Modeling Perspectives

For the sake of mercy on the poor reader of this:  It all gets to a point! 

Yes, all the words that follow attempt get to a point so I will present the reference to the point exactly right here at the start .  (Yes, that is a link you can click on to get the point).  Then after all the following that I wish to say about that point that I am working toward I will restate it (again!) at the end of what I say for those that have endured the torture you will have to go through to get to the end of how I say it. 

IT ALL DEPENDS ON HOW YOU LOOK AT IT!

"It" is a universal descriptor.  Any thing can be called "It".  Maybe even call it "That"

Hey, Look at "It".  Look at "That".  Yeah, I see "It", I see "That".

I might be calling attention to an object.  You might be giving your attention to the action the object is doing.  Both the object and its action are combined in something worthy of attention so does "It" really matter?  Yes, and No.  Very much in a complex situation, not at all in a simple one.  Or, (to complicate matters unnecessarily, or to make a point) not at all.

See What?  Well, it all depends on what is being talked about, what is being looked at.  They could be the same thing or they could be two fundamentally different things.

It all depends on how you look at it!

It can be any thing!  depending on the definition of "thing".  It could be every thing!

Confusing?  It is called communication.  Full of ambiguity until we take some steps to reduce the ambiguity in various ways.  Like a frame of reference, agreed upon definitions, the structure and rules of the language we use.  Some languages are more precise than others.  Natural language, mathematics, music, etc.

It and things:  It starts in first grade, actually it starts with our first word and we simply learn in first grade the formal rules for the differences between the words we have already learned to use to communicate.

We learn that things are nouns and actions are verbs.  The entire structure of the frame of reference that relates us to the world, our thinking about it and the world model that we build in out heads is all based on this introductory concept and it is wrong because it is one step removed from what is the most fundamental thing to start with and that is:

ALL THINGS ARE THINGS!  A NOUN IS A THING. A VERB IS A THING.  ALL THE OTHER WORDS WE USE AS MODIFIERS AND FILLERS OF THE CONTENT OF OUR LANGUAGE ARE JUST THINGS.  ALL THINGS ARE THINGS.  EVERY THING IS SOME TYPE OF A THING.

That concept is some kind of a thing called mystical when you think about it.  Maybe a thing called philosophical because it is something to think about when we seriously start thing think about the meaning of things. Something that does not start in first grade.  It is a later in life thing.  Maybe never for some or most people.

When we do start to think about the deeper nature of things in the world we are to some degree handicapped by what we have learned from the start:  Not the concept of thing but the duality division of all things expressed in the language we used as either nouns (the thing) or verbs (the action a thing does or relates to)  (and their little helper friends which are just tag along modifiers).

The Eureka!  The "Ah ha, I get it!"  The paradigm shift in thinking and point of view arrives where what we see as a vase becomes the face when we see the unity of things as all things.  That means we see verbs, the words that describe actions in our language as things.  That is the meta structure of language and thought.  Nouns are things in a conceptual structure.  Verbs are things in a conceptual structure.  They are both things.  They are not mutually exclusive things because we look at one thing (the noun) as a thing and the other thing (the verb) as not a thing but is an action, which is something that is done over time by a thing in the physical or conceptual world.  We tend to think of nouns and verbs as two different things.  We have a tendency to think in a frame of reference dominated either by tendency to focus on the thing or the action a thing is doing.

That takes it all back to the beginning.  Back to the basic start.  So, let's go back to where I started this thing I am writing. 

It all depends on how you look at "It" or "That".

If I say look at that!  Does the person I speak to look at the noun object or the verb action that some undefined but apparently obvious thing has some action relationship to?  Which in my mind did I intend to call attention to?  The noun object or its verb action.  There is not necessarily an ambiguity of intent involved in what I said nor a failure in communication due to interpretation of the meaning.  Make that last sentence a question in your mind.

It  depends.  Depends on the situational condition frame of reference.  Two basic frames of reference that influence our expression and interpretation of what we are talking about are thinking and feeling.  Not black and white binary dualities like on or off,  men or women but a combination of the two things in our minds where one tends to eclipse the other depending on the situation but at the bottom line tends to dominate how we see "things".

Torture mode off: 

The Modeling Perspective which is the point of all the previous determines the manner of problem definition examination and solution as described here as various approaches depending on perspective.  If in your perspective you did not see as described here as a link to something I am talking about on the internet then I will point that out as something to click on to learn about the different modeling perspectives.  As described here is a verb phrase that is an object thing with a function (having a private method that knows how to do some thing" that takes you to its explanation.

Get the point??

A verb in its action role in a conceptual structure is just another thing in the structure of all things in the structure.

You don't get it?

If you see a verb as an action and not a thing then you never will see it any other way.