Doing a new post because re-editing the previous one again is painful. Also it's long enough already.
Just wondering...remember how we were being given "imagine" over and over again in respect of our dollnean work (and also the spheres)?
So...if the essence of humans is our minds, what's the essence of our minds?
Thought? Yes. But I can think "I must make another coffee," or think about work I must get done.
What's real, creative, ideative and evolving thought? What's at the core of the "vision", and provides the force that will make it possible?
Imagination... I think.
Shouldn't that belong somewhere? Imagination?
Just a thought...
I agree with Mira about the centre being more "abstract". Also with IrishLass in her suggestions. I think these are in the right direction. My
rantings of yestereve about "The Crowd" were seemingly inebriated/stressed-out/frantic, but as I said (and confirmed in more detail to some members
via U2U's), it's not a matter of me being right.
What matters is finding what
is right.
Further to that image... What is the point of providing the image at all? We have the "vision statement", so why not just give us another statement
that includes all of the components and describes their interactions? Why use an image?
Because while words are one form of communication, one that we often call language, images are another -- one that strangely, we don't all
immediately think of when someone says the word "language".
While the first spoken languages developed from commonly-understood sounds and facial/bodily expressions within a particular group, the first written
languages were derived from images. The whole concept was to be able to pass on a message to others who were not there at the time when the message
was "written". This was the next level of language. With time, the images became more and more stylized, then as people understood that our minds
can take this much further and they used imagination and applied it to evolve communication, we developed alphabets to build levels of consistency and
more-accurate understanding into the intended communications.
Music is also a language, which these days has various levels of commonality, so a Chinese musician can play a piece composed centuries earlier by a
German named Mozart -- who never spoke a word of Chinese. They get the same mental picture and emotional drift, because they interpret the symbols the
same way.
I mentioned smilies. Visual language. And it's also an emotional language.
What is the next level of language? How, in future, will a language be derived so that almost anyone, living in almost any culture, will get the same
mental and emotional image and be able to respond?
I think that's part of the evolution. Yes, it may not be there yet, not literally in the spheres as they are now, but we need to imagine the future
in order to make it happen. So I'd say that one of the spheres needs to express this concept of future communication development.
How about a language -- an alphabet, if you will --comprised entirely of smilies, or the next level above basic smilies? Smilies with sounds that
express tones and levels of feeling and mood?
Imagine being able to send an entire message to someone in what are basically virtual pictographs or pictograms, knowing that s/he will "get"exactly
what you mean. We are almost doing this now, but with a little inventiveness we can work together to create a real, functioning and evolving
language... "Smilies" that will depict tense (past/present/future), singularity and plurality, conditional functions (like would/could/should),
questions but with no "question mark", poetic functions like rhyme, adjectival and adverbial concepts -- the list goes on.
This can be done. It would be wonderful to be the first to develop a truly international, functioning, virtual language based entirely upon active and
multi-layered images of light, sound and movement -- perhaps one that for the sight-impaired, could be interfaced with a reader program that will
present the message audibly, using the language of the recipient.
Yes, there are movies and cartoons that do present messages in this way so that almost all who watch them will get the same concepts. But those do not
allow the recipient to respond in kind, without spending many hours drawing a similarly-based cartoon or making a movie that functions at the same
level. I'm talking about the possibility of real-time communication, with almost anyone in the world.
Have your "dictionary" set up, with all its "multi-layer-smilies" placed within according to your formal symbolic conceptual framework (ie
language), click on the ones you want and send...
Goodbye language barrier...Goodbye to so many prejudices... Understand people and laugh with them and you will never want to go to war with them...
Does a "smilie dictionary" already exist? One where you can -- within the limits of the smilies that exist now -- just click-and-create complete
messages? If so, where is it? If not, why not?
I kind of like the idea of a fully working, multi level, tense-and-action-targeted smiley lexicon. I like the idea of being able to link two or more
smilies with hyphen characters to generate a new one that expresses the concepts contained in the originals and present it as a single multi-layer
functioning graphic...
Does anyone follow what I mean by this or am I going nuts again?
+
I mean...at the moment, there are thousands of these smiley things. But we can communicate a massive amount with rearrangements of just 26 characters
and a few items of punctuation. So smilies, while cool, are not answer unless they are evolved to the next level. Think beyond the cave men drawings,
in other words, because right now, that's effectively what they are...
Am i making any sense??
Somehow I have gone right off-topic from my original intent in this post. It just "happened". Sometimes does when I think out loud. People, I'm
very sorry and I apologise for this awfully long rave...I seriously considered just deleting it all but maybe something in it is useful for the task
to hand in this thread so I'll let it stand and bear the consequences.
To the moderators: sorry about all this.
[edit on 31-10-2007 by JustMike]