Position Paper #1
[Until revised, as required by new evidence]
(g.s. according to e.h.)

General semantics (g.s.) refers to one method of study to determine 
how the world fits together.  G.s.'ers assume that the world fits 
together, because if it did not, nothing would ever work out as 
expected.  We assume some consistency in order to expect anything at 
all.

Finding Fundamentals

We cannot begin at the beginning of anything, because we don't  
begin experiencing as a planned activity.  Experience comes 
unbidden.  Events happen to us.  At birth experiences begin to 
happen, unexpected, uncontrolled, and sometime unwelcome.  The 
normal human infant has only a puny undeveloped brain.  That changes 
rapidly during the first two years of life.  The brain grows larger 
and increases in neural complexity.  Understanding the mechanisms by 
which you experience, by using your brain, will take the better part 
of two decades.  That will require an extensive education in 
everything from physics to physiology. ** Now, you might ask, what 
difference does any of this make?  Let me try to explain.

Understanding the mechanisms by which everyone learns everything 
gives you the fundamental routes to knowledge.  With enough 
information and a little ingenuity, you KNOW what to do, how to get 
there from here, and how to adapt to new situations - and survive.  
Think of your life as a battle to survive in a competitive 
environment.  When you lose, you die.  If you know enough, you 
survive, as a student in school, as an employee of some company, or 
as a driver on the freeways where you have to drive defensively.

Knowledge consists of order, structure and relation.  This is not a 
test, but it counts as a lesson in the school of life.  Do you 
KNOW how to change a tire?  Knowing how to change a tire may mean 
the difference between life and death for yourself, or someone you 
want to live.  If you know how to change a tire, what do you do 
first?  However you answer that question, you will do something 
first and then something else after that.  Your actions will have an 
ORDER, a sequence.  That stands as part of your knowledge of how to 
change a tire.  Eventually, in the process of changing the tire, you 
will get around to the jack.  Where do you put the jack?  That too 
stands as part of your knowledge of how to change a tire.  Where to 
put the jack refers to STRUCTURE.  When you put the spare on, it 
will only fit over the lugs in one set of postions, those in which 
the lugs protrude through the rim.  That requires a specific 
RELATION between the rim and wheel lugs.  Your knowledge of how to 
change a tire boils down to a series of things you do in some order, 
on specific points of the structures involved maintaining some 
specific relationships. 

I you don't know how to change a tire (or something else you need to 
do) life passes you by, just like the rest of the cars on the road.  
If you don't know how and you decide to try, you might get lucky and 
apply you past experience to complete the task.  You might also get 
yourself killed.  I can picture a scenario where your ignorance 
could wipe out a few innocent victims.  It happens every day.

We gain knowledge by experience, and experience through our senses 
and sensations come through our nerves.  That goes for everyone.  
That's why you need to know about experience and how it affects 
whatever anyone does.**

 If you have ever hit your thumb with a hammer, you have 
experienced a (painful) result.  From just one such a simple result 
you learn something about experiences in general.  In order to talk 
about experience, you need a vocabulary.  For the time being, accept 
the vocabulary, work with experiences and discover what experience 
allows us to infer.(1)

Hitting your thumb with a hammer (aside from the painful 
consequences) allows you to infer that outside your skin exist 
objects (matter), specifically located  (space), which can move 
(energy) faster (time) than you managed to jerk away your thumb.  

It takes a bit of doing, but eventually we can think about the whole 
known objective(2) world of experience in terms of matter-energy in 
space-time.(3) 

 Here's an example of what I mean.   

"Oh boy, mother baked a cake."  We account for the various 
material ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, chocolate, sugar, milk 
and the vanilla extract that went into the cake.  We account for the 
movement (space and energy) of cupfuls of this and teaspoons of that 
into the bowl for the mixing of the ingredients. We account for the 
baking (energy and time) converting the once separate ingredients, 
which almost magically change into a delectable dessert.  Different 
observers see the same chocolate cake, each from a different point 
of view.  We can weigh the finished cake to establish that it has at 
least one public property about which we can agree.  How it tastes 
remains largely a subjective appraisal.

Here's another example:

 You drive on the highway late one night returning from a wonderful 
vacation when suddenly a possum ambles out from behind roadside 
bush.  Going too fast to stop in time, you run over the possum.  
That too, can be thought about in terms of matter-energy 
interactions in space-time.  Different observers see the same dead 
possum, from different points of view.  We call that an objective 
experience because seeing it constitutes a public perception. 

Chocolate cakes and dead possums qualify as objective experiences.  
We find out about them simply by experiencing them.  These events 
happen to us.  Experiences refer to _sensing_ things and 
_perceiving_ objects, as specific lumps, globs and chunks of 
matter-energy in the process of changing in space-time.  (Why on 
earth would anyone want to talk about the scrumptious experience of 
tasting a chocolate cake in such emotionally cold materialistic 
terms.  Partly because some people can't stand chocolate.  A 
scientific description provides everyone capable of receiving the 
basic sensations some starting point upon which to build a more 
unified point of view or a general framework.  It helps us to         
understand more clearly where our assumptions and opinions enter 
into description.  It helps to discover how we differ and might 
assist in establishing communication.

Chocolate cakes get eaten and dead possums eventually disappear, 
etc.(4)  So material things change in appearance and location in the 
course of time.  In order to discover how the world fits together, 
we need to examine some changes in finer detail.  Scientists tell us 
that matter consists of tiny particles (atoms) which move 
ceaselessly.  We have no evidence to the contrary, at least not on 
the scale of things we can experience.  Both chocolate cakes and 
dead possums dry out if left exposed to the elements even for only a 
short time.  Water, in the form of invisible particles, evaporates 
to become an invisible vapor and things change.

Can you find some similarity in the scenarios experienced?  Mothers, 
bakers, food technologists and nutritional scientists bake chocolate 
cakes.  The ingredients vary from one cake to another, as do the 
mixing bowls, the quantities called for in recipies and the variety 
of ovens.  The transformation of the separate raw materials which go 
into making cakes follows a predictable sequence, except for 
occasional failures.  How can these different people using different 
techniques and equipment say that they know how to make chocolate 
cakes?  Each and every possum killed on the highway represents a 
unique individual.  The particular circumstances of matter-energy 
and space-time make every individual thing unique.  How can we talk 
about unique events so easily, when they differ in every 
particular respect?

We seem to "discover" repeated scenarios of experience in the 
transformations things undergo.  We cannot run time backwards to 
achieve identical conditions.  The repetitions we "see" in events 
represent probable outcomes, not identical events.  Scientific 
methods of investigation lead only to probable descriptions of 
whatever-goes-on, based on reproducible results.  Science does lead 
to the Great Immutable Truths of the Universe. It does lead to a 
better appreciation of why we have disagreements.  Now you have a 
little better appreciation for the reason why we have some problems 
tracking events down to exactly what happened.  We don't know what 
cocoa plant grew the beans that made the cake, the cocoa powder came 
in a can from the grocery store.  We have no idea why that possum 
showed up on the road.

If we seek to understand how the world fits together and we cannot 
get to "first principles" directly, then we can attempt to do so by 
looking at similar events in an attempt to discover their common 
antecedents.  The common antecedent condition of any perceived event 
relates to matter.  Every event has material antecedents.  The 
observer (that's you or me or the reporter) consists of matter too.  
Even the poor fellow who suffers from hallucinations, consists of 
matter.  Our ideas come from the matter which makes up our brains, 
perhaps the most important part of the nervous system.  So do the 
poor fellow's hallucinations. >> Our ephemeral views of the world rely 
on continued chemical activity in the brain, supplied with glucose 
and oxygen in blood circulated by a consistently pumping heart.  
Just to perceive, we must have multiple overlapping layers of events 
which in turn consist of matter-energy changing in space-time.  

Let me try to break that down into ordinary everyday language.  If 
you close your eyes, you don't see anything you can describe.  You 
cannot see the computer screen. The light from the screen got cut 
off by your eyelid.  "Our ephemeral views" refers to the 
fleeting and changing things you see or don't see - the things you 
see depending upon the way you use your eyes.  The light when it 
enters your eye, triggers chemical reactions in very sensitive 
cells.  These cells only work if they have a blood supply.  They 
only have a blood supply if your heart pumps, and your lungs work, 
and you have a floating glucose level, and ...  I trust you can 
appreciate the difficulty of attempting to understand how the 
mechanics (the physics) of perception affect what you perceive.


No wonder attempting to understand how the world fits together 
involves going by means of a tortuous route.
 --------------

(1) Infer related to inference, a noun used to label a conclusion 
suggested by experience and incomplete information.  An inference 
refers to what you think has happened, could happen or will happen 
in the future.

(2) objective: an adjective used to modify specific kinds of nouns, 
like data and experience. We create nouns as labels, 
indiscriminantly.  Let's try an example.  Proper nouns refer to 
unique individual "objects" like The Washington Monument or Henry 
David Thoreau.  We also create labels for similar objects, to 
categorize them, like "pencil."  Finally we create labels for 
non-objects like the mythical "unicorn."  Our indiscriminate 
labeling sometimes gets us into trouble, in that some people cannot 
sense what others sense.  We use the adjective "objective" to make a 
critical distinction between nouns which label objects, which we 
acknowledge as sensed in common.  Let me break that down by using 
simple examples.   We agree to call "this" (and I hold up a pencil) 
a pencil.  If you SEE the pencil, and acknowledge that we sense it 
in common, we can modify "pencil" with the adjective "objective."  I 
cannot label my sensations objective. I might just have 
halluciations, or just say something for any number of reasons.  We 
have to agree about what we say we see.  We have objective data when 
separate individuals agree about specifically labeled publically 
perceived material things. Please consider the possibility of 
non-objective data and sensory limitations.  I know someone who 
cannot smell violets.  For that person, we cannot establish the odor 
of violets as objective data.  At best, we can run a series of tests 
to show that violets give off vapors which we can analyse.  Those 
analyses (chromatograms) can become acceptable objective data.  The 
unsighted person will agree to the feel of the Washington Monument 
as objective data, but not the sight of it.   

3) Let's not get excited here.  We have experience with things, 
objects and "stuff in general."  Physicists call anything that 
occupies space or has weight, matter.  A fellow by the name of 
Albert Einstein did the math to establish a relationship between 
matter, and whatever-it-takes to move matter, which we call 
"energy."  Matter can (under the appropriate conditions) become 
energy.  That happens in the sun when hydrogen fuses to become 
helium.  The weight of the hydrogen going in to the reaction does 
not equal to the weight of the helium coming out.  The difference in 
weight appears as energy.  Very little weight converts to enormous 
amounts of energy.  The sun produces prodigious amounts of heat 
energy and light energy by converting comparatively little hydrogen 
to helium in a continuous reaction.  In short, we can consider 
energy as equivalent (for bookeeping purposes) to matter and vice 
versa.  Hence the hyphenated form, matter-energy.  We experience 
light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation as nearly pure 
energy.  A lump of iron or coal reduced in temperature to near 0 
degrees Kelvin would come close to qualifying as matter with very 
little energy.  We experience matter-energy across a continuum, from 
hot chocolate to iced tea and points beyond..

The same sort of reasoning applies to space-time.  You cannot find 
an object in space without a time coordinate.  We experience 
matter-energy only when it occupies space.  Einstein added another 
mathematically necessary dimension to our experience.  Material 
objects don't just happen somewhere, they must also happen 
somewhen.  In the shorthand developed by physicists to keep track of 
everything, we experience matter-energy in a continuum of 
space-time.  We calculate space in meters and time in seconds.  All 
this helps when it comes to considering different kinds of 
descriptions of everything from sunshine to considerations about 
what to have for lunch.

(4) Consider that in this discussion I have led you to think of your 
experiences as the result of "tiny" or atomic-level material 
interactions.  No one could describe whatever-went-on exactly 
between any two marks in time.  The symbol "etc." signifies that we 
understand that no matter how exhaustively anyone attempts to 
describe anything, we could say more, indefinitely.  


 End of Position Paper #1.
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