Magic and mystery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ33gAyhg2c

The magic and mystery of writing, as well as reading and "getting what was intended" are more than what I have suggested thus far. I have asserted that what I experience I want you to experience also--in the same way with the sameness that I can be assured of with my careful scribblings. It doesn't work exactly this way, and because of this writing is not a description of what it is like for me that you can have but a description of what something akin to what I experience is like for you. These are not the same.

Douglas Hofstadter in his essay "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" (http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html) succinctly summarizes this magic and mystery when he talks about "just adding water."

The usual goal of communication is, of course, to set up “the same thought” in the receiver's brain as is currently taking place in the sender's brain. The mode by which such replication is attempted is essentially a drastic compression of the complex symbolic dance occurring in the sender's brain into a temporal chain of sounds or a string of visual signs, which are then absorbed by the receiver's brain, where, by something like the reverse of said compression — a process that I will here term “just adding water” — a new symbolic dance is launched in the second brain. The human brain at one end drains the water out to produce “powdered food for thought,” and the one at the other end adds the water back, to produce full-fledged food for thought.

Writing then is "essentially a drastic compression of the complex symbolic dance occurring in the sender's brain into a temporal chain" of words. Reading is then producing a re-constituted thought similar to but not precisely the same as what has been sent through symbols.

A never-before-danced dance inside your brain, launched by a unique set of squiggly shapes, makes you feel almost as if you had been there; had I spelled it out with another page or two of intricate black-on-white patterns, it would feel all the more vivid. This is a wonderful kind of transportation of ideas between totally different media--uprooting ideas from one garden and replanting them in a garden never even imagined before, where they flourish beautifully.

Writing is magic as is reading, the constituting and reconstituting. The mystery is how the written can do all of what it does, and do it well enough. If well, we can say the work is good or effective or whatever. If not, then failure, not worth our time creating and making it available and trying to decode.

However, however. The work is the synthesis of what was in the writer's consciousness, and in this it is the phenomenology of. It is a description, a rich description of his or her experience. Read as such, in a kind of witness-like stance, we get a picture of what was in consciousness. As we hold what is said, from a participating-like stance, we get an experience--approximation--of what it was like for the writer. When reading as participating, we get meanings. When reading as witnessing, we understand from an other's shoes what it was and what it is and what it is like.

This the closest we can get? What about those who say the word is the thing? the content is the what?