What is frustration? Or what is anger? Or love? When I say "love," the sound comes out of my mouth and hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, through their memories of love, or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying, and they say "Yes, I understand," but how do I know they understand? Words are inert; They're just symbols; They're dead. You know? And, so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed; It's unspeakable. Yet, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we have connected, and we think that we are understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion, and that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for.
[~Waking Life]
A question of expressing complex feelings by simple words. Is it possible at all? Indeed, any abstract and intangible things that we're experiencing, we experience differently. And we have only one set of symbols to convey this to the others. And then there are also variations on these symbols themselves – different languages…or same language, but affected by various cultural environment. What people might know of the meaning of the particular word may appear to other people not exactly the same, or completely different, yet we all use this generalisation and blissfully unaware if we’re communicating different ideas, for no one ever thought of asking: what set of physical sensations characterizes your definition of love, hate, frustration, anger? Are they the same as next person's?
Maybe to avoid ambiguity we should really operate on a lower level, describing emotions by simple tangible words? Define taste, colour, scent, texture, that you associate with certain emotion…I wonder how many of us would find that their love, hate, anger are nothing like anyone else’s.
Do we speak the same language?
[~Waking Life]
A question of expressing complex feelings by simple words. Is it possible at all? Indeed, any abstract and intangible things that we're experiencing, we experience differently. And we have only one set of symbols to convey this to the others. And then there are also variations on these symbols themselves – different languages…or same language, but affected by various cultural environment. What people might know of the meaning of the particular word may appear to other people not exactly the same, or completely different, yet we all use this generalisation and blissfully unaware if we’re communicating different ideas, for no one ever thought of asking: what set of physical sensations characterizes your definition of love, hate, frustration, anger? Are they the same as next person's?
Maybe to avoid ambiguity we should really operate on a lower level, describing emotions by simple tangible words? Define taste, colour, scent, texture, that you associate with certain emotion…I wonder how many of us would find that their love, hate, anger are nothing like anyone else’s.
Do we speak the same language?