You Never Can Get Enough
Of the personality tests, that is.
This one is from Zack--he did it ages ago (you can take it here), but I'm bored at the moment, so I thought, what the hell? That's as good a reason to post as any, eh?
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Materialist |
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75% | |
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Postmodernist |
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75% | |
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Existentialist |
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69% | |
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Cultural Creative |
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69% | |
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Modernist |
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44% | |
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Idealist |
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44% | |
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Romanticist |
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31% | |
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Fundamentalist |
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25% |
This isn't perhaps entirely accurate, but I thought some of their questions were skewed. The big one is that while I do think that all that fundamentally exists is matter and energy, obviously the human brain has managed to turn matter and energy into something more. It isn't important that I think we merely believe we have a coherent self and all that--the fact that we can manufacture beliefs and believe them is more than the sum of matter+energy. I don't happen to think that the something more is divine or comes from outside us. It comes from language, an ability we developed with our matter and energy over time and has now grown into something insanely complex and created this humbug we call "consciousness."
Feh. Well, that killed some time. But, just as the sun always rises in the morning, so has my son risen. I hear him up there shrieking now. Probably in horror at being condemned to be free, to have no essence, to find his way in the ontological vacuum. Or maybe he just needs a diaper change.
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POST SCRIPT: So, on the QuizFarm site, I also just took the "Are You a Nirvana Fan?" quiz, in which they give you some random lyrics and have you identify whether those are or are not Nirvana lyrics. I scored 100% correct, baby. They misspelled "overbored" (as in "she's overbored, self-assured, oh no I know a dirty word...") as "overboard," although you could make that work in the context, and I almost put "no," until I realized they were just wankers who can't spell. I'm so happy. I needed confirmation that I am a real, hardcore Nirvana fan. I was starting to doubt myself. (singing) "...cause today I found my friends, they're in my head..."
ha. here's my results:
You scored as a Postmodernist Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.
Postmodernist
94%Cultural Creative
88%Existentialist
81%Materialist
63%Idealist
56%Modernist
38%Romanticist
19%Fundamentalist
i can live with these results.
language created consciousness you say? it certainly allowed consciousness to express itself. i think, therefore i am and all that. and certainly consciousness comes from within but is also influenced by without. but what was thought before language? a dream perhaps? and what is more conscious than a dream?
Hmm...ontological vacuum or dirty diaper? Well, the diaper would certainly bother me more. And wow, quizfarm is quite addictive. Although at least now I know I'm a geeky Rita Hayworth with a postmodern world view. Of course!
To put it very simply--really, too simply, but this is just a "comment" not a book--consciousness is the means by which we build a self, a narrative self. It is how we tell ourselves stories about ourselves and the world around us and learn to recognize and predict and describe the events that make up our lives. Without it, it would all be a series of moments with nothing really holding them together into what we think of as our lives and our selves and our place in the ontological void. You can think and function and learn to play the piano without this consciousness, but you would have no self and no way of knowing or thinking about your place in the cosmos was. And that comes from language. Er, more precisely, they grew up together, as our brains evolved and so forth. As Lacan puts it, language and consciousness (this kind) are like a Mobius strip, they form a continuous surface. We did not have this kind of consciousness before we had language. And as language developed and took on more and more metaphor, our "self" and worldview grew much more complicated.
But, Itchy: Seriously, you think dreams are conscious? Dreams are, I think, paradigmatically not conscious, in any sense of the word. You're not going all Cartesian on my ass, are you?
Yeah, anyway. I keep wanting to write this book, joining Lacan, Heidegger, Lakoff and Johnson, Nietzsche, and Julian Jaynes into a sort of unholy unity. But, sigh--who really cares besides me? Like, no one.
image came before language, no? you don't think it was possible to tell ourselves stories using only image? i have no idea if the various cultures who left behind petroglyphs had language yet or not. maybe so. but it seems the drawings were attempts to tell stories and establish their place in the cosmos.
i think one might also argue that language gets in the way of consciousness. i don't pretend to be an expert on zen, but isn't the goal to let go of stories, of language, of reason and exist in a state of oneness with the cosmos? i certainly think it's possible to understand ones place in the universe, to understand one's mortality without language or even thought at all.
i do believe dreams are conscious. and using your definition of consciousness
consciousness is the means by which we build a self, a narrative self. It is how we tell ourselves stories about ourselves and the world around us and learn to recognize and predict and describe the events that make up our lives
dreams may just be our most powerful form of consciousness. what are dreams, if not an attempt to sift through the events in our lives, to make connections, to come to grips with our place in the universe? and as for prediction, well dreams can be excellent prognosticators.
as for cartesian, well, there's a little bit of descartes in all of us, but i certainly wouldn't create a geometry as a way of understanding the universe.
in the end, i suppose i'm simply getting all poet on your ass. i'd hate to be pinned down to just one form of consciousness. it's just how i think.
I don't really know if you're right about the goal of zen, but even if that is the goal of zen, that doesn't mean it's right. I think it's a load of hogwash personally. You can exist in a state of nonlinguistic oneness with the universe for brief snippets of time, maybe, but not all the time, and anyway I don't see that there is any evidence that people who do or try to are any further along in understanding their place in the cosmos than those of us who think they're full of shite.
You can understand your own mortality in a nonlinguistic way. In fact, Heidegger says you can only really grapple with your angst in silence (which doesn't necessarily mean it is truly nonlinguistic, but not everyone thinks in words). But the consciousness that allows you to do so is based on and structured by metaphor and syntax. Indeed, I would wager that nearly everything you know about the universe and yourself is based on metaphor and syntax. You can't even start to ask the question, "Who am I and what does it mean?" without them. I think Lakoff and Johnson made a really good case that we are unable to think at all, let alone tell any kind of complex story, without metaphor--even those who think in images instead of words. If you did have something you thought you knew that wasn't, how would you know you knew?
I can in no way go along with your ideas about dreams. They are not conscious at all. We have almost no control over them, we usually have no way of understanding them, and most people don't even remember theirs. I don't remember most of mine, and those I do remember are usually just, um, well, like a certain type of video found commonly on the Internet, and other than telling me that I have an overactive libido, I don't know what story of my self I might build from them. I also don't think dreams are good prognosticators, and especially not if you can't even remember them.
The reference to Descartes wasn't about geometry. Descartes was a dualist, not a materialist. He believed the mind exists separately from the body, as a separate substance. To which I also say hogwash. Hogwash to all of it. Geometry is mighty fun, though.
But, by all means, get all poet on my ass. Poetry is one of the indicators to me that language has by now far exceeded its original use, that we are now using language (at times) purely in service of our consciousness. Poetry is, for me, the most clear example of how language helps us define and understand our existence. It's also of course the most extreme example of how adept we are at metaphor. And metaphor is the key. Metaphor is the thing. Metaphor is how we make ourselves. In other words, my materialism is very poetic. Actually, I first encountered beautiful, bloody Julian Jaynes in a class called "The Poetics of Landscape."
ah gb, just because you reject things (i.e. zen) or feel you can't remember or control them (i.e dreams) doesn't mean they're any less valid. just because you or i aren't capable of achieving prolonged consciousness through the act of meditation doesn't mean others can't. perhaps dreams do unravel the mystery, but we "forget" them because our rational minds can't handle the truths they reveal. perhaps there are dream travelers out there who are capable of surfing their dreams into cosmic bliss. who's to say there's only one state of consciousness anyway. perhaps it's multidimensional and our language is completely inept at unraveling the mystery of it. perhaps all of these different theories/methods are needed to unlock consciousness. i think there just may be as many roads to consciousness as there are people. and for that matter, i think there just may be as many forms of consciousness as there are people. on the other hand, i honestly don't think anyone understands consciousness, we just think we do. we're all charlatans in this respect. some of us are just better at fooling ourselves. it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. like geometry, it's kind of fun.
as for poetry and metaphor. i actually don't see any difference between the symbolism of dream and the metaphor of poetry. poetry is often used to recreate the state of dreaming through language. or perhaps poetry are dreams for the waking life. regardless, i think dream symbols and poetic metaphors come from the same place. they're just expressed differently. the mode of expression doesn't make one or the other superior. double your fun. use them both i say.
and with that, i'm off to bed to see if i can't dream my way into a highly conscious state. i'll argue you with you some more tomorrow. sweet dreams.
I didn't necessarily say zen was totally invalid. However, you offered it up as valid, and while I don't totally reject zen (zen is actually really Heideggerian in some ways--although I don't know that Heidegger knew much about it, and I think he came to his ideas separately from the influence of zen), you offered it up as if it were necessarily valid/correct/possible. And what if it's wrong and you're wrong? Gary Snyder reportedly told some of his followers once that if they got really good at zen meditation, they should be able to fall asleep without anyone noticing, as he often did, which may or may not be what the Buddha had in mind, but ...hahaha, I already know Zack is going to say that maybe sleep is the meaning of life. Maybe it is.
As for your spiel about dreams and poetry--look at what you're saying. What the hell is metaphor without language? There is none. Metaphor is by definition a linguistic tool. So, alright, you have fancy dreams with heavy symbolism and cool metaphors. I don't, but that's fine--I can accept that your brain and mine are different, and we dream differently. All that symbolism and metaphor is still based on tools that our minds didn't have prelinguistically.
You're right that no one really understands consciousness. I have ideas about it, but not even my genius ideas could explain it all. Who wants to?
There may also be other "forms of consciousness" as well--I have no idea, and I don't really care. I have something very specific in mind when I use the word, and it might only be one form, I suppose, but I'm not talking about any of the other things that you leave unspecified that may or may not exist. "Consciousness" is always a slippery thing, because everyone thinks they know what it means, so when you're setting out an argument about it, you need to be clear what you mean by it. I thought I was. Nothing you have said has yet convinced me that there is a way to build a self, to maintain a self, and to ask and answer the questions, "Who am I? What the hell am I doing here? Why am I alive?" without language (or, at the very least, its tools of metaphor). And that's the only type of consciousness I am concerned with at the time.
I still don't know much about zen and meditation, but isn't the idea of meditation the negation of the self? Isn't the "being one with the universe" deal that you let go of self, in yourself and in others?
And if the goal is to negate the self, doesn't that presuppose that, the rest of the time, when you are not meditating, you have an idea of self? So, like, when you're alinguistic, you have no self, but the rest of the time, you do. The second you snap out of it and think "I" you're again depending on metaphor and the linguistic construction of the self.
So, like, QED.
I don't think that language is essntial to conciousness, It's only nessecary if you want to convey your conciousness to another being. One can easily contemplate naratives about oneself without having a tool to communicate them to others. Just because you can't apply a name to something dosn't mean you can't know what it is with relation to yourself.
To the second part: How do you make a narrative without language? Or, rather, without linguistic structures? Language and linguistic structures such as metaphor are much, much more than mere vocal communication. And language is really about a lot more than just naming things. Way more. The act of naming things is pretty pedestrian, and it's not really what I'm talking about when I talk about language. Keep thinking metaphor. And I don't really mean the literary device we all learned about in grammar school where the author says, "X was Y" when X wasn't literally Y at all. That is metaphor, but the metaphors I'm really concerned with as the basis of consciousness are metaphors you probably don't even realize are metaphors.
i don't think the self is a separate entity either, especially when defined as essence of being (i'm sure this isn't your definition, but it's one possible definition). on the other hand, i'm not convinced that the self is a construct. our understanding of it may grow, but i think it's innate, that we have it from the get go. also, i'm not convinced that the self is purely rational. i believe an intuitive element is involved and that it's possible to understand our self, our essence, through intuition. i know you don't agree, but that's okay fine with me.
as for my use of zen. i was wrong to use in an argument something of which i have little knowledge. what i was trying to muster was an example of non-rational thought, or intuition. i should have come up with a better example.
and now i have these questions to pose. if language is necessary to build a self, why do we feel the need to express ourselves in ways that don't involve language (i.e. music, art). and what is it that we are expressing through these non-language methods, if not the self? i obviously believe that art and music are expressions of the self and that we don't particularly need language to express and understand them, but i'm interested in learning how you view them.
as i've stated to you before, i'm no absolutist and tend to see the validity in most arguments about most things. as far as language and self, it appears to be yet another one of those chicken vs egg arguments. bottom line for me is that it doesn't matter to me which one came first as long as i have eggs when i want to make an omelet and language when i want to write a poem. peace out
A lot of forms of art (and certainly music) are prelinguistic, no question. I'm going to have to think about whether they are expressions of a self or not--I tend to think that, with some obvious exceptions (most of the ones I can think of are well after the development of the self--notice how art has become both more complex and more individual as time has gone along--it used to be strictly and very basically representational, except for representations of gods, and we've moved to greater abstraction, and I do think that the Renaissance notions of perspective and such are grounded in metaphor)...ahem, I tend to think that music and many kinds of visual art are expressions, not of the self, but of universality, of the joining of the self to the cosmos or whatever, and of pure emotion. I especially think that about music, and it's also clearly prelinguistic (lyrics excepted, obviously). I think that's one of the big turn-ons is that, possibly like meditation (and maybe this is why Heidegger says that art can only properly be viewed in silence because it joins you to the fourfold of being), art negates the self temporarily and relieves the burden of the self and peels away the layers of angst that are covering over your connection to everything. The thing is that even poetry is like that, at least for me. When I read "Ideas of Order at Key West," I can feel this awesome (in the literal sense) tearing away of my self and my admittance into the fourfold. Or possibly I'm melodramatic.
Hmm, this and my discussion with Zack (Zack's an artist) last night are making me think of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. You've read it, right? Surely. Anyway, he talks about the mental process by which we fill in the gaps. Inevitably, there is space between panels, and we have to make judgments (usually we do this without really being aware that we are doing it, unless the juxtaposition is odd or there is a big gap in time/space) about the connection between the two juxtaposed panels. I think he calls the process "closure" but it's just another type of narratization; we know how stories go, and we use that knowledge, which is linguistic, to make judgments. So, I think in a lot of visual art, where you wouldn't think there is this linguistic element, you can still find it.
Why do we feel a need to express ourselves, you ask? Man, I don't know. For me music is more closely linked with emotion than any kind of conscious process, so emotions? I don't know.
As far as the chicken and egg, I am quite certain that in terms of sequential time, we did not have a concept of the self before we had language, and babies still don't, although they learn to do it quickly because the linguistic structures are already there. Think about Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in which he talks about the "turning inward" which is an example of how our notion of self has evolved. And of course Charles Taylor traces the modern notion of the self quite thoroughly in Sources of the Self (clever title, no?). So, there is no question that we didn't have what we now think of as our "self" back in the early days before we were fully linguistic creatures.
There's your egg. Go make an omelet. Put some mushrooms in it, because I believe they grow in bullshit like this.
as long as your self contains an intuitive element i'm good with your theory. some follow ups. at what point in history do you think man started being born with linguistic structures? do you think the Renaissance announced the grand awakening of the self? was it perhaps, the tipping point, the place you can point to in history and say, "this is where the self truly got cookin'"?
universality? the joining of the self to the cosmos? i am shocked! and alarmed!
i have not read mccloud's book but will have to check it out. in film this closure is called the phi phenomenon. here's what my notes (yes, i'm that kind of nerdy) from years ago state: each frame of film is seen correctly as an unmoving image. our brain, however, fills in the gaps. it presumes that movement had to take place between frames, then creates and sees it. when a film is synchronized with sound one second of the film contains 24/50 of action and 26/50 of darkness. so most of the film is darkness. how's that for a metaphor?a citation is probably needed here, but i have no idea where i read this.
i wonder if there's room on Lacan's mobious strip for more than language and consciousness?
oh, i did try to make an omelet this morning, but the chicken had already crossed the road.
Man has probably had some internal linguistic structures since our inception, since the animals we are most closely related to have communication (as far as I can tell, all animals have some kind of communication, but primates vocally communicate). I think the first two big steps toward making our language become increasingly complex (because, you must realize, at this point our language is vastly more complex than anything we need for survival, and it starts to beg the question of why we devote such huge brain space to these processes) were when we started living in civilizations that were big enough that you couldn't know every other member of the community (early ag societies) and the onset of literacy. The "turning inward" that Nietzsche talks about was another huge step in our path toward a modern conception of the self. Then the Renaissance obviously put us on the long road to modernity. But our conceptions of the self do continue to change. I would argue, as does Charles Taylor although I would be more cynical about it than he is, that our modern (or, really, postmodern) conceptions of the self are increasingly shallow and ridiculous, but nobody really wants to hear it.
Metaphor, mind you, existed before all of that. If you look at some of the spatio-temporal metaphors, most of which are dead metaphors (i.e., we no longer see them as being metaphoric), they are so basic and fundamental to language and to our understanding of the world that it's impossible to think of life without them. I remember back in grad school studying some damn language that had their spatio-temporal metaphors reversed from ours (most cultures do use the same metaphors, such as time moves forward, so that on a line, tomorrow is to the right of today and so forth--and, yes, all of that is a metaphor based on the way that the human body normally moves through space--we mapped an intangible temporal relationship by metaphor with a tangible spatial one), so in this culture, tomorrow would be to the left of today, and time moved backward. It fucked us all up. You wouldn't think it would be so hard to deal with, but it ends up affecting so much of how you speak and look at the world. A similar metaphorical issue is what made Navajo so freaking impossible for me to learn--incredibly interesting, but really hard. Our brains are so stuck in the patterns of our dead metaphors (you really should read Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things) that if you encounter a language that has totally different metaphorical structures, it doesn't matter how well you grasp the grammar and all that, you still can't speak it. I think that's a problem with integration of Native Americans, actually--their metaphorical structures and understandings being different, I think there's a big old culture gap that it's going to take some time to bridge, and how hard to live in two different metaphorical spaces, but that's why I love to study their languages, even if they're dead and I will never be able to speak them, it puts your brain up against a quite different understanding of the universe. It's better than drugs, man.
Maybe the chicken crossed the road because she developed a sense of the self. In which case, you'd better catch her before she starts a blog.
interesting stuff gb.
so if time moves in reverse how exactly does it affect the way we look at a word? is it possible to give an example? that seems pretty freakin' far out, and i'm curious.
also how do the metaphors of the Navajo or Salish cultures different from our own and how does it affect the way we view their languages? Can you give an example?
i'm not sure if i'm using the proper terminolgy, but what about languages that are symbol rather than letter-based (i.e. Japanese)? could these symbols be counted as dead metaphors? are the metaphors there different then those of ours in the west? if so, how do they affect the way we look at those languages?
finally, are the Lakoff and Johnson books you mention overly dry and windy and full of jargon? or would someone who is not a linguist (i.e. me) find them compelling?
I think that Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things was written for the "educated layman" audience, which would include you. I don't remember Metaphors We Live By being very arcane--I was just looking for my copy, though, and couldn't find it. If I find it, I'll send it to you. We could always read it together and electronically discuss as we go along. Lakoff, like Chomsky, has now started writing mainly political books, and I haven't kept up with them.
About writing systems: I haven't honestly thought much about how types of writing systems per se have affected our metaphors or our concept of the self, but the Chinese characters are less dead than our own alphabet, which was originally derived from hieroglyphs. That we took a picture to represent not its meaning but merely a sound (actually, the Japanese kind of did that, too, when they invented the kana systems) is an interesting move, but I'd have to think about it more before I could think of what it might mean.
As far as the metaphors in other languages, it's been so long since I studied them, I'm having a really hard time pulling up specific examples. If I recall correctly, the backwards-time language had all of their time-space metaphors reversed, so that your back was to the future, for example, while your face was toward the past. Navajo has all these animacy and gender distinctions that affect the grammar and apparently derive from their myths and ideas of hierarchy of beings; for example, if I'm remembering correctly, a horse has lower animacy than a man, so you cannot say a sentence like "the horse kicked the man." Instead you have to say something like "the man let the horse kick him" or something. While the latter is acceptable in English, the idea that a horse cannot kick a man is odd (to me). It would seem to me patently the case the horses sometimes kick men, although I can appreciate the Navajo putting the blame on the man for being such a fool as to let himself get kicked. The animacy and gender rules in Navajo are very complicated, and I can't pretend to understand them all. My professor used to wonder if you could, as an insult or a joke, sometimes make the horse the subject of that, as if by grammatically reducing his animacy you'd be insulting him, but I haven't ever seen any research on that. Linguists so often ignore humor, which is very sad. In Salish, I have heard tell you can make jokes of that nature, by manipulating someone's standing in the grammatical hierarchy. But, sadly, I was never fluent and couldn't tell you. I like the idea of it very much though.
Of course, in Japanese, you can mess around with people by messing around with which pronoun you choose to address them and address yourself in their presence. That's one of the many things that makes it so hard to translate Japanese adequately; we just don't have the profusion of pronouns that they do, and with a simple "I" or "you" we can't convey what they can with their many variations on those two words. On the other hand, the Japanese have a hard time understanding why we would want so many words for 'big' and other things that seem like simple concepts to them. Feh. As if expressing social relationships via pronominal distinctions were more important than describing something's bigness. Occasionally as a joke, I start addressing my husband with honorifics, and his jaw hits the floor, and, you know, hilarity ensues. He isn't really used to hearing me humble myself.
thanks for splainin' gb.
in Latin poetry if a man was descibed as standing between a rock and tree, the poet (i.e. Virgil) would construct the line such that the word "man" was situated between the word "rock" and the word "tree." so the line would read "rock man tree" but make sense in the context of the line. i realize that this was simply a literary device and isn't the same as the Navajo horse kicking man example. still, your example reminded me of it, so i thought i'd share.
as far as time/space metaphors go, i wonder if by switching back forth and between Std and Daylight Savings time we are interfering with our time moves forward metaphor. Ask almost anyone if it will be darker or lighter at 7:00 a.m. the morning after the time change, and i bet he/she struggles with the answer. or not, but it seems we're moving time backward when it should be moving forward and vice versa. am i missing the boat here?
which do you think came first "=" or "equals", "+" or "plus", etc. and then there's all those translations of "equals", "plus", etc. do you think math symbols are the most universal symbols we know? seems like they would be.
and so it goes. thanks for sharing gb. this has been fun. to think it all started because you were bored. hopefully, you're not so bored anymore. ciao.
Mmm, yeah, Latin can do that because of all those case endings.
No, not bored anymore, but I do have a wicked stomach bug. I won't blame that on you and this discussion, though, since my son had it last week. Kids are germy.