Dreaming of New ?Dreams?
Every thought and emotion can be assigned/is a symbol. Symbols affect one another in often mysterious ways. Many symbols can not be expressed adequately with language, because every time one tries to capture the essence of the symbol, the meaning diffuses away, leaving an empty shell of a thought or idea. This happens to me with the most meaningful symbols. I find that communicating a symbol that describes the why of what I'm interested in and what I want to do on a very basic level is impossible. Instead I'm stuck with the bulky and often unwieldy apparatus of language, whose inherent impetus towards obfuscating meaning gets in the way of the ideas I would like to share with others.
Language hides meaning because it imposes constraints that are merely a subset of the possible constraints that are working in my brain. This is an important distinction to make. Whereas there are many many constraints in my brain, keeping it from either falling apart physically or mentally, the number of possible constraints in the mind is much greater than those provided for by the mere syntactical structure of language. There are only about 171,000 words that are in current use according to the Oxford English Dictionary. This is compared to the billions of neurons and trillions of connections that exist in the human brain. Hence the inherent complexity that is possible in the mind is much greater than what can be adequately conveyed with words...at least for now. It is true that one can string many words together to try to capture the essence of a single thought, but in many cases this fails to do justice to the thought or symbol, whose inherent structure in one's mind is so crystal clear. And there is also a much larger set of unknowns which is even more mysterious. The following diagram illustrates these relationships:
This diagram shows how the constraints on the set of possible thoughts are organized into categories. The unknown constraints rule overall, with reality, my mind, and language all being subsets of the largest possible set of constraints.
But of course nothing is ever this simple...sometimes language breaks out of the system and tries to define itself. A computer program is merely a language that is implemented with some sort of processing unit that records operations and instructions and takes input and gives output. Some could argue that language is then inherent in our own brains, because each neuron is talking in it's own language to other neurons (like little processors), and the total sum of their interactions produces a new higher level language (there are probably many levels involved here) that is conscious thought. But then language then is able to start talking about itself, since a conscious mind can come up with ideas like language...so where does language come from? Is language then all there is to reality? Or is there something more fundamental going on here? And what about the unknowns?
I have no idea what the answer to these questions are, or if they are even meaningful questions. I feel like maybe I have succumbed to the very weakness I spoke of earlier...that of not being able to adequately convey the meaning of an idea...yet when that idea is "not being able to convey the meaning of idea" things start to get very tangled and confused. And this is where language starts to get very confusing...whenever it starts referring to itself, language does some pretty bizarre things that our minds can not handle. We can of course "jump out of the system" for many of these silly paradoxes (e.g. "this statement is a lie") but in some cases we can't jump out of the system and we are stuck in some bizarre loop, going round and round and round and never knowing it, or knowing that we are even in the loop.
It's kind of like being stuck in a dream within a dream. Even if you do wake up there will always be some other dream you are stuck in...
Language hides meaning because it imposes constraints that are merely a subset of the possible constraints that are working in my brain. This is an important distinction to make. Whereas there are many many constraints in my brain, keeping it from either falling apart physically or mentally, the number of possible constraints in the mind is much greater than those provided for by the mere syntactical structure of language. There are only about 171,000 words that are in current use according to the Oxford English Dictionary. This is compared to the billions of neurons and trillions of connections that exist in the human brain. Hence the inherent complexity that is possible in the mind is much greater than what can be adequately conveyed with words...at least for now. It is true that one can string many words together to try to capture the essence of a single thought, but in many cases this fails to do justice to the thought or symbol, whose inherent structure in one's mind is so crystal clear. And there is also a much larger set of unknowns which is even more mysterious. The following diagram illustrates these relationships:
This diagram shows how the constraints on the set of possible thoughts are organized into categories. The unknown constraints rule overall, with reality, my mind, and language all being subsets of the largest possible set of constraints.But of course nothing is ever this simple...sometimes language breaks out of the system and tries to define itself. A computer program is merely a language that is implemented with some sort of processing unit that records operations and instructions and takes input and gives output. Some could argue that language is then inherent in our own brains, because each neuron is talking in it's own language to other neurons (like little processors), and the total sum of their interactions produces a new higher level language (there are probably many levels involved here) that is conscious thought. But then language then is able to start talking about itself, since a conscious mind can come up with ideas like language...so where does language come from? Is language then all there is to reality? Or is there something more fundamental going on here? And what about the unknowns?
I have no idea what the answer to these questions are, or if they are even meaningful questions. I feel like maybe I have succumbed to the very weakness I spoke of earlier...that of not being able to adequately convey the meaning of an idea...yet when that idea is "not being able to convey the meaning of idea" things start to get very tangled and confused. And this is where language starts to get very confusing...whenever it starts referring to itself, language does some pretty bizarre things that our minds can not handle. We can of course "jump out of the system" for many of these silly paradoxes (e.g. "this statement is a lie") but in some cases we can't jump out of the system and we are stuck in some bizarre loop, going round and round and round and never knowing it, or knowing that we are even in the loop.
It's kind of like being stuck in a dream within a dream. Even if you do wake up there will always be some other dream you are stuck in...
posted by meta_darwinist at 11:55 PM
1 Comments:
I think these are meaningful and worthwhile questions. It seems to me that you are making an inherent link between the (however impossible) precision of a language and its production of meaning or knowledge (that is, language is surely “bulky and often unwieldy,” and yet one might tend to think that it is also, as you suggest, the only constituent of reality or the only means of communicating with an other). Some useful questions might be, then: —are precision of language and production of meaning/knowledge one and the same? –is language (written or spoken) the only means of communication? –is communication possible between distinct alterities? –if not, is it at least possible to approach a modicum of “understanding” between alterities? There are a number of texts you might read if you’re really interested in pursuing further your line of thinking. Naoki Sakai’s introduction to his book Translation and Subjectivity, Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Coming Community, to name a few. I can really only offer more literary and philosophical texts given my background, but maybe you’ll find them of use.
But really all these questions circle back to your first comments on the nature of the symbol. One of the things I wonder about often is whether something needs to be articulated in order to be known. In other words, can there be a transmission of ideas/communication between alterities which takes place on the level of the sensed or felt—that is, is it always necessary for us to define what we know in language in order to truly know it? Furthermore, and probably I’m a poet, I lend a special status to poetry among other forms of language. It seems too simple to speak about language as a broad category in all its bulky and unwieldly splendor without at least considering the site of its more symbolic function and form—poetry. As poetry verges on the symbolic, it suggests/amplifies/releases/opens onto rather than denoting/encapsulating/etc. Poetry is where language seems to offer the greatest possibility for communication.
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