Friday, June 17, 2011

The meaning of life's milestones-- Robert Rowland Smith (28 Jan 2011)

Starts with the meaning of life, for which he quotes 4 main philosophical themes:
1) no meaning (sarte)
2) perfecting the self (humanism)
3) service to others
4) service to God

Then he looks at some life milestones (birth, school, etc) and offers some tidbits of wisdom on each.

He presents well. Lots of dry humor ("At the end we will talk about death, just to leave things on a high note"). Great voice, pauses, diction.

He lost me, however, when he posited the mind/body duality. This is so overwhelmingly false. He especially claimed that the body moves foward in time, you cannot be younger nor older than you are, but that the mind does not. Yet he has his own counter-example, which was that a young man can easily imagine where he is going, but a middle-aged man somehow can not-- at that age, one has a brighter picture of how one used to be. Poppycock, of course, but were it true, it would show that the mind also is fixed in time.

Which it is. The mind is an organ, like any other, which develops and ages. A 40 year old brain is physically very different than a 20 year old brain, and yes, Dorothy, this DOES change the way we think.

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