Synecdoche

It's a pity that my head is mine alone, or rather that the confluence of concepts and metaphors that occasionally arises when I get on a good streak of discovery cannot be shared, in such a way as to lend context to something that arrives CRASH and crystallises amorphous forms.

Here is a quote that does it nicely:

"This website considers the apparent one-to-one correspondences found between the characteristics resulting from simple dichotomous development and some of the modern models of reality, leading us to the probability that we have adapted to the, at least 'local', spacetime continuum by internalising at least one of it's characteristics - dichotomisation. And so the tendancy by some to see 'mind' in the formation of the universe, or to find 'truth' in esoteric maps is based solely on dichotomous analysis, and results from the projection of the proposed template out into the universe; the models of reality are based on metaphors which are models of our selves."

Whether we call it god, or science, or something else, we are looking at ourselves.

 OSU

Language

Words, far from being too definite, are rather too indefinite - language is a by-product of our evolution of an extremely powerful capability to model the world, and thus manipulate it. Thus it is NOT a tool for communication - if anything, language is a hindrance to communication when it comes to concepts which we can know intuitively such as emotion. Only when we communicate abstract concepts, fixed, distant and eternal, are we really at an advantage using language. Even then, we must go to so much trouble to fix our definitions for mutual understanding, that a conversation without such fixing can be worse than useless. It isn't just that you don't know the terms from my field, but that the terms I use work from other metaphors. My perspective on the world, my model of it, is not yours and you can only communicate with me to advantage if you build a ground truth from the same metaphors. If this seems too rigid, if it seems that in your life you manage to communicate about your ideas quite well, remember that you live in a world where homogeneity of thought has been increasing for milennia. Try to imagine communicating your most sophisticated ideas to a Guarani indian. Or even just a randomly selected immigrant of different educational background.

Of course all this doesn't include so-called 'peripheral' forms of communication when using language, such as intonation, prosody and body language. These are actually deeper, closer to our true meaning (unless we dissemble). However pure prose, dissociated words, are fixed meaningless symbols manipulated to address real meanings.

Probably music is closer to an expression of our 'felt' reality than words.

                  OSU