Individuality!

[Avetice]

I've been thinking...just like every second of my life but this is something worthwhile to think about. You could even use it somehow in your art, remember your telling a story with your visual art so...yeah anyway... wait there are a few things oh hell here it goes the reading may be a little jumbled though cause i'm going from my crazy chaotic mind to this structured communication.

Anyone ever think about what is it that makes someone individualy from another person. Think about it! What is is that is not reproducable or able to be acted out by someone else or something else. Our bones and muscles are part of a machine, as well as our brain, and eyes,etc etc. Think about your eyes, they are a machine that picks up the visible light spectrum of the electromagnetic field. It is kinda like magic, but we use it every day it doesn't feel like magic. We are able to tap into different forces to heat up food and conserve it, we can control waves of temperature to store food. ...gettin sidetracked sorta but it all relates anyway.

So our bodies are machines, doesn't sound all that individual does it? Good the human body is just as special as a tigers body or an ants body that occupies space in this same place we are at. It is almost like our bodies are a building for which something occupies it to experience what the human body picks up. It picks up differences in pressure and texture in objects, it picks up smell like a motion detector picks up on movement. The same with all the senses we use to navigate this place. We call it reality but we can't really define reality. Reality is what you can see? Well why limit reality to only that which comes through to your body through the visible light spectrum. What about gama and radio electromagnetic waves, we don't "see" those like we do when our eyes transfer what is receiving again the visible light spectrum. ...sorry i'm using mostly the eyes as examples but its the only one i know the most about to be able to contemplate crazily.

Ok do you get what I am trying to suggest there? Ok so if our bodies are machines and our brains are part of that and that develops as part of interacting with experiences through our 5 senses that define our world and most all humans have these and if our voices can be reproduced as well as all these machine like things we are, then what is it that makes someone individual? Is it purely based on our experiences and how we interpret our experiences through our receptors (senses) and our brains which would be where our perspective on this world we experience is?

This world by the way is not a city or a suburb or anything you think you know but rather the place of existence. Existence what was it before we started to build things? well the earth was ....im sure some of you science experts can tell me. If we took a 2 humans that looked exactly the same, sounded the same, had all the same chemical balances in the brain and in dna, basically both are EXACTLY the same in the respect of a human organic body, facial features, etc etc I hope you get the point. Where then is the individuality!?!?! It is not in something that we know, something we cant explain in language some try to give some sort of symbol to keep track and sort it within their thoughts, some such symbols in the english langauge are things like spirituality, or religion, or whatever you think of...

Anyway I wanted to record this thought of mine so that I may recall how I see things and to give some of you something to think about when your painting or drawing the human figure or trying to be "creative" creativity in academia is bullshit anyway. Anywho realize that when you are telling a story with visual art.... visual art is a language read by our eyes just like english is a vocal language, language is communication, communication is attempting to ....do many things, not just to entertain, teach us, and fill our brain with information to use or not use. So when you are painting a human with this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum called light, think about what is it that gives that human body life.

if someone read all this then wow im glad you thought i was crazy, because i know someone will just pass me off as that.

Please respond in anyway you want, hell if this sparks any kind of ideas for art pieces start a thread, i'd be glad to see some stuff if it sparked anything in you. .....well i could keep going on but i better stop myself now because assignments are wanted.

p.s.ok i tried to break them up into paragraphs for you so it might not look as daunting to read and i'll be posting some more thoughts in a little bit.

[SamusNeo]

Nice thoughts from what I have read thus far, but please post it again with paragraph breaks. I'll be looking when you do. Keep working them braincells.

[gekitsu]

very interesting thoughts, avetice

what jumps to my mind you didn't mention are different hardcoded ways our brain works.
you see, there are people hardcoded to keep everything in order. they aren't able to do chaos. they go crazy when you show them something chaotic. the won't be able to understand or cope with it.
same the other way round: i am a chaotic person, i can't stand things in order.
whenever i see all the data we store about our workers in huge lockers at work, i could go crazy. i for any sake can't understand the principle of knowing, archiving any single bit of relevant info about any single toilet-cleaner.
same with optimist/pessimist people. both see the same but their brain is either hardcoded or developed to interpret it as different things.

also, there are lots of ways for our brain to develop in a certain "style". think of literate brains, maths brains, color brains, emotion brains etc...
i guess individuality is the fingerprint of our mind. both the way it is hardcoded, the way it developed, the experiences...

also, there are things you can't explain with ratio:
things like music preference for example.
why are there people going off to punk while others can't stand that crap and listen to classical music while even others find their mecca in the spoken word of rap/hip-hop...
where do these preferences come from?

[SamusNeo]

Thanks for breaking it up, it helped a lot. In response to what you are saying, I think these are the types of questions that many serioud artists pose to themselves. Plenty of these issues have been looked at from every which way by philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Bohm, Krishnamurti..etc, etc, etc....).
It's funny to me to think about individuality. As an artist it is something I have concerned myself with, and for a long time all I did was strive to be as unique as possible. Looking back the irony is that individuality is never in effort...that makes whatever you do contrived. I believe it is a deepining understanding of who you are and the ability to pick up on your own rythyms.
When you talk about two people being the same in terms of structure, (I guess the current world view of this is genetics), you must take into account that even if two people shared identical genetic information the would still be composed of seperate matter. Not only this but it would be impossible for them to occupy the same space simultaneously, and therefore they could never percieve exactly the same thing at the same time.
In this way individuality is unavoidable. On the other hand, if you look at it closely we are all composed of the same basic elements all of which in turn are most likely composed of the same raw material...whatever it may be.
We get stuck in this rut of seeing everything as not being unique because we force everything through the lens of our perception which, for most of us, is the past. We become familiar with certain terms, beliefs, concepts and then we cling to them for security against the unknown(which is, if you will admit it to yourself just about everything we encounter). We shape the world (the world being now, this moment itself) to the way we have already percieved and so everything is trapped in a cage of previous experience.
If we could only allow ourselves to percieve without knowlege at all (that is, without that which we have alredy internalized) then we would be unable to recognize each new experience, each moment as anything but unique, because the present moment is in fact the whole of all eternity, not the past, or the future- which for us is just a projection of our past anyway. The present is a living thing, a movement that we are a part of.
You spoke of what we can percieve, the limits of our senses, and such. The problem is we are trying to percieve within those boundries because they are all we know or are comfortable with. We are looking for new experiance in the realm of old concepts. There are limitations to those fields of knowlege and we get frustrated with them when we feel the confines they have placed us in.
What if there was a completely different approach, a whole new way in which to percieve that we never even afford ourselves the oportunity to try? By this I mean something beyond only the physical senses, something which we rarely approach in day to day life. I understand all of this can sound like metaphysical mumbo jumbo in explanation, but it is quite different when it is experienced...it simply exists.
Scientifically it is more than feasable..we have already discovered that we only use a very small percentage of our brain at any given time. Let me just say I don't believe nature is ever superfluous, and that there must be an ultimate cause which all this dormant brain matter must serve. So we must pose the question of what is this brain matter for, or more importantly what is it, period? If we can understand what it is then the rest might fall into place on its own. The problem is we cannot figure it out withing our current state of mind, as this state of mind is in fact the boundries which we have not yet reached past.
This is why I meditate. I exercise my mind to forget all which it already knows so that it may recognise something new. It sounds so simple, yet I have found this to be very difficult. I have found that the mind does not want to quiet itself, it goes on and on and never gives itself a moment to breathe.
At any rate, all this only scratches the surface of what the questions you posed bring to mind, but alas, my fingers and eyes get tired if I stare at this electronic box and type for too long.
I suggest trying out the authors I mentioned earlier, especially Krishnamurti. I have really enjoyed his work and it lacks all of the usual intellectual walls that many philosophers and great thinkers seem to build around themselves. Givin what you said, I believe you would really enjoy it. I am always glad to see people flexing the invisible muscle of thought, and am glad you shared with us. I would be more than happy to discuss any ponderings at greater length if you wish. I'll be keeping my eye on this post. -Chris

[Avetice]

no matter how chaotic your mind seems there is some order to it even if you don't want to accept it.
As I notice now reading my thoughts in the morning, its all based on cause and effect as well. Thats another thing that our brains interpret everything through thinking that there must have been something before in a linear timeline, if the ball stays still and you push it, right there is a cause and effect. The ball HAD to move because ...well newton's laws of motion. Motion is just another force with which our bodies experience this place of existence.


ok once we learn all the forces we need to know about to be able to recreate a human body exactly. I mean exactly, copying the dna, the atoms, the eye, the exact shape of the eye and how the muscles are shaped and their strength(in the eye and throughout the body), the chemical balances in the brain and body allowing it to grow exactly the same, hair growing at the same rate as the body you would want to copy. The muscles interact the same, the bones are shaped the same, the neurons in the brain are all connected and flow exactly the same as the body your copying. So they would grow exactly the same chemically, physically, emotionally,philisophically, EVERYTHING. Once we would be able to do that we would think we were some sort of gods. In my brain thinking in linear fashion of cause and effect i would think, "well if we could do that then where did it all start?" Who or what sentience or thing fabricated this existence for which we experience. Why do we think in this fashion, because thinking is communicating and rationalizing to yourself everything you have experienced through an organic machine(the human body). This is because we learn to categorize and speak to identify and communicate to others your own experiences. When learning language (verbal communication and logical, progressional, cause and effect thinking) we begin to think rather than to be. Once we have learned to do this and our human body becomes used to it, it becomes natural and trying to not think becomes very hard because the human organic body throughout most of its use experiences and only knows(knowing is identifying through language so we can communicate). To end this linear thinking is to end the knowing, and to end this process of cause and effect way of experiencing this place(existence, reality,universe, etc etc).
After absorbing some of Krishnamurti's (a philosopher)thoughts about thinking I'm contemplating about not thinking and about meditating. Meditating is not meditating, because you can't really symbolize trying to end thinking with a word of language when that itself is thinking. The guy from the internet said that it's really hard to shut the mind up, it wants to keep thinking, our mind stops thinking so as to communicate
it becomes the mind again. This seems like a vicious circle that is not easy to end when i think about trying to stop thinking i am still thinking. Once we KNOW any one thing we start knowing and thinking. A child doesn't know language, you could wonder what is he thinking, well at this moment the new organic machine isn't thinking it is just observing because it's all it needs to do. It doesn't NEED anything but to exist.

That last part is pretty much me thinking about what you(samus) and what krishnamurti said about the act of thinking.
Most of this probably sounds familiar to you and maybe others that study philosophy, but the difference between knowing it as well as someone else already writing about it and actually getting is all the difference. I could sit here and read about philosophers and start spouting it out verbally to other people and still not really get it. Bah I can't communicate it, it's not communicateable verbally, visually, emotionally(feeling it) its just it.