Morning Platt, ----- Original Message ----- From: "Platt Holden" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 2:25 PM Subject: Re: [MD] Consciousness
<snip> Platt: > What are the "tool sets" of intellect besides science and reason? mel: The "tool sets" are the competencies-one-gains to leverage our abilities to "model and transform" the parts of the world outside of our brains into meaningful reflections within our minds. Just as the hand of an ancestor picked up a stone, a stick, and a strip of rawhide and created something new, an axe, the mind combines sense data (patterns), experience, and context to create something new. Platt: > Does one need to understand the physiology of the eardrum or how sound > travels through the air in order to lose one's separate self sense in > listening to Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto? That's the sort of > experience I was driving at. mel: It is not that one needs to understand the abstracted physiology, but one does need to learn the operational possibilities of hearing and appreciate them beyond JUST the experience. I grew up in a house without music. I vividly remember the first time I heard classical music played. The grade school teacher brought in a record player and put on the "Grand Canyon Suite." I was in the front row, next to the left side speaker and recoiled at the tumbling chaos of noise that errupted in a confusion from the speaker...it was horrid, an immediately low quality experience. Jangling, whining, screeching, booming, confusion rained and flooded the room. I looked around and saw that no one else was sharing this experience and I turned back to the speaker. What was I missing? I watched the red label in the center of the disc and the big RCA circling 33 times per minute and tried to hear what was going on. Some parts of it were more bearable than others. Maybe midway through the first movement something suddenly aligned and I "got it." There was pattern, regularity, harmony, and melody, stuff I had no name for, music and space and flow and not just individual sounds. Music "theory" would be a tool. To perform certain "forms of music" they must be understood and whether its by formal theory or fast, personal aprehension, the musician has to "get it" or there will be no success in performance. Complex, fine motor skills are also a heavy modeling activity on the CNS.(central nervous system). Diving is a very complex task and the divier needs to learn to express motions of position, time, change, and movement, that will cause the outcome. Before you dismiss that from intellect, there is one more item that makes it intensely interesting as a "tool set" of its own. Divers develop an intense non-verbal language by which they can understand each other's movements outside of the actual performance of the dive... The language is a physical shorthand of small motions expressing the reaches, bends, twists, flips, and entries that make up their technical repertoir. Two divers who do not share the same linguistic background can communicate meaning in the realm of diving, while standing together outside the pool. Martial artists often do the same. In both of these cases the participants "model and transform" parts of the world outside of their brains into meaningful reflections within their minds AND communicate them to others. Painters, sculptors, anyone in complex technologies, potentially can have specialized intellectual "tool sets" Science is simply one very specialized and powerful tool set. Reason is not so much a tool as the talent to leverage, create, and use the tools we need and derive the meaning. Maybe the most important part of this is that as we are not truly used to looking at the world in terms of MoQ we often forget that anything we do crosses multiple levels of our existence to make things happen in life. example: The [biological] diver pushes on a [physical] board that is a [static construction of intellect expressed on the physical] to gain speed and hight for motion [dynamic physicality] to express a form [static intellectual construct] in competition [a social function of a diving meet] and other people [in a defined social role] will assign numeric values for various attributes, aesthetic and intellectual, upon the result. So...that is how I see it when I use the tool box analogy. Thanks for the oportunity to work this out. thanks--mel Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
