A striking feature of language is that it is modality-independent. Should an impaired child be prevented from hearing or producing sound, its innate capacity to master a language may equally find expression in signing […]
This feature is extraordinary. Animal communication systems routinely combine visible with audible properties and effects, but not one is modality independent. No vocally impaired whale, dolphin or songbird, for example, could express its song repertoire equally in visual display. “
This would be hard to explain if consciousness were due to information processing, as we would expect all communication to share a common logical basis. The fact that only human language is modality invariant suggests that communication, as an expression of consciousness is local to aesthetic textures rather than information-theoretic configurations.
Since only humans have evolved to create an abstraction layer that cuts across aesthetic modalities, it would appear that between aesthetic modality and…
This is the story of how I began telling the truth. The truth I defined as “two truths and at least one lie.” The truth of my experience.
Poets often carry sorrow in their sockets – some underlying angst influencing attention. There’s sclera, iris, pupil, and a deepening mirror of perceived pain…or seared “ego.” Grief or grudge – and difficult to distinguish.
As much as there is to learn or to know, some simple patterns give the slip. Once you figure a composing context, the information is derived. Look out for what might constitute survival for each respective entity. Aim your inquiry there.
Parents hurt as much as heal. As do love and risk and wisdom (or well-being). All that is given in life is also taken away – exactly when it is given.
Everyone canvasses sorrow. The surgeons in their trembling hands, the librarians in their order. The therapist’s reflective stance, architect’s angles, businessman’s mettle. We all know that we’re going to die. Celebrities in their acclaim, the athletes in their strength, and whores in their affection. Everything is risk.
And this was the daily game of Reality-Telling…two truths with at least one lie. A morning-midday-evening list-assembling of continuous is-was-ises. Spilled coffee, set aright, sopped with towel. Triples. Thing – thing – relation. So many relations revising so many “things.” Complicating, co-creating, is-was-is.
“Change is never lossless,” it was written. Once comforted by the is of experience – that no matter the grief or anguish, no matter the disaster or rift, the poverty or destruction – experience kept accruing. “Experience is additive even in reduction.” Even deletion adds to experience. Isn’t it nice to know that regardless of what or who or how – for every living thing – at least something accumulates? Grows richer, more varied, expands?
But how calculate that every addition is reductive? That the raw fact of everything adding up = losing? At least this is one way of working the figures. An instant added is an instant taken away. “The Lord giveth…”
The very momentariness, unquantifiability of what happens seems to attest to this. Two precisely equal processes, or hands. The one inviting and offering, delivering; the other letting-go, sweeping aside, and waving goodbye. Moment in, moment past. Experience added, one less experience to have.
Life as a riverbank – new deposits and constant erosion.
The truth is: experience
The truth was: experience brought exactly what it took away
The truth is: experience
(therefore): NOW =
And thus it is known that living is equal to dying and “He who would save his life will lose it” is just a simple fact. Dying is equal to living. It all happens in the same instant. One step further = one step nearer to something else.
Sometimes people smile when they’re together. Sometimes they don’t. And sometimes other things happen.
There comes a time when being referred to as “sir” by 100% of an establishment’s wait-staff is no longer over-polite and ironic respect, but simply a pronouncement that in these contexts you have no peers.
Eventually you’ll be skeletal, perhaps before too long the way things are going, you’ve never been difficult to avoid.
And it’s never been easy to know what you want – are you being selfless or self-protective in the attention you pay toward your lovers? Are your emotions inaccessible (some stunted empathy) or over-attuned in such a way as to pay your own processes no mind?
Whatever the case, you’re threatened.
And now you are old, sir, and alone. And both nothing and everything is safe, because you are no one to lose. And any potential of personal contact – some sort of opening – would inevitably create leakage, exponentially multiplying your probabilities of loss.
If only it could be viewed as sport – this frolicking across the page. (It’s not).
Who lays the trail
in the white sand
of the page?
Who explains it?
-Cees Nooteboom
You. Not you. Here. Not here. Ever trapped in beginnings because of so many ends. At this age, sir, you must force it. Opportunity becomes a consolation called survival.
No one is fooled, particularly not you, sir.
But she reminds you of something, probably someone, which is no help to you, just an increase in the accumulated weight of what’s past. You’ll go on, because why not? – You are nothing to lose.
I am desperately vulnerable to being unable to move beyond beginnings….as witnessed by the following attempts…INTOLERABLE VULNERABILITIES
I.
When we begin – anything – we begin with. We start out already always somewhere as some one, some thing. Some entity or element among others. There are no, is no, such thing as a ‘fresh start,’ as a living organism.
From our particular inceptions we are loaded and formed with genetic baggage – our cells and context shaped by conditions far beyond and external to ourselves. And nary a freedom is advanced. Sure we participate in the shaping and construction and continuance of us, but we are never extricated, abstracted, or independent from an environment, a shared and shaping surround – it’s the contingency for existing: Other(s).
A world not formed by us. A plural existence, NEVER a solitary, isolated or uniform one.
Many find these ever-initiating constraints intolerable. That one is unable EVER, to start from scratch, re-invent, re-formulate, or create ex nihilo. Nothing, absence, void, simply – is not.
Therefore, ever existing in the already-established, already formulating, already-begun, we come together and transform.
Cells and genes, energy, matter and air conscribe to carry on in ripples and subject/objects of being. Including, colluding us – we, you, me, I.
Wholly integrated (smoothly or with great difficulty) into the ongoing flux and flow of languages, practices, thoughts and behaviors of a very large and intricate, complex and dynamic world – we arise – conditioned, constrained and subject to our sort of organization – make-up, culture, circumstance, arrangement, perception, emotion, body, reason, available resources, types, renditions of being A being in this possible world. A world, impossibly, that is just this way.
And the task is (always has) already begun – how will/does this particular, unique combination and configuration of elementary particles (a living, bounded, active, exchanging system/organism) adapt, effect, adjust, infect, evolve with its environment?
An environment of people, places, activities and things ALWAYS ALREADY begun, and also always already NOT-YET…awaiting, accepting, adapting, adjusting with US.
Our configurations, energy, activities and behaviors. Nothing the same with us. Nothing without.
Incalculable.
You, me, we make all the difference – along with EVERYthing else.
Some call this a paradox. If you did not begin, it would make no difference. If you do, it makes all difference. Both, always, true.
Nothing is the same with you. Nothing would be the same without you.
The world is a situation = both / and / more. A complex and indiscernible system that just seems to work this way. Call it “Butterfly Effect,” “Creation” or “Evolution,” “Chaos,” “Order,” “Life” – it all makes NO difference AND ALL the difference to actual experience.
And it is so.
Thus we begin – embedded, embodied, and extended – in an environment always long established, ongoing and begun: constrained, constructed, collaborated, and free.
I begin. I beg – “let me start over”, fully incorporated, already begun – I: in.
Here follows a rambling response to a course discussion post relating to social-media-tagging and authority-derived-taxonomies in information resources (pros/cons, advantages/disadvantages, issues, etc.)…from my unedited perspective. Perhaps it will interest some.
Option 2: Discuss issues surrounding social vs. professionally created metadata, citing examples from the readings. What are the problems and challenges as you see them?
“Naming entities in the world is a tricky business” (Mai, 2011, p. 116). Socially-created metadata is a fascinating approach and response to the inherent ambiguity, flexibility and complexity of the human use of language and the co-ordination of communicating the range of contextual usages of information resources / objects in contemporary life. I particularly appreciated Mai’s attention to the plurality and “heterogenous settings” (settings where there are “no unified contexts, goals, or objectives against which objects can be named and ordered…” p. 116) of networked global information resources. “Naming, indexing, has its limits – it can only be done within a given context” (Mai, p. 116), and as George W. Trow pointed out long ago – we are in the “Context of No Context” once we’ve embarked on a world-wide web engagement. The stimulating idea is that if you have those who are interacting with the resources “tagging” their meaningful engagement with those resources “in their own terms” – you are replicating the range and breadth and depth of ACTUAL human use and inference and representation of interaction with information. Now THAT is FASCINATING!
On the other hand. By now we are all mostly aware of the extreme subjectivity involved in perception, acquisition, attention, selection, and utilization or effecting of data-available-to-us (individually) in the experiences that afford us, expose us, enable us to actuate and in-form whatever available reality that resource represents for us. This means that each individual organisms experience of a given interaction with an available resource is intensely situation-specific. Which also implies that their report, account, or “tricky naming” of said interaction is apt to be highly idiosyncratic. Which (OBVIOUSLY) presents an enormous problem for the stability or repeatability or findability or accessibility of the potential import of said resource for any other organism. This, it seems to me, is where even collective or massive social input still engenders community-and-individual-sized gaps in findability and usability of digital information resources.
As I see it, the concept of “folksonomy” and social democratic tagging is a practical response to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Uexkull, et. al.’s realization that any and all conscious human individuals will seek, access, perceive and select elements of their environment FOR THEMSELVES – limited by every aspect of their own physiobiology, neurobiology, social contextualization and environmental situation – if a WHOLE BUNDLE, an aggregate, a swath of humans “tag,” “name,” “label” a resource according to the meaning it gave rise to in them – we might get an approximately adequate representation of the (at least human) RANGE of meaning or import that resource might have for our species – the uses to which it might be put, the ideas it might give rise to, the practical effects it may indeed effect. HOWEVER – it will by no means have overcome the inherent ambiguity, openness and possibility of said entity/resource/ordination of “information” for any further context / individual / situated need going forward, unknown. This is where things like mathematical language, artistic form/contents, agreed-upon languages, domain-specific terminologies, “controlled vocabularies” SERVE our species – they give us COMMUNAL resources by which to evaluate and organize our experiences – and COMMUNICATE. Private languages, really, tell us no more than the barking of a dog. We infer and intuit, but then, that is OUR language imposing order on someone else’s expression. Standardized, collectively agreed-upon terminologies and languages allow us to participate, interact and coordinate our experiences and understandings, while “folksonomies,” “tagging” and so forth allow us to nuance and extend or specify aspects of the agreed-upon discourse. At least these are the uses I find compelling around both Controlled Vocabularies AND individual or privatized labeling.
It’s fascinating because it allows a democratic voicing which accounts for many more human facets to ANY and all resources, while “social” in a “societal” sense – domain-oriented, authoritative and agreed-upon terminologies allow us a way to flesh out, fuel and invigorate COORDINATED meanings – something accessible to us more like our own bodies – a corporate interaction – avoiding both solipsism (isolation) and equivalence (anonymity). All sources seemed to agree that all things “con-” (con-sensus, co-llaboration, co-rrespondence and so on) are ESSENTIAL for our worlds to be useful and meaningful to us.
We have work to do in finding the dynamic balance in agreed-upon vocabularies as touchstones maybe not necessarily rules and the open source of additive description to equal something perhaps more in accord with human “reality.” I sense that this is the dream of the Semantic Web…and of all communities worldwide. I appreciate how the internet re-invigorates this ancient human process.
“A way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being”
“that ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being’… was what fiction was for. ‘A way out of loneliness’…”
Jonathan Franzen, on David Foster Wallace
“If the novel were able ‘to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves,’ it opens the potential that she might, as a result, feel ‘less alone inside’”
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, on David Foster Wallace
My son and I arguing about the nature of things – is there anything we can agree on? mutually believe? are we similar? – in what began as an attempt (on my part) to soothe obvious hurt and confusion (on his part). He kept pointing to (referencing) his mirror, his bedside table, in…
I’ve been working over things in my sleep. Parenting issues, marriage. Vocation deadlines, assignments. Logistics and payments and scheduling. Improbable care of the self.
– that overwhelm is inevitable, inherent.
Everything we know (or surmise) about anything indicates vast beyonds unknown and ignored. In order to see, to breathe, to speak, to hear, to feel, to think, to live. We filter and avoid. Press the vast majority of the world’s availability into a void. So of course we can’t manage our world, or comprehend, even minimally control. We can barely deal with even a relatively microscopic set of variables, and those only enough to survive.
Reminded, awake then, that overwhelm is constant and inevitable. Inherent to the systems of which we are and are a part. Living is processing vastness. Essentially unscalable. And…
All my Words are Silent 