GENIUS FORUMS

Otto Weininger discussed this subject substantially in "Sex and character", but I think it is important to analyse it in a modern context. Much has changed since Weininger lived, but things have essentially remained the same. People are just as superstitious and narrow-minded as they were earlier. They still perceive any quality of a person that amazes them as genius, but what they actually perceive is talent/intelligence. The truth is that, without consciousness to go with it, heightened intelligence and talent are just as "amazing" as a heightened physical strength. The talent or intelligence that most people have is like the talent of a tree for conducting photosynthesis, or the talent of a fish for breathing in water. Such talent cannot be valued positively or negatively, because it is not accompanied by any consciousness. Genius is only determined by how talent/intelligence is used, rather than talent/intelligence in themselves. A rock can be used to kill a bird, or to spark a fire. That fire in turn can be used to burn a house down, or to cook food. The valuation of the rock is always dependent on the conscious element associated with it.

It is understandable why people tend to see talent or intelligence as genius. Because the talent or intelligence is always applied on things that were created by genius - music, art, science, literature and so on. Everything that we call "human" and take pride in, we ape from the works of the true humans - the geniuses. Nietzsche said in one of his books - "I searched for great men. I always found only the apes of their ideals."

However, there is some correlation between consciousness/genius and intelligence. A person with an IQ of 70 may have a hard time understanding the basic logical truths, whereas a person with 100 IQ may understand them better. But that's about all the intelligence that is needed to understand them. I have a very high IQ myself, according to a mensa test I once took on the net(and in either case, a little serious studying is enough to get any person into mensa.) A high IQ basically means a greater ability to compute and retain data. The most powerful computers of today, and even my own intel quad core cpu with 3 gigs of DDR3 RAM and a 500 GB hard disk, have far higher IQs than the person with the highest IQ on the planet.

I'll clarify one of Weininger's ideas at this point. In his chapters on genius, Weininger talks a lot about "memory" and how genius has the highest memory. This memory is not the memory that a woman has for remembering when and where she bought each of her dresses, or who gave them to her. Rather, this kind of memory is simply the consciousness of the "I" in the past. It is not a specific kind of memory for a specific kind of thing(like chemical equations, something I couldn't remember at all in school.) Rather it is the memory of the "I" itself, and its relation to the universe. It is often the smallest memories that stimulate the greatest thoughts and feelings in geniuses - the face of a person, a sudden burst of wind, a line in a book, waking up on a particular morning, and so on. Other people would consider these things insignificant.

In the specific fields of endeavour, there is an infinity of difference between genius and mere-talent. The best musicians are much better at playing music than the people who compose original music, but the latter understand far, far more of the essence of music than the former. This single quote by Beethoven tells us a lot about what music is - "Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes." Academic philosophers know a lot more about philosophy than Ramakrishna would know, but Ramakrishna could reason infinitely better than them. A genius would understand what everything is in essence, in "spirit", and so he would know everything. To the genius, nothing is overwhelming or wonderful. Whatever a genius knows would be all there is to know.

At core, genius is simply a belief in logic. Belief and logic are two forms of consciousness, and in the absolute genius both of these are present in the highest measure....so much so that the genius himself is beyond all belief and all logic. The genius creates his own time and space, but he himself is beyond time and space. It's because he is beyond time and space that he can create them.

IQ has little correlation with rationality and I see little evidence for either intelligence, talent or genius.

It seems to me that the evidence supports a view of "talent" as a capability emerging from learned patterns of behavior or genetic factors which are not equal to the act in question. Such that a person might have a "talent" for basketball because they are tall or can jump high from practicing gymnastics.

Intelligence seems to be dramatically impacted by belief about one's own intelligence. The more intelligent one considers themself the more effort they put forth in solving problems. In my experience most people have such a low view of their own intelligence that they barely attend to questions on intelligence tests at all. They give up too easily.

Genius may just be the absence of delusion. It is way easier to figure out what's going on for real when you aren't clouded by falsity. I never much cared for other people or myself for that matter so I've always been an excellent problem solver, as paradoxical as that sounds. My concern was on how things were, just what the fuck was going on, and not on winning friends or awards. That wasn't really a function of innate genius, it was a function of life circumstance.

Genius is the consciousness of "I". A genius is someone who really exists.

High intelligence and great works are more or less incidental to genius. A farm is incidental to the farmer.

You can be a genius and not accomplish anything because genius is a being not a thing.

A Visual genius looks at the haystack of life, and says "There's the needle, why can't anyone see it but me?"

Which is that they see clearly through a random storm of information, and red herrings. they ignore their ears, and see for themselves with their eyes. Ears tell lies, eyes rarely do. The inner eye sees more clearly for a genius, because most people use their inner ear instead.

A musical genius is the other way around. Music doesn't tell lies, for them it is the truth. They need to overcome their vision, and listen to the truth instead, through a storm of white noise.

Unfortunately.. a mathematical genius is trapped into using only what has been given in words, and sounds. They are stuck with the lies, but use them to an amazing level. But it leaves science in a mess, because therefore science has to use the lies to the best of its ability. Science needs a visual Genius along side the mathematical genius, unfortunately it hasn't realised this, but Einstein was a visual Genius, and not very good at maths, so at one time.. science was working well. Now it is mostly just maths.

The memory of a genius comes from his attention. Attention --> memory. If you don't have a soul (the non-genius), then you can't give your attention to it, that is, you can't have any memory of what happens to it.

I agree with your whole post except your last line, which said that you believe genius = belief in logic. I thought we concluded that genius is the consciousness of an "I", something much more basic than a belief in logic. I would say genius and belief in logic correlate, however.

Another thing that occured to me on the topic.

Weininger said that man often becomes a genius on loving a woman. The stimulus is strong enough to wake his ego up, as it were. Why is this? I think it all comes down to concentration. When you love someone, you effortlessly concentrate on her. You give her an almost super-human degree of attention. And since I-and-Thou are correlates, since they're related, the attention you give it the "Thou" tends to have an effect on the "I." Attention and concentration are the soul of genius.