Carl-Richard

Does a car have a feeling of its boundaries? Why draw the boundaries around the car and not the components of the car? Why not draw it around each individual atom or each subatomic particle popping in and out of existence?

I would say that if you deactivate your senses (or dissociate from them), you'll become a void without any boundaries. I've experienced this myself. The vibration of course exists as a part of the transpersonal field of consciousness (reality itself), and it will vibrate the rock, but there is no solid indication that the rock will have a personalized perspective of the vibration entering its body. Then why will the rock be in "total darkness"?

What about genitalia? Is that gender expression? That is true. I edited my unnecessarily complicated response right before you responded to it:

I think the words man/woman don't fit neatly into either category, and that you can't change how people intuitively understand those words, and that you can also request somebody to call you something that you want to be called without anyone having to treat you badly for it (but also, don't expect the world to revolve around you).

Presumably, the reason you think it won't see anything is because it doesn't have eyes, but then why should it feel anything if it doesn't have any sensory receptors at all?

He didn't say whether or not it would be fun to be a rock. That was your projection, and now you're spreading it.

I haven't even heard about it. I stopped smoking years ago, and it's illegal over here, so I just got the usual gravel that my contacts had available.

Whatever you can get your hands on that has THC in it.

So the whole of reality is just a huge orgy then

It's more like the realization that you were thinking and now you're not. You're thinking about attention, not awareness. Attention deals with stuff like paying attention to objects. The truth is that you can't not be aware. It's just that thinking makes you forget some of the aspects of being aware.

Do you have a citation for that?

Yes, that part was totally fine. If I can use the ice cream example again: if you had just said "ah yes, that ice cream is pink, so it looks like it could taste like strawberries" (except not in an awkward way lol), that would also be totally fine (which is what you did in the second half of your post). I was only responding to the part that I think was puzzling.

No no it's me being pedantic, don't put this on him

Yeah, that's a puzzling statement to me. It's like we could be talking about ice cream, and I'll be like "I think this ice cream tastes like strawberries", and you'll be like "we can't switch roles to confirm that, but I can understand that"

I read all of your posts before commenting. Exactly, which is why I responded with puzzlement to that first sentence

It's like if I were to preface every utterance I make with "this is all just concepts, but..." Like ok, we already get that. We're already assuming that we're talking about concepts. Likewise, we're already assuming that we have to make inferences outside our immediate experience when we're talking about subjective experiences outside our own. There is a time and a place to bring up such facts, but in situations like this, it's just noise imo. That's all.

I don't really know that much about particular philosophers, but my list would be: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Kuhn, Immanuel Kant.

Bro, you don't have to do this solipsism loop all the time ?

When it comes to pure physical pain, you could have a point, but when it comes to suffering in general, humans are capable deep and complex states of emotional distress and mental suffering. Some animals have their own version of that too, so if you care about that, maybe avoid eating animals like cows or pigs. Arguably chickens, certainly bugs, are a bit different.

@LSD-Rumi Don't take it personally. I'm just thinking about the people on the forum who have a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality.

People are still going to call each other by gendered pronouns however way you square it.

It's a thorough ear cleanser

Well, the most extreme example would be the song "I". Fredrik Thordendahl said that he basically just sat down in the studio, pressed record and played some random stuff, and then the band built the rest of the song around that. For all intents and purposes, the song consists entirely of non-repeating patterns, like an irrational number. That would be their most experimental album though (and not just for that reason lol). Other than that, even some of their most well-known songs are very much like that: the intro riff to "In Death - Is Life" and especially "In Death - Is Death" are good examples (I swear to God, I've spent probably 4 hours trying to learn the first section of "Is Death", and I'm only halfway through lol). It's also so god damn heavy and weird-sounding, I'm afraid of traumatizing my roommates What I just noticed is that the intro riff to "Is Life" is non-repeating in terms of rhythm but not melody (uses almost only the same two notes), while "Is Death" is non-repeating in terms of melody but not rhythm (but it's still a really wonky polyrhythm, so combined with the non-repeating melody, it mindfucks you really bad when trying to figure out where in the song you are when trying to learn it, hence why it takes forever to learn ?).

I play guitar and improvise a lot and have wanted to see what I sound like when I'm "connected", but every time I press the record button, I play like shit Like Gavin Harrison puts it, it's hard to "mentally undress" when there is pressure to perform 38:32 And he goes on to talk about getting into Meshuggah in that clip too lol (the threads are connecting in my mind!). I was going to say this in the previous post, but I didn't find a way to make it fit (it's a concrete example of complexity in music), but anyway: the reason Meshuggah is often kind of hard to listen to, is because of the general lack of short and catchy repeating phrases. They often either use very long phrases, or they use similar phrases with slight modifications, and it can throw you off if you're not used to it (in other words, it can seem like it doesn't "make sense" ). But when you do get it, it's absolutely genius.

It's interesting that you mention music. Many people when they hear something like highly technical improvised jazz, just perceive it as non-sense or "noise". They aren't able to copy the intended message and represent it in their mind (understand it). On the other hand, if you're able to pay attention and actually hear all the sounds, and if you're familiar with the musical concepts that are being used, you would think it makes a lot of sense. Music, like stories, like logical arguments, have a kind of narrative structure to them (sequences of information in a particular order). It's just that the more complex the narrative, the harder it is to follow. So in that case, highly creative endeavors (like improvised music) can make a lot of sense. I think the point you're getting at is that creativity exists on a razor's edge, and that it can easily turn into non-sense. For example, great improvisers will tell you that to truly play something great, you have to risk making mistakes. You have to push yourself to the limits of your abilities and exist at that edge, and when you do play something incredible, it's when you've temporarily extended yourself past that edge into God territory (Steve Vai calls it "connecting", also referred to as "flow" or "channeling"). There is a great clip of him talking about it when remembering Allan Holdsworth (legendary fusion guitarist): 0:57