Fnord

"If you can dream something, you can do it. As long as you do not align your actions with your dreams, you are not fulfilling your destiny."

I'm in a weird space these days. It isn't bad but I don't find myself enjoying it.
Before I was up against a set of issues that I let hold me back from creating a life I wanted. I've gotten past those issues. It doesn't even matter if they come back because they'd be new if they did. They'd no longer be given the power by me to be long-standing controlling forces.
That said, with the wall down, I don't know where I want to go in the garden. I'd been dwelling on this point for a while now and I would've made a long entry about it. However, after today I think what I'll do instead is change what I'm focusing on.
I saw the above quote today after a deep adventure of a day. It put a nice spin on what I experienced. In the second sentence the word dream is used where I had been picking at the word goals for the past several months. I don't have any goals I'm committed to. I do have dreams. I can create a game in life in which I value exploring those dreams more than not.

I am choosing not to share those dreams here on the interwebs, but I will be recording them elsewhere.

So this in response to my previous entry about how I appear to others when I'm not trying to do anything.

I think people who see each other but aren't engaging directly react to a combination of what energy they fill themselves with and how they appear from body and facial language to clothing. You see the difference between someone filled with rage, wearing all black and someone who is feeling friendly and wearing all black, regardless of how stoic or hard-to-read they might be.
I don't think I can not go into my mind when I'm not engaged now that I think about it. I always have something I could be processing so I start to whenever I can. I think I have to accept that I will connect to the right people who will connect more of the right people to me in large gatherings of any kind. I also have to become comfortable with actively engaging others in more settings. I have gotten to a good point but I want to go farther because I can and I know I'm capable.

So a further part of the conversation in the previous entry had the other person talking about how it seems like I don't ask questions about others. I do and in fact I am very curious about others and how they see the world. With this person I tend to feel I have time when I am around them, like others that I spend one-to-one time with. So I don't rush interactions. I am constantly forming and readjusting impressions. I hold no attachment to an early impression so I seek out new insight to see where it takes me. Sometimes I must ask questions but I find that when you ask people about themselves it doesn't always give a truer answer than simple, relaxed, long-term observation. I am very aware of how we are all wrapped in our own false assessments of ourselves, waiting to finally be shaken of them so we can move along a bit more freely. A better and improving internal language helps.

So I asked someone who I value and has a significantly different viewpoint from me about how I seem when I'm not engaging people actively.

( Chat logs and more within )

If you turn a thought over in your mind enough times, can you get a repetitive stress injury?

Also, from now on I will call the Thought of the Day, the Tagesgedanke (daythought) since it is shorter and one word which is cool.

The collective doesn't often have the individual in mind.

• I finally realized that part of my fear of taking a non-self employed job was not being able to get out of it and being trapped and committed to it for a long time. I finally realized that this isn't really in keeping with how I think. It was in direct contrast to the way I think of relationships, which is that they have a time. That may be till one's death but it may not be. I don't consider the end of a relationship to be inherently bad or a failure of the relationship. It had its time, the participants hopefully grew and learned from it. If they didn't that is the fault of each individual unto themselves. I was aware and comfortable of changing careers throughout one's life and how it's more and more common nowadays. I guess I just didn't take the idea in fully and I was affected by my dad's experiences. Our parents' lives shape our conceptions of things a lot and it takes self-analysis and work to separate from that and find our own takes on things.
  
• You can go over things in your mind as many times as you want but sometimes you have to talk to someone about it and externalize it before you can say something that makes sense of it. It's a mind-blowing thing. The above realization wasn't even close to what other people in the conversation said, it was me typing things aloud and realizing that something wasn't connecting right in my thinking.
  
• Enigma is like a less-tripped out version of Klaus Schulze although I am finding it to be effective.

Idioms often came out of cultural references, inside references meant to be seen as amusing to other members inside a certain group.

As of the 20th century, these references don't really get idiom status. The vast majority die out and only make sense to a "generation" that is very limited in size. This is because of the pace of modern living and the ephemeral nature of modern culture. When someone perceived to be within a certain group doesn't grasp a reference, they are thought to be uncool and out-of-touch. When someone perceived to be outside of a certain group catches a reference made by a member of it, they looked at strangely or sometimes admired. People often feel a comradery with outsiders who can give a sense of knowing their culture.

My point is, today's cultural references are unlikely to become tomorrow's idioms. They will mostly stay inside jokes among people in generations thought to be "in the know" with this time in cultural history.

I think that when the mood strikes me, I will do a thought or, possibly, thoughts of the day.

Today's:
[ɪ] does not occur word-final in English. I was trying it out in my head randomly when I realized it. That's [ɪ] as in [bɪn] "bin". Try saying [wɪfɪ] instead of [waɪfaɪ] for "wi-fi," even [wifi] (weefee) sounds better in English.

Okay so this is a thought trail on a quote in Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. It wasn't even a main point but it got me thinking about the implications of what it actually means.

"We use the word "all" in a few ways which are defined by the thought processes of reasoning. That is, there are rules which of all obeys. We may be unconscious of them, and tend to claim we operate on the basis of the meaning of the word; but that, after all, is only a circumlocution for saying that we are guided by rules which we never make explicit. We have used words all our lives in certain patterns, and instead of calling the patterns "rules", we attribute the courses of our thought processes to the "meanings" of words."

I added the bolding to show which sentence carried the gist of what I'm responding to.

Basically a lot of outdated "linguistic" writings--often written before the idea of the study of linguistics or before it took on its present form--worked from the perspective of meaning being very inherent. They often assumed a single ur-language (original) that everything derived from and that the study of philology (an old term and concept of what linguistics is), or historical linguistics, would eventually lead us to the roots or etymologies (perfect forms) of words.

Now in a given language words have personalities, they feel different from each other to the point that no two "synonyms" have the same feel in a given use. The possibilities of usage of these different words even varies so that there is no simple, direct overlap. Any "perfect synonyms" could be argued against successfully by another person. However, between different languages words vary heavily, down to the sounds available to make them, they way they can be built, and they way they can be positioned together.

We are all working with very complicated rule sets for words, applied arbitrarily in the sense that "cat" could mean televisions and a verb for walking. There's no inherent meaning to words. We try to argue that "that isn't what that means" but they're just rules which the users form and remember. The rules can and do change constantly.


Now this relates back to something which interests me heavily. Does language affect the way we think? If so, how?
I feel the answer to the first question is yes. I will spend however long it takes to progress from "feeling" to being sure one way or the other. Now, if meanings are really just sets of rules that would imply that every human is working with the same tools and thus, there are no differences between the way an English speaker and say a German or Mandarin speaker thinks. Well, now we are also dealing with a metalinguistic problem--what does think mean? It's an awfully broad term. The primary entry at dictionary.com posits 27 entries, with 6 of them being phrasals of which "think" is the root but I would count this because they could be implied without the rest of the phrase in certain contexts.

I would say that one way that "think" fits here is in the sense of "perceive and process." If my language has no present or future tense, nor even phrases to refer to them, I will not be perceiving my experiences in that 3-chamber way. Time will be a continuous flow and I will simply see myself in a manifested point, without even necessarily presuming that reality could not be equally manifest at every other point in this endless flow. I will know that some experiences in this flow are now in my memory of experiences and some have not come to pass although I can imagine them clearly and vividly and they may come to pass. So, because I am not perceiving things in the same way, I will not be able to process them in the same way. A very different way of "thinking" would have to be used here.

Now if my language doesn't have a word for the pleasure one derives from pain, either to one's self or others, I will have to either continue to use the phrase "pleasure derived from pain" or try to make a word. I can coin a word, such as "painjoy" or borrow one, such as "Schadenfreude" from German. Were English speakers unable to "think" of this concept before these two new words? Clearly not, the phrase got the point across well enough to pass the idea on from speaker to listener. But, perhaps many English speakers didn't and don't think of the concept very concretely because they don't know of a simple word and don't hear it talked about. So they won't be making statements about it unless they become exposed to it through some out-of-the-day-to-day means. So while this is less significant than the idea in the previous paragraph, it is still an example.

So, now to tie this back to the idea of "meaning" actually being "rules" applied to words. If we remove this illusory layer of "meanings" being at all inherent, we just have "rules" for structuring clusters of sounds. The rules we have are unique. How unique? Unique to types of languages, individual languages, dialects, people who have close relationships, individuals, and contexts for the individual to be in. Don't take it for granted that you can't confirm the dictionary, or as it would be called in this case, a lexicon in another person's head is the same as yours. You really can't, there simply wouldn't be time to dig deep enough on every word. The sounds can even vary. Have you, dear American, ever felt that it sounded like Irish people are always asking questions with their statements? Well, they think of their tone differently, and even the sounds to use to express the same language you speak.

Are we all able to have the same spectrum of experiences? Well, presumably. I don't know that this could be proven and if you give me a while I might be able to disprove it. For the moment, let's say that even if we can, that's not true in a given moment. There is something I haven't learned that would make me capable of having a particular experience, and the same is for you. Now, if we can't all end up capable of the same whole spectrum, then this is very complicated to even try to write about. Let's assume we can.

Now I am still trying to get the full perspective on this issue as so many points have been argued but...it seems that the idea I stated in the previous paragraph, that we seem to all be capable of the same experiences is the one that is used by many linguists who are presently arguing that language has no effect on thinking. This also seems to be something disassumed by older-school linguists who said that language completely controls the way we think. I think that these are both extremist views and that neither are true. I think it is somewhere in the middle and that thought affects language and language affects thought in a continuous flow.

But even aside from the experience idea, the rules, the meanings we apply do vary. We know that. Does the man with no past and future tense perceive the event in the same way as the one who has them? No, clearly not. Is the experience he took away in his mind the same? Well, no we know that everyone has a unique experience. Does that mean that what made it different for him was exclusively something or some things outside of language?

More Later.

Note that I haven't reread this yet. It may not flow well. I will stamp this at 1.0. If you care to, check back for upgrades. :P

Experiences do not make themselves interesting for you. You must put in effort to do that. There are many kinds of effort that can be applied, different methodologies. I didn't find a lot of what I learned in school interesting. I wanted to learn in the areas I chose, so I did. This didn't typically materialize into coursework. The first school I went to encouraged that attitude. Perhaps that's why it's always underlain my attitude towards learning. I was taught, initially, that it was okay to function with that as a modus operandi. While it should be an aspect of how we learn, sometimes we need to accept the lessons being offered to us in the present, whatever they may be.
As I got further and further in school, I developed a pattern that I'm only now seeing the full brunt of. To make learning interesting I would generally ignore commitments until it was close to a due date for showing results. I would then cram all effort into those final moments as a challenge to see what I could handle. During the slack time I was also allowed to pursue whatever else interested me. This is a very subtle form of egotism. It's totally self-serving, it aims to prove abilities above others, and it ignores what others would value of you. Anyway, the point is, I'm still in this state but I don't want to be. Now I'm much more aware of it and its various sides and I can begin to tackle it and replace it with a more effective attitude that brings better results.

It's been interesting. Over the years I've learned that when I don't exercise any self-control I will almost always revert to a sleep schedule that's during the day. Like 8am - 4pm or so. So, I've done a lot of contemplation on whether or not I should accept the most natural path and do things such as stick to night classes, night jobs, and maybe work on moving to a more 24-hour city. However, I find it crippling. There are a lot of places you can't go and people you can't see. In addition, when I keep a more standard sleep schedule I find myself feeling healthier overall. I even look better (no bruises under the eyes and whatnot). So, my conclusion is that this is a case of me needing to exert constant self-control in order to keep a sleep schedule that makes my life better overall.

An obvious example of that is addictive personalities (people who easily become addicted to things) and things such as substances. Sleep pattern is more of a toss-up and involves individual personal evaluation. Then you can have less obvious things such as putting sugar in your tea. That may be your natural preference but it may be spiking your blood sugar levels too much and causing acne (commonly encouraged by sugar). So, I guess my point with this entry is it's interesting to think how many things in our personal makeup and lives are things we do naturally but would be better off not doing. Then there are opposite cases as well, where we've been doing something according to a strict system of self-control but in actuality we'd be better off letting go and just "going with the flow." I think it can be very powerful to reach a state where we question all these little parts of ourselves and keep a watchful, albeit not anxious, eye out for anything we haven't brought to some examination. You can become much more perceptive of yourself and others, gaining an insight into things few would dare question or even think about.

I like to question myself whenever I have a negative reaction to someone else's action. There are too many times when the reaction is caused by me resenting something I don't like or feel weak about in myself. Rarely are people aware of even a majority, yet alone all of these instances. The next step is to be more forgiving of others for it and to decide how reasonably I can work on it in myself. If I feel it will be something I'll have to live with for the foreseeable future I learn to forgive myself about it. I'm not saying this is easy, just that it's unwise not to pursue.

It doesn't matter whether or not we believe cultural ideas should be public domain, it's that they already always are. We are all connected. Cultures aren't as unique as they like to think. It's the individuals which work with them. Destroy every nation's goverment and homes and you will lose many cultures, but the individuals will still remain.

To say that culural values aren't public domain implies that I am rude for using chopsticks only in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants. Also, that I must scold Thai restaurants for not having any because that isn't in keeping with Asian food culture.

And to give an example, we think of Hunan food as very spicy and Italian as having a lot of tomatoes. Neither of these things were true until about 400 or so years ago. For much longer before that, they weren't.

The solidarity of culture is illusion.

I was thinking, can we become enlightened beings while we still take in mind-altering substances? I mean hard stuff, grass, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, taurine, prescription medication, etc. I've long felt that that's not possible. But I was just thinking. There's something in some foods. They have various effects on the mind, sometimes short term, sometimes more sustained (vitamins, minerals, etc.). Your brain naturally produces a heroin-like chemical, pain killers, depressants, relaxers, adrenaline, and more. When are we really not "on" something? So what is it we should be doing substance wise if we're constantly being affected by them? Just get drunk, caffeinated, high, buzzed, medicated, et cetera and forget it? Or try to avoid foods with strange elements and all the aforementioned substances and stick to our internal elements instead? (Not factoring in the challenge of the latter option.) Is the latter a lost cause? Is the former a wasted lifetime? Maybe moderation is the key, along with watching for elements that give a particular person severe negative side effects (emphasis on severe because everything has negative side effects, it's just a balancing act in that sense) and simply not feeling concerned about controlled levels of usage of acceptable elements (to said person).