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%.
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.