Michael Mitchell: Archive

Meaning pre-language? 👍 Nope. 😞 How versus why. I ❤️ the idea that humans control evolution, though. Been thinking that for years... 😎

Look. Some things are binary (true/false) and some things are spectral (anything measurable). Meaning is binary. The capacity may have developed over thousands of years, but the first symbol qua symbol was created overnight. No symbol, no meaning, just ephemeral association between objects or actions or whatever. If the meaning of a symbol is vague or approximate, then it has no meaning at all. As long as its meaning is (at least temporally) absolute, the symbol itself is irrelevant. It exists only to serve that purpose, to immortalize (at least potentially) concepts.

For instance, what is the proper word for "things" in the context of that first sentence? How can what I mean by it (the identification of reality in all its complexity) possibly be coherent to anyone, much less everyone, when it's loaded with much more meaning than it can possibly hold? It's because we're always in that state of mind until we concretize -- make perceivable by means of symbols -- concepts, thoughts, ideas, etc., we'd otherwise forget in a matter of seconds. We're implicitly aware of what identification is, in other words, whether we know the word "identification" or not. That's "meaning". It comes into existence when we connect a symbol to whatever it refers.

"Identification" is an ideal example to use to demonstrate the fleeting nature of "meaning" without language to concretize it, by the way, because we're literally doing it (integrating similar abstractions) constantly whether we've ever connected the word to it or not. We don't need to know (the meaning of) the word "identification" (or some equivalent) in order to identify things; we need to know (the meaning of) the word "identification" (or some equivalent) in order to know we're identifying things, in order to identify identification. The existence of identification precedes any symbol for it. When someone learns the meaning of "identification" -- unlike a word which refers to a completely unknown experience -- he/she (🤣) doesn't think, as if he/she just discovered the ability: "Oh, that's what I've been doing when I differentiate shit from other shit and associate it with a symbol." He/she thinks: "Oh, that's the word for that."

We all have to learn meaning just as we all have to learn language. They're the same thing. But understanding how something functions is not the same as being able to control it. The idea that anything beyond human control has a purpose is literally absurd. Anyone who doesn't believe that must think "how" and "why" are synonomous, rather than merely interchangeably using them loosely as shorthand, and the "meanings" of so many other words must also be innacurate that no one could possibly correct them all without completing some very intensive and extensive re-education regimen. 🤣