You know in Pulp Fiction how Jules is telling Vince how he had an epiphany, or a 'what alcoholics like to refer to as a moment of clarity'?
Well, that just happened to me. I want to write down what was in my head, because it all made perfect sense at the time. I've been seriously *thinking* about some complicated logic stuff for the last ten hours, and my brain hurts. I was trying to go to sleep, but my mind turned from one thing to the next. Basically there is no way I'll be able to express my thoughts, becuse it felt like a short novel played out in my head in the space of five minutes, but in point form:
I've been frustrated by poor use of language all day, where statements put as assertions conflicted to the point of nonsense, and I've been trying to find the truth in the matter. For details you can see this post.
I was wondering how this could have passed any serious scrutiny by people, but it has.
Anyway, my mind bought sarcasm and irony into the picture, for a variety of reasons.
I got thinking about language.
I got thinking about 'evil' mega-corps based on a variety of news I saw this evening that was manipulative.
I realised that I think in language.
I realised that I communicate in language.
Words that are defined in terms of other words can't have any *real* meaning.
I realised that if I don't understand another persons language they appear to be speaking jibberish to me.
I thought more about sarcasm and how its being applied in language. It causes a statement to be both true and false at the same time, thereby no meaning can be derived.
I remembered a friends comment to me from recently about wondering if a certain person whos native language was not English actually 'knew' what they were saying all of the time, or if they were just making noises.
I realised that I speak nonsense, and everyone around me speaks nonsense.
Our brains are just sophisticated pattern matchers that have adapted to created acceptable responses.
I can actually *program* people with words. I can also be *programmed* with words.
Orwell wasn't a genious. He was wrong. (I can't remember why, but I was sure it was true).
That was about it. Obviously, there was more too it, etc. but that I think expresses the essence.
How does that make you feel? What are you going to do now?
John.
Um, I went to try and sleep again, but my mind is still going. I came up with a few other things that still make sense.
Have you ever been really tired, or drunk or whatever, and had 'deep' thoughts, and then you've gone to try and write them down or tell them to someone, and at that point you've realised that what you have to say doesn't make any sense, but immediately before you had attempted to verbalise your thoughts everything had made perfect sense, and you had been using what 'seemed like' words in your brain, its just when you went to speak them, you realised that they weren't words at all.
I reckon that is just a raw 'concept'. Your brain has aggregated it somehow, and internally it's labelled, but has no matching expression in your communication mechanisms, apart from maybe the most basic non-verbal communication, like punching or smiling.
The other thing that I agreed on, was that basically communication is a distraction. When people talk to you all day, they 'distract' you from thinking. They are making nonsense sounds, eliciting what they hope to be favourable reactions so they can continue to play out there lives.
I reckon that is why people who are left alone for long periods of time, like in solitary confinement, etc. go 'mad'. It's a strange thing to not have the distraction of communication, where you basically get a feedback loop. If you take that away from people for an extended period of time, they recondition themselves and can't participate with the correct nonsense sounds in order to participate 'correctly' or elicit favourable reactions.
Invariably, they are insane.
I'm going to bed before someone comes to take me to the looney bin! They always come and night..
John.
Heh, still going here.. so basically we don't have any *premises* for our communication.
Everyone tries to argue things all the time (like now), and often people aren't capable of reaching the same conclusions. This is probably often a language barrier, even when both parties speak the same 'language'.
How can I have an argument when I can't define my terms?
John.
And more!
A words meaning varies with context. So a sentence is more than the total definition of its words, because a sentence uniquely redefines its words given them a unique context. A sentence is 'synergizing' words. :)
These aggreate contexts can sort of be useful, so from a very basically level of some super low level communication 'mehs' we can build up to what appears to be highly sophisticated language structures that can't easily be decomposed, but which can be applied to people to get consistent neural responses (sorry for my spelling etc. I won't go into the 'irony' of poor English I have used while writing all this stuff).
Interestingly, if you are looking for 'truth' you can probably find it, because it's just a word. But if you are looking for what I take it to represent then it seems almost impossible to find..
John.
btw: Orwell was wrong, because he thought that NewSpeak a 'restricted' language with less words would have the tendancy to limit expression. I don't think that is necessarily true. Good, PlusGood, and DoublePlusGood seem to encode far less ambiguity than say 'nice', 'awesome', or 'wicked'. But then, what is 'good' anyway..?
John.
i think orwell could be right, how can u say that :)
The big problem that I have with Orwell (who I basically love) is that he didn't seem to twig that irony is double-think.
That is, the guy basically epitomised that which he alleged to loathe. The implied meaning of his text tend to be the opposite of its literal interpretation. That's irony. That's double-think.
That's why we have a society who views the truths in something like a Dilbert cartoon, which are basically a massive problem, and they laugh.. the humour is the emotional trick we use to convince ourselves that double-think is OK..
Thank You!