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Hi, I know this isn't the exactly the right place for my Post to nestle up into but I'll be frank with you all. I couldn't find the right forum section for my post. To cut to the chase, I have started writing a novel which is a contemporary piece dealing with themes such as human interactions, human dysfunctions and peaceful parenting. It isn't going to be a slow piece like a female author's attempt at a "class and society and romance" type of novel although I am not knocking those novels and I must add that I don't intend to appear sexist by saying a "female author". It is a turn of phrase and an attempt at accuracy! Anyway, mine's going to have action and set pieces and adventure included in the finished package. Not just mountains and smatterings of Hardyesqe and Hugoesque type descriptions and conversations. Part of me is saying, "You can do this Owen", "You only live once, follow your dreams!" and "You could make a living this way and it does suit your temperament". And the other part is like, "You will be hopeless at it!", "Critics will say you are sloppy and uninspired" and "what if you are successful, do you want to deal with the consequences of being set apart when part of you sees yourself as a charming everyday man of the people" If it fails and I can't get published. Well I can fall back of my love and passion, the French Language. Thanks, green eyes

Here's a 1959 essay of his which was recently uncovered, on what helps stimulate creativity. Thoughts? http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-mulls-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/

I was just listening to Stefan, and he used the phrase "convince people rather than inspire them" (he was actually advocating the later) and it "inspired" me to post this open ended question. I'm intrigued by how this "woke me up" so to speak to write this, how it stimulated me to focus my mind on the essence of inspiration. Stef's statement was interesting b/c he moved away from the ultra rationality of reason, logic and empirical evidence we typically see from him toward a more right brain perspective. I'm not saying Stef has changed in any fundamental way, only that this statement was a less common expression of his creative, imaginative side while being coupled to argumentation, persuasion, and the underlying mission of FDR to change the world by (inspiration | persuasion) ?. I have a related series of posts on this subject (just search "plenty to say" to find it), but I wanted this topic to be open ended and more of a solicitation / free association exercise to see if other people's input further inspire me and help me figure out why this is such an invigorating topic to me. When I think back over the course of my life going all the way back to high school, it's questions like this that drew me into philosophical discussions and motivated me to stay up all night talking to people about it. It feels kind of "electric".

We all have heard the catch-phrase that "salary is slavery". What do you think: is it true in your understanding ? Does the "middle class" is actually the occidental slave caste, like was the Zealots for Sparta ? What is a salary for ? What does it rewards objectively ? I've read this morning a really interesting thread in the "self-knowledge" section, in which we're taught that any "reward system" is, against the common perception of it - a threat, a misleading, a blocker for a proper learning and cognitive development. At a psycho-sexual level, the reward system is what differentiate the human sexuality from the animalistic one: most animals doesn't have (or, more accurately, cannot process what we call: "sex for pleasure") the possibility to enjoy sexual intercourse only for the sake of it, which means: they literally cannot "choose" voluntarily to have sexe, since they're biochemically drove by their hormones at distincts periods of the year (the rut). Pleasurable sex is then strongly linked to the cortex, the memory, the ability to manage and organize perception, etc. - en résumé, all the premises allowing for a "reward system". So what is concretely rewarded here ? As I see it - the notion or "reward" clash big time with objectivity: the pleasure can only be felt at a psychological level, as an emotion; a reward is then a evolutionary mechanism whose purpose is too reinforce some (possibly any) behaviour who make an individual felt "good" (here the concept of "goodness" remaining concretely undefined in most case - since the journey to virtue is, as we know, terribly painful, even if ultimately releasing). The fact is that a reward, intended or not, psycho-somatic (reflex) or purposeful (given by an other person) - have always the outcome to consolidate some of your behaviour. Now, just keep all these various information consciously present. The question I wanted to ask you is: Imagine that every of our basic needs (necessities of life: clean water & air, shelter, food, clothes, etc.) - are permanently satisfied through automation and mechanization ? For sure, I'm taking into account that people will limits their objective needs to the minimum: there's no serious place for inflation, greed, aesthetics in general - in the field of human needs: these are the volatile, intermittents goals of H wants. For example, there wouldn't be sort of "free pass" for obese nor that it would be luxuries for limited individuals. The key to understand what I'm saying is this: H needs are essentially objective, finite, defined, quantifiable, etc. What everybody needs at an objective level is a shelter, not a mansion; warm clothes, not a complete fashionable wardrobe. It's like in the late interview with AR when she were dressed in a red dress, talking about the fact that if you want to accede you imperatively need to use your reason - and then the camera shows us a young, pretty coquette lady rolling her eyes with a disgusted face: that Lolita hadn't understood the difference being involved here. Because that every of her H needs were automatically satisfied since her birth by daddy's money and that consequently she had never experienced any form or real deficiency - for her, the existence of some "means of production", the very philosophical notion of "work" was a conceptual fantasy, some "rude stuff" invented by vulgar people to mock the aristocrats to which she belonged by "birth right". Oops, I'm digressing again ! Don't worry - I'm not falling in any sort of marxist ideation: the struggle nowadays is no more "cultural", or in Marx's terms: "dialectical" - now it must be seen as a scientific problem, the solutions being absolutely technicals. So I'm not talking about the suppression of the right to the "pursuit of happiness" - I'm rather talking about the very means to make it possible, which are: the automation of the means of production regarding the H needs. In an techno-efficient economy in which all (remember that they are only a few, and finite) of your H needs would be assumed and assured by a global, automatized production - would you accept a salary to "reward" a job involving mainly creativity, arts, speculation, etc. ? Surely, the value/role of money is larger and more complex - and cannot be reduce to the phenomenon of the salary. People would trade concerning H wants until the end of the world: no problem with that. The only objective way to trade non-objective objets and/or values is effectively by using a common, standard medium of exchange - who serves then as an insurance policy, a malleable but tangible tool to regulate or manifest the subjective value of all the luxuries, dreams, fantaisies, etc., that H wants can generate punctually. But my thesis is simply that the use of money to "trade" necessary values and de facto needs - is inefficient, counter-productive and completely absurd. I simply cannot conceptualize a practicable "free market" without any universal automation of objective needs. The brain (and reason) cannot work is they aren't feed. Individuals would have to identify and measure their context/specific needs and reasonable life's requirements: we need only very few things to live well on a physiological level - all that outgrowth that is no more objective in the sense of necessity: it is playful, contingent. The only viable, logical salary for creativity and any work of the Mind should be the necessities of life. What do you think ?