Semiotics is about signs in all their forms, including internal usage of signs. It’s about how we make meaning from signs - which include labels.
Thought is ultimately just a kind of communication.
I find that impossible to comprehend, but especially the latter. Could you communicate an example?
Labels are a kind of sign. Turning signs into meaning is a big part of how we think. So labels are intimately involved in how we think.
Same as above: quoting something in a language I don’t understand. The symbols are there, and something (the original idea) was communicated–but it wasn’t my thought.
As for ideas that I can’t communicate… well, frankly, just about any kind of feeling that isn’t easily relatable to something more common. The very best poets just barely manage to transmit a scrap of an approximation of a feeling, which really is impressive enough. I’m not among the best poets of all time, and so I’m incapable of communicating such feelings in anything but the crudest possible manner.
I couldn’t disagree more. Communication is about transmitting information through a lossy channel (i.e., our senses). Thought is about information processing. It can take thought to condense and organize information for the best chance at successful communication, of course. And to some extent, we think in symbols, but that is by no means universal.
If I am thinking about “the indefinite integral of x squared with respect to x”, I am not generally thinking about those words, unless I am preparing to talk to someone about it. I am probably not even thinking of \int{x^2}dx, although I can do that as well. Instead, it brings to mind the idea of an integral, which can lead to notions of area and volume, shapes composed of slices of lower-dimensional things, etc. And the idea of x^2 brings to mind actual squares, how they grow and shrink with side length, and graphs with an upward curve, and so on.
In this case, I’m of course capable of distilling it down into something I can communicate, but that isn’t how I’m thinking about it. Really it’s no different from any other experience you might have, whether it’s your response to a smell or sound or something abstract like nostalgia. Even if you can describe the experience, you aren’t really communicating how you think about those things. The best you can hope for is to produce a complete enough sketch that the other person can compare their own experiences and get some inkling of it (or bring to mind the actual experience they had).
Really, it’s amazing that we can communicate at all. Consider the difference in bandwidth: speech is only a few dozen bytes per second, whereas the brain has billions of neurons, and trillions of interconnections, firing dozens of times per second. It must be terabytes per second of activity. We can only communicate the most infinitesimal fraction of what we think.
I think much of the art that moves us, whether music, painting, sculpture, poetry…whatever. is often working in that realm. The feelings that we get from it are strong, they are very real and hugely important to us but often we are at a loss to describe or even hint at what it is that is being stirred within us.
Perhaps a good definition of artistic genius would be that such a person is able to give those feelings a representative form that can communicate the concepts. Not many of us fit into that category though.
You’re not the one doing the communication there, any more than a telephone switchboard is “communicating”.
Poor/crude communication is not the same as impossible to communicate. We have an elaborate structure for doing just that. Not all of it is verbal.
Well, then, we’re never going to come to any understanding.
That’s one kind of communication. Another is internal communication - the transmission of information in your mind. You are drawing a distinction between “information processing” and information transmission that, I think, doesn’t map to how our brains actually work. You can’t have information processing without continuous information transmission.
What’s “the idea of an integral” other than all the symbols that were imparted to you in your education to shape that idea? There is no abstract integral separate from all your experience of working with them, being told about them, talking to others about them, thinking about them yourself.
Of course you are. That it is an imperfect transmission of an idea doesn’t mean it isn’t a transmission of an idea.
This is probably best for another thread, but we communicate quite well about feelings all the time. “Jane seemed wistful this morning.” " Bob was excited for the concert." Hildegard was curious about the missing statuary." I suspect you understand the meaning very well, mainly by comparison to times you have felt wistful, excited, or curious.
I suspect that such descriptions as “excited”, “wistful” and “curious” are precisely the crude approximations that Dr.S is talking about.
Yeah, pretty much. Of course, I can add words: “excited, in the way that I was as a child when I first went to Disneyland, with a combination of anticipation of fun but with an element of fear, but translated to the experiences I’ve had as an adult”, and so on. Maybe an extended description hits home and maybe it doesn’t, but either way, I’m not directly communicating my internal state.
Still–and this is something I said earlier–I do actually think that with enough time and effort, we can at least get a reasonable idea of what’s going on inside other people’s heads. It wouldn’t be worth having conversations if that weren’t the case. It’s just that a few ideas and feelings are too subtle or esoteric for me to properly convey. Mainly I was just trying to emphasize the difference between thought and communication, and that while they are related they are still distinct.
Well, I’d disagree with that, but only because I’m a Platonist when it comes to math.
It’s true that the idea of an integral as it exists in my head comes from the things you mentioned. Nevertheless, what I have built up is a structure that represents that idea. That structure isn’t just in one place, though; it’s a kind of distributed, associative, holographic thing. I can jump from the concrete to the abstract and vice versa, going concrete to describe some aspect of it, then switching perspectives to describe some other angle to it. It’s more than the sum of its parts.
Dennett’s theory seems focused on sensory experience, which is no doubt important, but not the only kind of mental processing. In fact I don’t think he goes quite far enough. I think that what we experience as consciousness is essentially a virtual reality. It’s a model of the world reconstructed with our senses. Dennett has an excellent point with the “multiple drafts” in that our senses are ambiguous–we are trying to reconstruct a 3D reality with 2D eyes and other senses that are even more limited. So we are in a constant state of multiple competing interpretations of reality, and which may or may not ever resolve. I’m sure we’ve all experienced optical illusions (like the spinning dancer) that have multiple interpretations, and where it’s even possible to exert conscious control over which one we see.
Still–I can have ideas without sensory input at all. Put me in a sensory deprivation tank, and I can still complete math problems that I’ve never done before, or compose music (and “hear” it) that’s never been performed. At least some ideas can survive disconnection from the outside world.
That’s very much a “you” problem, though, not a @Johanna problem, as she has adequately conveyed her feelings to other people, me included.
…which requires communication between its disparate parts to form a whole. And that’s where signs come in.
And the conduit for the communication is:
…you.
No, it’s very much inclusive of internal dialogue between multiple selves, absent sensory input.
Thanks. I take it back. You’re not a twit.
& now I’ve said all I wanted to say.
Well now, On the face of it that’s a simple enough statement (bolding mine) but hints to a deeper issue. I certainly agree with you and is that not a really neat summary of why communications on difficult issues these days appear to be particularly fraught? Especially online.
How much time or effort is actually expended on gaining that deeper understanding of the other point of view? that other set of complicated internal feelings and motivations?
If I were to take the simple, crude, headline description of any position, belief or emotion as a complete representation of what a person is trying to convey and don’t try to explore any further then it would be no surprise if communication becomes harder and harder.
Online, the simplistic approach seems to be by far the most common one. In the real world, when sitting down with real people, less so. That goes some way to explaining the vast disconnect between online and real life. The immediacy of the media amplifies the simplistic and doesn’t encourage or reward deeper exploration.
This thread has veered way off topic, but if you are interested here is an interesting discussion of the case of a person who grew up without any sort of language.
It seems to suggest that thinking without language is a fundamentally different.
For example, Schaller had the hardest time communicating to Ildefonso the concept of ‘idea’ itself. She discusses her attempt to mime ‘having an idea’:
How could a languageless man have any idea of what is happening in the head? But I was just hoping that there were enough cultural clues, and he was an observant man. I was grasping at straws. So I would mime having this idea in my head with my fists close to my head and then I would throw it out at your head, as my hands opened. Then I’d become the student and I’d catch it [laughs] and put it in my head.
I did as many variations as I could, again, over and over-hours, days, hours, days. Frustrating-the most frustrating task in my life! I’d look at him every once in a while and sometimes he looked tired, sometimes he looked frustrated, sometimes he looked as if I were crazy.
That’s so reminiscent of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan and the “water moment” when it clicked for Helen. Or the earlier deaf-blind-mute person, Laura Bridgman, who had a similar apotheosis around the word / item “key”. (The manual signing alphabet that was used to communicate with Helen Keller was first developed to attempt communication with Laura Bridgman).