ABSTRACT
It was getting late. The sun was starting to go down over the ugly Chicago skyline. We had been walking a long time and I was getting tired and running out of steam like the old man I now was, so I sat down on a bench in the lovely park near my home. George sat down politely also, and we continued. So many intriguing and difficult questions: How did Gilgamesh come to terms with his own mortality? The fragment is missing! What is mind? What happens to the mind when one dies? Does it simply disappear? Is the mind simply a byproduct of central nervous system activity with evolutionary value and not made for asking Platonic questions? Then why do we keep asking these questions? We attempt to somehow transcend what seems to be the limits of our minds. Can we? Why do we try? Shall we come to the very painful conclusion that death is final? No body, no mind. It just ends. That’s all. This seems like such a colossal waste, to build that entire mind over many years of study, experience, and developing human relationships, and suddenly it is nothing. Perhaps Camus (1965) was right. Life is absurd and akin to the myth of Sisyphus.
