Fear of Failure, Hofstadter definition of intelligence

So anyway...

This was just messing around/learning how to do some stuff with arpeggios using synthmaster (not my favorite virtual synth). I'm thinking most... some other people would just delete the file eventually but I like to believe that within any 20 seconds bit there is a full good song and it just has to be found. And I like trying to find it. If nothing else it's like doing a crossword puzzle or playing suduko. Except when you're finished you've actually got a little something you can enjoy for the rest of your life, hopefully. Also if you keep deleting stuff waiting for that super perfect song, you can start accumulating a lot of failure. This accumulation of failure means that when you sit down to write some music, you know there's a chance you'll just be wasting your time, and so... perhaps you just don't bother doing so. IOW, Fear of Failure. A very perfectly legitimate fear of failure. The way around it is to just enjoy finding a way to finish every song... even if it eventually means deleting everything you originally started out with (within that song file that is)... (which actually is the same thing maybe but doesn't seem so...)

This one is kind of the same idea. Was just messing around, trying to learn to do more with drums than usual. Usually my drums are very repetitive. Was trying to do better, also trying to use better sounding ones... but here I just sampled a tiny slice from another song... which I had to add a ton of reverb to make it sound relatively natural. Sort of polishing a turd and this felt like random BS as I was writing most of it. But at the end it came together.

And it reminds me of Hofstadter talking about what intelligence is. The ability to make "sense" of seemingly random stuff. In the movie Victim of the Brain he uses the example of a human being able to recognize a book as being a book whereas a fly couldn't. The idea can be extrapolated to a level where people could improve themselves; something like playing a hard piano piece; instead of looking at each note as one of so many possibilities; getting better at understanding what key you're in and knowing that limits what can come next (although over the course of a few notes you still end up with a ton of possibilities). Or in chess instead of looking at each move in a vacuum and trying to play endless variations in your head; instead you understand what you're seeing; what sort of board position; how quickly things can be reduced down to just a few possible good moves. And my stepfather is a chess addict how is wasting his senior years playing endlessly online. I messed up my back so bad I could hardly move for a few days and played him for the first time in years and won most of the games simply by looking at what are good board positions and what are ways to put him in bad board positions. Only at the end is there little choice but to actually play out the variations of exchanges in my head. At that point I don't do as well and really can't even be bothered to try because it's just tedious stuff. At that point he does well because he's stuck somewhat more in seeing chess in that way.

In his book Godel, Escher, Bach he says in the preface he originally meant for it to just be a pamphlet... (his idea about infinite referencing loops) and... so far I'm thinking he should have just done exactly that. But, of course, then he'd be a no one I suppose, maybe not even working in AI. So as he likes.

...but anyway the point was about finding sense in what seems random (and may actually really just be random...) this song came together at the end. It's about how if you don't recognize how a person you've brought into your life is evil, it doesn't matter why you let them in. It could be that you're just so worried about dismissing a really worthwhile person; that you're just such a bleeding heart; an egalitarian; a person so concerned with justice... It doesn't matter the reason you let this person in, you're responsible for the suffering they bring you. And you never know who is actually such a devil.