I’ve been reading Fritjof Kapra’s book The Hidden Connections. It’s a wonderful book, for the following reasons: Continue Reading »

On my way back from London, jumping off a tram in Croydon town centre, I came across a street-scene: a man throwing pots and kitchen utensils from a 3rd-floor window at loud, late-night drunks in the street below. Continue Reading »

When, like me, you become old, and can look back on a life of material success and disease-free, fertile, extreme promiscuity, your thoughts will turn naturally to recording the narrative of your life to illuminate the lives of your many descendants. Perhaps you’ll begin by looking through the beautiful, grinning faces in your photograph albums, developing a list of your most memorable and fecund lovers, and setting to the research of the throbbing web of sexual liaison from which you yourself condensed, and into which your mighty seed was sown. Continue Reading »

A while ago I read Douglas Hofstadter’s book I Am A Strange Loop (out in paperback this June!) which contains a description of Hofstadter’s earliest memory of being conscious: looking at his reflection in a mirror, and realising that there was – or perhaps more accurately, generating – a conscious entity inside the head of the person reflected. Continue Reading »