Waking Life

I was surprised to hear Waking Life mentioned in the podcast that we listened to during class because I don't know that many people who have seen it. I feel like the movie Waking Life is relatable to everything. The scene that I think relates most to Phaedo is the scene with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy where they are talking about what happens when you die. The concept that they come up with is one my favorite's of the movie. I actually wound up choosing to write about it in an open subject paper for English class senior year.

They start by quoting Timothy Leary, a famous "psychedelic scientist" I guess you could call him. He said that he looked forward to the moment when his body was dead, but his brain was still alive (they say that there's six to twelve minutes of brain activity after death). They go on to talk about how dream consciousness is infinitely longer than waking consciousness and how those 6-12 minutes could constitute all of life. This seems to parallel Anaxagoras' theory that the universe is directed by the Mind, but takes it further, saying that life is lived in the mind and denying the objective physical being. I think that Socrates might have been somewhat pleased with this observation because it connects the mind and the soul, even in an extremely abstract way. Instead of saying that the soul lives on after death, they are saying, maybe, that the life of the mind, which is all of life itself, is infinite because time and consciousness are relative.

Socrates: "The soul is most like the divine, the deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself. . ." (later Socrates talks about how souls come from the world of the dead to the world of the living and vis versa, a sort of reincarnation theory)

In the second half of the scene, they deny the eternal cyclic nature of the soul itself. So that throws the Socratic view (of a deathless soul that comes from the underworld to the living world and goes to the underworld from the living world in a cycle) out the window. However, I'm not sure if this new theory is completely opposite of it's Socratic counterpart because instead of the soul being eternal you have this collective consciousness, that we are all a part of, being eternal, and compounded with the first theory you've got a persistent non-physical identity that is sort of soul-like. I'm not sure if that explanation is clear, but here is the link to the scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km5YGCRb0WM
(rated R for language)