Which is, basically, lying naked on a beach. Also standing, and walking, and swimming in the sea. But mainly lying on a towel, basking in the warmth of the Mediterranean sun, and getting an all-over tan.

Having gotten that off my chest, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, and I’m not sure where to go from there—as if the urge had been satisfied. But this does seem a bit short, so maybe I’ll just add some practical information.

Where was this? The strip of public beach that parallels the car park at the end of Chemin de la Matarane, Ramatuelle, France. If you zoom in on that Google Map you can make out, not actual sunbathers, quite, but one of their big parasols, made obvious by the shadow it casts. (I should perhaps mention that the beach is usually much busier than when this satellite shot was taken.) If you zoom out, you can see that this is just south of St. Tropez, on the Côte d’Azur.

This particular stretch of beach is one of two or three along the bay on which public nudity is accepted. I first visited it in 1981, on a package holiday, camping at St. Raphael. The couriers organised a coach trip one day to Port Grimaud and St. Tropez, with a visit to a nudist beach. I wasn’t awfully impressed, back then, though, perhaps because, inhibited by the people I was with, I didn’t strip off myself. But I did, and do, when the opportunity arises, sunbathe naked back home. So when I revisited the area last year (September 09), I remembered that beach, and paid it another visit, this time throwing caution to the winds, and enjoyed it immensely. So much so that I made sure my accommodation was much more convenient for my return in May this year—last year I did rather a lot of driving, much of it through heavy traffic, and in that respect my latest visit was a vast improvement. I got to the beach every day but one (when I took a train into the mountains), and on every day that I got to the beach but one (the first, when there was a really quite cool breeze, perhaps the Mistral) I got butt-naked.

Well, there it is, out in the open. I won’t add “at last”, because in fact I “came out” as a naturist a while back, elsewhere on this site. But that wasn’t broadcast to Facebook and Twitter, as this will be. I would actually like to write about a couple of more-or-less serious related issues, but that will have to wait. I’m due back on the Côte not much more than a week after my dissertation is due in, so might not manage much, or any, blogging for quite a while, but we’ll see how it goes…

So what it comes to is: do I want to do a PhD for its own sake, regardless of what I might or might not do with it? An important consideration is that my philosophical interests tend to be in the big picture, the broad sweep, and philosophers these days seem to be like scientists, focusing on smaller and smaller issues. I want to develop a sort of philosophical (as opposed to scientific) theory of everything: matter, meaning and mind from the bottom up. What are my chances of getting to do a PhD on that? Not good, I’d guess—but that’s all it is, a guess, I really don’t know.

So leaving aside the question of what I’d do it on, for now, ask this: would I be likely to enjoy the process of doing it, the life, as it were? Umm, don’t know that either, so how could I find out? If only I could do the next best thing, the nearest to a PhD that’s currently open to me, an MSc by research, and see what that’s like. Wait a minute, that’s what I’m already doing! Except, as long as I’m thinking about my future in philosophy, or studying other things like information (or blogging), I’m not. I suppose I better get on with it then…

[In a "senior moment", I forgot I supposedly committed myself to completing the MSc and going on to do (or try to) a PhD on information last week. That's fairly typical these days. Would having a memory like that compromise my ability to do a PhD? Let's see what effect it has on an MSc...]

The main development yesterday was my realisation of the link between the MSc dissertation and what is now my main aim for a PhD project. So here’s my favourite expression of what I very much hope to do a PhD on:

It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory. Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland.

My thing always used to be consciousness, but having a much clearer view of the state of the art since starting the MSc course, I don’t believe there’s very much left to do there. Information is something else, and I have some very definite ideas, which remain intact even after studying Dretske and others last semester, and spending much of this week looking at philosophy of info on the web.

The link between the MSc dissertation (see the proposal) and the proposed PhD project is memes, as items of information. I’m now thinking that it might be possible to explain the difference between Blackmore’s and Dennett’s concepts of consciousness largely in memetic terms. That’s basically because Blackmore, unlike Dennett, provides a convincing account of how memes get going in the first place (though she didn’t make the link between that story and consciousness). That unfortunately reduces the emphasis on meditation (probably, I think), but you can’t study everything!

If that works out as I hope and expect it will, it’ll make a great jumping off point for the PhD project. The timing isn’t so great, though, because as yet I’ve no idea who might be willing and able to supervise it, so I’ll probably have to take a year out, and start the PhD in September 2011, which seems a long, long way away! But of course I don’t have to wait until then to get working on it…

[Later: I should maybe make it clear that my commitment to this plan isn't absolute, but any alternative would have to be very good to compete. Short of sheer fantasy, I can hardly think of anything better!]

What’s happened is that my research proposal has been accepted and I’ve switched from the taught MSc programme to MSc by Research. And I could hardly have gotten a more interesting topic—fascinating, in fact: what meditation can tell us about consciousness. I’ve linked the proposal from the Papers page.

On a brighter note, I’ve uploaded the current version of my PhD thesis proposal. See Papers.