Full Moon Awards

The Full Moon Club, in a spirit that was not entirely serious, gave out awards last night for 2004, including ‘Biggest Band Slut’ (Fritz), ‘Best Performer with any number of strings’ (William Mysterious) and ‘Best Import’ (Electra). With due gravity and humility I accepted the award for ‘Most Shouted For Song’ (for Dylan of course). Well at least it wasn’t a Lifetime Achievement one! It was nice to make a return to active service with a severely under-rehearsed band consisting of Lynsey, two Decibelles, Nelson and Fritz.  It really came into its own on Living Water where it felt good to ride the momentum of bass, two drummers and three backing singers!

Re the comment on Susan Blackmore’s article yesterday, I think the gist of her argument is that ‘I’, the sense of personal consciousness as a pilot at the control panel somewhere in the head , is an illusion; it’s actually just a thought-figment (a meme, in her terms) that comes and goes with no real continuity. We often find we have done lots of things, for example driven from A to B, with no conscious recollection of doing so. Yet we were making decisions all along the route – at least someone or something was. In an earlier article, which is somewhere on her site, called Waking Up from the Meme Dream or something like that, she talks about giving up and just letting decisions ‘happen’. She tried it for various trivial decisions like which of two routes to take travelling home, and found that waiting and watching for a decision had no different effect from dithering and deciding. I haven’t read anything else on the topic since then so I guess she must have gone further into it. There is a paradox that however many things we find that determine and shape our actions, we cannot act except in the belief that we are free agents – our brains are wired to believe that.