BOUTIQUE EKMAN for SEO - Search Engine Optimization - on markets in Sweden, Europe, USA, Asia and Africa!

INTERNATIONAL SEO - Global Search Engine Optimization

We are the leading global experts as Wordsmiths / Draughtsmen emphasizing AIDAS: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action-Satisfaction. WRITE - AND BE VISIBLE ON THE WEB: Google / Yahoo / Bing / Yandex / Baidu, et al. Your company should reach out globally, being Efficacious, Efficient & Effective!
The True Joy of Being No 1!
(It is hard to be - or become - number one in search engine optimization, and it is even harder to stay there because everyone is trying to knock you off the top.)

Top 10

Independent SEO Specialist

Since 2002

on the market

24/7

24/7/365 personal service
Internet Text (SEO) Search Engine Optimization Firm - Boutique Ekman S.A. - Chairman CG Ekman (The Ultimate WordChain Detective) "Your reader should be a friend, perhaps even a protagonist; not an adversary, not a spectator." "We are perceived on internet, we are seen on internet; albeit, most importantly - consciously and unconsciously - we should be felt on the Net."
THE RECOGNIZED LEADER - AND AT THE FOREFRONT - OF YOUR CONTEMPORARY, ORGANIC AND ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL (SEO) SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SUCCESS!
Our combined team is dedicated to providing content- and designed-focused services that meet all your needs and exceed your expectations. With us, you'll notice everything is a collaborative effort as it is the best way to to bring out the best ideas, texts, words, designs, and graphics.
"Today, there is no economy but the global economy, no internet but the global internet, and no network but the global network."-Gösta Ekman
"A great internet writer is worth 10,000 times the price of an average writer."-Bill Gates
"'tis not reason, which carries the prize, but concinnity and eloquence."-David Hume "Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood."-Friedrich Nietzsche
CG Ekman's TV documentary describing International Search Engine Optimization - ISEO - being cut / mixed for release during early 2024. Sometimes a hazy and misty image can raise attention.

Boutique Ekman - SEO - Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing/Web Design

Ever since Palaeolithic humans worked out how to paint and carve, new media have been used for explicit representations and demonstrations. Yet, this is a reminder that however accomplished and consummate a web writer / web designer, there is never a single story to be told about an advanced internet site, an art - about anything, perhaps.
It is the creative text - the wording - that will determine your International Search Engine Optimization (ISEO) success on the Net. The web text - rather than slick design and flashy pictures - will be crucial; however, one does not exclude the other. Albeit, the web text must be pertinent, indeed utterly pertinent. Clear and concise writing is the key to clear thinking.
Consumers generally favour whatever they find on their mobile screens or at the top of their search results. The tail is indeed long, but it is very skinny. Visibility costs money, but then so does invisibility. Use an exquisite and impeccable language to reach that top! Why would we want constrained search engine optimization without a scientific linguistic approach? Writing procrastination lies between logic and emotion, between ambition and achievement. Bridging that gap can be difficult, even when you know full-well that if you do, the dreaded task will no longer lurk at the back of your mind like an unwanted squatter.
The first known marketing message in universe, 30.000 years ago. No search engine optimization (SEO) required - No search engine optimization (SEO) needed."I WAS HERE!"
Google, Facebook, Amazon ... Boutique Ekman ... and yourself on the Net. Figure this out!
Dustin HillwoodHead of Development
Jana Williams SEO Training Manager
"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers," Voltaire so wisely advised us. Many questions can be raised. Socrates asked: "What is knowledge?" Saint Augustine asked: "What is time?" We ask: "How can we hire/retain the sole supreme sovereign Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist who does not exist?" We might answer: "We can not hire/retain the sole supreme sovereign Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist who does not exist, but we can look for him/her when he/she does not exist."
How do people react to your text? How do they reason? What is the logic behind their actions? Perhaps there will never be a perfect website, for there is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in... Maybe the best approach to it all is by "denying or removing all reactions, reason, logic, actions - even the notion of finitude; that which surrounds us with its manifestations of mortality, incompleteness, imperfection - that are." The point of this is to plunge us into a "super-essential darkness of general investigation" in which we are stripped of our ordinary ways of thinking, and so try to grope beyond them, creating the ultimate, state-of-the-art international SEO-applied website. Heureka!!!
我们提供任何有价值的网站的真相; 和同上的文字.
私たちは、価値のあるウェブサイトに関する真実を提供します。 と同文のテキスト。
우리는 가치있는 웹 사이트에 대한 진실을 제공합니다. 및 동감 텍스트.
What can be seen is not asked about... Prima facie?
Svetlana Stehl has been our fashion and bild International SEO - Search Engine Optimization - specialist since 2012. Sveta can enhance the visibility of your images and/or photographs on any search engine, whether Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex or Baidu. ss.seo@boutique-ekman.com
Yuliya (Julia) Vavilova has been handling our International SEO - Search Engine Optimization - operations in intitially Eastern Europe, albeit nowadays succeeds worldwide for global clients in many industries, including retail, leisure, communications, technology, et al. yv.seo@boutique-ekman.com

AI - Artificial Intelligence & SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Follow our reasoning regarding artificial intelligence in combination with search engine optimization.
Who-m do you want on your bedside here, and nowhere else? Advertising agency dinosaurs on the brink of extinction ... falsifying subjective truths ... due to technological disruption and disintermediation; or Cognitive Individual Values, Imaginations for the Limits of the Possible?
Do interpret a picture thru your own life experience... Meet with us in London or New York - or anywhere - explaining your ambition-s and objective-s.
CG Ekman - Chairman of Boutique Ekman International Search Engine Optimization S.A. - is said by some to be the most focused Search Engine Optimizer ever; others say ... etwas anderes. CG Ekman, graduated cum laude from University of Göteborg with an emphasis on Swedish company establishments in the U.S., external-internal accounting, management control and commercial law.
In 1984 Claes Gösta received a scholarship from the Marcus Wallenberg Fund for International Industrial Management regarding research at Handelshögskolan in Göteborg concerning "Swedish Industrial Joint Ventures in the Far East", mainly China and Japan. The report, published in 1985, received large contemporary attention, in industrial as well as academic circles.
Claes Gösta has since 1986 been periodic Nordic/Swedish Chairman/Director of Transearch, Translink, Manpower, EIU (The Economist Intelligence Unit), Société Générale TR, as well as main board Chairman/Director of parent/subsidiary companies in Sweden, Norway, England, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and China.
CG has/has had membership in Göteborgs Börssällskap, International Society of Financial Analysts, Association of Investment Management and Research (AIMR) and Financial Analysts Federation (US).
Trained as an air artillery aviator in Sweden, later rated both an instrument and multi-engine/jet pilot in the U.S., CG is now a resident of NYC.
THE KING IS DEAD - LONG LIVE THE KING (Le roi est mort, vive le roi) -TIMING -LOGIC -TRUTH -FEELINGS -CONSCIOUSNESS -WORDS -LANGUAGE -BOLDNESS -IMAGINATION -COMMUNICATION
Tatiana Alderon is responsible for our "Wordchain" SEO undertakings in Eastern Europe.
Johann Kielmannsegg is manager of our SEO management in Europe.
Jasmine Blanchbois is responsible for our SEO undertakings in South Asia.
Jean Niepold is responsible for our SEO and creative writing throughout the Americas.
Colleen Yang is responsible for our SEO undertakings in East Asia.

Wise SEO Words

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.”
-Winston Churchill
Historical Words
”What are you reading, William?” “Words, words, words,” quipped a jesting Shakespeare.

Wise SEO Words

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
-Mike Tyson
Contemporary Words
The difference came out in the prose. Hemingway jabbed out phrases to pen “the truest sentence that you know”.
Dear Citizen!
Welcome to our Web Search Engine Optimization - SEO - and International Web Design / Digital Marketing Bureau.
If our tactical and strategic internet methods are adopted by our global clients during A.D. 2025, we are certain that their long-term competitiveness will be enhanced.
During 2023-2024 we have ourselves seen a record number of international web design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) assignments being completed.
How can we come to possess a complete, applicable, and accurate knowledge about the future, sort of looking-around-the-corner knowledge? We have dealt with a knowledge of things and people as they were at a given moment of time. The phenomena of life which appear in the formal encyclopedias can be regarded as frozen in mid-passage. The immense accumulation of data globally as we have seen on the internet - on an ever increasing scale - would be virtually all strategic web- and commercial intelligence required were it not for the element of motion in human events.
The obvious fact is that practically nothing known to man stands completely still, and that the most important characteristic of man's struggle for existence is the fact of change. Knowledge devised to fit the requirements of political / digital / commercial strategy must everlastingly take into account this fact of change. A freedom fighter in Afghanistan may turn into a rebel / a terrorist, a king may have left this earth but simultaneously someone else arises to the reign. As a matter of fact, the direction of change is sometimes more important to know about than the absolutes of quantity, extent, effect, et cetera. This matter of direction is one of highest significance.
Outside the realm of politics, things change as funda-mentally; contemplate the demises of Kodak, Polaroid, Motorola, Nokia. Some of the things we try to understand are infinitely complex – they are not understandable even in principle. We tolerate [this] complexity by failing to recognize it. That is the illusion of understanding. Rather than asking how we tolerate complexity, we will ask how to manage it.
Planned obsolescence is one means of managing change. Firms view changes as a response to an expected and reasoned demand calculation. “In summe, in what matter soever, there is place for addition and subtraction, there is place for Reason; and where these have no place, there Reason has nothing at all to do," as Thomas Hobbes formulated it in Leviathan.
What is an excellent product or service today, is probably not a similar ditto tomorrow. In times of change learners inherit the earth; the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. Practical people - the many; hoi pollo - focus on the next moment and leave the centuries to dreamers, consciously incapable of anticipating the future.
If we could learn from history - some say - what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us. Can we demonstrate, perhaps, that the future will conform to the past, or at least offer some evidence that it will probably do so? No, but we can conclude that the past is a valuable guide to the future.
Why can one expect certain events to be followed by certain other events, but reply to this only by stating that they have generally been found to do so? Can some evidence be provided for the principle that the future will resemble the past, or can we just offer but evidence that it had done so in the past? Expectations and predictions are a matter of habit, and extrapolating from what has been observed is something that we are sensibly prone to do. However, in general, even reasonable and dialectic people are incapable of anticipating with gusto and presto a complex future.
The fact is that it is more a matter of instinct than of logic that we use the past as a guide to the future. It is even fortunate for us that we are naturally inclined to extrapolate from experience - rather than using abstract reasoning - because our lives depend on our ability to do so; though, as the saying goes, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." In the context of forecasting and predictability, we might even be dramatically compelled to quote Blaise Pascal: "It is not certain that we shall see tomorrow; but it is certainly possible that we shall not."
Most people would rather die than think and plan ahead. In fact they do. "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future," as the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr formulated it. The idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behaviour that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.
Research show that the average expert, on the basis of a 20-year forecasting tournament, is "roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee". But the future can indeed be foreseen, at least in the near term. And, crucially, prophecy is not a divine gift, but a skill that can be practised and improved. Excellent forecasters are clever, on average, but by no means geniuses. More important than sheer intelligence is mental attitude. Humility in the face of a complex world makes excellent forecasters subtle thinkers.
Excellent forecasters do have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new information, and the ability to synthesize material from sources with very different outlooks on the world. They think in fine gradations. Excellent forecasters have a "growth mindset": a mix of determination, self-reflection and willingness to learn from one's mistakes. The best forecasters are less interested in whether they are right or wrong than in why they are right or wrong. They are always looking for ways to improve their performance. In other words, prediction is not only possible, it is teachable.
There may be few words in a website - there may be many words, whatever has the greatest impact; and life is simply too short to care about what other Homo sapiens [say they] feel about your text. Me ne frego! We can build and design a slick website with an intrepid semblance and a vernacular text; and the words - the wording - will [almost always] play the crucial part in reaching out [and ranking high].
Maybe you consider yourself [and your company] an honest plodder: a safe pair of hands that keep your promises and do your homework? Maybe you consider yourself [and your company] too dull to be bothered with? Or, perhaps you have thoughts above your station? Perhaps you should come out of the closet, boldly building a reputation; perhaps not an ideas person but one who nevertheless has a sense of what you want, being not only good but great and Delphian in what you do and achieve, showing it on the unparalleled media of all times!
"We absolutely love social media and as far as fashion, food, restaurants and the hospitality industry in general go, it is the great equalizer." In America at present, two-thirds of books, music and films are now purchased online, as well as over three-fifths of office supplies and toys. The overall growth of internet advertising and marketing will be aggressive, albeit the development of adherent logistics chains are not linear, so expect an investment to immensely materialize in the two to five-year timeframe. Language - words put together - will matter as immensely. Apply rhetorical bias and professional contemporary linguistics for quicker - monthly-weekly-daily-hourly-minutely - results.
Even Francis Bacon himself, in a remarkable passage in Book two of The Advancement of Learning, noted that the art of eloquence, while in true value inferior to wisdom, "with people it is the more mighty" and that "profoundness of wisdom will help a man to a name or admiration, but that it is eloquence that prevaileth in an active life." The duty of Rhetoric, he felt, was to apply reason to imagination and concinnity.
Some pundits will doubtless reason that, "no one uses Facebook any more; it is too crowded," or, "you can observe a lot by watching," quoting Yogi Berra. I personally think, however, that we simply have to reason independently. We have to act, reason and write independently; we have to create a conscious - often contentious - structure of inertia within an abundance of leisurely time and manoeuvring space.
(The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics/human design. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress.)
As an international team, Boutique Ekman may have written over 22.000 webpages [including prose] together , albeit even I - working with words and internet Search Engine Optimization (SEO) daily for a great many years - sometimes feel like in kindergarten: limpingly espial; vigilant, primordial and tautly syllogizing the convoluted, esoteric ruse on the Web, without derison or prerogative.
Should an international website upend traditional distinctions between reality and fiction, solid and void, surface and interior? Can we conceive of a website in which void as well as solid is given a starring role, and where the website merges seamlessly with its environment? Can we conceive of a website that has a slapdash quality that is transformative in itself? Should we design in diminutive works that contain the seeds of enormous ideas? What is deemed to be the most worthy of a web-creator's attention? What could be ground breaking? What is the logic behind it? Should it be "placebo" from Latin's "I shall please?" We need to constantly ask ourselves: "How do we stay relevant?"
Often golden rules turn to base metal, however, so we need to tell our story effectively so that people cannot only read/see/hear us, but read/see/hear us rightly. As an international text/website-designer since the birth of internet - in search of the optimal graphics, marketability, efficacy, and visibility - I prefer to begin at the beginning. Everybody lives by selling something. Selling/marketing ideas are common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than the selling/marketing we should dwell.
Is there an unquestionable logic [on the Net]? The estimation of a theory is not simply determined by its truth. It also depends upon the importance of its subject, and the extent of its applications; beyond which something must still be left to the arbitrariness of human opinion. In one respect, the science of logic differs from all others; the perfection of its method is chiefly valuable as an evidence of the speculative truth of its principles.
To supersede the employment of common reason, or to subject it to the rigour of technical forms, would be the last desire of one who knows the value of that intellectual toil and warfare which imparts to the mind an athletic vigour, and teaches it to contend with difficulties and to rely upon itself in emergencies.
That which renders logic possible, is the existence in our minds of general notions, our ability to conceive of a class, and to designate its individual members by a common name. The theory of logic is thus intimately connected with that of language. A successful attempt to express logical propositions by symbols, the laws of whose combinations should be founded upon the laws of the mental processes which they represent, would, so far, be a step towards a philosophical language.
Regarding logic as a branch of philosophy, and defining philosophy as the "science of a real existence", and "the research of causes", and assigning as its main business the investigation of the "why", while mathematics display only the "that", we contend, not simply, that the superiority rests with the study of logic.
What is the difference between explaining "why" and describing "how"? Looking back, explaining "why" means to find casual connections that account for the occurrence of a particular series of events to the exclusion of all others. To describe "how" means to reconstruct this series of specific events that led from one point to another.
To comprehend phenomena in the purest rational way - i e, to deduce the why and how of things with mathematical certainty - is not only to see them "from the point of view of eternity", but in some sense to become part of the eternal.
The pursuits of the mathematician, or the computer/software technician, "have however not only not trained him to that acute logical scent," to that delicate, almost instinctive tact which, in the twilight of probability, the search and discrimination of its finer facts demand; they have gone to cloud his vision, to indurate his touch, to all but the blazing light, the iron chain of demonstration, and left him out of the narrow confines of his science, to a passive credulity in any premises, or to an absolute incredulity in all.
The reason of which is cultivated by the abstractly logical is the only valuable form available, not reason educed by computer or mathematical studies. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths.
Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation - of form and quantity - is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart.
It is an important observation, which has more than once been made, that it is one thing to arrive at correct premises, and another thing to deduce logical conclusions, and that the business of [business] life depends more upon the former than upon the latter. The study of the exact sciences may teach us the one, and it may give us some general preparation of knowledge and of practice for the attainment of the other, but it is to the union of thought with action, in the field of Practical Logic, the arena of Human Life, that we are to look for its fuller and more perfect accomplishment.
If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without a confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought.
When we look at such simple forms of language, the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.
We investigate whether, e g, "Brick" means the same in the primitive language as it does in ours; and then this goes with our contention that the simpler language is not therefore an incomplete form of the more complicated one. We make it plain that words have the meanings we give them, and that it would be a confusion to think of an investigation into their real meaning. (We might refer to Humpty Dumpty for an ascending logical height: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less!")
If you have not distinguished between a language and a notation, you may hardly see any difference between following a language and following a notation. But in that case you may well be unclear about the difficulties in connection with the relation between language and logic. Much of all this can be answered by emphasizing that speaking and writing belong to intercourse with other people. The signs get their life there, and that is why language is not just a mechanism.
What is the meaning of a word? Let us attack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; what does the explanation of a word look like? The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question "how do we measure a length?" helps us to understand "what is length?"
Asking first "What's an explanation of meaning?" has advantages. You in a sense bring the question "what is meaning?" down to earth. For surely, to understand the meaning of "meaning" you ought also to understand the meaning of "explanation of meaning".
What one generally calls "explanations of the meaning of a word" can, very roughly, be divided into verbal and ostensive definitions. If the definition explains the meaning of a word, surely it can't be essential that you should have heard the word before. It is the ostensive definition's business to give it a meaning.
I point this out to remove, once and for all, the idea that the words of the ostensive definition predicate something of the defined; the confusion is grave between, for example, the sentence "this is criminal", attributing the [culpable] etiquette to some human behaviour or act, and the ostensive definition "this is called criminal".
However, the thought is not [always] the same as the sentence; for an English and a French sentence, which are utterly different, can express the same thought. A phrase or sentence has sense, if we give it sense. We know what a word, or a row of words, means in certain contexts, at specific times and/or geographical locations.
In [complex] contexts, words and meanings do not only have to be defined and/or stipulated, but understood in the probable "objective situation" affected by at least two elements, which are likely to be ever-present; they are the element of geographical location and the element of time. By "objective situation" I mean the situation stripped of the subjective characteristics with which a prejudiced human observer is almost certain to endow it. I use the word "probable", because, whereas knowledge of the objective situation is of highest desirability, any frail human being probably can never apprehend the true objective fact. He/she should, however, strive until it hurts.
We can here also note a consistent conceptual dilemma. The meaning of a word often depends not just on its dictionary definition and the grammatical context but the meaning of the rest of the sentence. We realize that "the pen is in the box" and "the box is in the pen" require different meanings/translations for "pen": any pen big enough to hold a box would have to be an animal enclosure, not a writing instrument.
Giving a reason for something one did or said means showing a way which leads to this action. At this point, however, another confusion sets in, that between reason and cause. One is led into this confusion by the ambiguous use of the word "why". This when the chain of reasons has come to an end and still the question "why" is asked, one is inclined to give a cause instead of a reason.
The difference between the grammars of "reason" and "cause" is quite similar to that between the grammars of "motive" and "cause". Of the cause - cause in this context naturally only a logical one, not physical, nor medical - one can say that one can not know it but can only conjecture it. For a linguistic investigator this is of vital importance de jure!
The double use of the word "why", asking for the cause and asking for the motive, together with the idea that we can know, and not only conjecture, our motives, gives rise to the confusion that a motive is a cause of which we are immediately aware, a cause "seen from the inside", or a cause experienced. Giving a reason is like giving a calculation by which you have arrived at a certain result.
In themselvselves, causes can be divided or refined into three sub-groups: in fieri causes, i e, in becoming or in progress dittos; in esse causes, i e in actual existence dittos; and, lastly, in posse causes, i e in potential or in the state of being possible dittos. That causes can have deux origines - primary and secondary; and more - is another interesting observation. The sobering truth is that everything is determined by a cause "which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity."
As linguistic investigators / linguistic developers - in language games, in philosophical investigations, and in reality - we often encounter what could best be conceived by the Greek word aitia, meaning both cause and guilt; a fact. And, as Mark Twain described the latter: "Facts are stubborn."
Instead of "craving for linguistic generality" I could also have said the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case. If, e g, someone tries to explain the concept of number and tells us that such and such a definition will not do or is clumsy because it only applies to, say, finite cardinals I should answer that the mere fact that he could have given such a limited definition, of for example a crime sequence, makes this definition extremely important to us. (Elegance is not what we are trying for as truth seekers.)
Our investigative method is purely descriptive; the descriptions we give are not hints of explanations. Think of words as instruments characterized by their use [...] It is no act of insight which makes us use the rule-s as we do, because there is an idea that "something must make us" do what we do. And this again joins on to the confusion between cause and reason. We need have no reason to follow the rules as we do. The chain of reasons has an end.
The expression of a truth cannot be negatived by a legitimate operation, but it may be limited. The equation y = z implies that the classes Y and Z are equivalent, member for member. Multiply it by a factor x, and we have
 xy = xz, which expresses that the individuals which are common to the classes X and Y are also common to X and Z, and vice versâ. This is a perfectly legitimate inference, but the fact which it declares is a less general one than was asserted in the original proposition.
Such is indeed the actual law of scientific progress. We must be content, either to abandon the hope of further conquest, or to employ such aids of symbolic language, as are proper to the stage of progress, at which we have arrived. Nor need we fear to commit ourselves to such a course. We have not yet arrived so near the boundaries of possible knowledge, as to suggest the apprehension, that scope will fail for the exercise of the inventive faculties.
Language, symbolic or not, however, is an instrument of logic, but not an indispensible instrument. Every proposition which language can express may be represented by elective symbols, and the laws of combination of those symbols are in all cases the same; but in one class of instances the symbols have reference to collections of objects, in the other, to the truths of constituent propositions.
Now the question of the use of symbols may be considered in two distinct points of view. First, it may be considered with reference to the progress of scientific discovery, and secondly, with reference to its bearing upon the discipline of the intellect. It may be observed that as it is one fruit of an accomplished labour, that it sets us at liberty to engage in more arduous toils, so it is a necessary result of an advanced state of science, that we are permitted, and even called upon, to proceed to higher problems, than those which we before contemplated.
The practical inference is obvious. If through the advancing power of scientific methods, we find that the pursuits on which we were once engaged, afford no longer a sufficiently ample field for intellectual effort, the remedy is, to proceed to higher inquiries, and, in new tracks, to seek the difficulties yet unsubdued.
The scarcely less momentous question of the influence of the use of symbols upon the discipline of the intellect, an important distinction ought to be made. It is of most material consequence, whether those symbols are used with a full understanding of their meaning, with a perfect comprehension of that which renders their use lawful, and an ability to expand the abbreviated forms of reasoning which they induce, into their full syllogistic development; or whether they are mere unsuggestive characters, the use of which is suffered to rest upon authority.
The order of attainment in the individual mind would bear some relation to the actual order of scientific discovery, and the more abstract methods of the higher analysis would be offered to such minds only, as were prepared to receive them.
It may not be inappropriate, before concluding these observations, to offer a few remarks upon the general question of the use of symbolic language in the logical / the computer linguistic science. Objections have lately been very strongly urged against this practice, on the ground, that by obviating the necessity of thought, and substituting a reference to general formulæ in the room of personal effort, it tends to weaken the reasoning faculties.
Logic must like, for example, geometry rest upon axiomatic truths, and its theorems must be constructed upon the general doctrine of symbols, which constitutes the foundation of the recognized analysis. It is no escape from the conclusion to which it points to assert, that logic not only constructs a science, but also inquires into the origin and the nature of its own principles, - a distinction which is denied to, for example, mathematics/computer science. (It is wholly beyond the domain of the mathematicians to inquire into the origin and nature of their principles.)
With the advance of our knowledge of all true science, an ever-increasing harmony will be found to prevail among its separate branches, including the paramount value and importance of the study of morals. All sincere votaries of truth may meet and agree that it is the characteristic of the liberal sciences, not that they conduct us to virtue, but that they prepare us for virtue." Die einfachen Wahrheiten des Lebens, however, is [as mentioned before, and worth repeating] that everything - including virtue - is determined by a cause "which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity."
On moral matters, and concerning the abundance of empty unintelligible noises and jargon describing virtue, one must beware of the hordes of journalists, politicians, and other "we-know-it-all"-pundits, who cover their ignorance with a curious and unexplicable web of perplexed words. With a sense of responsibility for the welfare of all, we must stay close to common sense, avoid raising [an existing] political paradox into profound truth, albeit, instead realize that full truth will not come in a flash (if it will ever come).
Beware, "no impression arising from something true is such that an impression arising from something false could not also be just like it." In other words, an illusion could be just as convincing as the real thing (that, indeed, is the point of illusions), so you might not be able to tell the difference between them just by looking.
Media, politicians and their ilk know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, [how] to utter true things. Remember that the interests of these groups and of [government] civil servants is to survive and self-perpetuate; not to get to the truth, living in a post-truth era. This does not mean that media and governments are useless, only that you need to keep a vigilant eye on their side effects.
Clever computer algorithms are indeed patrolling the frontline of truthfulness, and can already outsmart a great many digital practices. The need to understand their interactions is becoming ever more urgent as they - "algos" - become so central in areas as varied as social media, financial markets, cyber security, autonomous weapons systems and networks of self-driving cars.
It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say we are reaching a critical juncture. Is truth, in some senses, being electronically determined? The scale, speed and efficiency of some of these algorithmic interactions are reaching a level of complexity beyond human comprehension. We have let loose the most phenomenal power, although we are far from reaching a critical situation.
The immediate concern is that political and narrow commercial interests have learnt to hack society, and falsehoods can be replicated as easily as truths. When truth becomes endangered through spying and propaganda trolls we have an obligation to record facts, but as we have experienced during the last few years, that is not always a simple task.
The obvious principle that a proposition is either true or false with the exception of the occurrence of future events means that it is possible to arrive at a system of methods and processes for the treatment of hypotheticals: unconditional truth (categoricals) and probable truth meet together in the constitution of contingent truth, (hypotheticals). If you seek the truth, it is vital to define your terms, or else you will find yourself "entangled in words..."
Never accept anything as true if you do not have evident knowledge of its truth ... and include nothing more in your judgements than what presents itself to your mind so clearly and so distinctly that you have no occasion to doubt it. If you will begin with certainties, you will end in doubts; however, if you are content to begin with doubts, you might end in certainties. "Plato is dear to me, but truth is dearer still," expressed Aristotle in his desperate search for a final verification of the truth.
One of my favourite truth philosophers – Simon Foucher – brought to light in his 1673 publication Dissertations sur la recherche de la vérité people’s psychological predilections for certainties. He wrote about the art of doubting - about positioning oneself between doubting and believing. He wrote, "One needs to exit doubt in order to produce true science - but few people heed the importance of not exiting from it prematurely ... It is a fact that one usually exits doubt without realizing it." He wrote further, "We are dogma-prone from our mother's wombs."
There are three obvious alternatives when you look into the subject of finding the truth: Primo, you can think that you have found the truth; Secondo, you can come to the conclusion that the truth cannot be found; Terso, you can just carry on looking for it. "Truth, truth: how in my inmost being the very narrow of my mind signed for you," as Saint Augustine wrote of his immense quest millenia ago.
This eternal thing: truth. Is truth ever barren? Truth (we say) is the daughter of time. When is the truth approaching from the dim horizon? How will it look? Why is it hiding? How will it appear, now and then; in the future, when we need it so desperately? We should insist on probing, seeking, enquiring for deeper and deeper truths. (We might again quote Lewis Carroll, and now the Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark: "What I tell you three times is true!")
How should we fully employ our faculties in the attainment of truth? The firm answer is: we must not trust authority, even in the area of geometrical truth. We must ourselves examine the demonstrations, we must understand how the conclusion follows from the definitions, axioms, and prior demonstrations. For other truths, truths of the world, we must seek them “in the fountain, in the consideration of things themselves".
Each of us must also make truth and knowledge his own. There are no innate principles or propositions, hence there are no innate ideas, ideas being the constituents of propositions. How do we then acquire ideas, and how do we form propositions true of the world? We may use Descartes’ term, “adventitious truths”, to contrast with “innate”; ideas that result from experience and observation.
The well-disguised truth about truth - and about nature as a whole - is that its properties depend on underlying motion or change; pantha rhei - "all things flow - you can not step into the same river twice". Thus and hence prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world. Things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don't move seem to have some experts. "Not even the future is what it used to be."
The surest way to end any [expert enquiry] disputes - often as unwarranted as they are unfruitful - is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of an/the enquiry. For if there are any questions which science (linguistic, legal, or other) leaves to linguistic investigators / Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Consultants to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their verification and discovery.
We may distinguish between a "strong" and a "weak" sense of the term "verifiable", and that explains this distinction by saying that "a proposition is said to be verifiable in the strong sense of the term, if and only if its truth could be conclusively established in experience," but that "it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable."
For we subsequently go on to argue that all empirical propositions are hypotheses which are continually subject to the test of further experience; and from this it would follow not merely that the truth of any such proposition never was conclusively established but that it could never be; for however strong the evidence in its favour, there would never be a point at which it was impossible for further experience to go against it.
Consider, for example the case of general propositions of law - such propositions, namely, as "polonium is poisonous"; "all Search Engine Optimization Consultants are mortal"; "dead bodies tend to dissolve in water." It is of the very nature of these propositions that their truth cannot be established with certainty by any finite series of observations.
But if it is recognised that such general propositions of law are designed to cover an infinite number of cases, then it must still be admitted that they cannot, even in principle, be verified conclusively. They can never be necessary; however firmly we believe them, it is always conceivable that a future experience will lead us to abandon them.
And then, if we adopt conclusive verifiability as our criterion of significance, we are logically obliged to treat these general propositions of law in the same fashion as we treat the statements of, for example, a metaphysician or shaman. However, I am personally convinced that it is absolutely necessary - for progress in science - to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. It frightens me to realize I do not have time to know it all, and even if we know a lot, our ignorance remain immense. Irreverence is a key to progress, but so is also anthropocentrism.
No empirical proposition can ever be anything more than probable. It is only a priori propositions that are logically certain. A priori knowledge -from the earlier - or justification is independent of experience (e g, all bachelors are unmarried). You can see that it is true just lying on the couch. A posteriori knowledge - from the later - or justification is dependent on experience or empirical evidence (e g, some bachelors are very unhappy).
There are many points of view on these two types of knowledge, and their relationship is one of the oldest problems in modern philosophy. We might state that a priori implies from what comes before; before experience, reason alone. A posteriori implies from what comes later; after experience, unknowable by reason alone.
This difficulty is not confined to the case of general propositions of law, though it is there revealed most plainly. It is hardly less obvious in the case of propositions about the remote past. For it must surely be admitted that, however strong the evidence in favour of historical statements may be, their truth can never become more than highly probable.
It has sometimes been assumed that the principle of verification to imply that no statement can be evidence for another unless it is part of its meaning; but this is not the case. Thus, to make use of a simple illustration, the statement that I have blood on my coat may, in certain circumstances, confirm the hypothesis that I have committed a murder, but it is not part of the meaning of the statement that I have committed a murder that I should have blood upon my coat, nor, as I understand it, does the principle of verification imply that it is.
For one statement may be evidence for another, and still neither itself express a necessary condition of the truth of this other statement, nor belong to any set of statements which determines a range within which such a necessary condition falls; and it is only in these cases that the principle of verification yields the conclusion that the one statement is part of the meaning of the other. Presupposition and implication are two ways in which the truth of a statement may be connected importantly with the truth of another without it being the case that the one entails the other in the sole sort of sense preferred by obsessional logicians.
Statements about the past may, for example, be verifiable in the sense that when they are conjoined with other premises of a suitable kind they may entail observation-statements which do not follow from these other premises alone. This is not a peculiarity of propositions about the past; for it is true also of unfulfilled conditionalis about the present that their protases cannot in fact be satisfied, since they require of the observer that he should be occupying a different spatial position from that which he actually does.
But just as it is a contingent fact that a person happens at a given moment to be occupying a particular position in space, so is it a contingent fact that he happens to be living at a particular time. And from this we can conclude that if one is justified in saying that events which are remote in space are observable, in principle, the same may be said of events which are situated in the past.
We cannot quite make the simple statement that the truth of statements depends on facts as distinct from knowledge of facts. The truth or falsity of statements is affected by what they leave out or put in and by their being misleading, and so on. Reference depends on knowledge at the time of utterance. It is essential to realize that "true" and "false", like "free" and "unfree", do not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say / write as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, for these purposes and with these intentions.
The truth or falsity of a statement depends not merely on the meanings of words but on what act you were performing in what circumstances. The total speech / writing act in the total speech / writing situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating.
As it is a mistake to identify a priori propositions with empirical propositions about language, I now think that it is a mistake to say that they are themselves linguistic rules. For apart from the fact that they can properly be said to be true, which linguistic rules cannot, they are distinguished also by being necessary, whereas linguistic rules are arbitrary. At the same time, if they are necessary it is only because the relevant linguistic rules are presupposed.
Although it is misleading to write about linguistic rules and questions as "factual" language, it is often convenient for the sake of brevity. And we shall not always avoid doing it ourselves. But it is important that no one should be deceived by this practice into supposing that the linguist/organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Consultant is engaged on an empirical or a metaphysical enquiry. We may speak losely of him as analyzing facts, or notions, or even things. But we must make it clear that these are simply ways of saying that he is concerned with the definition of the corresponding words.
Such a system of definitions in use would reveal what may be called the structure of the language in question. And thus we may regard any particular linguistic "theory" of definite descriptions as a revelation of part of the structure of a given language. And in this context, it is not necessary to draw a distinction between the spoken and the written language. As far as the validity of a linguistic definition is concerned, it does not matter whether we regard the symbol defined as being constituted by visible marks or by sounds.
There is ground for saying that the linguistic philosopher/Search Engine Optimization Consultant with an organic aim is always concerned with an artificial language. For the conventions which we follow in our actual usage of words are not altogether systematic and precise. Thus if I wish to refute a pure philosophically concerned opponent I do not argue about people's linguistic habits. I try to prove that his definitions involve a contradiction.
But it is not necessary that the language in which analysis is carried out should be different from the language analysed. If it were, we should be obliged to suppose that every language has a structure concerning which, in the language, nothing can be said, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure, and that to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit.
The basics of this effort is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Consultants should not squander their energies upon the unknowable, but should perform their proper function-s in criticism and analysis. Words matter, however, and they have an obligation to be intelligible in a contemporary context; not covering some practitioner's ignorance with an ancient and complex row of words. (Most historical pundits though, can no doubt confirm having Voltaire's complex, confident and sharp pen on one's side was helpful at times.)
The practitioners did not take us to the moon, but some other people did; not always expressing gibberish [as claimed]. It is necessary to draw a distinction between practical verifiability, and verifiability in principle. Plainly we all understand, in many cases believe, propositions which we have not in fact taken steps to verify, which we could have, if we took enough trouble. But there remain a number of significant propositions, concerning matters of fact, which we could not verify even if we chose; simply because we lack the practical means of placing ourselves in the situation where the relevant observations could be made.
As Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Linguistic Consultants, we claim to base our practice on own experience and direct observation - perhaps even ultimately possessing an Oculus simplex - and never let us be deceived by idle speculations. Respecting immensely the past, and its thinkers and writers, we have a belief that fresh experience, which is a pre-requisite for any modern abstract reasoning, is a better guide to life than old volumes and the word of authority. The old adage, or motto, Nullius in verba, may loosely be translated as "Look for your self. Do not take anyone else's word for it."
(Concerning the upheld necessity of own experience and direct observation, I confess that I am growing doubtful whether this account and advice here given is correct; but I am not convinced that it is not. There is a sense in which "it is not logically inconceivable that I should have - or perhaps share - an experience that is in fact owned by someone else." Thus and hence, as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Consultants, we at times judge "an argument from analogy" to be justified.)
When it comes to the crucial questions of ethics and values and morals, our contention is that, in our language, sentences which contain normative ethical symbols are not equivalent to sentences which express psychological, or indeed empirical propositions of any kind. We admit that fundamental ethical concepts are unanalysable, inasmuch as there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgements in which they occur.
The reason why they are unanalysable is that they are mere pseudo-concepts. The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if we say to someone, "You acted wrongly in stealing that money," we are not stating anything more than if we had simply said, "You stole that money." In adding that this action is wrong we are not making any further statement about it. We are simply evincing our moral disapproval of it.
It is as if we had said, "You stole that money," in a particular tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker.
If now we generalize our previous statement and say, "Stealing money is wrong," we produce a sentence which has no factual meaning - that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if we had written "Stealing money!!" where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed.
(The meanings of words in the right context: In a typical criminal linguistic diversion, the Georgian Joseph Stalin, who commenced his revolutionary career as a bank robber, slyly called/named his robberies not stealings/thefts, but confiscations. Stalin - meaning "Steelman" in the rich Russian language - was simultaneously acquired as a nome de guerre.)
It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false. Other people may disagree with us about the wrongness of stealing, in the sense that they may not have the same feelings about stealing as we have, and they may quarrel with us on account of our moral sentiments. But they cannot, strictly speaking, contradict us. Sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feelings and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood.
They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable - because they do not express genuine propositions. This may seem, at first sight, to be a very paradoxical assertion. For we certainly do engage in disputes which are ordinarily regarded as disputes about questions of value. But, in all such cases, we find, if we consider the matter closely, that the dispute is not really about a question of value, but about a question of fact.
We find that argument is possible on moral questions only if some system of values is presupposed. It appears thence, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge and/or truth, is nothing more than a department of sociology.
What really determines the course of human affairs is finally never logic, truth, talent or intelligence. It's feelings, isn't it? Good and bad; behind what often lays a nightmare of unavowed knowledge, a mine field of unalleviated guilt. We are feelings. Philosophy has its origin in something healthy. Psychology has its origin in something unhealthy, something malady or malaise. The established practice historically was to regard feelings as out of the scientific picture. Until quite recently science studiously avoided the assignments of feelings to any brain system; feelings were just out there, vaporously hanging in or around the brain.
For me, however, the study of affects - the two ingredients of feelings and emotions baked together - although not understanding every nuance of them, makes you feel as though you are taking a witch ride or wrestling with a cobra. The scientific study of feelings comes - almost like Fred Astaire describes his (one of them) favourite woman: "She came at me in sections; she had more curves than a scenic highway." The subjects - the nature of emotions and feelings and the relation of mind to body [and actions] - are those same subjects that have preoccupied many other thinkers of the past.
Feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between are the bedrock of our minds. We often fail to notice this simple reality because in mental images of the objects and events that surround us, along with the images of the words and sentences that describe them, use up so much of our overburdened attention. But there they are, feelings of myriad emotions and related states.
One of the values of philosophy is that throughout its history it has prefigured science. In turn, I believe, science is well served by recognizing that historical effort. The fact is that the history of philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than the history of a sharply defined discipline.
The traditional image of it as a sort of meditative science or pure thought, strangely cut off from other subjects, is largely a trick of the historical light. The illusion is created by the way in which knowledge tends to be labelled, chopped up and re-labelled. Philosophical work is regularly spirited away and adopted by other disciplines. Yesterday's moral philosophy becomes tomorrow's jurisprudence or welfare economics; yesterday's philosophy of mind becomes tomorrow's cognitive science.
And the road runs in both directions: new inquiries in other disciplines prompt new questions for the philosophically curious. Tomorrow's economics will be meat for the moral philosophers of the day after. One effect of these shifting boundaries is that philosophical thinking can easily seem to be unusually useless, even for an intellectual enterprise.
This is largely because any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful ceases to be called philosophy. Hence the illusory appearance that philosophers never make progress. Who remembers, by the way, that Sir Isaac Newton was not a professor of physics, but indeed, a professor of natural philosophy?
In the attempt to understand the various parts of a human mind, we analyse feelings and emotions. Is the attempt to understand feelings of any value beyond satisfying one's mind? I do believe so. What comes before emotions for example? In the beginning was emotion, but at the beginning of emotion was action. Even Shakespeare in his time announces that the unified and apparently singular process of affect, which we often designate casually and indifferently as emotion or feeling, can be analysed in parts.
It is true that the common usage of the word emotion tends to encompass the notion of feeling. But in our attempt to understand the complex chain of events that begins with emotion and ends up in feeling, we can be helped by a principled separation between the part of the process that is made public and the part that remains private. Emotions are actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviours.
Feelings, on the other hand, are always hidden, like all mental images necessarily are, unseen to anyone other than their rightful owner, the most private property of the organism in whose brain they occur. Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind.
As far as the mind is concerned, feeling is what really counts. "There lies the substance." We suffer or delight from actual feelings. In the narrow sense, emotions are externalities. But "principal" does not mean "first" and does not mean "causative". The centrality of feelings obscures the matter of how feelings arise and favours the view that somehow feelings occur first and are expressed subsequently in emotions. This view is not entirely correct.
One of the main aspects of the history of human development pertains to how most objects that surround our brains become capable of triggering some form of emotion or another, weak or strong, good or bad, and can do so consciously or unconsciously. Some of these triggers are set by evolution (height, darkness, snakes), but some are not, instead becoming associated by our brains with emotionally competent objects by virtue of our individual experiences. Emotions are instantaneous, but feelings, recent evidence suggest, occur over several seconds, two to twenty being common.
In normal conditions the speed with which emotions arise and give way to feelings and related thoughts makes it difficult to analyze the proper sequence of phenomena. As thoughts normally causative of emotions appear in the mind, they cause emotions, which give rise to feelings, which conjure up other thoughts that are thematically related and likely to amplify the emotional state.
The scientific value of single-subject studies is always limited. The evidence usually is a starting point for new hypotheses and explorations rather than the end-point of an investigation. Nonetheless, the evidence in this case is quite valuable. It supports the notion that the processes of emotion and feeling can be analyzed by component.
Emotions and feelings are often taken as synonyms. My view is that feelings are functionally distinctive because their essence consists of the thoughts that represent the body involved in a reactive process. Remove that essence and the notion of feeling vanishes. Remove that essence and one should never again be allowed to say "I feel" happy, but rather, "I think" happy.
A feeling in essence is an idea - an idea of the body and, even more particularly, an idea of a certain aspect of the body, its interior, in certain circumstances. We can use the body to explain joy, sorrow, and fear, of course, but certainly not desire, love, or pride. It also is apparent that the brain can simulate certain emotional body states internally, as happens in the process of turning the emotion sympathy into a feeling of empathy.
In keeping with Spinoza (The Ethics) when he discussed sorrow (tristitia), the maps of sorrow are associated with the transition of the organism to a state of lesser perfection. The power and freedom to act are diminished. In the Spinozian view, the person in the throes of sadness is cut off from his or her conatus, from the tendency for self-preservation.
Feelings are the mental manifestations of balance and harmony, of disharmony and discord. They do not refer to the harmony or discord of objects or events out in the world, necessarily, but rather to the harmony or discord deep in the flesh. Joy and sorrow and other feelings are largely ideas of the body in the process of maneuvering itself into states of optimal survival.
There is growing evidence that feelings, along with the appetites and emotions that most ofte cause them, play a decisive role in social behaviour. Thus, when men say that this or that criminal or physical action has its origin in the mind, which latter has dominion over the body, they are using words without meaning, or are confessing in specious phraseology that they are ignorant of the cause of the said action... Remember that actions - as when a mouse takes the cheese in a trap, a frog snaps an insect, or even when an immature, short-tempered human culprit commits manslaughter - come first; before emotions and feelings.
But one wonders how the world would have evolved if humanity had dawned with a population deprived of the ability to respond toward others with sympathy, attachment, embarrassment, and other social emotions that are known to be present in simple form in some nonhuman species. (One might be tempted to dismiss this thought experiment summarily by saying that such a species would have been extinct soon.)
In a society deprived of such emotions and feelings, there would have been no spontaneous exhibition of the innate social responses that foreshadow a simple ethical system - no budding altruism, no kindness when kindness is due, no censure when censure is appropriate, no automatic sense of one's own failings. In the absence of the feelings of such emotions, humans would not have engaged in a negotiation aimed at finding solutions for problems faced by the group, e g, identification and sharing of food resources, defense against threats or disputes among its members.
There would not have been a gradual build-up of wisdom regarding the relationships among social situations, natural responses, and a host of contingencies such as the punishment or reward incurred by permitting or inhibiting natural responses. The codification of rules eventually expressed in systems of justice and sociopolitical organisations is hardly conceivable in these circumstances, even assuming that the apparatus of learning, imagination, and reasoning could be otherwise intact in the face of the emotional ravages, a most unlikely possibility.
The essence of ethical behaviour does not begin with humans. Evidence from birds (such as ravens) and mammals (such as vampire bats, wolves, baboons, and chimpanzees) indicate that other species can behave in what appears, to our sophisticated eyes, as an ethical manner. They exhibit sympathy, attachments, embarrassment, dominant pride, and humble submission. They can censure and recompense certain actions of others.
Nonhumans can certainly cooperate or fail to do so, within their group. This may displease those who believe just behaviour is an exclusively human trait. As if it were not enough to be told by Copernicus that we are not in the center of the universe, by Charles Darwin that we have humble origins, and by Sigmund Freud that we are not full masters of our behaviour, we have to concede that even in the realm of ethics there are forerunners and descent. But human ethical behaviour has a degree of elaboration and complexity that makes it distinctly human.
Importantly, situations that evoke emotions and feelings call for solutions that include cooperation. It is not difficult to imagine the emergence of justice and honour out of the practices of cooperation. Yet another layer of social emotions, expressed in the form of dominant or submissive behaviours within the group, would have played an important role in the active give and take that define cooperation.
As conscious, intelligent, and creative creatures immersed in a cultural environment, we humans have been able to shape the rules of ethics, structure their codification into law, and design the application of the law. We will remain involved in that effort. Yet it is apparent that, as human societies became more complex and certainly for ten thousand or more years since agriculture was developed, human survival and well-being depended on an additional kind of nonautomated governance in a social and cultural space.
I am referring to what we usually associate with reasoning and freedom of decision. It is not just that we humans show compassion for another suffering being as chimpanzees and other nonhuman species can. We also know that we feel compassion, and, perhaps as a consequence, we have been doing something about the circumstances behind the events that provoked that emotion and feeling in the first place.
And what about good and evil actions? Good actions and evil actions are not merely actions that do or do not accord with individual appetites and emotions. Good actions are those that, while producing good for the individual via the natural appetites and emotions, do not harm other individuals. The injunction is unequivocal. An action that might be personally beneficial but would harm others is not good because harming others always haunts and eventually harms the individual who causes the harm. Consequently such actions are evil. "... our good is especially in the friendship that links to other humans and to advantages for society" (The Ethics, Part IV, Proposition 10).
It is reasonable to hypothesize that the tendency to seek social agreement has itself been incorporated in biological mandates, at least in part, due to the evolutionary success of populations whose brains expressed cooperative behaviours to a high degree.
Our route to understand human development is through the use of reason and feeling. Reason lets us see the way, while feeling is the enforcer of our determination to see. We are out to make free humans of ourselves ultimately. Freedom is what gives us dignity. "Let every human think what he/she wants and say what he/she thinks." There is a struggle between control, power, and freedom, but whatever the intensity of this - often open - conflict, a spark was needed to light the fire of human creativity, and that spark was freedom.
The importance of feeling free is vital; it gives any sentient being grace and honour. The moment you give that up, you give up a great deal. You basically - as a human - give up the pleasure of looking yourself in the face in the mirror saying, "that is me."
Do we have joy and freedom, rather than human tragedy and anguish? Do we experience sorrow because of our feelings, in addition to having consciousness and memory, two biological gifts we share with other species but that attain their greatest magnitude and degree of sophistication in humans? In the strict meaning of the word, consciousness signifies the presence of a mind with a self, but in practical human terms the word actually signifies more. With the help of autobiographical memory, consciousness provides us with a self enriched by the records of our own individual experience.
What we do not know cannot hurt us. If we had the gift of consciousness but were largely deprived of memory, there would be no remarkable anguish either. Were it not for this high level of human consciousness there would be no remarkable anguish to speak of, now or at the dawn of humanity. What we do know, in the present, but are unable to place in the context of our personal history, could only hurt us in the present. It is the two gifts combined, consciousness and memory, along with their abundance, that result in the human drama and confer upon that drama a tragic status, then and now.
One, or perhaps the greatest, question posed to science is: what is consciousness? Other phenomena - time and space, matter and energy, even life itself - look tractable. They can be measured and objectified, and thus theorised about. Consciousness, by contrast, is subjective. A conscious being knows he is conscious - "Cogito, ergo sum" - but he cannot know that any other being is.
Subjective though it is, consciousness looks like a specific phenomenon, not a mere side-effect of something else. That suggests it has evolved, and has a biological purpose. These things - specificity and purpose - give researchers something to hang on to.
A crucial property of consciousness is that it integrates many sorts of experience, both sensory and internally generated. Discovery how this integration happens is known as the "binding problem". A phenomenon correlated with consciousness, which some think may help solve the binding problem, is a pattern of electric impulses, known as gamma waves, which beat at an average frequency of 40 HZ, in synchrony in different parts of a person's brain.
These waves are strongest during conscious concentration on tasks, are always present when someone is conscious, and largely disappear when he is asleep, unless he is dreaming. Many neuroscientists suspect gamma waves' synchrony means they are acting like the clock in a computer processor, co-ordinating the activities of disparate parts of the brain - in other words, binding them together.
Seeking an evolutionary explanation for consciousness, we might suggest that an animal which can model another's behaviour can gain an advantage by anticipating it. We further suggest that, since the only model available to a mind that wishes to understand another's is itself, a theory of mind necessarily requires self-awareness. In other words, consciousness.
It would be impossible, for example, to define a [conscious] being, or rather generally being, as a presence since absence too discloses being, since not to be there means still to be. The object does not possess being, and its existence is not a participation in being, nor any other kind of relation. That is the only way to define its manner of being; the object does not hide being - not for the wonder International Search Engine Optimization Consultant / SEO designer de nos jours; nor for a poisson d'avril - but neither does it reveal being.
Consciousness is not a mode of particular knowledge which may be called an inner meaning or self-knowledge; it is the transphenomenal dimension of being in the subject. The existence of consciousness comes from consciousness itself. By that we need not understand that consciousness "derives from nothingness." There can not be "nothingness of consciousness" before consciousness.
"Before" consciousness one can conceive only of a plenum of being of which no element can refer to an absent consciousness. If there is to be nothingness of consciousness, there must be a consciousness which has been and which is no more and a witnessing consciousness which poses the nothingness of the first consciousness for a synthesis of recognitions.
Consciousness is prior to nothingness and "is derived" from being. That certainly does not mean that consciousness is the foundation of its being. On the contrary, there is a full contingency of the being of consciousness. We wish only to show (1) That nothing is the cause of consciousness. (2) That consciousness is the cause of its own being.
As a web text writer / International (SEO) Search Engine Optimization Consultant, not using haut en bas verbiage but legalese, describing consciousness as ipso facto or mutatis mutandis or sui generis might be proper. Consciousness has nothing substantial, can not be compared or related to anything other than its opposite; it is pure "appearance" in the sense that it exists only to the degree to which it appears. But it is precisely because consciousness is pure appearance, because it is total emptiness (since the entire world is outside it) - it is because of this appearance and existence within it that it can be considered as the absolute. Il faut en finir.
Finding the neural correlates of consciousness, or even understanding what it is for and how it evolved, does not truly address the question of what it actually is - of what it is people are experiencing while they are conscious. This question has come to be known as the "hard problem" of consciousness. The nut of the hard problem is to make ineffability effable.
Some scientists concede that consciousness is real and may actually have great moral and political value, but that it fulfils no biological function whatsoever. Consciousness might just be the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes. Consciousness might be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It does not do anything. It is just there.
The worm of consciousness mines but also proves our existence; it is no use denying it, even as an act of faith. "The myth that denies itself, the faith that pretends to know: this is the gray hell, this is the universal schizophrenia," as one philosopher wrote a long time ago.
However, unconsciousness, or subconsciousness as I would prefer to call it in this context, is another matter altogether - not directly the opposite of consciousness - but rather as Carl Gustav Jung defined it, "reality in potentia." We question ourselves throughout our lives, seeking for clues. The unconscious feeds us with such clues in our dreams, "backward-looking dreams or forward-looking anticipations," which have always, in all cultures, been read as intimations of the future.
As images from the unconscious become conscious, telling us something about ourselves, they add to our sense of who we are, like the pages that are already read in a book. The fathoming of the unconscious is never exhausted. That lifelong quest, the embodiment of intuitions and revelations about ourselves, we can call "individuation". Jung defined individuation as "the process by which a person becomes a psychological 'in-dividual,' that is, a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole'" of all parts assembled and coherent, including those that feel unfathomable and unfamiliar to the person.
Other fields of scientific endeavour circumvent ineffability with mathematics. No one can truly conceive of a light-year or a nanosecond, let alone dimensions or wave-particle duality, but maths makes these ideas tractable.
No such short-cut invented so far can take a human inside the mind of e g an animal. Indeed, for all the sophistication of theory-of-mind it is difficult, as everyday experience shows, to take a human being inside the mind of another human being. The hard problem may thus turn out to be the impossible problem, the one that science can never solve.
Knowing oneself is important - and difficult - however, knowing others, not only treating them like oneself wants to be treated, is a worthy objective, aim, and goal on this great planet.
Recent evidence and wisdom supports the view that cooperative human behaviour engages pleasure/reward systems in the brain. Violation of social norms causes guilt or shame or grief, all of which are variants of unhealthy sorrow. "Therefore, in life, more than anything, or anywhere else, partner-up with a strong, happy and unselfish rather than with a weak, sad and selfish person..."
 Easily written...
Are mind and body two different things or just one? If they are not the same, are mind and body made from two different substances or just one? The above reasoning reveals the connection to the almost ultimate web text / Search Engine Optimization mystery, but not the mystery itself.
To behave "authentically" is to understand that we can make and remake ourselves by our actions and thus become what our acts define us as being. To talk rather than act is moral self-deception - "mauvaise foi" (bad faith) - which involves our behaving as insensate things rather than "authentic" human beings. In bad faith, we evade responsibility by not exploiting the possibilities of choice; in short, by not being fully human.
When considering the degree to which "authenticity" is marketed as a substitute for value, echoes the words of George Burns. When asked his secret to success the sage and screen deity replied: "You have got to be honest. If you can fake that you have got it made." A cynik - one might say - is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
People are capable of Bad Faith to the most important general characteristic of consciousness itself, namely its being separated from the world of things by a gap or Nothingness. It is the experience of this gap which reveals itself to us first and foremost by our ability to negate propositions, to deny the truth, and to describe things not only truly but also falsely, which makes us conscious of ourselves as different and distinguishable from the world which surrounds us.
In being thus conscious of ourselves we are thereby rendered conscious of the world. Consciousness therefore, as well as imagination and freedom are all brought into being by the emptiness of Nothingness.
There is no doubt that the methods of arguments used can appear grotesque and absurd. But they arise out of the existentialist conviction that to understand a man - or a woman, as is nowadays important to emphasize - must find out and experience for him/herself. For consummate philosophers as Kirkegaard and Sartre alike, it was of no use to tell people that something was true; they had to feel that it was so, and accept it for themselves.
Sartre even construed and concocted the expression Verité vecué meaning communicated truth - in its origin, lived truth, experienced truth. Personally, I believe you can often be too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek the truth, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.
Many, or I would argue even most, true metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire to venture outside the limits of experience.
We are, however, entitled to have faith in our procedure just as long as it does the work which it is designed to do - that is, enables us to predict future experience, and so to control our environment. Of course, the fact that a certain form of procedure has always been successful in practice affords no logical guarantee that it will continue to be so.
But then it is a mistake to demand a guarantee where it is logically impossible to obtain one. This does not mean that it is irrational to expect future experience to conform to the past. For when we come to define "rationality" we shall find that for us "being rational" entails being guided in a particular fashion by past experience.
Human understanding is so constituted that it will lose itself in contradictions when it goes beyond the limits of possible experience and attempt to deal with things in themselves. This may, or may not, be a matter of logic or a matter of fact. Our minds can not conceivably have the power of penetrating - as it appears - beyond the phenomenal world, but they are merely devoid of it.
How then, asks the attentive critic, is it possible to know only what lies within the bounds of sense-experience; and how can any wise pundit tell what are the boundaries beyond which the human understanding may not venture, unless he succeeds in passing them himself? Well, "in order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit." Es kommt drauf an, und es ist ein ganz einfaches Ding...
The fruitlessness of attempting to transcend the limits of possible sense-experience will be deduced, not from a psychological hypothesis concerning the actual constitution of the human mind, but from the rule which determines the literal significance of language. The sentences produced will fail to conform to the conditions under which alone a sentence can be literally significant.
What determines the being of the appearance is the fact that it appears. And since we have restricted reality to the phenomenon, we can say of the phenomenon that it is as it appears. Why not push the idea to its limit and say that the being of the appearance is its appearing? This is simply a way of choosing new words to clothe the old "Esse est percipi" (To be is to be perceived) of Berkeley. The percipi would refer to the percipiens - the known to knowledge and knowledge to the being who knows (in his capacity as being, not as being known); that is, knowledge refers to consciousness.
John Locke insisted that “Whatever idea is in the mind is either an actual perception or else, having been an actual perception, is so in the mind that either that by the memory it can be made an actual perception again”. Locke said that “Thought and Idea are the same thing”, and showed how this account of ideas can be derived from a few definitions, the main two being (1) the definition of “idea" as “the Representation of something in the mind” and (2) “a Representation of something in the mind, and to frame such a Representation of an Object, is to think”.
Locke further speaks of ideas as the objects of thought, as if ideas are something different from thought, but we take his broad explanation for his conviction that to have ideas and to perceive are the same. He professes ignorance as to what ideas are, “any further than as they are perceptions we experiment (i e, experience) in ourselves.
Perception, Knowledge, Consciousness and Truth; Are we squaring the circle at last?
Locke defines knowledge as ”the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas”, and he explicitly includes among his list of types of agreement that of coexistence. To the extent that we can discover truths by careful observation and experimentation, Locke accepted the corpuscular account of matter and perception.
Insisting that each one of us must, if we are to avoid borrowed opinions, see truths for ourselves, like Descartes, he placed intuition (cognitive “seeing”, grasping, apprehending) at the head of his list of methods to knowledge. Whatsoever is, is; or a more particular idea be affirmed of itself, as A man is a man. It is the difference of the ideas which, “as soon as the terms are understood, makes the truth of the proposition visible”.
“The Understanding is the most elevated faculty of the soul,” Locke said, “so it is employed with a greater and more constant delight than any of the other. Its searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure. Every step the mind takes in its progress towards knowledge makes some discovery, which is not only new, but the best too, for the time at least.”
All consciousness is consciousness of something, even of consciousness itself. What is or could then this consciousness of consciousness be? We suffer to such an extent from the illusion of the primacy of knowledge that we are immediately ready to make of the consciousness of consciousness an idea idea (in the manner of Spinoza); that is, a knowledge of knowledge. Wanting to express the obvious "To know is to be conscious of knowing," we might interpret it in these terms: "To know is to know that one knows."
In this way we should have defined reflection or positional consciousness of consciousness, or better yet knowledge of consciousness. This would be a complete consciousness directed toward which is not it; that is, toward consciousness as object of reflection. It would then transcend itself and like the positional consciousness of the world it would be exhausted in aiming at its object. But that object would be itself a consciousness.
Immanuel Kant once said: "All our knowledge begins with the senses." Kant with this statement proposed that all knowledge commences from the senses but "proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered." Culture overall - whether personal, professional or national - is about matters of the mind; behaviour and actions are the observable outcomes of these preferences and adherent knowledge.
The rhetorical criteria by which knowledge is tested and accepted and is thus transmitted successfully are themselves social conventions that are subject to cultural evolution. To say that propositions are accepted when they are supported by evidence is not much help, since it has to be specified what "supported" really means and which kinds of evidence are admissible.
A society in which "evidence" is defined as support in the writing-s of earlier sages would be very different from one that relied on experiments, but even the latter has to determine what experimental design is regarded as permissible and what outcome is accepted as decisive. Unlike what happens in biological evolution, cultural selection is not natural but is mostly conscious. The questions are what happens during the acquisition process and how are such choices made.
Persuasion and the diffusion of new ideas depend on many factors. One seemingly unassailable factor is that when knowledge is effective (that is, when techniques or predictions based on this knowledge work well), beliefs can change quickly. "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge," as Stephen Hawking phrased it. I'd say human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
We may here distinguish between propositional and prescriptive knowledge, the former roughly corresponding to a genotype, the latter to an observable technique. There is no easy mapping between the two. Sometimes techniques are used with virtually no understanding of why and how they work. At other times, the necessary underlying knowledge may well be there, but the techniques fail to emerge. Moreover, there is no clear-cut casual between them; the best we can say is that they co-evolve.
All knowledge though is power, and the real test of "knowledge" is not whether it is true, but whether it strengthens us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. (Ask any renowned physicist about the Quantum Theory versus Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and you will get the answer that both theories are wholly true and correct, but they are not compatible with one another...) Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things, for example, writing and designing a creative filter-avoiding 3-D internet Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithm with Chinese characters, would constitute knowledge.
Every form of writing is, in a sense, a translation of the words thought or spoken into a visible, concrete representation. The question of the relation between the revealed word and human language is central. Language, we know, is our most effective tool for communicating but, at the same time, an impediment to our full understanding. Nevertheless, it is necessary to go through language in order to reach that which cannot be put into words. Language may materialize into something tangible, as "speech made visible".
All writing is the art of materialized thought. "When a word is written," wrote Saint Augustine, "it makes a sign to the eyes whereby that which is the domain of the ears enters the mind." Writing belongs to a group of conjuring arts related to the visualizing and transmission of ideas, emotions, and intentions. Painting, singing, and reading are all part of this peculiar human activity born of the capacity to imagine the world in order to experience it. Language, even in Hell, grants us existence; and the intellect, the seat of language, is humankind's driving force, not the body, its vessel.
Readers belong to societies of the written word and, as every member of societies must, they try to learn the code by which their fellow citizens communicate. Not every society requires the visual encoding of its language: for many, sound is enough. The old Latin tag scripta manent, verba volant, which is supposed to mean "what is written endures, but what is spoken vanishes," is obviously not true in all oral societies. That is also the meaning readers discover: only when read do the written words come to life.
Certainly the passage from spoken to written language was less an improvement in quality than a change in direction. Thanks to writing speakers are able to overcome the limitations imposed by time and space. Either as the inspiration that led to the invention of writing or as its consequence, the assumption that justifies the existence of writing as an instrument of thought is one of linguistic fatalism. Just as everything in the universe can be given a name to identify it, and every name can be expressed in a sound, every sound has its representation. Nothing can be uttered that cannot be written down and read. Writing does not reproduce the spoken word: it renders it visible.
We use words to try to recount, describe, explain, judge, demand, beg, affirm, allude, deny - and yet in every case we must rely on our interlocutor's intelligence and generosity to construe from the sounds we make the sense and meaning we wish to convey. The abstract language of images helps us no farther, because something in our constitution makes us want to translate into words even these shadows, even that which we know for certain is untranslatable, immanent, unconscious. 'A picture may say more than a thousand words, albeit,...'
A language can be incomprehensible because we have never learned it or because we have forgotten it: either case presupposes the possibility of an original communal understanding. Not to be able to communicate with one's fellow human beings has been compared to being buried alive. The notion of a primeval single common language that was fragmented into a plurality of language bears a symbolic relationship to contemporary theories about the origins of our verbal capacities. Indeed, humans not only can learn an existing language but can take an active role in the shaping of new languages.
"He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe." -Percy Shelley, Prometheus unbound Language is "the beginningless and endless One", the imperishable of which the essential nature is the Word. Language is c co-terminus with human existence or the existence of any sentient being. Things perceived and things thought, as well as the relationship among them, are determined by the words that language lends them.
We name things and images - in words. Socrates argues (or at least, puts forward the suggestion) that "names rightly given are the likeness and images of the things which they name", but goes on to say that it is nobler and clearer to learn from the things themselves rather than from their images.
A name defines us from outside. Even if we choose a name to call ourselves, the identity purported by the name is exterior, something we wear for the convenience of others. Names, however, sometimes encapsulate an individual essence. "Caesar I was, and now I am Justinian," proclaims the emperor who codified the Roman system of law in the sixth century, and sort of redefines himself as he acts and implements a new system.
In an effort to translate the idea that things are metaphors of themselves, that in an effort to translate the experience of reality into language, we sometimes see things as the words that name them, and the feature of things as their incarnated script. The question "Who am I?" is, however, no more fully answered by a name than a book is revealed fully by its title.
We know something about timing, logic, truth, feelings, consciousness, language, words - and their true meaning - and now, in order to be highly present and perceived on the Web, we need to implement a robust and functional International Search Engine Optimization (ISEO) strategy. "Why?" (in its many variations) is a question far more important in its asking than in the expectation of an answer.
Instead of getting the visitor of your website to think / ask, "How much will it cost?", or "How long will it take?", the person should elaborate on "Why?" The first medieval punctus interrogativus (?) was defined as a mark that signaled a question which conventionally required an answer. In a ninth-century copy of a text by Cicero, a question is followed by a symbol that looks like a staircase, maybe implying that questioning elevates us. What we want to know and what we can imagine are somehow, as well, the two sides of the same magical page.
Your international website should be "thought that generates thought," and even more, "experience that generates experience." There should exist a constant state of rich uncertainty. Only fools have made up their minds and are certain. The state of questioning is as rewarding as, or even more so than, that of knowing. Curiosity has a very sweet taste. Words should express the pleasure felt in the expectant moment that precedes the acquisition of knowledge.
Prior to experience, anything might be the cause of anything; it is experience, as well as abstractions of reason, which help us to understand life. Curiosity is born from the awareness of our own ignorance and prompt us to acquire, so far as possible, "a more exact and fuller knowledge of the object it represents." Curiosity in all its forms is the means of advancing from what we did not know to what we do not yet know. A vocabulary, a certain terminology, that we may face or experience, is nothing more than a means, a method.
We may not be innovators or original thinkers, albeit to our common stock of "Why?" and "How?" and "When?" we should add "Who?" and "What?" The pursuit of knowledge of what is good, true, and just is an ongoing endeavour - implicit in all our International (SEO) Search Engine Optimization assignments (we would say that, wouldn't we?) - with no absolute conclusion, a process of concinnity rather than a ditto product.
Whether or not a question leads us up the garden path may depend not only on the words chosen to ask it but on the appearance and presentation of those words. We have long understood the importance of the physical aspect of the text, and not only of its contents, to transmit our meanings. Every text depends on the features of its support, be it clay or stone, papyrus or computer screen. No text is ever exclusively virtual, independent of its material context: every text, even an electronic one, is defined by both its words and the space in which these words exist.
Boldness and self-esteem are utmost necessities in order to communicate forcefully and effectively on the Net. Throughout college- and university, I trained and served as an air artillery aviator, and even before that, as a teenager, I flew solo (myself) to Paris - and also London for that matter - six years Charles Lindberg's junior. Although covering a shorter distance, in a more modern aircraft, and far better and more broadly educated, the wintry climatic conditions were far worse for me; a Scandinavian/European youth flying record that still holds, and ever since I worship boldness, boldness, and boldness, more than any other human trait.
No man is an island, and we're born not alike, but with different talents. "There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots" is an old adage that we in our modern world can disregard. Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. The only thing in life achieved without effort is failure, and surely, we'll always find the good people on the rough road. In order to rank high on international internet search engines we need to have a bold and consummate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. Being meek will not strengthen our method and endeavour.
Yet, defining boldness solely by vision and imagination is almost always a mistake. None of the top-ranking corporate winners of today would have made it to the internet ascending-heights had they not successfully executed plans they laid out years earlier. Linking vision to execution is the essence of a good strategy. The visions of some folks have definitely affected the world and the world belongs to people with something to do, say or write, however, as Arthur Schopenhauer advised us to remember: "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."
"Ambitious but doable" is a first requirement for a realistic vision. A second is to strive for simplicity and pragmatism. If the goal is inherently complex - like entering the Chinese market utilizing existing subcontractors from a dozen Western countries - what is needed is to break it down into smaller, closer steps, while resisting the temptation to add complications as the strategy develops.
Entering Asian markets, for example China's (I ought to know, having undertaken extensive university and industry research - as well as marketing/sales negotiations - there as a young graduate back in the mid-1980's), one does not assume that boldness requires an entirely new product or approach. Sometimes innovative new paths - such as using Baidu in the vernacular - branch off from existing ways of doing things; and, perhaps, the sooner the better.
One might ask how to build on the past, but at the same time challenge the things and procedures that do not need to be there any more. If things - optimizing marketing and sales through, for example, wise and prudent SEO - come off, it will provide further proof that to succeed, you do not always have to aim for the stars. Sometimes, you simply have to come up with a different way of using what is right there under your feet - and on the Net. "What we look for is here, and nowhere else," as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a long, long time ago.
Admiration is a form of inverted envy, and this is what I have and feel for all those entrepreneurial individuals out there in the ball-game of life, being bold and taking risks, on behalf of us all, intrinsically not hurting anyone else, and at the behest of no one ... but themselves. Despite dodgy odds, the best entrepreneurs push on. People often persevere, from what I can tell, because they have an almost irrational commitment to a cause.
An entrepreneur - from the French entreprendre, meaning to undertake - is defined as a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable intitiative and risk. We care about entrepreneurs - they may be inventors, but more often than not innovators - and we care especially for young entrepreneurs. There are forces at work in young people, the greatest of which is growth, and they may experience a certain hopeless helplessness, leaving juveniles bitterly acrimonious.
Instinct and law demand of young people obedience. But growth demands disobedience; and here truth and myth may collide, if we are not misreading our meek compatriots completely. Any government or state of society which fails to win for itself some measure of the generosity and loyalty natural to youth is in for grave trouble. And, indeed, experience has proved it: of all forms of breeding, that of human cattle is one of the hardest. The young West glows white-hot with talent, and they are indeed our most valuable asset, surpassing all others by a wide margin.
Competitive war is part of nature, and struggle breeds greatness. It is Mother Nature's way of testing her creatures; sort of refining the pecking order. Doing well is not enough; we also want to do better than our peers. This status anxiety - unfortunately and sadly I must add - runs [too] deep. True humbleness comes from not comparing oneself with others, in each and every single area. From a society that valued the creation of a unique storehouse of ideas in each individual, alas, man is moving fast to a socially constructed mind that values speed and group approval over originality and creativity.
My partners and associates may on occasion exceed me in experience and ability, albeit, the Search Engine Optimization team courage d'esprit will always be decisive and of paramount importance. The International Search Engine Optimization - ISEO - Process is one of group - as opposed to individual - effort; there must [most likely] be a complicated and careful division of labour, which is peculiar to the nature of the enterprise, and by no means characteristic of all familiar and homely efforts on internet.
Boutique Ekman - as an international strategic/tactical webtext, internet Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and graphic design bureau - has on a permanent basis linguistic communication and computer academics retained from 12 countries: USA - Canada - Brazil - England - France - Germany - Holland - Sweden - Denmark - Norway - Russia - China, and, can therefore, offer our clients unique solutions relevant to each opportunity and client desire.
As an established digital marketing group we know most - or all - of what is worth knowing regarding Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Our broad academic linguistic competence, which we apply to multi-language, multi-cultural and multi-purpose platforms, is what will indeed ensure overall success in the global marketplace. The secret formula lies "in bridging the gap / Between the word and our hearts".
I think it is vitally important to preserve that feeling - also of pain - that wants us to crawl out of our physical existence. The ancient Greeks had the expression gnothi seauton - "know thouself" - albeit, let us never be contained, caged, immobilized or broken by ourselves or others. Other people - many, even most; not all - will try to impose a levy on you, make you conform, but thoughts are "free of duty". That is the varnished truth, and, in art, truth is important, not sincerity. L'enfer c'est les autres - "Hell is other people," as J-P Sartre formulated his experience. We would say, "Hold your ground; firmly!"
On critics and criticasters: We should remember the consummate poet writer Alexander Pope’s remark about “the constant and eternal aversion of all bad writers to a good one” and ask where the provocation began. Pope further stated that “the Dunces (showing a calm contempt for them on all occasions) after all, did not have to write – there were other ways of earning a living;” but having committed themselves to the pen, their chief quarrel with Pope was his creative energy and their own impotence, which they exposed even as they denied it.
He angrily wrote “the Dunces’ natural habit is sewage; ev’n those you touch not, hate you.” The idea that writers such as these compete only to reach the bottom first, had been growing in Pope’s imagination ever since reading the elegant jibe of the Earl of Dorset:
"As skilful divers to the bottom fall, Sooner than those who cannot swim at all;
So in this way of writing without thinking, Thou hast a strange alacrity of sinking."
Pope further questioned why the flow of bad writing was so unquenchable. Because it was so much easier to write badly than well. But why did the Theobalds of this world not try harder? Because they were in love with their own productions, and refused to acknowledge any talent larger than their own.
Horace had seen what Pope was in the process of discovering – that the writing of effective philosophy was first and foremost a technical problem, of achieving easiness without loss of weight, and authority without dogmatism.
"True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."
Pope was a learned writer, not for scholarship’s sake, but from a sense of responsibility: he had to know where each word came from, and what work it had done in the past, before he could decide what work it could do in the present. But this is only the beginning of communication...
Contemporaries of Pope were struck by the fact that he was a cripple, and ambitious, and a genius (in that order); I would put it the other way around – that Pope was a genius, who was therefore ambitious, and who happened to be a cripple. Even Voltaire’s pity gradually turned into admiration and at last even into envy.
It is rattling in all of us to compete, and we humans are the recent descendants of shy, murderous apes. Envy is the eternal worm that never rests, and each worm has its own individual terroir. What is left behind after years of observations and questioning is a pervasive sense that beneath the veneer of human civility, something wilder is always lurking. My long-time advice is, and remains, "compete with yourself [only]." All honour to benchmarking, however, bear in mind you stand above the rat race, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
Our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. We argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour.
Though, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the individual level. ("Special" and "limited" are important distinctions in this sentence.) Universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are overall concepts which sadly and simply do not make evolutionary sense.
As a linguistic developer / lingustic investigator, I am not advocating a morality based on evolution (I have seen that on one too many occasions), but rather telling how things have evolved. A human society based simply on the gene's law of universal ruthless selfishness is indeed a very nasty society, albeit, we may deplore something, but it does not stop it being true. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
However, there are those who say "we are in times where there are no human heroes" and I would retort, saying "these people just do not know where to look". I meet heroic people on a regular basis, people who consider spineless appeasement a "no, no", individuals who would say "I will do my utmost as if the whole issue of this rightful struggle depended on me alone". There are persons - close, and amongst us - who want to make that difference...
When we search for consummate, state-of-the-art writing / communication partners, we always look for persons who can find things out for themselves; for no one without imagination was ever very great in his / her profession. If imagination makes for honour in many things, it will, above all, honour you in the web design and Search Engine Optimization competition; a sort of war - with words - for attention, and more.
And it is to be observed, that every creation (applied fantasy; imagination), even though minor, is celebrated by historical writers, as is seen where they, for example, praised Alexander the Great, who, in order to break camp more secretly, did not give signal with the trumpet, but with a hat on the end of a lance.
For the benefit of our customers and clients globally - whether you are in Energy & utilities, Financial services, Technology, Industrial, Services, Transportation, Communications, Public sector, Defence, Consumer products, Retail, Automotive, Health care, et al - we search for [speculative] knowledge, the rarest ingredient in the creation of an efficacious Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and web site, only produced by the most competent participants this industry possess.
It (speculative knowledge) requires of its producers that they be masters of the subject matter, impartial in the presence of new evidence, ingenious in the development of research techniques, imaginative in their hypotheses, sharp in the analysis of their own predilections or prejudices, and skilful in the presentation of their conclusions.
It requires of its producers the best in professional training, the highest intellectual integrity, and a very large amount of wordly wisdom. In this case, what I am speaking of is not the important but gross substance which can be called recorded fact; it is that subtle form of knowledge which comes from a set of well-stocked and well-ordered brain cells.
We should be effective, primarily; and efficient if possible. The International (SEO) Search Engine Optimization Strategists should be considered sub-contractors to top management in any organisation, small- and large. The strategists will have their greatest marketing success when their creation bears the unmistakable signs of superior research, cautious development, sound design, and careful production. International SEO - Search Engine Optimization and web text strategy, as a state-of-the-art discipline, can not be just a hunch; it should be organized with a defined management objective.
Genius nor fortune are altogether necessary to attain a high International - SEO - Search Engine Optimization ranking, but rather imagination, creativity, and a happy shrewdness. We should and must also: "Try! Fail! Try harder! Fail again!" We must have perseverance - showing grit, combined with patient fortitude - and be undismayed in adversity. A "little shot that keeps shooting" - or an Edison trying and probing ten thousand experiments - come to my mind. Success does not always breed success, and alas, we often sort of conceive it as ... conclusive.
If you want a creative and impressive web/internet first page that implores, as well as explores, what we call AIDAS (Attention - Interest - Desire - Action - Satisfaction), like Franz Kafka's first page in The Trial - known as the most highly esteemed page in the history of literature - you have come to the right place, right now.
As the leading global contemporary Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and web text consultancy, we can not in honest earnest and with common sense promise that we can provide and supply the ultimate bonus of turning your name - like Google or Hoover or Uber - into an international [performative] verb. Name and brand recognition, however, are the best chance of making a good first impression, and we can promise you a qualified time estimate for enhancing your presence worldwide - on the Net. Bear in mind overall though, that great companies can survive boring names but even the best names cannot save dismal companies.
Verbs, which seem on grounds of vocabulary, to be specially performative verbs serve the special purpose of making explicit - which is not the same as stating or describing - what precise action it is that is being performed by the issuing of the utterance. Other words which seem to have a special performative function - and indeed have it - such as "guilty", "off-side", et al, do so because, in so far and when they are linked in "origin" with these special explicit performative verbs like "promise", "pronounce", "find", et al.
Are we floundering here? To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges. Let us take an example: the uses of "I search on Google" as opposed to the use of that verb in another tense or in another person. "I searched on Google" and "he searches on Google" are not performatives but describe actions on my and his part respectively, actions each consisting in the utterance of the performative "I search".
If I utter the word "I search on Google...", I do not state that I utter the words "I search on Google", or any other words, but I perform the act of searching; and similarly, if he says he searches, i e, says the words "I search on Google", he searches. But if I utter the words "he searches on Google", I only state that he utters - or rather has uttered - the words "I search on Google": I do not perform his act of searching, which only he can perform: I describe his performances of the act of searching, but I do my own searching, and he must do his own.
We may suggest that the performative is not altogether so obviously distinct from the constative - the former happy or unhappy, the latter true or false. They are very commonly the same sentence used on different occasions of utterance. We shall have to revert to the notion of the explicit performative, and we must discuss historically at least how some of these perhaps not ultimately serious complexities arise. All this is bound to be a little boring to read and digest; however, not merely so much as to think and write. The real fun comes when we - in due course - begin to apply it to reality.
We may contemplate identical sentences used on different occasions, and Friedrich Nietzsche is father to the notion that you cannot divorce what is being said from who is saying it. Ideas did pour out of him in a torrent of constantly evolving thought; ourselves finding inspiration in his subjectivity; in linguistic game-playing as a philosophical method; and in how Nietzsche merges truth, power and morality so that might is right and speech is itself an assertion of strength.
Many - probably most - people do not really comprehend Nietzsche and his views on God and the Übermensch, although they are clearly visible between the lines of his many works. Nietzsche stated the ultimate objective as a search for the truth, and this has led ineluctably to atheism, "the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a 2,000-year discipline in truth, which in the end forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God."
"God is dead..." Nietzsche had written earlier. "And we have killed him." Nietzsche considered the Übermensch not as any - or one individual beyond our reach and understanding, but simply the heroic soul eager to say Yes to anything, joy and sorrow alike.
Sometimes, when the task at hand is to describe who someone is, it is helpful to describe who someone is not; and it is also a psychological truism that the higher the number of instances we hear something, the greater the likelihood we'll accept it. Keep in mind, that as critical as the content of the message is, delivery trumps it - it is that important.
Understanding this will make us take a quantum leap in getting to the truth. No matter if the communication conveys a quintessential example of what we call an "unintended message", or what we sometimes refer to as "truth in the lie", no matter how brilliant and compelling the content is, without an effective deliverance the exercise and effort is thoroughly wasted.
The takeaway here is that a message - from Nietzsche or Joe Smith; the same principle applies - needs to be relevant and believable, but not necessary factual. Convincing messages or statements are made to influence or manipulate perception, and they are extraordinarily powerful. Their power lies in the fact that they are either true, or they are irrefutable.
Nietzsche's intellectual aims were to "unmask" Christian morality; to offer a "critique of modernity"; to show that "the old truth is coming to an end" and find ways of affirming life nonetheless. Certainly no democrat, he had much to say about how the old order was decaying and perhaps too little about what could replace it. "From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step."
How can we use the great thinkers of the past to solve today's problems? Clear writing is the key to clear thinking and how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot. Nietzsche was a writer; his proper medium is words. By putting into spellbinding words - Nietzsche's metaphors are vital mental shorthand; great balls of fire - his confidence in [discovering] truth gave us something nobody else could: the precise nuance of solitaire and/or Gestalt. Not treating any or some individual en canaille, Nietzsche still believed only petty men seem normal..
We must now never forget that internet Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about psychology as much as it is about technology, or more; nor forget, given human nature, that good internet Search Engine Optimization (SEO) councels, whence soever they come and are implemented, are born of the mandate and wisdom of the principal/client, not vice versa. And before we can connect the dots, first we have to collect the dots.
If the preceding text contains words new to the reader-s, if they seem unduly concerned with semantics, I plead, as once John Locke, that "It may perhaps be censured an impertinent criticism in a discourse of this nature to find fault with words and names that have been obtained in the world. And yet possibly it may not be amiss to offer new ones when the old are apt to lead men into mistakes,..."
On the other hand, I don't suppose there's anything in here that somebody somewhere doesn't covet. The Web World is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose. When you enter the shady world of global Wordsmiths / Draughtsmen / Search Engine Optimization, you will discover that there are layer upon layer of decorum, and you have to be both clever and persistent to find out the truth... My scientific writing about Search Engine Optimization, in general, have not the good luck to please, yet if anybody is gravely offended with me, please be assured that – with the exception of half a dozen individuals – this [writing] was not intended for them. But if anybody thinks fit to be angry and rail at it, he or she may do it securely, for I shall find some better way of spending my time than in such kind of conversation. I shall always have the satisfaction to have aimed scientifically and sincerely at truth and usefulness.
An opportunity is a terrible thing to waste - and should it arise unexpectedly - it's not part of webtext designers' job description to add mirth to the party, but provide and demonstrate solid, tangible, palpable, and measureably high Search Engine Optimization rankings and stark visibility, in a realistic context.
The Web giveth, and the Web taketh away. Twist the Lion's tail and wait for the results, albeit, ask for some competent and professional advice - beforehand. Beware, jealous emulation will only be an entrepreneur's case of turkeys voting for Christmas; but, for creating a new Gestalt, we may need a lateral jump by the prepared mind - serendipity - followed by unrelenting work. Right, or wrong; Good, or bad? Wo steht das geschrieben?
Finally, let me add (pour la petite histoire) that to avoid having your digital derrière kicked by le pouvoir, do not use web statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost - for support rather than illumination - but faute de mieux (for lack of something better). Magical Might! We're making them (the statistics) ten feet tall; and not a single vacant web site available.
We need to give an impression of assurance, purpose, volcanic sincerity and quick perceptions. Continuous success will habituate us to profit, which need not be stated - simply tried out. Caveat emptor.
Thank you for reading my introduction, and,
"All's well that ends well."

Claes Gösta Ekman

CG Ekman / Chairman seo@boutique-ekman.com
P.S! Bear in mind - when you commence writing your creative site text - that tedium can be a useful spur to inspiration. In a recent study researchers found that people who had copied telephone numbers out - or, even better, just read them - before taking a creative test outperformed those who had not. Boredom, reckoned Nietzsche, is that disagreeable "windless calm" of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful breeze. There is nothing like boredom to make you write, agreed a young Agatha Christie. My own blood-line predecessors often stated - when I as a youth wanted something badly - that "hunger is the best spice". However, desperate efforts to induce creativity can be self-defeating, in the same way that telling yourself that you must get to sleep is bound to keep you awake. "Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night," as the foremost poet and thinker E.A. Poe formulated it - and tempus fugit. Erit hora - and in language, norma loquendi - what is actually thought, said or written - is the highest authority. Armchair free advice often repeats: Omit needless words! Less is more! Well, I'd say, "If you got something to tell, however lengthy, do it. More is more, and, after all, repetition is just a reinforcement," (or a just reinforcement), as we might more impeccably formulate it. Josef Stalin (The Steelman) often expressed: "Quantity is a quality in itself." Negligence of this fact can be an offence. In short, make your creative prose as lean and robust as necessary to maintain attention - but not more.

Leading International SEO Specialist

Boutique Ekman's professional experience in SEO - Search Engine Optimization - and digital marketing, and its global reach - geographically, the most extensive amongst search engine optimization firms - allows it to advise its clients in ways which are unique in the industry.
About us
Our broad academic linguistic competence, which we apply to multi-language, multi-cultural and multi-purpose platforms, is what will indeed ensure overall success in the global marketplace. The secret formula lies "in bridging the gap / Between the word and our hearts". How little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot...
CGR Ekman, Co-founder

STATE-OF-THE-WORD TECHNOLOGY; PARTNER UP WITH US!

In carrying out a vast amount of enormously complicated business we must be foresighted. We should be prepared for the future; we should put every effort into being well-girded for its contingencies; we must not be caught off balance by an unexpected happening. In the perfect grand Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence strategy nothing that happens can have been unexpected. The knowledge at issue is sometimes, or often, speculative; the obtaining of it puts a very high premium on the seeker's power of evaluation and reasoned extrapolition.
Not just anyone can hold a professional job in a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence organisation. My point is that a digital business intelligence organisation is a strange and wonderful collection of devoted specialists molded into a vigorous producing unit. That employees in such organisations, and within industry at large, must be loyal and discrete goes without saying.
When a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence producer - or a Search Engine Optimization / Artificial and Digital Marketing Intelligence Group as Boutique Ekman - realizes that there is no sense in forwarding to a commercial client / consumer / customer knowledge which does not correspond to preconceptions, then Intelligence is through. At this point there is neither tactical- or strategic Search Engine Optimization or Digital Marketing Intelligence and the client is out on his own with no more to guide him than the indications of the tea leaf and the crystal ball. He may do well with them, but for the long haul I would place my money elsewhere.
Without discarding intuition as invariably a false friend, I would urge the consumer to use it with a full knowledge of its frailties. When the findings of the Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence arm are regularly ignored by the consumer, and this because of consumer intuition, he should recognize that he is turning his back on the two instruments which Western man has so successfully deployed, since Aristotle steadily enlarged his horizon of knowledge - the instruments of reason and scientific method.
By using its backlog of experience it (Search Engine Optimization / Digital Marketing Intelligence) can anticipate - even create - consumer demand for a new product, but only by maintaining the quality can it expect continuous acceptance. Like many a producer of consumers' goods, Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence will have its greatest marketing success when its product bears the unmistakable signs of superior research, cautious development, sound design, and careful production.
Unless the kind of knowledge here under discussion is complete, accurate, and timely, and unless it is applicable to a problem (or an opportunity) which is up or coming up, it is useless. In this proposition is recognized the fact that Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence is not knowledge for knowledge's sake alone, but that it is knowledge for the practical matter of taking action.
Knowledge or truth is not the final objective or aim of the Company, Corporation or Business; it is victory in markets, domestic and global. Business is a struggle, in essence like warfare. We should be effective, primarily; and efficient if possible. The Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence division or staff should be considered sub-contractors to top management; the consumer-s of the Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence product.
Boldness is crucial in business, however, defining boldness solely by vision and imagination is almost always a mistake. None of the top-ranking corporate winners of today would have made it to the internet ascending-heights had they not successfully executed plans they laid out years earlier. Linking vision to execution is the essence of a good strategy. The visions of some folks have definitely affected the world and the world belongs to people with something to do, say or write, however, as Arthur Schopenhauer advised us to remember: "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."
"Ambitious but doable" is a first requirement for a realistic vision. A second is to strive for simplicity and pragmatism. If the goal is inherently complex - like entering the Chinese market utilizing existing subcontractors from a dozen Western countries - what is needed is to break it down into smaller, closer steps, while resisting the temptation to add complications as the strategy develops.
Entering Asian markets, for example China's (I ought to know, having undertaken extensive university and industry research - as well as marketing/sales negotiations - there as a young graduate back in the mid-1980's as mentioned before, and worth repeating), one does not assume that boldness requires an entirely new product or approach. Sometimes innovative new paths - such as using Baidu in the vernacular - branch off from existing ways of doing things; and, perhaps, the sooner the better.
One might ask how to build on the past, but at the same time challenge the things and procedures that do not need to be there any more. If things - optimizing marketing and sales through, for example, wise and prudent SEO - come off, it will provide further proof that to succeed, you do not always have to aim for the stars. Sometimes, you simply have to come up with a different way of using what is right there under your feet - and on the Net. "What we look for is here, and nowhere else," as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a long, long time ago.
KNOWLEDGEABLE LINGUISTICS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! Language, as we argue often and elsewhere, matters immensely. Sloppy use robs terms of their meaning. It also shapes perceptions; even public perceptions... Language is the foundation of civilization; it is the glue that holds the people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict, whether legal, commercial or political.
Humans form non-kin communities that do not involve direct control or acqaintance with others; we have science and mathematics and seek ultimate explanations. The introduction of language must surely be among the most important factors explaining how these remarkable capacities came to us. This conclusion makes sense on independent grounds. You cannot speculate and think about matters far and near unless you have some way of constructing an unlimited number of complex thoughts that you can detach from current circumstances and use to range over arbitrary times and circumstances.
Language gives you this capacity. You cannot organize and construct projects involving cooperation between individuals unless you have a way of planning well into the future, providing for contingencies, and assigning specific roles; language gives you that. So one reason to be interested in the science of language is because it tells us what natural languages are, what gives us, but no other creatures, language, and what explains the introduction of language and the beginnings of our remarkable cognitive capacities.
The science of language is an objective natural science that treats language as a biologically based system that evolved in a single individual and was genetically transmitted to progeny. Evolution of this sort – very different from the usual gradualist stories about evolution of complex systems – nicely explains how language came about. And there are important implications of the fact that language is a “natural object”, and that it came about by means of evolution.
One implication of the idea that the evolutionary introduction of language may have made us the distinctive species we are is that it – perhaps by itself – explains what is human about human nature. If this is so, there is a naturalistic – not religious, and not merely speculative – account of our distinctiveness and its origin. If so, and assuming that a creature’s fundamental needs are based on its nature, we might be able to find a naturalistic basis for views about “the Good Life for this kind of Creature”.
Rationalism consists of a set of proposals – a procedure, strategy, or methodology – for studying the human mind, and language in particular. The methodology is not chosen at random; it is adopted because rationalists believe that it offers the best way to proceed in constructing a naturalistic science of mind and language, a science that while it differs from physics and chemistry in its subject matter is, like them, a natural science.
It is assumed [by some] there exist two sets of observations about language and its use, and about how language and other human mental capacities develop in the infant and child. One is called the “poverty of the stimulus” observations and applies to all cognitive domains such as vision, audition, facial and object recognition, and so on. The other, the “creative aspect of language use”, is specific to language. We wonder if humans develop a language automatically, that is, if much of the human mind’s structure and “content” must somehow be fixed or innate? The answer is most likely a big yes.
It is also reasonable to hold that humans really are free in the ways in which they use language, and also to hold that if one wants a natural science of language, the only way to get it is to focus entirely on the nature, development, and operations of a person’s “language organ”, not on the uses to which its resources are put as they appear in a person’s linguistic actions and behaviours.
Perhaps the science of language should in some measure be a science of linguistic behaviour and how the mind relates to the world outside the head? These asumptions and the methodology for the study of mind dominate current research in psychology, philosophy, and related cognitive sciences. We might insist that the only methodology appropriate for developing a theory of language is that which is also employed in chemistry and physics. The study of language differs only in subject matter and experimental techniques from other naturalistic scientific endeavour.
We can acknowledge that language is a very useful cognitive tool that can serve many roles and that has given humans extraordinary cognitive advantages, compared to other creatures. We might, however, resist the idea that language evolved because it improved the human capacity to communicate; further against the idea that language is some kind of social invention, an institution that was put together by us to help us serve our needs, and transmitted to the young by some kind of training or social inculcation.
Now let us take language. What is its characteristic use? Well, probably 99.9 per cent of its use is internal to the mind. You can not go a minute without talking to yourself. It takes an incredible act of will not to talk to yourself. It is perfectly true that language is used for communication. But everything you do is used for communication – your hairstyle, your mannerism, your walk, and so on and so forth. So sure, language is also used for communication.
How can we compare animal and human communication? There is a kind of taxonomy of animal cries, and human language does not even fit the taxonomy in any of the senses. Whatever those things are, they are apparently a code (cues, signals, signs); alas, there is no relationship to human language. That is not so surprising: apparently, our nearest surviving relatives are about 10 million years apart in evolutionary time; so you would not expect to find anything like human language. So animals do have communication systems, but they do not seem to have anything like a language.
There was a sudden “great leap forward” – an outburst of creative energy – in an instant of evolutionary time, during perhaps ten thousand years or so. Some small genetic change led to the rewiring of the brain that made this human capacity available. And with it came the entire range of creative options that are available to humans within a theory of mind – a second-order theory of mind, so you know that somebody is trying to make you think what somebody else wants you to think...
It is very hard to imagine how any of this could go on without language; at least, we can not think of any way of doing it without a language. And most of it is thinking and planning and interpreting; it is internal. This genetic change – this mutation in the brain creating language capabilities – must have taken place in a person, not in a group. It had to have happened in a single person. Something happened in a person that that person transmitted to its offspring. This mutation – or modification – must have had some selectional advantage.
Adding, merging, creating syntax, experiencing syllogism mean to take mental objects [or concepts of some sort], already constructed, and make bigger mental objects out of them. As soon as you have this capacity, you have an infinite variety of hierarchically structured expressions [and thoughts] available to you.
So it is conceivable that that is as far as the evolution of language is concerned. And the reason we continue to primarily use language to think [within] ourselves is that that is the way it got started, less than one hundred thousand years ago. And, after all, sixty or seventy thousand years [and maybe up to a hundred thousand] is not a lot of time from an evolutionary point of view; it is [virtually] an instant.
Now, there are a lot of more complicated theories, but there is no justification for any of them. So, for example, a common theory is that somehow, some mutation made it possible to construct two-word sentences; and that gave a memory advantage because you could eliminate this big number of lexical items from memory.
So that had selectional advantages. And then something came along and we had three-word sentences and then a series of mutations led to five...; finally you got complete syntax, because it goes to infinity. This somehow constituted an evolutionary advantage for that individual and his or her offspring.
There are many arguments and evidence against thinking that the language and arithmatic capacities are related, albeit, it is not very clear what the evidence purports. The evidence is, in part, dissociations. You can get neural dysfunction in which you lose one capacity and keep the other. However, that is not going to tell you anything, because it does not distinguish competence from performance. It may be that those neural deficiencies have to do with using the capacity.
So to take an analogy, there are dissociations in reading a language. But nobody thinks that there is a special reading part of the brain. It is just that there is a way of using language in reading, and that way can be damaged; but the language is still there. And it could be the same thing for arithmatic. As a matter of fact, it could turn out that, whatever language is, it is just distributed in different parts of the brain.
There are so many possibilities that the evidence just does not show very much. So what we are left with is speculation, but when you do not have enough evidence, you pick the simplest explanation. And the simplest explanation that happens to conform to all the evidence we have is that it (reading) is just an offshoot of language derived by imposing a specific restriction on syntax.
In fact, there are other specific restrictions, which are much more modern. So take what are called “formal languages”, say ... arithmatic, or programming systems, or whatever. They are kind of like natural language, but they are so recent and so self-conscious that we know that they are not really much like the biological object, human language.
In natural language, you do use edge properties for scope; and you do it through internal syntax. Formal languages do not have internal syntax; but they have got to have something that is going to be interpreted as scope. So you use the same device you do in natural language; you put it on the outside with the restricted variables, and so on.
There are things that just flow from having a system with syntax inside you; and probably the same is true of music, and many other things. We got this capacity that came along and gives us extraordinary options for planning, interpretation and thought. And it just starts feeding into everything else.
The evolution of human language has got to be one of the hardest topics to study. Yet somehow we feel that we have got to understand it, or we can not go further. It is a highly irrational approach to inquiry; something that we might think of as pure science, science that aims at basic structures, without regard to applications. This is a huge step in the sciences and, in fact, a step only very recently taken.
Our tradition has been strictly descriptive behaviourism, but now the fundamental biological question arises: what are the properties of this language system that are specific to it? How is it different from walking, say – what specific properties make a system, unlike other systems, a linguistic one?
That question is, why do biological systems have these properties – why these properties, and not other properties? This was recognized to be a problem even back around Darwin’s time. Even natural selection – it is perfectly understood, it is obvious from the logic of it – even natural selection alone cannot do anything; it has to work within some kind of prescribed channel of physical and chemical possibilities, and that has to be a restrictive channel.
The basic questions of what is specific to language really have to do with issues that go beyond those of explanatory adequacy [that is, with Plato’s Problem, or explaining the poverty of the stimulus facts for language acquisition]. “We should consider what is natural not in things depraved but in those which are rightly ordered according to nature,” as Aristotle advised us.
But if language is not rooted in nature, but in accident and history. There is a possibility, which is not unreasonable, given what we know about human evolution. It seems that the language system developed quite suddenly. If so, a long process of historical accidentis ruled out, and we can begin to look for an explanation elsewhere – perhaps, as Turing thought, in chemistry or physics.
And there are, of course, lots of instances of what François Jacob calls “bricolage”, or tinkering: at any particular point, nature does the best it can with what is at hand. You get paths in evolution that get stuck up here and go from there and not start over and go somewhere else. Language is a pretty intricate system with highly specific principles that has no analogue anywhere else in the world, and this might lead to the end of any discussion of the central problems of biology of language – what is specific to it, how did it get there?
We have agreed that only humans have language, and language is part of communication [systems]. It has been said that Koko the gorilla knew over 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, and used them to do everything from asking for food to joking around. Her trainer thought Koko went further still, signing in novel ways and showing complex emotions. However, linguists and experts in sign languages pointed out that these have complex grammars, equivalent to spoken languages in expressiveness. Koko’s ability fell well short of a fluent human signer, in particular when it came to syntax, an infinite capacity.
We have a debate over whether emoji constitute a language. If anything, emoji are too good at communicating to count. They are blunt and literal. A smiling emoji means a smile. Nearly all words in a human language, by contrast, are arbitrary. A dog does not make a sound like “dog”. Form has no connection to meaning.
With a few joking exceptions, emoji are like gesture and tone of voice, in that their form and meaning are inextricable; they are almost impossible to to misunderstand because they are universal and obvious. Indeed emoji are so popular because they do in writing what gesture and tone do for speech.
But attempts to “translate” (most historically known literal translations were made at a time when the derivation of the word was still understood, coming from trans-ferre, to bring across) novels into emoji are mere amusements. No one without previous knowledge of the plot could possibly understand them.
No language in the world merely strings relevant signs together like emoji, or communicates at the tourist-abroad level of pointing and making exaggerated facial expressions. That gorillas lack syntax should not blind humans to their magnificence. But the fact that Koko could communicate should not mislead observers into thinking she possessed language. Homo sapiens is an ever more impressive primate, too.
Nothing would work in the absence of communication. Flowers must communicate with bees in order for pollination to be successful. Male songbird must communicate with females if they are to mate and rear young. Lions on a cooperative hunt must communicate with each other about how they will attack their prey.
A human infant must communicate with its parents so that the needs of both are met. Great orators must use their communicative skills to captivate and manipulate the emotions of their audience. Computer programmers must design software to communicate with their hardware. And who knows, perhaps there are extraterrestrials trying to communicate with us at this very moment, although perhaps more successfully with some of us mere mortals than with others.
But why do birds sing rather than speak? Why do not human infants scream and cry when they are content as peas in a pod, but coo and gurgle when they are angry, annoyed, or in pain? These are questions about design, and what is true of all communication systems that work is that they have specific design features. The design features of a communication system are the result of a complex interaction between the constraints of the system and demands of the job required.
For natural communication systems, such as those observed in the plant and animal kingdoms, constraints can be seen at several levels including neurobiological, physiological, and psychological. These constraints are important, for they determine the relative success of the organism in responding to socioecologically relevant stimuli in the environment.
For all organisms, including humans, communication provides a vehicle for conveying information and for expressing to others what has been perceived. But organisms differ with regard to what they can convey and what they can perceive. Consequently, there are a diversity of communication systems in the natural world.
These perspectives or problems are not hierarchically structured. They represent a coherent theoretical and methodological framwork for both studying and explaining communication. Current understanding of communication exceeds many other areas of natural behaviour because the question “Why?” has been addressed thoroughly.
A close look at what we know about human language suggests that our understanding of mechanism and ontogeny is sophisticated, whereas our understanding of function and phylogeny is relatively poor. By the phylogeny of language, we are referring to the evolutionary changes in communicative structure and function preceding the emergence of language in modern humans - i e, Homo sapiens sapiens.
In fact, rarely have researchers asked whether language should be considered an adaptation and, if so, what its fitness consequences are for members of the species. There are at least four reasons for this omission. First, for some linguists, the analytical lens focuses exclusively on the problem of syntax.
Those working on this aspect of language show little interest in the fact that syntactic structure provides humans with an extraordinary communicative tool and, as a result, show little interest in the evolutionary pressures that may have led to this form of communication rather than some other form.
Second, language is sometimes conceived as a trait that is detached from our biology – most of the interesting features of language are the result of cultural processes. Clearly, anything that is not part of our biology cannot be an adaptation, sensu strictu. Third, interest in the evolutionary origins of language has concentrated on syntax and the computational machinery that it appears to require, a machinery considered a unique feature of modern humans.
Without precursors, it makes little sense to talk about gradual evolution by natural selection. Last, evolutionary thinking has generally played a minor role in the social sciences. This statement is certainly true of most researchers working on human language. The study of human language requires a good dose of medicine flavoured with functional and phylogenetic ingredients.
Because human language is communicated via auditory and visual channels, the design features of our own communication system can be directly compared to the design features of other animals without the complications of different sensory modalities. We may search for a working definition of communication, and here are a few known dittos:
-Communication occurs when the action of or cue by one organism is perceived by and thus alters the probability pattern of behaviour in another organism in a fashion adaptive to either one or both of the participants.
-Communication is the transfer of information via signals sent in a channel between a sender and a receiver. The occurrence of communication is recognized by a difference in the behaviour of the reputed receiver in two situations that differ only in the presence or absence of the reputed signal. The effect of a signal may be to prevent a change in the receiver’s output, or to maintain a specific internal behavioural state of readiness.
-The term “true communication” is restricted to cases in which the transmitting organism engages in behaviour that is adaptive principally because it generates a signal and the interaction mediated by the signal is adaptive to the receiving organism as well.
-The process in which actors use specially designed signals or displays to modify the behaviour of reactors.
-The term is used in a narrower sense, to refer to the behaviours by which one member of a species conveys information to another member of the species.
-Communication is a matter of casual influence. The communicator [must] construct an internal representation of the external world, and then ... carry out some symbolic behaviour that conveys the content of that representation. The recipient must first perceive the symbolic behaviour, i e construct its internal representation, and then from it recover a further internal representation of the state that it signifies. This final step depends on access to the arbitrary conventions governing the interpretation of the symbolic behaviour.
-Human communication includes forms of verbal communication such as speech, written language and sign language. It comprises nonverbal modes that do not invoke language proper, but that nevertheless constitute extremely important aspects of how we communicate. As we interact, we make various gestures – some vocal and audible, others nonvocal like patterns of eye contact and movements of the face and the body. Whether intentional or not, these behaviours carry a great deal of communicative significance.
The concepts of information and signal form integral components of most definitions of communication, including communication on the internet. Information is a feature of an interaction (i e, not an abstraction that can be discussed in the absence of some specific context between sender and perceiver).
Signals carry certain kinds of informational content, which can be manipulated by the sender and differentially acted upon by the perceiver. Signals have been designed to serve particular functions, and the function they serve must be evaluated in light of both production and perception constraints.
Constraints on the system include the energetic cost associated with generating the cheliped display, and for purposes of clarity we have to draw a technical distinction between cues and signals. Cues, like signals, represent potential sources of information. Cues, however, differ from signals in two important ways.
First, cues – also on a website or in a standardized e-mail – tend to be permanently ON, whereas signals are more plastic and can be in an ON and OFF state. A beautiful scenery in a website would be a cue, an urgent symbol (!) in an e-mail would constitute a signal. A second distinction is necessary between cues and signals on the one hand, and what we might call signs. Having an SSL secured website, showing https:// rather than http://, might to some, indicate a sign of heightened security and hence solidity.
In addition to his theory of natural selection, the comparative method is what made Darwin great. His major works are packed with comparisons based on detailed studies and anecdotal observations. The comparative method is not without problems. The problems are most acute when phylogenetic relationships are poorly documental and when variables or traits are codes as present versus absent. We will not question Darwin’s belief that the structure and function of language were shaped by problems associated with mating and survival – albeit, we ought to contemplate how this affect our electronic communicative behaviour and endeavour.
The presence – absence distinction is at the heart of most discussions of language evolution. Although there is nothing theoretically misguided about this distinction, it must be used with caution. This is particularly the case in comparative studies of communication, where the units of comparison commonly differ between subjects and knowledge of the communication system is typically asymmetric for the subjects being compared.
For example, it is often stated that a fundamental difference between human language and nonhuman communication is that the former has access to an infinite set of meaningful utterances whereas the latter is more restricted. The difference in expressiveness lies in the fact that language makes use of the combinatorial power of syntax whereas other communicative forms lack syntax. Although this distinction is currently accurate, it is perhaps premature in a predictive perspective.
Predicting short- and long-term future linguistic experience will be essential, crucial and of utmost importance. Who can claim to be a true scenario-planning expert? We, as a Digital Marketing Intelligence Group, value structure above all, without being completely averse to deviations from the tried and true. Response is not the same as creation – the latter looms larger over our thoughts – and we can never duck reality over time, especially not when it is coming broadside.
Being positive, though, is, as always, an argumentum e silentio. An endless stream of new discoveries makes science thrilling. But, as any seasoned researcher knows, such novelties are worthless unless they can be replicated. Often, however, replication does not get done as thoroughly as it should be – or even at all. For, as any seasoned researcher also knows, replication is rarely the stuff careers are built on; studies conducted with that goal may even struggle to get published in peer-reviewed journals.
A scientist / philosopher, Wilhelm Roscher, has explicitly stated that for science the development of peoples is in principle always the same; and the category of appropriation, both of economic and scientific resources, is older than that of legitimacy.
The economic instability and political divisions - i e, constructive, creative competition - sometimes or often associated with business management- and computer linguistics (think Facebook and Cambridge Analytica) have caused some sharp minds to think of them as a curse, not a blessing. But economic thinking on this issue is also prone to division and swings in sentiment. Is business management- and computer linguistic science in fact marred by reverse casuality?
Our knowledge, and especially our scientific knowledge, progresses by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems; in a word by conjectures. Not only our knowledge, but also our aims and our standards grow through an unending process of trial and error, which must be subjected to critical tests.
A theory of experience may – and should – assign to our observations the equally modest and almost equally important role of tests which may help us in the discovery of our mistakes. Though, it should stress our fallibility, albeit, not resign itself to scepticism. It is vitally important to stress the fact that knowledge can grow and that science can progress – just because we can learn from our mistakes.
Anything that can not be reached by meagre knowledge and wisdom is beyond scientific control: it lays in the realm of genius, which rises above all rules. (Being aware that a tomato is in fact a berry is knowledge; not putting it in a fruit salad would be considered wisdom: a small reminder for those who can not differentiate between these two words.)
I share with many the penchant for delving into the genius of the past and asking how a similar knowledge spirit might guide the future. Knowledge is somewhat paradoxical. It is most productive when freely available. But the incentive to create it depends on the ability to restrict its use. The former consideration justifies dissemination. The latter justfies control. How, then, is this balance working?
Historically, knowledge has been [considered] dangerous. One anti-intellectual diatribe published in 1526 went so far as to pronounce knowledge “the very pestilence, that putteth all mankind to ruine and hath made us subjecte to so many kindes of sinne”. Better, wrote the author, “to be Idiotes, and knowe nothinge” than to have one’s head filled with pernicious ideas.
But although such thoroughgoing scepticism was an understandable reaction to the plethora of “knowledge” then on offer, it was a hard philosophy to stick to and nobody really did stick to it. It was more plausible to employ the weapons of Scepticism in a strictly limited way. Sceptical arguments were generally used to undermine outdated or overambitious claims to knowledge, not to attack all intellectual activity.
Globalization has been helping to spread useful knowledge. This analysis sheds light on the contemporary landscape of innovation, on the current diffusion of knowledge, on the role of global value chains and on the impact of competition and use of knowledge and language. Knowledgeable technology is the process of turning the magical into the mundane, and rivalry is the best fuel for scientific language exploration.
Most people spend a lot of time inspecting a brochure’s first few pages and hardly look at distracting websites. But as time wear on, their attention starts to flag, and then it collapses completely. It is hard to accuse these people of being lazy or ignorant. They really want to pay attention and absorb information, but their attention fails them.
Communications are written by experts. Most experts love the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, especially when their contribution is acknowledged. Contributing to the community of knowledge is in our collaborative nature. These experts feel like everyone must understand what they write because the expert does. This is the curse of knowledge.
It is a result of participation in the community of knowledge – the failure to separate what is in one’s own head from what is in the heads of others. The consummate philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that the ways things really are will always remain hidden from our view. All we can ever know is the appearance of things.
So perhaps the best we can hope is that science gives us verisimilitudinous knowledge of the universe; that is, gives us a narrative that appears to describe reality. What seems is the sensory veneer of what we see, what we hear, what people say, what people do. What is hides beneath what seems. For truth is not what happens, but how and why what happens happens.
Ignorance is not bliss, but it does not have to be a misery. For humans, ignorance is inevitable. It is our natural state. There is too much complexity in the world for any individual to master. Ignorance can be frustrating, but the problem is not ignorance per se. It is the trouble we get by not recognizing it.
Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem (and/or opportunity) which we are trying to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problem (and/or opportunity), and able to propose more mature solutions; steps forward that take us nearer to the truth.
Truth is not manifest, as a rule. We may raise questions, albeit, give no answers. The simple truth is that truth is often hard to come by, and that once found it may easily be lost again. Erroneous beliefs may have an astonishing power to survive, in defiance of experience.
I am mainly dealing with the structure of business, industrial and marketing organizations in a comparative and systematic manner, at the risk of falling under the anathema “Dilettantes compare”. I do so in order to remind us all that thinking, writing and judging – being creative overall - if it is to be of any value, must always be and remain comparative, open and in the context of time, historical events and business / social development. Striking the right balance between “thinking and doing” is important, and I would henceforth like to “bend the arc towards doing”. Eilt sehr. Sofort am Schirm. Zugreifen! Time is of essence; Tempus fugit.
The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. How we think is helpful to understand why we think. Thought could have evolved to serve several functions.
The function of thought could be to represent the world – to construct a model in our heads that corresponds in critical ways to the way the world is. Or thought could be there to make language possible so we can communicate with others. Or thought could be there for problem-solving or decision-making.
Or maybe it evolved for a specific purpose such as building tools or showing off to potential mates (evolution dictates that there is no more important action than mating; some say that if life has any purpose, surely it is to propagate). All of these ideas may have something to them, but thought surely evolved to serve a larger purpose, a purpose common to all three proposals: Thought is for action!
Thinking evolved as an extension of the ability to act effectively; it evolved to make us better at doing what is necessary to achieve our goals. Thought allows us to select from among a set of possible actions by predicting the effects of each action and by imagining how the world would be if we had taken different actions in the past.
One reason to believe that this is why we think is that action came before thought. Even the earliest organisms were capable of action. Single-celled organisms that arose early in the evolutionary cycle ate and moved and reproduced. They did things; they acted on the world and changed it. Evolution selected those organisms whose actions best supported their survival. And the organisms whose actions were most effective were the ones best tuned to the changing conditions of a complex world.
The best tools for identifying the appropriate action in a given circumstance are mental faculties that can process information. Visual systems must be able to do a fair amount of sophisticated processing to distinguish a rat from a leaf. Other mental processes are also critical for selecting the appropriate action. Memory can help indicate which actions have been most effective under similar conditions in the past, and reasoning can help predict what will happen under new conditions.
Some - or many, even most – business and marketing institutions are trapped in financial constructs that makes it hard to pursue missions intelligently, albeit, it is not flesh and blood that make us fathers. Being [critical] of everyone enable us – as a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Group – to be impartial, utilizing oratio obliqua; explicit and implicit, verbal and non-verbal.
You need to own – or create – great content to differentiate yourself in the market, and it is like anything else; perseverance seems to pay off. The market gives no quarter - you need technological and/or linguistic advantages - and be reminded that while the amateur may feel like your friend, there is joy in developing expertise and craftmanship. Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. Peel that onion of reality!
Science shows us regularly that our intuitions are mistaken. Science is constantly learning something new, and more often than not such learning means jettisoning wrong ideas. That is why science often clashes with common sense – our intuition, for example, wants Earth to be flat and still, and time to be the same everywhere. None of this is true.
Perhaps our difficulty in dealing with impermanence (or the passing of time) is at the root of our anxiety and suffering. It might have been in order to escape from this anxiety that the Greek philosopher Parmenides denied time’s existence, Plato imagined a world of ideas outside it and Hegel spoke of the moment in which the spirit transcends temporality.
In our emotional fog – with a temporal structure far removed from our intuition – perhaps, ultimately, we end up losing our own sense of time; and the emotional dimension of time is not the film of mist that prevents us from apprehending its nature objectively.
“Here-and-now” is a well-defined notion in science, but “now” on its own is not. If we call reality that which exists now, what is reality after we have realized that there is not a well-defined “now” everywhere.
The very grammar we use to talk about things, in which verbs have only a past, future and present tense, is inadequate to describe the ways of nature. Is our perception of time illusory? No, not necessarily, however it indicates that what we perceive as time may not be a simple and elementary aspect of nature, but rather a complex phenomenon with many layers, each needing to be addressed by a different chapter of science.
The full complexity of what we perceive as the flow of time has to be understood by studying the structure of our brain: evolution has shaped our brain into a machine that feeds off memory in order to anticipate the future. Time remains – also for explorers of Digital Marketing Intelligence and Search Engine Optimization – a mystery; a mystery that relates to issues of our individual identity and natural consciousness.
How do we reach a perfect symmetry between search engine optimization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, overall digital marketing and management control? To combine purpose and means is to create. Art is the capacity to create. Theory is the representation of art by way of concepts. This constitutes the whole of art, with two exceptions: talent, which is fundamental to everything, and practice – neither of which can be the product of theory. In short, even the most realistic theory can never match reality. (We will look into established rules with prescriptive powers of business management / digital linguistics research at a later section of study.)
We are not exploring the difficulties – the friction – of having decisions implemented due to uncertainty, ignorance, confusion, fatigue, error and countless other imponderables inferring with the effective application of business and digital marketing development. We are not [yet] investigating one important element in business / digital development – chance – subject to theoretical analysis. What depends upon a few persons is, in great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes; what arises from a great number may often be accounted for by determinate and known causes.
Most men / women are neither capable of achieving intellectual mastery over complex areas of human activity, nor much interested in it. People are happy just to carry on carrying on. To help them through the confusion of business / digital marketing development and application, initiative and required means demand relatively firm guides.
How are these to be provided? Experience goes a long way, as does a comprehensive and scientific analysis of Homo sapiens, and of human nature as it is. Understanding [reality] as such is what matters most to us. Any logical and intellectual symmetry achieved at the expence of reality will not do.
The realm of business and computer linguistic science – of Digital Marketing Intelligence – extends wherever in psychology our intellect discovers a resource that can serve our battle. What [motivational] resource? Your initial guess is – I would say hesitantly – decidedly not as good as mine... The future lies not just in predicting our outermost behaviours, but understanding our innermost ones.
I am obsessed by this type of Digital Marketing Intelligence. It has taken years – or decades – to understand what is at stake. The great Digital Marketing Intelligence of the world must demonstrate that it / we will “serve” and not “dominate” in the scheme of things. I have seen and noticed among journalists and a few pundits the sentence that, “international search engine optimization is complex to a degree, however, it is not rocket science.”
I think this judgement, by these people, is wrong and misguided. Already the competition, which will increase, demands future natural, organic algorithms and linguistic capabilities so complicated that no one person completely understands them. Rather, different people understands different aspects of them. The complexity of human invention – and writing; think Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, et al – pales in comparison to the complexity of the natural world.
We, as a communications partner, are helping clients transform their marketing model to face digital disruption and the threat of new entrants. At present the mystified theme du jour of a new technology priesthood is “artificial intelligence”, however, we would opt instead for the more limited “machine intelligence”.
When people hear the term AI, they often think about a robot taking over the world, albeit it is about increasing the efficiency of what we do across the board. Every part of our business is always being augmented by these new capabilities. Strategic distraction over denominations are not needed when content is paramount.
We must bear in mind that “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer, albeit instead perhaps call it “collective intelligence”. All AI algorithms need to be trained using reams of human-generated examples – i e, machine learning. Unless they know what the right answers (provided by humans) are meant to be, algorithms cannot translate languages, understand speech or recognize objects in images. Data provided by humans can thus be seen as a form of labour which powers AI.
We might compare AI giving Michelangelo modern sculpturing tools like laser measurement tools and X-rays to detect flaws in the marble; a more hybrid approach with substance and depth over surface.
Initially – in the 1950s – academic researchers were looking for a way to imbue machines with human-like “general” intelligence, including complex reasoning. But that remains a distant aspiration. AI/ML is about to make humans more efficient, not to take them out of the process entirely.
Buying AI/ML takes time, can feel like hard work, and the results are often imperfect, however, artificial intelligence / machine learning is likely to have a bigger impact than anything since the advent of computers, and its consequences could be far more disruptive. Being both powerful and relatively cheap, it will spread faster than computers did and touch every industry.
We used wrongly to believe that “situational understanding could be delivered on a computer screen”, albeit, we have learnt the hard way it can not. Sometimes you have to be there to understand. We advocate the merits of understanding the world both through the data and through personal experience. Numbers will never tell the full story of what internet and life on Earth is all about. Hard logic and personal impressions work best when they reinforce and correct each other.
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most research attention. However, word representations have an important limitation: they conflate different meanings of a word into a single vector. Representations of word senses have the potential to overcome this inherent limitation.
Indeed, the representation of individual word senses and concepts has recently gained in popularity with several experimental results showing that a considerable performance improvement can be achieved across different NLP applications upon moving from word level to the deeper sense and concept levels. Another interesting point regarding the representation of concepts and word senses is that these models can be seamlessly applied to other linguistic items, such as words, phrases and sentences.
Personally, I chiefly write for ourselves and a few global multinationals – less than ten in numbers: from USA, Japan, China, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Russia – being as linguistically stringent and creative as possible. Each project is seldom a “quicky”, but rather comprises long periods of “writing slowly”, following the template of marketing success by “the well-told story erasing scepticism by wrapping [its] meaning inside an emotion”.
Speed in itself will never be taken as an index of progress or success with ourselves! Commencement, on the other hand, of a creative writing assignment could - and perhaps should - be both rapid and immediate.
Our corporate authors and digital art directors cover most sectors on this planet in a timely fashion. However - one wonders - can any one person be an expert on all the writing and linguistic systems in the contemporary digital world? Let us explore humanity’s greatest invention, putting it in context of today’s convoluted internet verbosity. WRITING Writing is perhaps humanity's greatest invention. Without it there would be no history and no civilization as we know it. How, when, where and why did writing evolve? Do alphabets function better than hieroglyphs? Are we today, in the computer age, moving towards a "universal language" of signs and symbols? The details will make the whole full, and thence you will be able to reach your ultimate telos - with an intact kudos - soon; very soon. "N'en parlez jamais; pensez y toujour" ("Speak of it never; think of it always") as the famous philosopher Michel Gambetta wrote it down a long time ago.
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