Comment by em-bee
15 days ago
the way i read the quote it felt less like building an abstraction and more like destroying the richness.
but abstractions are mere shortcuts. but everything is an abstraction. to counter wittgenstein, language is not actually limited. we can describe everything to the finest detail. it's just not practical to do so every time.
physics, chemistry, we could describe a table as an amount of atoms arranged in a certain way. but then even atom is an abstraction over electrons, protons and neutrons. and those are abstractions over quarks. it's abstractions all the way down, or up.
language is abstractions. and that fits well with your meditation example. stop thinking -> remove the language -> remove the abstractions.
How can you know that we have language to describe everything in the finest detail? That suggests that we are omnipotent.
There's lots out there we don't know. And it seems to me that the further afield we go from the known, the more likely we are to enter territory where we simply do not have the words.
Can't speak to it personally, but I have heard from a number of people and read countless descriptions of psychedelic experiences being ineffable. Lol, actually, as I type, the mere fact that the word ineffable exists makes a very strong case for there being experience beyond words.
ok, fair point. what i am trying to say is that when we see/experience something that we can not describe we can create new words for it. we see something, we can name it. this directly contradicts the idea that language is the limit and that we can't talk about things that we don't have words for. that claim just doesn't make sense.
the problem then is that these new words don't make any sense to anyone who doesn't see/experience the same, so it only works for things that multiple people can see or experience. psychedelic experiences will probably never be shared, so they will remain undescribable. quite like dreams, which can also be be undescribable.
Agreed, we can and will always come up with new words that attempt to approximate the experience, but, imo, they will always come up short. The abstracting inevitably leaves fidelity on the floor.
It's necessary based on the way we're wired, struggle to think of a paradigm that would allow for the tribalism and connectedness that fostered human progress without shared verbal language initially, and written word later. Nothing inherently wrong with it, but, language will always abstract away part of the fidelity of the experience imo.
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