Meaning is not carried by the words, it’s carried by your mind. We assume that we assign the same meanings, but that’s a big assumption.
These online conversations, composed of words and only words, are arguably 99% us just talking to ourselves. Maybe even 100%.
You should read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, it’s basically this but with cool cyberpunk shit and more mindfuckery.
Meaning is not carried by the words, it’s carried by your mind.
I disagree. Meaning is carried by words. That’s what words are for. And you can use them to clarify their meaning in fine detail.
This is why a lot of academic papers outside of science start with a definition of used terms with citations.
Makes sense. If we try, if we are careful, the quality of our communication can be vastly improved.
In my own particular field I often first try to ensure that all participants in the conversation share the same experience.
That’s a pretty tall order. How do you confirm that you objectively share the same experience if you can only ever access your own subjective experience?
You could stand next to the guy while you both look at the relevant thing. That’s a pretty good way.
Another way would be to use the same method for looking at the relevant thing. Let’s call it “an experimental method”. Because it delivers an experience.
What does water taste like?
Get a glass of water and taste it. It tastes like that.
But how would I know if our experience of the taste of water is the same?
Because it’s water.
You’d have to settle for close enough here. You might even drink from the same glass. Beyond that … until we invent telepathy.
Yeah, without telepathy we’re all just guessing 😂
With a bit of careful effort we can improve the process.
In fields where communication matters more we have several methods for that.
No, we are communicating. People can coordinate their actions to achieve things that are impossible for an individual. We obviously don’t have perfect shared understanding, and miscommunications are not uncommon (as others have already pointed out) but we can exchange enough information to do useful things.
Also, we can make jokes. The fact that it’s possible to craft a joke and make someone laugh by setting up and intentionally subverting expectations through language is pretty good evidence that we have shared understanding and similar processing.
So you mean to say: we personalize interpretation of someone else’s writing, therefore we’re rather responding to our own thoughts, than in response to the other’s writing? If so, I would say this is true for the majority of people; especially when discussing anything political for example, where a strong bias is present.
Yes, this is pretty much exactly what happens. It’s the map-territory problem, but with every single word. We have rough agreements on what some words mean. Easy enough with what we take to be solid objects. This X is a cross, like two objects intersecting. Yes, we know what X is. Okay, now do the same thing to every word in this sentence. And then again to every word in this sentence. Oh… how about subjective experiences? Love. Sadness. What are those? How did you come to think of those words when describing love? Were you born with language? You don’t inherently know what anything is. You just have a bunch of code in your head.
Yeah, if you really start breaking down sentences, to their individual words and their respective concepts, everything falls apart. But it’s important to keep context in mind: which generally limits room for interpretation enough, for most to roughly interpret them similarly (unless your autistic brain makes you go on a detour…). If you start formulating your wording carefully enough, you can start writing legal documents; and ironically make sure, 99% of the population, can no longer follow a word you’re saying.
Yeah, if you really start breaking down sentences, to their individual words and their respective concepts, everything falls apart.
Yes.
Yes.
Go on. Read that again. Or write that again, slowly.
Misunderstandings happen quite frequently. Especially between neurodivergent people and neurotypical people. Now imagine how many misunderstandings we don’t know about
Not exactly a new though, pretty sure Olato covered this 1000 years ago
I’m assuming that when you say “though” you mean “thought”, and when you say “Olato” you mean “Plato”, and when you say “1000” you mean “2400”, and when you say “covered this” you mean “proposed that we all subconsciously share knowledge of a realm of pure, unmediated ideas which we learned in a previous life”… but of course you might mean something else entirely, and I’d be none the wiser.
Yea, thank you, neither my memory nor my fingers were working.
I’ll leave it as-is so people will know what you’re talking about.
I wasn’t trying to correct you — just demonstrating OP’s point about the assumptions we have to make before we can pretend to understand each other.
Oh, but your corrections were perfect, and a great example!
What?
Ah yes, the days of IRC chat.
What do you suppose it implies? What signs might we expect?
Zhuangzhi wrote about it well over 2000 years ago.
What do you suppose it implies?
All language is a fundamentally incomprehensible illusion of communication, and people have thought that for a while.
Makes for some banger songs though.
All language is not created equal. There is language with vast context (irl, face to face, between acquaintances, in a shared ultrarich physical environment) and language with minimal context (social media). That’s a big important difference.
For the record, I do agree. It’s worth occasionally thinking about the limits of communication, but it is the foundational technology of civilization.
Yeah, words have meaning to the person saying them, but aren’t guaranteed to have the same for the receiver.
Its why we try so hard to share a reality and define things.
And we have faith that we are on the same side of understanding.
Its also why the world is fucked up right now, no faith, we need to know, and we quiz and push to narrow our world to just those we can be sure of.Do you really think its worth it to only talk to yourself? Or do you figure out how to share how you feel and what you see in the world with others?
