Over a decade ago, a friend of mine killed himself. As we, his many shocked and grieving friends, exchanged notes of commiseration and regret and nostalgic remembrance of a life we had all drawn pleasure from, one refrain made the rounds: “I guess I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did.” Indeed.Continue reading “Suicide And Our Many Personas”
Tag Archives: the self
Perfect Strangers: Seeing And Hearing Ourselves
Here is a familiar phenomenon: we hear an audio recording of ourselves and are surprised and perplexed to find out we are listening to a stranger; we are used to hearing our voices from the ‘inside’; but when we hear a recording, we do so from the ‘outside.’ The timbre and tone of our voiceContinue reading “Perfect Strangers: Seeing And Hearing Ourselves”
The Joys Of Crying
I cry easily; so I cry a lot. Many, many things set me off: movies, songs, talking about my parents, a sportsman’s death, showing my daughter music videos of songs that I listened to as a teenager, Saturn V liftoffs, the misfortune of others in the world’s ‘disaster zones,’ witnessing random acts of kindness onContinue reading “The Joys Of Crying”
Westworld’s ‘Analysis Mode’ For Humans
In the course of a discussion about the various motivations underlying the character Robert Ford‘s actions in HBO’s Westworld, a friend raised the following query: In what senses would it be good, and in which bad, if human beings could put one another into ‘analysis mode’ like techs can do with hosts in the show?Continue reading “Westworld’s ‘Analysis Mode’ For Humans”
On The Dissolution Of A Personal Boundary
One of my favorite pastimes when visiting my in-laws in Ohio is to borrow one of the family cars and head to the local cinema to catch a matinée show; it’s how I catch up on the big-screen action I miss out on here in the Big Apple. The tickets are cheaper; the audiences areContinue reading “On The Dissolution Of A Personal Boundary”
Paul Valéry on the Indispensability of Avatars
Paul Valéry is quoted in Stephen Dunn‘s Walking Light (New York, Norton 1993) as saying: I believe in all sincerity that if each man were not able to live a number of lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life. Valéry’s stress on the sincerity of this claim for theContinue reading “Paul Valéry on the Indispensability of Avatars”
Bohm and Schrödringer on the World, the Self, and Wholeness
Sans comment, two physicists of yesteryear on matters that might be considered philosophical. First, David Bohm on ‘the world’: [T]he world cannot be analyzed correctly into distinct parts; instead, it must be regarded as an indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as valid approximations only in the classical [i.e., Newtonian] limit….Thus, at the quantumContinue reading “Bohm and Schrödringer on the World, the Self, and Wholeness”
Samir Chopra 