Words Used As Abstractions

Words have other properties ThinkingOutLoud.DonaldNoyes.20130130930


Abstractions can be represented and described using words, but can also provoke ImageThinking? or BehavioralModification?.

Your mental processes are not word or image bound, but can manipulate and store associative, imaginative and behavioral things as abstractions. You can give such things names, but that is not how the mind processes them.

Take for example the words "bad" or "good", "strong" or "weak", "helpful" or "harmful". They convey FuzzyMeanings? to you because they are AssociativeAbstractions? and are handled within your mind differently than they are handled in another's mind. They are however useful in what we do about how they impinge upon the moment of time in which they arise in your consciousness. You can represent the idea as a UsefulTruth, a UsefulLie, GoodEnough or some other such notion.

ComputerPrograms? are full of such AbstractionNotions?. While a ProgrammingEnvironment? may take notice when you type the following:

 Private sub DoSomething?()

End Sub

It has little to do with it "yet", it does not know what the something you want done is.

DoSomething?() is a word used as an abstraction. But given an environment, it is, but can not yet "do".

When you typed it in, you knew something about "WhatItWantedToBe?" but you had not yet formalized or instantialized it.

Don't read to much into what is said above, for it is a "ThinkingOutLoud" abstraction, meant to stimulate my own, and perhaps your own thinking process.

Does it make sense to you?


Re: "Your mental processes are not word or image bound,...You can give such things names, but that is not how the mind processes them."

Some people truly seem to "think in words". I wouldn't rule it out for some WetWare. Being a visual person myself, I often have difficulty communicating with such people. -t

That sick feeling that comes when your brain process is such that when your state is this: you are several hundred to a thousand feet above the place you are, and you have a wall or a fence in front of you - do you have an image or a word for that? And yet the mental process is one which alerts a flight instead of a fear response in you. Rationally you should feel secure behind the protective fence or wall, but your mind says otherwise, and not in a word or an image. You do not think "fall", nor do you see an image of "falling! Perhaps you would call this a "fear of heights", but for me it is a little more than a condition, it is a process as well and the mind is doing it, regardless. It says " back away " this is not a safe place!


Spuntoonic is a word I use. I have a wonderful picture in my mind of what the abstraction represents. You don't though. To cut a long and probably boring story short, words are used for sharing abstractions.

I used to really like the henic puspump show. There were bonzer nancarrows there.

there are singular, personal abstractions which have meaning to only one, but are useless to others. On the other hand there are abstractions which have shared meanings to more than a few. The shared abstractions, can usually produce useful results via a GoogleSearch


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