One of the comments in the thread about intelligence and consciousness reminded me of a thought I have had. This is for the more artistic in the group. The question is this - Are artistic creations (music, art, whatever) original with you or are they things that are just out there and you have the antennae to pick them up and present them to the world?

Thanks.

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 13, 2008 3:03 pm One of the comments in the thread about intelligence and consciousness reminded me of a thought I have had. This is for the more artistic in the group. The question is this - Are artistic creations (music, art, whatever) original with you or are they things that are just out there and you have the antennae to pick them up and present them to the world?

Thanks.

I suspect that the answer to your question is simply "Yes."

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 13, 2008 3:03 pm Are artistic creations (music, art, whatever) original with you or are they things that are just out there and you have the antennae to pick them up and present them to the world?

I agree with Kristoff. Certainly that's exactly how it seems with any sort of creative writing. Well, when it's going well. Other times a person has to work at it!

I suppose it's analogous to sculptors who see the statue in a block of stone and 'all' they have to do is chip away the bits they don't want.

But then again... With a lot of short fiction the word count is an important consideration for editors who have to fit the story into a magazine's predetermined format. So I write a fifteen hundred word story and it comes out at ,say, 1750 words. The subsequent pruning is more difficult and can take longer than it did to write the story in the first place.

So you could say the writer gets the story simply for the effort of putting it into (computer) memory, taking it from the ether,as it were. The work starts after he's written it.

Piaget described learning as a process of assimilation and accommodation. We take in part of what we grasp and we adapt to part of what we pick up.

Learning is a dialectic in which assimilation and accommodation interact to create schemas that become part of the mind. This process means that what we learn is uniquely ours. Thus, learning is an active, creative process. Intelligence is not passively adding information. It is not simply making up what we learn. Artistic expression is like learning and learning is like artistic expression. Even what we think of as the most elemental learning has this open. creative character. That explanation might sound a tad pretentious, but the pure straightforwardness of Piaget's theory thrills me. I mention this because learning is an artistic process.

Blaise (imported) wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2008 1:25 am Piaget described learning as a process of assimilation and accommodation. We take in part of what we grasp and we adapt to part of what we pick up.

Learning is a dialectic in which assimilation and accommodation interact to create schemas that become part of the mind. This process means that what we learn is uniquely ours. Thus, learning is an active, creative process. Intelligence is not passively adding information. It is not simply making up what we learn. Artistic expression is like learning and learning is like artistic expression. Even what we think of as the most elemental learning has this open. creative character. That explanation might sound a tad pretentious, but the pure straightforwardness of Piaget's theory thrills me. I mention this because learning is an artistic process.

"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." Bergson.

The way we construct our minds or the ways our minds construct themselves determine what and how we see.

it's simple to say YES and leave it at that.

however it greatly depends on the art form and the individual, their moods, emotional and physical state when making or preforming their art forms. some art comes from thinking outside the box/outside the norms.some art comes from channelling devine sources, and some come from hard work and concentration.

In my choosen art form the harder I work at it,the more I think about it the worse I am at it.for me it's best to void my mind and let the art take over my body, at times it feels like my body knows what to do so I just let it do it cause if I try to think it through I mess up. that is where the weeks/months of trainning comes in.

Arab Nights (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 13, 2008 3:03 pm One of the comments in the thread about intelligence and consciousness reminded me of a thought I have had. This is for the more artistic in the group. The question is this - Are artistic creations (music, art, whatever) original with you or are they things that are just out there and you have the antennae to pick them up and present them to the world?

Thanks.

Many artists, from composers to painters, have reported exactly that. Sting has said that he is a conduit for higher spirits, that he just writes down the music. Mozart suggested much the same thing, that entire compositions would come into his head and he could even hear them...all he did was write down what he heard. That's what I was talking about in my post on consciousness and intelligence; the brain is a receiver, and our higher selves (the consciousness that makes me uniquely ME, for example) is not (I repeat, my consciousness is NOT in my brain), but rather it resides on some other plane. All that we think we know of the physical world is merely an illusion. It's a very convincing illusion, I'll give you that, but many physicists are coming to the same conclusion...in a universe that can express itself in either wave or particle form, our physical selves (in particle form) merely responds to what our higher etheric, spiritual selves (the wave form) inform us to do. I have written a few guitar compositions, and I assure you, they did not come from me, they came from somewhere else.

I know that one of the best stories I ever wrote just slipped off my pen onto the paper, and it felt as though I was 'catching' it rather than creating it. It required a minimum of editing, and every time I return to it I read it as a new and exciting story.

amahl_shukup (imported) wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2008 10:55 am Many artists, from composers to painters, have reported exactly that. Sting has said that he is a conduit for higher spirits, that he just writes down the music. Mozart suggested much the same thing, that entire compositions would come into his head and he could even hear them...all he did was write down what he heard. That's what I was talking about in my post on consciousness and intelligence; the brain is a receiver, and our higher selves (the consciousness that makes me uniquely ME, for example) is not (I repeat, my consciousness is NOT in my brain), but rather it resides on some other plane. All that we think we know of the physical world is merely an illusion. It's a very convincing illusion, I'll give you that, but many physicists are coming to the same conclusion...in a universe that can express itself in either wave or particle form, our physical selves (in particle form) merely responds to what our higher etheric, spiritual selves (the wave form) inform us to do. I have written a few guitar compositions, and I assure you, they did not come from me, they came from somewhere else.

I enjoy your posts. You are thinking. However, I do sometimes disagree with you.

You are thinking. However, I do sometimes disagree with you.

You are reworking a long ago rectified myths about Mozart. I have read several recent books about Mozart including two full biographies and two biographies of certain periods of his career. These works mend the quixotic view of his compositions falling from heaven.

Mozart worked on his compositions just as much Beethoven worked 0n his compositions. Wolfgang wrote about his struggle with compositions. He refers to these struggles in his voluminous collection of letters.

He industriously studied the compositions of other composers. His mentoring by Johann Christian Bach, for example, deeply influenced his work as did his friendship with Hayden. He discovered Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugues late in his life and they influenced his final two symphonies. We have records about his struggle with composition.

He apparently composed in his head while Beethoven composed on paper. You can sense this by comparing the work of the two great men. Beethoven’s compositions are frequently like journeys. They begin and then they go somewhere. Mozart generally knows were his compositions will end. He construction this like architectural structures. I think that is why he could put together a work and then restructure the work.

The myth of all this coming to him from heaven was used in that terrible an utterly delightful play and movie Sir Peter Shaffer wrote and Milos Forman directed. The conceit of heaven sent music to a near idiot served a philosophical and theological point. Mozart was probably a tad boorish and crude but there is ample evidence that he was a highly intelligent man who was something of a public intellectual just as was his father. His boorish sense of humor supports the myth at the core of the literary and cinematic conceit.

This myth resembles the one that Mozart died a poor man. He had prospects of a good job. He earned good money even without that job. He was not poor but spendthrift. He earned the equivalent of $150,000 a year, not a poor man’s income, not as much as his late friend the emperor but good enough for comfort. At the time of his death, all funerals were by imperial order pauper’s funerals. Mozart received a high requiem mass and a large number of people attended the service but a thunderstorm interrupted the funeral. The burial in a pauper’s grave was, as I just said, the order of the day.

Your account of some physicists expounding their own reworking of the old philosophical notion of panpsychism is of a kind with Sir Peter‘s use of the boorish myth.

But you are on much better ground here than in your recitation of the caricature of Mozart's biography. Panpsychism is highly regarded by some terrific philosophers, most of them theistic ones. Whitehead proposed a highly lucid theory of panpsychism and in this order and Charles Hartshorne expanded and elucidated Whitehead's ideas. Whitehead read mathematics at university and did foundational work on symbolic logic and the philosophical foundations of mathematics, but he taught physics long before he became a philosopher. There is a vast literature on panpsychism.

I do think that the way our brains works leads us to think that creative works just come to us. When we obtain a resolution of questions, it feels as if we were just handed the solution or resolution. We are not necessarily aware of what we all the neurological processes involved.

Thanks for your thoughtful post.

Old Greebo (imported) wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2008 1:13 pm I know that one of the best stories I ever wrote just slipped off my pen onto the paper, and it felt as though I was 'catching' it rather than creating it. It required a minimum of editing, and every time I return to it I read it as a new and exciting story.

Preachers sometimes say they just let the Spirit speak! I have had this experience just as you describe it.