On what constitutes a filter in communication - Why I think the author's intention to be inconsequential (letters 6.0)

As the George Orwell meme that's presented below crossed my facebook feed earlier this week, I couldn't resist bringing it into the illustration of my idea that, once the work is finished and the author ceases to be present, his intention also ceases to have consequences upon the interpretation of what he was trying to communicate. Recently I have also experienced this phenomenon myself about a text I released with all the best of intentions being received as an attack on something I didn't even consider while writing the piece and what I expected to be a later contribution was clearly undestood as a fault on my part for not mentioning it myself. It's quite bothersome to be misunderstood, especially when you are still alive and kicking. It happens the most when your OODA loop goes way faster than your interlocuteur's. (OODA loops, I'll be addressing in a future letter).

(Image: A relevant meme with a phoney quote from imgflip.com)

On occasions I will be going back to @ty-ty's assertions on letter 4.0, because the very structure of the article allows me to dissect and handle the ideas upon it in a very clear fashion, so I'll start by saying that, regarding the following points in the thesis:

(1) The basis of communication is some kind of metabolism.

I fully agree if you are including the understanding of the communication, else, the communication would be void of interpretation, and therefore null.

(2) This metabolism is bi-directional, i.e. the author of a text is part of its interpretation.

I don't agree that it is bi-directional, in the sense that the author cannot understand you back. He did try to predict your interpretation while producing the work, however, once it is finished, his intention ceases to be of consequence, because only the receiver can be target of change by a finished work. The work that is target of interpretation will not change according to the reader's intention. Only it's interpretation may change, not the object per se. Also, a different receiver, or observer, will probably not have the exact same perception of the object, and his interpretation can be quite different.

Bi-directional is not the expression I would use. I would rather call it a dual process, insisting that it does carry an inner cog that utterly separates the parts of that dual system.

This may even be a factor regarding a normal dialogue, where one of the participants tries to express himself in order to produce a specific understanding of his message and the other receives it as the exact opposite of what the emitter's intention was. And this happens a lot more than we would be confortable with because, even before the mind filters, there are three perceptual filters.

(1) Omission

This filter is represented by, on one side, the eventual omission of a piece of data on the emmiters side. If the emitter has presumed that the receiver already posessed that piece of data or not, is irrelevant, as it constitutes the backdrop for an incomplete communication, and therefore imperfect, of the author's intention.

On the other side, omission can be produced by the incapacity of the receiver to gather all the data, whether its due to noise , to the incapacity of his senses to get the complete essence of the message or object, or his poor capacity to retain the full memory of the message.

As for this, the image of the rainbow presented in (Letter 5.0) is relevant here because we cannot see the full spectrum of the rainbow when we observe it due to the biological limitation of only being able to consciously perceive what we call the visible light, as we are incapable of seeing the ultraviolet and infrared in that same rainbow, while other animals have a clear domain of one or both of those spectrums of light and even among humans, the range of colours we can tell apart varies greatlly and there are even conditions like daltonism or blindness that can deny important parts of the spectrum, or all of it to the subject. Whichever sense you choose to analise, it will carry the same type of limitations and lead to the same reasoning.

(2) Generalization

This happens when the receiver uses a reference from his past and generalizes to all the others. This creates communication failure as it tends to create deeply embedded rules and beliefs, where one experience becomes the point of comparison to all the others, impossibilitating the receiver to create exceptions. This result is commonly known as the establishment of a particular prejudice (the origin of the word is self explanatory, it means to pre-judge, or to take your conclusion before the observation). This communication failure is usually the most damaging to understanding.

(3) Distortion

Distortion occurs when, instead of presenting a clear, assertive message, the emmiter wrongly assumes to know what the receiver is thinking or feeling about his intervention. The distortion occurs when the emmiter presumes to know the inner experience of the receiver, giving the same meaning to two wholly different experiences and inner thought or emotion processes.

These are the external filters, or, better put, the ones that are exogenous to the observer (receiver), as he has no clear domain over them, except in the part of the generalization filter that does not correspond to pavlovian reflexes or subconscious processes.

If this was a scientific exposition, I would now have to exemplify, by postulating a pure, or perfect emmiter, and asserting that, even a message sent by a purely perfect emmiter, will not reach the receiver in it's original, perfectly pure form, due to the existence of these three filters. Perception is fully exogenous to the emmiter. Be his intentions what may and the receiver is always prone to not get the full meaning, get it in a distorted manner, and reject parts or the whole due to prejudice.

Secondo me, the fact that, even for a perfect emitter, communicating through the correct channel, using a common code and the same reference system, this filter is already exogenous to him, and perfect reception would require a prefect receiver and the absence of noise, which is negated by the existence of enthropy in all systems. A system with perfect emitter and receiver will never have zero filtering exogenous to the emmiter.

I will close this for today, expecting to have fully explained why I think that, once the emmiter/ creator/ author finished his message, all perception, interpretation, and reflection belongs to the receiver, voiding or nullifying the emmitter's participation in the consequences of any interpretations of his issuing of a finite communication/finished work.

This implies the disconnection of interpretation from the origin of the data, ence, the end of the consequentiality of the authors intention. Any improvement or change in interpretation, by the part of the same receiver will have to be based upon his effort, or repeated efforts to reduce the level of filtering between him and the message/object received or observed.

There will be deeper levels and a number of systems of treatment of the perceived or received information, that @ty-ty is already well into the arguing of, and all of those, work on a different level and on a different moment of what we both agree to call the metabolism of communication. Although these three filters of perception are always present, it can be shown that it is possible to reason into an intuition of their absence, but that is a wholly different moment of this metabolism and we won't have the space to analise it today.

I hope this was helpful in the understanding of my point of view and to show that we were comparing apples with peaches. I hope the definition of what constitutes a perception filter has been made clear by this text and why it negates the influence of the author in the perception of his message, or, of the object in the perception of it's image.

@hefestus 03.03.25