That policeman is too young to be .... er .... a policeman

Watched QI last night and noticed that one of the researchers is Molly Oldfield. Now this may be the daughter of Mike "Tubular Bells" Oldfield. If so, then I feel decrepit. I remember when Mike Oldfield wrote a tune called Molly for when she was born. It was on the album QE2. Tell me I will start going backwards when I reach 40. Well maybe not.

It may just be me but sometimes the fact that I will die one day hits me hard. You know when you have a week without anything to look forward to, other than a weekend of course? Well sometimes I compare this fact with my own mortality. Just occasionally this becomes a "why bother" worry. (I hovered for a second with all that text selected ready to press the delete key but I have left it there.) At present, this does not seem to bother me. In fact a few times, the day has seemed so wonderful that the thought of becoming defunct does not worry me at all. I look at idea of time being just a mechanism to keep things separate just as space is and that makes me realise that there is no difference between separated from someone in time and being at a physical distance from them. It is just that distance can be overcome with technology and time cannot.

This generation is probably the first that can seriously expect the possibility of immortality not in the real sense of bodies living for ever, but in having their consciousness kept forever within machines. The human brain keeps experience and memory and everything else that makes its owner who they are, in a nice compact space. Everything else about the human body is to keep the brain happy and alive. I am not sure I could live without the sensory input which makes life so damn fine but on the other hand, I do live a lot of my life within my head. Human consciousness as part of a giant connection of machines may sound terrible but if you can record consciousness, you can stimulate that consciousness with things to make it think it is alive and walking around.

I cannot write the word consciousness.