Nietzsche and Runaway Audio Consumption


Came across this today. A lot of posts bring up the issue of "how much is enough?" or "when is audio consumption justified" etc.

Does this Nietzsche aphorism apply to audio buying? You be the judge! 

Friedrich Nietzsche“Danger in riches. — Only he who has spirit ought to have possessions: otherwise possessions are a public danger. For the possessor who does not know how to make use of the free time which his possessions could purchase him will always continue to strive after possessions: this striving will constitute his entertainment, his strategy in his war against boredom. 

Thus in the end the moderate possessions that would suffice the man of spirit are transformed into actual riches – riches which are in fact the glittering product of spiritual dependence and poverty. They only appear quite different from what their wretched origin would lead one to expect because they are able to mask themselves with art and culture: for they are, of course, able to purchase masks. By this means they arouse envy in the poorer and the uncultivated – who at bottom are envying culture and fail to recognize the masks as masks – and gradually prepare a social revolution: for gilded vulgarity and histrionic self-inflation in a supposed ‘enjoyment of culture’ instil into the latter the idea ‘it is only a matter of money’ – whereas, while it is to some extent a matter of money, it is much more a matter of spirit.” 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Cambridge University Press. (p. 283-4, an aphorism no. 310)

I'm pretty sure @mahgister will want to read this one! (Because they speak so artfully about avoiding the diversion that consumption poses to the quest for true aesthetic and acoustic excellence.)

128x128hilde45

@mahgister 

´´  i thank all for your patience with my loneliness...´´ 

It is lonely at the top .

Only Christ or Buddah are at the top...

I am not at the bottom for sure but i am alone because of retirement and because of restrictions here caused by this world crisis...

I have many friends here then i am not alone ... I only feel alone in my room and when the screen is down in these crisis days...

More are way more alone than i ever was, but i am not the best stoic...

Merry Christmast to you....

 

You seems yo have an extended culture and free spirit.

 

Einstein at some point was surrounded by a lot of people . He must have felt alone

when only 2 or 3 person in the world , were able to understand what he was talking about.

 

I am not Tesla nor Einstein...I never felt alone in ALL my life...

I was surrounded each day by all the most brilliant students from all fields for 35 years...

Then it is a schock to be retired...

I concentrated on my audio system solutions and music...

But my audio system is now optimal...

i listen music walk read and thats all in winter... In summer i use my 2 bikes and i am very happy... Winter is hard for me...

Yes i am a free spirit i never had a boss and never lived in any other way than in my own house almost all of my life....

For the culture i studied english badly because i never spoke it where i live and latin and greek and after that philosophy poetry, linguistic, semiotic and all mystics of all religions and read about mathematics heavily all my life...I even study astrology, indian and occidental , but never mention it here because it is too easy for an idiot to post stupid remarks... Astrology is very important to understood history, ancient sciences, other cultures and psychology and even world events...

The best contemporary book is "cosmos and psyche" by Tarnas... A stupendous proven analysis of the last 250 hundred years by synchronsation of events and planets alignment ...like someone once said not only idiots but billionairs consult astrologers guess why?

i take a volontary retirement few months before the crisis i was not in the obligation to do so guess why? i see all the crisis to arrive for december 2019 ...like i advise one friend to stop play wall street for september 2001...Astrology is very easy to verify if you study it ... Only James Randi uncultured materialist  idiot speak about what they never study themselves...It is like in audio people argue about anything save the most important factors : acoustic, they really think like primitive peoplethat the sound come directly from the gear and not from the coupling of the gear/rroom/house/ears... it takes me only few months to figure out after my basic gear choices were made after some errors in my buying spree...

i could perfectly understand now why astrology is not total non sense... Guess why Carl Gustav Jung a master astrologer also worked on that with Wolfgang Pauli one of the greatest genius of modern quantum physic ?

Dont tell anyone here by the way or i will erase this post... 😊😁😊

 

Merry christmast my friend...

 

I go almost every day in a Café Bistro . I Just drink a coffee.

It is almost always the same people that are there . I talk with some.

Then come back in my appartment.  Read , listen to music , take a nap.

One houre at a time.  Tomorow will be another day. I will see then .

Christmas …. the worst time of the year……

Have a ´´ not too bad ´´ holyday period 

243 posts , in some parts of the world this prodigious blather would equate to a life of languid yet bittersweet  torpor…

If you read my post recommendation about books, articles, and writers and why i recommend them i dont think that  my posts are not interesting ... It is my excuse..

But i cannot deny that the OP was right about my heavy too lenghty prose...

Thanks OP to take patience with me...

I really wish you the best for your family and you...

I am very thankful for your patience...

Great remark !

Boltzman was a so great genius it is unbelievable and he kill himself because he was mocked by clowns...

But i think that the view of Karl Friston about the analysis of diisipative structure away from equilibrium and his free energy principle minimizing principle is a better way to explain these posts and to add to Boltzman thermodynamic cosmical principle...His mathematical simple treatment is very elegant and somewhat simple...He takes at the root the question what is a diferential equation and what is his relation to time...

Living structures are the mystery nowadays not so much atoms...

I think living system will teach us more about atoms than atoms would ever teach us by themselves alone about living system..

 

 

https://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/a-neuroscientists-theory-of-everything

 

merry christmast djones

 

I just view it as energy conservation.

You think by decree like the pope?

There is no such thing as runaway audio consumption.

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@tubebuffer  Please do not generalize about philosophers, or put them down. All kinds of people become philosophers. We are doing our best to make sense of the world and act kindly toward other people. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Take some peace into your heart, hold it there, and let it out by being nice to someone else.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

There is more knowledge about humanity to be found in art than philosophy.

The more that the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

If you can't acknowledge that this may be true, then is your mind really inquiring?

 

The more that the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

If you can’t acknowledge that this may be true, then is your mind really inquiring?

 

 

The more we study the universe the more complex and the more comprehensible it seems the less you can reduce it to a simple unit of understanding... it is then a never ending process to be explanable and an opening IRREDUCIBLE interelated trees of mysteries also AT THE SAME TIMES....The best philosopher who ever explained that was the Greatest romanian thinker in philosophy and the greatest romanian poet...Lucian Blaga...A genius of complete originality and a philosopher of science vastly unrecognized...like Goethe is but for other reasons...

why what is more and more explanable without end stay anyway a mystery forever?

Because it is like a living system the more you comprehend it the less you can reduce it to be a simplistic isolated unit from the WHOLE to be undestood by itself alone...

One thing is sure The universe is not NOISE or Brownian motion but music...

By the way if you want to understand Brownian motion study Brown, Einstein, Wiener, Kolmogorov and ESPECIALLY Mandelbrot... All of them give a definition that EXPANDED with time and knowledge, then you will understand that seemingly pointless noise hide sometimes music of its own ...

https://www.lukethorburn.com/fBm/

Saying that the universe is pointless is only showing a lack of perceptual imagination...Then a lack of artistic creative intuition...Bad artist only create pointless object...By the way if technological idolatry make people completely stupid most of the times, true science awake spirit ALWAYS...

Knowledge is not science and will never be it only and science is not technology and will never be it only ....

 

 

You are right about that....One of the greatest thinkers of all times were artists...Goethe is the foremost example with Leonardo da Vinci... Any truly great scientist is also an artist and in most case often very spiritual men...(not religious fanatics )

There is more knowledge about humanity to be found in art than philosophy.

Lonely philandering audiophile seeking adoration about sexual prowess on a HiFi website…. i am guessing you are taking the blue pill for senility @tubebuffer 

I am a girl from the northcountry kind of robot

Mahgister,

You do simplify things though your posts makes Faulkner a monument  of succinctness. Yes, I know English is not your first language. Folks desire to explain things. When things move fast or become very complex simplistic (or convoluted) reactions start to take hold. We are in uncharted territory and to think the bankers or 400 year old intellectuals have a clue as to the future is pie in the sky. Maybe the chaos of the internet will check cynical manipulation. 

Neither James nor Rick. 

Perhaps you must read my posts before commenting and asking clear questions..

For example you distorted completelky what i said...

I never said that Mandeville was a Nostradamus... I said that he was a scientist, a doctor by the way, who figured for himself how the human animals is workable... He did not ever wanted to predict the future...But some very great thinkers and less amicable folks AFTER him takes advantage of his understanding of the animal aspects of humans to control them... It appear only conspiracies for ignorant... It is history written in books to study...

Then try to understand clearly before posting...Reading my ideas about Mandeville like if he was Fu-Manchu chinese vilain in a James Bond movie is CHILDISH play...

 

 

And my post are badly written but it is impossible to explain more SUCCINTLY than the way i did what i intend to explain ... Take for example my last post above is it not a clear one with even a reference to an underestimated Romanian philosopher and to a doctorate thesis about Brownian motion ? i spoke here to explain why and how universe made sense... By the way the notion of fractal Brownian motion is there to illustrate under the deep apparent noise the LONG RANGE CORRELATION between events in time and some aspect of the cosmic memory... The link to this article refer to the mathematical doctorate thesis about fractal brownian motion...In a word behind or under noise there is some music or some meaningfull movements... Saying that the universe is pointless is popular in atheist fanatic circle... I dont mind about fanatics be them religious or atheist...They partake the same simplistic zeal...

And by the way all what i said is absolutely not simplistic... But i must simplify yes ...I cannot wrote a thesis in audio thread....

Mahgister,

You do simplify things though your posts makes Faulkner a monument of succinctness. Yes, I know English is not your first language. Folks desire to explain things. When things move fast or become very complex simplistic (or convoluted) reactions start to take hold. We are in uncharted territory and to think the bankers or 400 year old intellectuals have a clue as to the future is pie in the sky. Maybe the chaos of the internet will check cynical manipulation.

Neither James nor Rick.

Science by itself by the way will NEVER explain the universe...(try to study Goedel to understand why if you dont like mathematiucal logic try the sufi mystic Rumi)

Man is not only a brain....

If you want a one word explanation and no other lenghty post of mine...

This word is love...

But you can replace it by Christ name or AUM...

Is it enough succinct?

 Anyway i feel less alone today thanks to all for their questions or for their kind patience with a lonely fool....

 

@jpwarren58 Tsk tsk! (And I thought "trigger" was just a horse in Hollywood. Do you spike your hamsters' water with caffeine, too? ;-) )

Apologies to all. M has gotten me to rethink the importance of mysticism in dealing with the vagaries of life. Just exhorting brevity and making a point as to how we are living an experiment with neither goal nor control. Merry Christmas to all.

Great thread and relevant to the season.

 

Neither Orange nor Julius.

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Perhaps we “audiophiles “ owe Mr. N a little consideration. He might’ve been an audiophile?

 So often, when my Audiofoo buddies come over for a listening session, the first thing they do is blah, blah blah…talk about equipment, cars, etc…

 They need to take a vow of silence like the kid in “Little Miss Sunshine “ and Shut The …. Up”! 
 That vow of silence can do wonders for a spiritual approach to music, not equipment. (Good equipment helps, don’t get me wrong…)
 

How bout imagination. Based on my observations, adults seem to organize and run every moment of their children's lives. I recall as child running free in Michigan prairies, much time to wonder about nature's secrets. Too many are far from nature to imagine and wonder, mysticism isn't even a known word. Without immersion in nature you can't begin to know our place in time and universe.

Great post sns thanks...

It is the reason why the book about Goethe method the greatest unrecognized natural scientist is so important..

When we live through this method of "seeing" and realize that we never has seen any animal in our life but only LABELLED with a name coming from habit a living object, we fall off our chair the older we are...

I was fortunate enough to read Wolfgang Schad first book (300 pages) 35 years ago and falling from my chair i did not broke my back... 😊

I just bought for 120 bucks few weeks ago the new edition completed after his long life work , 1300 pages +1500 illustrations...

A testimony to the vision and "rigorous "exact imagination" method designed by Goethe whose intelligence when assessed humble us all...Only Aristote and Archimedes compared... Think about a man with the genius of Shakespeare in his own language and his scientific vision and experience and discoveries in morphology and evolution on par with Darwin, and a view about colors that open research about light and physiology of colors experience out of the Newton box...

Nature is the only altar where God speak his words like in the first days of creation : all, minerals, vegetals, animals, and humans appear coming directly from the 7 first day... Only in cities million of years hide us from the explicit metamorphosed beginning of wild nature taking with it his implicit mysteries for us to "see" with the right gaze...

Children under 7 years old see without labels... They are the only masters...

Each animals in his personal  environment is a book whose chapters are parts of his morphology and main three systems: the polarity of nerve-sense and metabolic-limb systems and the mediating circulatory-respiratory system ...

"Seeing" this dynamical polarities playing at all scales of the relation between the animals and his environment is loosing the "scales" veiling our gaze...

Goethe wrote with the same method the most beautiful book ever written about plants..." the metamorphosis of plant"...

Discusasing one day with his best friend Schiller, himself a thinker of the highest order, he answer to Schiller gazing his drawing of the archetypical dynamic of the original plant and making to Goethe the remark that this drawing reprent no existing plant but only an "idea"; my dear friend i must say to you then that i am very happy to see ideas with my concrete eyes.... Think about that deep observation....

The word genius about Goethe is well deserved...

Why Goethe is not so much well known as scientist: Because it is not the amount or importance of his discoveries that reveal his genius or a unique idea like the darwinian paradigm but it is a deep method or inquiring without looking ONLY in the parts but perceiving by "exact imagination" the whole itself all around us... Stupendous ... This is the yoga of zoology and botany.... This explain the complete reverence from many geniuses for Goethe and the huge influence of Goethe on all people, the more intelligent they are the more deep... I cannot insist enough on that... Test by yourself... But reading Goethe is not like reading a philosopher by arguments and reason... It is a transformative artistic and scientific experience OVER any LOGIC and ANY words and way over language itself...

This great poet who describe in the Faust all the contemporary hubris, and scientist was also the more spiritual man in front of the sacred nature... His devotion all his life shatter all our distraction and sleepwalking...

The list of those who place Goethe at the center of their life is very long... Those who put Goethe aside paid the price... For example Goethe is the geatest phenomenologist in German language over Hegel and over Husserl...The "cul de sac" where the mathematician Husserl put himself with his phenomenology inclined to a formal never ending chain of abstractions is completely unknown in the concrete phenomenology of Goethe where the phenomena spoke by themselves WITHOUT any theory to replace them or hide them...Husserl himself so wise it is is a children who speak too much compared to Goethe...

The only known man who is goethean before Goethe is Leonardo Da Vinci whose method is almost the same...The two men are artist and scientist devoted to "exact imagination" contemplation and understanding and perceiving of living forms...They are exact twin separated by centuries...

Verify by yourself...

http://www.adonispress.org/threefoldness.php

@ rodman99999

Being a long time dog lover and companion I quite enjoyed and can concur with your post.🐕

In regards to people and spirit - my thoughts are turned to a particular couple (husband and wife) of friends who left a life long impression. Though they were very successful in their business enterprises and quite well to do they never once flaunted their success, who they were or what they had. We shared with them many wonderful and memorable times and their radiant, kind and generous spirit made them a pleasure to be with. When they were both taken in a tragic accident, the world lost two beautiful people who were the very definition of spirit. Our hearts were broken and these many years later, still hurt.......Jim

@sns , great observation on the micromanaging of kids and not having the proper setting to raise them in. Before tags and memes, my parents were the "free range" types who instilled trust in us. The only rules were to be back by dinner time, or before sunset.

Things were different back then which accounts for the results. That could be part of the combo that made us the "greatest generation". Having nature at our disposal allows us to connect and develop. Surrounded by concrete doesn't. 

Neither Tom nor Jerry

All the best,
Nonoise

Some very interesting opening remark, from a thesis related completely to the Goethe /Nietzsche relation ,about Nietzsche opinion about Goethe :

«Of these intellectual ancestors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a writer and
polymath who lived in the German town of Weimar, had a premier status. The
numerous quotations and references to Goethe, indicate that he was constantly on
Nietzscheʼs mind from his Gymnasium education in Schulpforta to his final
productive days in Turin.6 And what clearly distinguishes Goethe from other
prominent characters in Nietzscheʼs writings is that he received more favourable
coverage than any other: praise was rife and criticism scarce. Nietzscheʼs
intellectual transformation never required him to “shut doors” on Goethe, who even
seems to have been a major guidance for Nietzsche when he turned against his
earlier heroes of Schopenhauer and Wagner. As Adrian Del Caro puts it, ʻGoethe
was one of a few individuals whose image kept apace with Nietzscheʼs selfinflating image over the yearsʼ. Arguably, he was the only modern man in that
category»

Thats say a lot more about Goethe than my posts... N. is one of the most intelligent man by all acounts that lived in the last centuries...Think about that...

«While Nietzsche constantly cited Goethe as someone who truly lived, Kant was someone who never did so, neither physically nor mentally. Goetheʼs vitality and passionate way of living and thinking was lacking in Kant: his thoughts were sterilised -and his thinking was merely a biography of his head.»

This is the reason why the great philosopher Ernst Cassirer, writing his philosophy of symbolic forms, coorected his Kantian perspective from the beginning of his life toward a complete Goethean phenomenological view on which is based his deep semiotics of forms...

The ultimate reason why Goethe is the greatest thinker of the last 3 centuries in Occidental civilization is simple : Goethe was UNTOUCHED by the pervasive NOMINALISM at the root of the TECHNOLOGICAL progress and power of European culture from the 13Th century till this day....But technology is NOT science...There must be a balance in the soul between ideas and living perceptive experience, Goethe is this corrective balance with his concrete phenomenology....

Nominalism was the personal foe to struggle against for the greatest american thinker, the founder of phenomenological semiotic, Charles Sanders Peirce... Because ultimately the technological power make possible by the nominalist revolution is also a chocking, a stifling and a smothering of real EXPERIENCED science...

The pure nominalist extreme thinking is illustrated nowadays by a cult of technology which is the more ANTIHUMAN movement which was ever designed on earth... Stalinism and Hitlerism were a walk in the park if the power is seized by these corporates fools...Think about Ray Kurzweil and Bill Gates folly among others....The destruction of the soul is the goal of transhumanism... The ultimate incarnation of the nominalism extreme trend...

A balance was need between Ockham and Plato, like in Aristotle time....Goethe was the new Aristotle ...

https://www.academia.edu/8484845/Nietzsches_Goethe_A_Portrait_of_a_Good_European

By the way the experience of music and sound NEED to be understood by a phenomenological approach... Why?

Because sound and music are completely unexplanable without a lived experience of physical acoustic and psycho-acoustic at the same times in our room...

Sound must be seen like a dynamic surface and volume and the dynamical micro structure of the playing timbre must be perceived concretely...Music must be seen so to speak...

Physical acoustic and psycho-acoustic are 2 faces of the same experience united in one perception, divided by nominalist technology or attitude...

The sound and music and the internal qualities of a resonant body are perceived DIRECTLY through the waves-image transmitted by the air...

Without that goal and experience people are in the cult of engineering marketting buying spree or listen sound and music guided only by their conditioned taste and habit... Discovery cannot be produced by our taste only or by our habits...But by listenings experiments...

I think that my posts are all in the spirit of this thread and absolutely not off-topic save for those who cannot think anymore...

Feel free to criticize me BUT with arguments only....

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@femoore12 - I for one am very happy that science and technology have replaced 'mysticism', and I don't need anybody to tell me what I need or don't need in my life. It would be a boring world if we were all the same!  What works for one does not necessarily work for everybody else.

Happy Holidays!! 

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It is not about science and technology to be replaced by "mysticism" at all...

If you understand that this way you are beside the point...

My posts are about the way science need to be A LIVED EXPERIENCE not learned dogmas and propositional sentences recipe...

Putting in my mouth the alleged fact that science and technology dont work is distorting completely what i spoke about...

I am not a nazi proponent of taking the science and putting science under the direction of old paganism.... Goethe would have never be a nazi....The non- goethean existientalist ex phenomenologist Heidegger was....

I am not either a cultist of technology disguised in science clothes in the transhumanist cult...

Anyway we cannot convince people to go from comic book to philosophy it seems...

Following his own path yes this is right, but ask yourself where it goes....

Slaves are free to keep their chain...

Crocodiles are free to keep their tastes...

Man are free to look for some light coming from Great men of the past....Marvel comics scientism propaganda is not Goethe reading...

Try someone in America then : Charles Sanders Peirce....

Merry Christmast...

Every human walk in his own shoe and the wise dont blink about that...

Alas! i am not always wise....😁😊😊😊

I am used to speak with students looking for truth... Ripe men working for life and  money are not my usual interlocutor...

I apologize for my rant here even if i am spot on the matter of the thread...

I dont want to hurt anyone feeling but i did in spite of my good will...

Merry Christmast....

 

 

@femoore12 - I for one am very happy that science and technology have replaced ’mysticism’, and I don’t need anybody to tell me what I need or don’t need in my life.

 

 

 

@mahgister,

"Guess how the first world war was programmed to be, and especially the Versailles treaty after it was programmed to create central bankers control and the second war inevitable modulo the Hitler puppet controlled by banks who are the ONLY reason why Hitler was able to seize power...

You know how Lenin was able to go from Swiss to Russia with enough money to finance his propaganda ? Do you think he sell the gold jewels of his mother or he make a fortune in business? 😊 Ask to the first Russian who receive him from debarking the train...Who was with him?"

 

Great stuff!

Sometimes you will have to join the dots yourself because no one else will.

 

"The more we study the universe the more complex and the more comprehensible it seems the less you can reduce it to a simple unit of understanding... it is then a never ending process to be explanable and an opening IRREDUCIBLE interelated trees of mysteries also AT THE SAME TIMES....The best philosopher who ever explained that was the Greatest romanian thinker in philosophy and the greatest romanian poet...Lucian Blaga...A genius of complete originality and a philosopher of science vastly unrecognized...like Goethe is but for other reasons...

why what is more and more explanable without end stay anyway a mystery forever?"

 

Isn't it a question of how much understanding we need?

And to what aims?

 

A fantastic amount of ingenuity and effort seems to be deployed in the gaining of capital. So much so that  most of those who devote themselves to this end often end with terminally increasing cases of OCD that they can never shake off.

Klaus Schwab himself is an interesting case. Not only does he look and sound like a Bond villain with Rothschild connections, particulary for man of his age (83) seems unusually obsessed with 'solving' the world's problems.

Now if the silly bugger had devoted his time and energy towards better pursuits, such as the improvement of audio playback, he could have ended a superhero, instead of a supervillain.

 

 

We need enough understanding to move our heart in the right direction....

the aims is the only one truth: all is one...Or only love exist at the end and in the beginning and during all time for eternity...

Not knowing that is the only tragedy...who want for his children a world without hope nor love, a world where exist ONLY technology ?

Knowledge is science moving by the Heart/brain/body toward unity....Technology by itself alone is death by stiffening increased rigidity of our onw body in a hive collective mindset....

Knowledge is not science alone and only nor science is technology alone and only...

These three are a dynamical beating musical polarity like the polarity in mammals body between the nerve-sense and metabolic-limb systems and the mediating circulatory-respiratory system... Knowledge is the EMBODIED mediating system between embodied science and embodied technology...

Computer programming and A.I. is a powerful tool but the reduction of this complex polarity to a dead logic and to a dead "perfect" world...

Guess who want to sell you that?

In his " Faust" Goethe call the seller : Mephistophélès....

Before the invention of modern  comic book, the "Faust" was the favorite "comic" book across Germany... Our modern comic books by Marvel corporation are only a weakened version of this mother of all comic books...The father of all comic books being the Bible...

 

 

Isn’t it a question of how much understanding we need?

And to what aims?

I haven’t read all the way thru yet, to catch up on this entire thread ... but plan to when I get home late tonight from my Mom’s house, which is where we all spend the majority of Christmas Eve day together, celebrating.

Although I have something I’d like to share now.

I tend to be a systems thinker, and am intrigued by how "all" things work (and don’t work), as a system. I don’t claim to be half as bright as a lot of the folks who hang out in this group, just bright enough, really, that I can follow along with and enjoy most of it. Given all of that, I think @mahgister has said it quite well w/ the following quote:

"I think living system will teach us more about atoms than atoms would ever teach us by themselves alone about living system." @mahgister

I want to wish you ALL a joyous, and happy holiday ... whatever version that may be for you. Even those of you who’re completely solo. As the OP, @hilde45 has pointed out in his post:

Thus in the end the moderate possessions that would suffice the man of spirit are transformed into actual riches. Nietzsche

this reminds me that we can all experience bliss from our enjoyment of this hobby of ours, regardless of our budget. The choice is ours.

And to you, @mahgister I think that is a very astute comment you made ... and I thank you for your wisdom and insight.

May we all get a good listening session in tomorrow.

Peace, to all of you ...

 

"If we think that the world of organisms is a world of machines, we will begin to treat each other as machines. That is the huge danger of this whole mechanistic model of organisms. That's this terrible nightmare coming true. My worry there was the worry expressed by William Blake: 'What seems to be is, to those to whom it seems to be and is productive of the most dreadful consequences to those to whom it seems to be.' "
Richard Strohman, PhD

Imagination is more powerful than anything real?

Why?

Because our own imagination is the mother of OUR reality... Without a father this mother deliver only half-dead monsters haunting her and created only by his uncontrolled dreams...

Guess who is the father?

Call it unity, God, love, spirit, the tao, the name dont matter because to deliver a children we need a mother AND a father....The names matter not....

 

By the way for my fellow english reader who love freedom...No spirit is so great and free than William Blake who contrary to Niesztche never fall for a science and technology without a soul...He was wise among the wisest and his prophecies and mythological poems are WARNING in the midst of the Great-Britain industrial age and Empire and technology of enslavement using Mandeville recipe book...Blake wrote ONLY  one prophecy about the destruction of mankind and of the soul...I cannot say how i love William Blake ... A true seer, poet and an artist engraver  impossible to forgot, the greatest engraver after Dûrer, and a genius akin to Old testament prophets...English people produced many giants, Blake is not the shortest of those...

Your kind words really moved me in my isolated Christmast...

I wish you the best with my prayer and heart....

And to you, @mahgister I think that is a very astute comment you made ... and I thank you for your wisdom and insight.

If someone dont see miracles and moving mysteries in sound and music like in light and colors , he is blind and deaf, and know nothing about sciences...

Science is the altar of living experience...

Not a chain of dogmas based on conditioning of the mind set , a dead end, which is way worst than children faith which is a golden beginning ....

My greatest discovery here for the last 2 years was acoustic and psycho acoustic experience...This changed my life as a music lover...Any acoustic treatise is way more than a cooking book recipe  it is an invitation through experiments to experience  miraculous transformation of ourselves  through our own hearing experiments...

 

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I apologize if i misread you...femoore12

If science is the altar of living experiences...

Spiritual life is the material itself composing this altar...

Science without a spiritual life go nowhere save to death....

Science has nothing to do with robot programming, which is only a technology nothing more...

Science is an ethical mind-set toward understanding the phenomena without perturbating them TOO MUCH and especially without killing them ...

The only people who would contradict that are the monstruous corporations enslaving science in the name of power and greed...

Blake called the technology of the british industrial age satanic, not because he was against technology or science, but because of the way the power to be used sciences and technology to enslave mankind... It is not conspiracy it is PLAIN history...

The history only repeat today in a monstruous way way more hoorible than in Blake Times ...

I am optimist though because i see an incoming awakening around the world...

 

20 years ago interview of an enlightened scientist whose worst fears are coming true in the world....

 

 

 

Interview, Richard Strohman, PhD.

[Interview conducted in 2000; Previously published at the original Truth Barrier, 2009.]

Q: My understanding is that Gene Therapy, as a field, suffered a crisis after the death of Jesse Gelsinger, but it’s gaining momentum again...

A: Yes. It’s quick to wash out. Our memory of these things is so readily overcome by the next news hype about the newest gene and the newest potential cure. The world is full of potential cures that never happen.

Q: You lecture on the misinterpretations of genetic medicine, is that right?

A: My perspective on this is a little bit wider. It’s my new career, looking at the limitations of genetic determinism, looking at the shortcomings of the science that I myself practiced for 30 years.

I did a lot of work in MS, which is a real genetic disease. My take on that is that there are genetic diseases. GT is in theory something to be looked at but at the same time we have to say that there isn’t a single case of any genetic therapy that has ever worked successfully. Not one.

Q: But the other side claims success in France and so on

A: I don’t know where the data is. In the newspapers? All those people at Penn were totally carried away by their own hype. There’s always, in these medical centers, a resident bio-ethicist who is completely a spinner, what he’s there for is to acknowledge the difficulties and then explain them away.

But these people assume that molecular genetics can actually do what is says it can do. They prepare us for what they think is inevitable. Then they grease the skids for all these things to go forward.

I was interviewed by Swedish TV about Gelsinger.

The broadcast criticism is that if you take a simple case, putting genes into plants, genetically engineered plants, where the testing can be done on large numbers without having to worry about ethics, what you see is: If you put the gene in with a viral vector and the vector is there because - and here we get back to our old friend Peter Duesberg - it’s a strong promoter, the gene of choice will be expressed at levels it’s never expressed in nature so... this faucet of gene expression that is always on for this protein that we’re talking about now is itself a totally abnormal phenomenon. Another problem. In the lab you see that the gene is turned on [to make the] plant resistant to the pesticide. In that narrow analysis of success you see that the gene transferred was successful, its incorporated into the host genome, its stable, it can be inherited, third you see that the protein that the gene encodes for is present, it’s expressed. The unnaturalness tends to disappear. The questions that are not asked are: What other side effects [are there] of this gene transfer? It’s like going into a room full of people and inserting an opinion that they’ve never heard before and expecting it to go down without reverberations. In New York City, say. It never happens. And it never happens in these cells either.

Monsanto knows that this is true. All these corporate agricultural technologies know what’s going on but they willfully - and here is the deep ethical problem that science has to deal with and [isn’t] - it willfully chooses the narrowest boundaries for the evaluation of success. That’s a criminal act. And I think the FDA buys it.

When you have to use these methods in the lab, and apply your criteria of success then take that same criteria of success and, apply it to the goods and services that come out of the lab and into thousands of acres of cropland or into young men in Philadelphia hospitals - those narrow criteria are overwhelmed by the realities of the real world. And that’s the criminal act that’s going on here and it’s totally carried along by the chutzpah of these scientists and their ignorance of complex biology. That’s the best you can say for them because a lot of them are aware of the measurements that could be made to check on all this but are too expensive to make.

These people don’t want the FDA to approve any labeling of these things. We have a lot to learn from genetically altered foods that we can take over into the very rare events of genetic modifications in humans.

There’s a whole raft of new biology of DNA that these people are not aware of. The liquidity and fluidity of the genome itself in this to the slightest environmental perturbation in the process of gene transfer changes everything.

It’s the machine metaphor in biology. Biology is dominated by a mechanistic point of view. And it’s one of the profound mistakes. Living things [laughs] are not machines. They may act like machines but they’re not.

The science, which we need to attribute some good to, is totally capitulated to corporate interests, and how do we get out of this? It’s really hard stuff.

Q: How can we trace this historically? Where does it start?

A: It all started when Barbara McClintock [in the 1940s and 1950s] showed that genes could be transferred horizontally between organisms, and even between species, but when the technology got better and better, it became clear that you could manipulate genes in the lab and transfer normal genes. We were part of this picture in MS, we had animal models and we could do very simple experiments in the lab and transfer normal genes into the cells with the mutation. That’s what fed this hype that you could cure whole human beings or whole organisms, you could do very interesting things with individual cells, but that’s in culture under limited conditions.

So, yeah there was a lot of excitement about all of that but it wasn’t well thought through. We didn’t know a lot that we knew five years later about the complexity of the genome and its ability to become destabilized when you did these things. You could get a positive effect from putting in a good gene but you weren’t able to measure what the other side of that coin was. What was the response to the cell, what would it be like if it was in a whole body, interacting with this enormous computational array of possibility.

That’s why the corporations don’t want to look at it because it’s so complex. The amount of money and effort that would have to be put into that denies the technology. You can’t afford it; you have to take these shortcuts.

[These things are] transcalculational.

The whole idea of the ability of the simplest living organism to resist our scientific interpretation in any complete way I think is well accepted.

These are interactions that reach what’s called a catastrophe of computation. The computer people say that there is no computer that could make the calculation and there never will be such a computer.

Q: But GT depends on that not being the case right?

A: Right, there are two things. First, you shouldn’t expect that we could compute the organism from the genome, because the organism doesn’t compute the organism from the genome.

The organism computes itself from a vast array of data including genetic data. The idea of the success of GT is that you put a single gene in there and that it will be expressed and that the insertion and the accommodation to the insertion will be normal in all other respects. That’s an assumption. That’s a huge assumption

Q: But that’s what the whole thing is riding on.

A: That’s what the whole thing is riding on! And they’re avoiding all of the other [aspects.]

The only breakthrough I’ve seen, it was the last issue on the west coast last week’s issue AAA, their committee on germ line therapy has issued a report in which they say it’s too dangerous, should not be done with eggs and cells. Too many things that we do not know about and maybe cannot know.

The transfer of genes in such a way that they cannot be inherited.

Gene transfer should not be done in germ line cells, in eggs and sperm. This is the first time that the committee has given some signs of constraint to the corporate interests that they have to slow down. That the researchers must slow down

Q: Why was their alarm limited to gene line therapy?

A: That’s a good question. I don’t know.

If you understand what the assumption is that’s being made — there is no proper scientific response to that. There is no way that they can say, "Don’t worry about it, we’ll fix it."

If you get them that far, you say: "You mean to say you really don’t know what you’re doing?"

They don’t know what they’re doing.

They got into this idea that what we need to know is that there are gene programs that are responsible for the more complex traits of human beings and other organisms, and that if we really could understand totally the human genome, if we could know what it was in some sort of a printout, then all of a sudden somehow in the picture itself we would get some kind of illumination. It was almost like some kind of a religious experience was expected here. Some epiphany would come once this picture was published. Ten years ago we were all yawning at that, or most of us were anyway, but not in the ranks, not in the training of young people, these molecular laboratories went right ahead with this whole notion of somehow everything would be understood and wait and see and don’t sell science short this and what it’s all about waiting and blah blah blah and that was it, and its still it, and these guys are out there with their big computers and they don’t understand the limits the way physicists do. And the physicists seem to be remaining silent on all this, you’ve noticed. So the HGP [Human Genome Project] is now desperately looking for a way to explain what it’s going to do with the data that it’s got and it’s an oncoming embarrassment that is almost at the level of the HIV/AIDS phenomenon. These people do not know how to go from the genome to the organism, period. They can’t do anything and the reason they can’t do anything is the reason that Tom Kuhn spelled out: If you’ve got a paradigm that’s losing steam you can’t turn it in for a new one until the new one is up and running. We don’t have a new paradigm up and running and we’re stuck with this and it’s very hard to work your way out.

Given the power and money of the corporate interests, this thing is going to play itself out. It all comes together around the applications. The HGP [Human Gene Project] is funded — and it was funded from the very beginning — in order to cure human diseases and to provide the wherewithal to increase life expectancy.

Japanese are going to live to be 90 soon, genes aren’t even mentioned.

This is another problem: Life expectancy has nothing to do with genetics.

The excitement came because there was a time fifteen years ago, in the ranks of biologists that clung to the view that there was something called "gene programs."

The only thing left open to them is this GT, using the fruits of the HGP and using molecular tools to feed this hype that’s trying to become a major industry. It’s servicing basic research.

They simply didn’t anticipate this reality. Well, they did but...they decided to overlook their worries. There were other patients who showed signs of sensitivity. There were some warning lights flashing there. What killed Jesse Gelsinger was this insistence on the narrow focus of accounting in the lab.

They don’t know what happened.

They don’t know what happened!

There are lots of reports about all kinds of things that can happen when you put foreign DNA into a cell but they’re all disregarded. There are papers showing the bizarre things that happen when you take cells in culture and put DNA into them and put them into an animal.

Q: What kinds of things?

A: Cells become sensitive, they exhibit a hypersensitivity response, any DNA sequence as small as 25 or so base pairs will generate really unpredictable reactions on the parts of the cells. The simple act of putting cells in culture in order to do this manipulation created genetic instabilities, which are inherited. This is seen very clearly in plant cells. The idea that you’re not generating with the experiment is the huge amount of variability about which you know nothing is... you overlook that at great danger to everybody.

Q: An industry gets born out of some moment of eureka, surely?

A: Right.

Q: How can we explain why they thought this would work?

A: It’s so simple, it’s like the HIV thing, you just can’t believe it.

They were doing all their experiments under controlled conditions in the lab which made them work, you could see the results. Everything changed in a way that was predictable. Of course what they didn’t show you was the stuff that happened that wasn’t predictable. But that’s all data thrown in the ash can. And you continue to do the experiments in different ways until you find the way that gives you the answer you want.

Q: Then the gravy train got rolling?

A: Right. In days gone by, science might have worked this out but its been so captured by these relationships with corporate means and the rush to force things from the laboratory to the marketplace that created all this. So the [true] method of science is an old one.

We never had this incessant urging [in the past] to produce something useful — what that means is profitable. And under those circumstances everybody is caught up in it. Everybody is caught up in it, grants, millions of dollars flowing into laboratories, careers are made.

Q: Didn’t the gene therapy hype come via AIDS via cancer?

A: Oh yeah, everything is due to genes, whether it’s a human gene, normal gene, or a viral gene. All causality starts with the gene.

Q: And where did that belief come from?

A: That comes, my dear from, Gregor Mendel. A straight line and a straight simple line its absurdly, grotesquely simple. Going from Mendel to medical centers is the most absurd thing in the world.

Q: Why?

A: Because Mendel described very simple traits in plants.

This is what I published one year ago, the data is that there are these diseases in humans to which you can ascribe a single gene causality, and for which you can have some hope of doing something. But if you looked in the world almanac for the extent to which any one of these genetic diseases or all of these genetic diseases combined come into play in looking at life expectancy or mortality rates they aren’t there. There are thousands of genetic diseases but they only amount to less than 2% of our disease load. Now you’re taking that same logic which has been fruitless and you’re going to apply it to the complex diseases, now we’re talking about heart disease and cancer, and it’s totally strange — it’s weird and terrible science. Anybody who says it’s not going to fly is a Luddite and anti-intellectual and anti-scientific.

They think they’re doing science for science’s sake. They think if their work leads us into the tunnel of obscurity then they’re going to find their way out and they’re going to find the light and so forth. The question is, what do we do in the real world while we’re waiting for everybody to figure out where the light is? That’s another ethical question that science doesn’t have any answers for and we have to look at this from the point of view of giving science some guidelines and that’s also resisted mightily. That’s like a denial of a first amendment or something. I call it an invitation of the devil, this technology.
One of the most destructive phenomena in the history of the world.

Tape #2

Q: The paradigm that we’re in now is called what?

A: The machine model of biology. That life is a machine and the elements of the machine are genes and proteins, and that we can reduce the machine to its parts. The idea that we can control life.

Q: And what paradigm did that replace?

A: That’s an interesting question. There was never a monolithic paradigm other than evolution, which is coming under a lot of criticism these days. We’re in a state of revolution now I think. Lilly Kay at MIT wrote a book about this a few years ago.

Went through the archives at...50, 60 years ago there was a pluralism in the life sciences, we could have an evolutionary paradigm, or a holistic paradigm... but the powers that be.. even before WW2 decided that the direction we were going to go in was going to be molecular biology and a deterministic pathway. That life was controlled by these structures that we could get a handle on and therefore we could control life in that way.

Whether they were Machiavellian enough to say ’well that’s how we could all make a bundle’ I do now know. But [in the past] there was a pluralism there in science, and many different directions, [that’s gone.] Today, unless it’s genetics, it ain’t science in biology. That’s what happened. It’s reflected in the changing structure of the university. Fifty years ago we had organisms- we had zoology, botany. In most of the larger universities these departments have been phased out. I used to be the chairman of the zoology department; now its gone. I call it the intellectual urban renewal program, they tore down the neighborhoods and put up all these high rises and nobody talks to one another.

All these directions of research may still be there but they’re still dancing to the same tune. The old metaphysical ideas, that life was only partially materialistic and that something called a vital force was required to fully explain life... It was obfuscatory in many ways, biology struggled to free itself from that for a long time when Mendel came along with inherited particles. In the early part of the 20th century we began to put Mendel’s conceptual particles together with things called chromosomes and then genes, in a way which enabled that whole structure of biology to relay itself to the big cosmological question of evolution. That was the end of any kind of soft-headedness. A full-throttle shift into materialism and determinism.

Dick Rowan said in one of his NY Review Of Books pieces: "You have to understand that modern biology is materialistic. We have a prior commitment to materialism. And we’re not going to let God get his foot back in the door."

In the name of not letting God get back in the door we’re not facing reality. What you might think of as mystical is simply something that other people call complexity and complexity is scientific, it just doesn’t coincide with this linear thinking that characterizes most of genetics.

Epigenesis is everything about the genome that is not the gene. It’s an old word. The modern form of epigenesis is the scientific finding that is not talked about by these corporations... if you perturb a cell in culture, the genome will respond to that change in very specific ways, part of a cell’s response to stimuli, many things will change in the way genes are expressed. Genes that were silent before you gave it a stimulus are now caused to express themselves in a pattern that is different from the one you had just been using. And not only that, genes will be marked by chemical pathways that we know about now but don’t understand the pattern.

You change the organizational structures of the genes without changing the genes themselves, because that would be heretical - if you could change the genes other than by random mutation.

All these complicated changes [occur] in the genome exposure of the cell to any number of stimuli, certainly the intervention with foreign DNA. Genes make proteins, proteins interact with one another. They form networks and those networks take on a life of their own. They have a logic that isn’t found in the genome. The come only in the real world of expression. Epigenetic phenomenon, the [immense] complexity is nowhere to be seen in this corporate thrust to cure everything by intervention.

Q: What do you worry about? What is the most dangerous scenario at the end of this road?

A: I worry that we’re going to contaminate the entire planet with genetically modified plants. And that this will be irreversible. And we haven’t even got the slightest idea what might happen here.

The chief CEO of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy had a big piece in Wired, in march of this year. Bill Joy is calling for a slowdown in technology. The co-founder of Sun Microsystems. You know what he’s afraid of? He’s afraid that what we’re going to do... this is already part of this whole business of genetic manipulation of humans, embryos... Joy is afraid we’re going to start making hybrids, between human beings and nanotechnology circuits made in place like Sun Microsystems, and that these hybrids will take over. This is the director, talking seriously. This is a serious guy. And we biologists...I’m worried that before we make the robots we will already have created the conditions that will demand the robots because there won’t be anything called agriculture left anymore.

[Mentions a newsletter about technocratic eugenics.]

Q: Is it the potential loss of organic life on earth?

A: Yes.

Q: What worries you most when you think about so-called Gene Therapy?

A: My worry there was the worry expressed by William Blake:

’What seems to be is, to those to whom it seems to be and is productive of the most dreadful consequences to those to whom it seems to be.’

If we think that the world of organisms is a world of machines, we will begin to treat each other as machines. That is the huge danger of this whole mechanistic model of organisms. That’s this terrible nightmare coming true.

N's confused notions of anthropology certainly corrupt much of his moral conceptions (it's a pretty poor foundation).  That said (quite apart from the bogus Spirit idea), his general point as regards proper use of goods, entertainment, etc. can be helpful when finely filtered.  In the end, N's the last guy I'd read on ethics.

 

The OP dont used N. quote to recruit new disciple for N.

He quote it to illustrate by it the spiritual and CONCRETE experience of sound/music versus blind and deaf consumerism...

 

I add to that that my own experience was listenings experiments with physical acoustic and psycho-acoustic sciences not frantic upgrade of my gear each year......

Then criticizing N. without any notions of philosophical history is beside the point of this thread...And over the head of comic book consumers anyway sorry....

Try to think before posting one line meaningless trolling remark and prove us that you can ....

Nietzche? Really guys?. Come on man...

I am not in complete disagrement about your take on N. What corrupt N. ethic was is belief in the Darwinism and atomistic materialism of his era....

But i will not go further about N. here...

But your remark about the "bogus spirit idea" say more about you than anything..

No serious thinker in all human history called the spirit a "bogus idea" save James Randi and Barnum the father of circus which are more comic book persona than thinkers... Than try to "think " a liitle bit more than repeating materialist Richard Dawkins TV mantra interview...

I am sorry to say this in a seemingly rude way, but there is many people here who dont like to be called consumers of "spirit bogus idea" ....

 All litterary, philosophical and scientific education point to the "spirit"...If you dont know that go back to school...But not in engineering school for sure....

N’s confused notions of anthropology certainly corrupt much of his moral conceptions (it’s a pretty poor foundation). That said (quite apart from the bogus Spirit idea), his general point as regards proper use of goods, entertainment, etc. can be helpful when finely filtered. In the end, N’s the last guy I’d read on ethics.

Eventually, you reach a point where it’s again just about the music, and the equipment is forgotten. Then you are on the road to healing.

The equipment itself is but a means to an end. Music has been part of our DNA for a very long time, perhaps from the beginning of rational thought. We hear music we dance and frolic moving with the waves and rhythms. Melodies elicit emotions in us. We become children again, we become lovers, we become fighters, all with music. Look at UFC fighters going to the ring. They puff out their chests and become emboldened. We go to battle or dance to the rythmic sounds of the drum. We float on air with music that speaks to us at a deep level. There is no rhyme or reason its just part of us, part of our common and individual spirit. I say that because i believe we are all ultimately part of one spirit. I think when most of us are drawn to this hobby, yes the gear tinkering to satisfy our inner creativity and builder, but ultimately we are chasing that music bliss.

 

I feel ‘spirit’ or spirituality doesn’t really depend on ‘leader’ or ‘follower’ persay. The divine exists in all of us, even those inclined to follow. A person may be a follower of one, and a leader of another. Being in touch with the divine part of ourselves and ‘connecting’ with the universal divinity or spiritual energy requires practice and conscious effort to become able to free ourselves. Jiddu Krishnamurti is profoundly insightful and Sadhguru takes those ideas and explains them compellingly.

There are definitely those that become addicted to gear. So for myself, its not about the gear so much, although i do take pride in my system, as does my son in his. The elusive goal is music reproduced to touch my soul and spirit