Personally, I have been less affected by the lockdown than many. I already live alone, and am over the official retirement age, although that has not stopped me writing. The biggest effect on my life was not being able to see my mother in the nursing home for over 3 months - now I can see her on very restricted conditions, but she hardly recognises me with the mask on. The greatest hurt is listening to her talking jumbled nonsense due to the dementia, when I remember the person she used to be.

Like most of us I am becoming more digitalised. More card payments, less cash. With libraries shut I rely more on Google. But I remain an amateur philosopher. Originally I came to that from a social science background, and it's still the mix of moral and applied philosophy which pushes me. Yet my essays show my views on much else too.

In particular, I came to the conclusion that out of the various theories of truth, the one that best fits what (I think) we understand by 'true' and 'truth' is accurate representation of (not correspondence to) what is present to us. By that I do not mean just empirical 'reality', but also what we can find by reasoning in mathematics, logic, etc., and what we sense in our feelings. For all these purposes I suggest consciousness has real efficacy beyond what unconscious mental processes enable us to do - especially when it comes to dealing with the unfamiliar. I am not sure that answers Chalmers' 'hard problem', but perhaps it makes sense of why we (and other animals) develop consciousness at all.

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