Definition
Concepts grow from abstractions. The focus, or some automated engine habitualized from it, abstracts from memories some atom of experience from it, whether a sensation, or perhaps the feeling a given series of events feels like.
Once a lexicon of such abstracted words exists, imagine a concept, therefore, as a chain of micro-experiences, of the most basic sensual sort, that feel contextual-less. They feel like they are floating, though they are grounded in reality, and in this free-floating form, they may be bound together in abstract chains to create definitions of abstracts. A definition is a definited, deliniated, repeatable, exact experience. It by no means refers to anything but itself, and is immediately real. A definition is not a verbal formula as in a dictionary, but those are meant to give you the feeling of the definition. A definition as its name suggest is the most definite experience possible.
When we hear a rule “When at time X do action Y” we must always first interpret it. Inter-pret:.to put ideas between the objects. We have image XY, but they are mere words, they are not direct experiences that apply again and again in the world. To understand the connection for all things like X and Y, we must put between X and Y a verbal sense.
X~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Y
and then put in substitutes
Q~~~~~~~~~~~~~~R
And then we may infer the sense or spirit of the rule:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Once this is known, all the variables that can be united by verbal conceptial “~~~” can be applied. After a rule is interpreted, and its sense felt, we no longer have to interpret anymore, we make a judgment to add it as habit, and do it automatically, blindlyl.
All interpretation, analysis, and insight requires finding the hidden binding name between imaginable elements. It is a conscious process. If it is ever done unconsciously, that is possible because the interpreting itself has becone an unconsicous habit, but only after much deliberate practice. Nothing comes without willfull effort.
A concept is abstracted from a sensual fact. The fact, a living experience, recorded as a memory, is abstracted, like a painting whose details are wetted out, leaving only a general shape, colored with an ethereal ambiguity that lets any detail needed fall in. When we think the word “dog” we think a sensual imagined thing. Not a specific dog, but something specific enough that any possible example of dog will be seen to be the same thing. For concepts are made of sensual experiences, and are sensual, but are reduced to simple forms, and combined with emotions. Since the entire mental language is made out of feelings and sensations, even the most abstract ideas are in fact imaginary, suggest a rudimentary geometry, and feel like a meaning, are felt to correspond to other ideas. Not only the bare words that we label them are sensual, but they are made of chopped and structured images, with a valence of meaning, a chain of abbreviation, by which we can feel the whole category it corresponds with. When we think the word dog, our full history of experience with this concept is recalled instantly under an abbreviation, a meaning that symbolized the whole.
Ambiguity is also a positive experience. The feeling of a range of possibilities is definite and visceral.
Meanings are concrete because they are definite and repeatable: either one experiences a meaning, or he experiences another. The sensual word we use to label a meaning can confuse us, and make us think that language is abstract, but we should say that spoken language can be ambiguous, whereas the language of pure thought is absolutely self congruent.
In a precise language like mathematics, all numbers, even though abstract, are abstracted from sensual things, and still retain a sense, or feeling, of identity. Each number is symbolize not only by the name we use to handle it, but a physical relationship we’ve had with the number. This is not only true with addition and subtraction, which feel like something be added or taken away from our hands, but applies to even the most abstracted higher mathematical formula. These operations are based in gross bodily experience, and finally refined into precise operations. And executing an equation involves the tension of holding a goal, the effort of focus, the desire for a solution, curious, self doubt, perhaps a dozen periphery emotions, with a definite sense of finality when we feel we have solved it. All these emotions lend a mathematical operation a completely subjective and sensual experience which would assumably be lacking in the computer calculator seemingly performing the same operation.
To think of a dog is to imagine for a second what it is to be a dog: we mirror everything we see, and take in its concept wholistically. From many various experiences of objects in a category, certain absolutes are drawn from each category, making a skeleton, and the variable parts are like a paint of grey were we can plug in any details.
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Perfection
Is
Easy
www.msu.edu/~junedan
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