008_Sound of mind
In my posts so far, I have been looking at two ways to interact with the world. The processes share certain features, including objects of attention.
First, I wrote about the heart responding when the mind’s eye resonates with an object of attention (tree). The Canjeez for that is 想 think about.
想 presents an image of the heart responding to “tree” data passing back and forth through the lens of the mind’s eye. Any type of sensory input can pass through the mind’s eye. That includes not just what we see, but also what we hear, smell, taste, and touch.
Then I discussed the idea of heart responding to sound to generate a mental framework within which significance can be discerned: mind.
Heart then responds to what’s in mind to make memory.
The relevant Canjeez here are 音 sound, 意 mind, and 憶 memory.
In the case of 意 mind, we see 心 heart bound to 音 sound. Sound, too, is sensory. But in Canjeez terms, “sound” actually stands for a fusion of any two sensory inputs that are associated with the same object of attention.
As I mentioned in my last post (#007), 音 sound conveys a sense of something that we discern. We see the moon (filtering out all the other objects in our field of view). We hear “moon” spoken (filtering out all the other noises reaching our ears). Identifying a correspondence between these visual and auditory signals generates significance: the word moon. Sound is pregnant with meaning.
Incidentally, these two inputs do not necessarily make use of two different senses. If you have difficulty hearing when you’re growing up, you may learn words by associating sign language (visual) with items that you see (also visual). Using Canjeez logic, two visual signals are fused to make a visual “sound”. A tree then “sounds like” (corresponds with) its representation as a hand gesture.
Helen Keller, who could neither see nor hear, formed words from two touch sensations. Put yourself in her shoes for a moment. You might associate the sensation of a finger tapping twice on the back of one hand with the sensation of water flowing over your other hand. From those two different sensations, you would be able to form a sense of the word “water”. In order to do this, you would need to filter out contextually irrelevant touch sensations such as the pinching of your shoe, or the warmth of the sun on your face.
The two inputs must always be brought together in relation to a specific object of attention. In the baby example, the word “moon” can only be generated if the visual input (baby sees moon) is consistently discerned as matching the auditory input (baby hears “moon”). The two inputs must tally consistently.
What if each time the baby looked at the moon, the parent were to use a different sound to denote the moon? In that case, the baby would have nothing to discern. It would be impossible for the baby to reliably, repeatedly tally auditory input with visual input.
So in 意 mind, the “sound” part denotes noise that has been rendered significant by a fusion of two sensory inputs, two signals that have been isolated from other noise in order to make their relationship discernible.
The baby wants to know what’s going on. The baby’s heart binds with meaningful sound (as opposed to meaningless noise) to make sense. And making sense is what we have to do if we want to communicate.