Tag Archives: learning

Split Focus

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So I had idea of what it might be like to have multiple personalities earlier. My guess is that most people will stop reading now. If not, just keep in mind that I’m not meaning to offend anyone for whom this might be a sensitive issue.

Earlier this afternoon, I was playing a song on guitar, and I noticed something: I moved around, mentally. It was as though I wasn’t alone. I mean, I never felt what I would describe as another presence in the room, per se, at least not physically, but for a little while there, it did seem as though I adopted the perspective of someone else, someone who wasn’t ‘me’ (at least not in a way that I could recognize), but yet someone whom I was definitely immersed with.

This ‘not me’… ‘person’… I didn’t sense them exterior to myself. As I was playing guitar and doing the best I could not to sound like crap singing along, I started paying extra close attention to what I was doing. Some time had passed. I was barely conscious of the fact that I had been talking through my thought process out loud to myself. From the voice/perspective of what I can only describe as a bonafide music teacher.

Memorize that picking pattern. Start over. Do it till you get it right. Slow it down if you need to. Now keep doing it right. Again. Again. Again. Good.

You’re slouching. Support your voice, from the diaphragm.

Feel the dynamics, don’t just play them.

Quit it. You think you’ll have time to stop and burp if this were live in front of an audience? Either disguise it or wait.

Listen. You hearing that? That’s what this part of the song is supposed to sound like! Keep it up.

So, a mix bag of tips and pointers, complements and constructive criticism, all of which I learned from my teachers from high school and college. Seems like I’m just regurgitating information, right? I’m not so sure. It felt an awful lot like I was both myself saying the things that I know that I already knew AND I was someone else, someone who was hearing all of it as though for the first time in either a very long time, or perhaps even just for the first time, ever.

Logically, I know I wasn’t ‘hearing’ anything, let alone anything new, but it sure as hell felt like I was.

Maybe I just have an over active imagination, which would usually be a good thing, being an aspiring writer as well and all, but in this case, when I ‘realized’ this seeming split was taking place, there was difficulty ‘disengaging’ from it. When I felt like I was wholly back into my own head space, it was almost like breaking a spell, snapping out of it.

I’m not claiming to have multiple personalities, or to know the first thing about what it’d be like through the eyes of someone who does. What little I know about the topic comes mostly from tv, so… I know essentially nothing, in other words. This little ‘episode’ could have been any number of things (petit mal epilepsy?), but it did get me thinking: What if it were possible to adopt/permit the presence of additional personalities by choice? Would we? Should we?

My default attitude would largely have been “hell no!” Too much at risk. What if an unwanted second-party internal personality became dominant and unrelenting? Could we ever trust a source guaranteeing that that could never happen? Who’d be willing to be a guinea pig? Maybe a neurological ‘sandbox’ environment would allow a safe, mental buffer space with which to experiment, but is anything really ever completely safe?

Regardless, after this experience, I realized that I might actually be down to try it. What I feel I could now expect, should the technology ever be developed and proven ‘safe’ (less dangerous than getting into a car and crossing town?), is that an additional internal personality would manifest itself in the form of coach, teacher, trainer, etc. In other words, for someone who wants to learn a new hands-on skill and/or improve on one, it would just be a simple matter of turning on a pre-selected ‘voice’ in your head (probably downloaded from a reviewed and rated repository), only you feel what they feel, you understand exactly what they’re trying to convey.

Essentially, if you want a demonstration, you simply tap into the appropriate bank of compiled experience (could have a name, a personality modelled after someone in particular, whatever) understand a set of directly-relayed instructions (should feel natural if you adopt enough of the alter), and then, simply, do.

Also, the free version should be the only version. Open source that shit.

Lesson Learned?

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You know what sucks? Losing something you spent a lot of time working on. For example, a nearly-ready-to-publish draft of a short story.

I take autosave for granted. In fact, I’m taking it for granted right now with WordPress, which, if I might say so, is precisely what it’s designed for. Anyone disagree? Not that I care. My blog. My rhetoric. Anyways. The funny thing is, not everything in life has autosave features (believe it or not), even if it seems like certain bits should. For example, Wattpad doesn’t have a native autosave feature.

So.

When one is working on a typed something something, doesn’t matter what it is, if one happens to be doing this using Wattpad, one would be wise to consider manually clicking the save button every so often. Another way of thinking of it is to compare this recommended strategy with one that this author highly discourages: The one who is perhaps not so wise might draft up a lengthy typed document of whatever sort, and even if it falls short of being a masterwork the likes the world has never before seen, it still requires due diligence to proofread and edit the whole thing. After a long day and a late night of typing, such a task might best be served with a fresh set of eyes, as would be the case after getting a good night’s sleep. Wouldn’t want to be hasty, skimping out on a quality clean up prior to publishing, now would we?

However, one might happen to notice an icon in the system trey awaiting their attention in the morning. An icon, as it so happens, indicating that updates are ready for one’s computer. Perhaps, never having any prior issues with installing updates before, one might be tempted to rubber stamp all updates as soon as they are made available. A sensible notion, keeping up with security fixes and what have you. And certainly, just because the updates in question happen to be specific for the browser one evidently happens to be using to type the soon-to-be-published literature, there is no mention that following through on said updating process might cause the sturdy, never-failing interweb-bearing application to suffer, how shall we say? A ‘minor’ hiccup.

What could possibly go wrong?

Ah yes! After a good night’s rest, a fresh batch of updates successfully installed, it is now time to — oh whatever. You already know how this story ends. I didn’t think to save my shit. Not even once. I leave all the data in the text field, let it sit over night, install an update for my browser, everything freezes, aaaaaand…

Gone. All gone.

🙂

Making Waves

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In an earlier post, I offered up my uncertainty about certainty itself. I love ideas, learning, unlearning, relearning, and asking questions. It’s a big part of what makes me tick these days.

Growing up in a Christian home, there were a number of dogmatic principles that I essentially swallowed hook, line and sinker, no questions asked. How could I? I wasn’t raised to even be aware of the possibility of having a choice in the matter. I had to discover that for myself many years later than I might have ideally liked.

Anyways, in my own way, I essentially took a 180 degree turn in my personal beliefs in my early 20’s. If science couldn’t back a claim up, it no longer held water for me. If two claims competed in terms of their scientific validity, it was my observation that the one not in favour of spirituality was the more sound of the two. Further more, if science gave any kind of ammunition with which one so thoroughly disillusioned and pissed off with traditional Christianity as I had become could use against claims disseminated within the modern church, I would aim to use such rather militantly.

I described myself as predominantly atheist at most, agnostic at least, and there was no lack of “science” with which to draw from in order to substantiate that position.

These days, I identify far more closely with agnosticism and vague, skeptical-but-open-minded spirituality. The reason is that failure of science to disprove negatives amuses me. Straight up. As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t conclusively prove that leprechauns don’t exist, then, as immeasurably improbable though it may be, I hold the view that it’s possible that they just might, in fact, exist.

I don’t throw much weight behind views of that nature, but I can’t get rid of them. To do so, in my view, would be to become utterly close minded to all of the unknown possibilities which may, in fact, be true, however unlikely though it may seem.

The other thing is that my faith in science is likewise never safe from questioning and scrutiny either. By definition, I accept that science is supposed be a grand quest for truth using our best, verifiable and agreed upon methods, but that science is also, by definition, constantly at the mercy of its own evolutionary processes. As new findings emerge, old models used for explaining the world as best as we can are replaced in favour of ones that better succeed at doing so.

In case it isn’t clear, the logical extreme of that premiss must include the possibility that, any given day now, we could wake up to the knowledge of new findings in the field of one such branch of scientific inquiry or other which can, conceivably, completely undo EVERYTHING we thought we ever knew about anything provided it ultimately led to a more thorough, accurate and truthful explanation and interpretation of the world in which we actually live.

2 + 2 = 5, apart from semantic and metacognitive issues, is one such possible change. Again, it’s almost inconceivably improbable that science would ever be responsible for something as seemingly absurd as that, but never impossible.

More likely, we’ll simply discover that we were wrong about the way certain fundamental forces actually work, perhaps having confused certain effects with their causes, as a classic example.

For a lengthier but far better explanation of what I’m driving at, check out the following video. The speaker’s name is Rupert Sheldrake. He was invited to speak at a TEDx convention not too long ago. Shortly thereafter, his video was removed from the site’s archives. Just watch, and you’ll soon understand why:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0waMBY3qEA4