Philosophers
and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes
human beings more than complex robots. "The Guardian" - One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in
1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on
consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking
out – or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an
aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young
Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and
scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps
the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they
were from solving it.
Next week, the conundrum will move further into
public awareness with the opening of Tom Stoppard’s new play, The Hard Problem,
at the National Theatre – the first play Stoppard has written for the National
since 2006, and the last that the theatre’s head, Nicholas Hytner, will direct
before leaving his post in March. The 77-year-old playwright has revealed
little about the play’s contents, except that it concerns the question of “what
consciousness is and why it exists”, considered from the perspective of a young
researcher played by Olivia Vinall. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Stoppard also
clarified a potential misinterpretation of the title. “It’s not about erectile
dysfunction,” he said. "The
Guardian"; January 21, 2015 http://bit.ly/1uoKMl0
Tom Stoppard’s
new play, The Hard Problem is playing
at the National Theatre, London London Neptune . Neptune
is the archetype of the transcendent, of ideal reality, of imagination and the
spiritual. It represents the ocean of consciousness that dissolves all
boundaries between self and other, between self and universe, between self and
God, and between this concrete reality and other realities. But Saturn represents our
consensus reality so that when it aspects Neptune, it demands concrete
and practical explanations about consciousness from elusive and hard-to-pin-down
Neptune .
Another
element of the chart that resonates with the above theme is the Mercury-Jupiter
opposition that aligns with the meridian.
Mercury
represents the concrete mind, thinking, and the movement or exchange of ideas
through speaking, writing, and other forms of communication. It governs the
capacity to conceptualize and communicate, to articulate, to use words and
language, to analyze and comprehend, to learn, to perceive, to mediate,
transport, and connect.
Jupiter represents our ability to grasp meaning and is
therefore connected to higher consciousness. When it opposes Mercury, as it
does here, it challenges Mercury to expand its limited ability to conceptualize and communicate
this “higher consciousness”.
Finally,
let us note that Mercury on the MC is conjunct Venus – the ruler of the 5th
house of the chart. This house is associated with “theatres and plays” [3]
So it would
appear that the astrology of the New
Moon does summarize the challenges presented by the new play.
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