User:Timpo
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Timpo
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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.
Best wishes to all Wikipedia users for a life as rich as this (but maybe rather better informed), regards, Timpo (talk)
Philosophy
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?
The memories habits we inherit from long ago
Prehistory
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
Greek, Indian, Chinese philosophy flourished because they were linked by trade routes
Recent history
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
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