Thursday, October 29, 2009

Improving timing in life and the life calendar

Lately, my mantra has been to improve my timing in life - hopefully that will make my music playing more precise, rhythmic, and feel better. Anything that has to do with timing, scheduling, driving, speaking, eating...I'm trying to improve.

So, regarding scheduling, I've come up with this thing called The Life Calendar. I realized that the month-view of a normal calendar makes a lot of sense to me...so I made a year-view, where a season is a week (4 seasons in a year), and a month is a day (12 months in a year...so each season gets 3 months). This made me think, well, can we do this with a decade? Yes...there are 10 years in a decade - so I decided to make the half-decade a week...5 years in a half-decade...and 2 half decades in a decade. So, naturally, from there, I decided to make a life calendar of 100 years. I suppose I don't have to stop there...but that seems good for now.

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Tuesday, October 27, 2009

It's always both - the yin-yang interaction (YYI)

There seems to be a roadblock to understanding certain concepts. For example, if there is freewill, then how can there be determinism? Many philosophers take the stance of compatibilism, which says that both concept live together in sweet, beautiful harmony, we just have to let go of the idea of one being "right" and the other "wrong." (See Daniel Dennet's book Freedom Evolves.) This is the idea of a "false dichotomy" where two things seem to be opposites, but really are two sides of a coin that are complimentary, rather than conflicting. (Immanuel Kant's writings on the "antinomies" is exemplified here.) These complimentary things form a paradox - two conceptually opposite terms that seem intrinsically related to each other. I call one side of the paradox "Yin" and the other side "Yang." I refer to Yin as the negative pole and Yang as the positive pole.
From Wikipedia: "Yin–yang, thus, always has the following characteristic: yin and yang describe opposing qualities in phenomena. For instance, winter is yin to summer's yang over the course of a year...It is impossible to talk about yin or yang without some reference to the opposite: yin–yang are rooted together. Since yin and yang are created together in a single movement, they are bound together as parts of a mutual whole. A race with only men or only women would disappear in a single generation; but men and women together create new generations that allow the race they mutually create (and mutually come from) to survive. The interaction of the two gives birth to things."
The basic paradigm of a paradox is Unity versus Duality. The interaction of Yin-Yang is the Unity and Yin-Yang treated separately is Duality.

I assert that there is a limit to understanding/describing how both sides of a paradox work together, but we can experience their interaction. This forms a basic Yin-Yang Interaction (call it YYI). I have a huge list of YYI's that seems to grow everyday. Here's a top 10 list:

1. Love: Attraction (Romantic, Friendship, etc), Repulsion (Independence, Ego, etc)
2. Good, Evil
3. Infinitely large, Infinitely small
4. Freewill, Determinism
5. Feeling (experience, art, hedonism), Understanding (rational thinking, criticism, making distinctions)
6. Jung's Psychology: Introversion, Extraversion (etc). Subconscious, Conscious. Type A, Type B. Nature, Nurture
7. Mundane, Divine
8. Night, Day
9. Teleology, Goal-less-ness
10. Mysticism: Collective Consciousness, Personal Consciousness.

Within art is a load of YYI paradoxes...here's a short list:
Practice, Performance
Talent, Education
Form, Content

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