You have absolutely no idea on what I am thinking about right now. You can take a guess from my behavior, but you can't know definatively. It would be reasonable to guess right now, I'm thinking about phenomology and R.D. Laing, as that is what I am writing about. But you still have no idea what inspired this piece of writing, what I was thinking about, what I saw today, or what actually inspired it all.

It's a game of the unknowns. It's frightening, as you may think you know me pretty good, but you really don't. You get hints on who I am from reading my writing, seeing my public aspects, and interacting with me as person, but your still pretty clueless. You can learn a lot about me, from my public side, but what I choose to make private and without an action equalivent that you can percieve, you will never know. The private is secret and to some it is rather scary.

We have a field known as pyschology which attempts to understand the inner-self, beyond the level social interaction. Inevitably, much of what pyschologists do is actually a matter of social interaction, and is a question of sociology, we tend to downplay that aspect. We as humans, particularly in a free society, don't really care what people think as long as they don't act in ways that are incompatible with the 'normal' men who make up 'sane' society.

Yet, how can we understand others internal selves, when we are unable to communicate ourselves fully? How can we be pyschologists, when words will never be able to fully express how we feel and how we percieve. Language is inheritably limited, as few of us use more then 800 different words in our lives. Words, after all are symbols to explain experience. Combinations of 800 words can explain a lot, but leave us limited in the sense that there are things we can't communicate, and even if we could, they would still be meaningless or at least changed to others who have a different experience.

Difficulties Sharing Experiences

Lets say, one day driving down the road, I have you in my car, and I decide to pull over in front of a house that is little more then a shack in the woods. I ask you to write me a 300-word essay on what you see, and what it means to you. I agree to do the same thing. Our essays will be fundamentally different, as we don't see the same 'shack', although in many ways our experience will be similiar, as it is the same object that we are looking at. To standardize our essays further, I could set some ground rules that we both have to follow, conventions that bring a greater readablity to the essay. But they'd still be different, not only in content and belief, but also in wording. English grammar gives us some rules and ideas for structuring our thoughts on paper, but it still permits many of our personal idiosyncaries to show through.

Effective and honest communication is difficult if not impossible. How can one share his experience with another, if he does not know what symbols will provide an accurate response? Call up a friend from New York City, and tell him a story about mucking the barn. Even if he knows what you are talking about, he can not understand what it really feels like, especially if he's never been in a barn. These desparities make things difficult, as you never know how people are going to react. There are certain tricks, such as using standardized English, and providing explanations that you audience can understand. But those things are likely to distort your message, and when those gestures are understood better, they are still likely to be misunderstood.

You can't control experience as experience is based on existing experience. Experience automatically creates it's own precedence, it decides how you will view things in the future. The individual has some control over his experience, but much is dependent on external forces of nature and to a lesser extent other men. Maybe when humans become more conscious of their experience defining how they view things, they will become more free. If you can understand why you experience things, then you at some level, can control your experience. Unfortunately, as Frued and his predecessors would note, much of your childhood experiences are repressed to the point where they can not be accessed anymore, but they are still defining experience.

Understanding What You Project

Your own experience to external stimuli is an interesting area of pyschology, but not as important as you ability to understand how the world around you, experiences you. I really have no idea how people experience me, and I can only take a guess. I can see myself in the mirror, but I can not see beyond that. I can hear what people say to me or around me, but how do I know that what they see in me is the truth, or if they are being honest. The truth does not come in a nice package with a bow wrapped around it, nor does honesty. Neither concept can be proven or disproven nor can the truth be tested without presumptions.

As previously noted, the blindness we have to other human beings is frightening. How to act, is a question that we must always be asking ourselves. What is appropiate, and what is truthful? Is it okay to lie or change the details, and when are we lying and when are we not? These are difficult questions to grabble with. At best, we have to guess, and make calculations. Sometimes we make mistakes. Some of us have more experience then others, so we can better make decisions in the blindness of the inner-self, by guessing the usual 'normal' response to an action.

I often wonder what people see in me, when I am talking to them. For many of us, our voice seems so foriegn when we hear it reproduced by tape recording. Many of us wouldn't even recogonize our own voices, if it weren't for us remembering what we had previously said or recogonizing our thought patterns. Similiarly, even our written words have an errie unfamiliarness to us. We write, but we don't always see our words like we think we do.

It's rather scarry to realize the problems with communication and interpretations of symbols that I've mentioned throughout this article. You can speak and write, but the meaning will be changed depending on who reads it and in what context it is read in. Some people will read what you wrote in a fashion totally different from what you orginally intended.

Conclusions

The goal ultimately is to effectively convey the meaning you intended in your writing or speech. You want to persude people and make them understand who you really are. Getting the meaning across perfectly will inevitably be impossible, so at best you can hope to use the words that get the meaning across as best as possible.

We have rules of grammer and of spelling which certainly help. By using the 'offical' versions of how to write and speak, you may be limiting what you can say, but the meaning will likely be clearer and less obfuscated. Still you can never really understand what a person is thinking or intending to communicate, you can only guess from the meaning as you understand it from your own experience.