h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I tried to watch it. I really tried, twice. But there are limits to human endurance. And yes, I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, too. Maybe we need more Duck and Cover practice?

I’m going to try and respond to as many of the points raised in posts 18 and 19 as I can so this post might be a bit disjointed.

First, a general point about our subject (what is our subject? The nature of the human mind? The nature of individual identity?): As a student of philosophy, I dislike analogies because I think the whole point of philosophy is to talk about human being directly in language that should be understandable for everyone; for example, I think one of the problems with social science is that it is, effectively, a set of analogies which is why it can tell us things that seem to make sense but has failed to build a body of predictive laws to match the physical sciences. However, there is one analogy that keeps coming back to me whenever I try to think about this. If you imagine trying to grasp a ten foot diameter balloon in your arms; it’s very difficult as it keeps slipping out of your grasp, but if you take a knife and try cutting it up to make it easier to hold all you are left with is some wrinkled scraps of rubber and a lot of gas.

It’s important to recognise the possibility that this is not just a very difficult problem for science but the central problem that we struggle with all our lives. It was the ideology of the Enlightenment that gave us the hope that we may be able to see it as a story that runs parallel with our lives and study it objectively (this is the difference between immanentism and transcendentalism in philosophy). As an example of this, in 1987 Bryan Magee had a BBC TV series called “The Great Philosophers” which consisted of Magee and a different academic each week sitting on a sofa in a blank set discussing one of fifteen famous thinkers from Plato to Wittgenstein. Why have it on television? It would have been perfect for radio but it actually reveals an agenda (whether conscious or unconscious) of suggesting that philosophy takes place outside of everyday reality in some eternal moment.

The opposite view would be that we are working out our identity in everything we do rather than just those rare times when we have a spare moment to stop and think about ourselves. For instance, while I’ve been writing this post I’ve also been vacuuming the bedrooms, doing the washing and hanging it up, cooking the dinner and running to the toilet every time I fill the kettle.

In fact, I would like to suggest that anything that never feels the need to go to the toilet is, by definition, incapable of demonstrating intelligent behaviour.

As for stardust, this is a simple scientific fact; all the heavy elements that make up our body – carbon, iron, calcium etc. – can only be produced when dying stars explode and when we die those elements cease to constitute an individual body returning to the cosmic recycling process from which we’ve diverted them for our brief hour on the stage. I don’t think anyone has successfully described a process whereby individual identity can be imprinted on a single atom so the only sense I can make of this other than, as I say, remaining in the memory of people I’ve encountered in life is some sort of Jungian unconscious. One thing I find interesting is that the internet may represent the first time all human knowledge has been contained in a single entity since the Library at Alexandria burned down.

Maybe the robot manufacturers should take that toilet suggestion on board. I foresee litter boxes...

Hm, I agree about the atoms. But what if consciousness is not made of atoms? What if 'things which are seen were not made of things which do appear'? In other words, what if there is more *there* than what we can already measure? In which case I would propose that consciousness is not a print circuit, but a holon made of my least favourite Star Trek substance, 'some sort of...'. Just a speculation.

I understand and agree that we can't prove such a hypothesis with the science we've got, but if we're only going to talk about what we can already prove, why have the conversation at all?

I did find an intriguing quote by Arthur Koestler, from 'Ghost in the Machine':

'The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.'

Which I thought was pretty funny and worth a thought as a jumping-off point for reflection.

Yes, absolutely. Keep speculating! Speculation and imagination are the basis of all science. It's just us philosophers are terrified of being told off by scientists for losing touch with realityhttps://h2g2.com/entry/A87884680/conversation/reply/F22150378/T8317487/P111029463# The Koestler quotation is perfect; goes straight to the heart of this conversation. His "Darkness At Noon" is one of my all time favourite books

that was meant to be

Hi Dmitri and Chris! That's a great Koestler quote. And pertinent indeed! I do believe 'mind' is something that does actually exist in the universe ... and it has to be based on something, and as far as I can tell, can't be atoms, or protons, or electrons, or electric fields, or anything else we presently know about ... *unless* atoms, protons, electrons, electric fields, or anything else we know about in a scientific sense, *also* have some properties we've no clue about.

The issue in my mind, is not *intelligence*. What we need to work on, is *awareness*.

To restart the conversation perhaps I should make a statement of my perspective on the subject. Dmitri will like it because it’s highly speculative but, I hope, supported by rational argument.

First, I think that consciousness, or self-awareness, is the strangest thing that has happened on our planet (although Trump’s Twittering runs it a close second). We tend to take it for granted because we live with it all the time but at the same time we are deeply troubled by the problems that arise from it and expend huge amounts of energy trying to explain it. One of these attempts at explanation is “God”, a name given to the sensation that the world is looking back at us which is inherent in the reflexivity of self-awareness. Originally this was expressed by investing the whole natural world with spirit leading to the idea of nymphs, satyrs, dryads etc., and as self-awareness became clearer these grew more human-like eventually becoming refined to a very human, single god. The Scottish Jesuit philosopher Gerry Hughes has written that Genesis can be read as a political manifesto for monotheistic religion as it was written at a time when the idea of a religion with only one god would have seemed laughable to most people. It also introduces the idea of original sin, the guilt we feel as we separate ourselves as individuals from the rest of nature and other humans.

As the Koestler quotation makes clear, he viewed consciousness as an emergent property, an accidental combination of elements that served no particular purpose originally but obviously gave humans a huge advantage to survive and adapt. However, it can be argued that it is a contradiction (on a medieval map at this bit you would find a label saying “Here be Dragons”, as I have to admit I really can’t say for certain what contradiction means). To try and illuminate this idea let’s consider those people writing Genesis; inside the atoms making up their bodies, the Higgs boson was functioning just as it does now, it didn’t know that it was called a Higgs boson but that didn’t affect the way it functioned and, of course, two plus two equalled four just as it does now. But the concept of one and one and one and one objects being gathered together under a single label “four” was only beginning to develop in Egypt. Does this mean that arithmetic is part of the natural world or a product of human intelligence that is separate from nature?

In developing set theory in order to define number for “Principia Mathematica”, Bertrand Russell discovered the Russell Paradox (also referred to as the Russell-Zermelo Paradox as Ernst Zermelo discovered it independently at the same time). As the ability to count is essential to our being able to differentiate ourselves as individuals from the rest of existence this appears to be a real contradiction inherent in individual identity. According to some, Kurt Gödel’s famous response to the paradox proves that the contradiction is a real and unresolvable part of human consciousness thus making it impossible to produce a mechanical model of the mind that would be necessary for a human-like artificial intelligence. According to others, it does just the opposite. Personally I found his proof beyond my comprehension so my jury is definitely still out on this one. It could just be another way of saying, with Koestler, that Evolution has played an enormous trick on us however, unlike Willem, I can’t be sure that contradiction does not play a part in being human.

This is your basic Hegelian package (sorry, but I can’t write these things without hearing it in the background being played out as a Monty Python sketch) that sees the contradiction inherent in consciousness dialectically producing progressively more refined consciousness. For Hegel, the contradiction is never resolved; it remains the driving force of dialectic movement.

Some interesting ideas there Chris! Anyways here's a rather long piece I wrote ...

ASPECTS OF MIND

I want to try to explain why I don’t think mind is an ‘emergent’ thing or an ‘epiphenomenon’. Calling it that, is a philosophical and scientific dead end … it doesn’t allow you to figure out what mind really is or what it does or can do. Now I am both scientifically and philosophically optimistic: I don’t think that there’s any phenomenon in the universe that, ultimately, we won’t be able to figure out. This kind of optimistic attitude is, as I see it, vital for conducting science and philosophy. After all, if you believe there’s nothing more that you can learn, you stop learning. And I’m sure that is always a mistake – at least for the person who really wants to understand him or herself and our world.

For the same reason, it doesn’t help to consider mind to be an ‘accident’. This goes right back to the nature of our universe and the Cosmos. Now here, it helps taking cosmology into account, and specifically, the ideas that ‘all that is’ is likely far more extensive than the bit of it that we can see. Also, that universes might have been coming into origin since forever and will continue coming into origin forever. There’s no start or end to creation, in this view. We can’t yet prove the existence of other universes, but soon we might … if reality is indeed all real, all part of one single thing, which I think it is. Now with the universe we have, again, scientific optimism means expecting to solve all mysteries eventually. We believe that there’s a single set of laws of physics, that are operating throughout the universe. Laws may however have been different in the past and may be different in the future, but even these differences happen according to ways and patterns we can figure out. Now the way I see it … the mind is indeed intrinsic to the universe, it happens according to actual laws of physics. Mind is indeed a phenomenon and it has regular qualities: the mind of one is much like the mind of the other. If all minds were ‘accidents’ and/or entirely separate and disconnected from each other, this would be hard to explain.

Instead, I personally am convinced that mind is a primary and fundamental aspect of reality. You know, perhaps, of the ‘particle/wave’ duality of quantum physics? And the matter/energy duality of relativity? I think the mind/matter duality is another duality of the universe … the whole universe. I wasn’t facetious when I said that maybe the stars are made of mind-stuff. I believe there is indeed a kind of mind-stuff out there, which underlies matter and energy and everything else. The universe itself, as a whole, has not just a matter-nature but also a mind-nature. Mind, in my view, is unified and unifying. Its essence is awareness. Awareness implies subjectivity. Subjectivity is something that intrinsically diversifies and proliferates, and yet, there is a ‘deeper level’ where all of subjectivity is interconnected and unified and indeed the same thing. OK but this I admit is pretty heavy going, philosophically. In my book I will put forth the considerations, including some thought experiments and philosophical arguments, for why I consider it necessarily so that mind is unified and unifying and a single unbroken whole in spite of its apparent multifariousness.

Good, now for consciousness: The issue has been confounded by the term ‘self-consciousness’ which actually doesn’t say anything useful and is only used to try and prop up human ‘specialness’. I propose dropping the ‘self’ and just looking at the ‘consciousness’ part. Now even that has been messed up. Descartes, who came up with a lot of ideas that are still prevalent, thought that only humans possess any kind of consciousness at all. He saw animals as mindless automata. In his view, animals could not feel pain or anything else. Scientific evidence that we have today, as well as some basic philosophical considerations, should make it utterly clear that this is not so. Animals like cats and dogs and rats and birds obviously do feel pain … this can be proven by showing that their sensory nerves look and function essentially just like ours, and they display reactions consistent with them experiencing pain. Until we have direct access to their minds, that should suffice for us as proof that they do indeed have feelings. If they can feel pain, they can feel other things too.

The idea of human ‘specialness’ also comes from religion. Descartes was indeed religious, and believed that God only gave ‘souls’ to humans. Now even today the idea is prevalent even in irreligious people that there’s something special about the human mind and that there’s a clear separation between humans and animals. But this, again, is obviously not so. If we take humans and chimpanzees: we are genetically extremely close. Our brains are very similar. The human brain is not qualitatively different from a chimp brain, only quantitatively … we have more of some stuff than chimps do, but our brain cells are pretty much exactly the same kind of thing as chimp brain cells. So because I truly believe that mind arises from the normal functioning of the thinking and feeling organs – the brains – it follows that human minds can’t be qualitatively different from chimp minds, only quantitatively. We do the same things with our brains as chimps do, only somewhat better. And that, not even always.

If we go into our own past, we have a wonderful array of ancestors, from the Australopithecines, which clearly were not much better at thinking than modern chimpanzees are, through intermediates like Homo habilis and Homo erectus to us modern Homo sapiens … and even the latter has existed for over two hundred thousand years. Human-like things have existed on this planet for over three million years. If the intelligent, aware human mind was an accident … then where in this progression did it arise? Note that this doesn’t allow us to ask why. Is it possible that some or most of those human ancestors, even when doing things like using fire, making clothing, and fashioning tools, were ‘philosophical zombies’ – without actual minds or conscious experiences?

I seriously, strongly doubt it. Now all right, let me state my own position. I believe the human mind hasn’t ‘emerged’ from a previous state of mindlessness. I feel it has been elaborated from simpler kinds of minds, which already had the basic features of mind, the most basic of which is consciousness in itself. So: Homo erectus did have a mind, just a somewhat simpler mind than ours. I am sure they had many qualities we consider human. And Homo erectus had a mind somewhat more elaborate than that of Homo habilis, which had a somewhat more elaborate mind than those of the Australopithecines, and so we go. In this view, cats and dogs and rats also have minds, but these minds are just simpler than ours. There’s no break, no insurmountable step, but a progression from simpler to more complex kinds – and this not necessarily happening in a ‘straight line’. The elaboration of mind can take any of many different avenues. We shouldn’t consider ourselves as being at the ‘top’ or at the ‘peak’ of mental development! Once again I will go into this issue at great length in my book.

But considering mind as a phenomenon that has evolved, passed through a great many steps of elaboration from simple to complex … is there a level below which mind is absent? Once again from my own studies and considerations I would say that even something like a mouse or a rat, in order to survive in a complex environment, needs a mind that, while simpler than the mind of a human being, still would be quite complex and sophisticated. Scientifically we still understand almost nothing about mind, and if we actually study a mouse mind in full detail, we’re likely going to have an incredible complexity of threads needing disentangling. So – a mouse likely already has an extremely complex mind. ‘Below’ a mouse you might find the mind of a lizard or a frog. And again, I am sure even these are still very complex, complex beyond our current understanding. So what about the mind of a fish? Simpler still, but complex all the same. And insects? I think insect minds are much simpler. I am not convinced that insects feel all of the sorts of things we can feel … but they must have awareness of something. I can imagine a caterpillar being actually hungry … experiencing an impulse to feed, if not much else. Insects have senses … if they see light or colour, that must go along with an awareness of something even if that awareness might not be the same thing we humans experience when we see light or colour.

This is an interesting subject to me … I’ll see what I can find out about the nerves and brains of insects. But if a nerve impulse in an insect is the same thing as a nerve impulse in a mammal – and I don’t think that fundamentally there can be that much of a difference – then these impulses in insects also need to give rise to sensations.

‘Below’ insects there are even simpler creatures. I feel that, if they have nerves, then they must experience sensations and need a very basic kind of ‘awareness’ of their surroundings and/or their own interior conditions. But what about the most basic things of all like single celled animals or bacteria? Or what about plants? These don’t have brains, they don’t have sensory cells or nerves. So likely they don’t really have feelings or sensations. But perhaps even they, somehow, have a kind of proto-awareness, an incipient mind that exists at a very, very basic level … something like the deepest possible sleep, with just the barest smidgen of an awareness, of things just about to happen, a kind of anticipation of a mind about to awaken.

The bottom line is that nothing comes from nothing. Again this is a philosophical standpoint, a premise that allows for learning and understanding to occur. If this was wrong then we would be fundamentally incapable of understanding ourselves and our world. So taking this as a premise … in my view, mind thus elaborates itself from simpler to more complex phenomena. But it has to start with something, and that something must be this kind of proto-mind, which has to exist in very simple organisms with a very low level of organisation. This proto-mind in turn needs to be an aspect of reality as well, it too can’t come forth from nothing. If mind is indeed a basic and primal thing, an ‘essence’ of reality, then that is the substrate from which minds arise and elaborate themselves … a rock-bottom basic ‘mind stuff’ existing in all of the universe, in time and in space.

OK I’ll leave that there for now …

Willem I have a feeling we are sort of agreeing with each other from opposite directions but it's going to take me some time to absorb your post and reply to it. In the meantime can I persuade you to look up the neuro-scientist VS Ramachandsan and watch some of his TEDTalks on Youtube. I think you'll find them fascinating.

Sorry, mistyped his name... VS Ramachandran...

Willem, I’ll try and respond to your post point by point although there are a couple of areas I’m not entirely clear about.

Paragraph 1:
I agree that modern science is essentially optimistic (here I need to make clear the difference between modern science, based on hypothesis and deduction, beginning with the work of Huygens, Galileo, Newton etc. and the subjective methodologies of Aristotle and Descartes) and as such no hypothesis can be considered a dead-end until it’s been shown to be false by some clear and indubitable evidence. Similarly, no hypothesis, no matter how badly formed, can prevent that evidence being gathered and examined; for example, calling things “atoms” didn’t prevent scientists from understanding that they are really nothing like how they were pictured originally.

Paragraph 2:
Again, I’m happy to concur with your view that our bit of the universe beginning with the Big Bang is only a part of something much bigger; as far as I understand, there are good mathematical models which show that to be perfectly feasible. However, I would dispute your view that mind is intrinsic to the universe and works according to the laws of physics. If this was the case then, presumably, we would not be having this conversation; artificial intelligence would be easy to produce and individual identity would present no problems. As I’ve proposed in previous posts, I think the essence of the problem we are discussing is the tension generated because we humans are both part of the whole and seemingly autonomous individuals. “If all minds were ‘accidents’ and/or entirely separate and disconnected from each other, this would be hard to explain.” But that’s exactly the point; it is probably one of the hardest things we’ll ever try to explain.

Paragraph 3:
In one of my earlier posts I mentioned my distrust of analogies. They can be misleading and I think the analogies you start this paragraph with are indeed misleading. I can’t claim to understand Quantum Physics so I don’t know whether that constitutes a real duality in the sense we’re talking about here but I do know that matter and energy are not a duality, it’s simply that the energy of any matter is calculated by multiplying the mass by the speed of light squared. The rest of the paragraph, as far as I can see, amounts to a statement of faith of the same type as Donald Trump declaring that he is going to make America great again – no one knows what he actually means or how he would achieve anything that could be covered by that statement but of course I look forward to examining any arguments you put forward to support those claims.

Paragraph 4:
Here, I have to say I’m as guilty as most people in using “mind” and “consciousness” or “self-awareness” and “self-consciousness” very loosely and interchangeably so perhaps we should have defined the terms more precisely at the beginning but a quick trawl through the internet shows that even the experts are sometimes a bit undecided as to what they mean. However, there is clearly a difference between consciousness and self-consciousness; all animals are conscious but as far as I know only humans are self-conscious, that is aware of themselves as separate, autonomous individuals able to think about what they are and what they do and express those thoughts in language sophisticated enough for other individuals to interpret and misinterpret the ideas creatively.

Paragraph 5:
I’m afraid I am one of those irreligious people who regard humans as special. I think it’s absurd to deny that the human race has become the dominant species on the planet through its ability to think and communicate. However, I don’t think we’ve achieved this position because we deserve it or because we’ve been chosen or as part of some great plan; it’s simply a meaningless process. On the other hand, that dominance makes us responsible for taking care of the planet and all of its inhabitants. I’m perfectly happy to believe that Chimpanzees are well on the way to developing the same level of self-awareness as humans and, believe me, I really do think it would be a much better place if there were a lot more Chimpanzees and a lot less humans but we are where we are and we have to deal with the situation as we find it.

I ran out of time before I was able to finish the previous post, so here’s the rest of it:

I agree that all living things have some sort of awareness but I think Evolution can account for the development of this awareness without the need for assuming that it exists as a fundamental aspect of matter. However, your idea of “mind-stuff” is one that is shared with many mainstream scientists; in fact, Sir Arthur Eddington used the same terminology in his book “The Nature of the Physical World”, published in 1928 (the Wikipedia article about him gives a reasonable analysis of his views). On the other hand, for Eddington, it seems that this still doesn’t necessarily resolve the duality but rather moves it to a different level:
“It is sometimes urged that the basal stuff of the world should be called “neutral stuff” rather than “mind-stuff,” since it is to be such that both mind and matter originate from it. If this is intended to emphasize that only limited islands of it constitute actual minds, and that even in these islands that which is known mentally is not equivalent to a complete inventory of all that may be there, I agree… I certainly do not intend to materialise or substantialise mind. Mind is – but you know what mind is like, so why should I say more about its nature? The word “stuff” has reference to the function it has to perform as a basis of world-building and does not imply any modified view of its nature.”
So in this is he following Berkeley or Kant? To be honest, I really don’t know and, perhaps in the end, this is the place where the individual is at its most isolated; each individual having to express its own understanding of how it relates to the universe without much hope of any other individual being able to comprehend it but with some hope of an empathetic or hermeneutic recognition.

As for the idea of something coming from nothing, of course that depends what you mean by nothing. Physicists tend to have a funny idea of what constitutes nothing:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/something-from-nothing-vacuum-can-yield-flashes-of-light

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141106-why-does-anything-exist-at-all

I hope those links work.

There appears to me to be some congruence between the ideas of quantum mechanics in those articles, and the old kabbalist notion of the 'ain soph'. But that's just an idle thought.

See what Willem says when he gets back from safari.

I wish I was there with him rather than in wet miserable Scotland but I did have a bit of a safari this afternoon when my wife spotted a couple of mice in our back garden

OK now that I'm back from my holiday and caught up with most stuff I'll get back to this! Just gimme a bit more time please ...

These days I find all this detailed analysis hard work and very tiring (I remember A. J. Ayer saying that Russell, having spent years working through the detail of the logical system for Principia Mathematica, could never again face that sort of detailed analysis) so your mentioning of Kabbalah has given me an excuse for something of a meandering detour along which, I hope, there are sufficient signposts to bring me safely back to the main road. Other than the word I knew very little about this so I looked it up and found lots of very exotic terminology describing all sorts of mystical ideas. One piece on Quantum Cosmology and Kabbalah by Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams seems particularly pertinent for our conversation. In it a scientist attempts to describe in the language of the Kabbalah how quantum mechanics might explain the origins of our universe.

“The reason kabbalistic terms are helpful to our account is that they bind together the search for truth with the search for the divine. If terms such as Hokhmah did not already exist, bearing religious significance, we would have had to try and coin them – which would probably have been as successful as Esperanto. The emerging scientific cosmology and Kabbalah are two metaphor systems whose juxtaposition points toward a truth larger than either can express alone.”

Now, philosophers necessarily regard language as their principal concern; as I’ve mentioned previously, while artists and musicians can express feelings that we may all share, to articulate a detailed analysis of a philosophical argument or create a law that can be implemented without too much controversy requires unambiguous language – we think in language so the only way of transferring thoughts from one mind to another with any precision is through language (I would define knowledge as transferrable information which is, presumably, a much narrower definition than Dmitri would recognise but I want to differentiate it from feelings and beliefs that we can never be sure are identical to those in other minds). However, the precision of language is a continuum, a spectrum from nonsense to something that transfers thoughts with as much transparency as language is capable of achieving without any hope of ever reaching perfect clarity. This isn’t denigrating nonsense, by the way; I get as much enjoyment reading Edward Lear and Ivor Cutler as I do from Bertrand Russell or David Hume and I think the sort of nonsense Alan Sokal was highlighting can be just as much a source of creative thinking as Shakespeare or T S Eliot but the growth of “fake news” means that the need for clear thinking and, thus, clear language is more important than ever, the point being to make the direction of thought that people derive from my words as predictable as possible. One way of dealing with this is either using the sort of juxtaposition of language worlds mentioned above or, as I have tried throughout this conversation, to describe ideas in different words as a form of triangulation to locate the meaning slightly more precisely.

I tend to consider myself a common old bloke - common in the pejorative sense given to it by an English language that has been flushed down the lavatory of the class system: “ee by ‘eck, thou’s as common as muck” as they say due South of here (the Scots, of course, never needed a class system as anyone posh is English or from Edinburgh, anyone who is alright is Scottish) – so I like to think my feet are firmly planted in the muck. I like ordinary things; I love watching the sparrows, dunnocks, tits, finches and robins living out their ordinary little lives in my back garden and I would love one day to hear that scientists have discovered that the Loch Ness Monster is actually a previously unknown species of giant slug. Consequently, when I read something like this (written by Louis Althusser just before he went mad and killed his wife):
“To be clear, this means that basic structures of the Hegelian dialectic such as negation, the negation of the negation, the identity of opposites, ‘supersession’ [hang on, that’s an album by Al Kooper], the transformation of quantity into quality, contradiction etc. have for Marx (in so far as he takes them over, and he takes over by no means all of them) a structure different from the structure they have for Hegel.”
I have to consider how this helps me decide what to have for lunch.

Obviously, fact-checking here offers no benefit so if I were a Logical Positivist who has mistakenly derived the idea that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus was prohibiting any expression in language of a non-factual nature I would be going hungry by now. The problem is I find thinking about food very distracting and…er…what was I talking about? Oh, yes: signposts. Well, all the signposts here seem to be in a foreign language. Damn, what’s Esperanto for HELP…?

Or, as Heidegger would say, 'Sein und Zeit'.

I agree: language is a slippery, slippery critter. Particularly as we often use what we think are precise terms, only to find out later that...what was it Richard Nixon said? Oh, no, fake news: it wasn't Nixon. Nor, according to Wikiquote, was it Alan Greenspan. But *somebody* said it...or did they?

'I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.'

That used to be a popular wall poster in dorms. Anyway...

Which is why I mentioned Heidegger. I used to get philosophy grad students coming to me for help with German. They needed to read Hegel, or Heidegger, or some other incomprehensible German philosopher. And I'd explain that words like 'Sein' and 'Zeit' meant one thing to the philosopher in question, and quite another to Herr Schmidt over at the butcher's shop, so we'd better read carefully to see what warped misuse of Kant's native tongue was at work here...

My very wise piano teacher used to say to me, about 50 years ago, that true communication was trying your best to get the idea in your head to somebody else's head without damaging it too much. I think that's a true of musical language, or any other form of art, as it is of words. Maybe it's even true of emoticons... Does that mean the same thing to you and me?

Or as the Lutheran theologian put it in Missouri, decades ago...

His colleagues demanded: 'When God said, 'Let there be light', did He SAY 'Let there be light'?'

[That's what we call a 'Gretchenfrage'.]

The prof replied, 'In English, or in German?' and left the seminary to found his own. Taking the half of the faculty who got the joke with him.

PS I agree about the kabbalah and the metaphor systems. There is a sneaky theory that Einstein knew a fair amount of kabbalah. But then, other people say the best language to use when discussing quantum mechanics is probably Navajo. I don't speak Navajo, so I couldn't say...