Keep it fresh

The student

Using the mind...

Resisting sadness and happiness

The idea that stayed with me from listening to a buddhist monk was that one should resist the impulse to happiness as much as the impulse to sadness.

Music as speech

Music as a form of archaic speech, with the rhythms, repetitions and pitch shifts of the intimate but wordless language we hear as infants. It's often said that Jimi Hendrix 'spoke' with him guitar, and one hears a kind of primordial voice in the strains of a violin. The construction of musical phrases carries the same arcs and patterns of spoken language, with sonorous overtones and the emotional senses of anger, danger, joy, etc. which we learn from early language.

Touched by music

Music as a form of touch: a rhythmical pressure like being stroked, rocked or patted. We talk about 'feeling' the music, being 'touched' by it, being 'hit' by a sound, being 'grabbed' by a melody.

The world is flat (sometimes)

The world is only spherical when considered from a particular viewing position. From some positions it can appear flat, just as a coin appears round from some positions and rectangular from others.

Moved by music

Air guitarists, living room conductors...when the impulse takes us to mimic the action of the instrument we hear it is as though we are trying to make the sound come from us, as though we are the player or orchestrator.

As for foot tappers, anthem swayers, and dancers...it is not so much that we are responding to the music — as a puppet would to strings — but that we want the music to respond to our actions.

Listening to music is not a solely auditory experience, we associate it with spatial activity and physical movement, and there is evidence that, in the case of trained musicians at least, passive listening can active the motor cortex:

See Involuntary Motor Activity in Pianists Evoked by Music Perception

Non-absolutist view of the unity and pluraity of mind

The cognition is a unity as well as a plurality. The contents are not absolutely different and distinct. A relation presupposes that two terms which were once apart are now held together. The relation is the cementing bond between them. Things which are absolutely autonomous and independent of one another cannot be brought into relation, or to put it the other way round, the relata have to shed their exclusive autonomy and discreteness if they are to be bound by a relation. So the terms of a relation are neither absolutely identical nor absolutely different. Absolute identify of the relata would annul the duality of the terms, which is a necessary condition of relation. Absolute difference, on the other hand, would never allow the terms to come into a point of contact, which is again the presupposition of a relation. Thus the affirmation of absolute unity of the cognition in spite of its relation to different contents is only an imperfect statement of fact. It is one and many at the same time. [my emphasis]

The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism by Satkari Mookerjee, p. 51

Suspicion, perplexion and indeterminacy

Still from Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941).

In this scene, police inspector Benson examines a reproduction of Picasso's Still life with Pitcher and Fruit (1931), and is clearly perplexed. The sequence in which his bemusement, indeed shock, is make clear can be seen as an abrupt switch in subjective positions in the 'narrative space', as Stephen Heath calls it ("Narrative Space", in Questions of Cinema, 1980).

"Benson's painting too – 'his' insofar as it catches him out in his gaze – has its effect as a missing spectacle: problem of point of view, different framing, disturbance of the law and its inspectoring eye, interruption of the homogeneity of the narrative economy, it is somewhere else again, another scene, another story, another space." (Heath, p. 24).

By this point in the film we have come to appreciate the unfolding doubts in the mind of Lina about the motives and behaviour of her husband Johnnie. These doubts we experience from her (subjective) point of view. But since they are doubts – rather than confirmations – they retain a strong degree of ambiguity, which is maintained throughout the film until the final (and for many, quite unsatisfactory) scene. This ambiguity, as Heath suggests, is mirrored in the disconcerting painting examined by Benson, presented both as a continuation of the ambiguous theme and as a reversal of the subjective positions we have to adopt within the narrative space (presumably unlike Benson, Lina is quite 'at home' with the Picasso).

The film and the painting within the film both demonstrate the alarming effects of conceptual and perceptual indeterminacy, which can be seen in the gradual deterioration of Lina's mental state as her suspicions grow about Johnnie and Benson's utter perplexion about the Picasso.

Working hard

How do we know if we're trying too hard or if what we're trying to do is hard?

(This on the basis that the best work is produced with the least conscious effort but the most preparation)

I am a brain...

I am a brain,
But I can't see,
I can't feel,
I can't smell,
I can't taste,
I don't know where I am...

Intentionality and consciousness

"Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs." (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

To talk about conscious states of mind being 'intentional' is normally taken to mean they are directed at something other than themselves, often things in the 'real world', e.g. to be conscious of the curtain in my room requires a relation between the curtain and my thoughts about it. But intentionality also implies a relation between me and my thoughts about the curtain (to the extent that 'I' and my thoughts can be dissociated). Moreover, there is an implicit relation between my act of thinking and the mental representation of the curtain about which I am thinking (on the grounds that the curtain, in this case, I think about is not a 'real' curtain in the world but a mental representation of it). So, we have at least the following terms in play:

1. ME –> 2. MY THOUGHT –> 3. OBJECT OF THOUGHT –> 4. OBJECT IN THE WORLD

What happens with this sequence when I think about myself? Is term 4 identical with term 1, i.e. am I as an object in the world the same as 'me' the person thinking about myself? Am I, as an object in the world, the same as my thoughts about myself, including my thoughts about objects in the world? And what happens when I introspect on my thoughts about my thoughts, i.e. when I contemplate my experience of my consciousness of something like the curtain, or myself? Surely my thoughts become in themselves intentional objects, multiplying the complexity of the 4-term relationship above.

It may be possible to disentangle this knot of relations, but it may be more fruitful to question the validity of the distinctions upon which the relations rest. Can 'I' really be dissociated from my thoughts, and can my mental representation of the curtain really be different from the curtain 'in itself', i.e. in the 'real world'?

One way to answer in each and all such cases would be 'yes and no'. Yes, we can draw a distinction between, for example, me and my thoughts about something, but at the same time we must recognise these terms are referring to something continuous, i.e. I am my thoughts about something. So 'no', the dissociation is not absolute.

The necessity for drawing distinctions is grounded in our primordial capacity to impose divisions on the continuous fabric of reality, the reinforcement of those divisions with language, and the consequent seeming 'naturalness' of the divisions in our everyday discourse. We are then put in the position of trying to account for these distinctions as if they were human-independent and natural, rather than human-dependent and synthetic.

It is in the realm of thought (mind) that we find both the world and our thoughts about it, while being forced to accept (contra idealism) that the world and our thoughts about it are one (insofar as idealism holds we cannot know the world beyond the mind). This does not erase the distinction between mind and world (a distinction that is entirely valid, and indeed necessary if we are to exist at all) but neither does it assert the distinction as anything other than a consequence of the very process that brings us and the world into being in the first place.

Objective and subjective knowledge (the ontological distinction)

"Some entities that exist in the real world have a subjective mode of existence" (Searle). For Searle, pains and tickles and itches, and all our thoughts and feelings have an ontological subjectivity, unlike mountains, molecules and tectonic plates that have ontological objectivity. This distinction seems less than clear cut. All our knowledge and experience of mountains, etc. is subjective, i.e. it exists within our minds. We can't know reality in any other way. We may chose to distinguish within our minds between certain kinds of thoughts — ones that we classify as referring to the external world our our internal world — but this does not overcome the fact that all those thoughts are, by definition, mental and therefore subjective, which is not to deny they are just as real as molecules.

How do I distinguish between the mountain and thoughts or feelings about the mountain?

Objective and subjective knowledge (the epistemic distinction)

Speaking of the epistemic distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, John Searle (video) asks us to separate objective knowledge, of the kind x was born in 1606, and subjective knowledge, of the kind x was a better artist than y. Supposedly, the former is a fact of the external world and the latter is an opinion held by the internal psyche.

But consider what happens if the new evidence comes to light suggesting the birth actually took in 1605 due to a miscalculation in the way calendars were drawn up in the early 17th Century or a mistake in the attribution of a birth record. A dispute then erupts between scholars of the period, some of whom retain the belief that the birth occurred in one year and others who hold it occurred in another. The apparently objective fact now becomes subjective, being dependent on the views of different minds.

And in the case of the belief that one artist is better than another: presumably Searle has grounds for holding that one artist is better than another, i.e. there are some criteria by which the judgment can be made, else it is an entirely fickle one. Given that there are such criteria, it is conceivable that these could be formalised and tested across the population as a whole, allowing us to arrive at 'objective' view of who is the better artist — at least by those criteria.

Since no-one alive now was witness to the birth of x we are reliant on evidence, gathered according to certain criteria and agreed consensually, to determine our beliefs. The same could be true of the relative merits of the artists, providing the criteria and evidence were consensually agreed.

The epistemic distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, therefore, may not be as clear cut, or as useful, as it might appear.

Art and the spiritual

With religious or spiritual art the art is never an end in itself, but is always directed towards something beyond itself.