Just wondering in all this ; cacophony of sound and information(data); do we put enough time aside for stillness. Not a philosophy of stillness; Just Stillness in and of its self.
Each to their own, I guess. Some can't abide stillness, they need constant stimulation. Others recharge through periods of stillness. It's subjective.
My initial pondering is this: is stillness the absence of motion or is stillness an entity within itself. However a philosophy of stillness provides the following answer(s): Stillness is the absence of change i.e. if something is STILL then it is the same (as it has always been.) It has not changed. It is the same. Equal. If it has not changed then it has NEVER done so and has been STILL to the present. As we meet stillness we may simply claim that it simply IS: this solidifies the previous claim of equality; Something EQUAL, IS! Stillness "IS" as anything we might name "IS": anything that can be stated "IS" (else it could not be stated as so.) If it did not exist it could not be identified or named. This gives relevance to Ghosts, U.F.O's The Lochness monster and all other mysteries: they exist AS mysteries or myth if nothing else. However they DO exist! Stillness therefore exists and has always done so. Conclusively it has encountered EVERYTHING ELSE and KNOWS ALL! In conclusion STILLNESS KNOWS ALL and ALL KNOWS STILLNESS. Stillness is without boundary and barrier and may therefore travel without obstacle. Stillness is free. Apparently ignorance is bliss!
On the contrary... If stillness is the absence of change then the only thing it can know is itself. If it interacts then it changes, and is thus no longer still. Nothing can interact with stillness, thus stillness knows nothing, has encountered nothing and is oblivious to all, just as all is oblivious to it. The only thing that is still is nothing, and nothing is still. Stillness thus isn't free but is a prison of its own making, and not just a prison but solitary isolation, where it can only ever be what it is.
For a considerable time in my career as a telecom engineer, I conducted telephone listening tests under the auspices of the TIA. One important result we found was that people generally do not find absolute dead silence to be soothing; quite the opposite, they find it creepy. Codecs which injected dead silence in our tests were always rated much lower than ones that injected white noise. Stochastic resonance is an important effect.
...But stillness is not nothing for it has a title: stillness. I agree it knows itself but while stillness may not be anything else, other entities may become stillness. :-D To danshawen: I agree; quiet is creepy. I imagine the end of time would yield much silence, while anything increasing at the moment of ending would continue increasing. The end of time (while quite smelly) still presumes a moment of timed existence. Such an action then deducts an ending but concludes as it was before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance "Stochastic resonance has been observed in the neural tissue of ... sensory systems... Computationally, neurons exhibit SR because of non-linearities in their processing. SR has yet to be fully explained in biological systems, but neural synchrony in the brain (specifically in the gamma wave frequency[6]) has been suggested as a possible neural mechanism for SR by researchers who have investigated the perception of "subconscious" visual sensation.[7]" In other words, if there is dead silence, our auditory acuity may seem to be impaired because there is a sensory threshold below which the neurosensory apparatus of the ears don't work as well, and dead silence would most certainly be below this threshold. Our perception would be that we had suddenly become hearing impaired or deaf, and that sensation would be both creepy and disconcerting. If the silence lasted for very long, the most likely response from test subjects would probably be to begin humming, drumming, or otherwise making some kind of noise themselves.
