Our real sense organ is language.

Even better; perception of the reality is language. The carriers, media, can be sense organs, Word, Music, everything, but it is what they have in common that makes the difference. The language. The ability to assign a meaning, a content. Something that carries this meaning, like words.

Men are made of words.

The outer world, the reality, is perceived as we do according to the meaning the individual assigns them. The meaning is inside the individual, subjective, and it may fit more or less precisely the intrinsic meaning of the reality, that is objective (and unknowable downright).

Consequently, the one who wants to be more fully aware about himself and what surrounds him, he has to use better and better words. (Link to the previous post about communication.) He has to own an improving resolution, to discern smaller and smaller details and differences.

He (or she, it's clear) has to start talking to himself. 

 

It's interesting to think about how senses operate. For istance, the eye. It's known that people who were born blind and start to see at some point (I'm not alluding just to miracles, but to certain physiological conditions), they are not actually seeing anything: their brain receives the images but just can't interprets them. It does not connect the external world (the geometrical space conformation in front of it) to the inner one (presence of himself in that space, distances, objects consistence, etc…). It will learn this ability with time. Again is the information contained in the images which let us see, not light emission by itself. Here's the language: it does not exist information without encoding. It would not exist any encoding without information, after all. 

This would start a diversion from the theme, about computers world. The code made by men using these machines, the language animating them, them as human "extensions". Maybe we will talk about it next time.

Coming back: for every communication system, and they are uncountable, it's always a matter of coding.

Now the first observation: the system is not necessarily finite. That is projecting men towards eternity for which they are designed, coding and communication system available are first of all A LOT but, more important, they are open to such a huge amount of possible evolutions, extensions, changes, interrelations, that my head hurts just thinking about it. Then what men are, what they perceive, is potentially eternal indeed. Not to mention the usal thing: nothing is ever exactly identical to itself, not even twice in a row.

Second observation, more interesting at the moment: the system is currently imperfect. Our imperfection, as said before, corrupts expressive systems but above all decoding systems, frustrating largely the great existance function of the Ego, the language. Reminding the other post, again, we have to try to refine our communication abilities, both expression and decoding ones. Misunderstandings, or data transfer errors, are noxious and have on thoughts and relationship the same effects eletromagnetical noise has on audio/video data transfer, for example. Consequences then span in a range of possibilities starting from simple "unpleasant" up to "painful". To use a technical term, we have to costantly work to obtain the better Signal to Noise ratio ever.

Dialogue. Dialogue, dialogue! First af all with ourselves; it is not possible to interact effectively and pleasantly with others if we do not know our own "functioning parameters" first, our coding/decoding patterns, our features, abilities and indiosyncrasy, what do we need a what we can give. Then it's necessary to proceed dialoguing with neighbor; not just talking, but trying to excercise the function for which language exists between sentient beings, that is the exchange. We do not have the gift of word to exercise a funtion similar to that of a tv channel stuck on advertisings 24h a day.

We have the wonderful ability to internalize part of the universe, part of the sensible reality (and part of it that is not, thanks to our spiritual component). After this, we can share our vision of what we know with others; replicate this procedure with a number of people for a given period of time (tending to infinite) and you'll see this way we obtain an always richer and more accurate perception of reality.

Moreover, we reach a greater happiness degree, which comes from giving. 

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" – Frank Zappa

 

A tiny preamble:

It is remarkable what occurred to me between yesterday and today. Yesterday I had begun drawing up this text when my pc crashed, with one of those typical and so lovable blue-screens, leaving me sitting in the semi-darkness of my couch alone with my frustration (and tiredness). But straight to the point. I was writing about how language is… how can be said… now the most summarying word is "plural" or non univocal. Computer crashes, now I have to rewrite the same things, but obviously those naughty notions come up with another shape, that is different words, different sentences, other mental structures.

I should be pleased with that, on the other hand is one more evidence about my point. Now free meditations follow.

 

Once i wrote an essay about Writing. Quite strange that one can write about Writing, or can talk about Language, while it's not possible to play about Music or desing about Architecture. Every tongue has its words, but this is another matter.

Words, yes, writings… It's really the only magic allowed to men. That of producing a discourse, it is an art indeed; while everybody can pile up words together, relatively few are those who know how to create something with even slightly noticeable features.

The arcane of clothing a concept, an idea, with something undescribable… with something aspiring to carry its meaning; a symbol, a synthesis of what it is. Words as bricks, as atoms, as cells… They can be grouped to form living, real, functional structures.

Language exists under the fact that exists someone who can communicate. This is not just banality. It may take uncountable shapes, colors, tongues and expressions, but it always refers to the same underlying truths. And misunderstandings are just consequences of our own imperfection. Comprehension isn't something that language carries along with itself; it's something it encounters, finds, even better retrieve, in the individual receiving the message.

This is obvious examining the languages of nature; the perfect harmony of phyisical laws, how their mutual interaction produces in the end not only an intellective enjoyment in us, but also a deep emotive envolvment, like the one we experience admiring the drapery of the petals of a flower, or an impressionistic sunset or a misterious and boundless starry sky. 

Men would arrogate the right to define what art is – the language – distancing from concrete rules, searching for the abstract, the pure, the mathematic, even chaos. But they do not realize that what they perceive as "sublime" responds to the same rules that allowed their tecnological progress, the very same rules allowing our perception of harmony in music. But this again is another matter.

More: words, speeches, are like snowflakes… They can fall with indifference, loveliness, silently too, and they could even seem redundant, obvious. On the contrary every flake is dramatically unique, even if it belongs to the same family, the same species! Every man has the right to feel pride about his uniqueness, but what modesty induces in us the thought that every year, every day, there's a greater number of unique identities falling from the sky than the ones that are born by men! Thus isn't just a right anymore, but a duty to express oneself, and before (and meanwhile) expression, research, meditation, reflection, to gain insight, first of all about ourselves, then about others.

Utopia! Obviously this is an ideal. How can we ever think about being able to know everything? But this is our nature, searching for indefinite time, human conscience stretches towards eternity just because of this. Or thanks to this. (Never confuse cause and motive).

Back to mutableness, to the plurality shown by speeches (and then by languages containing them): they are like the light, you're lying under a tree and you're watching the sky through the branches and leaves… In every instant the light filtering through them is different from the light in the previous instant, maybe because the position of the parts of the tree moved by the wind has changed, maybe because the clouds moved, or maybe because of the variation in the humidity ratio, or temperature, or the height of the sun, or the chaotic movings of the molecules of oxygen and steam exaling from the leaves, each of them with its own refraction index… Not to mention the physical state of the eye, the electrical one of the nervous system, and the mental state, of the observer.

Anyway, we keep on seeing the same landscape, the same tree, the same picture What a paradox! The very same thing is never the same thing, strictly. And here now that just pronouncing a word alters it: because if the word it's just a series of pressure waves in the air, perceived as sound, what it contains, the meaning of which it become ensign, that vibrates inside of us (and, pay attention, in a different way for each of us). So, what I am saying will never be understood the very same way as I am thinking it (did I discover the obvious?) but anyway it accomplishes its task. It's a matter of "resolution", to use an optical term. The smaller the element the reticule is made of, greater is the detail depicted and perceived. Then comes back the importance of relfecting, of the communicator's "artistic" ability: his tongue is the instrument to be sharpened, sped, empowered, to differentiate the smallest parts and to secure that the message will reach its destination satisfactorily. Also because those who really want to communicate consider everybody (or at least a major part of them) as their public, and it's clear, it's just natural and correct to care about the comprehension of the audience. Otherwise the speech becomes just an exercise in front of the mirror, for which we could even be almost unlimitedly satisfied, but that will remain an infertile exercise if it does not stick to the real nature of language: the exchange.

 

Now I stop here  because if you want me to talk about the exchange then I will have to stay up all night…!