Do symbols affect our experience of the object that is represented?
Asked by
hominid (
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May 19th, 2015
Incomprehensible question time! Sorry.
Children go through a symbolic drawing phase. they will draw a “person” – usually a head with lines for arms and legs coming off it. When they need to represent a person, they draw that symbol. They continually come back to the symbol (“How do I draw a person again?”), rather than make an attempt to draw what they are really seeing.
When they get a bit older, they will make attempts at more realistic drawing (or more realistic drawing). Those that enjoy this and/or are talented will continue to expand their ability to draw what they are actually seeing. But many people just stop and give up, maintaining more sophisticated symbols to represent objects.
We use words as symbols in order to communicate. And we think in language (I believe? At least I do much of the time.). Are our symbols a way of describing what we see/feel/hear/taste/etc, or are they a representation of a generalization or model? If the latter, does our perpetual experience of objects and experience through symbolic understanding affect our experience?
I was out walking the dog when I got home from work, and I noticed that everywhere I looked, my mind named “bush”, “cat”, “tree”, “house”, “path”, “street”, “flower smell”, “lawnmower sound”, etc. Of course, right? But the concepts felt crude and simple, like a child’s symbolic drawing. Was I really seeing? What was I missing by my immediate labeling of everything that came into my consciousness?
I warned you. Sorry, again.
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14 Answers
For starters, you missed the meaning they have in culture. For example, at a school near my home there’s a huge oak tree. Twenty years ago it was just an oak tree in a cow pasture, but now it’s a “Heritage Tree” and they have to hire an arborist to come out and make sure we don’t damage it in anyway and that it’s healthy and all that.
Labeling anything precludes truly seeing. If you label a flower a floweryou miss the flowerliness of the flower. Yes, rote, programmed labels do interfere with present perception of that individual label. What you miss is being truly present with THAT particular item you just labeled. You are experiencing the label not the subject.
Have you read up on latent inhibition and creativity?
Basically, some brains are very efficient. Once they make an initial connection or label, it is quickly processed when it’s encountered again.
Whereas, other brains take a longer time to make these “obvious” connections. This delay leaves room for a broader interpretation.
In large doses, latent inhibition can lead to psychosis. But in smaller doses, lends itself to more creative thinking. Because you’re re-experiencing things that a more efficient brain has already processed (and more easily dismissed).
Anything that helps us to “understand” something (symbol or language) will reduce our struggle (which could have lead to a meaningful understanding) of the item itself.
The human brain labels things for simplicity – once we have a label for something, we know whether that thing is in the “safe” or “unsafe” bin, and we can basically allow ourselves to stop observing it if it is known to be safe. I agree that to be truly present we need to try and circumvent this wired behavior at least a little bit.
The symbols are shortcuts. If you are driving, and encounter an octagonal red sign, the odds are you will stop regardless of what (if anything) is written on it.
Your description of the dog walking episode leaves me feeling a little uneasy. If this is a unique and new experience, perhaps you should talk to your doctor about it.
A very interesting concept and question to ponder. I think our perception is colored by the symbols that we are “given” in our own societies. Think of snow for example. We (those of us on Fluther) pretty much use the term snow and we have an idea of what that means. We’ve all heard about the Eskimo’s or Inuits having many different words or Lexemes for different types/qualities of snow, which makes sense if one lives in an area where snow is present most or all of the time. You would need to have a greater understanding of snow if you lived where there was snow all the time. I’m guessing that the amount of words/symbols/lexemes one uses in their own society and culture is influenced by the actual place(s) in which that particular culture was born, and that, in turn, gives people from that particular society, a different perception of how things are.
Economy of representation, whether in language usage or visual image does not necessarily mean you are missing or dismissing the value of the entire thing, it means you are prioritizing the importance of that thing for the moment. If you were to consciously acknowledge all the details, the entirety of every thing at every moment you would so overload your awareness as to become catatonic.
There’s a discussion of labels here that you might find interesting.
Don’t dismiss the value of categorizing, the trick is to avoid limiting all things to their symbols.
Be mindful of details when it’s appropriate.
Our symbols, whether graphic or verbal, are indexed to our conceptual representations of phenomena. I have a concept of “dog” for which the word “dog” is just a shorthand substitute. My own concept of “dog” is different from your concept of “dog”, not necessarily in definition, but in scope and richness of detail. This is because you and I have had different experiences with dogs and have paid attention to them in different ways, so that our concept “dog” has been fleshed out differently.
As the question details suggest, one’s concepts tend to become richer, more nuanced and more aligned with experience over time. The word that stands in for the concept doesn’t evolve in the same way, so it will always be far more simplistic than the concept to which it refers. But we’re generally aware of this limitation and take for granted that there’s way more to dogs than the word “dog” would suggest.
Where we’re more often confused is in not recognizing that the concepts themselves are also a symbolic system. Where words are stand-ins for concepts, concepts are stand-ins for experience. And just as there is a huge loss of subtlety in reducing concepts to words, there is a massive loss of subtlety in reducing experience to concepts. And this loss is typically unrecognized.
It’s not just detail that gets lost (though that’s certainly the case). It’s also context and relationship. As soon as you have a concept, you have a “thing”. In other words, concepts parse experience into a collection of discrete entities, each of which is delineated by a particular concept. The world appears to be a collection of separate things. This view becomes so entrenched that it’s almost impossible to see that this division isn’t there in actual experience, but only in our conceptualization of it.
This was deep! I need to think on it. But it did make me wonder if other animals use symbols in their mind, too.
@morphail I guess it depends on what you Read and how the data is interpreted. I stand by my answer.
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