Seeing
“Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.”
―Arthur Schopenhauer,The Art of Literature
When I learned Serbian, I had a personal one-on-one tutor. She was from Belgrade, and we spoke in Serbian; she answered questions in Serbian, and unlike other languages that I have studied and are familiar with, the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, it is not one that is easily manageable.
If you think of “Is breá liom” , liom … “Is maith liom”.
“Liom” is something, yes, maybe I could work my way phonetically to sounding out by looking at it.
But the Cyrillic alphabet is not, and I say that because learning Serbian, and learning the language I am currently in a battle to learn, the difference is that I do not have a one-on-one private tutor.
And as such I've been taking my little bit in notes from the computer, and I study, and I practice, and the next day go back, and I write my little notes, and what I'm finding is that as I work through the curriculum on my own, I find myself rewriting my notes that the computer has given me, but in the way that I can understand them.
Which got me thinking about note-taking, and I'm starting to see that perhaps it is the act of writing it down, but I think it's more interesting, and it ties into the concept.
“Seeing is not understanding”.
When you see something, you don't necessarily understand it, and when you hear something, you might not be able to absorb what you're hearing.
You have to think through it a bit, and this brings me back to a quote of “reading is thinking with someone else's head”.
And a way to summarize that is that you have the capacity to read someone else's words, and then you, as the owner of your consciousness, are able to take in that, and then digest it, to then understand it.
So reading the words, or hearing it, seeing it, it doesn't mean you understand it.
It is you, as the conscious being, who then consumes it and then understands it.
Which brings me back to note-taking and language learning for when we think of AI, and we think of, oh, it understands you, the algorithm, the data points, the virtual avatars in which are created.
That so many billions, if not trillions, are wagered on.
The map is not the territory; seeing is not understanding.
There is something in that connective issue between that, that AI, an artificial, right, an artificial way of consuming doesn't get.
Because I am reading to understand, not to see the words to predict the end or to guess.
Seeing something doesn't mean you understand something.
Collection of data and then creating an amalgamation to then try and predict and or evaluate, decide, predict, right? Whatever the tool is being created for.
It's just seeing. It's collecting. It's not understanding.
I am currently just seeing the language I am working on.
I don't understand it. I'm just seeing it.
And that connective tissue is the human experience.
I'm experiencing the language.
Anyone who has a working knowledge of multiple languages understands that it is an experience to hold that other language.
You feel it, you are connected in your mind to a whole other register of thought and experiences of the physical world.
And that's just something that I've been bopping around in the old brain box as I work through this language independently.
