Really doesnt make very much of a difference since I'm not really writing for anyone, or for that many people to view at all.
Been hectically busy and been a little despondent when faced with the task of committing thoughts to words on the screen. I realise just how much effort, not really physical...rather-emotional/mental effort is involved, sifting through the mush and churning tumoil of consciousness and then rearranging, choosing the medium, form, language, tense and wording them to understandable forms following the language rules which bind such.
Been often plagued recently with this sense that words are completely ineffective, insufficient and very often incoherent. Anyone agree?
Just a bit of personal information. Been working two jobs, one with a Physiotherapy practice, another a retail job in cosmetics with one of the cosmetic company houses. Yes-- I am a cosmetic girl. And yes, I can actually think and communicate myself beyond the intellectual spectrum from Cleo to Madison. I say this tongue-in-cheek, the people I work with really aren't that dumb at all, because that's the usual stance that people take when on realising they person they are speaking to, doesn't quite fit the norm or stereotype. Yeah well, get over it and move on. Incorporate another piece of information, however oddly shaped to your perspective. I'm more inclined to say that most customers can be blatantly stupid. Infuriatingly so, very often beyond comprehension that one has to question whether they are deliberately persisting in their stupidity and following questions/statements, ie:
1) Does Sunscreen cause Cancer?
Ans: No, it doesn't. Infact, it has been inequivocably been proven to grant protection FROM sun-causing melanomas/cancers.
1ii) But...I'm sure it does. I READ it SOMEWHERE that it causes cancer. It SAID so.
Ans: Where did you read this?
1iii) In a fashion magazine...
Ans: ... I've already granted you the decency and time to give an actual serious answer. Please go and fuck yourself now.
2) I want a cream to bleach my skin. Preferably if it has lead in it.
Ans: Choke. (Refer to historical advances when knowledge was found that hypothetically, it was possible the Roman empire failed due to mass accumulated lead poisonings due to lead lining of wine casks by the wine-makers. Refer as well to the lead-laden makeup in the early times of Geishas in Japan. And the accumulated skin deformities that became a consequence as these Geishas grew older, occupational hazard! Refer also the many unexplained non-violent deaths of sailors who'd set out on long expeditions only to be found adrift, all dead, untouched, with the cabins filled with food. Lead had lined all these tins!) And here was this profoundly touched idiot!
Bit more personal information, studying to become a Physiotherapist in Sydney Australia. I love what I'm doing...but I think for the moment, i can forsee a time when I definitely will want something more challenging. Will probably, more than likely go into further study, not research though, hell no. Been working with patients and observing the principal Physio over the last couple of months, which has been a definite eye-opener for me. Will relate patient stories as I go on at some point...
ok. On to other things. Next post.
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Words have often seemed to communicate very little to me.... The key thing is to note at what times you have the feeling that words are meaningless.
I think you mean many things here. Words can be ineffective if they fail to convince, if they fail to change something, if they fail to inspire another, if they fail to communicate the gravity or importance of something, if they fail to change another's emotional state or to communicate one's own. This is the less worrisome problem for me.
When I experience the sense that a simple string of my words, a sentence, could really be incoherent to another English-speaking person with a human brain, I find a lot more worrying.
I'm not talking about conversations involving scientific language or obscure vocabulary. But that sense that what I've just been saying doesn't cohere with previously expressed opinions and ideas, each of which may have been expressed passionately.
Anyway, it is easy enough to break apart most sentences in to whole classes of assumptions, and meaning seems to evaporate very quickly unless you're speaking to somebody similar to you.
I think ambiguity and hypocrisy are difficult to avoid.
I forgot to add. I think there's a strange sort of agreement with what you say here with my post about language and philosophy. I think that when concepts start becoming really difficult, without the use of alternative ways to express ideas and theories, you plunge in to an abyss of incomprehension of self and other.
Probably one's own mind and emotional processes are just this, a very complex system which artists and writers try to take snapshots of over time and never quite see the bigger picture. (Or if they do, this might be even more disturbing to them)...doomed to fail, due to evolution not equipping us with adequate facilities to express ourselves.
I like your description of incorporating another piece of information in to one's system. For a while I've taken very literally the idea of a "path to one's heart" and more generally a path (physical and psychological) towards arousing a particular mental state in anybody else...however convoluted and individually varied such paths might be.
I often think about the problems which arise due to the fact that we are serial information processors. We can't communicate everything at once, and that is the problem. Our words spill out slowly and we can only make others understand gradually, if at all...and because they spill out and are processed in sequence rather than instantaneously they are subject to misinterpretation even before the clarifying extra information which the next paragraph contains can be seen. We might reject everything that another person says where under different circumstances we might've agreed with everything that they said, depending on our reaction to their first few sentences. "First impressions matter"?
It requires a perfect knowledge of another's brain to discover the ways that the paths of another's brain wind.
if i were talking about the problems of language in my coding,information and ciphers course, we'd probably talk about information loss. in hindsight, this is a better way to think about it.
great literary minds can better communicate feelings with complex, more subtle words. only idiots are either truly happy or truly sad, so it's surprising that people aim to be happy...although of course, to summarise our overall state, we must use words like happy or sad. the problem is, we use such vague words too often, and we feel that we've not communicated either our opinions or our feelings properly...or, if we've done the best that English allows us to do but still haven't properly communicated, we might say, as you've done, that we were incoherent or contradictory (english may not be expressive enough to demonstrate that some contradictions are only APPARENT contradictions)
if we were to instead send over a huge data file describing the physical state of our brains, we would be sending relatively lossless information in comparison to when we summarise our feelings with a one minute speech...although the data file is far less intelligible, at least to every human that I am aware of (although this might change in the future)...
oh yeah, so the point is, for really complicated ideas, which english is poorly equipped to handle (as our our brains, which not only were not designed to handle abstract conversations about consciousness as well as they do social things, but aren't as adapted for written as spoken english)...most information is extremely lossy.
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