From bruce@brucewebber.com Sun Feb 13 07:36:57 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 13 Feb 2005 07:36:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from smtp807.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ([66.163.168.186]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.34) id 1D0Lnt-0005P6-IV for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Sun, 13 Feb 2005 07:36:57 -0800 Received: from unknown (HELO ?192.168.1.100?) (bwebber000@ameritech.net@68.21.32.45 with plain) by smtp807.mail.sc5.yahoo.com with SMTP; 13 Feb 2005 15:36:56 -0000 Message-ID: <420F7418.20906@brucewebber.com> Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 10:36:56 -0500 From: Bruce Webber User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 (Windows/20041103) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: newb needs urging forward References: In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 0.89.0.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed X-archive-position: 1139 X-Approved-By: bruce@brucewebber.com X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: bruce@brucewebber.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners I'm also a lojban beginner, and if my any of my statements about lojban are incorrect, I know that the experience lojbanists will chime in. :) My short answer is that lojban will help you, but it won't provide everything that you want. (No language will.) WGraph wrote: > The point is the motivation behind learning lojban. Basically I have been > changing in a fundamental way, long story short I had one of those life > changing realizations, dropped out of third year engineering. The reason is > really hard to explain (the crux of the problem), and boils down to what it > is to be conscious, how we think, why am I alive, etc. > > I've been writing extensively and I am constantly finding difficutly in > expressing my ideas, like there are no words in existence that can express > them. Lojban (or any other language) won't have all the words or structures that you need. That's because some of the things you are trying to express are nonverbal. Humans abstract on many different levels, and some of these levels are silent (without words, i.e., nonverbal). Wittgenstein wrote "What cannot be said must be shown." For a language to be useful, it's structure must match the structure of the world being described. At the same time, you need to ability to leave out details that are not relevant (i.e., to abstract). Lojban has some advantages over natural languages because it focuses on relations, and relations are a component of structure. Also, constructed languages such as mathematics map the structure of the world very well in certain regards, and lojban was designed in part for expressing mathematics. > There could be no functions that fit, or no appropriate roots to create > arguments. Well sorry for the long post, congrats for reading this much. Any > input positive or negative welcome I would encourage you to learn lojban, because having another language (especially one with a different structure) will give you new perspectives. Lojban also encourages invention (through tanru and fu'ivla) which can be quite powerful. I would also encourage you to investigate General Semantics (http://www.general-semantics.org). General Semantics provides a system for developing "consciousness of abstracting", which is very powerful and I think would address some of the areas you are exploring. Good luck on your journey! -- Bruce Webber bruce@brucewebber.com http://www.brucewebber.com