Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Re: Just the facts.
Well.......you did indeed expand upon it. I am left admiring you and liking
you. Actually I already did. You and most of the UN-REV crew. There , that
toned it down a bit. GER (01)
Enough of this. Back to topic. I find the Jazz part of particular interest.
Sometimes when I speak and sonetimes when I play a musical flute I find that
I'm not the source of what play. Something wanting to be said/sung is playing
through me. And YES, I DO have enough ego to think I created it and accept
credit, but I've engaged in enough self-deception in my life to know that, at
best, it only delays disaster and usually with interest at that if I am grabbing
credit for being more than a messenger when in fact that is what I am. At other
times, I work for it and damn well deserve the kudoes.
GER (02)
Peter Jones wrote:
> OK, now I've stopped laughing at myself I'll try and articulate better what I
> meant.
>
> I have the kind of brain that tends towards a high degree of coherence.
> Everything has to fit together as a whole. If I encounter incongruent evidence
> sometimes it takes me days or weeks for my mind to rejig everything so that it's
> coherent again. It's not that I'm not open to change, just that assimilation of
> new information is an involved process. On the positive side it tends to lend me
> a lot of power to exert on matters that call for sophisticated modelling of the
> situation. While other people reach for tools to aid their thinking I can often
> just think.
> So, the theory goes, when I start thinking about how to solve world problems,
> everything in my head is neat and lined up, and the problems outside are all
> messy and poorly understood, and the task for me is to move my comprehension of
> the mess to the point where I see it as a system and not as a poorly understood
> mess. Once I've done that I will start to see solutions. Seen in that light,
> human wobbliness (to use a neutral term) becomes something that has to be
> accounted for, factored in, made predictable. That's fine, as long as it's part
> of the model building in my head and not a projection outward.
> Now, I also have creative tendencies. So I would add the following analogy to my
> model. Imagine I sit down to play a Beethoven sonata on the piano (for the
> record I can't play it really), but my playing is truly wobbly. Someone comes up
> to me and says, "Great jazz, man!" By sheer chance someone recorded my playing
> and my latest jazz composition becomes a hit. Can I replicate the performance?
> Not a chance, but apparently it was great jazz when it happened.
>
> So, when I take the time to see, error and creativity look like the same human
> tendency - wobbliness - placed in different circumstances. Sometimes though, my
> model building tendencies override my ability to see the wobbliness of others in
> a given context as essentially human and something to build into the model rathe
> r than something to squash out. And when I take my desire to squash the awkward
> stuff out, and look at it in another light, I'm just being a wobbly human
> myself. I must be more careful about having fearsome expectations of others.
>
> Perhaps extra slack-giving is something we need to build into our future social
> systems. Maybe many of our systems even need to be built to capture errors as a
> source of creativity.
>
> Yours, in penitent wobbliness,
> --
> Peter (03)