Sunday, May 08, 2005

Pleasure

I was just thinking on the quality of emotions, and was reminded by something written in the Artistotle's Ethics, that everyone is looking for pleasure or fun. How many different feelings of pleasure can we experience ? What are the mechanisms behind it ? And how are they decoded into our DNA sequence ? An interesting quote of the composer Mendelssohn in this context:

"Music can not be caught with words - not because, music is more vague and undetermined, but because it's more precise than words are."

Thursday, May 05, 2005

A cloud of resources

Hi,
nice that you still are interested in my thoughts on thinking. I hope it is still entertaining somehow, also when I lack the time and routine to update my personal progress regularly.
I find it still a brilliant idea that what a brain does, a mind, can be seen as a cloud of resources, agencies or pieces of machinery. Isn't it fascinating how our activities relate to our minds ? Isn't it also fascinating to realize how little we think about our concepts of "mind" ? Somehow we understand that a mind controls one's or other people's actions. A mind does this in many, many different ways, and we often popularize this as 'showing emotions' or 'having thought on something'. But how does a mind discover something which seemingly not existed before... ?
In the case of emotions: M. Clynes is arguing that to understand what emotions are, what they do, why music spark them off, it is essential not to seperate the external expressions of emotions and the internal physical mechanisms, i.e. the quality of our emotions can very well be studied by studying the quality of their expression. Why is it that children or students never get some basic training in expression of emotions, yet it is one of the most important forms of communication we human being use ?