Saturday night was the grand and spectacular return to the Mars for us. Once more to stake our place in our 'watering hole' which is our fond referral for the den of iniquity of our bar? Funnily enough, 'watering hole' is a slang term used to describe a regular spot for drinking and quenching your thirst but in my insane way of connecting things I can laughingly consider that other thirsts are quenched and the 'watering hole' has another meaning. Tee Hee! (Yes I know I'm naughty! I make no apology. You also perhaps understood my meaning!)
Oh lick me!
It is too much too soon my darlings. After a week of work, which was a great feeling for me in both wanting and desiring a taste of before, a taste of regular routine again. I admit that I incorrectly assumed that I could relax on a Saturday night in my usual happy fashion. I went out to enjoy good company, those wild girls that I consider my friends, lots of laughs and lots more cool beer with ice. The early hours of Sunday morning had other plans for my state of being. The sleepy hours found me feeling ill in the extreme and emptying my stomach content in quite a violent manner, as my Doctor tells me that my consumption had a nasty reaction with my medication. The cure, as drastic as it was, was missing out Sunday's medication, fasting for twenty four hours and drinking lots and lots of water. Hitomi sitting in the kitchen to eat her meals with the doors closed might have helped a little and was very considerate of her but I live above a restaurant and with the balcony doors open on a nice warm day the aroma's from below tormentingly drift up to tease my senses and have my mouth watering as much as my 'water diet' and Pavlov's dogs. Such torture!
You can guess that Monday lunch could not come soon enough. My denial over and I couldn't overdo it but I did enjoy it and savor each moment. I had bread, fish fillet in an egg sauce followed by a glazed, mocha ice cream! Even the first taste of bread in my mouth seemed like heaven and prepared my way forward for the pampering of my taste buds with the richness of flavors that were to follow. Simply divine and this time my mouth watered with relish! Pavlov's dogs eventually received their reward and although Sunday was painstakingly long, my Monday lunch-time seemed to make it all worthwhile! OK! No more alcohol until I'm off my medication. Even stubborn Momo can learn her lesson!
I used to like to think that my cat would say "Good morning" to me. "I love you Momma" and "I'm hungry, please feed me." Perhaps I'm silly, idealistic (laughs at the term) and sentimental.
Ludwig Wittgenstein once said "If a lion could talk, we would fail to understand him" and perhaps that may sound unconvincing or preposterous for several reasons. Many thoughts flooded my mind just upon considering this single statement. One of language, one of history, one of thought and one of perspective immediately came to mind. I won't say these yet though because I would dearly love comments on what this sentence means to you!
Any takers?
Consider that the world has many approaches to philosophy and Wittgenstien was considered an idealist. As such the world could only be considered and possibly is a construction of human thought. This at once would have me think then that what values would be in the world before humans existed? Is there nothing independent of the human mind?
The big bang (or let there be light) happened eighteen billion years ago. If we say that 'time' started from this moment then I can say that for the last eighteen billion years I was dead. I had to be since I was not alive. There wasn't any period during that time that I was uncomfortable or sad or cared that I had a choice or not.
Suddenly here I am alive with a mind to regard the universe and consider things. Later in a few decades ( I hope at least) I will be dead again. I can speculate that since I am aware of what happens after people I know die, that the lives of others and the universe will carry on without me. I guess you can see my point from my individual and not as a human collective that I don't offer much credit to idealism them!
Wittgenstien also once considered that thought and language mirrored the constructs of the world but again I say 'not so' and he too finally gave up on that! The wondering and grunts of the animal with the over-sized brain (us) can attempt to contemplate the world we live in and loudly describe it but it still exists without our thoughts and languages. Is there truly nothing that cannot be said?
I would say there are some things that cannot be said or even expressed and with that in mind, I settle the turmoil of my own considering of why we cannot understand a talking lion because I do not believe there could be a Rosetta stone for Japanese or English and lion-talk. All of our human languages are based on human references.
Think about language for moment.
I think I could make myself understood to a foreigner who shares no tongue with me that I want six chickens in exchange for my goat and not four. I have believed that the first attempts of language must have been for bartering, for taking stock and trade. Enter a written language and suddenly we get the ability, no, the power to preserve our thoughts. (I knew there was a reason I liked to blog!)
The oldest stories we have were probably passed down to each generation by means of song and yes, I remember lyrics much better than I can remember scripts. How wonderful it must have been to finally put those songs, those stories in pictograph and other written language forms. Writing must have at least one definition of artificial memory before these last few decades of the silicon chip.The earliest writing form was the pictograph of the Sumner which perhaps like cave painting before them, could be interpreted as metaphors of sensuous realities. Only the natural evolution and the introduction of phonetics, I think allowed human language to remove itself from that reality, the one with lion-talk and began to point inwards to human considerations only, our mouth and the sense of our own uttering! Although I do wonder how pictographs would have expressed our abstractions? (Laughs) I doubt it could have been this way. Language had to evolve as our thought also evolved beyond the constraints of what we see and hear!
I think therefore I am. A rock does not think but it still is! Yes I'm being pedantic! But I don't think (pun intended) that we need our over-sized brain that develops conscious awareness to have sensation and awareness. All animals have this and even a lot of plants. Some trees for example issue a chemical to warn and make their neighbors aware that their leaves are being eaten by caterpillars. Bacteria swim towards sugar and away from acid. This tells me that living things have some level of cognition. Even Nietszche realized this when he protected and apologetically hugged a horse that the owner was beating. An owner with a Platonist belief that animals are no more than machines! Our over-sized brain truly has a high degree of self awareness but conscious awareness is only a fraction of what we can and do assimilate from the environment around us by our senses. Subliminal perception gives us a much greater knowledge and this is what many animals also have and because they are unencumbered by this self aware consciousness they may have 'simpler' (by comparison) and more of what we may term 'instinctive' lives. True to circadian rhythms, we like many other animals fall asleep at night and we dream. I also believe many animals dream. I have seen Rina's dog reacting to something while it sleeps as if running for a ball in its dream.
But our dreams, the dreams of a highly developed consciousness we often imagine have symbolic meanings and yet how easy is it to consider that its the brain cleaning up its daily intake of subliminal perception?
Our deepest motivations are hidden from our own conscious scrutiny and so much processing of that information takes place in parts of our mind that we don't have conscious access to.
Is that a good thing?
The best craftsman produces his best work without considering his actions, he just does it! Consider then that we are at our most skillful when we are least aware. Is this why our meditative techniques in Zen Buddhism is to empty the mind? Is this why our archers were taught that they would be most accurate when they neither considered the target nor themselves?
Consider also then that these are not methods of heightening consciousness but actually by-passing it!
I look at the dress on the model in the shop window. My conscious mind may consider how it would look on me, how it will match with what I already possess in my wardrobe and the reactions of my friends when they see me in it. Yet my senses are aware of many other things happening around me. I see behind me reflected in the glass of the store window, I smell the food cooking from a street vendor several yards away, I hear passing conversations, the car engines, my own heart beating. I feel currents of air pass across my skin and I'm aware of the weight of my shoes and purse and the 'feel' of my clothes against me and that is just the surface of what my senses tell me all of the time I am awake.
If I step out into the path of a car, I do not consider trajectories, I do not consider consequences of continuing such action and nor do I contemplate alternative actions or the full spectrum of preventative measures.
I simply react and step back.
This decision needs no conscious effort on my part and comes from the areas of my brain that I share with other animals on this world, the same place that processes all the subliminal input.
My point is that we do not act the way we think.
Perhaps we do not 'author' our lives for the greater part of them. I make choices the same as everyone else but it is not a constant function. If, and I have no reason as yet to believe otherwise, these filters that our conscious minds need and allow the rest of sensory awareness information to fall into the unconscious mind, filter about one millionth part for conscious consideration...
The brain perhaps can processes 12 - 15 million bits of information per second: (based on active neurons count)
The bandwidth of consciousness is about 20 bits per second
This if true, would imply that we play in our conscious minds with only one millionth of sensory input data. Fragments and shadows play across the minds of a genius and of a simple person. Such are the philosophies and thoughts from the value of the self and the collective human experience.
Thanks for considering my little part of the whole.
And now as an ease back into the simpler parts of daily considerations....
... more lick me!
Koda Kumi - Lick me
Ludwig Wittgenstein said:
"Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use"
But, everyone knows that we communicate by not only language and words, we have eyes, we have tone of voice, we have body language – this is something we can’t modificate, we can’t control it. Ok, many specialists try teach us how to control our body to speak as we want, but seriously it is very hard and I don’t think we need it in ordinary world, daily duties. If I started control my body this way, what is conflicting with my thoughts and what I really feel inside, I would feel like one big lie. I said lie, not liar, because I think it express better what I want say. If I act contrarily to myself I lie not only to other people around me to jockey for some reasons, but I contrary myself in my own feelings and I would feel strange, because it is like I would like to say: “no matter how I really think, more important is what other think about me” and it was always a thought I couldn’t stand.
“we do not act the way we think”
Yes, we don’t. But why? Act the way we think need great courage and it is impossible in our world which notabene we crated to satisfy ourselves. I told you once that human imprison himself in cage he built on his own, because he thought that it can satisfy him, give him a feeling of power. Our brains are impressive, fast machines we can’t control as much as we would like to. Is this mean that we haven’t grew up to our brains? Are our brains too complicated, too advanced to us? I can say: “I don’t know” because it is one of greatest enigmas and we haven’t find answers for these question yet.
Thank you for amazing post, you made me think again. Thank you very much.
Ania
June 19, 2009 6:20 PMLudwig Wittgenstein and his philosophy is something new for me, I've never heard about him before and this makes me excited a little bit - the same like new toy excite a child - I can't wait to have great fun. I've read some articles and interviews with him and about him to understand it better.
"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him"
Language and comunication are topics I really like and I think that comunication between one human and another is a base everything we can do, create, built, achieve, etc. From simple talk we can go much further than we think we can - conversation with second person in front of us, new point of view makes us think, we see other new aspects of the topic we talk about. It is fantastic, because there is no two identical persons, everybody is unique and in consequent, there is no two the same opinions. Even if we agree with somethign there are always other parts we don't agree - so comunication, even if we think about as a simple talk, conversation, it is completetly natural for us, because we do it everyday with many people - conversation is powerful tool we use to learn, educe and change other minds too. Many people don't appreciate this gift, don't think about language and our opportunities this way.
So let's back to Ludwig...
John Gray (British philospher) squabashed him in his book and quoted words of John Aspinall (defender of the nature):
"It is obvious, that Wittgenstein hasn't often travelled in the company of lions"
But, 40 pages later Gray wrote:
"If dead persons could talk, we could not understand them"
Human is something needless to this world: if all people disappeared immidiately, our absence would not hurt this world we live in. What if all animal disappear...? What if every creation disapear? Trees, grass, flowers, lions, cats, dogs... My point is that human is part of this world, this huge, complicated structure. Obsence one person change nothing, but if we delete all of us, that would have big meaning.
Language: word -> a few words -> sentence -> a few sentences -> monologue
What is the main sense of comunication? We need to take two people, sit them in front of each other. Second condition: a message has to be say loudly and be addressed to one of persons. Words have meaning only if its said. If we don't say anything, there is no comunication, so words hidden have no meaning.
Look at word for a while. What is this? A few signs with a meaning definited by human. Human say that word "red" means red colour, "lion" means lion. What if we said that "red" mean green or "lion" min cat? I want say that since Homo sapiens fossilis invented language, we have been changing the meaning of words many times, we have inputed many new words and gramar modification, etc. Language is something very flexible and we shape it as we want. Now, if you think what I wrote at the beggining again, about that words, language is a basic of comunication and that comunication is as powerful as we are and let us do what we are able to do and what we've already done in this world, then you can say that word is just a word. Word is something we crated, we can change it as we want, so we don't know if "red" will means read 20 000 years later.
Ania
June 19, 2009 6:20 PMThanks Ania
All the elements are there within my words, its just putting them together.
Our brains & Language --> Speech
Our conscious selves spring only from that small small part of our brain, that small part with the conscious thoughts. Haven't we all heard that we don't use 90% of our brain?
Well we do use it all. it's only that our conscious mind has no access to it at all.
We simply deny this fact because admitting it seems to 'deprive' us of control.
Therefore the greatest part of our lives go one without thinking about it. We 'think' our actions are the end-result of our thoughts and one of the key reasons of that is often the feeling or the remembering of impulse conflicts (shall I - shall I not?). When we 'know' what we are doing we are hardly conscious of it.
We are 'programmed' to perceive identity in ourselves when the truth is that we are always changing. The world around us changes as we do.
By projecting this self into our actions we can make them accountable in our memories of them.
We achieve this illusory sense of identity from our power of speech. As babies our parents spoke to us. We remember such sounds as 'our names' we make a fictional self in our mind so we can see ourself from some imagined outside perspective. This language helps us project this fictional self into the past and can formulate possible futures too. We can even create scenarios after our death.
We are a collection of perceptions.
Not all knowledge we have is instructions in the brain.
I leaned to drive a car and I drive often without thinking what I'm doing. I talk to Hitomi in passenger seat. Road awareness is in another part of my mind.
I was helped in becoming bipedal as my Mother helped me learn to walk upright.
I never was given any instruction how to take milk from her breast.
We must consider then that some 'knowledge' is inherent and comes with the body we are given. That body took a long time getting here. I don't mean the nine and a half months in the womb, I mean the 5 million years of hominid descent and the thousands of millions of years before that in other pre-evolutionary forms.
We do communicate by many ways you are right. Animals do it too. They know 'play' and that play fighting is not aggressive. All humans regardless of culture, mother tongue,ethnicity raise their eyebrows when we meet someone we know.
No need to feel one big lie Ania, the specialist is either teaching you a new skill of modifying behaviors. Such specialists have taught us to walk again after illness, taught us confidence to speak in public, taught us to overcome psychological issues.
*
Language evolves. How would the Ancient Greeks describe a modern day aircraft? They would have to use terms they were familiar with at that time.
Jazz
June 20, 2009 8:07 PM