Thinking

Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Friends of mine tell me I think too much. Actually, when I think about it, most of the time I walk around in a somnambulant stupor, a muffled inner voice vaguely shouting at me to get off the internet and put some trousers on.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Actually, when I think about it, most of the time I walk around in a somnambulant stupor, a muffled inner voice vaguely shouting at me to get off the internet and put some trousers on.
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i think we might be brothers
 
straight

straight

wings cru
Its interesting reading this thread, i had always assumed that everyone else was thinking constantly. I think one of the reasons I love immersive music (and drugs as well i suppose) so much is that it is the only thing which I can really pay attention to without feeling im conciously thinking so much. I tend to do my analysis of music unconciously, feeling it more than anything else (im very aware how wanky that sounds). I'm sure this must be positve on many levels, it becomes very apparent when I come homw for xmas and half the guys I grew up with arent really doing anything with themselves and dont seem to have a drive to do anything more than the 9-5 slog to get cash for kitchens and holidays

Recently ive been trying to limit how much im thinking and overthinking. Ive spent the last year or so finally setting myself up as a designer and as a result I have spent huge amounts of time perfecting projects which really dont deserve the attention ive paid to them and also setting up the perfect portfolio as a presentation of myself. This seems to have kickstarted a period of self analysis which I find really hard to turn off to the extent that I'm finding I can't concentrate on anything else and the analysis has crept into many other aspects of my life. My reading speed has plumetted as I can't seem to commit to the text, my mind goes on tangents. It seems to have calmed down a bit now that I am getting a bit more recognition for my work and the commissions are coming in, if it hadnt I had quite serious fears for my sanity
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
jenks said:
i find that in many ways i am quite a slow thinker - often the implications of a situation take quite a long while to sink in - that's why my wife trashes me in an argument - i need to go away and think it about stuff and by then it's too late...
however i have always held this idea that the brain carries on doing your thinking for you whilst you get on with the mundane - i think that's how inspiration works - that moment of clarity that occurs at unexpected moments - plath once said she did most of her serious thinking in the bath looking up at the cracks in the ceiling (cue cracked jokes about plath) and i can see this, it happens to me all the time - these ideas then come with incredible clarity, fully formed and quite robust.
as to the different ways of thinking - this is all the rage in education at the moment - the 6 (or is it 8 this week?) different types of learner - visual, kinesthetic etc even OFSTED expect to see evidence of learning styles being catered to.
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Look Jenks it's you as a 22 year old. You got married very young I see.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Last year I had an epiphany that I never really thought about anything. I just read books/websites etc. and ingested other people's thoughts.

I determined to keep a notepad by my side and really think about all the stuff I'd never thought about, and which I consequently had no opinions or beliefs about.

But very quickly the book became a (is it called?) commonplace book, full of quotes from other authors.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I believe it was about how reading is an experience not a way of taking in information ... something like that
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Granted I'm still not even at an intermediate understanding of neuroscience, I think advancing on this psycho/neuro dichotomy is important. How can thought be understood in the terms of science? The mistake would be to ask "whats really going on?" because that would set us up to make the prevailing error or conflating the map with the territory.

But the curiosity persists - what is going on there, insofar as our science can voice it? Marvelously complex circuitry that can push its own boundaries of complexity. The cosmic zenith of organized matter. But if it is conveyed via words, images, or anything that imports meaning, its the map.

The error is to suppose/presuppose that the content presented by the map exists identically beyond the map. You can even do this and be met with positive feedback, which merely indicates that your prediction was sufficient, that the map approximated the territory enough to satisfy whatever you needed satisfied.

But this approximation, I believe, is best considered asymptotic - moving closer and closer to identifying the territory, but never aligning into complete identity with it.

But we can consider the territory as the untouchable real (short of a sustained nirvanic lucidity), and still operate pragmatically in response to our reality. We are able to contrive meaning even after the point when we become convinced that meaning does not exist beyond our attempts to contrive it.

This could be an antidote to nihilism, albeit one that requires work, perhaps constant work. But as of the last couple months, it doesn;t feel like constant work anymore.
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
If anyone has seen End of the Tour, in which Jason Segel plays David Foster Wallace, theres a couple scenes where Wallace just goes on these multiply compounded hyperreflective rants fueled by this or that insecurity, and that largely exemplifies the potential to get swept up in your own thought. In the DFW case its extreme, very sharp thinking allowing for higher degrees of compounded reflection, etc. Watching that was important for me, learning that other people experience it, even if "other people" here is represented by Jason Segel's David Foster Wallace.
 
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