My brain hurts, but I like it!

Although I grossly misunderstood the length at which I was to read one of the five texts required for my graduate class (thinking I had 150 pages to read in a week when it was closer to 300), I was intrigued by the subject matter when we discussed it (the whole book). This is what (in a nutshell) we talked about:

First, the pragmatics of communication, which referrs to the analogue (or behavior) and digital (or verbal) aspects of communication. Second, the communication about communication, or what's referred to as metacommunication, or in other words communication about how we communicate. Next, meta-metacommunication, or communication about the communication we communicate. (Is your brain hurting yet?) Finally, the fourth stage of knowledge which is explainable only by saying that we've had a Gestalt moment (the point at which we say "aha!") but can't explain how we know we know. This, my professor said, is more or less the basis of believing in religion. We don't know how we know, and we can't adequately explain what we know or how we know it, but we do. Get it?

This subject matter is so incredibly deep that it almost makes your stomach turn to think about it, but it's kind of fun to think about the mind-boggling theories!

I can kind of relate this kind of thinking to Ron, in a way: He likes to think about the mind-bogglingness (my term!) of mathematics. He's always thinking about probabilities of occurances, the way things interact mathematically, etc., and it's always way over my head. But that's just because I never had to take any mathematics past college algebra, and I didn't. That was in 1999, and I haven't touched a math book since. Ron, on the other hand, likes to check out math books for the reading at the library. Just for fun!

I guess we're both nerds. Oh well! We like it like this! I hope our kids are smart. They'll almost have to be in order to keep up with us. Most likely, they'll surpass us, though. That would be cool! Do you think they'll be good at communicating in the mathematical realm? Or good at figuring out communications mathematically? Who knows? I guess I'll have to think more about Gestalt theories in relation to my metacommunication on this topic...

;D