Más vale pájaro en la mente que ciento volando. 


A reflection on the phenomenology of meaning and the possible. 

You have to leap a few hurdles to get the meaning of the title of this piece. First you have to speak Spanish. But you can't just translate the words into their normal Spanish meaning. You also have to know the Spanish idiom "Más vale pájaro en mano que ciento volando," which translates into the English idiom "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush (lit. 'a hundred flying')." AND THEN you have to get that I have modified the idiom, hopefully to mean in English "A bird in the mind is worth two in the bush." AND FINALLY, you have to get the idea that thinking about a bird (or anything) is maybe more desirable than having more birds (or more of the thing) right in front of your eyes (at least some of the time).

That's a tortured path to the reflection for today: what exactly is meaning, what kind of a space do we enter when we consider meanings, and how does this world of possibility connect up with events that happen to us. Plato, of course, thought that there was a world of ideas separate from the world of perception, thought that the average human had very little chance to get closer to this world of ideas, but that if we only could, it would be much better. Plato virtually invented Western philosophizing. He offered a solution to the problem of the one and the many and also the problem of change. We need not adopt his philosophy and approach wholesale to comprehend the magnitude of the problems he was working on.

Modern logic has virtually quantified the relationship between general predicates and particular instances of those predicates. Integral and differential calculus has accounted for motion patterns, and sciences in general have focused on uncovering the processes which underly the patterned evolution of inorganic and living matter. But even though those two babies have grown up and long ago left the proverbial bath water, I think there was still another one swimming in Plato's primordal philosophical soup. And that is a version of the question I raised earlier: what is the ontological status of the possible events and actual events, and how is the possible related to the actual?

My thought is that what I do when I am conscious (awake or dreaming), is to create possibilities. Animals probably do this too, at a much reduced state, also maybe machines of the feedback type. But in the case of humans (and perhaps a few animals and computers) language was invented/evolved as a way to structure possibilities. So to my first claim: possibility is an emergent phenomenon, enhanced and structured by language. Let's say this: "Understanding meaning is creating possibility." Reflect for a minute on understanding meaning. Once we "get it" it is an immediate phenomenon (not that we can't be mistaken). Meaning leaps into existence upon comprehension, a set of possibilities that we can reflect on, manipulate as possibles, or look for in experience.

We don't have to buy that corresponding to the word "virtue" there is an Idea of Virtue, as Plato did. We can, however, appreciate that even the meaning in so simple a phrase as "A bird is flying." could be true or false of an infinite number of possible events. We actually do have at any time the capacity to take any event that comes along and determine if the statement "A bird is flying." is true or false of it. Wow! Doesn't that astonish you? In other words, there is an inherently general to particular aspect built right into understanding meaning. And that is just for ONE statement. There are of course also an uncountable number of other meaningful statements, e.g. "A book fell off the shelf, " that we can capably apply. How big is infinity times infinity? And where are these possibilities?

It seems clear to me that they are in mental space. Language and linguistic users create immeasurably huge mental spaces. The world we know is created out of the interaction of the immeasurably huge mental spaces with each other and with the rest of the Universe. I also don't think that my own and others immeasurably huge mental space has successfully been located in the efficient causality of the 4-dimensional universe of our shared perception. You may have a program to REDUCE my mental space to the shared perceptual universe, but right now, I'm not convinced in the slightest.

OK, and I've got even more to say. It's coming together. It's interesting that we use the word 'see' in English as a synonym for 'understand'. But it would be much better if we didn't gloss over the two distinct meanings of these two words. 'See' clearly has its home in what we might call meaningful perception, and for that to occur, there definitely has to be a percept, something seen, literally by our physical eye. 'Understand,' rather, clearly has its home in the construction of possibility, whether or not that possibility has become actual. When we get the meaning, we construct the possibility. The world of possibility is as real to us language-speakers as the world of actuality, not the least because many of these possibilities can be actualized.

Here are some concluding, thought-provoking facts. The entire world of fiction exists in the world of possibility. The entire world of untested theories exists in the world of possibility. The entire world of disputed history lies in the world of possibility. Indeed, the entire world lies in the world of possibility, just because one can question any fact, and sometimes, in doing so, discover that things weren't just the way we thought they were. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Next on the horizon: synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) as a way of ordering the actual world out of the possible world.  

Posted: Thu - June 8, 2006 at 11:09 PM          

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