Continuing yesterday’s blog post about communication, I would like to focus on a crucial point that I see might well be one of the greatest misunderstandings of communication in art — syntax does not equal semantics.

But before we dive into the wonderful world of semantics and talk about a brilliant philosopher named John Searle, if you haven’t read the first part of this blog series, I do highly recommend you check it out.

To make matters simple (I myself am no professional philosopher but like to dabble in it a lot), there are three stories I would like to tell, all describing one of the more important facts of communication described in the first paragraph and to kick things off, let’s start with bats.

Thomas Nagel, the author of the story titled What It Is Like To Be A Bat posed an interesting proposition:

While humans can understand and imagine the behaviours of creatures, in this case a bat; merely being able to imagine how it would feel to be able to fly, navigate by sonar, hang upside down and eat insects, would never really be the same as a bat’s perspective.

Nagel claims that even if we were able to gradually turn into bats (think Kafka, but more uplifting), our brains would not have been wired as a bat’s from birth; therefore, we would only be able to experience the life and behaviours of a bat, rather than their mindset.

To behave as something isn’t equal to being something, regardless of how much it looks, swims and quacks like a duck, the shocker is, it might just be a rubber ducky.

And this goes for our language and communication problem too; I could paint a picture of an apple being picked by a woman somewhere in a forest. Some would see a nice lady picking apples, others would see the highly complex concept of Ancestral Sin. Same painting, same communication, immensely different results.

The next story, written by Frank Jackson is also about a woman who’s life is changed because of an apple — not because of eating it but merely by looking at it! Titled What Mary Didn’t Know, it describes a very curious lady who loved natural sciences — the field of colour theory especially. 

She knew everything there was to know about colours; their wavelengths, the numerous psychological effects colours have on us, the various types of receptors that are utilised in our bodies to see them … just about everything. But she had one issue. She had been educated about all of this in a black-and-white room.

Black-and-white books, TV screens, and furniture — for some weird reason even Mary herself is black-and-white, but it is a story and if it was OK for Little Red Riding Hood to be red, I guess Mary can be colourless too.

So Jackson argued: Even though Mary had all the same information about colours that we do, she had never really experienced them and was therefore missing one crucial piece of information; one important bit of quaila, as philosophers like to call these magical bits of subjective experience, namely actually seeing red.

Jackson proposed that when Mary stepped out of her room and saw a red, juicy apple, she not only saw colour for the first time, she in fact learned something new. Something that she couldn’t have learned through any text book or YouTube video. She gained a new emotional and preceptorial experience — seeing red. (Remember all those people who told us that we can’t learn everything from books, well they were right in a way!)

And the last, and my personal favourite story curiously also evolves around red (philosophers love it for some reason). One of the greatest minds of the 21st century, John Searle wrote a wonderful tale about a talking room.

Titled The Chinese Room, this wonderful tale of speaking Asian walls stirred the lines of cognitive scientists when first presented in 1980. It describes a room, where one would input a piece of written-down information — be it a question, a statement or just a remark about the weather — and the room, after a period of time, would answer back. All in Chinese for some weird reason, probably because Searle himself said he’s awful at speaking Mandarin (the man speaks more than 6 languages fluently).

Well, the room wasn’t some magical artefact from a forgotten time, it was operated by one person. And the interesting fact was, that parson had no idea how to speak or write Mandarin. What he did have though was an assortment of instructions and guidelines on what to do and a giant library of cards with Chinese signs, decorating the walls of the room.

Whenever text was slid through the opening in the main wall, he would open the instruction books at the appropriate page depicting the combination of symbols (he was obviously really efficient at what he did and compensated generously for his job, probably owned a villa and a few Ferraris too).

After locating the right page in the manual, he would then find the appropriate cards on the shelves of the room, align them in the order depicted in the instructions and return the answer back though the slit in the wall. And the person on the outside would be absolutely amazed of how wonderful a computer this contraption was!

But the point of Searle’s work wasn’t to explain away computers by using miniature librarians living in our processors and memory units, he wanted to point out a simple yet profound truth about communication, computation and the mind. One that we have heard twice before, albeit in different iterations and with slightly different points.

Syntax (that is the assortment of signals; be it voice signals, written words or electric currents going to the processors of our computers) does not equal semantics (that is the name we give to meaning; the meaning of a word, a picture, a sign … anything that has some symbolical value to anyone).

But if painting a pretty picture of an apple isn’t enough to communicate the idea of a pretty apple, what then should we do to make our work more accessible and less misunderstood? This and more in the next part of the blog.