His parents got a scaled-to-size violin for their then 5-year-old son and started giving him lessons. Bell began taking violin lessons at the age of 4 after his mother discovered that her son had taken rubber bands from around the house and stretched them across the handles of his dresser drawer to pluck out music he had heard her play on the piano. Bell told The Jewish Journal, "I identify myself as being Jewish". His father is of Scottish descent, and his mother is Jewish (his maternal grandfather was born in Israel and his maternal grandmother was from Minsk). Bell, was a psychologist, Professor Emeritus of Indiana University, in Bloomington, and a former Kinsey researcher. This is the thing we can do.The Americn violinist and conductor, Joshua David Bell, was born in Bloomington, Indiana. And these brief flashes of consciousness can reflect the universe and maybe even figure out what it is. And at a brief moment in the evolution of the universe there are planetary surfaces and negentropy gradients that allow for the creation of structure and then there are some brief flashes of consciousness in all this vast darkness. It's a giant fractal and most of it is just boring. There's all these iterations of patterns, but mostly there is nothing interesting happening in these patterns. You see there is this amazing vast darkness which is the universe. It's an attempt to be a reflection to this universe. And these are of course the ends of a spectrum and the truth is often somewhere in the middle, but in a way there is this fundamental distinction.Īnd there are in some sense the true scientists which are trying to figure out something about the universe. The true artist in my view is somebody who captures conscious states and that's the only reason why they eat. That you try to capture a conscious state for its own sake, because you think that matters. Where you think that your mental representation is the intrinsically important thing. It's one where people fall in love with the loss function. It's a mutation that is arguably not completely adaptive. I don't like fascism because it's going to kill a lot of minds I like.Īnd the arts is slightly different. And when the contribution is negative then the superorganism kills it in order to be fitter in the competition against other superorganisms. Fascism is a mode of organization of society in which the individual is a cell in the superorganism and the value of the individual is exactly the contribution to the superorganism. And if you realize this you can try to get behind this and I think the solution to this is fascism. Everything we do, all the complexity that we create, all the structures we build, is to erect some surfaces on which to out compete other kinds of yeast. The thing that is able to digest anything and turn it into structure to sustain and perpetuate itself, for long as the local puddle of negentropy is available.Īnd in a way we are yeast. And eventually the search for evolution will, if evolution reaches its global optimum, it will be the perfect devourer. If you're lucky the monsters that eat you are your own children. Don't go into the desert and perish there, because it's going to be a waste. Evolution is about getting eaten by monsters. You know, life is evolution and evolution is about eating. That is similar to the mind of an artist. And at some level my mind is more interested in meaning than in relevance. They have an understanding of the difference between meaning and relevance. “I find that most people serve practical needs.