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Timpo

Joined 5 February 2004

I am a baby boomer (1946 vintage) and have enjoyed possibly the most privileged life of anyone - who ever lived! Having worked in Cyprus, Frankfurt, Munich, Brussels, West France, Marseilles, and most recently - since 2005 until retirement in 2012, central Madrid. I now live in the outlying suburb of Aranjuez#La_Montaña

This user is an octogenarian WikiGnome pensioner, formerly an airman serving in Cyprus, an electronic technician in Scotland, a systems analyst in Munich, a documentalist in France and a business adviser in Madrid. During various recessions he worked in his native Southern England as a technical college lecturer, a police-station legal affiliate, a citizens advice volunteer, an unemployment consultant and a SME sales manager all of which half-dozen or more pursuits were serendipitous failures - preparatory to his interest in philosophy and ethics, studied during his expatriate retirement, first at at a local community college and now by distance learning.

Other obsolete qualifications include a Bronze C, a PPL and diplomas in electronics and law

Best wishes to all Wikipedia users for a life as rich as this (but maybe rather better informed), regards, Timpo (talk)

Philosophy

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Philosopy is not truly 'love of wisdom', because φιλία, philia) means "affectionate regard, friendship". Aristotle, following Arete proposes "untellectual virtues" of knowledge, art, practical judgement, intuition, and wisdom. Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals seems to agree, for it implies philosophy is simply respect for the opinions of others, no matter how odious they may seem to be.

According to my opinion, we humans have four constituent elements:

  • A body which in ancient times was the slave, in modern robotics the sensory and actuator mechanisms
  • A mind approximating the overseer or the operating system connecting the sensors and actuators to the application program
  • A spirit – the [[executive director|master] the intense fire that is the power driving operations (but see Mind-body problem)
  • A soul – those eternal traces we all leave behind, whether saints, sinners or simpletons (great men of the past still depended on the hewers of wood and drawers of water to survive) Without the warnings of the vanquished psychopath-dictators, would not humanity be the poorer?

Eternal souls?

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The memories habits we inherit from long ago

Prehistory

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A million or so years ago someone risked burning down the forest in order to control fire and develop cooking without which pre-digestion civilisation could not have got far!

The ancient world

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Greek, Indian, Chinese philosophy flourished because they were linked by trade routes

Recent history

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As a boy in the middle of the 20th century I remember polishing kitchen knives of tool-steel vigorously with a cork and abrasive paste, because the stainless steel variety we could afford was not sharp enough! Telephones were a rarity, bolted to the wall and lacking a dial. I was fortunate that my parents, as professionals were entitled to have a connection - in those post-war days denied to those without a specific need!

Modern times

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Recently, looking at my smartphone, I realized how many of the failed projects of my youth were now mainstream: touch-screens, plasma displays, gesture control… These ideas were the stuff of private ventures – the major arms manufacturers we worked for “before Thatcher” then tolerated, rather than supported such initiatives. Those employers did occasionally patent our ideas, and reward us with a small salary bonus, but we had neither adequate technology nor the finance to develop such innovative designs into practical products. These are but a few of the “immortal souls” embedded in our daily lives today

The future?

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As an atheist, I believe one should respect God! But perhaps not the anthropophilic gods of religion meaning either re-reading (and dogmatically reflecting on ancient texts) or re-binding (and humbly obeying superiors such as priests and their divinely appointed leaders).

I prefer Socrates ‘’(I know only that I know nothing – or at best very little) and Heraclitus one can not step into the same river twice, since the water flows swiftly, the banks erode slowly and one ages imperceptibly.

In law, truth comes in four qualities, the lowest of which is hearsay (gossip), followed by probability based on prior experience (arbitration), then the best probative truth based in contention and peer review. Finally there is absolute truth which in a complex and ever changing world, is ultimately known only unto to God (as a lawyer might say). Thus, in a world with both macro astrophysics and micro quantum mechanics and microbiology still in their infancy, we are beginning to realize how little we actually know! So God is merely a pace-holder for, well God only knows what we don’t yet know!

But perhaps we should now review (perhaps even re-edit) our heritage text in the light of these rather recent discoveries?

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