The power of meaning.

The power of meaning.
The writings I have in my notes on the politics of social technology are about ten pages long, so I'm just going over a couple pages at a time and posting them. This way anybody semi interested doesn't get too overly bored or overwhelmed.

The next question is how do these politics become elevated by technology besides changing the ways of objective (the physical world’s) life? The answer I have for this goes back to hunter-gatherer. What helped us develop the ability to survive beyond epinephrine (fight or flight chemical in the brain) is the ability to have abstract thought. This ability could help us perceive where prey was in our minds that disappeared from sight. The ability to do this gave hunters an ability to talk about what wasn’t in front of them and develop plans to track down and attack the prey. This ability to imagine, create, and dream narratives of the things that can’t be seen has transcended with us over time, but we now use it to theorize about what might be physically possible before putting new ideas into action more often than hunting prey. When we fail at an action we have to readjust our theories and try again and that’s one of life’s main processes for survival or to better our lives beyond survival. There is an element of this I’d argue that becomes a burden more than a reward. The ability to think about what isn’t there when it isn’t in front of us is a great tool for things that used to be in front of us, and we’d like to know how to confront them best if we assume there’s a probability of them being back in front of us again. However, there’s also a problem when one of two things happen. When we assume the thing that will act a certain way is a person, they don’t always come back in the form we think they would, because they too have the ability to imagine the world a certain way different from us and act on those dreams. It’s the ability to understand our desires best that gives us leverage in a confrontation. What we tend to do is let our imagination tell us how we’d like things to be, and in reality we’re willing to surrender the meanings of certain words to another in order for the dream to become a reality. This is a form of trade off where we desire to attain one label by giving up the meaning of another instead of maintaining both and we lose power. For example, when I ask if we’re friends and you say yes, but we only hang out once a month and my definition of a friend is someone I see once a week, it’s only when the definition is mutual that we have real friendship. We obviously won’t hold elements of friend in a holistic sense but if we have enough partial definitions that overlap we can have mutual ground. You may however have something I want like a cool video game and it’s because I desire to play it those few times I see you that I’m willing to concede to your meaning of friendship in order to get to the ends I desire. My dream was the video game and yours was friendship on your definition. We’re playing out what seems like the same dream in our reality till one person communicates what they believe is happening. We either maintain the reality and let the new meanings stick to our actions, or we call off the actions in order to assert our desired meanings. There may be other cases where we do communicate right away, but one person will surrender their meaning even after communication for a lower grade their desire rather than nothing. This occurs because the social market has subjective value and we convince ourselves that what someone has to offer is of higher grade than anyone else simply because it’s from them, even if the quality of the product is lower than what we could get elsewhere. Why would we do this? It’s because we aren’t bargaining goods, but services from people. The service of company by some people is held at a higher value even if we don’t get it as often as we want, because we’re willing to convince ourselves that this person is more special than someone else out there we might come across. When we tie a subjective value of higher meaning to the label a person can give us over the original meaning of what we like from people in general, we give them over us. It’s only through the conflict of experience with these people that we learn what we think they could be versus what they are and will be are very different, and this is when we finally move away from them back into the market. If we really want water to meet at its own level we will not let ourselves change the definition of our desires and wait till someone who feels the same can meet them. Sometimes we may find that after enough time our desires aren’t realistic, but this is better than changing our meanings for others in trade offs of one meaning to sacrifice it for another.

The second flaw that can be made in the imagination are the things we imagine that weren’t ever objects in our lives. Unlike people we thought may come back in a way we assumed they would, these things are intangibles. We get these ideas by getting a conglomeration of all past physical experiences through our perceptions and create combinations of these things in our minds that don’t actually exist in reality. For example, heaven brings a picture to our minds based on all things we’ve actually come into contact with and we assemble a picture of something we’ve never seen based on what we have. I’d argue the first flaw in the last paragraph was about physical interactions that reflect the natural language, and this second scenario about heaven is the metalanguage. The metalanguage represents ideas that are inventions of the minds that made up of words that represent natural objects of the world. The natural language is layer one once removed representing the objective world, and the meta is layer two representing layer one, and sometimes we combine both layers together into a third layer. For example, there’s a word for sun, which we can see (layer one of natural language). Then there’s a word for god that we can’t see (layer one of metalanguage). Then we combine the ideas of the seen an unseen into one and say god is the sun (layer two spoken about and representing layer one) and it has powers over us (layer three describing layer two). The metalanguage is the description of abilities the world has that we invent without testing them empirically, and sometimes never can test them that way. The metalanguage is the kind that exists in religion and laws. It’s only when the language is up to date it can better represent the times that it reflects closer to objective reality. If the laws are flexible to change with a society to reflect the desires of the people in a context, then the laws will be closer to reflecting the way people choose to live. However, if a religious way of life or law isn’t adapted to constant changes it reflects older ways of life that aren’t in our favor. Just as we may assume people will be other than they actually are based on dreams we create that are based on the past interactions we had with them and merely reflect who they were and can be. The dreams can carry into the present without reflecting the present mode of reality, but our actions on the dreams create new realities. It’s the epiphenomenona of the meaning from our past being placed on other context in our present that the meaning changes, or the meaning of the present is altered to fit the present, so we accept it rather than seek to change it. It’s only after conflict has occurred enough times between two people that we learn to respect each other, and develop feelings for each other. The reason there is conflict is because someone won’t surrender their meaning for what another sees as a greater meaning they could both share, but in giving up this meaning for the other person’s greater meaning we are giving them power over us if the greater meaning isn’t one we truly hold in our hearts mutually. If we do find mutual meaning without sacrifice in enough partials then we can finally stop taking from each other what someone has to offer, and start giving one another because the product is no longer important in itself as much as who it comes from and this giving is reciprocal so it doesn’t look like taking anymore. That’s because the product is in lie with the person as we intended instead of seeking to shape them in the product of our meaning. This also only works when water meets at the same level because both people haven’t altered meaning of desired actions and came to take on an equal playing field instead of one person taking while another changes meaning to take on a lower grade in return.