Friday, November 01, 2013

Before and After Sometime Ago

Sometime ago, someone felt good when he/she could start formalizing/codifying some sounds made to mean certain things. Like calling something a 'stone', looking up and calling whatever we see above as 'sky' and other things that can be sensed and identified. For every new thing that they tried to communicate, they needed a sound. It was created and added to the list. The group then agreed to use those sounds. For a new person who came into the group, like a child born, the sounds were taught. Everyone in the group made sure the sound was accurately 'registered' in the next generation carrying the same 'words' forward. When the group became quite large and people didn't have time to teach their children these words to identify things, they assigned the task to an expert - 'teacher'. There was a constant effort to formalize and correct each other on how each word was pronounced and written. It was a struggle to keep up the hope to communicate what you imagine or think in your mind to be exactly replicated in the other person's mind. The words were tied together to form a chain to give the context of time and space to the 'thing/idea' being spoken. 

To communicate the context exactly as one person imagined would mean that 'the same rules of context exist in the other person's mind', 'the other person must have already seen something like it earlier to be able to imagine' and 'the other person must be able to construct the image based on the levels of description the first person tries to give, using the things he thinks you already know'. While the list of things have grown, they reached a proportion that made it very challenging to be communicated through just memory and talk. They were 'written down' in places that can be seen by many - giving these sounds some permanence. For codifying how they were 'written', these sounds were broken down into some identified shorter sounds that made up the most common 'word sounds'. These shorter sounds that could make up every other sound were coded and identified as the most basic structures for communication. This made it easy to link what was written to what was spoken. 'Letters/alphabets' made it easier for someone to make a start in learning other sounds as groupings of these things. 

While the rules used to write/speak/bring context were made, they became a burden for the coming generations to learn, spending time and energy. They were taken for granted as a base for everything the new entrant into that world tried to understand. The new entrants mimicked the sound, remembered the rules and learnt to believe in the ideas so much until they became 'natural'. Before the new entrant could start having his/her own ideas, he/she was first totally immersed into the established system. It was like every new idea should come up within this established system of rules in communication. The building blocks for every new imagination was based on what these rules could describe. It was the only channel and bottleneck for what someone could imagine and communicate. This way, everyone who came into this 'world' was plugged-in into this system of existing thoughts/ideas/words/sounds. The new entrant/someone who wants to create something new could only tweak the combinations a little to come up with a new combination of existing 'words/sounds --> thoughts/ideas'. This background had its impact on people's ideas and philosophy.
More on that later..



No comments: