Quotes About Interpretation

Villon is great because he doesn't pretend to know what he doesn't know. What he does know he tells us in direct language—language so simple that stupid critics have debated several hundred years now on what makes his poetry so strong.

The process by which we construct a kitchen chair out of a whirl of atomic energy is just as creative (artistic) as the processes by which Patty Hearst turned her father from a beloved parent into a Pig Imperialist.

Do people only re-act as if words really equal things ("sticks and stones may break my bones, and names can also hurt me") in such "touchy" areas? Try opening two restaurants and have the menu in one say "Chef's special: Tender, juicy filet mignon" and have the other menu say "Chefs special: a hunk of dead meat hacked off a castrated bull." Both phrases describe the same nonverbal event, but see which sells better.

If by some miracle I have managed to make sense out of this issue, where physicists themselves seem to have trouble understanding one another, the basic point of Copenhagenism seems to be similar to my own Nietzschean-existentialist view that the nonverbal or preverbal world never contained meters or kilograms or ergs of energy or photons or good or evil or beauty or meaning until primate nervous systems (human minds) put them there as systems of classification.

Similarly, the Russians discovered, in the 1920s, that an actor ordered to show no emotion as he looks out a window will seem to show any emotion the director wishes, if in the editing we, the audience, see something outside the window. Do we see a dying child? The expressionless actor seems to project grief so deep it cannot find expression yet. A dog playing? The same actor with the same non-expression seems to project quiet amusement . . .

Like most other experimenters he found only and always what he looked for.

I think it might help to regard this UFO, not as an external event () or a human hallucination () but as the synergetic product () of event-plus-human-interpretation.

I deduce that everybody tends to believe the clock, or alleged clock, that fits his own reality-tunnel.

Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.

The world does not consist of words, graphs or mathematics, which make up the "tickets" or pookahs we most commonly use to file-and-index our experience. The world of experience consists of non-verbal, non-graphical, non-mathematical processes, encountered and endured, which we convert into words, graphs or math (or other, more arty pookahs or masks.)

2Nor does an iron bar possess the essence of hardness. It merely seems hard to humans, but might seem comparatively soft or pliable to a muscular 500-pound gorilla. ~•~

Jan Huizinga, a Dutch sociologist, studied the game element in human behavior, and noted that we live by game rules which often have never risen to the level of conscious speech. In other words, we not only interpret data as we receive it, we also, quickly and unconsciously, fit the data to pre-existing axioms, or game-rules, of our culture (or our sub-culture).

The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming the camera is a liar. What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

If this begins to sound like nonsense, that is inevitable on this level. As Lewis Morgan notes, in books on linguistics there always comes a point at which the prose itself becomes wildly incomprehensible, disintegrating into nonsense.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, created by Niels Bohr (another Nobel winner), says much the same as operationalism, in even more radical language. According to Bohr, common sense and traditional philosophy both have failed to account for the data of Quantum Mechanics (and of Relativity) and we need to speak a new language to understand what physics has discovered.

It now appears that we may have a more complete quantum theory at hand, one that includes Hidden Variables. However, at this point, that does not mean we have found deep reality and can junk the Copenhagen Interpretation. It simply means that we have another new model — which implies, for most physicists, another argument for model agnosticism or zeteticism.

Every reality-tunnel is real to those who experience it, and none are real in the old sense of existing apart from us in a platonic Absoluteness.

The vegetarian does not "see" (experience) meat on a rack in the butcher shop the same way the meat-eater sees it. The racist does not see a member of another race as, say, that person's parents do. More generally, as the Poet tells us: "The Fool sees not the same tree that the Wise Man sees.

Everybody you meet is an "artist" who has made a similar creation.

If they are bizarre, if they don't fit our reality-tunnel, and if they go away quickly, we are happy to dismiss them as only appearances, or as misperceptions.

language controls our thinking.

It is possible, and even probable, that nymphs and satyrs and such are only gods who have been apprehended without love-partially, obscurely, distortedly.

In San Francisco I read a review of John Huston's recent movie, Victory, which described it as exciting. In the Irish Tribune yesterday I read another review which described it as dull. Is the excitement or dullness in the movie, or was it in the nervous systems of the reviewers?

What is tuned-in by Mr. A may not be tuned-in by Ms. B, but that does not mean that either of them is crazy or perverse. It merely means that every reality-tunnel encourages us to notice some things and ignore or forget other things.