Aphorisms

It's really funny how useless aphorisms are. There's always a true lesson behind each and every aphorism, but no aphorism is enough to actually teach that lesson.

It's basically a cryptographic hash function, if you think about it.* The profound lesson maps to some trite saying via this mapping we call an "aphorism". Yet the inverse function is ridiculously difficult to compute, unless you... learn the lesson through some other means. That is, the only way to figure out what an aphorism means is to actually learn the lesson behind the aphorism. Thanks, aphorism.

So what, exactly, has the aphorism taught you? What have you gained from the aphorism, besides a common way to express what you had to figure out yourself (with no help from the aphorism), and a sense of pride in finally having that a-ha moment?

Maybe it has some use in serving as a reminder for those who have already experienced it -- meaningless to anyone else, but poignant and deep to those who "get it". Kind of like a souvenir.

*I just realized that my reference to a "cryptographic hash function" is itself an example of this kind of phenomena for those who don't know what it is... 

Souvenir

Do you ever do that thing where you keep a tab open thinking you'll come back to it later, but eventually because of that 50-tab limit you just overwrite it with something else, and something else, and then something else... and before you know it you've completely forgotten what you wanted to remember under a chain of internet history?

Well today, I wanted to remember. So I kept pressing back, back, back in the browser -- and found that I was scrolling through the memories of a couple nights ago, and some other night before that, but backwards.
Then I realized... these were events and experiences with people I love, that I want to remember -- much more so than the title of that book I'd been wanting to buy. By accidentally overwriting something I thought was important, I had kept for myself a souvenir of something truly important. 

People know what they want. Anyone reading this will agree that cherished memories are a good thing -- this is little more than  a reminder. So what's the problem?

It's more like we forget what we want. You might be so busy optimizing for all the things you think you want that before you know it, you forget to work for things that you should want (scratching an itch doesn't make you any happier after it's gone, but it sure feels good while you're doing it). Or maybe like me, you were never made aware that you wanted it or had to work for it, maybe you never even thought about it. One might call these types of wants "schematically inaccessible".

I wonder if this is the kind of thing people regret on their deathbed. How many people right now are regretting that they forgot to not forget? What other things are we forgetting to want?

Come to think of it, buying souvenirs and taking pictures have never been a priority for me. "Be present", "enjoy the moment", "people will think I'm a tourist".
I feel a bit differently now, but I'm still not going to purchase some generic model Eiffel Tower on a visit to Paris (the picture is obligatory though). But I just might take an escargot shell from that overpriced restaurant to memorialize the funny conversation we were having about snails over lunch, or something to that effect.

A relevant song

The 9/11 Memorial means something special and poignant to a small subset of us. I could empathize with the sadness while I was there... but it's nothing close to how it feels to those who were closer to the event and suffered real loss. My memories are secondhand -- my parents talking about it, videos of the event, stories... the rest I've filled in to the best of my imaginative ability.

As humans we have a tendency to build permanent things to remember other, impermanent things by. It makes sense for those who have the corresponding memory, but can that object really hold the same meaning for their children, much less their grandchildren? 

Of course, when those of us who remember die, other memories take their place -- you may have had an exceptionally memorable date on the Broome Bridge, once remembered by the late Sir Hamilton as the place he wrote down the now famous "i² = j² = k² = ijk = −1". But as for those memorials who claim to represent some piece of history... those "true" memories vanish. To call it a "memorial" is to lie, if only a little. 

It's an interesting perspective though -- to understand that someone, at some point, prescribed some very specific memories and emotions of an event to the structure claims to memorialize it... but no longer truly does. 

Words

Words are themselves "images". The sound of the word, or perhaps its shape on paper reminding you of its sound, is only an image -- that is, a sense experience.

Sense experience is all we know. To make "sense" of it all, we impose structure. Certain images seem similar; we group them. Sets of associated images... classes, or ideas if you will. We seem to be born with this innate sense of "association". Or at least for me. I can only think about how others think via some kind of projection and by assuming some complicated array of associations built upon frameworks upon frameworks of ideas. 

A "word" is just another class: the way I said it once, the way your mother said it that one time, the visual image reaction in my mind when I hear it. The utterance of that word is but one image that reminds us of these other things: "representing the broader idea", if you will. 

So a word is part of an idea, at least within this framework. But words are special for most in that they are somehow "canonical" -- most people think of language as something separate -- the medium for which to transfer ideas. 

That's fine. We still have the fact that words associate to ideas.

But of course, words are also noisy and ambiguous. Describing an experience using words -- we often fool ourselves. 

The purest form of the idea is simply the idea itself. But the human memory is... well, it works the way it works. And the mind likes to make associations, build structure.

By verbalizing an idea, you run the risk of associating the event, the experience, with those words. Those words, in turn, may be associated to a much larger set of experiences and ideas.

And thus, by metaphor, the particular experience may become associated to this larger set. Perhaps things become what they aren't. Or perhaps not. 

Correctness can only be judged within another framework. But it happens to be that using words can lead us to "incorrectness" -- we see things that aren't there, we judge when we shouldn't. It gets worse when others are involved, and you give them those words. But that's a whole separate problem.

It's probably best to be mindful. What is there is all that is there. Labeling actions, people, events... sometimes makes it seem worse than it actually is.