world contains a past, present and future that are different from the pasts, presents and futures of other generations’ worlds. Teenagers, and those of us who can remember what it felt like to be a teenager, know how, when in conversation with our parents, we suddenly see the gulf that separates our world from our parents’ world. In that moment, we experience the loneliness of living in our own individual world.
This kind of loneliness is often called the loneliness of being. It is a very valuable loneliness because it allows us to think deeply, to become absorbed in meditation, or in the contemplation of nature, or the arts, or in some form of creativity. But, when we feel that intense loneliness of being unloved by those we want to love us, or of being with people who are so absorbed in themselves that they ignore us except when they want to use us, to be told that the loneliness of being is inescapable can mean that the loneliness we feel is unendurable.
Even when we are with people who love us and are interested in us, we find that our conversations always involve misunderstandings. This too is inescapable in our own individual worlds.
Here is a list illustrating the kinds of complaints people make about a conversation in which they are or have been engaged.
‘You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean.’
‘He can’t get it into his head that he has to do what he’s told.’
‘She just pours out all her feelings.’
‘He gave us his thoughts about this proposal but they proved to be rubbish.’
‘I can’t grasp his meaning.’
‘I gave him a piece of my mind but he just closed his ears to what I was saying.’
‘He never takes my advice.’
In each of these sentences something is being said about a thing. To speak about a thing we use a noun or a noun clause. The things talked about in these sentences are ‘idea’, ‘what he’s told’, ‘feelings’, ‘thoughts’, ‘rubbish’, ‘meaning’, ‘what I was saying’, ‘advice’. Each of these sentences contains the metaphor of something being passed from one person to another. The linguist Michael Reddy called this the ‘conduit metaphor’.1 We think of conversing with one another, be it in actual conversation, or writing to someone, or reading a book, or watching television, as a process of passing something from one person to another. The means of passing something from one person to another is along some kind of conduit. The thing launched does not always reach its objective, as in ‘His words fell on deaf ears’, or ‘That idea has been floating around for a long time.’ The conduit metaphor assumes that the communication one person sends along the conduit reaches its target complete and intact. What you receive is what I send.
The conduit metaphor lies behind Richard Dawkins’ idea of the meme, which he defined as any kind of information which is copied from one person to another. The meme I send you is the one you get. Memes, Dawkins argues, replicate like genes. To explain why one person misinterprets the ideas another person gives him, Dawkins says that, like genes, memes are not always copied perfectly, and so give rise to new memes. He likens the memes he disapproves of, such as religious beliefs, to viruses, and thus they can be dangerous. His colleague the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote, ‘Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and replicate at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison. They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable.’2 Richard Dawkins used to occupy the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. It is somewhat ironic that the person whose task it is to assist the public in understanding science does not understand himself how human beings communicate with one another.
Dictionaries define the words we use. If I do not know the meaning of a word you use, I can look it up in a dictionary. However, a dictionary cannot tell me the connotations you have given to that word. Connotations are the meanings we attach to words and phrases. Your connotations for a word are unlikely to be the same as my connotations for that word because your connotations are drawn from your past experience and my connotations from my past experience. Dawkins’ and Dennett’s connotations for the word ‘meme’ would be along the lines of ‘good’, ‘intelligent’, ‘indubitably right’, while my connotations for ‘meme’ are along the lines of ‘what rubbish’.
Everything we say has unstated implications. The person listening to what we say tries to guess the implications for the speaker of what they hear. The invented implications are rarely the same as those of the speaker, unless the listener knows the speaker extremely well. For instance, you might say to me, ‘My computer’s out of action again’, and I immediately assume that the implication of your statement is that you are frustrated as I would be when my computer fails to function properly. I do not know that you are secretly delighted to have such a good excuse for not answering your emails. We read into a communication much more than the words alone convey. Listening to one speaker we might be most perspicacious but with another we can be quite wrong.
These connotations and implications are part of the process of what we call, wrongly, receiving a communication. When someone speaks to us, what we hear is not what the speaker intended but our interpretation of what was said. If there were eighty people listening to my lecture, eighty-one lectures were heard in that room that night – one for each member of the audience and the one I heard in my head as I spoke. If we actually received a communication as it was given, there would be no need for literary critics to explain what a play or novel might mean; no need for political commentators to analyse what political leaders say or do; and in our personal lives we would never be mistaken in what someone communicating with us actually meant.
We make mistakes when we listen to other people, but surely when we listen to ourselves we hear exactly what we mean. We tell ourselves the truth. Isn’t that what intuition is?
Even if we leave aside for the moment the popular activities of wishful thinking and lying to ourselves, the question of whether, when we listen to our internal monologue, we hear exactly what is said is not simple to answer. That kind of awareness we call consciousness is actually quite a small part of what is going on in our brain. It is difficult to decide what to call the part of the brain of which we are not aware. The words ‘unconscious’ and ‘subconscious’ are now so loaded with the often lurid connotations of psychoanalysis that they are virtually impossible to use in a discussion about the brain’s functions, while ‘non-conscious’ seems to refer to someone in a coma. Psychologists have devised three pairs of terms to refer to aspects of the unconscious, namely, explicit / implicit, declaratory / procedural, controlled / automatic. For instance, if you say, ‘I am walking down a path’ while carrying out this action, the part of your brain which is operating is that which is conscious, explicit, declaratory, and controlled. If you are discussing the finer points of last night’s game while walking down a path, the part of your brain which is enabling you to put one foot in front of the other without falling over is unconscious, implicit, procedural and automatic.
We need a new word for the unconscious because it has very important functions, monitoring and memory. I could create a name based on these two functions, but it has many other functions, the details of which neuroscientists have yet to uncover. So I shall use ‘unconscious’, but ask you to remember that I am not using this word in the ways that Freud and Jung did.
It seems that our unconscious brain constantly monitors our environment. It is interpreting the environment, and these interpretations are meanings. For instance, you might be so engrossed in watching a film that you do not consciously notice that your legs are becoming cramped. However, your unconscious notices, and creates the meaning, ‘Change your position’, and you do so quite unconsciously. If you do not change your position, your unconscious will, metaphorically, raise its voice until it breaks through into consciousness and you move – unless, of course, your loved one is snuggled close to you and you do not want to risk destroying such bliss. You ignore the conscious warning and ensure your future pain when the film comes to an end.
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