• Tag Archives epistemology

  • Boomers Crashing on the Beach

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                        Waning Bloodroot Moon

    “The only source of knowledge is experience.” -Albert Einstein

    I’m not sure I completely agree with Einstein, since I would give abstract thought the potential for creating knowledge, too; but, it is true that without experience the thinker has none of the material necessary for understanding.  This leads to an interesting observation about life at any point.  As we remove ourselves from experience, whether by depression, illness or again, our capacity to develop new knowledge grows weaker.  We can fall prey to narrow perspectives, prejudices, knowledge built on weak foundations.

    The silver tsunami, baby boomers crashing on the beach of old age with considerable force, runs the risk of making our politics out of balance.  That is, if the aging who have been active in the world pull back and reduce themselves to voting what seems to be in their self interest, those of us in that number might find ourselves on the sharp end of political reprisal.  Read Susan Jacoby’s fine book, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age.  She outlines the case for intergenerational struggle if we don’t extend health care coverage to all citizens through a program similar in scope and kind to medicare.  With a smaller number of workers supporting an increasing number of seniors, remember tsunami waves keep coming, in this case for 25 years +, national health insurance will be critical to assuring the successful retirement of all those workers we need.  Absent a way to see their ways through to their own retirement these younger workers may rebel against the burden of carrying us on their backs.

    Jacoby’s book has several other pertinent perspectives, among them reminding us to prepare for old old age, now sometime after 80, when 50% of those in that age bracket have Alzheimers.  50%!  And the rest of us will likely have some other debilitating condition or another.  A good read.  An important one.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Health Politics Retirement 📎and tagged

  • Dream a Little Dream of

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                             Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Inception.  Kate and I watched this last night here at Artemis Cinema.  Kate, who doesn’t tolerate much fiddle-faddle when it comes to movies, said early and often that it wasn’t clear.  Later on, perhaps around the time they’re navigating a well-defended ego, complete with snow camouflaged Hummers with tank tracks in place of tires, snow mobiles and white clad gunmen protecting a concrete gray fortress, we both decided that we had something of a grip on things.

    A Russian nesting doll movie with plotlines and concepts connected but difficult to unravel, determining what was real or not became a challenge.  Which was, I suppose, the whole point.  Mol, Decaprio’s wife, kills herself because he convinced her the world they shared inside a dream was not real.  She carries with her, back into waking life, the idea that the world she is in is a dream, an illusion, and that killing herself will cause her to wake up and be with her real husband and her real kids.

    This is, of course, a neat cinematic version of solipsism turned inside out.  A solipsistic thinker believes the world to be a creation of their own imagination.  In this case the solipsist believes the world cannot be her creation and therefore must not be real.

    This is a movie more about epistemology, how do we know what we know, than it is about psychology or ontology.  In the end we’re left hanging, not sure whether the world Decaprio’s character has returned to is in fact the real world or only a figment of a dream, “A slight disorder of the stomach… You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Scrooge faced the same epistemological problem with a strong dose of skepticism.

    We’ll watch inception again.  See how it fares on a second pass.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Dreams Family 📎and tagged