Grieving as an Impediment to Historical Accuracy

Within a few months after my mother died I started to worry that I was losing her in additional ways beyond the enormity of her death.  Memory is a fluid medium, subject to reinterpretation, changes of focus, and loss of detail.  Memories carry meaning and sentiment but that sentiment is dulled each time the memory is replayed.  It has been thirty-eight years since her death and I greatly question whether my memories, my heavily reworked and rerecorded memories, are authentic anymore.  

From time to time some token from the past manifests itself.  Most recently it was a large business envelope full of receipts and dated 1982 that I received in a box from my brother shortly before my father's death.  Sometimes patterns emerge out of the past.  Sometimes realizations come to me.  In this case I realized that the envelope had been a work in progress, a progress that was interrupted by my mother's diagnosis of lung cancer in late 1982.  She died in early 1983.

It was a message from the past that had lain in a drawer rarely touched.  After thirty-eight years my grief was made fresh, possibly shared with someone who could never discard an object that unintentionally became filled with powerful emotions.  It became a memento of a life shared for thirty-eight, then held in a drawer for thirty-eight years of separation.  A life interrupted.

Yes, I still remember essential details about my mother.  I am lately surrounded by her images, images now enriched by an adult's perception of what they mean.  If I have it wrong it is way too late to change or fix my memories now. 

Bob Rambles about Camus, Consciousness and Cause (and Effect)

 Managing real-time applications is one of the greatest of computing challenges, both in coding and in implementation.  The ultimate real-time application would be consciousness (distinguished from "intelligence" which is a series of parlor tricks).  As usual, I am too harsh since the quality of consciousness, and even any resulting wisdom, arises out of the various faculties that comprise those very parlor tricks.  All of my understanding of consciousness is shaped by my understanding of computers and my observation that there is so much of it that I can not observe.

Camus suggests that the resolution of the question of the purpose of life (with that ultimate resolution of suicide) is an ongoing problem of consciousness, with the resolution lying at hand while varying the answers from moment to moment throughout our lives.  The decision not to kill oneself is a matter of policy that might (along with fear and the perception of the finality of nothingness) carry one over a few rough spots - perhaps only to be overridden by an especially fraught or meaningful moment.

Out of my current (dilettante as usual) reading of Camus: I see that he distinguishes between truth and meaning.  As a side note: I once postulated that "meaning is a relationship between ontology and truth".  I now realize that is the ideal rather than what we see in the beliefs of the people around us.  I also subscribe to the idea that there is an identity between Truth and Beauty (as in that moment of consciousness captured in the poem by Emily Dickinson: "I died for beauty".   Regardless, Camus suggests that we spend our lives in the search for meaning.  Certainly that is true for me, with the qualification that for me truth is the higher goal, whatever that means.  In it most fundamental sense it means that I say more than I should say in the service of truth.  It also means that I may die for the truth.

There is a classic computer science exercise where the student is asked to program a robot to brush its teeth.  It is an essay question where one must not leave out any detail in the description of the process.  I will not entangle myself in this tar baby.  Instead, I will propose a similar exercise where the student is asked to layout the basic assumptions associated with the search for meaning in Camus' absurd universe.  As a clue I am going to suggest that a belief in "cause and effect" is a prerequisite if meaning is not to become a totally random construct without any basis in observation, received reality, or established wisdom.  

I am entertaining the idea that quantum entanglement is just another way of saying there is a cause and effect relationship between two entities.  That opens up a whole universe of possible ways for there to be a cause and effect relationship between two entities, a man and a woman for instance.  Now we can approach the discussion of some of the crazier concepts such as autopoiesis and structural coupling as yammered about by Maturana and Varela.  After all, people talk the way birds sing - for the sheer joy of it.