Faith and achievement

[Thumpalumpacus]

That's how I feel about faith, too.

I'm curious if people think religious faith serves any useful psychological purpose, as I think it does (basically Christians might call "God" what I call "the little homunculi in my head" or whatever)?  Or is it just pure BS and can only lead to delusion and failure?

I think it can serve a purpose. I think it can help people hold things together inside themselves when the shit hits the fan.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I take my hat of to you sir. And anyone who can improvise. I played the pianie for 15 years and sax for 12 and could never improvise. I was a good technician (music awards left and right) but not creative.

Fuck up on stage enough, you'll learn!

[The Grand Nudger]

To me, any part of my brain that I don't have conscious control over is a kind of cohabitator in my head.  I don't consider it "me" playing, but more those other parts playing through me.  It's like cooperative channeling or something-- "Hey, musical me, let's make this one a good one!"

But yeah, the two best musical experiences I ever had were really great practices/concerts, along with the dread, the disorientation when I "come back" to the real world, and the other is  a lucid dream in which I realized I could compose music and hear it, real time as I created it, in the dream.  That was bitching.  And while I wouldn't say it came from a Sky Daddy God, it certainly had the aesthetic qualities of a kind of revelatory or religious vision.  Choirs of angels, that one was.

You -do- have conscious control. Contrary to pop cultures narratives, parents of child prodigies...and even the experience of the more musical among us..no one auto-plays music. It doesn't happen.  It's also -not- a "cohabitator" playing the tune for you.  Now you can "consider it" anything you like...but we'd be back to jesterrs original comments regarding the OP..where you are not discussing anything of qualitative substance or meaning...simply attempting to make logical inferences from linguistic flourishes.  I'll just explain, again...that the feeling you get is due to a limitation in your biological structures. You zone out, when you focus in. You can feel a sense of losing yourself, but the sense is in no way meaningful or informative as regards -actually- losing yourself, or a cohabitator, or a lack of conscious control....or faith. Even all this "muscle memory" business is more folklore than truth. We are only describing, on a minor level, what it feels like for a task to require less effort as you gain in proficiency, and in extreme cases what it feels like when a task consumes so much of your "available work", let's call it....that compromises between it and other tasks are made. It's all very fascinating...but has absolutely nothing to do with what you are inferring, ostensibly, from it.

If a witches tit is cold, then they are not mammals.
A witches tit is cold.
Therefore witches are not mammals. 

Can you see why this might not work, even if the premise is true and the idiom is intelligible. Now throw in a dash of wiggle room for what we might consider what, and imagine the hilarity that could ensue if I defined the words witch, cold, and mammal how I saw fit?  

[bennyboy]

You -do- have conscious control.  It's also -not- a "cohabitator" playing the tune for you.  Now you can "consider it" anything you like...but we'd be back to jesterrs original comments regarding the OP..where you are not discussing anything of qualitative substance or meaning...simply attempting to make logical inferences from linguistic flourishes.  

Pretty sure I -don't- have conscious control over a musical performance. Chopin and other difficult pieces have orders of magnitudes more complexity, both in pure physical requirement and in the musical lines that must be followed, than I can ever hope to monitor at the conscious level. Even when I'm first sight-reading a piece of music, there's much much more going on than I am aware of.

[The Grand Nudger]

If you say so.  

[Thumpalumpacus]

Not every musical decision I make is conscious, by a long shot. This is what is meant by internalizing knowledge.

[The Grand Nudger]

If it isn't conscious, is it a decision?  Linguistic flourish.  I -also-...sometimes, hit the wrong chord and play it off like a pro. 

Sometimes, I mean to play a chord, should play a chord, but instead riff on a scale associated with the chord. We like to describe or conceptualize these things as something that "flows" from us, or a creative outburst, etc...but it's not a meaningful or qualitative distinction with regards to conscious control. I learned to do it, I may not have intended to do it before the moment, but I was focused on it in the moment. Improvisation is not the sonic equivalent of auto-writing, nor is it the musical application of the unmoved mover, nor would making a pleasant sounding mistake qualify as un/non-conscious control or decision making.

(one of my favorite things to do for my kids though, is to look at my hands like I'm surprised...it makes them giggle)

[Thumpalumpacus]

Are we aware of every decision we take?

[The Grand Nudger]

By definition, we must be (or it's not a decision..just something we do/think).  You're probably wondering something more along the lines of "are we aware of every action we take, or the outcomes thereof".

[Thumpalumpacus]

I can live with that wording, sure. Point being that I don't see a big involvement in faith there -- not that you were saying that.

I'll confess one semi-superstition: I'm leery of cutting open this particular goose, 'cause I rather like these golden eggs on those rare occasions they pop out.