Sometimes I feel the urge to talk about all the positive things about this world. OK, so I will — just for a quick moment. It’s summer. And that’s still a positive thing in my book. Yea, it gets hot and muggy here where I live, and sometimes the bugs can be annoying (although I don’t mind the beetles, and the ladybugs and butterflies are part of the joy of summer). But still, the days are long, the mornings are cool (relatively), the thunderstorms are entertaining (so long as you find your way to safety), the flowers are pretty, and so are the young women. When I was a kid, summer meant swimming and ice cream cones and vacation trips and lemon ice and barbecued burgers. Today, none of those things make my list. Life has changed for me. But there’s still something about summer that makes life a little more user-friendly.

But back to negative things (i.e., let’s get real). Here are two of my pet peeves. First, the way that President George W Bush smiles after answering a challenging question, as if he thinks that he proved his point beyond a doubt. I don’t remember any other president ever doing that. OK, Ron Reagan smiled a lot, but that was more or less a permanent fixture. Actually, Dutch had enough sense to stop smiling when trying to be serious. GWB just doesn’t seem like a US President to me. And that stupid smile has a lot to do with it.

Second pet peeve: David Chalmers. Chalmers is a philosopher who thinks and writes about human consciousness. He’s gotten a lot of attention over the past 10 years, as consciousness research has experienced a renaissance. David is a groovy guy, and no TV or radio special on consciousness is complete without an appearance by him. But when you delve into his theories about consciousness, they make a lot of sense until you start thinking about them. In a nutshell, Chalmers suggests that human consciousness is just a peak form of some entity or event that permeates the universe. Where ever there is information, according to Chalmers, there is consciousness — to some degree, anyway. (Although Chalmers sometimes denies saying this, in fact he does). So consciousness is and isn’t a part of this universe of matter, energy, timespace and the physical laws that govern them. According to Chalmers, there could be a world where consciousness and matter / energy / timespace do NOT coexist. In that world, there could be human-like creatures just like us, who act just like us — but who just don’t experience consciousness (even though they talk about it, in the same fashion that Chalmers and the rest of us who are fascinated by the mystery of human consciousness). Chalmers calls them zombies. They live in a world where consciousness is just not in the air.

Chalmers thinks that this little ‘thought experiment’ proves the validity of his concepts and viewpoints regarding consciousness. But as various other philosophers point out, most notably John Searle, zombie-world is not our world. Perhaps we should stick to things as they are in the world that we live in. Regarding consciousness as we know it, it occurs within the brains of living human beings under certain conditions, i.e. not under anethstesia, not in a coma or deep sleep, etc. We still don’t know exactly what set of conditions lights the flame of consciousness. But it does most logically seem to be a triggered condition, an all-or-nothing event, not something that lodges in varying degree in simple machines such as thermostats, or in macro phenomenon such as the population of China. When you read Chalmers, he makes some good points in his first two or three paragraphs. But it’s probably best to stop right there. Everything that follows is the philosophical equivalent of President Bush’s triumphant little smile.