Day 1 (of memorade)

Memorade is an aid to my memory. As I age it seems harder and harder to remember something I read, even if it was only five minutes ago. It seems even harder if it is something that I am particularly interested in remembering.

Like all the other journals I've ever kept in my life this one has a life expectancy of 30 days. The only difference is that this one is electronic. See you on August 6th ... maybe.

This started because I was just reading some Isaac Asimov. No, wait, let me go back further. When I was 25 and chatting with J and K we pondered the trend we saw in those around us. Upon arriving in their thirties these "others" would abandon their politically active ways and raise families, thus becoming "sell-outs". I am now one such sell out, but not because I have raised a family, but because I have moved away from those rebellious activist days that is for sure.

Yet this is not because I am raising a family, indeed I seem to be more and more selfish. Far to selfish for a family at any rate. Instead I have come to see political debates as completely superficial. Likewise with justice ... and injustice. In fact I am often amazed that I even exist. I even find the contemplation of my existence so fundamental that ultimately I don't care about politics as much because if none of us existed we wouldn't care to begin with.

Now back to the Asimov. In discussing the evolution of philosophy Asimov points out that there eventually began a trend to state "Aristotle says ... " and "Euclid says ..." in any discussion. I have found myself doing similar things. And then forgetting about them, hence Memorade. It seems like a lost art now to deduce things about our surroundings for ourselves. A practical example involves a grassland sparrow project I worked on. We were trapping birds and tagging them (and then re-releasing them of course). There was this one branch in the way of our set up and one fellow technician lamented to me "what if the bird lands on this branch" thus upsetting out set-up. I reached out and snapped that branch in half. Problem solved.

In a separate conversation with J and K we were discussing artificial intelligence, robots, and zombies ... of course. We even got voodoo in there and I eventually proclaimed "maybe that is what a human being is, neither master nor slave". As the masters are always intent on keeping themselves the masters and the slaves are always intent on becoming 'not-slaves'. K responded by saying that this is what Plato's definition of a human being was, and we had stumbled upon during the course of our own conversation.

You see, if Plato had Memorade then we wouldn't have had to rediscover this observation. At least I have Memorade, and now I won't forget what I said that day. Thanks again to Memorade, I won't forget what I said today: Day 1.