How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 18: What Does “Meaning” Mean?

Hey, Baby!  And I do mean hypothetical baby, because I’m using the idea of a newborn infant as a foil so that I can subtly confess to readers that I spent a lot of time, energy experience untold frustration learning things that now seem like second nature.  BTW, there’s nothing in life quite like asking obvious questions to shake things up. When I was young, I assumed I was slow and that everyone else knew things that I didn’t understand (like the word “meaning”). Now I know that most people shy away from the simple questions because their ”meaning” often runs deep.  Words like “person” or “thing” or “good” or “unfair.”  You will start using these effortlessly when you are 2 or 3 years old, but you’ll rue the day when someone comes up and asks you to “define” these words.  And many other words.

This is my 18th Chapter. Doesn’t that sound pretentious for someone who it tapping away at night, sipping tap water and listening to the sweet jazz recordings of the recently-deceased piano player, Lyle Mays?  If you are intrigued and not too disturbed by this growing series of what will be 100 articles, you can access all of them at this link. And if you someone else who might enjoy articles like this, please share them. As you might have noticed, I’m funding this entire operation myself. There are no ads on this website. I’m avoiding any risk that I would be financially influenced by advertising.

Let’s start with the word “define,” because I think that’s where things got off track with the word “meaning.” Academics might get really complicated about this, but what it has historically boiled down to is this:  When you “define” a word, you are either pointing to it (where it is a thing you can point to) or your are describing that word in terms of other words. The second meaning is the predominant one and unfortunately, it leaked over into the way most people (and academics) understand the word “meaning.” Most people you ask will assume that when you ask for the “meaning” of a word, you are asking them to use other words to describe that word. If your eternal regress alarm bells are going off, good for you! Let’s look into it further.

What does it mean for a word to have meaning? This simple question affects almost everything we do, every day. Now here’s something mind-blowing: For the past 2,500 years (including up to the present) most of the people studying this question (“How is it that words have meaning?”) have analyzed meaning from their armchairs, content to assume and then preach it, that meaning is best studied by defining words in terms of other words, without considering the neurophysiology of the human biology.  Long distinguished careers of many philosophers and linguists have come and gone without making the human body even a tiny part of their analysis of this question.

Philosopher Mark Johnson describes this failure:

The overwhelming tendency in mainstream analytic philosophy of language is to begin with concepts more-or-less well formed, and then to analyze their relations to one another in propositions and to objects of reference in the world. This leads one to overlook the bodily origins of those concepts and patterns of thought that constitute our understanding of, and reasoning about, our world . . . when I found myself immersed in linguistic philosophy as a graduate student in the 1970s, I did not even realize that I had been plunked down in a landscape that had been invaded by the body snatchers.

Johnson, Mark. Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason (2017).

You would think that overlooking of the human body while discussing meaning would be impossible, especially over the past few decades, during which dramatic new cognitive science findings are everyday occurrences. Isn’t it obvious that the oral and written words we use, the grunts and scribbles we produce, don’t have any inherent meaning? Isn’t it obvious that it is only when those grunts and scribbles interact with a human body that those grunts and scribbles trigger meaning? Apparently not.  It hasn’t been obvious for thousands of years and it is still not obvious to many people. Why not?

Here’s my suspicion. Many of those who study language want to believe that each word has one “objective” meaning, the same meaning for every person who properly uses that word (if not, it’s the fault of the user, not the word). This biologically un-anchored belief in objective meaning guarantees that one can study word meaning without knowing anything interesting about human bodies and brains. It means that “professionals” can sit in their armchairs and draw trajectories from selected words to other words and declare that they are studying and establishing word meanings, as though a grunt means nothing more than another grunt or a scribble. QED!

Many academics studying meaning have ignored horn-blaring necessity that means must absolutely have something to do with human brains, which are situated in bodies, which are situated in social environments. To the extent that a linguist simply declares that meanings inhabit words much like souls supposedly inhabit bodies, without any reference to brains, bodies and societies, the whole enterprise is immensely simplified to such an extent that we don’t need laboratories, but only dictionaries to do our research. More specifically, in this cartoonish world, linguists don’t need to roll up their sleeves to study any neuroscience, and that makes everything a lot easier. That’s as absurd as claiming that in order to understand the human sense of taste, you only need to feed Cheez-its to people and then ask them what they think. “My dissertation proves that when you feed people Cheez-its, they sense a Cheez-ity taste on their tongues and it makes them reach for more.  QED!”

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 18: What Does “Meaning” Mean?

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 17: Conversations Worth Having

Chapter 17: Conversations Worth Having

Greetings once again, hypothetical newborn baby!  Instead, I'm here once again to teach you another Life Lesson. I had to learn these at the School of Hard Knocks. No, I'm not claiming that you're not as able as me to learn those lessons.  I'm just trying to spare you some pain and frustration.  OK OK!  I admit that this is merely a thought experiment by which I am trying to set forth the most important things I've learned in 65 years. By the way, if you aren’t completely satisfied with these lessons, I’ll refund all of the money you paid for them ! This is Chapter 17 already.  Wow.  Aren't you tired of hearing my voice? No?  OK. Then I'll continue. If you need to review any of the past lessons, can find them all here. 

Today we’re going to talk about conversations. That term doesn’t simply mean talking with someone any more than food is defined as anything you put your mouth. Er, I can already see you drooling at you stare at my car keys. Just settle down now . . . OK, you can suck on your toes while you listen. That’s cool.

There are many types of conversations, but they fall on a continuum from simple factual exchanges on (“Is it raining?” “Yes”) to collaborations in which the parties set out to figure out a complex topic as a joint exercise by celebrating each others’ contributions.

Psychologist Scott Barry Kauffman recently Tweeted:

Imagine what discourse would be like if instead of it being conceptualized as a "match" to see who "wins", discussions were seen as mutual attempts to get at a shared truth or seen as a shared mission to get outside of ourselves and transcend our individual perspectives.

That would be a nice world, the kind I can imagine happening 24/7 at the big house where the philosophers and other "virtuous pagans" hang out just on the other side of Dante's River Acheron. You, however need to live in the world you were handed. You ended up on a Grade A planet in a Grade C era with regard to conversations.

Right now, your interactions will mostly be where some other baby grabs your toy and you cry. Here’s the problem you'll encounter when you get older: Even if you optimistically join a discussion hoping it is of the “Kauffman” variety, that doesn’t guarantee an enlightening and engaging experience. It takes two to tango and many people would rather honk at you (don’t look at ME as I say that!) than celebrate each other’s differing perspectives. Tango is the correct metaphor because, at their best, conversations are like dancing with other people. If either of you are stepping on the others’ feet, neither of you are going to have a good time.

Here's why this era is so fraught for those who want to share complex ideas with others (especially on contentious topics): We live in a time where the so-called news media makes much of its money by stirring up conflict and even hate. It’s the same thing with social media. The companies in charge of these things have decided in their corporate consciences that it's quite simple, actually: no conflict, no money. This has wrecked a pretty decent (though admittedly imperfect) conversational thing we had going on for decades.

Here’s how it so often plays out: Let’s say that you join a conversation in an open frame of mind, interested in freely sharing perspectives on an issue, but the other person is not so inclined. The other person, having been steeped in news media and social media, and now cooked to an extra-fever pitch of loneliness and rage during the pandemic, is committed to scoring points, schooling you and “winning” the discussion. I know, right? Why should there ever be a “winner” to a discussion, but that’s how many people see it these day. And they have plenty of tactic for “winning,” including these: [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 17: Conversations Worth Having

Ukraine: Forbidden Discussions

I'm despondent that the mainstream news outlets are so intensely jingoistic, so focused on the logistics of war, so unwilling to look into the mirror. This is not surprising given the vast numbers of retired military and spy state talking heads who now work for the left leaning MSM. It's also unsurprising given that this is how war propaganda always works, illustrated brilliantly by "War Made Easy."

Here are a three snippets of conversation that I with the news media would take much more seriously:

First, this is from Freddie DeBoer's Substack:

[R]ight now, [the United States is] investing hideous amounts of treasure to maintain an order that we can’t afford and that no one really believes we can maintain. Perhaps the Ukrainians will beat back the Russians and they’ll be welcomed into NATO and we can all cheer that the good guys won. But hegemony does not last forever, and sooner or later you’re going to have to ask more adult, more useful questions than, “who’s the goodie, and who’s the baddie?” Otherwise the superpower eventually goes down the hard way.

I find myself considering this quote from a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?

It doesn’t take sympathy for Putin to see that this is a very good question.

Second, Tulsi Gabbard tweeted this:

Third, Matt Taibbi reminds us that history matters:

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.

Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man we can do business with,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”

Fourth, this excerpt is from Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of our tribal dysfunction that mushroom when that exciting topic of war hits the tabletop:

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.

. . .

There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.

I will end with a photo:

Continue ReadingUkraine: Forbidden Discussions

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Hello again, hypothetical newborn baby!  I'm here to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn the hard way.  Here are all fourteen lessons in one easy link. 

Let's start off by noting that at this point in your life your parents, your crib, your blanket . . . and me, of course are your entire universe. That's all you've got in front of you, yet you are feeling like there is nothing else that could be worthwhile and there is nothing at all outside of your bedroom door.

Let me tell you about my situation. My toe is hurting.  Nothing major, but it's red and throbbing. When I think about my hurting toe, that thought gets quite big in my consciousness. It almost seems like my throbbing toe is the only thing in the universe.

Here's another example: When I'm thinking about a lawsuit while walking to court through the downtown area, I'm barely aware of anything other than what I'm going to tell the judge when I arrive. I'm not noticing any other people or any cars or that new restaurant going up even though those thing are right in front of me as I walk. Isn’t it weird how our ability to attend to things is so incredibly limited?

Using a technique called conversation shadowing, psychologists Broadbent and Treisman demonstrated that one’s ability to absorb multiple simultaneous conversations is severely limited. Attention is bottlenecked at the site of working memory  during perception. In 1956, George Miller pointed, “[T]he span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process and remember.” George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information." Given that humans have such tiny attentional windows, it is surprising the extent to which we take it for granted that we share the same world. The real world is laughingly beyond our capacity to fathom without rampant simplification. Just because we can say the phrase "the world" doesn't mean we can comprehend more than a trillionth of it at any particular moment.

This is one of the downsides to having a human body. We are incredibly limited in what we can attend to at each moment. That's Part One of a two-part whammy that affects us human animals every hour of every day. This attentional limitation in attention interacts with an equally important phenomenon that I have long thought of as the “illusion of fullness." I'm referring to this: it seems like whatever we are currently seeing or pondering, it's somehow enough for us to feel well-informed when the stream of information we are getting is almost nothing at all.

Morgan House wrote the following in “Ideas that Changed my Life”:

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.
It's like we see the world through fish-eye lenses. The things that are in front of us look very big, indeed. Yet the things that are not directly in front of us are barely visible or not visible at all. Our perceptual machinery make us (and I’m writing this in a non-judgmental way) extremely self-centered. We are condemned to make severely overconfident and skewed generalizations and to engage in a lifelong adventure of sense-making based on not-nearly-enough awareness about the billion ring circus into which we have been plopped. Each of us is only one out of 8 billion people. You are almost nothing at all in the scheme of things and you are experiencing only the tiniest speck of what is going on, yet it feels like you are sitting in the front row VIP seat to the most important event in the universe.

It takes conscious effort to know what is happening outside of ourselves. This makes it easy to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own story, justifying our routine of putting half of our conscious horsepower to work doing PR, in-person or on Facebook, tooting to everyone who will listen that we are saving the planet by switching to LED bulbs or whatever.

Skip this paragraph if want to continue being the hero of your own story. Human cognitive machinery massively distorts our sense of morality. With very little effort, we can cause any troublesome moral issue to vanish simply by not paying attention to it. In many cases we develop (sometimes consciously at first) deeply ingrained habits of not paying attention to certain aspects of the world, making our immorality conveniently unconscious. Here's a common habit among people who are financially comfortable: Not-thinking that on here on our planet, a child starves to death every 5 seconds. If you have habituated yourself to not-think about this horrible and undeniable fact, it is quite easy to blow a large sums of money in clear conscience on things like haircuts for your poodle, vacations in far-flung places and steady streams of meals at high-priced restaurants. If this troublesome thought ever bubbles up into consciousness, we scrub away all traces of inchoate guilt by reminding ourselves that everyone else we know is behaves much like us and then we run off to purchase some new porch furniture for our vacation home, thus pushing thoughts of child starvation off the tiny stage of attention. If by some chance we experience the prickly thought we are hypocritical, immoral and selfish because we purposely don't think about starving children, we can take care of that troublesome thought too by thinking about something else. We can fix most of our most disturbing thoughts merely by thinking about something else.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

One of the main reasons I am engaging in this 100-Day Creative Project is to find a new voice as a writer of essays.Since 2006, I have written more than 7,000 articles here at Dangerous Intersection. Since becoming an attorney in 2006, I have drafted thousands of court filings, including hundreds of lengthy appellate briefs. Doing so much of this work doesn’t mean that I’m good at it, but I do think I’ve learned a lot of things along the way and I do seem to be competent at that writing style.

But I want to learn how to be a better writer by exploring new styles. Most of my writing to this point has been technical and precision advocacy of a point of view. I am using this Project to explore a new style of writing. Still persuasive, but also more fluid, more free, more creative and with a dash of humor here and there. The only way I'll know to get better at a new style is to have a lot of reps. Over and over for 100 days would be a good start. I’ve addressed (in my former writings) many of the ideas I am discussing in my lessons for “the newborn baby,” but I’m now working to present them in newer ways that might be more effective for a different audience. I hope t break down some old writing habits so that I can draw from heretofore rather quiescent parts of my brain. I hope those parts have been merely sleeping and that they haven’t completely died off.

I was inspired to create new styles of articles as my 100 Day Project after enjoying about a dozen essays by Freddie DeBoer, who describes himself as a “Marxist of an old-school variety.” https://dangerousintersection.org/2022/02/15/the-type-of-real-life-government-freddie-deboer-can-believe-in/ With his writing, Freddie successfully does a lot of the things that I want to do better. This Project will thus be a 100-step experiment and it’s clearly off to an uneven start, although I am clearly writing in a more unvarnished and less edited style (as you can see from the typos). I am forcing myself to write a lot and to do it more spontaneously. I am keeping in mind Mario Andretti's admonition: "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough." I'm not striving for any length of these essays, but I am noticing that by the time I've emptied out my quiver, I've spilled out more than 1,000 words, which is a fairly grueling pace for me in the context of the other demands (including self-demands) I face in my life.

I am consciously trying to modify many deeply ingrained and ossified writing habits. I hope that by the end of this project I will have noticeably moved the needle regarding my style. It would be fun to see a difference by the hundredth essay, but more importantly, that the difference is for the better, which is not a given when one screws with some that has worked reasonably well. For more insight into a few of the things I'm aiming to accomplish, here's an excerpt from my new writing guru Freddie DeBoer’s recent article: “If you Absolutely Must: a brief guide to writing and selling short-form argumentative nonfiction from a somewhat reluctant professional writer.”

Your politics are your affair. But fear all political fads, resist all political peer pressure, and be ruthless in asking yourself whether you actually hold a position or if you are just afraid of the consequences of appearing to not hold it. Then express yourself. Whatever you do, be weird. As a consumer of writing, please, for me, be weird. Whatever this profession needs, it does not need more hall monitors or commissars and it does not need more writers who seem to have nothing to offer beyond looking down their glasses at the world in shrill derision. That territory is covered. That corner has been taken. The whole point of writing, the only reason to have an alphabet, is to say what no one else is saying. To be singular. What is the value of replicating words that have already appeared in the same order? You can’t choose to be good and you can’t choose to be successful. But you can choose to be your own.

Be brave and tell the truth. Absolutely everyone and everything in the life you are choosing will try to force you to conform. They will hate you if you break ranks, but they’ll hate you if you say something inoffensive but easily misrepresented too. All they want is to root out heretics; it’s the only thing that makes them feel alive. So you may as well not live in fear. If you let them in there will be little of you left when they’re done, so don’t let them in. If you can hold on to some piece of yourself that does not care what they say, you can have the one pure thing left in an industry now made up only of snitches and nuns, that last virtue for a writer, the courage to be human.

. . .

But do write a lot. Writing is like playing an instrument: it’s all about reps. I know that this is as banal as advice gets. But I think we live in an age of distraction where there are so many other things fighting for your time; I think it’s easy to tell yourself that composing social media posts improves your longform writing when it does not; and I think there remains some unfortunate impression, perhaps left over from the Beats, that great writers produce writing the way a bird produces song.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author