We cannot describe how we operate

We cannot communicate how we perceive the world. We can show people, we can make statements. But our language – our communicative abilities – hit the limit when we try to describe the way in which we see the world. If it were possible to describe this, disagreements could be erased. Everyone’s explanations for behaviors and events would make perfect sense. I would say all of the experiences that accumulated to make my perceptions, and then you would tell me yours. Yours would be sensible. Mine would be sensible. There would be no disagreement, that is, unless we had to decide what to do next.

Bad Advice

The concept of “do unto others as you’d have done unto yourself” is tricky and misunderstood. It seems so simple. That is deceptive. First of all, it presupposes that you know how you like “done unto yourself”. Do you? Do you know how you like people to act toward you? Second, the exhortation to “do unto others” commands the impossible for many people. To “do” in any specific way, i.e. do unto others like a dog would”, presupposes that you can control your actions. Can you? Can you “do…like” or can you only “do”? Third, it presupposes a concept of “others.” This means that a person, an actor, would have to recognize that other people have emotions and ideas, that they might react in the same way the actor might. This is an extraordinary act of consciousness! All of this, recognition of others, knowledge of self and control over actions, demands a highly refined mind. Simple advice gone to waste. Better advice to get to this point (since, if you recognize that other people are like yourself in their feelings, and you have strong self knowledge (the two are probably hand in hand), this principle is utterly self-evident), is to spend 10 minutes a day thinking about yourself and other people. You will derive the advice on your own, and give it to yourself.

Easy Conversation

Sometimes you find yourself at a dinner table with a group of people. Conversation is lagging. Everyone is looking around the room, trying to think up something to say. A funny incident happens across the restaurant and the tension is relieved. Everyone starts chatting again, and then the group settles into conversation on some topic. Let’s say it is about drinking coffee. This conversational topic is enough to engage the group for 45 minutes of involved discussion – by simply following a web of personal associations for coffee. One person mentions Kona coffee, another mentions the coffee they had in Hawaii, then conversation drifts toward other great places where people have had coffee. Polled in advance, no one at the table would have thought he or she had so much to say about coffee, or that a group of people could talk for so long about it. And yet, it happens without anyone steering the conversation in a particular direction. In good conversation, there is no conscious thought involved, very much as if we were talking to ourselves.

Meaning and experience

Meaning is dependent on the experience of each of the concepts in a sentence. For example, when I complete the sentence, “yesterday it was raining” – you know my full meaning – I raised concepts in you, of yesterday and raining. (Because you know of raining, you also know what “it” refers to in the sentence.) For a more complex sentence like “I saw three movies in the last 3 weeks”, a whole range of concepts are invoked. You need to know who I am, what it means to see a movie, what a movie is, and categorize that over a duration that I’m referring to as 3 weeks. Because experience substantiates each concept, and there are invariably several concepts of varying complexity involved in a sentence, it is easy to see how miscommunication can creep into even such simple sentences as the above two. Now, when we consider a sentence like “freedom is the choice of people who have the opportunity to seek it” we see how many complex concepts we would have to share with the speaker in order to understand his or her meaning.

Undressed thought

When we are unclear on an idea, we can not communicate it. If we try, we expose our naked thought process. We all recognize when someone else is parading around undressed thoughts: Our eyes glaze and our minds wander.

Questions assume.

Questions are not benign. You may have heard of leading questions. These are the kinds of questions that lawyers ask witnesses to try to get the response they want. How fast were you going when you smashed into my client’s car? How many beers did you chug before you climbed into the vehicle?

Even supposedly non-leading questions, though, are based on leading assumptions. When there are too many assumptions, the question appears ridiculous. No one would ask: why do aliens eat their supper late at night? This loads too many assumptions in, and we call the person on it. A more reasonable question might be: why don’t aliens contact us? This is more acceptable because even though it gives existence to aliens, and it gives them the ability to contact us, it acknowledges the widely held belief that they haven’t. We tend to overlook the assumptions in questions because, on the whole, we tend to agree with them.

Thought behind Language

Everyday conversation requires a significant amount of thought. We carry out these thoughts so naturally and effortlessly that they lie entirely beneath our radar. A friend might ask us: “what are you going to wear tomorrow night to the dance?” A simple question, perhaps, but a significant amount of hidden thought goes into the answer.

First, we have to decipher the sentence. Then we have to remember that we do, in fact, have a dance to go to tomorrow night. Did we already choose our outfit or not? If we didn’t, then we have to imagine our wardrobe and pick out something. Perhaps we also think a bit about what we wore to the last affair that had the same group of people, lest we wear the same thing twice! Once we clear the outfit, we might think about whether it was cleaned recently or if it still has a stain from the red wine at the Jones Wedding. We follow no checklist in this process. We do not even recognize that we are doing it. It is automatic. And, miraculously, we do it all in seconds. We respond: I think I’m going to wear my black dress. The simple sentence is the punctuation of a complex web of underlying thoughts.

Conversational types

Conversation is not always about talking. There is emotional conversation, which is similar to nuzzling. This is pillow talk, where people make up their own words and speak utter nonsense. The value in this conversation is simply hearing the other person’s voice. No one will remember what is said or makes any pretense to think about what they’re saying.

There is the power struggle conversation, where a person tries to beat the other in debate. This is more like sparring than talking. Jabs are thrown as feeler arguments, and regardless if we agree or disagree with what the other person is saying, we try to sneak in our left hook. Conversations of this type are not about working through a point; they are about bludgeoning.

There is small talk, or getting to know you talk. This is the equivalent of circling around someone and checking them out, but through language. Innocent questions in these types of conversations are not necessarily so innocent. They are often probes, as a doctor might needle you prior to making a complete diagnosis.

Learning without understanding

We can learn words without associating any meaning to them. This is very much what goes on when we learn the lyrics to a song. We sing along effortlessly, never stopping to think about what the song might mean. If someone were to stop and ask us: what is that song about? We might have a vague understanding, but nowhere near what you’d expect. A significant amount of everyday conversation is like this. We respond to questions and make conversation as if we were all singing a wonderfully complex song. We follow the pattern, we know the rhythm of it, and we produce the appropriate words.

The Shape of Word Learning

One of the curious aspects of learning words is the way we segment them from other words at first, only later to unify them and separate them again. Let’s say that a child first hears the terms “sociology” or “economics”. To him, these words have no meaning until they are explained and he sees them a few times. Eventually they gain meaning, and he has a definition of them, which he can spit out: “Economics is X and Y and Z”

As this child gets older, and perhaps he chooses to study Economics, the term starts to expand beyond his limited definition. Where he saw it at first as primarily about money, he now sees it spreading its tentacles into psychology, sociology and politics. The word starts to lose its individuality.

I visualize this process like the shape of an hourglass. At first the meaning of the word is diffuse across subjects. Then, over time it becomes pinched and narrow, as we believe we have a clear and distinct definition for it. However, if we proceed further ,the meaning of the word widens once again. We learn that no word stands in isolation.

Shared perceptual abilities

If you and I are standing next to each other, looking out into an open meadow with one gnarled oak tree in the middle – we can assume that we are having virtually the same perceptual experience. We both see the tree and the meadow. For both of us, the tree would stand out. Even if I don’t say anything, but just point at the tree and shrug my shoulders, you will know that I’m referring to the tree. You do not know this by process of elimination, and you are not guessing. We both notice the single tree – it is the most important feature of the landscape.

It is this shared way of perceiving the world that makes communication possible. If we segmented the world differently – if my meadow and tree looked radically different from yours – we would have nothing to talk about. I would be trapped in my world, and you would be in yours.

Learning by doing

If a child asks an adult “how does this radio work?” The temptation to answer the question is so strong, and the adult wants to show his knowledge, so he explains it. Excitedly, he demonstrates how the radio operates, while the child sits there and observes. Even if the child learns the operation of the radio this way, it gives him the wrong impression about learning: over time he comes to believe that he can turn to others for answers – and get them. This differs tremendously from the adult saying: “Here, take this radio apart and see if you can discover how it works. I’ll be here if you get stuck.” In this second example, the child learns a radio in an unforgettable way. And he learns a much more important subtext: I can figure things out on my own.

We notice parts, and even that, not well

If you ask someone to draw a dog, he will have a difficult time with it. If you ask him to draw a dog’s ears, he has no problem. Draw a dog body with a tail, also not too difficult. But when you ask him to draw the whole thing it becomes complicated. He gets stuck.

Even though we always see dogs as whole dogs, we remember the ears and snouts and tails. This is the nature of human perception: we notice and remember salient features. When we try to draw the dog, our little perceptual secret is outed. We can draw these parts, but we have a difficult time putting it all together into a whole dog.

So, we use “stock” images for the parts we can’t remember. How do a dog’s feet look when we draw them? Do they look different from cat feet? And when we draw the whole dog we have to worry about things we never take care to notice, body length, relative length of legs to tail, head to body, etc. Our dog comes out looking strangely similar to our horse and our goat.

If we want to be able to see things aright, and draw them correctly, then we have to push ourselves out of the way. We have to see what is hitting our eyes, rather than what we notice from what hits our eyes. In other words, we have to see the whole dog as one image. This way, our drawing will be able to reproduce the same image for someone else, or for ourselves at a later time.

Conscious experience is assembled from feelings

The feelings in the muscles, in the head, in the arms, in the legs, in the genitals, etc. changes greatly from one instant to the next. Many of these changes depend on our environment – if an attractive person walks by, certain parts of our anatomy might wake up. If a great song comes on the radio, our toes might start tapping as if they alone wanted to dance. And yet we believe that our whole experience – our emotional state – will persist. We fail to notice how the parts – the subconscious changes in our body and in our environment – affect the whole, our conscious experience.

Boring Pleasures

One of the pecularities about pleasurable experiences is that we remember them as pleasurable without really remembering them. Let’s say that you are recalling a time when you were on the beach listening to live music. There were the sounds of the music and the ocean, there was the sea breeze on the skin, there was the colors in the sky, the taste of the pina colada, and the unique smell of the ocean air. If we can remember all of these aspects of an experience, we can feel the same pleasure again. But we don’t remeber things this way. Normally we gloss over the little pleasures that sum up to the general feeling. We just remember the general feeling, i.e. it was relaxing, or it was really nice. And this is how we describe it to other people, which, of course, for them, is boring.