Betty knew that god had her back.

Goals in the creative brain

picking a train of thought is difficult. whatever I choose to start writing will determine the rest of what I write. It's a creative choice. 

sometimes we make creative choices without deliberating. We have no concern for the direction of the expression.

With no internal monologue inhibiting our flow of decisions - choices fly past and content is produced. 

It's an elusive state of the brain I think. Artists are always trying to reach it - believing that their best work is achieved 

from this state.

They might be correct. If I let the walls of thought fall down and allow my neurons free roam - maybe they'll chat to each other and come up with something truly intuitive and complex

maybe that depends on my intelligence, or maybe more precisely, the types and number of connections between neurons.

If every experience generates new connections (I don't know if this is true) then perhaps I should just go out and experience as much as possible. 

Am I confusing artistic maturity with truly insightful creation? is that every artists goal?

What do i think about achieving while I create? Can I really stop myself from thinking anything at all? will I always have a target audience in mind? or a target response at least?

In the middle of writing a song I use my basic ability on the guitar and with language along with the random chance of hitting a new note combination that works well.

While this is happening , I am purposefully trying to make something with meaning for my audience. My audience is everyone whose opinion I value, which is unfortunately more people than I would like.

I try and make it sound "cool", catchy, interesting, intelligent but relaxed, familiar but original, always original. Not original themes, but an original take on a theme,

a clever way of looking at it. It's usually always about relationships and love and loss and fun. Sometimes it's just words that fit with a theme that's anybodies guess.

I imagine "would I like this if I heard it on the radio?" "would I change channel?" I then adjust that standard to what I guess is the taste of the Australian/American public.

I say Australian/American because the bulk of my musical influences are from these countries, my style of play is simply a collection of my favourite artists mixed together (not particularly well if you ask me.

I like it when someone says " wow, I liked it when you went here with the song - it was unexpected" 

or,  "wow, I can totally relate to that"

or when they guess at what I'm trying to say and create a story better than any I might have had (I usually don't have one)

Even though I don't really care intensely about the content of my songs (maybe I should), I still care when people don't relate or enjoy them. It's as though I'm personally connected to my creation in a way that affects me emotionally when others respond. Sharing a creation is taking a risk. Almost like asking someone out. It's very difficult to detach yourself from something that you've created, if you like it that is. Would we create if there wasn't an emotional connection to what we've made?  Does everyone want some attention for their work? even if they don't admit it? 

will I grow out of it? I doubt it. There must be a state of being that makes it less nerve racking though. MDMA would probably help, but I value my brain cells. I suppose we just have to weigh up the risk versus benefit and make a decision as to whether to pursue the endeavour. And hopefully, eventually, we have taken the risk so many times (or received the benefit sufficiently) that it isn't hard any more, it's just fun. I'm sure this is what all "successful" artists go through. I'm sure stand up comedians always feel this way. On the edge of a pit, balancing on laughter. Somehow they ride the roller coaster and keep getting back on for more. Are any of them so secure that it's just fun? or just a job? if it's just a job now, why do you bother? is the point of doing it that it challenges us to feel the risk, feel the drama - know that we might fail and know the pleasure of not doing so.

I think everyone struggles with this. I think it must be related strongly to suicide and depression. Self worth and the judgement of our output. 

Choosing what we value in life is so important. What do you want? what will make you happy? Are you making others happy and neglecting yourself? Are there simple things that make you happy but you want more? Is our industry of fame causing us to feel forever inadequate? 

How many chances do we get when we make mistakes? who gets to judge us? when are we too far gone? what about the people who know us best? does their opinion of us matter? do their memories of us attest to a greater version of us than is represented by our choices today? or a worse version?

One answer for me that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once is : have children and raise them well.

I guess it could certainly be cultural and likely is. but the obvious biological history is very influential also. We are not slaves to our biology thanks to the functions of our advanced brains, but I'm sure that the urge is instinctive. I don't presume it's universally present- but I'm sure it is rewarding for many and would be for me. It's a risk, but I feel like I have the skills and passion to do well as a parent. I value the opportunity more than anything, It feels like a lasting contribution to the culture and civilisation that has allowed me so many personal joys. I can pass on my passion, or at least my wealth and some skills. And the risk is huge - I could lose them early or I could make mistakes that were irreversible. I want to be so much for my children, but fear of inadequacy is strong. I want them to have more opportunity than I've had, I want to give them a happy life of learning and loving like I'm living now. 

In case my parents read this, I am so lucky to have had the life and opportunities I have had, my decisions have all been my own for some time now and I am already happier than I could ever want for my children. I would just like to give them a chance to do extra things that I now know would have got me further in my own interests (science and music mainly) but there is every chance that they won't care about these things anyway. I hope they do. 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                           

As promised, a fun picture of the pope looking fit as ever.

okay, so not really world changing, but I have to have some artistic content or it's all just me crapping on about what I think. According to the side bar no-one is following my blog. maybe I should advertise somewhere? I don't have much to sell though. I wonder if there is a view counter somewhere? If anyone out there aside from me has read any of this, please let me know, blogging can be a lonely world. 

"Pope is stupid" - Richard Dawkins (seconded!)

According to the article at a university in Spain Prof. Dawkins said :

 "I wonder on what basis anyone can say condoms make Aids worse. The Pope is either stupid, ignorant or dim."  

  "If people take his words seriously he will be responsible for the deaths of thousands, perhaps millions of people."

Apparently though, according to Pharyngula Blog (see Link in the sidebar -->), Dawkins was misquoted and in fact said:

"The Pope is either stupid, ignorant or wicked."

Awesome Professor, love your work. In fact I might even have some pope themed image for tomorrows 'atheist pic post' (that's right, a weekly atheist picture designed by yours truly - the world of satirical religious images is about to change forever :)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5088516/Richard-Dawkins-says-Pope-is-stupid.html

This is my new favourite Youtube video. If you've ever been called closed minded for not instantly believing someones supernatural story, or simply for asking for a bit more (or any) evidence, you'll enjoy it. 

Did you watch it? what did you think?  

Conflicker (conficker?) Virut and my fossil

Well, Today is Conflicker day or.. Conficker day. Not sure. I think I'm covered, AVG is updated and apparently it detects all variants of the worm anyway. I've checked Google News a few times and haven't seen anything about it's activity yet, maybe I'm a bit early.

I get the feeling it's april fools. The news keeps saying experts are sure it's there and dangerous, but I haven't seen any experts interviewed, and all everyone can say is, we don't know, just update your Antivirus. Anyway, likely I'm wrong, here's my latest virus story, it might help anyone infected with VIRUT.

I HATE VIRUSES!

I was hit by Virut a few weeks back, it was horrible. The only good thing about it is that it pushed me to buy a new laptop. The virsu infected everything it could get its hands on. It spread through any executable file available : not just .exe files...everything! .jpg .bmp .dll , basically anything that opens.

To get rid of it I unplugged my modem first and switched off my wireless connection. Then I ran a spybot scan and an AVG scan at the same time. AVG could barely keep up with the rate of infection. Hundreds of files were infected and removed. Yep important windows .dll' s were removed. So eventually it was not active - not infecting. Great. Only now my windows functionality was screwed. Heaps of my programs weren't working and I couldn't use any browsers. I was still in windows however, and so could have transferred all my files onto a backup harddrive. But stupidly I thought I could just repair my windows installation by chucking an XP cd in. Not so. I screwed up windows and now my computer wasn't even booting!

I was relieved at least that bulk of my data was still safe on my internal hard drive. Years of songwriting, photos,photoshop work and more. So I thought maybe I would just buy a new laptop (on credit)and then attatch my old externals to it with a caddy (never used one before) and just transfer everything over.

Not so simple, Couldn't find a decent caddy anywhere and didn't really know if any would work. Luckily a nice guy at Harvey Norman told me about UBUNTU!

UBUNTU saves the day! For those who've never heard of it (I had, but not much) It's a linux based desktop operating system. Like a free windows. The version I downloaded fit onto a cd and booted off the cd. So I didn't need to install an operating system onto my inaccessible hard drives, I just booted ubuntu off the cd and it recognised the drives and my external hard drive.

I copied everything across to my external hard drive and that was it! I had beaten virut! Or had I?

It was still lurking in files! I stupidly didn't check the drive before opening an old copy of Diablo 2. two dll files were infected and it started all over again. Same story except that I caught it a little earlier. Thankfully I'd only had the laptop for two days now and wasn't afraid of formatting it. It's a toshiba and they have an easy way of factory resetting (can't remember it now, google helped). So factory reset and Vista reinstalled - scanned external harddrive and lost a few more files but completely wiped out virut.

Wow, long story. It was horrible and expensive. I don't know where I picked up virut but I'm watching my downloads alot closer now. Scanning everything with AVG before I open it has so far been successful.

Oh...I bought my first fossil on Sunday! it's a Knightia sp. see the extract from http://www.rocksandminerals.com/fossil/fish.htm below:

(knightia sp.) - The Knightia is an ancestor of the modern herring. It is the most common of the fish species found in the sedimentary layers (some up to 2,000 feet deep) of the Green River Formation that were deposited in the Green River Lake System of western Wyoming, eastern Utah and northwestern Colorado.

I love having it, it's from the EOCENE period, around 50 Million years ago and it only cost $30 - i can't believe the way things are valued. I spend more than that at the movies! 50 Million years old! thats amazing.

Love it.

Blog soon.

Consciousness: My Brain Blogs on Brains

Consciousness:

I thought I might use my second ever blog to talk about consciousness. Everyone has ideas about consciousness; at least most people that I know have some thoughts on thought anyway. That would make sense seeing that a pre-requisite of thinking should be that one can think about thinking. What is thinking though?

Can an animal think about thinking? Is that question even worth asking? Studies may well answer it but they will likely only ever be vague guesses about the nature of animal thought, at least pet dog thought anyway. Enough of that.

I'll lay out my basic idea of consciousness and you tell me what you think!

I should note first that I have not done a lot of study on the subject but have picked out some highly recommended voices on the subject and watched plenty of videos and read some parts of some books - so, not an authority.

Consciousness refers to what we humans think of as that feeling that we are more than our physical bodies. A sense of self. A personality capable of assessing its own attributes and making choices about what aspects to refine and what to drop. It's able to contemplate its surroundings while processing multiple other ideas about space, time, and unobservable futures and past happenings. A memory bank with the ability to constantly make lightning speed, yes and no decisions about what is important to the body that stores it.

Some people say "Awareness". That makes me say "of what?" It's that feeling that you are you and they are them and nothing about that should swap or change. It's imagination - you couldn't ever be them but you can imagine what it might be like. You can place yourself in their situation without having to physically re-enact the circumstance.

Pretty exciting stuff, sounds like an advanced computer, the next i-phone. Maybe not.

So cutting to it, it's all in the brain. And you're like - yeah I knew that! But some people attribute consciousness to something else, or more appropriately "nothing" else. Consciousness is some separate sort of soul type ghost type spirit thing that no-one can see or scientifically prove.Or.. Consciousness is all there is and we are all just imagined physical beings in a giant gooey mess of consciousness.

A little bit simple and un-explanatory though. Again, like religion, explaining something with nothing and ending all questions. Boring really.

So what is it in the brain that makes us ourselves and why does it bother? Two very big questions. But aren't they exciting! Don't they seem like two of the most important questions we can ask?

We know where we came from already (see - evolutionary biology) and the big physics questions are likely a while away (though equally interesting). The brain seems so close, and the applications of the knowledge should be enormous. Imagine a psychology that truly understands the inner biology of the brain. A philosophy that elevates neurons to their rightful place. And the amount of brain diseases that might be better understood and or eradicated - wow, now we're talking!

I think of the neuroscience side of consciousness rather like I think of the role genes play in development. The final characteristics of a human being mostly don't correlate directly with any one gene. There's no real "gene for this" or "gene for that". Genes are naturally occurring phenomena evolved over millions of years and are the ultimate unit of selection in the evolution of life on Earth. The process by which genes evolved was essentially unguided, except by the yes and no of their physical environment and the limitations of their form. Genes (or whatever they once were) didn't have a plan. They blindly reproduced into the future, with the more successful varieties passing their random beneficial variations onto their offspring.

This random block by block approach to building a complex organism such as ourselves (or an earthworm) may seem counterintuitive; you would never employ it if you were planning to complete anything of relative worth in your own creative lifetime. However, over millions of years of duplication, error correction and multiple paths of attack you might just expect to arrive at something functional. But what if you built the foundations that were required to survive in an ancient environment and they have suddenly become unnecessary? They were imperative once and are now a deeply rooted left over waste of space. Unfortunately you're stuck with that junk, or that pathway that caused you initial success. Perhaps your evolved brain can think of better ways of connecting your nerves to your lungs to prevent that annoying old habit of hiccupping that was once so useful when you were a tadpole. If only the genes were a readable blueprint you might have some genetic avenue to travel down and make adjustments. The truth of our evolutionary history is crucial in understanding the haphazard construction of our biological systems(brain included).

So we must understand the brain and consciousness from an evolutionary perspective. Our genes are all working together in millions of different ways to produce an extraordinarily complex end result: us. Our brains likewise are a big messy collection of neurons of which not one is responsible for any one task but all collectively influence one another in ways that have been successful in creating thought patterns that ensure our physical survival.

So, Consciousness is a physical mechanism? Yes.

Basically, the dimensions of our brains and their general functionality can be thought of as genetically predetermined (I guess). Then comes experience. The more we're exposed to anything through our senses, the more branches our neurons make. The more branches - the more surface area for interconnection and more connections between more surface area means more accessible memories and more information to use an process. Wisdom = Connecting Neurons X Time.

Now this description is very short and likely inaccurate in many of its assumptions, but I think it basically covers the way I think about the brain at the moment. The consciousness that we feel is simply an illusion created by the unimaginably complex interlinking of neurons in our brain. BUT I'M ME people will say. I personally don't see what's so hard to let go of. Just because we don't hold a spiritual soul somewhere in our bodies doesn't mean we're any less important or that our actions have any less consequence. Someone once argued with me that “the whole world could just be your dream or mine" Perhaps it could, but so far we have no evidence to suggest it is and besides, all of our physical interactions with the dream have very "real" reactions. Commit a serious dream crime and you may end up spending your life in a dark dream prison being dream beat up or dream raped..How much thought would you give to the idea that it might be a dream while all this is happening?

If there is a soul, that would be interesting. But all we have to go on, is the evidence. Speculation about invisible ectoplasm is pointless. If our consciousness and therefore our moral reasoning is all an illusion - or at least simply the product of physical activity ...that doesn't make suffering any easier. That doesn't make love any less exciting and it doesn't make life any less valuable.

I've covered a lot with a little and I apologise for a lack of references, details and recommended reading, but this is a blog and really I suppose, an opinion piece. I'd like to blog on morality and its origins later.

I'd love to know if anyone has read this and what they thought of it, so please comment. Negative or positive, I would appreciate any feedback.

Cheers

YoungAtheist

First Post

Welcome to my blog! Life, Science and Atheism. This is my first ever blog so please excuse any terribleness that ensues. Hopefully I can come up with some interesting notes on my new favourite subjects: Science and Atheism. (inextricably connected unless you are in a tiny percentage of scientists who are able to suspend rationality to please the idiots surrounding you) 

Lovely way to start, call people idiots.

I have recently taken up a number of Atheist books, and put them down again after the first few chapters. Not because they weren't good, they were too good. I was convinced early on and the rest was preaching to the converted. If you're interested in atheism and the positive effect it can have on your perspective (in all things) then hopefully I can share what it has done for me. The depressing part is that once you see the pure stupidity of superstition and religion, there's not much you can do about it. Our only weapon is consciousness raising. The ammunition is plentiful though:  Logic, Reason, Rational upholding of and investigation of evidence, humour, intellect....and more I guess, just can't think of all of them. 

I love using photoshop, so I've decided to do a series of atheistic images in support of the idea that : RELIGION IS CRAP (and in need of a thorough dressing down - plenty of mocking with some direspect on top)

So I hope you enjoy and I hope that I can add to the discussion somehow and perhaps rebut some arguments.

NUMBER 1:    THE LAST BARBECUE     (click image to go to my picasa album where you can enlarge to see all the detail)

From Life Science and Atheism I'll post a new image every week, and will hopefully blog alot inbetween. Any feedback would be excellent.