Experience vs. Memory, Pictures, Nominalisations, Verbalizations, etc.

To experience an event is vastly different than reading or hearing a story describing an event.

When following a story, we do not experience the story’s sentiments ourselves, but only learn that someone else has a certain sentiment — which they attempt to describe and we attempt to reconstruct or at least mimic an understanding of that sentiment from our own memories of similar sentiments.

Yet we are often unable to describe or fully comprehend our own sentiments ourselves, let alone describe them to someone else, who has not had them. The reduction of sentiments to words is somewhat analagous to the distallation of alcohol from a hummingbird in flight — I would not say that it’s impossible, but it certainly seems to require quite a stretch of the imagination.

A significant part of this difficulty has to do with the cognitive structures with which our sentiments record events. First of all, I believe our brain does not use the same language that we employ to communicate with one another. This is most obvious when considering the static nature of our language: It simply is day or night; or, in describing how we feel, we give what is commonly referred to as a “status update”, rather than a depiction of the changes in state our mind is currently traversing. Even when we attempt to describe such changes (e.g. “I’m going to town”), we — for the most part — simply describe the net change of state (i.e. “now = here”, “soon = there”), rather than describing interim stages (which, at some point would become impossible — or otherwise I would have to say that I am now type the word “w-o-r-d” and could not move forwards without describing that I am in fact moving forwards).

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