Blind But Can See

What is consciousness? You may say that it is to be aware. But what does it mean to be consciously aware of something? I can type this paragraph while outside my window a bird chirps, shadows dapple the window ledge, and here, inside this room, my fingers move on the keyboard, music plays on the radio, and other events also happen as I focus only on these words. I stop for a moment, and there they are, all these other things. Then I return my attention to the computer screen. In a sense, I see but I don't see. I am aware but I am not aware. Things are part of consciousness and, so to speak, they are not.

Graham Young of Oxford, England is a case in point.

Julian Barbour: Killing Time

Time's Arrow and Entropy

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. St. Augustine (354—430)

Theologists could help support their theologies if they did more thinking about the problematic nature of time. Me at Mind Shadows (—)

According to the math of quantum physics, Time's Arrow can flow either direction, into the future, or into the past. Time is symmetrical. Why then do we experience time as asymmetrical? Our deaths lie ahead, not our births.

Physicist Julian Barbour: Time and motion are illusions. They are put into the external world by our brains, but don't exist there.

Belief in No God Is Also Irrational

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett hopes to break the spell--not of religious belief, but of the conviction that it is not a fit subject for scientific inquiry. Never the twain shall meet--this is a bad idea according to Dennett. Stephen Jay Gould wrote of "non-overlapping magisteria," of both science and religion as worthy of respect in their own rights, but unbridgeable, the one to the other.

Seeing Through Self: David Bohm & Krishnamurti's Ego

Quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) was a protégé of J. Robert Oppenheimer and liked by Einstein. So impressed was Einstein, that he referred to Bohm as his successor. As for Bohm, he had deep interests outside science. This led to the day when Bohm met J. Krishnamurti and began studying under him until the two men had a falling-out.

He Wanted His Father's Body Back

The Date: September 1897

Who: American Explorer Robert Peary, African-American Matthew Henson, the crew of the ship Hope and six Inuits, known then as Eskimos, including the 7-year-old boy Minik, and his father, Qisuk. During his several voyages to the Arctic, Peary's quest was to reach the North Pole.

Years later Minik told a reporter from The World about the day he first spotted Peary's ship looming in the distance around Cape York: ''I had never seen anything bigger than my father's kayak. The big ship brought to our little village more white men than we had ever seen. I lived in a little igloo with my father. My mother was dead, and I had no brothers or sisters. And so I loved my dear father very much.''

A 100 ton meteorite was on deck, brought back from the Arctic. During the  voyage, the Hope was tossed by fierce, wild seas, and the Inuit thought they had been cursed for allowing the meteorite to be removed from its native soil.  After anchoring in New York City they, dressed in sealskin coats trimmed with polar bear fur, suffered sweltering heat.