I would call it a real life multitasking but others, including my girlfriend, would probably identify the working method as madness. However, during the hours since dinner I also trying to understand the system thinking and it’s important contribution to a more sustainable world. During my university studies, MA in International Relations, we talked a lot about system thinking with focus at international politics, relations, humanitarian interventions, human rights and so forth but then again, its still a fragmentation of the reality. Its, and I’ll quote Weinberg:

“Sometimes we fall easily into a systems fallacy, the selection fallacy.”

Are we, as Humans, ever able to grasp – more or less – wholeness? Or is this the human limitation, that we do select? Or do system thinking even have a contextual framework, beside not focusing on fragments?

This blog, thanks Anders, and your replies Mr Weinberg is really motivating me to deepening my knowledge about system thinking.

I’ll continuing with my fearless multitasking…

Well, they certainly have in the past, so it’s quite a solid prediction. Minstrels seem always to have had a special protected place in many societies, and between and among societies that otherwise were often in conflict.

Of course, there’s nothing automatic about it. Musicians have also been used often to lead soldiers into battle, stirred by the strong emotions of martial music (which I often use to motivate my writing).

In other words, music may have charms to soothe a savage breast, but that’s only within the right context. Music alone won’t do much to save us from ourselves, much as it helps each of us individually to be calmer and more likely to think in systemic terms, right, left, and middle brain.

So, one of the tasks for non-musicians like me is to protect and serve music and music-makers. And not to waste energy thinking about the “assembly line, studiomixed, blond-singer, mainstream crap.” There has always been inferior music, and lots of it. (I read somewhere that there are over 50,000 published operas.)

Sometimes we fall easily into a systems fallacy, the selection fallacy. Our “classical” music is not a valid sample of the music of the past. It’s a very few survivors from a long, long selection process. Just take the long view and concentrate encouraging the best stuff. Let natural selection take care of deciding what’s mainstream crap.

Diversification is important when coming together, but there has to be some kind of common ground and connectedness at first, or else there will be competition or chaos.

The thing I focus at is that musicians playing together do a lot of things simultaneous which makes, more or less, fully usage of their brain. Playing the instrument, listen to the other musicians’ instruments so that the song/track sounds “as it should”, following the notes and lyrics either from paper or from a good memory, feeling the rhythm and getting emotional. There is, as you are talking about, several dimensions that you could lay upon the factors above. But then again, we talking about live music. Because, like you said, there is plenty of assembly line, studiomixed, blond-singer, mainstream crap, that cant be counted in when talking about music and system thinking.

I don’t think it’s possible to talk about Art in general as a connectedness. You never see painters come together and paint a canvas at the same time, never do writers. That would probably be kind of a chaotic situation. You close to never see painters do stuff in front of an enthusiastic crowd. That’s why I think of music as a “higher” level of connectedness and probably closer to system thinking then other Art, or art-alike, expressions.

Even more interesting, and Ill be quoting you:
“Thankfully, often intuition comes to our help.”

Now and then this “intuition” rescues us from different kinds of situations. Could this be a system thinking mechanism? If we would understand the logic behind our intuition we could find a way of find the wholeness? Or is intuition just a mechanism that saves us in difficult times?

Just my 5 cents!