Words and Tiny Worlds~
Sitting here with my pot of green tea (‘Jade Ring Green’— I think of Imperial China, dinosaurs they thought were dragons) and infinitudes of sugar plums. I sort of like where I am right now, in that I have the luxury of time to really, fully throw myself into things. I’m learning so much, hmm.
But I was thinking how good it is to write down thoughts and consider them, and suddenly blogging became not much of an egoic ‘oh-listen-to-the-woes-of-my-life’ thing at all, and became more of a sharing of ideas. Which has a huge amount of appeal— I mean, ideas fuel our world, so I guess I’m seeing this as much more worthwhile.
But to get to the point of this… the idea, I suppose. I was reading this book by Douglas Hofstadter and came across this:
”From earliest childhood on, we are handed concepts such as ‘milk’, ‘finger’, ‘wall’, ‘mosquito’, ‘sting’, ‘itch’, ‘swat’, and so on, on a silver platter. We perceive the world in terms of such notions, not in terms of microscopic notions like ‘proboscis’ and ‘hair follicle’, let alone ‘cytoplasm’, ‘ribosome’, ‘peptide bond’, or ‘carbon atom’. We can of course acquire such notions later, and some of us master them profoundly, but they can never replace the silver-platter ones we grew up with. In sum, then, we are victims of our own macroscopicness, and cannot escape from the trap of using everyday words to describe the events we witness, and perceive as real.
This is why it is much more natural for us to say that a war was triggered for religious or economic reasons than to try to imagine a war as a vast pattern of interacting elementary particles and to think of what triggered it in similar terms— even though physicists may insist that that is the only “true” level of explanation for it, in the sense that no information would be thrown away if we were to speak at that level. But having such phenomenal accuracy is, alas (or rather, “Thank God!”), not our fate.
We mortals are condemned not to speak at that level of no information loss. We necessarily simplify, and indeed, vastly so. But that sacrifice is also our glory. Drastic simplification is what allows us to reduce situations to their bare bones, to discover abstract essences, to put our fingers on what matters, to understand phenomena at amazingly high levels, to survive reliably in this world, and to formulate literature, art, music and science.”
I was reading this, and what really struck me was the first sentence— the thought that a mosquito is a ‘concept’, rather than… you know, something you see flying around, this complete entity in itself. Just that I’d never thought of the make up— that what I would perceive as a ‘mosquito’ is the culmination of an infinitude of atoms and molecules working together, processes and cells receiving impulses and sending them off; a whole world going on within that tiny, buzzing, ‘mosquito’. And that made me think, well, perhaps what I am seeing isn’t what it really is— rather, that a mosquito is a process, a collective… rather than this solid “thing” that I perceive.
But it made me think, if this single word— ‘concept’ can trigger a whole chain of thought, isn’t that testament to how powerful a force language is; how much that influences our world view. The idea that we’re given words to understand and put what we experience into some sort of comprehensible order just makes me wonder whether the world is seen differently by an English speaking person to a French speaking person. And building on that— would learning another language widen your perception of reality/change it somehow?
It’s sort of a strange thought, but in a way, it gives me even more of an appreciation for writing, and writers, and poetry and stories, because when we are beings that largely perceive the world through the blinkers of language, it just becomes incredible that we are able to manipulate words and use them creatively like that. Paint some sort of picture of a world through language. The beauty it creates becomes somehow more tangible, how real it is.
And, from there, it makes me wonder if we’re really so trapped by language at all. I wonder how much of the world we see is subject to our influence— whether we can manipulate that.
Regardless, this year off is starting to look mighty appealing.
