Category Archives: The magic of hand talk

The second task or group concerns the iconicity and immediate indexality of hand talk, the indexality to the body, as well as the symbolic ordered system of gestures. This topic is addressed in chapters 2 and 12.

06/14/21

Looking at Kirk Kanzelberger’s Essay (2020) “Reality and the Meaning of Evil” (Part 12 of 18)

0049 Kanzelberger writes, “Moral evil deflects from a norm which the voluntary agent is conscious.”

0050 What about the agent’s unconscious?

Does the story of Adam and Eve bring, to consciousness, the arrival of an evil, a privation, that natural selection ruled out by grounding talk in gesture, even in its final incarnation, hand-speech talk?

0051 In the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, our hand and hand-speech talk words overflow with meaning, because they image and indicate the things that they refer to.  The referent itself defines the word.  How can a gesture-word be false?  How can a gesture-word be deceptive?  They are pictures and pointings, even though they operate in a symbolic order.

In our current Lebenswelt, our spoken words do not image or point to anything.

0052 How horrifying and unbelievable is that?  How deep does the privation go?  Does it trap our desire?  Does it entangle our will?  What does this mean to me3b brings the actuality of moral thinking in phantasms2b into relation with the possibility of objectivity1b, on the basis of a thing or event2a which now, consists of spoken words2a, which are sequences of formant frequencies.

Moral evil arises when our spoken words2a, which are purely symbolic, sow and reap the joys of symbolic privation within our phantasms2b.  We find the right words to both express and conceal our falsehoods and deceptions.  Prostitution is not the world’s oldest profession.  The oldest job is to tell someone something that they want to hear.

Oh, that is prostitution.

07/28/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DV

Summary of text [comment] page 82

[Our current Lebenswelt is not the Lebenswelt we evolved in.

The transition from intuitive reference to projected reference was the first singularity experienced by our species.

To me, this singularity is captured in those early stories of Genesis.

Indeed, all ancient written mythologies of southwest Asia testify to the first singularity.]

07/24/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DR

Summary of text [comment] page 82

[How did speech-alone talk potentiate unconstrained complexity?

Consider the word “property”.

Property is not a thing. One cannot see, hear, touch, taste or smell the referent. The referent cannot be pictured or pointed to.

The purely symbolic word ‘property’ did not exist in hand-speech talk. Its referent cannot be imaged or indexed.

Speech-alone talk can label anything, even non-sensual things like “property”.

Real things and patterns no longer receive iconic and indexal words. Instead, we project iconic and indexal qualities into words that label things that we figure must be real, like the word “property”.]

02/21/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 W

Summary of text [comment] page 80

[Our current Lebenswelt exhibits a wide variety of symbolic orders.

We might distinguish them as ‘specialized languages that make sense of the world’ (sensible construction) in contrast to ‘specialized languages that inspire us to social construction’. This dichotomy matches the distinction between naturalism and theism.

This is a false dichotomy.

Why?

The ‘languages that make sense of the world’ are no longer obviously referential.

Why?

Just try to image a thing using purely spoken words.

Try to point to a thing with spoken words.

Tell me how your spoken words index your body.

Compare spoken words to pantomime and manual-brachial gestures. Hand-talk words were iconic and indexal. They were intuitively referential. That is not the case for spoken words. Even the most familiar speech-alone words do not intuitively image or point to their referent. Instead, reference is projected into word-sounds.

In our current Lebenswelt, meaning, presence and message are projected into our speech-alone words.]

02/20/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 V

[In the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, our ancestors exhibited constrained complexity.

So, what can we (humans) conclude about our evolved nature:

We innately expect words to be referential, facilitating seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and safely ignoring the rest.

We innately hold a self-centerness and a selfishness that expects to be contradicted by a (nonsensical) tradition within constrained complexity.

We innately expect sensible construction to be contradicted by social construction.

Social construction builds networks of cooperation based on objects that are ‘references constructed on references’.

We innately expect to conduct sensible construction on the basis of a reference, that cannot be fully talked about, generated by social construction.]

02/17/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 U

[In social construction, we expect images, pointings and presences that defy immediate gratification.  They do so by ‘not making sense’, thereby forcing the participants to construct meanings that are not the plain meanings of the words.

By acting as if the new references were Real, our ancestors (and we ourselves today) opened spaces for cognitive and cultural adaptations outside of ‘what we would expect from pursuing immediate gratification’ and ‘what we would expect from sensible construction’.

Our ancestors gained an adaptive advantage from ‘not making sense’. Social construction facilitated exploration of advanced social cooperation. This proved crucial in the milieu of intergroup competition.

We construct ourselves as distinctly human social beings through this second symbolic order.]

02/16/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 T

Summary of text [comment] page 80

[The second symbolic order, the one that did not make intuitive sense, evolved because the symbolic processing of grammar offered the opportunity.

The symbolic operations of grammar increased the efficacy of word-gestures. Yet, it also allowed nonsensical utterances. These forced the reader (remember that this is hand talk, working with the expectation of reference) to construct ‘a reference based on the nonsensical utterance’.

The secondary symbolic order facilitated the evolution of the mental synthesis that we now regard as ‘the religious mentality’. Here is a mentality that explores advantages outside the frame of sensible construction.

I call this secondary symbolic order ‘social construction’.]