If you read my blog regularly you might know i get a bit compulsive about me view counter..

This week the counter has shot up from 7000 to 7500, 500 views in a week!

So thank you to everyone who has taken the time out of their busy schedules to visit this blog,

It is much appreciated.

Must get my head down, re-read the book chapters.

Must do study, must not procrastinate.....

Oh look bake off is on tv, its quarter final week...

I am still clueless about what to write for the TMA.

I will just have to go over the relevant chapters again to see if anything pops into my head.

This philosophy module is very hard.

This year is going to be a struggle.

Whatever mark i get will have to be ground out.

Its tutorial day.

No messages on the planner to say it has been cancelled because of the storm.

So its off to Guildford i go.

First tutorial in six months and first of this new module.

Should be fun.

At lesst i will save some money of petrol. The 60mph winds forecasted for today will blow the car along the a3 to guildford...

Are there any past or present A222 students who read this blog?

How are you coping with?

A. The huge amount of reading required?

B. The lack of resolution of topics.

C. Thought experiments, i get a bit overehelmed with all the potential positions, do you?

I am keen to hesr your input.

Okay personal identity.

Locke refuted physical identity as part of personal identity,

Locke decided that the continuity of memory is important to identity.

Locke decided we have a soul and it is a material thing.

But Hume...

Hume thinks we don't have continuity of memory as personal identity

The identity is made up of impressions (senses) and idea's (informed by senses)

Our identity is a mental stage that ideas and impressions float across like actors. 

Hume looked inside himself and could only detect ideas and impressions, hence he had no soul, he could only detect ideas and impressions. Hence the idea of a 'self' is only a fiction.

If I wrote my TMA1 today I would suggest that I agree with Hume, because when I look inside myself t the moment I just find confusion.

The self as confusion?

Now to wade through Taylor, lets hope Taylor proves insightful, because after that is Parfitt's bloody tele-transporter and that's not going to resolve anything!

'The self as confusion' so I must rely on the process of the study to see if it all becomes clear.

Perhaps Hume was right, my 'self' is the theatre that the ideas and senses play up, and only by having a organised process to make clear stage directions to those bloody ideas and impressions can I make a clear 'play' out of all of it.

The self as 'mental play- director, stage manager, orchestrator, lighting rigger, critic, actor, audience, in fact just the whole bloody theatre'.

So is, 'my self' just the auditorium that all the external impressions  and internal ideas perform in. The performance is a fiction, the theatre is not.

Can you quote Nick Hornby in TMA'S?

Rather than ponder so much about personal identity,

I could reference Hornby's 'about a boy'

'they say every man is an island!, fucking right, and if I am to be an island,

I will be I-fucking-biza, thank you very much'

So Saturday is the first tutorial of this module. A222 exploring philosophy 

This year the tutorials are in Guildford.

It will be good to catch up with my cohorts from last year.

Looking forward to seeing Simon and Stephen again.

I might even get some insight into what ever the hell it is that the first A222 book has been on about.

Well i did my online application to be in the Open University challenge team.

hopefully I did well enough to get a call back for the second round of interviews.

I would so love to have a go at it.

Just looking at the hit counter for my blog.

By this time tomorrow it should pass 7000.

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by.

You know you are in the first month of a new module when....

The book says....

'This activity should take 15 minutes'

And it takes you a full hour....

Oh well, slow and steady wins the race?

Is it just ME feeling a little overwhelmed by this module so far, or is anyone else in the SAME BOAT.

For clear use of language, informed by the chapter one glossary.

By ME, I am not referring my physical self, I am referring to my personal me, my conscious self. SAME BOAT is not used in the sense of an numerically identical boat, regardless of its state of continuum, as in the ship of Theseus. SAME BOAT implies a shared position of consciousness potentially shared by YOU*

. *YOU refers to my fellow students senses of self identify in consciousness, not their physical existence. (Which cannot be empirically proven until we have physically interacted with each other at tutorials).

So I have completed week 1's work, the study planner for week 1 is done.

Happy days, I think!

So I have looked at the ship of Theseus and john Locke's ideas about personal identity.

So Locke separate's the self, from the physical existence of a 'me', thats not relevant, to the idea that I am my self.

It is the continuity of memory and the persistence of self-consciousness that make me a self.

Okay I can get with that, no problem, week one done. Feel smug, happy its done, I can do this, no worries.

Then....................

I clicked the link to an article from the additional reading list:

Mind blown------ they were words, but I could not follow them,

temporal identity, empirical duality of purpose, four dimension definition of spatial existence.

There are even formula's !!!!

if a is to b as x is to y, across a continuum of t1 to t2, then t1a is the same as t2b if X(t1a) is spatially separate to Y(t2b).

MIND BLOWN !

This years blog posts might turn into a whinging set of 'I do not understand' entries.

Or I might get an handle on it all, after all my self now (OMFG1) might be temporally identical to my self in 9 months time (OMFG2). So (OMFG1)=(OMFG2) if I add the empirical factor of time (t). OMFG1 x (t) = (omfg2) / T.

This might be a very long nine months......

Such a serious situation in Spain at the moment.

Spain as we know it has only really exsisted since 1974. Just 43 years and now it faces instability and police ( and not the police from the region- police shipped in from outside the region) firing on its own people.

The central spanish government are on a hiding to nothing from here on in.

How much damage will it cause to a country still struggling with high unemployment, low growth and debt repayment?

So today we see a couple of political theories being put into sharp practice.

Politics as violence

And

The legitimste use of force by a central government against its citizens.

I wonder how much more pressure from, the Catalonia country trying to become the country of Catalonia, can the central spanish government can stand?.