Off the Map

Last Friday, I made a remarkable bus trip from New York City up to Montreal, Canada, to see Milton Dawes.  I’m the webmaster for Milton’s new website titled “General Semantics.”  I was there to help him conceptualize his new blog-based website, and teach him how to use it.  Five hours after arriving, I was headed back to NYC, having taught Milton how to use his website and having had a wonderful Indian dinner with Milton at a buffet called Maharaja.

Milton seemed to catch on pretty quickly how to use his new website, and being there helped me understand how he uses his computer.  It also helped me understand what he sees on his computer and how what he sees differs from what I see on my computer.  There were things on his computer I don’t believe I could possibly understand if he explained them to me over the telephone.  We worked together and fixed up his computer to make using his website better.

You might say that our meeting was also a lesson in general semantics.  Among the profound things general semantics taught me when I first started learning it, it was that there is no such thing as an absolute perspective.  Instead, each of us have perspectives, and each of us have nervous systems, and those nervous systems are not the same in structure.  That they differ in structure means that there is the potential that we process reality differently.  There are many perspectives and there is no absolute perspective.  That is reason enough to calm down an insistent person who believes that he sees something “the right way.”  By the general semantics logic, there is no “right way,” and instead there would be just “different ways.”

By seeing Milton’s computer, essentially I was seeing the internet through Milton’s eyes.  What Milton sees on his computer is different from what I see on my computer.  My screen is wide, his is comparatively smaller.  My browser window is open, his is slightly crowded by a search box.  My screen resolution is high, his is lower.  Each of these differences makes for quite a different perspective of his website.  On my screen, his website “floats” in the middle of a gray sky.  On his screen, his website wasn’t even completely visible.  Furthermore, presumably because of the older browser, some effects I saw on my browser did not display on his browser.  When it comes to talking about his website, if we did not account for these differences, we would probably have ended up talking at cross-purposes.

Milton is probably one of the most knowledgable and accomplished people out there when it comes to general semantics.  He has ingrained a lot of its principles in his life, with (he admits) still room for application.  It is funny that we didn’t talk about the general semantics lessons embedded in our website meeting, but they serve as a modern-day example of the importance of general semantics knowledge.  I could have insisted what I was seeing on my computer was what Milton should see, which probably would have broiled eventually into conflict if I grew frustrated with his not seeing what I saw.  But I never really took that insistence on, all the while wondering what Milton saw on his computer and having to ask questions to gain insight.  General semantics taught me that.  And that’s only part of the power of general semantics.

See also: internet-browsers, milton-dawes, perspective