A little picture (which I finally got from my mother today - for safe keeping).
My dad and what he did in the war! He's the one with his hands out on the flatbed - only time he got in the papers! (Well, aside from the infamous 1959 pork scratching heist in which two lorry loads of pork scratchings mysteriously appeared in our front room. Made page 5 of the London Evening Standard, that did!)
There is no date but judging by what's in the news on the reverse of the newspaper clipping this comes from, it would have been sometime between June 1944 and October 1944.
That's all for the nostalgia!
It's difficult given the sense of 'I' that we all have to perceive of anything except in terms of 'I' looking in/around some sensory perception and making a judgement about it. The smell you receive through your nose, the taste which you get from a fine curry, mostly from your nose, oddly enough, but some through your tongue.......and your cheeks and gums when you realise that the speciality of the house 'Jalfeezi' is just that; especially designed to make your head explode and your eyes water! (Tip - don't drink water. The active ingredient in red chillis only dissolves in alcohol, so lots of beer, or a large scotch!)
It's even harder when you come to concepts, like is the Iraq war just (warmongering from a clapped out administration that knows only two things; how do dig a hole and how to dig it deeper, so deep in fact, that we all fall in it!) or what is truth, beauty? You see 'yourself' pondering the 'truth' that is laid out before you, the 'beauty' and 'you' make a judgement. What Dennett calls the 'Cartesian Theatre'. You are the audience. An observer to what is laid in front of you! The power of 'I' is so great that even when you realise it's nonsense to think this way, still the embedded power of the concept, the notion of a 'soul' gazing from outside, is so beguiling that it's difficult not to think that this is a self-evident truth; like the grass on your lawn mower which always turns to rust over the winter.
Now it's plain that all of you who have faith in some 'higher' being, a belief that there is all some purpose to this, not just the purpose we give it by being alive, all of you who believe in some everlasting 'soul', life force, whatever; those of you who believe this is not the only life we have, that somehow when we are all burnt to a crisp, dressed up in all our finery, life, of a sort, goes on; then this is not hard to imagine. But, what if this life is the only one possible; what if it really is ashes to ashes, dust to dust and whence we came is the only resting place? Food for the worms, cinders scattered to the winds, molecules endlessly recycled? Then the concept of a 'something' separate, distinct from the physical person we are, something looking in, like some worn-out shopper outside Harrod's, must be wrong. If there is no 'soul', if there is no life except what we conjure for ourselves, if the notion of a spectator is merely illusion then where does the notion come from? This sense we all have of 'I', who interacts with the world around us, but is somehow separate.
If our brain is all we have then there can be no doubt that somehow the random, and not so random, movement of chemicals across gateways in cells, the random, and not so random, electrical differentials that cause neurons to fire, discharge electicity, is all we have to justify, explain this sense of self.
A truly mad concept, wouldn't you agree? That this 'I' is the end product of merely physical forces and actions taking place in our physical brains?
And yet, mad as it is, in the absence of a 'soul', it must be close to the truth of what is to be 'me'. 'I' am simply what emerges, as a natural consequence, out of the physical actions taking place in my head. No 'soul' is required. And if no 'soul' is present, then no 'soul' is more privileged that any other.
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