From: Tennessee Leeuwenburg (tennessee@tennessee.id.au)
Date: Wed Jan 18 2006 - 22:23:01 MST
Phil Goetz wrote:
>>"This is because of their peculiar serial form of communication.
>>Less
>>intelligent organisms perceive the world in a gestalt manner that
>>enables conscious reflection. More intelligent organisms develop
>>means
>>of communicating these gestalts to each other in a way that preserves
>>the topology of interrelations between perceptions.
>>
>>"Humans, however, use a spoken language, which requires taking any
>>thought to be communicated and linearizing it. This destroys almost
>>all of the relationships contained in a network of ideas, which must
>>
>>
>
>I thought this was an original idea, but by coincidence I just read a
>review which indicates that the postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard
>said something like this in his 1971 book /Discourse, figure/. I
>haven't read the book, so I don't know how strong the similarities are.
>
>- Phil
>
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Wittgenstein and Ayn Rand (not that they would want to be associated
with eachother, I suspect) both push the position that our shared
histories give us some kind of reasonable commonality of meanings.
Wittgenstein saw the problem as somewhat absurd -- the language games we
all play with ourselves, but the ongoing success of human life as
pointing to something deeper than the apparently poor knowledge
representation of humans.
Ayn Rand saw a process of refinement as one of the essential goals of a
properly led life.
Cheers,
-T
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