h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>
When golfers get MRIed...

... but I can't help but think brain activity is a better bet to explain the feeling than some kinda 'world force'.
<< Pedro

<> kea

I think we're not getting each other here. My point was, me being a materialist 'n' all, is that how you feel derives from physical brain (and body) activity, which is amenable to measurement, even if we can't do it very well. A feeling will be reflected in combinations of neurotransmitters and neuron activity, probably plus other things we don't know about yet.

If chi actually exists, then it will interact with the brain in some way. If it gets found, brilliant, how cool would that be? I doubt it will, though.

If it doesn't, then essentially you're inventing it.

Which isn't to say it's not a useful metaphor, but that's not the point. If it *is* a kind of shorthand to achieve certain mental states (and I've no doubt that chi and other things like meditation, prayer, gardening and taking a corner perfectly on a Formula 1 game on an Xbox), then it's just a useful myth because people aren't geared up to understand themselves much, we're geared up to pass on our genes.

kea, you've mentioned rationality not being the best way to learn some things. I totally agree with this, but I don't really see where you're coming from. A rationalist/materialist(/probable atheist too) would think that there's a rational explanation for things, but there's no particular reason why we'd learn calculus to improve at darts or pool.

The feeling you get when you don't even need to look at a ball to know it's going to go into a pocket sounds like chi to me (even if that's a trivial example). The MRI thing would suggest to me that when we get better at something we learn to ignore a lot of extranuous stuff. If you were going to teach that, once you got to a certain level of skill, you'd say 'Relax, just let it happen naturally'. Saying 'Try to reduce neuron activity in the medial hippocampus' would be meaningless twaddle as an instruction. And that could apply to all sorts of things, from tai chi to flying a glider.

I think where I'm going is that the reasoning bit of our brain isn't in charge nearly as much as we'd like to think, but that doesn't mean anything. It's just a good use of processing power driven by natural selection.

Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there

Frs:
>>At the risk of repeating myself...can't you sometimes hang loose mother goose for a while. It's more creative and a bit like jamming, which can throw up all kinds of stuff.

Look...I promise you I know that unanalytic jamming is the key to Art. The more ambiguous and less tractable it is the better, as far as I'm concerned. This is why ugly art is so much better than pretty art. And the best Art (and *especially* poetry) is about banging ideas together to see what sparks fly out. All I'm saying is...it's reducible. There's no divine spark added by the artist. I really can't figure out what we're disagreeing about.

Similarly...it is utterly obvious to all if us that people have different perspectives - not only between cultures but between. This is as banally obvious as the fact that some flowers look like genitalia. It's also obvious that culture is reducible.

I really don't know what we're arguing about here. The emotional and analytic views are not mutually exclusive.

kea:

Good Tai Chi is soooo not better than sex! Although possibly you've been doing one of them wrong.

>I really don't know what we're arguing about here.<

ah, so we were arguing. Thanks for filling me in.

I was meaning 'arguing' in the sense of 'discussing'.

Although you can hardly blame me if I think you come over as argumentative.

Common ground:

>> The emotional and analytic views are not mutually exclusive.

Agreed?

Provocative I'd call it. But then that all depends on how you take it. I like to shake things up a bit in discussion, to try to come at things from different angles, rather than just fall into some kind of one dimensional rut style, which as you well know has bored the absolute knickers off me on TGD thread.

I like to think its mostly aimed at being *creatively provocative* on a thread like this. I think jwf is also creatively provocative in his 'inimitable way'

Your tai chi post to kea? Now I'm wondering in what sense that might be called provocative.

I guess you and I just don't boogie very well together. I'm not much interested in having common ground at present in this discussion. That's what I've enjoyed about this particular thread...there's been lots of uncommon ground here, and yet it's been discussed without the usual polarisation stuff that so often occurs in threads; it can be incredibly creative.

>>Provocative I'd call it. But then that all depends on how you take it.

Provocatively. Keep 'em coming!

kea:

I#m thinking of stuff like the various African masks (from various cultures) that Picasso et al thought of as being interesting ways of representing faces (and yes, they are) but which only truly make sense in their ritual context. They weren't intended as gallery pieces.

>>
Good Tai Chi is soooo not better than sex! Although possibly you've been doing one of them wrong.
<<

Likewise Ed.

T'ai-chi -- Martial Art

Sex -- Marital Art




See, it's just a minor difference in spelling....

Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there

Just because you can't feel it (or measure it) doesn't mean it's not there.


What I'm saying is that how you conceptualise chi affects (determines?) how you experience it. So Ed experiences chi as mechanistic and I experience it as energetic (as in energy, not as in vigorous) because of how we each believe. At this point, the rationalist will want to talk about what's really real, in a reductionist, we have to be able to measure it or it's not real sense. And that takes the conversation, and the ability to experience chi, in a certain direction, one that IMO limits experience and understanding of chi because it inherently excludes so many possibilities. And that is frankly unscientific and irrational. It's also an intellectual cul de sac, because as much as I respect the ability to be irrational there are distinctly un-useful ways of doing it and that's one of 'em.


On the other hand, if instead of immediately jumping to 'how can this be real if we can't measure it' (which is of course a strawman, because we don't know if we can measure it or not yet, it's merely *belief* that says that it's not real i.e. it's the rationalist world view that prevents proper investigation of the phenomenon)... instead of we decide to explore what chi is via other means, if we keep our minds open and believe that chi is possible, then it's much more likely that we will surpass tai chi as mechanistic and enter into the realm of the non-rational (different from irrational), which for those of us who go there regularly is really quite fantastic. I can have a conversation about how chi works in the body with people that experience chi. I can't have it here because so many people here don't believe that it is possible, so we are sitting round arguing about nothing.

And that doesn't mean giving up the rational, it just means putting it back in the tool box for a period of time. I think about what chi could be in rational terms sometimes, it's quite an interesting exercise eg comparing it with Western understandings of physiology. But it's really not necessary, and to do that to excess prevents good, direct experience of chi.

I'm actually a very analytical person. It drives people in my life crazy sometimes. A friend of mine says if you take the clock apart to see how it works you don't have the clock anymore and you can't tell the time. I like taking things apart and putting them back together, but I think he has a point. He's a poet and what he is saying is that that degree of reductionism prevents one from seeing the whole for what it is (more than the sum of the parts).

And of course we are nowhere smart enough to take chi apart *and* put it back together so attempting to do so just leaves us with some parts that aren't much use.

Or, more accurately, what is happening in this thread is that chi is being taken apart and put back together as something completely different. Which is daft.


I agree with Effers, loosen up dudes! The chi won't flow in tightened limbs

Crikey, Taliesin, I hope you're not saying I need a husband to have sex. If that's true then I've definitely been doing it wrong

P'raps it should be:

Good T'ai-chi -- extraordinary Martial Art

Good Sex -- extra-Marital Art

Right you are girlie!
But I'm sure he also implied or assumed SEX = Extramarital Art.
Extramarital sex is actually a much higher art form.

~jwf~

btw, my T'ai-chi instructor taught that chi was more a physio/mental process than an actual force.

Naturally, techniques in the 'soft' martial arts, such as Aikido and T'ai-chi,
in contrast to the 'hard' combat arts such as Karate and Judo,
are effective only if the body is relaxed, the attention is focused, and the mind is calm.

When that is achieved, the 'chi/ki' is said to 'flow', and the technique is performed seemingly without conscious effort.

The notion of chi as some kind of energy belongs firmly in the world of fiction

What nationality and ethnicity was your instructor?

Chinese, Canadian immigrant. Why?