Tentatively,’s answer to “What is the meaning of life?” > Likes and Comments
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Thanks for your reply to my reply. The thing about an answer like "2 B Happy" is that it doesn't answer the question "What is the meaning of life?", it answers the question "What purpose do you have in life?" - which isn't the same thing. If you were to ask me what I mean by that sentence or 'What is the meaning of that sentence?" it would be fairly easy to answer because I made the sentence in order to express a meaning.
However, if you were to ask me something like 'What is the meaning of that cloud?' & were to point to the cloud in question I'd then have to decide if describing the cloud in terms of its manifestation of specific weather conditions were its 'meaning' or if that would be too weather-centric an explanation. In other words, couldn't the cloud be taken to 'mean' something else entirely? Or 'nothing' at all?
A more apropos philosophical question might be: 'What do we mean by meaning?' What does it mean to say that something means something? I don't have much of a problem saying what it is that I mean when I say something because my sentences are usually meaning-driven. AND I don't have much of a problem with saying what I think the meaning of other people's sentences (or non-verbal expressions) are when it seems clear to me. But "life" isn't something that I find to be providing me with 'self-expression' to be interpreted. Therefore, I can interpret aspects of it every which way but when it comes down to trying to impose a 'meaning' on it in an all-encompassing way I just think that all I'd produce is an irrelevant gross oversimplification.
Thanks for the ongoing dialog here. I generally tend to think that questions ARE "a particularly intelligent form of communication" rather than the reverse because they instigate critical thinking & not necessarily answers - answers are often oversimplifying (even this one too of course).
I've been saying for many decades that "I had a philosophy once" by which I mean that I spent a good deal of time when I was in my early 20s trying to accurately formulate what I believed in order to have a base to proceed from for decision making. I was particularly preoccupied with whether I thought it was best to be amoral, immoral, or moral. I decided against all 3 in favor of being ethical which I decided isn't the same as being moral. Being ethical, to me, means being mindful & caring about the consequences of my actions. Not surprisingly, given the often extremely hostile social environment I've existed in, there are probably many people who would refute any claim I might make to being so mindful.
It wasn't really my intention to answer the question "What purpose do you have in life?" but if I were to do so I'd be giving you a much more elaborate reply. Such a reply would include: to undermine what I call "'reality' maintenance traps" by which I mean things that seem insuperable obstacles to desired & envisioned accomplishments & processes that one feels trapped by for mere survival.
By the latter I don't mean things like 'How to get rich' or, to refer to a famous example, "How to win friends & influence enemies" (although I probably do spend a fair amount of time on this latter). In my life, I've been more or less completely dedicated to creative activity that's largely outside the support systems of mainstream society for various reasons: my being an anarchist certainly being one of them. These days, there're probably many anarchists who don't even think I'm 'one of them' because I avoid subcultural rhetoric. That said, I still perceive the state as being the primary terrorist & still perceive the individual as needing to take personal responsibility in order for megalomaniac-induced genocide to be curbed.
As for the "Flow" & the "Zone". Of course, I've been aware of those expressions for a long time but I specifically looked up the Wikipedia entry on the subject & found it interesting so thank you for that. I do have a strong ability to be focused & this enables me to accomplish much more than I think most people are capable of. Whether I get as much joy out of it as I feel I should is a different story.
Instead I feel that I am extremely disciplined & that this discipline is rooted in childhood decisions of my own that weren't imposed on me by adults. I can remember working on homework & setting a schedule that involved a 'reward' to myself after a prescribed amount of work was accomplished. This type of self-disicplining has proved very useful for me as an adult. Besides which, I'm very stubborn about not being defeated by a hostile society.
However, I say that there's probably not enough joy involved partially because I am almost completely alienated from even the local potentially somewhat supportive subculture for the simple reason that I AM so disciplined & most people seem to just not give a flying fuck. To put it in obvious cultural terms: If you write a great novel in a world of illiterates there's not much love there for you to get as feedback.
No, I only received the one reply of "Oct 09, 2016 02:53AM" that shows above so maybe you accidentally deleted the 1st part? Dunno.
I like the way you summarize what you understood to be Occupy's desire: "For you to stop being greedy assholes." Why not? It's very down-to-earth & common-sensical. There's no need for it to be any more complicated. If a small group of people are taking all the resources needed by a large group of people & then selling them back for ransom then what they're doing is pretty obvious. It's the PR smoke-screens that the greedy use to hide the process that gets complicated & confused.
I like to think that some of the more sophisticated cognitive activity that I engage in that appears to be 'useless' to most people is training for things that'll be very useful in the future. I even collaborated with a brain researcher at one point to use FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to try to map the brain's response to one of my movies in 2 research volunteers. The results were completely vague but I like the movie I made from the process.
I'm glad you enjoy what you've run across of mine online. I've only put about half of my movies there (on YouTube, Vimeo, & The Internet Archive) because I like to save the other work for presenting in-person. Alas, there's very little interest in that these days.
I tend to think that telepathy already exists outside of humans in the form of instinct & feelings but that language interferes with it in us. Perhaps oddly, I like language anyway. SF writers have, of course, explored imagining the problems of telepathy extensively. How does the telepath filter? What constitutes a "thought".
My friend the writer Alan Davies & I have had some discussion about "pre-lingual thought": in other words, what happens in one's brain BEFORE one articulates into language. It seems to be a common philosophical position that thought doesn't exist outside of language. I'm not sure I agree with that. It's like in dreams: an environment can be amorphous & then part of the brain makes it specific, solidifies it. The amorphous phase is one of possibilities.
As for "immortality"? Is matter destructible? Or does it just continually morph into something else? I don't study physics so I'm sure that anything I might write here has already been investigated in depth by people dedicated to such things but I vaguely ask anyway: is it even 'possible' to convert all matter into energy? Is energy just another matter-state?
What I'm getting at is that if one thinks of an individual as a temporary conglomerate of infinitesimally small 'building blocks' do we still exist 'in potentia' when the building blocks crumble & take on a new form? Even when the corpse is burnt? &, if so, isn't that a form of 'immortality'?
I reckon this whole preoccupation with 'soul' or 'spirit' is just rooted in the desire to have one's consciousness continue independently of the temporary set-up that hypothetically generates it. I don't seem to be as obsessed as some with whether or not 'I' exist for 'eternity'. Existing as I do now seems to be pretty good as it is. I'm not sure I 'need' for it to be anything other than temporary.
To return to being in the "Zone": I do like the idea &, yeah, I probably do spend quite a good deal of time 'there' insofar as anytime I get immersed in creative/expressive activity there IS a flow to it & I enjoy that flow. Right now, e.g.. Writing this is intimidating, in a way, because I do want to accurately express what's 'on my mind' but at the same time it's also fun because there's a joy to shaping the meaning as it pours out.
Sometimes I play with this outpouring in ways that're deliberately 'outside' of 'normal' expectations. Those are possibly the most joyful times. EG: I like to go off on tangents in book reviews that're inspired by the book being reviewed. Some more uptight people might object to taking such liberties. Here's an example of what I mean from a review I recently wrote of Ron Goulart's "The Cyborg King":
"Shatterbox went stomping through the rehearsal room. '"Excuse the intrusion, MJQ," he said, "we have to get to Storeroom Two."
""Oh, nothing bothers me. I could practice at a yodelers' convention during a monsoon," said the six-armed green man. "In fact, once on Venus I—say, I haven't met you, sir, I'm the Modern Jazz Quintet, considered by critics the best one-man band in the universe." He held out several green hands." - p 111
Having a 6-armed man have a name that's a take-off of the Modern Jazz Quartet pleases me to no end. The possibilities are endless. Imagine a 91 armed critter named "PSO" for "Pleasure-Seeking Organism".
"Zicker smiled, ceased smiling, cleared his throat. "Shatterbox, you are suspected of transporting enemies of the illustrious Jigsaw regime. These enemies of the state, whom you transported through the Badlands, are charged with conspiracy to commit . . . What's this blamed word? All blurry."
"The nearest lieutenant leaned to look. Appears to be transom, sir."
""How could they commit transom?"" - p 156
I'm sure PSO cd find a way.
There's a flow, a stream-of-consciousness to moving from Goulart's "MJQ" to my own "PSO" that I enjoy very much. I don't need to 'justify' the PSO interpolation as being directly taken from "The Cyborg King". It isn't. Nonetheless, it's in the same spirit.
Editing is one of my favorite things to do. Placing content(s) in relation to each other in ways that're more imaginative than the conceptual pre-sets is very enjoyable for me. Take, e.g., this recent movie that I made about the ORGAN: https://youtu.be/i0hWJdRTBJY . It's a documentary but it's not a documentary that would appeal to 'purists' of the genre because it avoids any explicative subtext. Instead, it's just an example of 'Fun-you-can-have-with-the-ORGAN' without even bothering to identify itself as such. Such a work could be said to have been made in the Zone.
Hey John, Sorry, I didn't see this until you pointed it out to me elsewhere. It's 5:03AM as I start to write this so I probably won't get far at the moment because I'm about to go back to bed but maybe I can at least get started for the sake of acknowledging that I know your comment's here now:
"Prelingual thought. In the womb. The being hasn't been civilized yet."
Exactly. Of course the debate is about whether this actually constitutes "thought" or not or whether it should be described with a different term. If one makes the argument that most people don't remember anything before language has solidified in their head there's the counterargument that some people DO remember things without language. A case in point is the subject studied in Russian psychologist A. M. Luria's book "Mind of the Mnemonist" who talked about remembering being in the cradle even before his eyes focused & being aware of his mother's approach, maybe by the increase in warmth?
"The Zone is where it's at. You've been having fun your whole life doing your creations, projects, expressions. You are working on it but it is also play. Like you don't work music you play it."
Right. In fact I say, perhaps too often, "Have fun!" as one of the staples of my interaction with other people. The structures of most, if not all, of my (M)Usic are aleatoric, i.e.: game based, because I want people to be able to bring themselves into the play without being enslaved to through-notation. I also like to use my neologism "Psychological Playfare" or "Playfair" instead of "Warfare".
"I absolutely love comic writing and comedy. It's a puritannical sort of hangup when people think stuff has to be dead serious. They take themselves too seriously. Bores."
One of my sayings is: "Seriousness is Death". That doesn't stop me from often being very serious tho! The above "hangup" is rampant in classical music circles. It's understandable that the profound discipline it takes to be a truly remarkable classical player is something that can't be arrived at lightly. On the other hand, if you're someone like me who represents what I'll call, for simplicity's sake, "Punk Classical" there's no way you're going to be taken seriously by the classical music world except by the more free-thinking end of the spectrum. That's true of sports, too. How many professional football players could be down with playing a game where there're no goals & no competition?
"You are someone who is visionary."
Well, thanks. I like to think I'm visionary & a polymath but it seems conceited to say so. Then again, I dislike false modesty as a form of trying to manipulate other people into complimenting one's self.
"A concern you brought up was the problem of an individual having to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to keep his stomach fed and a roof. Yup."
Yeah, what I call "Reality Maintenance Traps".
"Then your freedom of association is limited because you have to be around and interact with various people who are assholes to one extent or the other."
That can be trying but educational. I stopped going into work at one job because one of my coworkers was sabotaging my work & then saying I was doing it deliberately to my boss to get my boss angry at me. It's good to know that there're people out there like that. People who lead insulated lives tend to be naive about how fucked-up other people can be if they only surround themselves with like-minded folks.
"Andy Warhol said in the future people will not eat food--they'll just take a pill."
I was the projectionist & one of the A/V techs at the Warhol Museum for 19 years. I can't say I miss it.
"I'd like that. That would free up everybody on this globe."
Well, in a limited sense but then there would be people who'd control pill distribution for massive profits & who'd start to cut the pills with addictive substances or toxic ones, etc, etc..
"The idea of having to make money is stupid to me."
Yeah. It's interesting to think that there was a moneyless time &/or to think about, say, Amazonian tribes that probably still don't have money to this day.
"NEA (as in grant); when I see that phrase it tends to turn my stomach."
Ha ha! I made a parody of a porn movie with another guy named Dick Hertz. The movie was called "Balling Tim Ore is Best". We snuck it into a peep show & screened it there for 2 weeks. One scene has an unfortunately unreadable shot of my naked ass with "The was funded by a grant from the NEA" rubber-stamped on it. Naturally, I thought that was pretty fucking funny since the movie, & pretty much everything else I do, is as far from what the NEA would fund as it gets.
"Politics and voting--bullshit, give me a break. "Here's my vote--so go ahead and have authority over me." Fuck voting."
These days the "Lesser f Two Evils" justification for voting has reached a new low level of imbecility. I don't want to be complicit in putting either of these 2 assholes in power.
"I'm an instinctive anarchist."
Me too.
"That someone said 'you're not a real anarchist because according to the doctrine of anarchy.." That guy's not even in the spirit of anarchy."
Well, these days (& for decades, really) there's what I call "Subcultural Anarchism" & "Stalinist Anarchism" - the latter being a particularly harshly intended criticism since Stalin was, of course, anything but an anarchist.
"The Golden Rule. Everybody follow that--to the best of their ability. The result: Everything's cool."
Unfortunately, too few people have sympathy for their fellow humans & 'leadership' constantly plays on that. Originally, the 'indentured servants' that preceded the slaves in the North American colonies were the Irish & the poor British. The aristocracy could debase them as 'subhumans'. Later, because they spoke the same language as their 'masters' they eventually became too sympathetic so the aristocracy switched to using people of a different skin color who didn't speak English as a 1st language. That worked much better to keep the slaves & the masters separate.
"What kind of an asshole supports war in any way shape or form."
People who're willing to separate themselves from others to the extreme of classifying them as subhumans. This 'justifies' any barbarity & enables massive profiteering.
"War is mass murder. So I guess that makes the Commander in Chief a mass murderer."
If Manson was a mass murderer for leading The Family so has been EVERY president & EVERY political leader.
"Internet downloaded into peoples brains. So an explosion of intelligence."
Or conflicting degrees of misinformation. At any rate, no human mind can handle that right now. Most people can't even read between the li(n)es of the TV 'News' that's force-fed them.
ANYWAY, I haven't completely replied to your comment yet but I'm about to go out & I wanted to send you something to show that I'd read what you've read.
Have a nice day!
"It's all about a personal transformation on the part of each individual. Not about politics bullshit. It's attitude."
I agree - even though I'm a political activist (more & more rarely) - but even my attitude toward that is staunchly individualist.
Recently, I had a long conversation with a woman about a plentitude of things that included the notion of Paradigm Shifts. The standard scientific belief is that paradigm shifts come about as a result of technical advances only. SO, the printing press comes along, the shift happens, the internet comes along, the shift happens. I think these things do cause paradigm shifts but I was making the case that psychic things can too.
I don't have the energy or desire to write the appropriately detailed discourse on this right now but a simple way to put it that's relevant to your statement might be something along the lines of: ' a paradigm shift might occur when a shift in group consciousness comes about due to similar changes in a multitude of people.' With that in mind, it's possible that a paradigm shift happened as a result of generally expanded consciousness as a result of the ' '60s countercultural revolution'. Some people might reply that that was because of the 'technology' of consciousness expansion drugs coupled with amplified music but I think there could also be a philosophical gestalt & zeitgeist that's not so easy to pin on new technology.
"Telepathy. The aborines in Australia actually do it--across vast distances of the outback. I am fairly certain it's been studied observed and proven."
Have you seen Werner Herzog's movie "Where the Green Ants Dream"? That's a fantastic movie for presenting the interaction & conflict between Australian aboriginal psychic culture & Eurocentric technical culture.
In Somerset Maugham's book The Summing Up, he wrote something very close: There is an answer to the question What is the meaning of life? but most people find the answer unpalatable. Life has no meaning. And, yes, I do think the last three minutes of Life of Bryan says it about as well as anything. Life is just whatever it is.
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Thanks for your reply to my reply. The thing about an answer like "2 B Happy" is that it doesn't answer the question "What is the meaning of life?", it answers the question "What purpose do you have in life?" - which isn't the same thing. If you were to ask me what I mean by that sentence or 'What is the meaning of that sentence?" it would be fairly easy to answer because I made the sentence in order to express a meaning. However, if you were to ask me something like 'What is the meaning of that cloud?' & were to point to the cloud in question I'd then have to decide if describing the cloud in terms of its manifestation of specific weather conditions were its 'meaning' or if that would be too weather-centric an explanation. In other words, couldn't the cloud be taken to 'mean' something else entirely? Or 'nothing' at all?
A more apropos philosophical question might be: 'What do we mean by meaning?' What does it mean to say that something means something? I don't have much of a problem saying what it is that I mean when I say something because my sentences are usually meaning-driven. AND I don't have much of a problem with saying what I think the meaning of other people's sentences (or non-verbal expressions) are when it seems clear to me. But "life" isn't something that I find to be providing me with 'self-expression' to be interpreted. Therefore, I can interpret aspects of it every which way but when it comes down to trying to impose a 'meaning' on it in an all-encompassing way I just think that all I'd produce is an irrelevant gross oversimplification.
I think I was meaning, from the beginning, "What purpose do you have in life?" And you answered it well, with your "interacting with others who have more awareness, which will lead you to dodge the bullets." It is surely pompous to think of it like a huge profound mystery of the universe question that some very smart person could answer and explain "everything." As if there was such an answer. Somebody once said "I don't think questions are a particularly intelligent form of communication."
As you go through life you develop a philosophy of living. You find out the stuff that you ought to reject, the stuff that is not worth bothering with. What you said about dodging the bullets makes plenty of sense. I've found a key to be simply to completely avoid all the bad vibes (in whatever form they are) and go towards and enhance the good ones. And edit out of your life the un-worthwhile. A philosopher said, "When you drop something from your life, something better comes in." I am intrigued with this saying, especially because he is stating it as a law of the universe. He is not saying, "If you drop something from your life you are making room for something better to maybe come in." He is saying it will come in. So I am wondering how that can be true.
The key is to free your mind. And getting results doesn't have to be a hard, laborious, puritanical thing, it can be an easy, effortless thing. Go with the flow. Get in the Flow Zone. I urge you to look up "Flow Zone" on wikipedia. It's been added to the vocabulary as a psychological term. This is a zone I know you dwell in.
As you go through life you develop a philosophy of living. You find out the stuff that you ought to reject, the stuff that is not worth bothering with. What you said about dodging the bullets makes plenty of sense. I've found a key to be simply to completely avoid all the bad vibes (in whatever form they are) and go towards and enhance the good ones. And edit out of your life the un-worthwhile. A philosopher said, "When you drop something from your life, something better comes in." I am intrigued with this saying, especially because he is stating it as a law of the universe. He is not saying, "If you drop something from your life you are making room for something better to maybe come in." He is saying it will come in. So I am wondering how that can be true.
The key is to free your mind. And getting results doesn't have to be a hard, laborious, puritanical thing, it can be an easy, effortless thing. Go with the flow. Get in the Flow Zone. I urge you to look up "Flow Zone" on wikipedia. It's been added to the vocabulary as a psychological term. This is a zone I know you dwell in.
Thanks for the ongoing dialog here. I generally tend to think that questions ARE "a particularly intelligent form of communication" rather than the reverse because they instigate critical thinking & not necessarily answers - answers are often oversimplifying (even this one too of course). I've been saying for many decades that "I had a philosophy once" by which I mean that I spent a good deal of time when I was in my early 20s trying to accurately formulate what I believed in order to have a base to proceed from for decision making. I was particularly preoccupied with whether I thought it was best to be amoral, immoral, or moral. I decided against all 3 in favor of being ethical which I decided isn't the same as being moral. Being ethical, to me, means being mindful & caring about the consequences of my actions. Not surprisingly, given the often extremely hostile social environment I've existed in, there are probably many people who would refute any claim I might make to being so mindful.
It wasn't really my intention to answer the question "What purpose do you have in life?" but if I were to do so I'd be giving you a much more elaborate reply. Such a reply would include: to undermine what I call "'reality' maintenance traps" by which I mean things that seem insuperable obstacles to desired & envisioned accomplishments & processes that one feels trapped by for mere survival.
By the latter I don't mean things like 'How to get rich' or, to refer to a famous example, "How to win friends & influence enemies" (although I probably do spend a fair amount of time on this latter). In my life, I've been more or less completely dedicated to creative activity that's largely outside the support systems of mainstream society for various reasons: my being an anarchist certainly being one of them. These days, there're probably many anarchists who don't even think I'm 'one of them' because I avoid subcultural rhetoric. That said, I still perceive the state as being the primary terrorist & still perceive the individual as needing to take personal responsibility in order for megalomaniac-induced genocide to be curbed.
As for the "Flow" & the "Zone". Of course, I've been aware of those expressions for a long time but I specifically looked up the Wikipedia entry on the subject & found it interesting so thank you for that. I do have a strong ability to be focused & this enables me to accomplish much more than I think most people are capable of. Whether I get as much joy out of it as I feel I should is a different story.
Instead I feel that I am extremely disciplined & that this discipline is rooted in childhood decisions of my own that weren't imposed on me by adults. I can remember working on homework & setting a schedule that involved a 'reward' to myself after a prescribed amount of work was accomplished. This type of self-disicplining has proved very useful for me as an adult. Besides which, I'm very stubborn about not being defeated by a hostile society.
However, I say that there's probably not enough joy involved partially because I am almost completely alienated from even the local potentially somewhat supportive subculture for the simple reason that I AM so disciplined & most people seem to just not give a flying fuck. To put it in obvious cultural terms: If you write a great novel in a world of illiterates there's not much love there for you to get as feedback.
Damn. I was writing a long reply, correcting it, and hit the enter button by accident. I'm sorry for any confusion. I think it means you received the unfinished reply I was writing.
I'm glad you are receptive to reading ideas in general and making a conversation of it.
If you got the first part of the reply, tell me, because I am continuing from where I was correcting it.
I had been saying, when the Occupy movement came up I understood their not having a list of things they "wanted." Observers were complaining that they were not articulating their "agenda." My response was, "What the hell do you think they want?" I would sum it up as: "For you to stop being greedy assholes." Those who didn't understand were either pretending not to understand or trapped in a mind state of politics. I think the Occupiers were saying "Die Yuppie Scum" in a milder fashion. Apoliticism is the initial step in anarchy.
Reading passages from a book by Gertrude Stein and someone's analysis of it seems worthwhile. Mental activities of a high nature will be (I'd guess} commonplace in future times when work, in the "grind" sense will not exist. People will be philospher-poets, artists, whatever. Then you can have listeners and more people responding to you, more people on your wavelength.
John Lennon's "Imagine" is something everyone knows to be true.
Sure, questions are intelligent and necessary. Curiosity. I was referring to dumb questions that imply oversimplified answers. (in another realm, in interpersonal relations there's the nasty kind of questions that really should be statements given the speaker's subtext. Less aggressive as statements. They are statements from the questioner's point of view, anyway. Tennessee Williams said the only sin is intentional cruelty (think of all the forms subtle and not so subtle that can take.}
The things you do, your writings, films, etc.==I looked at your website and a video or two--are interesting, creative things that are for people who have evolved to a higher level. What you do is what people will do in the future when there will be no "grind" work,
Beyond that, on another, even more future level. people will be in a tripping-like ecstatic state that they will not come down from. And why would you want to? Telepathic communication would transcend language and. finally. we would communicate in a super=intelligent mode of color vibrations and whale sounds. Except Terrence McKenna said that language itself, equals consciousness, which might go against that. Unless the "words" part is incorporated into it. Beyond that we just merge with the one consciousness (die, become immortal? Are those the same things?). Then maybe humans evolve again from one=celled organisms. But I question that theory as well (evolution).
There's some ideas for you. Any thoughts. Feel free to disagree. I anticipate "naive." Also (and this would be problematic) I think you have heard already every idea I mentioned.
I'm glad you are receptive to reading ideas in general and making a conversation of it.
If you got the first part of the reply, tell me, because I am continuing from where I was correcting it.
I had been saying, when the Occupy movement came up I understood their not having a list of things they "wanted." Observers were complaining that they were not articulating their "agenda." My response was, "What the hell do you think they want?" I would sum it up as: "For you to stop being greedy assholes." Those who didn't understand were either pretending not to understand or trapped in a mind state of politics. I think the Occupiers were saying "Die Yuppie Scum" in a milder fashion. Apoliticism is the initial step in anarchy.
Reading passages from a book by Gertrude Stein and someone's analysis of it seems worthwhile. Mental activities of a high nature will be (I'd guess} commonplace in future times when work, in the "grind" sense will not exist. People will be philospher-poets, artists, whatever. Then you can have listeners and more people responding to you, more people on your wavelength.
John Lennon's "Imagine" is something everyone knows to be true.
Sure, questions are intelligent and necessary. Curiosity. I was referring to dumb questions that imply oversimplified answers. (in another realm, in interpersonal relations there's the nasty kind of questions that really should be statements given the speaker's subtext. Less aggressive as statements. They are statements from the questioner's point of view, anyway. Tennessee Williams said the only sin is intentional cruelty (think of all the forms subtle and not so subtle that can take.}
The things you do, your writings, films, etc.==I looked at your website and a video or two--are interesting, creative things that are for people who have evolved to a higher level. What you do is what people will do in the future when there will be no "grind" work,
Beyond that, on another, even more future level. people will be in a tripping-like ecstatic state that they will not come down from. And why would you want to? Telepathic communication would transcend language and. finally. we would communicate in a super=intelligent mode of color vibrations and whale sounds. Except Terrence McKenna said that language itself, equals consciousness, which might go against that. Unless the "words" part is incorporated into it. Beyond that we just merge with the one consciousness (die, become immortal? Are those the same things?). Then maybe humans evolve again from one=celled organisms. But I question that theory as well (evolution).
There's some ideas for you. Any thoughts. Feel free to disagree. I anticipate "naive." Also (and this would be problematic) I think you have heard already every idea I mentioned.
No, I only received the one reply of "Oct 09, 2016 02:53AM" that shows above so maybe you accidentally deleted the 1st part? Dunno. I like the way you summarize what you understood to be Occupy's desire: "For you to stop being greedy assholes." Why not? It's very down-to-earth & common-sensical. There's no need for it to be any more complicated. If a small group of people are taking all the resources needed by a large group of people & then selling them back for ransom then what they're doing is pretty obvious. It's the PR smoke-screens that the greedy use to hide the process that gets complicated & confused.
I like to think that some of the more sophisticated cognitive activity that I engage in that appears to be 'useless' to most people is training for things that'll be very useful in the future. I even collaborated with a brain researcher at one point to use FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to try to map the brain's response to one of my movies in 2 research volunteers. The results were completely vague but I like the movie I made from the process.
I'm glad you enjoy what you've run across of mine online. I've only put about half of my movies there (on YouTube, Vimeo, & The Internet Archive) because I like to save the other work for presenting in-person. Alas, there's very little interest in that these days.
I tend to think that telepathy already exists outside of humans in the form of instinct & feelings but that language interferes with it in us. Perhaps oddly, I like language anyway. SF writers have, of course, explored imagining the problems of telepathy extensively. How does the telepath filter? What constitutes a "thought".
My friend the writer Alan Davies & I have had some discussion about "pre-lingual thought": in other words, what happens in one's brain BEFORE one articulates into language. It seems to be a common philosophical position that thought doesn't exist outside of language. I'm not sure I agree with that. It's like in dreams: an environment can be amorphous & then part of the brain makes it specific, solidifies it. The amorphous phase is one of possibilities.
As for "immortality"? Is matter destructible? Or does it just continually morph into something else? I don't study physics so I'm sure that anything I might write here has already been investigated in depth by people dedicated to such things but I vaguely ask anyway: is it even 'possible' to convert all matter into energy? Is energy just another matter-state?
What I'm getting at is that if one thinks of an individual as a temporary conglomerate of infinitesimally small 'building blocks' do we still exist 'in potentia' when the building blocks crumble & take on a new form? Even when the corpse is burnt? &, if so, isn't that a form of 'immortality'?
I reckon this whole preoccupation with 'soul' or 'spirit' is just rooted in the desire to have one's consciousness continue independently of the temporary set-up that hypothetically generates it. I don't seem to be as obsessed as some with whether or not 'I' exist for 'eternity'. Existing as I do now seems to be pretty good as it is. I'm not sure I 'need' for it to be anything other than temporary.
To return to being in the "Zone": I do like the idea &, yeah, I probably do spend quite a good deal of time 'there' insofar as anytime I get immersed in creative/expressive activity there IS a flow to it & I enjoy that flow. Right now, e.g.. Writing this is intimidating, in a way, because I do want to accurately express what's 'on my mind' but at the same time it's also fun because there's a joy to shaping the meaning as it pours out.
Sometimes I play with this outpouring in ways that're deliberately 'outside' of 'normal' expectations. Those are possibly the most joyful times. EG: I like to go off on tangents in book reviews that're inspired by the book being reviewed. Some more uptight people might object to taking such liberties. Here's an example of what I mean from a review I recently wrote of Ron Goulart's "The Cyborg King":
"Shatterbox went stomping through the rehearsal room. '"Excuse the intrusion, MJQ," he said, "we have to get to Storeroom Two."
""Oh, nothing bothers me. I could practice at a yodelers' convention during a monsoon," said the six-armed green man. "In fact, once on Venus I—say, I haven't met you, sir, I'm the Modern Jazz Quintet, considered by critics the best one-man band in the universe." He held out several green hands." - p 111
Having a 6-armed man have a name that's a take-off of the Modern Jazz Quartet pleases me to no end. The possibilities are endless. Imagine a 91 armed critter named "PSO" for "Pleasure-Seeking Organism".
"Zicker smiled, ceased smiling, cleared his throat. "Shatterbox, you are suspected of transporting enemies of the illustrious Jigsaw regime. These enemies of the state, whom you transported through the Badlands, are charged with conspiracy to commit . . . What's this blamed word? All blurry."
"The nearest lieutenant leaned to look. Appears to be transom, sir."
""How could they commit transom?"" - p 156
I'm sure PSO cd find a way.
There's a flow, a stream-of-consciousness to moving from Goulart's "MJQ" to my own "PSO" that I enjoy very much. I don't need to 'justify' the PSO interpolation as being directly taken from "The Cyborg King". It isn't. Nonetheless, it's in the same spirit.
Editing is one of my favorite things to do. Placing content(s) in relation to each other in ways that're more imaginative than the conceptual pre-sets is very enjoyable for me. Take, e.g., this recent movie that I made about the ORGAN: https://youtu.be/i0hWJdRTBJY . It's a documentary but it's not a documentary that would appeal to 'purists' of the genre because it avoids any explicative subtext. Instead, it's just an example of 'Fun-you-can-have-with-the-ORGAN' without even bothering to identify itself as such. Such a work could be said to have been made in the Zone.
Thanks for getting back. You brought up plenty of food for thought. I'll respond to you after awhile.
Back. I'll try to recall some of the original reply that was lost. (It was deleted).
First I go thru the above:
Prelingual thought. In the womb. The being hasn't been civilized yet.
I get amazed thinking about how the child just naturally picks up language from hearing it. Wow.
Burnt corpse. Sure, consciousness going on. Maybe consciousness itself is the air and the body is a bottle with the cap on.
The Zone is where it's at. You've been having fun your whole life doing your creations, projects, expressions. You are working on it but it is also play. Like you don't work music you play it.
I absolutely love comic writing and comedy. It's a puritannical sort of hangup when people think stuff has to be dead serious. They take themselves too seriously. Bores.
I didn't look at the organ link. I will. I'll get to more of your vast collection you have done for decades. I see what you mean about recording all of it and being able to archive it and it would reach more people and take on more meaning in the future. You are someone who is visionary.
A concern you brought up was the problem of an individual having to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to keep his stomach fed and a roof. Yup. Then your freedom of association is limited because you have to be around and interact with various people who are assholes to one extent or the other. Andy Warhol said in the future people will not eat food--they'll just take a pill. I'd like that. That would free up everybody on this globe. So unless you find some alternative way ya gotta do that stuff. Who needs it, right? It's admirable that you've a managed a giant body of work. It's really stupid. The idea of having to make money is stupid to me. Not because of laziness.
NEA (as in grant); when I see that phrase it tends to turn my stomach.
Politics and voting--bullshit, give me a break. "Here's my vote--so go ahead and have authority over me." Fuck voting.
I'm an instinctive anarchist. That someone said 'you're not a real anarchist because according to the doctrine of anarchy.." That guy's not even in the spirit of anarchy.
The Golden Rule. Everybody follow that--to the best of their ability. The result: Everything's cool.
What kind of an asshole supports war in any way shape or form. War is mass murder. So I guess that makes the Commander in Chief a mass murderer.
Two sides of the coin on all human emotions and the reason for humans' various actions: Fear and Love.
Internet downloaded into peoples brains. So an explosion of intelligence.
It's all about a personal transformation on the part of each individual. Not about politics bullshit. It's attitude.
People not tuned in have faulty radios that are stuck on the worst schlock station on the dial.
Gertrude Stein said "Art isn't everything, but art is about everything."
Make each moment the best it can possibly be. I mean each and every moment. When you keep up with this form of maintenance it makes a big improvement in your life. It takes a small (but constant effort).
Telepathy. The aborines in Australia actually do it--across vast distances of the outback. I am fairly certain it's been studied observed and proven.
What do you think?
I can discuss the above in more detail.
I think I've stated some basic truths, that are simple, and that life is complex in its details. But what I've said is at the core, maybe you could say the heart of the matter.
When you get basic stuff cleared up, then you're freed up to go on to the more complex things. Meaning, people don't even have their mind straight so the more perceptive things are not going to penetrate.
First I go thru the above:
Prelingual thought. In the womb. The being hasn't been civilized yet.
I get amazed thinking about how the child just naturally picks up language from hearing it. Wow.
Burnt corpse. Sure, consciousness going on. Maybe consciousness itself is the air and the body is a bottle with the cap on.
The Zone is where it's at. You've been having fun your whole life doing your creations, projects, expressions. You are working on it but it is also play. Like you don't work music you play it.
I absolutely love comic writing and comedy. It's a puritannical sort of hangup when people think stuff has to be dead serious. They take themselves too seriously. Bores.
I didn't look at the organ link. I will. I'll get to more of your vast collection you have done for decades. I see what you mean about recording all of it and being able to archive it and it would reach more people and take on more meaning in the future. You are someone who is visionary.
A concern you brought up was the problem of an individual having to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to keep his stomach fed and a roof. Yup. Then your freedom of association is limited because you have to be around and interact with various people who are assholes to one extent or the other. Andy Warhol said in the future people will not eat food--they'll just take a pill. I'd like that. That would free up everybody on this globe. So unless you find some alternative way ya gotta do that stuff. Who needs it, right? It's admirable that you've a managed a giant body of work. It's really stupid. The idea of having to make money is stupid to me. Not because of laziness.
NEA (as in grant); when I see that phrase it tends to turn my stomach.
Politics and voting--bullshit, give me a break. "Here's my vote--so go ahead and have authority over me." Fuck voting.
I'm an instinctive anarchist. That someone said 'you're not a real anarchist because according to the doctrine of anarchy.." That guy's not even in the spirit of anarchy.
The Golden Rule. Everybody follow that--to the best of their ability. The result: Everything's cool.
What kind of an asshole supports war in any way shape or form. War is mass murder. So I guess that makes the Commander in Chief a mass murderer.
Two sides of the coin on all human emotions and the reason for humans' various actions: Fear and Love.
Internet downloaded into peoples brains. So an explosion of intelligence.
It's all about a personal transformation on the part of each individual. Not about politics bullshit. It's attitude.
People not tuned in have faulty radios that are stuck on the worst schlock station on the dial.
Gertrude Stein said "Art isn't everything, but art is about everything."
Make each moment the best it can possibly be. I mean each and every moment. When you keep up with this form of maintenance it makes a big improvement in your life. It takes a small (but constant effort).
Telepathy. The aborines in Australia actually do it--across vast distances of the outback. I am fairly certain it's been studied observed and proven.
What do you think?
I can discuss the above in more detail.
I think I've stated some basic truths, that are simple, and that life is complex in its details. But what I've said is at the core, maybe you could say the heart of the matter.
When you get basic stuff cleared up, then you're freed up to go on to the more complex things. Meaning, people don't even have their mind straight so the more perceptive things are not going to penetrate.
Hey John, Sorry, I didn't see this until you pointed it out to me elsewhere. It's 5:03AM as I start to write this so I probably won't get far at the moment because I'm about to go back to bed but maybe I can at least get started for the sake of acknowledging that I know your comment's here now: "Prelingual thought. In the womb. The being hasn't been civilized yet."
Exactly. Of course the debate is about whether this actually constitutes "thought" or not or whether it should be described with a different term. If one makes the argument that most people don't remember anything before language has solidified in their head there's the counterargument that some people DO remember things without language. A case in point is the subject studied in Russian psychologist A. M. Luria's book "Mind of the Mnemonist" who talked about remembering being in the cradle even before his eyes focused & being aware of his mother's approach, maybe by the increase in warmth?
"The Zone is where it's at. You've been having fun your whole life doing your creations, projects, expressions. You are working on it but it is also play. Like you don't work music you play it."
Right. In fact I say, perhaps too often, "Have fun!" as one of the staples of my interaction with other people. The structures of most, if not all, of my (M)Usic are aleatoric, i.e.: game based, because I want people to be able to bring themselves into the play without being enslaved to through-notation. I also like to use my neologism "Psychological Playfare" or "Playfair" instead of "Warfare".
"I absolutely love comic writing and comedy. It's a puritannical sort of hangup when people think stuff has to be dead serious. They take themselves too seriously. Bores."
One of my sayings is: "Seriousness is Death". That doesn't stop me from often being very serious tho! The above "hangup" is rampant in classical music circles. It's understandable that the profound discipline it takes to be a truly remarkable classical player is something that can't be arrived at lightly. On the other hand, if you're someone like me who represents what I'll call, for simplicity's sake, "Punk Classical" there's no way you're going to be taken seriously by the classical music world except by the more free-thinking end of the spectrum. That's true of sports, too. How many professional football players could be down with playing a game where there're no goals & no competition?
"You are someone who is visionary."
Well, thanks. I like to think I'm visionary & a polymath but it seems conceited to say so. Then again, I dislike false modesty as a form of trying to manipulate other people into complimenting one's self.
"A concern you brought up was the problem of an individual having to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to keep his stomach fed and a roof. Yup."
Yeah, what I call "Reality Maintenance Traps".
"Then your freedom of association is limited because you have to be around and interact with various people who are assholes to one extent or the other."
That can be trying but educational. I stopped going into work at one job because one of my coworkers was sabotaging my work & then saying I was doing it deliberately to my boss to get my boss angry at me. It's good to know that there're people out there like that. People who lead insulated lives tend to be naive about how fucked-up other people can be if they only surround themselves with like-minded folks.
"Andy Warhol said in the future people will not eat food--they'll just take a pill."
I was the projectionist & one of the A/V techs at the Warhol Museum for 19 years. I can't say I miss it.
"I'd like that. That would free up everybody on this globe."
Well, in a limited sense but then there would be people who'd control pill distribution for massive profits & who'd start to cut the pills with addictive substances or toxic ones, etc, etc..
"The idea of having to make money is stupid to me."
Yeah. It's interesting to think that there was a moneyless time &/or to think about, say, Amazonian tribes that probably still don't have money to this day.
"NEA (as in grant); when I see that phrase it tends to turn my stomach."
Ha ha! I made a parody of a porn movie with another guy named Dick Hertz. The movie was called "Balling Tim Ore is Best". We snuck it into a peep show & screened it there for 2 weeks. One scene has an unfortunately unreadable shot of my naked ass with "The was funded by a grant from the NEA" rubber-stamped on it. Naturally, I thought that was pretty fucking funny since the movie, & pretty much everything else I do, is as far from what the NEA would fund as it gets.
"Politics and voting--bullshit, give me a break. "Here's my vote--so go ahead and have authority over me." Fuck voting."
These days the "Lesser f Two Evils" justification for voting has reached a new low level of imbecility. I don't want to be complicit in putting either of these 2 assholes in power.
"I'm an instinctive anarchist."
Me too.
"That someone said 'you're not a real anarchist because according to the doctrine of anarchy.." That guy's not even in the spirit of anarchy."
Well, these days (& for decades, really) there's what I call "Subcultural Anarchism" & "Stalinist Anarchism" - the latter being a particularly harshly intended criticism since Stalin was, of course, anything but an anarchist.
"The Golden Rule. Everybody follow that--to the best of their ability. The result: Everything's cool."
Unfortunately, too few people have sympathy for their fellow humans & 'leadership' constantly plays on that. Originally, the 'indentured servants' that preceded the slaves in the North American colonies were the Irish & the poor British. The aristocracy could debase them as 'subhumans'. Later, because they spoke the same language as their 'masters' they eventually became too sympathetic so the aristocracy switched to using people of a different skin color who didn't speak English as a 1st language. That worked much better to keep the slaves & the masters separate.
"What kind of an asshole supports war in any way shape or form."
People who're willing to separate themselves from others to the extreme of classifying them as subhumans. This 'justifies' any barbarity & enables massive profiteering.
"War is mass murder. So I guess that makes the Commander in Chief a mass murderer."
If Manson was a mass murderer for leading The Family so has been EVERY president & EVERY political leader.
"Internet downloaded into peoples brains. So an explosion of intelligence."
Or conflicting degrees of misinformation. At any rate, no human mind can handle that right now. Most people can't even read between the li(n)es of the TV 'News' that's force-fed them.
ANYWAY, I haven't completely replied to your comment yet but I'm about to go out & I wanted to send you something to show that I'd read what you've read.
Have a nice day!
"It's all about a personal transformation on the part of each individual. Not about politics bullshit. It's attitude." I agree - even though I'm a political activist (more & more rarely) - but even my attitude toward that is staunchly individualist.
Recently, I had a long conversation with a woman about a plentitude of things that included the notion of Paradigm Shifts. The standard scientific belief is that paradigm shifts come about as a result of technical advances only. SO, the printing press comes along, the shift happens, the internet comes along, the shift happens. I think these things do cause paradigm shifts but I was making the case that psychic things can too.
I don't have the energy or desire to write the appropriately detailed discourse on this right now but a simple way to put it that's relevant to your statement might be something along the lines of: ' a paradigm shift might occur when a shift in group consciousness comes about due to similar changes in a multitude of people.' With that in mind, it's possible that a paradigm shift happened as a result of generally expanded consciousness as a result of the ' '60s countercultural revolution'. Some people might reply that that was because of the 'technology' of consciousness expansion drugs coupled with amplified music but I think there could also be a philosophical gestalt & zeitgeist that's not so easy to pin on new technology.
"Telepathy. The aborines in Australia actually do it--across vast distances of the outback. I am fairly certain it's been studied observed and proven."
Have you seen Werner Herzog's movie "Where the Green Ants Dream"? That's a fantastic movie for presenting the interaction & conflict between Australian aboriginal psychic culture & Eurocentric technical culture.
yes, yes
everything
Punk Classical seems to be a perfect label
The reading of good books seems to promote empathy. (Causing people to voluntarily follow the Goldenn Rule--which is the key ingredient of anarchism).
I'm flashing on a novel rite now ("In the Belly of Paris.") For example. 2 years ago I was reading this, got half done, never finished it (was just lazy) but it was very worthwhile (dont have the book anymore). It painted a picture of life in 19th century france. and you entered into the characters lives, and totally got ito them as fellow humans, the psychology, in addition to its being a vivid portarait of a time and place. So herein lies the social value of literature.
I'm going to write you again on the message box part of the site.
everything
Punk Classical seems to be a perfect label
The reading of good books seems to promote empathy. (Causing people to voluntarily follow the Goldenn Rule--which is the key ingredient of anarchism).
I'm flashing on a novel rite now ("In the Belly of Paris.") For example. 2 years ago I was reading this, got half done, never finished it (was just lazy) but it was very worthwhile (dont have the book anymore). It painted a picture of life in 19th century france. and you entered into the characters lives, and totally got ito them as fellow humans, the psychology, in addition to its being a vivid portarait of a time and place. So herein lies the social value of literature.
I'm going to write you again on the message box part of the site.
In Somerset Maugham's book The Summing Up, he wrote something very close: There is an answer to the question What is the meaning of life? but most people find the answer unpalatable. Life has no meaning. And, yes, I do think the last three minutes of Life of Bryan says it about as well as anything. Life is just whatever it is.
I like your last paragraph. Yes, seeking out positive interactions and dodging the bullets. I agree that you can't really say what the meaning of life is and it's not necessary to think of it in terms of a question like that. Thanks for answering the question and using a lot of words. I know you didn't have time to give me a short answer so you gave me a long one. But if I were to answer the question it would take me 3 words: 2 B Happy.