Authors Electric

Five years ago, I wrote a blog entitled Vitamin pills, toilet rolls and philosophy . It was simply to offer light relief amongst the specific miseries of that period and give a loose idea of the strangeness of the world I inhabit. I’m repeating it here because of two recent events. First, there was a fascinating, informative (and very long) article in The Guardian . Then came the opening of Tom Stoppard's latest play, The Hard Problem , which examines the issue of  the coexistence of 'brain' and 'mind'. Thanks to those events,  I now see that, far from being the ravings of a disturbed psyche, my absurd confessions were part of an ongoing philosophical argument about consciousness  and may qualify me for the role of a modern Brahan Seer . The Guardian article examined the mystery of awareness. Its arguments were too complex for my tiny brain to summarise here but it seems that philosophers, neuroscientists, poets, religious people and all sorts of others have...