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APRIL 2020 READING NOTES

It has been a while since I have entered on this blog. Now we are in the Coronavirus Pandemic or the panic of 2020. Since last September I have finished the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And just like the Roman Empire in decline we are plagued by incompetent leadership, subversive enemies, pestilence, economic collapse...

Since then I have started on a project to read James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. I have read Dubliners, Portait of the Artist as a Young man and about 2/3 of the way through Ulysses. I also listened to Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce. But the Cover 19 pandemic has drained me of my desire to finish it and press on to Woolf.

My thoughts for 2021-2023 was to focus on a few philosophical issue and get a reading list that represents Religion, Philosophy and Science toward the psychology of each. The problems are stated by philosophy as Mind Body Problem, Free Will and Determinism, What is the Good and Metaphysics. In religion we think of it as the problem of the soul, of free will and God, of sin and eternal life. For science it is the psychology of personal identity, of human agency and consciousness and of physics of time.  The central problem that interests me is the idea of who am "I"? When we die who dies? What is consciousness and what do we lose when we die. Memories, feelings, sensations and ideas. Life is so short. Time is so long. What is this ghost in the machine idea? Where is this "inside"?

To start this out I am reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of he Bicameral Mind by Jaynes. His exploration of what it means to have this interior monologue this inside "me".

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