Language Has Failed Us (or maybe just me)

So I was in an intense state of sleep-dep last all day yesterday beacuse I was working on a project and get stuck in one of those infinite-loop mind states you sometimes get into when you've been staring at a computer screen for days on end; kind of like the blue screen of death only in your head. So I stayed up way too late and all day the next day I kept having these strange out-of-body ish moments where I'd be going thru my daily routine and suddenly normal, mundane things would strike me as inordinately strange and I felt completely disconnected from my life and the moment-to-moment experiences which make up my life.

Two things that really struck me throughout the day:

1)Instant Messaging is wierd.
I talk to many of my friends more thru IM than in person on a day-to-day basis. How wierd is that? I communicate with the people in my life thru little words on a screen that come out of my friends' heads as ideas which are put into words which make up the sentences, which are then parsed and broken back down by a machine into words, then letters, then zeroes and ones, shoved thru miles and miles of wires, and then repackaged from zeroes and ones into letters and then words and then sentences which my mind turns into ideas that eventually go into my head (most of the time).

2)Using Language is Extrememly Infefficient
This led me to the realization later in the day that language, as a system, is extremely inefficient and primitive. I often suffer from a lack of ability to communicate the thoughts in my head into words. There are a million thoughts that go thru my head every day that don't get parsed into words; they are thoughts, they can be very complex, but they aren't words yet... they are like these gelatinous ideas that contain no words but *DO* have content and meaning. Ideas with content but not words, true Thoughts, happen in the blink of an eye and can range from very simple (i.e. "red light") to very complex (i thought about giving an example of complex but complex is relative and besides that's personal) and aren't necessarily just instinctual.

And on top of that, many thoughts don't really seem to become word-ed until you direct your consciousness to be AWARE of them; so it logically follows that even the act of TRYING TO BE AWARE of your thoughts which DON'T contain words CREATES WORDS. What I'm talking about is that state when you wake up in the morning but aren't really self-aware yet; emotions are another example because they contain no words but you can experience them rather acutely without words at all. You can describe emotions with words, but when you experience them in and of themselves, they are wordless. Feelings. Feel-ings.

I don't have to think logically in order to have an emotion, say empathy. I can see somebody in pain and I instantly feel bad for them; I don't have to work thru it like a math problem (in my head), "oh they are in pain; i know what feels like; i can conclude that i feel bad for them" because three statements ago, I already felt it.

It's like the question: WHY ARE THINGS "FUNNY"? What is funny? What does that mean? Funny. Funny is when symbols, gestures, things that happen have multiple meanings that produce unexpected, right? And the multiplicity doesnt need to be explicit; nobody has to tell you in words the second (or third or fourth) meaning and why its funny, you just instantly understand, without necessarily having to communicate the other (multiple) meanings with words. When you see someone fall down the stairs, or even if your own dumb ass falls down the stairs, it is ALWAYS -- ALWAYS funny. You ever wonder why??? WHY is that funny? What does that mean? What distinguishes falling down the stairs from anything else, say, driving a car or walking across the room? (This is the part where you say, "cuz its funny!") but really it's because its something that is unexpected and wasnt supposed to happen, doesnt happen very often (unless you're a total spaz) but did. And if people always fell down the stairs in the exact same way, eventually it would stop being funny, right? It's the subtle nuances that foil our expectations that create a different, unexpected meaning which is not explicit but implied, and therefore, funny.

(I'm becoming aware that I'm rambling like a total stoner but whatever, man).

Ok, I'm getting to a point: if there are ways to experience states of mind that contain no words but DO have meaning: thoughts, emotions, mental images then WHY (why why why!!!) is it that to actually communicate those things to other people, people who experience these same states on a daily basis and instantly understand what you mean once you explain it with words, WHY in the heck do i need to go thru all the trouble to break it down into the little tiny zeroes and ones of language - SOUNDS (or SYMBOLS which signify sounds), which the reciever has to reconstruct from sounds back into words and then sentences and THEN finally BACK into either the originial raw ideas, thoughts, or mental images.

When you really step back and analyze this process as a system, its really kind of
inefficient.

It happense relatively quickly most of the time so we don't really notice its inefficiency. But we do know that when we meet people who we have an affinity for, most of the time you'll notice that you have an easier time communicating with those people because there is an unspoken understanding that forms a sort of foundation; things which go unsaid but ARE communicated nevertheless. So we tend to gravitate towards them because they "get" us; our ability to communicate and understand is quick, efficient, and feels more... effortless.

So I guess I'm saying its time to really overhaul the entire IDEA itself of communication and what we understand communication TO BE and become aware of the artificial notions of language that we inject into it, without concerning ourselves with what we think the "logical" limits of human potential are.


***End of transmission


Visual aid courtesy engrish.com.