Index 
Language written today The Desk
Language: Words and other abstractions, especially counting, delude some into believing we can share our universes, our love, …. sex, …. friendship …., caring …., empathy …., etc., etc. ISTMRN all we share are representations of our universes, images, metaphors, similes, and analogs. We English speakers mostly agree that certain identifiable objects are something we call “red”, but I have not even remote knowledge of how you experience what I perceive to be and we agree to name “red”. “Reason” can’t share our mental experiences, our awareness. It’s the ambiguous nature of tools at our disposal for sharing that experience: words, pictures, gestures, inflections. Abstraction abstracts or “pulls out” for emphasis from the continuum for inspection, classification, description, and communication each with other embedded abstractions. A sphere, ball, roundness, 4/3r3, perfection; though no sphere-like thing in the stream is perfect even the finest ball bearings. When does an ellipsoid become a sphere as the name given along a continuous scale from parallelepiped to sphere. Judgement, ambiguity caracterize mathematically rigorous abstractions, let alone distinguishing “loving” and “liking” by 13 year old girls. We “abstract” from a continuum of feelings some part of it we call “love”. Is there ambiguity about what that abstraction communicates when said with an equally ambiguous inflection and gesture? Each abstraction abstracts, pulls out, distinguishes, defines. Each abstraction has boundaries, and all boundaries are fuzzy if magnification enough.< We invented counting and numbers to further chase ambiguity into the darkness. Of course counting is ambiguous, but what about the numbers used to represent the count, are even they ambiguous? Can numbers be the best of perfection that we can manifest and communicate precisely? Well folks, that’s sort of where I am now. Drugs: I might drink beer tomorrow, a geologists alumni get together. Geologists drink beer. After long days in the hot dusty sun riding over two lane rocky ruts and worse, a tall cold beer back in camp is the order of the day as we regale each other with tales of how we outsmarted mother nature and put up with human stupidity, each in turn a conqueror of man and nature. |