Trefor Bazett ~ Thoughts

Into:
Every human is faced with, at some point, two basic questions: "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" This page explores my thoughts and opinions on a series of different matters; however, I believe that they reduce to, at the most basic level, my attempts to answer these two questions.

A note about this page
To date, everything that has been written on this page was written spontaneously, either I was thought of an idea and typed it up right here on this page, or I remembered thinking of an idea and went and wrote it down here. I didn't think to my self, "Self, lets write something about choice, " and then proceed to think about something to do with choice and then write it down. As of now, there isn't enough entries to logically group them in to any form of categories and so they are ordered in chronological order. Of course, this is going to make for a very eclectic assortment of entries that don't make much sense either in themselves or holistically.

Truth vs. Truthfulness
Truth is a state of being that is constant throughout time. A truth about the past, a truth about the present, a truth about the future will not change as time does: it is absolute. Truthfulness is a function of perception. We sense, through our eyes or ears or other sensory device, raw data. This data represents the truth. The frequencies and intensities of light traveling from objects to our eyes are exact. They existed or exist, depending on your time frame, as they are regardless of when you recall such images, from what point of view the light was observed and the truth of how that light existed does not change should it not even be observed at all. How we perceive the light is entirely different. Our mind transcribes the data resulting from reactions to the light in our eyes into images. These images are not the truth, they are not the actuality of the light, they are not constant. How often will two people agree on the height of a certain pole to within feet, let alone inches? The pole has a height that is the truth, if you measured it with an exact ruler you could find its height to within the uncertainty of the ruler. However, the perception of the height of a pole may not be correct, and most likely isn't. The image that we see, a horse for example, is not the truth. However, what we see is truthful. Although it is not the truth it is truthful in that it resembles the truth. But where is the distinction drawn better sheer error and truthfulness. If you see a shadow of something move out of the corner of your eye, and think of a predatory animal to the point that for a moment you think there is a predatory animal there and not just the shadow of bushes moving in the wind is your perception of the truth of what is happening truthful or simply wrong. Ones perception does not resemble the truth but does that mean their is no truth in ones perception at all? In terms of trying to ascertain the truth, such a perception is wrong. However, this does not mean that their is not truth to be gained seeing as actuality can still be gleaned in that there was a motion in the bushes. But does this not imply that truthfulness is merely an inaccurate representation of the truth? I believe truthfulness has an importance in itself beyond that which it reflects the truth. For example, should you happen to find out that someone you know well and care about has actually committed some act previously that you definitely do not approve of, such as murder, should your perception of them change? You knew, you cared about the person after they had committed such a terrible act.

Those evil people who exaggerate to get their point across ...
<<I can't believe you would destroy the one thing I have worked so hard on all this time!!!!>>
<<Ok, I am sorry I knocked your plant over, it was a mistake, here, let me help set it back in the pot for you. >>

People use dramatic language to try and convey their opinions. A small issue, judging from the language used, can often seem to be of catastrophic importance. Sometimes it really makes me wonder if people need to use such a dramatic lexicon in order to make their issue appear to be important when really it isn't. If something is important, isn't it going to be quite apparent regardless of the hyperbolic camouflage you hide it behind? I am going to chose to believe that if someone should exaggerate an issue then it means that they themselves don't even think that the issue itself is important enough so that they decorate it in dramatic terms to make is sound more important. As such, I will treat such an issue with less importance then that which I would attribute to it without all the excess...waste.
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The use of the word "They"
English lacks a gender neutral third person pronoun. He bought it for her. What if you don't know the gender of a person? Do you refer to them as "it"? It bought it for it? The French simply use the masculine version, il or ils in the plural, to describe the gender neutral case. However in these times of gender neutrality and in a language that does not distinguish between gender in inanimate objects, I believe that simply referring to all cases where the gender is unknown as him or he is insufficient. I believe that "they" should be incorporated into the English language to make up for this deficiency. For example, "I heard a story about someone who was seen walking their dog and they had the strangest hairstyle" In this case the "someone" identifies that the person is singular, and the "they" implies that the gender is not known or is irrelevant. Just as orally there is no difference between il and ils in French, there should be no difference between they in the singular and plural. You would never say, "They went to the store" without first demonstrating who or what the pronoun "they" represents. It is as correct to say "My friends Bill and Janet, they went to the store," as is to say "...a random person I met on the streets, they went into the store." Unfortunately, this isn't my own idea as the Webster dictionary proposed this idea. Since when this dictionary become a reference for grammar and not definitions I don't know. English is a language spawned from so many other languages, we incorporate elements from a huge variety of sources which is why English is simultaneously the most flexible and the most difficult to learn. Ergo, it is possibly the easiest language in which to add or modify words. The point is that I am going to spend the rest of my life furthering this cause! I will experience Satyagraha and refuse to accepted the mindless sexism inherent in our language!!! Why should it matter if some generic person is male or female, they are merely "they".
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The Matrix Religion.
{Unfortunately, this is not actually my own idea. I was tricked into going to a church service by a bunch of friends and this is what the pastor talked about} Basically the premise was in drawing the parallel between the matrix and the exodus. In the matrix the humans have been enslaved by a treacherous machine race and are being asked to put their faith in one man who will lead them, via miracles, to freedom. The exodus consists of the story of God's peoples, who were enslaved by the Egyptians. They trusted Moses to lead them through the parting of the Red sea, this great miracle, to a free life in their own land. {my own ideas will ensue}
The movie(s) are about a whole bunch of issues but some pertinent ones are the concepts of faith, belief, love and struggle. It is these issues which are at the forefront of all religion. People have gone as far as to ban the matrix in Egypt as it "tackles the issue of the creator and his creations, searching the origin of creation and the issue of compulsion and free will." However, it is not as if the Matrix trilogy was created without this in mind. The only human city is called "zion", a name which doesn't exactly follow any of its dictionary definitions, yet is a very obvious reminder of Jewish people and Israel. It is as if the matrix was planned to be alluding to the exodus in some ways. The matrix is popular on a number of different level: it contains breaking edge wire-fu fight scenes and CGI that are simply very cool to watch but also it addresses several core human value in a world which, hey, just might be true.
To the matrix page
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"As you adequately put, the problem is choice" {Matrix Reloaded, the Architect}
What exactly is it that makes us choose between options? Fate? God? Random chance? I believe that every choice we make is backed by 3 things: Our genetic coding, our conditioning and a randomization factor resulting from the creative imperfections of the human mind. What you do is inscribed within your genes. Not only does it define what our choices are in that our genetic coding controls, to a degree, what we can do (ie, how big our muscles are, intellectual prowess, ect..) but also our genes control how we view our choices. The genetically intelligent will consistently be thinking on a higher level, a level that will be prone to making decisions of intellectual value. However, this is not enough. Clearly two identical twins will not live identical lives and make all the same choices. The difference there is in conditioning. The two people will always exist in different environments, will always have slightly different perspectives. One twin forced to live on the streets all their (their being singular and gender neutral) life will have radically different opinions and therefore make radically different choices to the twin who was lucky enough to spends their entire life living in an upper class society. Thus, if you control the input, you control the output. A choice is dependant on the information, the conditioning, that a person receives. How will anyone be able to think of logical solutions when they have not received the correct input? O right, those wonderful things called intuitive leaps. Humans are capable of coming up with solutions to problems when they have not been informed of the steps to tackle the solution, or even how to perform any of the individual steps. The reason that intuition exists is not some superior intellectual ability engraved in the human genome but by virtue of the fact that the human brain is imperfect. A computer can take a limited amount of data and perform calculations on it at blindingly fast speeds, speeds no human could ever hope to achieve. Where a computer can do long division in milliseconds, it take incomparably longer for a human to do such a mundane, computational task. . This does not mean that a human is stupid compared to a computer, merely different. A human can contain an enormous amount of information, all of which is subconsciously available and makes connections between the data to arrive at new ideas. Random synapses in the brain form new pathways between neurons to order the data in different ways. The brain can rationalize whether this new connection is better then a previous one or not. As such, while the brain can spend ages attempting to find a solution to a problem that a computer could find incredibly quickly, it is possible for a connection to be made that will far surpass the exhaustive comparative analysis of a computer. The human brain knows a series of facts and from them extrapolate new information. This new information is not guaranteed to be correct, and often isn't, however it is possible that such an extrapolation of data will create an idea beyond that which a computer could develop. I knew basic facts such as, I liked writing polemical works and quotations, I preferred using the computer medium to the written and that people made personal web pages. I have known all these facts for a long time however it was only recently that my brain made the connection that perhaps I would enjoy my own personal web page. I extrapolated this idea from ones I already knew. It is not guaranteed to be correct, who knows, I could end up hating working on a web page. This randomization factor is compounded as people start extrapolating data from data that they extrapolated, and so on. When we dream, random synapses fire off and our brain tries to extrapolate stories in the forms of visual and audio to explain the random data presented to it by the random firings of synapses. Dreams obviously aren't true, but they can be truthful in that they reflect how our brain deals with certain, random, data. As such, two people with identical genes AND identical conditioning will not always make the same choices. If you where born again at the time your were first born with none of your memories, would you still be reading this exactly now? I don't believe this to be the truth, the randomness of the human brain does not allow for it. Genetics merely dictates how we go about extrapolating the data, with how much logic and intelligence we do this and conditioning merely dictates the data in our brains from which we extrapolate such possibilities. Ergo, genetics and conditioning change the probabilities of choices, they do not guarantee that a certain choice will be made.
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Music does not pretend to be a concrete science with practical applications in the real world. It is merely a medium through which the musician can pour their emotions, thoughts, feelings, passions, hates and loves through their technical facility with an instrument. No human is ever capable of producing on an instrument that which they experience. No audience will ever be able to listen to a performance and completely experience everything that has gone into the piece of music, however; they are capable of experiencing a rough approximation of what the musician envisions-they are capable of seeing a shadow of it. All of music consists of attempting to portray the music in the purest form, as it would exist in a "World of Sounds." As such, the music-not the the audio waves we hear, but the expression of all of ones soul-is more real then the shadow of reality that playing an instrument can achieve.

Whether this is true or not, there is a definite advantage to thinking of music in such a manner. There are two very separate elements to the production of music. The most practiced, is ones technical facility with a particular instrument. Learning to be able to play that which one want to play, learning to play as we envision the sound to be. This involves learning the speed at which the piano key must be hit, the strength of which the string must be plucked or the rate at which air must pass through the clarinet for a certain volume to be achieved: mechanical movements that alone result in nothing, but together create music. These processes for the production of music become engrained into a musicians mind to the point of being subconscious, such that they do not even need to be thought about. Technical facility is also used extensively in any particular piece, as the notes, with respect to time, the volume of each note and the tone of each note must be learnt. However, no matter how much time a musician spends learning the music, following the direction of the composer and practicing the music until it flows fluidly under their fingers, if the musician does not understand how the music would be in the World of Sounds, if the musician does not hear how the music should sound, then there is no way the audience will be able to appreciate at the highest levels of an expression of emotion. A pertinent example occurs frequently with the piano when you will have a series of moving chords, playing dozens of notes a measure. One can learn the notes perfectly, they can play it all at the volume designated by the composer with the appropriate tone and strength, however if they do not understand where each note is going, which notes are part of the same harmony, how the harmonies relate to the whole, there is no possible way that the audience will be able to hear how the music could be, how the music should be. When the musician - as I have myself had to do on countless occasions - takes the time to envision how the passage should sound, analyze the passage to understand how all the notes relate to each other, that the musician is then capable of placing the incredibly slight and almost unconscious differences in key speed and strength so as to be able to play the music not as the notes dictate, but as an approximation of how the music would sound in an ideal world of pure sound. The final work cannot be achieved from mere structural analysis of the composition. Composers do not analyze the way chord tones mesh together and do it to create music. They hear what they are trying to write down in the language of music in their heads from the World of Sounds. It is through this that a single chord can be repeatedly played on the ukulele and while it takes an enormous effort to try and single a single string (for example, a middle string being the hardest) as louder then the rest, it is relatively simple to hear how the chord should sound, with all the strings relative to one another, and then when you play the chords with this thought in mind the subconscious skills that you know come into play and the imperceptible accelerations/decelerations of strum speed give the sound that can only be achieved accurately by thinking of how the sound should be. On the drum kit, it is almost impossible to continuously think of what every arm and leg is doing while playing complex beats. As such to make the sounds pure, 90% of what one concentrates on is not the majority of individual beats, one listening to how the sound SHOULD be, and the arms automatically get into the beat, almost without thinking. It is only then when the beat is already going that one can listen to the sound as it would be in the World of Sounds and change elements to the drumming. Throw in a triplet on the high hat amongst running eights. Throw in a snare/bass drum switch; add a complicated fill: all of these additions are added by envisioning the sound as it occurs in the world of sounds and filling it in. I do not count beats when I play. But i guarantee that the minor switches occur on the bar line, the larger fills occur every 4 or 8 bars and the shifts between particular styles occur on the 8 or 16 or 24 bars. It is not through mechanical application that this sound is able to purely flow through the drum kit, it is through envisioning how the sound would be in the world of forms.

My random musings.....
~If you float on the dreams of others, when will you learn to fly?
~Your so called Intuition is merely entopic success
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Currently the authors are listed alphabetically by last last name. All the authors are ones where in the last few years that I have read more then a couple books of.

Isaac Asimov
Ben Bova
Terry Brooks
Orson Scott Card
Tom Clancy
James Clavel
Michael Creighton (sp)
Author C. Clarke
Fredrick Forsythe
John Grisham
James Michener (sp)
Robert Silverberg
Wilbur Smith
J.R.R. Tolkein