SatNav for the soul®

Consciousness is an activity in the brain (although we assume it is completely localised in the brain). Sleep is another activity in the brain although we have no recollection of it apart from occasional brief impressions from the dream state. We observe sleepers as being inert and unresponsive. Something is going on in our brains and we have no idea what.

Is this where our fear of death comes from? If we were conscious twenty four hours a day with no need of sleep, a lack of consciousness would be as unfathomable to us as death is to animals fixed in ‘now’ time. With sleep however, we get a reflected glimpse into a void, we come back from nothingness and realise that nothingness exists and that the possibility exists that nothingness may be the default setting.

Of course, all this conjecture stems from consciousness. Just because consciousness cannot contemplate something does not mean that it does not exist. Consciousness can only contemplate itself. We are left then with the possibility that I am an x dreaming that I am a man and that I awake when I die.

For some strange reason I keep coming across references to this story all over the place. I’d never heard the story but apparently, it is so overused it is now a cliché.

So having familiarised myself with the story just now, I immediately noticed a flaw in it (damn these critical thinking skills!).

The story is about a bloke who is throwing starfish back into the sea. Another bloke asks him what he is doing. He tells him he is saving starfish. The other bloke looks at the miles of coastline and says he can’t possibly make a difference to the overall population of starfish. As the starfish guy throws another starfish into the sea he says “I’ve made a difference to that one.”

All very twee but as with all cliché’s nobody stops to think about it before they repeat the story parrot-like. Here is a conscientious guy going out of his way to help a species that can’t even evolve a basic survival strategy. What sort of design is it to have a salt water species getting stranded at every low tide? It’s doomed from the start. Unless, of course, the stranded starfish are sick or disabled and cannot get back into deep water before the low tide. In which case, by allowing the possibility of these sick starfish to breed with healthy specimens, this bloke is simply diluting the fitness of the starfish gene to survive in a hostile environment. Instead of saving an individual starfish, he is potentially threatening the survival of the entire species – the exact opposite of what he intended!

I’ve complained before about this idiocy in this article here where I bemoan the use of an incandescent light bulb to graphically illustrate a good idea.

Approximately half the human population is made up of women. Women think differently to men. In a true democracy, women would get proportional representation.

That is why I propose we abolish the House of Lords and replace it with the House of Women. Here, proposed new laws would be scrutinised by breast feeding mothers and given the due consideration they deserve in an atmosphere of howling babies and even louder, reality-based gossip.

If the legislation is simply too complicated to understand, it is thrown out. If it is the result of testosterone fuelled one-upmanship, it is discarded along with the dirty nappies. If it does not nurture, then what is the point of it?

Following on from yesterdays post it occurred to me that we are not so far removed from the idea of someone else owning your body. It was not so long ago that someone proposed that we all be on a donor register by default. So when your time came you would be on the autopsy table ready to be carved up like a Sunday roast and dished out to whoever was invited to the organ feast. If you didn’t want this to happen you would have to tick the tiny box at the bottom of your income tax return, or whatever, that said ‘if you do not want to become spare parts signify here’.

Had that proposal become law, it would have meant that the state physically owned you (they already own nearly all of you so why not the whole hog) when you died. How long do you think it would be before the state laid claim to your body parts before you died and required you pay for the upkeep and maintenance of those parts? Thus, binge drinking would be punishable by a hefty fine as you were doing criminal damage to the state’s property – their liver. Not exercising would be punishable by community service as you would be neglecting the upkeep of another bit of the state’s property – their heart.

Actually, this wouldn’t be such a bad idea as people would be motivated to look after bodies in order to avoid punishment which ultimately would lead to a healthier population and therefore reduce the need for organ transplants in the first place – hey! problem solved.

I boiled an egg. I put the egg into a container of cold water. After several minutes I removed the egg from the container and noticed how warm the water had become in the container. The egg had transferred its abundant energy into the warmed water. The greater energy was given freely to the lesser energy. Nature demands that things be in equilibrium, in balance.

Capitalism is the opposite of this principle. Capitalism encourages accretion; the rich get richer as the poor get poorer. There is no balance, no giving of the abundant to the bereft. We KNOW inequality is wrong. Now I know why. It is unnatural.

It has been said that life is just nature’s way of speeding up the equilibrium of energy throughout the universe.

I boiled an egg. From that I got the cosmic order of natural law.

Sometimes I wonder where these thoughts come from.

Have you ever wondered how an invention seems to have several independent inventors? The telephone, for example was patented by Alexander Graham Bell just hours before Elisha Gray submitted his patent. How amazing is that?

Not much at all. I have long suspected that our brains work in similar ways so that when there are enough ‘clues’ to a puzzle we will all eventually figure out what the puzzle is. Admittedly, some people will take longer than others but most people will figure stuff out using the same process. Often, this process is non-verbal; our subconscious simply presents the picture of the solution to the conscious part of our brain. We need the clues though; the Fosbury flop couldn’t have come about without the introduction of the inflatable mattress, as a ‘flop’ into a sand pit would have resulted in a broken neck. Similarly, electricity and one or two other things was needed to be in the world before curious minds could start to see new connections and the telephone could be invented.

The same principle obviously must operate for jokes. Indeed, I have proof that it does.

Years ago I had a routine which included a joke about blister packs. I would complain about them and describe how you need a Swiss army knife to get into them. I then tell a story about needing to remove a stone from a horses hoof. To do this I would ideally need a Swiss army knife. So I subsequently bought one. Which came in a blister pack…

And here is a Basic Instruction strip which reproduces the joke in a slightly different way.

There is a theory in comedy which proposes that jokes can be created in three different ways;

• a flash of original inspiration on seeing possible ‘clues’ to a potential joke

• hearing a good joke, forgetting about the joke but then subconsciously remembering the joke when one of the ‘clues’ is spotted and then mistakenly attributing it as your own flash of inspiration

• deliberately stealing a joke from someone else

Well as far as I know, this joke of mine has not been posted on the internet and Scott is in the USA so it would be unlikely he could have heard it and then subconsciously stolen it from me. This means certain jokes lend themselves to being found, in the same way that evolution would eventually throw up the same universal solutions to a problem – flight for example.

Unfortunately, this means we aren’t half as clever as we like to think we are (I deliberately stole that line from a popular song). To a higher intelligence we must appear as predictable as ants.

In my last post I wrote about the second world war and the rationing of food and how it was made illegal to waste food. If they could do that then, why can’t they do the same today but with energy?

Most people would be able to detect a bum note. The bum note is just another note, but In a Western musical scale only certain notes are ‘allowed’ to be played alongside each other. It is like a game, with its own rules. Anything outside the ‘allowed’ scale of notes is considered a bum note.

Over the centuries we have followed and understood this game so that we now find it difficult to imagine any other game.

So when we hear a Chinese musical scale we are at a loss. The scale is incomprehensible to our ears and we puzzle over the idea that anyone can enjoy this ‘music’ which seems to be full of bum notes. To the Chinese however, it is beautiful music (I will have to enquire if the Chinese find our music equally incomprehensible when they first encounter it. Logic dictates that they should).

Music is only sounds which exhibit a pattern. How we interpret these patterns is culturally conditioned. What else is culturally conditioned? How can we identify them? Does it take an outsider to point them out or can we figure it out for ourselves? Does the music/art/philosophy of any culture limit itself to what it considers to be harmonious notes?

But it is the bum notes which give meaning to the other notes.

After completing a painting, the excited artist had someone come view it. The viewer admired it for a few moments then asked the artist what it meant. The bemused artist replied that if she could verbalise what she was trying to express, she would have written a book instead.

Recently, I was visiting a large municipal art gallery and I entered an exhibition room. At least I think it was an exhibition, as it had a bored attendant guarding the room. Apart from myself, he was the only person in the room. The room itself was filled with flat pack furniture that had carelessly been half assembled by ten year old children with attention deficit syndrome. At least that is what it looked like. My first thought was, ‘what does this mean?’ My next reaction was to look for a sign that explained it all for me.

So, was I being stupid or had the artist failed to communicate? I think the answer is more like this.

Art is a language like any other. To communicate, everyone has to understand the language and so basic words, concepts, structures et-cetera are agreed to mean something. And so it is with art, with representational art being the basic language. As people become specialised in certain fields however, they begin to develop a more advance language with new words, subtle nuances, specific ideas, acronyms et-cetera. People outside of this sphere will find any conversation difficult to follow because they are not familiar with the extended language.

Eventually you can get a field of study that is so specialised and insular, that only those working within the field can understand what is going on at all. The extreme result of this process is where only the author of a particular text or speech can understand what is being said (and so, by definition, there is now no communication).

This is what happened in the exhibition room. I had no doubt that the artist had a train of thought which eventually led him to the pieces he had produced, but I couldn’t understand the language because it was too far removed from my familiar territory. Maybe some art critics could understand the language, otherwise, why would they have given him some space in the gallery?

The great trick, of course, is to make any art work on many levels. As in literature, you can tell a simple story which everyone can understand at one basic level, but the more perceptive practitioners of the language may see allegory and symbolism in the text or images. For them it works on several levels and thus becomes a profound story.

A piece of art either takes you to another place metaphysically, or it doesn’t, in which case it is then just a pile of material. An explanation may help but it would be analogous to having to explain a joke to someone. Ultimately, the piece has to stand alone.

This is why I advocate that all labels are removed from works of art in galleries and only numbers are assigned. The labels are a distraction from the true visceral moment of reflection when considering the artwork. If someone really wants to find out more about a work then they have to make a note of the number and consult a book at the exit of the gallery. That way, it becomes an intellectual exercise after the event.