{"id":289,"date":"2010-03-28T11:02:13","date_gmt":"2010-03-28T15:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/?p=289"},"modified":"2010-03-28T11:02:13","modified_gmt":"2010-03-28T15:02:13","slug":"meeting-up-with-milton-dawes-eminent-general-semantics-teacher-practitioner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/2010\/03\/28\/meeting-up-with-milton-dawes-eminent-general-semantics-teacher-practitioner\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Up with Milton Dawes, Eminent General Semantics Teacher-Practitioner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, I made a remarkable bus trip from New York City up to Montreal, Canada, to see Milton Dawes.\u00a0 I’m the webmaster for Milton’s new website<\/a> titled “General Semantics.”\u00a0 I was there to help him conceptualize his new blog-based website, and teach him how to use it.\u00a0 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Milton seemed to catch on pretty quickly how to use his new\u00a0website, and being there helped me understand how he uses his computer.\u00a0 It also helped me understand what he sees on his computer and how what he sees differs from what I see on my computer.\u00a0 There were things on his computer I don’t believe I could possibly understand if he explained them to me over the telephone.\u00a0 We worked together and fixed up his computer to make using his website better.<\/p>\n

You might say that\u00a0our meeting\u00a0was also a lesson in general semantics.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Instead, each of us have perspectives, and each of us have nervous systems, and those nervous systems are not the same in structure.\u00a0 That they differ in structure means that there is the potential that we process reality differently.\u00a0 There are many perspectives and there is no absolute perspective.<\/em>\u00a0 That is reason enough to calm down an insistent person who believes that he sees something “the right way.”\u00a0 By the general semantics logic, there is no “right way,” and instead there would be just\u00a0“different ways.”<\/p>\n

By seeing Milton’s computer, essentially I was seeing the internet through Milton’s eyes.\u00a0 What Milton sees on his computer is different from what I see on my computer.\u00a0 My screen is wide, his is comparatively smaller.\u00a0 My browser window is open, his is slightly crowded by a search box.\u00a0 My screen\u00a0resolution is high, his is lower.\u00a0 Each of these differences makes for quite a different perspective of his website.\u00a0 On my screen, his website “floats” in the middle of a\u00a0gray sky.\u00a0 On his screen, his website wasn’t even completely visible.\u00a0 Furthermore, presumably because of the older browser, some effects I saw on my browser did not display on his browser.\u00a0 When it comes to talking about his website, if we did not account for these differences, we would probably\u00a0have ended up\u00a0talking at cross-purposes.<\/p>\n

Milton is probably one of the most knowledgable and accomplished people out there when it comes to general semantics.\u00a0 He has ingrained a lot of its principles in his life, with (he admits) still room for application.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I could have insisted what I was seeing on my computer was what Milton should<\/em> see, which probably would have broiled eventually into conflict if I grew frustrated with his not seeing what I saw.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 General semantics taught me that.\u00a0 And that’s only part of the power of general semantics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, I made a remarkable bus trip from New York City up to Montreal, Canada, to see Milton Dawes.\u00a0 I’m the webmaster for Milton’s new website titled “General Semantics.”\u00a0 I was there to help him conceptualize his new blog-based website, and teach him how to use it.\u00a0 Five hours after arriving, I was headed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,25,27],"class_list":["post-289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-internet-browsers","tag-milton-dawes","tag-perspective"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":298,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions\/298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}