A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private, large ‘computer’. He asked it: “Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?” The machine then set to work to analyse its own computational habit. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machines do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words:
THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY.
Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature.
What is it to know another person’s soul? To know their true nature? To look into the heart of their being? It is to be able to enter the infinite universe of their stories and to recognise the utter interconnectedness of their stories with yours.
As Bateson points out, our language does not describe the world as it is… it describes the world as it is useful to describe it. Our language is primarily a language of things. Or as Pratchett put it
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
Again, as Bateson points out, the language of “reality” (whatever that may be) is the language of relationships, of connectedness; the language we use to describe the world simply does not describe the world. It only describes what is useful for us. Stories, though… stories are all about the relationships. All about the connectedness.
On a blog I read regularly, the author wrote about Lucretius’s “great didactic epic poem, which aims to teach us that the soul is mortal, death is not to be feared, religion is mere superstition, and the whole of creation is nothing but the random coming-together and shearing-apart of an infinity of atoms sleeting through the void.” He posed the question why would Lucretius do all this in the form of a massive complex poem? because the poem itself is a metaphor for order and structure, right down to the arrangement of letters in structured, grammatical and poetical order being a direct metaphor for reality and experience created from natural phenomena, atoms arranged and structured in patterns and relationship to each other…
On the first part of what you say: language not describing the world as it is ….
There is a distinction made by philosophers between metaphysical and epistemological knowledge.The first refers to that reality you mention that we cannot really know. The second to what we can know. This seems simple. But they are not two totally separate categories. So the problem is where do they overlap? In the past it was often said that God gave us (as a privileged species !) the ability to know the world as it is and its just a matter of finding out how things are and describing it in language which was unquestionably adequate for the purpose. Few philosophers today feel able to make that assertion and often use ‘God’ simply as a useful device to assign ultimate knowledge to.
So ‘God’ knows but humans just tell each other stories. Well, yes, but some of the stories seem to enable us to do things quite a bit more complex than finding where the fruit is. And some of those ‘stories’ are in language other than the spoken words we communicate routinely in, and need to include mathematics, musical notation, visual symbol systems … where the language gets more – or less – precise for some purposes and less – or more – precise for others.
Language{s} have to be about relationship & connectedness: to each other, to facts, to our ideas about what it all means. Are we really that incapable of telling it like it is in some way or another? I don’t know. I used to accept that posit about language only being the way we construct the world for our own stories as humans. But increasingly I now think that maybe [']God['], the gods, the conscious Universe …. whatever is able to tell us what we need to hear and if we listen hard enough we may find what the poet Edward Thomas called “a language not to be betrayed” in which we might repeat the message.
Which is not to say that there aren’t things that snails, ants, trees or rivers don’t know better than us, in different ways from us, because they hear it to a repeat it in their own way.
How’s that for a story?
But what about the third category? What we *think* we know? Distinct from the other two, but how do we tell which falls into that category and which falls into what we know? (I guess, by definition, we can’t, since if we could, we would know
)
I have intentionally missed a chunk of thinking out of my blog post… I hope to get responses that provoke my thinking further, without predetermining those responses
All language is metaphor, which is why it lends itself to relationship so perfectly… I’ve just tried to see my daughter as collection of things that agree to be recognised as one thing.. didn’t work
No, it wouldn’t work with my daughter either
What useful purpose would be gained from differentiating between that what we think we know and what we actually know? (I don’t believe that you can actually separate them as neatly as some would like, for I cannot think of any significant advantages.) It is my experience that knowledge, like most of existence, is fluid by nature and steadfastly refuses to be boxed. The experiences created and ongoing with the environment continue to present us with differing perspectives and language is but one method of transmitting, what are essentially, definitions of experience. But language also displays to us this fluidity, by it’s non-static nature.
Fair question
I think the distinction is useful not because we can distinguish between what we know and what we think we know (I don’t know that we can, though I suppose I would know if my arm was cut off, but can only think I know that my wife is faithful) but because having both categories reminds us that knowledge is indeed not absolute but derives from our dynamic engagement with experience.
No,language doesn’t describes the world as it is. It describes the world as the individual or a group of individuals see it (e.g. scientists who use an agreed way of looking – and measuring – the world and a specialised language.We perceive the world through our senses and then our imagination, aided and abetted by our past experiences and associations, tries to build up a coherent picture of what it is like. We construct a narrative to explain the world and our lives because we have a propensity to look for patterns. Our stories – whether of the individual or the group – describe these patterns.
Neils Bohr once said the world is not only stranger than we thought: it is stranger than we could think.
Do we know what we cannot know?
Are we getting into Donald Rumsfeld territory here?! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_unknown