Even without naming a thing, once we categorize it we perceive it differently.
This can be shown, for example, in chicken sexers. Chicken cloaca all look the same to most of us. But once you've learned for to distinguish the two sexes, they actually look different to you.
But any beginner art student knows the drawback of this. When you see a face, your brain sees it as a set of "face symbols." You then draw a set of "face symbols," and your drawing looks like a bad cartoon of a face.
Becoming an artist requires turning off the part of the brain that turns a face into face symbols, and being able to see the things for the thing it really is.
"Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter."
"The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing of true existence; he knows appearances only."
This is an excellent observation. In fact, when learning to draw from reference photos, I would invert them and likewise draw inverted. This allows one to see the trees not just the forest.
Also playing music: it's very common to “play the song” you're hearing, but not realize just how much of the melody, the rhythm, the chording you're eliding.
It is Paul Valery, but per Adrian Kohn's A Way to Look at Things by Not Forgetting Their Names, Valery may be (intentionally?) misreading Blaise Pascal just to get a jibe in. See footnote 3, bottom of page 11: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2674801
That's something I notice when I take mushrooms. Instead of seeing "my hand" I see veins, skin, bumps, tendons, shadows and a lot of other things. I think a lot of great artists either see like this always or maybe they are taking psychedelics to help.
Not even need for drugs. Just give a good, intense, long stare at your hand. I bet before long, a weird sense of "this is not mine/me" or it being very uniquely unique, rather than a "hand", or being an empty set of parts, etc. will emerge.
Or, alternatively, you can consciously switch how you see it. A hand. Me. A bunch of molecules. Remnants of an old supernova. The results of millions of years of evolution. The tool with which you can communicate the depth of your love to your child by gently stroking them. Just actively changing the "name" you give it will change the way you perceive it, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite radically.
If you are interested in this kind of things, I would recommend the teachings or Rob Burbea. His whole works are built around exploring this topic.
I think for me psychedelics are a good tool to learn observations like this. Now I often can recall this state without taking any substances. I think my meditation also has improved.
A pleasant surprise to see Rob Burbea mentioned. I recently started listening to his Gaia House retreat from August 2008. I've heard nothing but good things said about him.
The map is not the territory. Your dog is not any dog. And you may perceive enough differences between the abstract thing and the real, present one, to disconnect the abstraction name from it. To the point to be out of words to name it.
I think of this more in terms of looking at a piece of musical notation, and moving the tune from an external to internal storage.
That is, the mechanical effort of forming notes on an instrument and reading them in and then playing a song is replaced by feeling the tune.
Once I've owned a piece of music, I can goof off with the tempo, try some variations, put in some mood.
In a word: jazz.
As an aside, this may help explain why neither jazz nor this sort of thinking is popular. There is much effort involved in hoisting oneself up to this level of skill.
I concur! Once you know the rules, you can break them. I believe that jazz hits the most fundamental bits of music. Pure feel. And when someone “breaks” the rules but preserves the “feel”, it’s magic. It proves to me that there is something new, something beyond the predictable. It’s hard to describe. I love jazz for this very reason!
"The second kind of occasion on which you must act without rules is when you can refer the situation to a known type, but are not content to do so. You know a rule for dealing with situations of this kind, but you are not content with applying it, because you know that action according to rules always involves a certain misfit between yourself and your situation. If you act according to rules, you are not dealing with the situation in which you stand, you are only dealing with a certain type of situation under which you class it. The type is, admittedly, a useful handle with which to grasp the situation; but all the same, it comes between you and the situation it enables you to grasp. Often enough, that does not matter ; but sometimes it matters very much.
"Thus everybody has certain rules according to which he acts in dealing with his tailor. These rules are, we will grant, soundly based on genuine experience ;and by acting on them a man will deal fairly with his tailor and helps his tailor to deal fairly by him. But so far as he acts according to these rules, he is dealing with his tailor only in his capacity as a tailor, not as John Robinson, aged sixty, with a weak heart and a consumptive daughter, a passion for gardening and an overdraft at the bank. The rules for dealing with tailors no doubt enable you to cope with the tailor in John Robinson, but they prevent you from getting to grips with whatever else there may be in him. Of course, if you know that he has a weak heart, you will manage your dealings with him by modifying the rules for tailor-situations in the light of the rules for situations involving people with weak hearts. But at this rate the modifications soon become so complicated that the rules are no longer of any practical use to you. You have got beyond the stage at which rules can guide action, and you go back to improvising, as best you can, a method of handling the situation in which you find yourself."
--
From the autobiography of R.G. Collingwood. His writings often have the theme of trying to understand particular instances of a thing on its own terms, only generalising into abstractions when seeing some quality in crowds of individual instances. I've rarely regretted that same approach when it comes to abstraction in code/software, but have regretted premature abstraction many times.
"See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a Halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a Chung Ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way."
Took the intro to biology course in college, and was excited. But the curriculum was mostly memorization. Phylum, order, family, etc. Even the cell structures, which I though would be amazing, were mostly memorization.
I felt (and still feel) the course was a tragedy, that I had an intro to biologists, not biology.
I think the same thing happens with mathematics education. Even though I took maths up to 2nd year university, I never really got what it was like until many years later when I watched all of Leonard Susskinds Stanford lectures in order on YouTube. It just gave him a way of thinking and talking about something far more interesting than the symbols themselves, and I got the sense that if I had been introduced to the majesty of the universe and then shown how English as a language was inadequate to describe it, that I might have been more motivated to learn the symbols.
I had the same experience with math and physics. High school / college was mostly rote memorization, and it wasn't until much later that I heard a perspective that showed me the shape of of the concepts. It's too late for me to dive into them now, because also in college I had a friend that showed me what computers are capable of, and I've been down that rabbithole ever since. It's a good argument for being a proactive mentor. You never know when it might click for someone.
I just took freshman bio at UW as a 47 year old (with a master's and a job). They mentioned 3 people's names, Mendel, the guy with the sex chromosomes and fruit flies (see barely even covered the name) and hardy Weinberg's formulas. The whole class was stats, hypothesis testing, critical thinking and understanding and math with those formulas. We had to memorize about 30 total terms like gene, allele, heterozygous, etc. It was all observation, use a model hypothesize why the model does or doesn't fit.
I took it because when I learned honors bio in highschool in 91 it was all memorization of plant parts. This was way way better.
So you were looking for a top-down approach and you got a bottom-up approach. I guess those biologists have enough intrinsic motivation not to care about such things.
I think knowing the names of things is useful and gets unfairly maligned. It gives your mind a set of symbols with which it can make connections, which is how understanding forms. Rote memorisation of names is a precursor to understanding.
I agree - names have power. I think consistently giving something a name teaches your brain that it is worth paying attention to, and over time that can radically alter your conscious experience of it.
I think what is being pushed back against is that the idea that knowing the name of something is important knowledge by itself. As you say, it is a handle to knowledge - a node that you can connect to other nodes, a precursor to understanding.
This is not a straw man - people spend hours of study learning the Latin names for funny little blobs in the human body, and call it "learning anatomy", and feel a sense of achievement. And the sense of achievement is important! It's motivation for an important task. But they have learned nothing, until they go back and learn what each blob does. It is vital to keep reminding the student of this, to not let their sense of achievement fool them into thinking they have finished learning anatomy. They have only started.
At lest it lets you talk about things with people who also have the knowledge.
When my mum was in medical school (1950s) they still used Latin (teaching was otherwise in English). It wasn’t one of the languages she spoke, but she just memorized the tokens and then could go back home and work in a hospital because all the technical terms were the same.
I did learn Latin and so used to be amused by the names of things. Unfortunately she was quite busy and never shared my amusement. A shame as she otherwise had a good sense of humor.
I can't say, but with a standardised and agreed-upon definition of a word/phrase, there should be much fewer ambiguities than otherwise. It probably doesn't matter quite as much what that name is as long as everyone knows what it refers to.
> One of the most infuriating things today is large swathes of people getting this wrong like you, and then acting on their limited view.
Humility and you aren't closely acquainted huh? Also love how you launched off on this tangent without thinking it through too much.
> Giving a name to it doesn’t change the thing in the slightest
Where do you think the shape and form that I'm speaking of exist? I'm referring to our subjective experience of reality. Did you genuinely think I meant that we changed objective reality by classifying something in our minds?
An eclipse is the moon getting in front of the sun, but for some people, it was a jaguar eating the sun, and that was scary. That's the shape and form they gave an eclipse in their minds.
Well, in my country, a kiwi is called that because that's what the call of the most common species sounded like, ditto kea. And likely a fair few others.
So you have a rough idea what they sound like.
Waxeyes/silvereyes are called tauhou (stranger or "new arrival") which tells us something very interesting about them indeed - that they self-introduced across 2000km of windswept ocean.
Can know _some_ things from a name.
Like that Feynman likely just made those names up :D
You are correct that knowing the name of something can teach you (or help you remember) more than just the name. But if you didn't know that 'kiwi' is onomatopoeic, knowing the name wouldn't tell you what the bird's call sounds like.
Onomatopoeia also depends heavily on language and culture. In other words, knowing an onomatopoeic name for something only tells you what somebody thought it sounded like, at best.
A name is just a name, even if some are better than others.
If its not a typo, Feynman definitely made these names up. Halzenfugel looks like mock-german. I would have bought it if it were written Halzenvogel... But not with -fugel. Dutch, maybe? :-)
I’ve seen J Krishnamurti say this so many times. I’ve seen so many neo-Advaita teachers say similar things. Yet, I believe I am barely at the edges of understanding what this means. If you would kindly share your understanding of this phrase, so I may have yet another perspective of this, I would deeply appreciate that.
I know this is off topic but translating "tao" as "reason" seems antithetical to taoism. A lot of taoist philosophy and practice is about suspending your intellectual faculties and perceiving the world in a more unfiltered and intuitive manner. But I don't know anything about Chinese, maybe there's some scholarship justifying it that I'm not aware of.
Right? I don’t know about this post (and comments) discussing this quote from the western point of view only, ignoring the fact that this is the whole basis of- and arguably explored much richly in- the entire western philosophy
I guess you mean "the entire eastern philosophy" in your last sentence.
I absolutely agree that there is a lot of parallels with Buddhist descriptions of "co-dependent arising", but there are also important differences. Buddhism is focused on suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. It is a practical path, and everything that is not related to this path is out of its scope.
But I would disagree that eastern philosophy explores this "much richly". The article cites Kant and Husserl in the second paragraph. And the whole idea of seeing "things as they really are" was imported to Buddhist thought by western thinkers[1]. This idea is present in currents of the 3 Abrahamic traditions, in great part through the influence of neo-platonism from the 3rd century onward.
This kind of concept is present in mysticism in all 3 Abrahamic traditions, though in a different language.
As a Buddhist practitioner turned mystically inclined Christian, I would argue that there are lots of facets to look at this, from a wide array of traditions, and all have their place and value. One of the hardest things to do is not to immediately dismiss them by analogy with waht we already think we know, e.g. "oh yeah that's just good ol' teaching of the emptiness of all phenomena, I know that!", without rejecting what one learned until now either. What is beyond word can be described in countless ways, and each of them can help shed a new light and reveal holes in ones current understanding of "reality", if you let it do its work.
[1] you could argue that it is part of some Mahayana traditions, but the way they describe it is so foreign that if you do not engage with it for years, theoretically and practically, you will understand it through a "romantic" lense.
In the case of the Pali canon, the Buddha always re-orients the questions whenever asked about the nature of the universe or of reality, to teach the "noble truths" of suffering, its origin, its cessation and the path to its cessation. I am not aware of any text in the Pali canon where the Buddha would be teaching in order to see "things as they are". It is just not the point of his teaching.
A central concept in Buddhism is actually "emptiness", or the absence of inherent existence of all phenomena. It is sometimes used in Mahayana teachings as "the way things really are", but as I said, this is subtle and confusing, because "the way things really are" is that they do not have independent existence. I would not venture interpreting those strands of teaching too much, as I am not famliar enough with them.
I heard those arguments from various sources, mostly from Thanissaro Bikkhu and Rob Burbea. They are both westerners, formed in the Theravada tradition and scholars of the Pali canon (able to read it in the original language), which I think actually makes them particularly well suited to identify points that might be misinterpreted from a western reader.
> "emptiness", or the absence of inherent existence of all phenomena
Phenomena is empty of a permanent self but not empty of existence. The phenomena exists, but that phenomena is not possessed of a permanent unchanging nature.
The Bahiya Sutta has:
> "Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen."
It's a short article. Maybe the author didn't think they needed to write about the complete, global history of the idea, as opposed to just introducing it using examples they were most familiar with.