Weird scenario's thread.

[Doctor Emmit Brown]

sorry I missed that...

[brnleague99]

How about an Austrian tailor living in Paris at the turn of the century who made a parachute out of a coat and jumped off the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, falling 190 feet and dying upon impact?

No wait! It happened, on February 4th, 1912. AND it was recorded.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BepyTSzueno

Poor dumb bastard.

[Tenjen]

Maybe he should have used a helicopter's window cover >> cough*

sen⋅tient /ˈsɛnʃənt/ [sen-shuhnt]
–adjective
1. having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.
2. characterized by sensation and consciousness.
–noun
3. a person or thing that is sentient.

sen·tience (sěn'shəns, -shē-əns)
n.
1. The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness.
2. Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought.

Make of that what you will.

yep. that dictionaries suck at this sorta thing

[Mythiene]

*shrugs* Bear posed a question about the meaning of sentience. So I gave him the official answer.

[Tenjen]

oh i know. Just stating dictionaries do indeed suck at the words with deeper/wide meaning.

Though thats more due to the limitations of the english language. It makes me wonder about other languages. There are words and feelings in other languages that are totally different from english. my former so was a linguist with a huge number of languages under her belt, she'd often tell me about these things. I often wonder what sorta of life experience and sensual encounters iam missng because of my lack of skill with languages outside of english.

[Asaryu]

It's also because the dictionary records the 'official' meanings of things, and doesn't often relate the allusions and blatant post-modernity of the English language. My housemate whinged the other day that Slumdog Millionaire was described as "poverty porn". And he sat there with the dictionary definition of pornography and scratched his head for a very long time.

I think consciously using words out of context, and deliberately altering words' meaning gives the average person a significant power over the thoughts and feelings of those around them. If, as it is assumed, people use language to facilitate thought. With the development of language, our minds have been let loose from the child's playpen of cognitive thought, but with language comes a limitation in the available permutations of meaning that can be thought and expressed. The average person is not child in a playpen, but a cognitive suburbanite, with a localised knowledge of language that serves the functions of everyday usage. Restricted in their understanding of the world around them by the power of the language that describes it. To step out of that, and become an international language (and here I do not mean to learn a foreign language) user is outside of the realms of possibility for most people. I like to think of artists as language astronauts.

I have longed for the day that regular, mundane usage disempowers the word 'cunt'.

[Tenjen]

its happened in small pockets though [the cunt thing]

*****just throwing this in, someone nearby is talking like this. But he's an willfully ignorant [as in, he choses to be ignorant] fool, so it doesnt matter.
i hate it when people question the need for art and philosophy. Like its an insiginificant something that the world can be the same if it was without it.

*****end

I believe in the concept that all material has consciousness. But that it is limited by its form. Its form provides its function. The level of function as per the limitations of its form judge how expressive its consciousness is, as well as the potential for growth of its consciousness. A rock for example has very limited consciousness due to its form.

However. say said rock was broken down into minerals by time and said minerals were absorbed by a tree in time. Well, a tree's consciousness is greater than that of a rock [eg like how they grow towards the light in a box with a hole providing sunlight on one side]. Say said fruit is eaten by an animal and said animal is eaten by us. The minerals, the physical matter that once was a rock has achieved a much greater level of consciousness.

Ofcourse. There are levels far exceeding us as well. But which we dont know of yet or cant recognise due to us not having stared away from the shadows in our cave [no not the elder cave] that we think is our world and walked out to see the world outside. Many of us, over the years of human existance, have explored and grown our consciousness much beyond what the masses have though.

To elaborate on the form and function. It is not simply the functionality of the form, but the experiences that come with the greater functionality of the form [and the lack of possible experiences due to its limitations] that forms and develops the experiences.

Which is why i dont believe a "soul" doesnt pop the hell into a child a few weeks into its feotal development. Or it somehow becomes human/sentient at a certain stage.

i believe that its experiences and the growing functionality of its developing form that help it experience things in the first place are what develop it into..well...something more. hearing the mothers heartbeat, the blood rushing through her veins. her voice when she speaks. Sounds from "outside" like music or the father. responses to the mothers mood and blood chemistary [hormones]. The experiences of being in the womb.

The experiences are what develop its consciousness [or soul if you like].

[Radbaron]

I have longed for the day that regular, mundane usage disempowers the word 'cunt'.

When Robin Williams was interviewed by James Lipton for his show "Inside the Actors Studio" (iirc) He was asked what words he loved and hated the most. His favorite word was *pussy* , with a Robin rant on feelings of warmth and cuddlieness, etc ; his least favorite word was *cunt* as it brought about images of hurt and mean things. He was amazed that both words could be used to describe the same female anatomy, but had 2 very different symbolisms <== my big word for today ;)

found him.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evq8wnvTC3M

[Asaryu]

Oddly enough, I read the Vagina monologues, and one of them is a talk about the interviewees favorite word, cunt...how it is all-encompassing...it doesn't refer to any individual part of the anatomy, it doesn't seek to rationalise or dissect that part of the body, it's just a cunt. It's actually a beautiful monologue.

of course, when we performed these monologues as part of my performance studies class, I had to play the 3rd world rape victim describing being penetrated violently with both a gun and a broken glass bottle, and my disgust at my own body. >.<

[JVDifferent]

I find myself strangely interested in these monologues now...