Thinking

[jenks]

agree with the words thing - is it because i read so much or do i read so much because of the way i think?
if i don't read for any length of time i certainly feel that my psychic health sufferes and insomnia increases, i don't sleep half so well as when i am content in my reading.
i have almost no ability to represent something through images and whilst i love art i find my response toa painting etc is very much a verbal one. i find comix a bit of a mystery although i was recently lent persepholis and lapped it up.

 

[luka]

what does a verbal reaction to a painting entail? does the painting just trigger a load of words in your head?

 

[jenks]

roughly yeah - my first 'thought' is to reach for words.

 

[luka]

a how do you respond to paintings therad might be interesting. for me anyway.

 

[infinite thought]

Yeah, enjoyed persepolis 1 +2 a lot, especially having just been to Iran (in hijab, very cute). was a clever way of linking up the personal and the political, I thought...

Regarding the art thing, doesn't bits of conceptual art try and mess with the whole visual/verbal/context thing in different ways...I mean, you're supposed to be reminded of what art used to be like, plus what abstract idea went into the current piece, plus where it is and what you're doing thinking about it...like mona lisa with a moustache....but, yeah, art, I dunno. Is a tricky one. I end up reviewing things in my head, as if I was writing for the Evening Standard or something. Is all very mediated and not often do I have a direct encounter with art.....unlike a mate of mine who went to see the Blake exhibition a couple of years ago on mushrooms and broke down in front of one of the etchings.....quite embarrassing, apparently....

 

[luka]

i reckon looking at paintings is a very good way of shutting down that kind of verbal thinking, just to look until you're absorbed into it with a glazed idiot sheen in your eye. i reckon brian sewell would disapprove though. so infinite thought i was wondering of you use a different tyoe of thinking when you#ve got your philosophers hat on? is there a more structured, deliberate way of thinking i haven't been exposed to? becasue i do see people alluding to something like that from time to time, not just letting the mind talk to itself, but making it do particular things, frogmarching it up a particular avenue, whatever. i would like to learn something like that. go from a to b to c and so on. could you talk about that, becasue that was the point of the thread, though i'm finding the direction the threads gone interesting too, general accounts of interior experience. i'd be keen to hear from all the philosophy students, silverdollar, nina, mark, effay etc. i won't be rude i promise.

 

[infinite thought]

i won't be rude i promise.

Ha! is ok, don't mind at all. I don't think I think any differently as a 'philosopher' than as a 'little girl in general'. If I've been reading tons of good stuff then sometimes I feel a bit more articulate and my thoughts seem somewhat more interesting and less interior (all for the best, obv). But, nah, wouldn't be able to separate out philosophy and non-philosophy thoughts as completely distinct.

There's an interesting thing about following other people's arguments and papers tho and trying to reconstruct the moves in your head - it's pretty rewarding and you can ask 'em questions about it in the bar afterwards. Did formal logic in my first year - was tricky at first but solving the problems makes you feel swell. Like completing crosswords and word puzzles and quizes and that. I love all that low-level autistic stuff.

The rubbish thing about reading a lot tho is how much you forget - if at one point you think you've got an argument sorted out in your head and you can write or talk about it, six months later it's almost completely gone and you have to research it all over again (usually by reading your old essay and thinking 'fuck me, that's quite good. I'll never be able to write that kind of thing again! oh no!'). People just end up saying the same three things they remember about a philosopher or writer and repeating them until they convince themselves that that's all they said, and it's usually not even philosophical but biographical: 'Marx used to go on pub crawls!' , 'Kant used to get his manservant to strap him into bed to stop him touching himself in his sleep!'. But that's ok, some stories take a while to get worn out....

 

[luka]

thank you! i'm getting well into this, to the point where i'm getting really frustrated that i haven't had an answer from every singel person on the board. i think i agree with the man who said thinking takes place at an unconscious level. if i want something, for example, for the neo-con strategies, i let the brain know i want some neo-con strategies, then i wait till it gives me some. i don't think about it as such, i listen and wait. if i focus i can get a more articulate version than if i'm letting my head be lazy and blurred. it's like tuning a radio. i'm not sure i would call this thinking. likewise, someone mentioned body language. for me, this kind of awareness is visceral, if i see a particualr emotion or mindstate embodied in a persons posture i respond at a visceral level, with fear, with lust, with sympathy, or whatever, so i don't consider that thnking either really. it doesn't translate into thought as such. it's the same with paintings or photographs, i don't tend to have intellectual responses to things, presumably because i'm not the brainiest boy in the world. it's not only thoughts that enter consciousness is it? not everything you're conscious of could be classed as a thought? anyone care to distinguish between all the things which enter the mind?

and i still want to hear from all the other philosophers of course.

 

[luka]

also for most things i already know what i think. so i'm just repeating things i've already come to conclusions on. i have a theory and nothing better has come along so i'm sticking with it. i think thats why life ends at 21. you lose that giddy feeling of not knowing what you think about anything. that's exciting. everythings up for apprasial, deconditioning yourself and that.

 

[owen]

erm I'm not a philosopher but I do the odd philosophy course on the MA so I might waffle for a bit if thats OK...

I don't ever sit down and say right, I shall have a jolly good THINK about THIS....partly this is cos as well as wanting to think about THIS i'm also thinking about my bowels, instant noodles, the rent, why there isnt any earl grey in costcutter this week, whether or not so-and-so is in love with me and whether or not i'm going to finish the bastard book in the corner...i'm very envious of people who can concentrate analytically on a specific thing without effort. if these people exist, that is.
when I started this MA part of what I tried to do was force myself to think in a very particular way- i've always thought in terms of dichotomies, lists, arguments, facts and so forth, and was very slapdash in my thinking and a fast and not particularly close reader. I was a bit bored with this- so tried to immerse myself in derrida or deleuze and see if i came out thinking in terms of flows, or in some sort of non-heirarchical, non-argumentative way...to be honest I don't remember what I was trying to do but that was the gist.

Anyway this totally failed, and what actually happened was that I A) had more names to drop in arguments and B) I fit the knowledge I'd acquired into this pre-existing anally retentive, argumentative way of thinking.

Oh and I don't know about being more certain what you think as you get older. But as for getting stuck in a way of thinking...

 

[scottdisco]

i know i'm not a philosopher either but i generally do just have to sit down and have arguments with myself. i suppose there is a bit of a dialogue going on, it's nothing fancy.

unbidden thoughts entering your head are all very nice but it seems like other contributors i just have to tune in the radio, listen and wait for thoughts on a specific subject to enter my head, see what i think, and ping pong back and forth about things.

not knowing what to think about certain things certainly seems a workable system. as i get older i certainly lose sight of some of the certainties i clung to when i was younger.

how i respond to visual art is not to put my reactions and appreciations around a verbal framework, i tend to float on into nothingness or get swirly broad coloured thoughts of colours that i don't know popping up, i rarely assess anything at the moment of viewing by reference to something else. actually the colours thing is a lie, personally, i seem to go into a trance sometimes.

a friend told me about thinking of something in reference to colours, one particular piece of music that made her think in pastels, and i know that it's very common to do that, the colours thing (i can't even remember what it's called!), but her actual description was the most eloquent and careful i suppose i'd ever heard. that was quite nice.

sorry i know this is not very deep or anything compared to some of the board but Luka you asked.

i suppose some visual art does just empty my head of all other thoughts and also extinguishes the oxygen i would normally use to start critically evaluating what i see before me, because visual art for me if i get it or like it or whatever seems to be my version of a religious experience, so whether i use gallery trips as an easy form of meditation or something, i don't know, a lazy way to epiphany maybe. there's one particular Bridget Riley swirl at a local gallery and i couldn't tell you what happens to my thoughts, when i view it. i do love that painting to the point of madness (to paraphrase John Peel on some alt.country or something album).
i went into a trance once the first time i saw a vast Rothko canvas, an orangey one, and i stayed there for what seemed like forty five minutes tracing my eyes over the surface, looking at things. i know he thought his stuff was all religious (and not very fashionable these days, i know, i suppose).

i assume there are philosophical and pyschological explanations for this and there's lots of different terms and such for all your various thought processes and whatnot so i'm sorry if i sound a bit ignorant!

sometimes you think like a playwright i suppose, quite concrete and rooted in the here and now, and at other times more like a fractured poet or florid novelist, and at other times you jump between different times and spaces, i guess.
that's one thing it feels like, anyway.

 

[turtles]

wow. lots to talk about.

though i do think along literal/language lines, i definitely enjoy good art/movies/scenery, and now that it's been mentioned i do actually tend to respond to them in a non-language way. I find it really hard to articulate why i find somethings beautiful and others ugly. I think this is because all the visual processing that goes on is pre-conscious, and so by the time any image has reached my conscious (and thus speaking) self it's likely already gained whatever characteristics that i would consider beautiful...

Anyway, on the more practical thinking style tip, i'm sort of a combined computer science and philosophy major, and actually i'd say it's been my experience programming that has most effected my thinking style. Solving programming problems requires a very specific style of logical, step-wise thinking, and though i originally had a bit of a knack for it, having spent months at a time on programming projects i found that it has greatly influenced the way i think. So yeah I think maybe one key to getting "good" at thinking is practice. By solving a lot of problems that require a type of thinking, you become better at that type of thinking. Then you start applying this style of thinking to a lot of other domains.

Hmmm, so this is my attempt at describing at a high level my programming-problem-solving technique:

Main overarching technique is the really obvious: take the larger problem and split it down into smaller sub-problems. Take those sub-problems and split them up into sub-sub-problems. keep doing that untill you've reached problems that are solvable.

But how to break up the problem? I don't really want to go too much into Object Oriented programming, but the basic idea is: what are the players in the problem? what things (objects) are involved? what are the properties of these things (what do they do? how do they do them? what do they want/need)? What are the relationships between these things (part-whole relationships? Intermediary objects? Does one thing derive it's properties from another? Does one thing control another?)?

Basically i just have this list of heuristics and i kinda throw them at a problem...and things usually work out. Now i find myself using the same technique often in analysis of politics or philosophy.

So yeah, uhh...practice!

 

[turtles]

BTW, that's not to claim i have any sort of corner on the "good thinking" market. in fact there's no guarantee i'm even any good at thinking. but it seems to work for me, and luka seemed to want some specifics, so i thought i'd give it a shot.

 

[polystyle]

synergy

i hear you Biped on the brain on computer programming and breaking things down

i mention then some kinds of production mode - thoughts ,
when you are going through the processes, details taken care of / thinking good ideas about the music,
the art , remix , Movie , whatever creation it is
The recording , mastering, getting cover stuff right through to finished CD on shelf thinking

Liikewise the similar preproduction and production thoughts involved with say, shooting TV shows,
doing docu's , making indie films , software
all the little things and big things it takes and then bringing them together , on budget
for whatever the project is .
must be a' flow phase because you can get so into things , solving problems,
thinking on things over night , and also letting those other brain levels bubble things up over time

the idea of breaking things down into doable pieces , programming
I feel that works with the simple refresh i do get from meditating , when i remember to do it
It did make possible a touch more peace all around

thoughts when you get a job and to do it you have to crash into doing research on what the task at hand is until you can find a solution for them . Say , getting a permit to shoot at Ellis Island for a magazine , finding people who wanted to come to a sleep research meeting for Japanese Co.
Then the team is gone , job done until the next thing comes .

travel thought
emotional thought

 

[luka]

this one was pretty good

 

[zhao]

beauty is shallow. but at least it's not as shallow as thought.

- who else could it be

 

[zhao]

... nevermind

 

[Mr. Tea]

Wilde said about half the things that ever been said by anyone in the English language. Winston Churchill said most of the rest.

 

[zhao]

Wilde said about half the things that ever been said by anyone in the English language.

and all delievered dry as is imaginable with poker face in complete and invariable insincerity.

 

[polystyle]

Fun to read back through thread.
No philosph here, rather resent alot of that French and other BS , read some years and years ago and went the other way.
Around 16 - 17 I sat bored on our family front porch watching another sunset and thought 'OK, that's it, I've got to do something every day to move into what I want to do".
After wearing too many hats and going from out of town gig to Studio to out of town gig,
there were some days and nights I could just 'be home' and those times I do love.
Sit back on the daybed in bright winter sun and go through the plans , updating stuff, seeing where things are -and where they will go.
Take a bath with green tea salts, sleep early or late, eat whatever,
go buy a second hand book -still a deep pleasure of finding something interesting, for $4.
From these times the next next things emerge and get pushed forward.
Point being, simply going through the various and sundry brings one to another point,
hopefully one with a bit of a view.
Running the systems

Then dealing with , running all communications; emails, calls, meetings, bills, people, time difference.
Between the 'day book' and exterior commitments, there are 'thought's'.

Some observations towards Luka's questions >
With art - to first simply select and actually go there to see or soak up an experience.
Filters on and off.
Drift through the many , many art, media , music shows here until finding something - and there almost always IS something.
Some shows just blow you away, in a big city that happens more then one can keep up with.

Keeping diaries and idea books allows for something quite valuable -an ability to look back and find little thing jotted sometimes years ago, even decades back that are sometimes worth pulling up into the present.
This works well for creating lyrics .
Most come from word pools made along the way, used to glean from tech & science mags ( remember buying mags ? reading them at a stand , in a store ), headlines.

Old ideas and thoughts - comparing what you used to think and what you think now
has also been useful. Think of when one writes a lyric say , or a track- then you come back to it 2- 4 -6 months later and think ' jeez, this needs ...." and you can see plainly what it needs.
So setting time targets, organizing towards an end and meditating when and if one can sets the mind to do alot without thinking - but it depends on the person's mind.