The difficulty of communication..

[Fumesucker]

The story of the tower of Babel is an old one that speaks to the difficulty of communicating our thoughts to others.

I've been online since the days of local bulletin board and three hundred baud acoustic modems and if I have learned anything at all about communicating with others in that time it is that communication is exceedingly difficult and the possibilities for getting it wrong on both the sending and receiving end are endless.

We are all locked in these bone boxes behind our eyes and attempting to use a remarkably imprecise and error prone method of exchanging our thoughts with others who are likewise locked behind their eyes. I have done some reading that leads me to think that we may all have our own unique internal language which we map with varying degrees of imprecision onto the language which we use to communicate with others.

Having seen endless flamewars on the most trivial of subjects I've now come to believe that a lot of this conflict is brought on by our inability to adequate translate our unique internal language into something which we attempt to imperfectly relate to others.

This post is brought on by the GD OP on whether one unjustly accused of racism should resent such accusations. Everyone is at least slightly different from everyone else and the only real constant is that there are going to be differences. Unfortunately it seems that a lot of the time many humans prefer to notice and act on the differences between us rather than the similarities. If you cut us, do we not all bleed?

If I'm not making any sense here chalk it up to my inability to properly translate my own internal dialog into some sort of shared vernacular.

Or not.

[1handclapn]

1. i agree.. just read the following books, discussing them is Taboo, maybe cause you'd get murdered

maybe they are just protecting me..

http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Islam-Crusades/dp/0895260131/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249144330&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Muhammad-Ali-Sina/dp/0980994802/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249144373&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Muhammad-Intolerant-Religion/dp/1596985283/ref=pd_rhf_shvl_1:shrug:

[kentuck]

2. That seems to be the challenge of our times..

Since time immemorial, actually. Jesus tried it and look where it got him?

[1handclapn]

3. yea.. got him into nearly every house in the western world..

[canetoad]

4. Thus the need

to form groups of those of a like mind for the benefit of strength in numbers. The trouble is, no group is composed of utterly identically like-minded members, so you have to compromise or go it alone.

[Fumesucker]

5. Given the imprecision in communications it's often difficult to know..

Just how alike or unalike your thinking may really be from that of others who you believe to share your goals.

We map our ideas onto the world and no two of us use the same map or the same ideas.

Look at how religions and political groups tend toward schisms and splintering, keeping a mass movement focused and moving in roughly the same direction is one of the more difficult tasks that humans ever undertake.