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juliaoceania -> RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? (6/28/2011 7:38:50 PM)
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quote:
We have no difficulty understanding a series of representations depicting an army approaching a shore, boarding ships, travelling across the sea, debarking their ships, and engaging in battle, even though the parties to the communication are millenia apart in time.
I am trying to decipher your position here, and I will have to say I agree with Tweaky. It is not certain what is going to be communicated millenia apart. For me a representation of Washington on his boat crossing the Potomac is going to be widely different from what people who may have never heard of Washington are going to think of it. Most Americans would have a definite idea apart from the actual representation of a man leading an army into battle when looking at such a representation. It means our freedom, the sacrifice we made for it, the continuance of our nation, the precariousness of our freedom, etc etc etc... in a 1000 years from now it might just look like a weirdly dressed dude on a boat leading a military charge.
Things mean what we decide they do. That meaning is communicated at multiple levels, and the context of those meanings are very important. The reason why I posted the work of Geertz earlier was that he thought that meaning always had layers of culturally specific contexts, and one had to be a member of a culture to really get all the nuanced meanings of any symbolic communication. Gestures, images, words, the ordering of words, etc etc etc, can never be fully understood by outsiders unless that outsider immerses themselves into another culture... and even then meaning will be lost...
Now, you are free to disagree with that, but it makes sense to me as someone who has had more than one instance of assuming that someone "understood" me because it seemed like my meaning was something that could not possibly be misunderstood.
We never know whether or not we are truly being understood when we communicate with another...
I think this thread took a very different turn than I imaged it would or intended it to, which tells you how I thought people would understand the OP. I thought of meaning in the terms of "what is the meaning of life" or "What is the deeper meaning of the reality we experience"... instead others understood the thread differently than I intended... which was fine by me because it was interesting nonetheless... but still, it tend to show how we think we are communicating one thing, and we are actually communicating another. Communication is a nebulous sort of endeavor at its most basic level. It is why existing along with others can be very hard, even when it should be easy. I quit expecting to be understood a long time ago, and I shoot for understanding others these days... it makes life easier and more rewarding for me...
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