Scratch Paper

Communication is the process of attempting to convey information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium. Communication requires that all parties have an area of communicative commonality.

There are the first two sentences about the subject from the Wikipedia article on Communication. The article goes on to say that communication can even take place between earthworms and fungi. One would therefore think it ought to be a piece of cake for human beings.

I prefer the first sentence, especially the word attempting. The drawing above shows the same Tree leaving the emitter and arriving in the sender’s mind. Copy, paste. Sometimes that works at the level of approximation we need. “Pass the salt, please.”

Often the communication remains an attempt that does not quite make it, or does not even sort of make it. Such as when people have something that bears discussion, but is not quickly reduceable to something mechanical like passing the salt.

Part of the trouble arises during codifying. The Greeks developed the field of rhetoric to address the problem of codifying into words. Another part of the trouble happens during the sending phase. You can easily handle a pass the salt request, but listening to me especially if my codifying leaves something to be desired as I communicate something more meaningful… well, unless you really care about me, you no doubt have better things to do. Finally you may find decodifying a pain as well. Like with this blog entry. What the heck is Mark driving at?

Does it matter? Will it end like Lem’s Fiasco story? Or simply like 4-year-olds who play alongside each other without playing together?

Perhaps the first musicians sought to communicate the amorphous contents of their psyches, but could not do so in words.

My last entry does not make sense directly. I forgot to say the entry hinges upon the unipolar measurement system of a depressed mind, where greatness lies off the scale, a scale starting at zero and running to negative infinity. Greatness is positive, hence not possible by definition. How, therefore, can depression fuel greatness?

Even in a healthy mind the conversion of thoughts to words can end up disappointing. Maeterlinck seemed to say that when he wrote the paragraph quoted at the outset of Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, where the treasures found deep under water turn out to be worthless shards when brought to the surface.

I gave up on a book of essays by George Steiner a couple of years ago, putting the book down right as he suggested thought without words is not really thought. Steiner has a knack for bringing thoughts to words. His polyglot active vocabulary goes beyond what most of us can recognize without a dictionary. He manipulates shades of meaning like Monet manipulated colors of paint.

At the time I told myself I was dropping the book because of an allergic reaction to the claim of no thought without words. No doubt I felt jealous, but would not admit my jealousy to myself. No thought without words looks similar to no science without logic. Science could not proceed without scientists experiencing emotion, inspiration, boredom, confusion. Yet without logic science would lose its reproducibility. The shards would be worthless when brought to the surface.

Do I understand? Babel, Plato’s cave, struggle with words… struggle with anything mechanical, including a guitar: Sunday Afternoon Blues.

In August I read Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk. Shenk investigated Abraham Lincoln’s life. Shenk found Lincoln lived with depression since sometime in his 20s until he got shot.

Wikipedia defines, “Clinical depression which is marked by symptoms that last two weeks or more and are so severe that they interfere with daily living.” Melancholy: “Great sadness or depression; gloom; black bile; Affected with great sadness or depression.”

I figured maybe the book would hold some of the keys of how Lincoln coped. Lincoln seems to have learned to deal with his melancholy. Lincoln used everything from friendship to Laudanum to humor to get through life, though an unmistakeable portion of his time was spent ill. Nevertheless he held down some difficult jobs, including President of the US during the Civil War.

Mom later said it seemed to her Lincoln wound up in his position because he stood in the middle of the road, whereas others around him were seen as too politically extreme. At that point Lincoln started to appear more like a character combining the subheroics of Philip K. Dick protagonist with bad luck out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

Then I read Les particules élémentaires by Michel Houellebecq. To what extent did depression fuel Lincoln’s greatness? Maybe I should read Shenk’s book again. (Shenk’s short answer to the question lies at the bottom of http://www.lincolnsmelancholy.com/feat_back_1.html.)

Telecommunications makes those of us in software feel like we speak mostly plain language. Perhaps medicine, finance, or the military manages to have even more.

The above screenshot is from the TeleManagement Forum section of the Operations Support Systems article at Wikipedia. Basically it’s not possible to get an introduction to the topic until you have absorbed a bunch of jargon about how the industry works.