LastThursday

If it makes it easier for you to understand then yes. But it is not actually one, or many, its neither. God is not countable.

It's in the nature of consciousness. It can divide itself into many things: birds, cakes, other people. What can't God do? God's imagination is reality itself. If absolute infinity = God = consciousness, then yes. The separation is real because God's imagination = reality = existence. It really makes no sense to ask if God is one or many - this is just a convenience for language and thought. If it makes it easier both are true, there is both one consciousness and many consciousnesses.

Whether something is separate or not, is within consciousness. It makes no difference if there is one or two or more consciousnesses. It's like water, if you pour water into two glasses, it's still water - it's irrelevant that it's in two glasses. There isn't one water or two waters, it doesn't make sense at all.

Imagine that numbers didn't exist. Asking whether there was one consciousness or two or an infinite number, wouldn't be possible. So all this talk just boils down to this: do numbers exist? The answer is of course no, they are a concept appearing in consciousness. If you want to get a flavour of what it's like not to have numbers, ask yourself: how many parts is my arm made up of?

The speed of light is the rate of change of existence, the tick tock, and this is constant. But rate is second order not first - so "now" is necessarily relative. When stuff moves, velocity is exchanged with time, because the speed of light is the conversion factor between the two. Something only exists when you have information about it (observe it) and this only reaches you at the speed of light. Before you have information about an event, it sits in a hypothetical realm. Before the sun rises, you can only hope it will rise.

I spent Sunday editing midi in Cubase of one of my piano compositions. I'll do this sporadically when inspiration seizes me. Boy is it time consuming. Mostly, I'm trying to iron out the deficiencies in my playing and reach some sort of polish and perfection. Like photography, it's better that you take a good picture in the first place rather than try to "fix it" later. I find it amusing that I can't play my own compositions, what's in my head is always far in advance of my technical ability. With a lot of fingering practice I can get closer, but that's also time consuming - Cubase allows me to be more precise to achieve the effect I want. I still need a much better workflow, one that doesn't get in the way of my creativity. A more permanent setup would help for a start. The thought does keep crossing my mind that I should spend even more time and just write my own midi editing software, so my workflow is exactly how I want it. My idea is a kind of pianola roll (so vertical) and big fat blocks (easy to grab and move around) representing notes with time going downwards - scrolling sideways with a mouse-wheel never feels natural. But I know writing software is always a deep-time-sucking-vortex-of-a-rabbit-hole activity. Cubase really does suck for midi editing with a mouse though. But yo! I'm living in the 21st century not the 20th, there's probably a shit-ton of software that will give me exactly what I want. Only time is my enemy, and I fu...... hate searching for and trying things out, it's so time wasting and boring. The other side of the coin is getting my stuff out there. What's the point in just creating and hoarding stuff just for myself? This is a less onerous activity. I have already dabbled with Soundcloud and directly on Youtube, I have basic video editing skills so there's that. The issue here is capturing high quality output from my Yamaha keyboard, heck I just need to buy the cables and a high enough table for the laptop to sit on (just do it man!). It'll be going to mp3 anyway most likely, so instant quality drop. Maybe even buy a dedicated laptop. And the third side of the coin is actually coming up with long enough compositions. I always get good ideas, but then trip over myself because of the workflow, lack of finger skill, and getting bogged down in details too quickly. I also need to greatly improve my "big picture" view of compositions, where are they going, what's the journey? That will help me produce longer pieces and improve creativity. The main question is how serious am I? Or is it just an occasional fancy? Dunno. But it gives me joy and that's probably enough.

There are degrees of freedom and different types of freedom. Actualising is the process of gaining ever greater freedoms, bit by bit.

I really need a holiday from myself. Most folks use surrogates such as social media or binge Netflix or play videogames to get away from themselves. There are other ways to be absent, such as meditating or getting lost in creativity. I find all this sort of thing work to a degree, and you may have your own escapes. I want whole days where I can be not me. The absence of myself implies the presence of someone else. I can't ever get too far away from being a human, this physical body doesn't let me. I could take drugs I suspect and that would even take me away from this body, and I can probably spend whole days doing it. But without drugs, the only option is to become someone else. The current me is an intricate system of memories, manerisms and context. To become someone else implies changing all of those things. Saying that I do feel like there is this disembodied ineffable pinpoint at the centre of it all that I can identify as me. I've had moments in my experimentation where that pinpoint has shifted and I've felt like someone else entirely. What's a better name for that pinpoint? Let's call it my anchor. My anchor is the thing that responds to the name "Guillermo"; it being that recognition of myself as myself. One way to pull that anchor away is what I call forcing. Techniques include wearing different clothing, talking differently, moving differently, hypnosis. With sustained effort I have longish periods where that anchor is not my anchor, but someone else's. It's a kind of possession, or walk in. In fact I will often invite that new person in and expel the current one (temporarily). This is fundamentally play acting, the things kids do in the playground, where they are temporarily possessed by the characters in their imaginations. I could argue that there is a real "Guillermo" living inside this body, but in actuality I'm play acting even him - it's just that he's taken hold and become anchored firmly in the seabed. This is all very powerful stuff. Having the flexibility to genuinely switch characters and take a holiday from yourself is both relieving and crucial to growing yourself. It allows for the expression of completely different traits. And for me it's all a step further to mastering my own psyche.

I've had this sort of question in job interviews. The answer I always want to give is: "not working for you". And so it is. Answering the question is a bit like predicting the weather on a specific day in 12 months' time, the best you can actually do is say it'll be Spring. Being very specific can give you a sense of certainty, and that can be very motivating, which is where the value in asking the question comes from. But the whole reason for asking the question at all, is that you're either unhappy with where you are now, or you see you current situation as temporary. But also, it's always good to tease out what things excite you and are important to you and what your values are: a.k.a living authentically. If I'm honest with myself, I don't want any part of the life I have now in ten years' time. But I have no clue what that would look like (yet).

Solipsism is bullshit but that's for another thread. Or, read my journal, although I forget which year.

I get this feeling about every ten years, but it passes.

The Truman Show Man finds out he's living in a reality TV show. Total Recall Man saves inhabitants of Mars. Or does he? A Scanner Darkly An undercover drugs agent finds out no-one is who they seem to be.

I'm continuing to work on myself along with my coach. When can I stop working on myself? I dunno, maybe I won't. Stagnation is the work of the Devil. Whatever circumstance we find ourselves in, it is or becomes normal for us - even if it's miserable or ecstatic or something in-between. We always want more or something different though, that's our nature; just like cats like to stalk birds and dogs like fetching sticks. It's our nature to constantly expand and explore our potentials because we know it's latent within us. Anything which suppresses our latent nature depresses us and constricts us. Although. We are limited: in time, place, abilities, physicality, circumstance, thought. Part of the joy of limitation is in working with it, around it, or pushing through it. It's also human nature to tell good stories of how we overcame our struggles and succeeded: it's the hero/ine's journey. Like great art we work within the media at our disposal and use the limitations as something to push forward against. The struggle against limitation can be hell, but we always expand our boundaries as a result - and so we get to express our true natures. Also. Our potentiality needs to be directed. Having a sense of direction gives us impetus and shows us where to expend our energies, we need hope and purpose. We humans work so much better with certainty however ill-defined it is, even if the certainty is just a working hypothesis. So we push against limitation and pull towards purpose. And when it's all over we get to tell the story, the joy is in the story and the journey. What more can a man like me need?

The fallacy is that all change can be resisted. On an individual level your body will keep on changing, if nothing else - and you'll have to confront this change. The paradox of change and identity is that once you change it becomes your identity. As @Inliytened1 puts nicely, "your identity is just shifting and morphing" and it will do this even if you resist it; you may even convince yourself that you haven't changed at all over time. All identity is in any case is a self-sustaining system of beliefs and ideas about a "you". In order for the identity to exist at all, it has to be naturally resistant to its own destruction; so it makes up stories about how special and pure it is. Change is a kind of death, but change is also a kind of rebirth.

And I always appreciate your questions. Nah, just have two cameras timed so that they shoot snapshots alternately and so there are no gaps - since each camera has a finite exposure time. Even video cameras have frames (snapshots) or more likely a rolling shutter. There is never any continuity as such, it's always static frames. More precisely that movement is relative to the observer. An object can be motionless in one POV (frame of reference) and moving in another (at the same time). My mug is motionless on my table, but moving at thousands of miles an hour relative to the centre of the galaxy. Being motionless is just a special case of movement. If instead of a camera you used a Doppler gun, you could most definitely get a measurement of movement, because of the absolute shift in the wavelength of the returning light. So the paradox is only manifested by the equipment you use to measure movement with. Notice that with a Doppler gun you can't measure position, unlike with a camera. So you have the opposite paradox, where you know the arrow is moving, but not what path it takes through the air.

Very Beethoven and one of my favourites and it's loooong but worth it

The legend that is Billy Connelly Oh my lord

The Unexpected Hanging Paradox is a mind warper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox

Three things come immediately to mind: 1. The snapshot has an exposure time which is unavoidable. So there will always be motion blur on the snapshot (no matter how small). Ok, motion blur isn't movement, but it is evidence of it. If you keep decreasing the exposure time, the image will get darker an darker. A zero exposure time will capture the arrow perfectly still, but there will be no image. If you were thinking of it scientfically you might even conclude that the arrow becomes partially transparent when it moves through the air. 2. And a lesser more philosphical point: is a snapshot of an arrow an arrow? Can it be trusted as a representation of the real thing? A representation necessarily throws away a lot of information - including in this case most evidence of movement (and the back of the arrow etc). Can you even trust the person showing you the snapshots that they are all of the same arrow? 3. This story shows that the mind thinks platonically as it were: where snapshots are perfect; motion is composed of a series of perfectly still arrows; the snaphots all go "together" in a series and are of the same arrow, taken close in time together etc. But reality is always a lot messier and less clear cut.

And intuition can be wrong, that's why science does experiments and gains consensus. It's not either/or. The process of science is a combination both. You need intuition to tell you what experiments to do and to come up with theories. You need experiments and consensus to tell you if you're deceiving yourself or not - or at least to get rid of as much bias (deception) as possible.