Posted by araucaria
(here)
Posted by Skyhaven
(here)
Ps why do people in these kinds of discussions only thank the ones they agree with... I say, thank you all for your perspectives!!!
It is a valid basic use of the thanks button to acknowledge something you might have said yourself. I often do this on threads in which I take no part other than to express agreement without disturbing the flow. In this thread, I thanked observer for a post I didn’t like at all with the button and I thanked him in words as well.
Since this doesn’t seem to go without saying, let me reiterate an earlier post:
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post976508 I welcome discussion, to the point of preferring a forum to writing alone, and responding to posts to starting threads.
I value discussion as opposed to contradiction. When observer criticizes other people’s mantras with mantras of his own, that is contradiction. When he criticizes me with that sort of non-argument, I further object because I personally take pains with every post to say something slightly new or find a new formulation for something already stated. If this leads to an ultimately positive core message that is increasingly solid, that is the opposite of a mantra, which is the repetition of a pre-established “truth” by some disembodied messenger. Here the core message comes under constant reappraisal and examination, resulting in reinforcement of those aspects of that message that will stand the test of constant reappraisal and examination.
Despite this lack of argument, I have persisted with observer more than most, because since discussion of his material is impossible, i.e. requires prior agreement with his findings, he nonetheless continues to post, thereby inviting discussion as to why he should do that. This he perceives as an ad hominem attack. It may be ad hominem, but it is not an attack, any more than my above self-disclosure is a self-hating attack. It is an expression of concern by one human being for another, which is the basic modus operandi of this forum.
That is the core message for world peace that we are practising here – in both senses of the word: both “getting the hang of it” and “as opposed to preaching”. This means that as long as no one is getting hurt, people can say whatever comes into their head without getting it bitten off. We are dealing in
ad hominem protection.
The difficulty comes with that content. All communication sits somewhere along a spectrum ranging from 100% to 0% hard information. I think the present discussion is, as often happens, over where we should be along that spectrum. The idea of aiming at a high signal-to-noise ratio is all well and good, but it is not quite that simple. You see, a high signal-to-noise ratio is also the trademark of dogmatism and any kind of authoritarianism, and over-seriousness in general. Hoaxes, false alarms, jokes and other illusions result from a misunderstanding in these terms, overestimating the message and underestimating the medium. The very idea of “noise” is pejorative, derived from the Latin “nausea”, and related to “nuisance”; and yet the happiest times and places are usually the noisiest, something we in France are very good at
– and not just in bars, restaurants, concert halls and football stadia…
See this post:
Posted by araucaria
(here)
Maybe Samwise was only pretending to be serious, maybe not. Either way, he is going to get a serious response.
Duality is present in the language we use to communicate. Indeed communication involves two different things. First, we communicate information; one extreme example of this would be a flight controller talking to a pilot coming in to land: every syllable is calculated to achieve that one goal. On the other hand, we use language for social bonding (‘phatic communion’ is the technical name for this). In extreme cases, it is not what you say that counts, but the way you say it. Imagine Marilyn Monroe reading a shopping list, or a social gathering where, if you get into the spirit of things, you could probably tell a stranger that you had just murdered the wife and buried her in the garden, and they wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
Most of the time, we are somewhere in between these two extremes. A scientific presentation is heavily information-oriented, but if no effort is made to accommodate the listener, it will be as dry as dust. At the other end, talking to a tiny baby could be just gurgling together, but often we express our feelings in words, which is the start of the information-gathering process. Or sweet nothings exchanged by young lovers might move into the technical question of the exact colour of her eyes.
A holistic view of this spectrum, the equivalent to white light in relation to the colours of the rainbow, would be to say that the need to communicate at all is always because you value the other person. That is the subtext even for the flight controller, whose task being after all to keep planeloads of people alive and safe, is ultimately the same as the mother’s looking after her child. The medical doctor ideally combines both: the technical side with colleagues and the bedside manner with patients.
The danger lies in the tendency we all have to restrict our thinking to the small band along this spectrum which is our own comfort zone, and cutting ourselves off from the rest. Any pair of opposites, male-female, science-arts, will fit in with this setup. Someone with a scientific, information-based leaning will be learning to express themselves with more feeling, and the spouse of such a person will likely be doing the opposite. Light-hearted conversation is the bedrock of any serious relationship and is ultimately what makes serious discussion with diverging views at all possible. As I was saying a while back, the Here & Now thread has made a huge contribution to the overall quality of discussion on the forum. It is not by chance that Ulli and Carmody are members capable of embracing the full spectrum; that is what we honour by blowing out candles, posting cat pictures and cheering each other on.
Re: Road to world peace
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