Posts Tagged ‘meaning’
“One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another”*…
Wisdom for the exquisite Existential Comics (“A philosophy comic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also jokes.”)…
Frege was an early philosopher of language, who formulated a theory of semantics that largely had to do with how we form truth propositions about the world. His theories were enormously influential for people like Russel, Carnap, and even Wittgenstein early in his career. They all recognized that the languages we use are ambiguous, so making exact determinations was always difficult. Most of them were logicians and mathematicians, and wanted to render ordinary language as exact and precise as mathematical language, so we could go about doing empirical science with perfect clarity. Russell, Carnap, and others even vowed to create an exact scientific language (narrator: “they didn’t create an exact scientific language”).
Later on, Wittgenstein and other philosophers such as J.L. Austin came to believe that a fundamental mistake was made about the nature of language itself. Language, they thought, doesn’t pick out truth propositions about the world at all. Speech acts were fundamentally no different than other actions, and were merely used in social situations to bring about certain effects. For example, in asking for a sandwich to be passed across the table, we do not pick out a certain set of facts about the world, we only utter the words with the expectations that it will cause certain behavior in others. Learning what is and isn’t a sandwich is more like learning the rules of a game than making declarations about what exists in the world, so for Wittgenstein, what is or isn’t a sandwich depends only on the success or failure of the word “sandwich” in a social context, regardless of what actual physical properties a sandwich has in common with, say, a hotdog.
“Is a Hotdog a Sandwich? A Definitive Study,” from @existentialcomics.com.
* René Descartes
###
As we add mayonnaise, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Norbert Wiener; he was born on this date in 1894. A computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher, Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines– a field that has had implications for implications for a wide variety of fields, including engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, and philosophy. (Wiener credited Leibniz as the “patron saint of cybernetics.)
His work heavily influenced computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and many others. Wiener was one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms and could possibly be simulated by machines– an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence.
“So much of performing is a mind game”*…
As John Seamon explains, in describing how they remember their lines, actors are telling us an important truth about memory…
… Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character. In describing these elaborative processes, the actors assembled that evening offered sound advice for effective remembering.
Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. The actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text. In his book “Acting in Film,” actor Michael Caine described this process well:
You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously…
…
Deep understanding involves focusing your attention on the underlying meaning of an item or event, and each of us can use this strategy to enhance everyday retention. In picking up an apple at the grocers, for example, you can look at its color and size, you can say its name, and you can think of its nutritional value and use in a favorite recipe. Focusing on these visual, acoustic, and conceptual aspects of the apple correspond to shallow, moderate, and deep levels of processing, and the depth of processing that is devoted to an item or event affects its memorability. Memory is typically enhanced when we engage in deep processing that provides meaning for an item or event, rather than shallow processing. Given a list of common nouns to read, people recall more words on a surprise memory test if they previously attended to the meaning of each word than if they focused on each word’s font or sound.
Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating something you are trying to learn to things you already known. Retention is enhanced because elaboration produces more meaningful associations than does shallow processing — links that can serve as potential cues for later remembering. For example, your ease of recalling the name of a specific dwarf in Walt Disney’s animated film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” depends on the cue and its associated meaning:
Try to recall the name of the dwarf that begins with the letter B.
People often have a hard time coming up with the correct name with this cue because many common names begin with the letter B and all of them are wrong. Try it again with a more meaningful cue:
Recall the name of the dwarf whose name is synonymous with shyness.
If you know the Disney film, this time the answer is easy. Meaningful associations help us remember, and elaborative processing produces more semantic associations than does shallow processing. This is why the meaningful cue produces the name Bashful…
On the art of recall: “How Actors Remember Their Lines,” an excerpt from Seamon’s book, Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us About Memory, from @mitpress.
* Joshua Bell
###
As we recollect, we might recall that it was on this date in 1952 that Guiding Light (AKA The Guiding Light) transferred from CBS Radio to CBS Television… and, as while radio actors could read from scripts, tv performers couldn’t, an enormous new occasion for the memorization of lines was created.
And indeed, there were lots and lots of lines to remember: with 72 years of radio and television runs (18,262 episodes), Guiding Light remains the longest-running soap opera, ahead of General Hospital, and is the fifth-longest-running program in all of global broadcast history.
“For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.”*…
And we humans are, as Kit Yates explains, myth-making animals…
Unfortunately, when it comes to understanding random phenomena, our intuition often lets us down. Take a look at the image below. Before you read the caption, see if you can pick out the data set generated using truly uniform random numbers for the coordinates of the dots (i.e., for each point, independent of the others, the horizontal coordinate is equally likely to fall anywhere along the horizontal axis and the vertical coordinate is equally likely to fall anywhere along the vertical).
The truly randomly distributed points in the figure are those in the left-most image. The middle image represents the position of ants’ nests that, although distributed with some randomness, demonstrate a tendency to avoid being too close together in order not to overexploit the same resources. The territorial Patagonian seabirds’ nesting sites, in the right-most image, exhibit an even more regular and well-spaced distribution, preferring not to be too near to their neighbors when rearing their young. The computer-generated points, distributed uniformly at random in the left-hand image, have no such qualms about their close proximity.
If you chose the wrong option, you are by no means alone. Most of us tend to think of randomness as being “well spaced.” The tight clustering of dots and the frequent wide gaps of the genuinely random distribution seem to contradict our inherent ideas of what randomness should look like…
…
… As a case in point, after noticing a disproportionate number of Steely Dan songs playing on his iPod shuffle, journalist Steven Levy questioned Steve Jobs directly about whether “shuffle” was truly random. Jobs assured him that it was and even got an engineer on the phone to confirm it. A follow-up article Levy wrote in Newsweek garnered a huge response from readers having similar experiences, questioning, for example, how two Bob Dylan songs shuffled to play one after the other (from among the thousands of songs in their collections) could possibly be random.
We ascribe meaning too readily to the clustering that randomness produces, and, consequently, we deduce that there is some generative force behind the pattern. We are hardwired to do this. The “evolutionary” argument holds that tens of thousands of years ago, if you were out hunting or gathering in the forest and you heard a rustle in the bushes, you’d be wise to play it safe and to run away as fast as you could. Maybe it was a predator out looking for their lunch and by running away you saved your skin. Probably, it was just the wind randomly whispering in the leaves and you ended up looking a little foolish—foolish, but alive and able to pass on your paranoid pattern-spotting genes to the next generation…
…
This… is just one example of the phenomenon known in the psychology literature as pareidolia, in which an observer interprets an ambiguous auditory or visual stimulus as something they are familiar with. This phenomenon, otherwise known as “patternicity,” allows people to spot shapes in the clouds and is the reason why people think they see a man in the moon. Pareidolia is itself an example of the more general phenomenon of apophenia, in which people mistakenly perceive connections between and ascribe meaning to unrelated events or objects. Apophenia’s misconstrued connections lead us to validate incorrect hypotheses and draw illogical conclusions. Consequently, the phenomenon lies at the root of many conspiracy theories—think, for example, of extraterrestrial seekers believing that any bright light in the sky is a UFO.
Apophenia sends us looking for the cause behind the effect when, in reality, there is none at all. When we hear two songs by the same artist back-to-back, we are too quick to cry foul in the belief that we have spotted a pattern, when in fact these sorts of clusters are an inherent feature of randomness. Eventually, the dissatisfaction caused by the clustering inherent to the iPod’s genuinely random shuffle algorithm led Steve Jobs to implement the new “Smart Shuffle” feature on the iPod, which meant that the next song played couldn’t be too similar to the previous song, better conforming to our misconceived ideas of what randomness looks like. As Jobs himself quipped, “We’re making it less random to make it feel more random.”…
“Why Randomness Doesn’t Feel Random,” an excerpt from How to Expect the Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions—and the Art of Knowing When Not To, by @Kit_Yates_Maths in @behscientist.
* Stanislaw Lem
###
As we ponder purported patterns, we might send carefully-discerned birthday greetings to a man who did in fact find a pattern (or at least a meaning) in what might have seemed random and meaningless: Robert Woodrow Wilson; he was born on this date in 1936. An astronomer, he detected– with Bell Labs colleague Arno Penzias– cosmic microwave background radiation: “relic radiation”– that’s to say, the “sound “– of the Big Bang… familiar to those of us old enough to remember watching an old-fashioned television after the test pattern was gone (when there was no broadcast signal received): the “fuzz” we saw and the static-y sounds we heard, were that “relic radiation” being picked up.
Their 1964 discovery earned them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
“Can one desire too much of a good thing?”*…
In his wonderful newsletter, The Convivial Society, L. M. Sacasas wonders if the success, and thus proliferation, of language in the world around us has undermined its effectiveness…
Close to the start of the year, I reflected on the plight of language under digital conditions. I was motivated by the sense that “something of consequence is happening to ordinary language, the lifeblood of human thought and action, under digital conditions.” More specifically, I proposed the following thesis: “that having built our political structures on the assumption that human experience and human society can be ordered by human language and speech, we may now be suffering through the discovery that the world we have built is no longer responsive to either.”
To put this in parlance that has grown increasingly familiar in the intervening months, the human-built world is already unaligned to human values and well-being because it operates at a scale and according to a logic that elude our comprehension and confound our agency. And this is so largely because it exists beyond the reach of ordinary language. The realm of speech, specifically its public and thus political quarters, increasingly becomes the realm of exasperating and maddening futility. And we may all be forgiven for feeling as if we are the idiots whose words, however full of sound and fury, finally signify nothing, and, more to the point, effect no change in the world.
Just as in the modern West faith was deemed too irrational and volatile for the public sphere and thus relegated to the relative obscurity of private life, so now it seems that language itself is being likewise banished to the realm of the private, which is to say that, whatever pretenses to the contrary, real power no longer resides in ordinary human speech. We are not ruled by words but by formulas and algorithms and those who wield them…
… now, nearly a year later and after an unplanned hiatus, I find myself serendipitously drawn back to the theme of language but from a different angle: from the perspective of silence. The specific occasion has been my reading of The World of Silence, by the Swiss philosopher Max Picard.
Silence, like darkness, tends to be conceived chiefly as an absence, as nothing in itself. Darkness is merely the absence of light and, likewise, silence is merely the absence of sound. Considered this way, it’s tempting to imagine darkness and silence both as negations of some more positive reality. Light is to be preferred to darkness, and sound to silence. We bear this out when, if darkness or silence threaten, we instinctively flood our living spaces with both light and sound.
Not surprisingly, I suppose, it is hard to describe in words what I have chiefly learned from Picard. But if I were to try, it is this idea—which became more than idea, something sensible to me—that silence is what Picard called an autonomous reality, it is something of itself and not merely a negation, and, critically, that it is part of the nature of silence to be a vital, renewing force from whose absence we suffer more than we know.
…
Picard asserts that “silence is the only phenomenon today that is ‘useless’.” “It does not fit into the world of profit and utility,” he continues, “it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.”
This uselessness is precisely what gives silence, in Picard’s view, its healing quality. Consider these words:
“Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all the ‘useful things’. Purposeless, unexplainable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-powerful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.”
This wholeness emerges from Picard’s metaphysical reflections on the nature of silence. At another point he speaks of silence as a substance that enters into us. That substance creates a buffer among the various, often conflicting realities within us. Our own contradictions must pass over the substance of silence before coming into contact with one another. In this way, silence is a substance protective of our inner life. Picard also suggests that “man is better able to endure things hostile to his own nature, things that use him up, if he has the silent substance within …. Technics in itself, life with machines, is not injurious unless the protective substance of silence is absent.”
These are not words to be analyzed. They are, I believe, simply to be contemplated, and their truth ascertained only in practice. But they struck me. They struck me for the promise Picard holds out of help and healing and wholeness. We live in a scattering time, to borrow a line from the poet Richard Wilbur. All the forces at play within us and without seem to be centrifugal forces, pulling us apart. I remain interested in understanding the nature of these forces. The critical conversation remains important. But I’m increasingly interested in how we might find and deploy alternative ways of being in the world. What are the practices that will sustain us? Silence may be just such a practice, and we may do well to experiment with whatever possibilities are afforded to us to enter into silence and to allow silence to enter into us…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Thing That Is Silence.”
Bonus recommendation: Percival Everett‘s Dr. No, a “caper” novel about an “expert on nothing” (that’s to say, a brilliant mathematician who is an expert in his area of study: nothing) drawn into a plot to rob Fort Knox. As thought-provoking as it is entertaining– which is to say, tons.
[Image above: source]
* Rosalind, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It
###
As we query quietness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that Billboard magazine published the first pop music chart– the “Music Popularity Chart”– based on record sales. A listing of the ten most popular records, it became a weekly feature in 1940 (as pictured below). It fluctuated in size from ten to 30 records until 1955, when Billboard introduced its first Top 100 chart. The “Hot 100” chart, now recognized as the definitive singles chart in the US, was first published on August 4th, 1958.
“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits”*…
Helena de Bres on what philosophy can– and can’t– help us understand about the meaning of life…
… It’s not always clear what the average person is after when seeking life guidance from philosophers, but it tends to be a mix of three things. First, some general orientation in the universe; second, a serving of existential consolation for when life fucks us over; and, more rarely, a dose of specific practical advice (to text back or not to text back?)
The easy reply to the last of those requests is that philosophy can supply at best only part of the answer. How someone should respond to a particular situation depends on facts about the world that we philosophers have no special expertise in… so we can’t pronounce on the question solo.
The more socially uncomfortable reply is that the demand that philosophy be personally helpful, in any of these three ways, sounds wrongheaded to someone with the training of a mainstream contemporary philosopher. Saying that aloud involves accusing a fellow human who’s having a life crisis of being naïve, which is an asshole move I try to avoid. But I do think it, because pretty much the last thing I saw myself as acquiring while I skilled up in graduate school was transferable expertise in how to deal with everyday life, on either the grand or the intimate scale…
Science has practical applications, but to true devotees the applications aren’t the main point, and attempting to go straight to them is likely to backfire. Seeking direct life guidance or swift consolation from philosophy is similarly risky, for similar reasons. Bernard Williams writes in his essay “On Hating and Despising Philosophy” that, though philosophy can be pressing, it doesn’t get there “by instantly addressing the urgent and the deep.” That results in mere superficiality, intellectual kitsch. Being genuinely helpful usually requires being truthful, and because the issues philosophy addresses are complex and difficult, the search for the truth about them should start in the foothills and inch up cautiously. A truthful philosophy will be unspectacular and inaccessible to the average person as it proceeds. And if philosophy does eventually generate good life advice, there’s no guarantee it’ll deliver comfort along with it. Truth can be a bitch…
Academic philosophy and the meaning of life: “Help!,” from @helenadebres in @the_point_mag. Part one of a four-part series (it gets less bleak :). Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
* William James
###
As we search, we might wish a Joyeux Anniversaire to a philosopher whose practice was robustly practical: Denis Diderot, contributor to and the chief editor of the Encyclopédie (“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.”)– and thus towering figure in the Enlightenment; he was born on this date in 1713. Diderot was also a novelist (e.g., Jacques le fataliste et son maître [Jacques the Fatalist and his Master])… and no mean epigramist:
From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.