Interior Compass: Adequacy and Accuracy

Apropos of adequacy and accuracy in this series on common themes, I decided my earlier post on the subject was inadequate and neither quite as accurate as I’d like. (Making this current version the third if one includes a completely inadequate first draft.) However considering this essay is about adequacy and accuracy I thought I’d leave the earlier more inadequate and more inaccurate post for comparisons sake, the two essays together being an object lesson in their content.

On the bright side, spending so much time on this subject has been remarkably fruitful as I have discovered significant connections among several other interior construct symbols - although this essay does spill over its ’one common theme’ just a bit and just about in all directions.

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Symbol Adequacy and Symbol Accuracy:
These two are closely related as both involve the concept of ‘good enough’. If a symbol were akin to an orienteering sign, accuracy deals with a symbol’s definitional ‘heading’ and direction on the compass, but adequacy deals with a symbol’s degree or ‘distance’ travel. Together they form a ‘functionality vector’, e.g. plain heart shaped paper in a homemade lunch may be an accurate direction for a functional love symbol, but some sort of decoration denoting effort and passion might be needful for a functionally adequate love symbol as well. 

The truly fascinating thing about adequacy and accuracy is how we use them; in conjunction with our mental framework they form an interior symbol compass, by which we can sense when a symbol ‘feels right’, when it is ‘good enough’ for the expression we want. (For an example see the poem-symbol The Endless Battle.)  I believe this ‘feels right’ interior compass sensation is caused by the new symbol’s fitted-ness, functionality and coherence with the general structure and other symbols of our interior mental framework, rather like puzzle pieces of symbol and meaning.

When lower level adequacy and accuracy form a merely ’good enough’ symbol for a specific circumstance, such a symbol is also prone to have more temporary efficacy, a more ephemeral meaning, and a more mundane significance because “sometimes a [symbol] is just a label, just a temporary net designed to catch just enough meaning and haul it across the void between persons.

On the other hand, a higher number of (important) interior symbols accurately and adequately fitted and a higher overall degree of fitted-ness results in a higher intensity of ‘feels right’ compass sensation, and results in longer term meaning because it resonates with coherence throughout a person’s existential experience in the biological meaning matrix – in fact, an effortless, sudden and extremely high level fitted-ness can be a numinous experience.

But if such large scale effortless synaptic fitted-ness is rare, neither do we normally need to ‘listen’ to our interior compass as we most often take its ‘adequacy and accuracy reading’ automatically, unconsciously. It’s only when we are aiming for a symbol with a higher level coherence with our framework –a coherence that doesn’t come easily–that we subsequently ‘read’ our compass with more attention, more intently scan our interior for points and directions of fitted-ness, and it is then we notice the orienting process of our compass. 

And I think one of the most noticeable features of this ‘existential orienteering’ is it’s easier to determine one or two things that are inadequate or inaccurate symbols long before determining what symbol will be accurate and adequate. Of course when we are lost it’s always easier to pick one (1) wrong compass direction when there are only a few right directions. The key is figuring why those first wrong directions are wrong, something again done almost automatically but if we had conscious thought about the process:

If I use this symbol to point that direction then I’ll have a meaning too much like this other symbol direction combination which already has this other specific framework meaning. A better more accurate symbol than this would have (more or less) of (x) aspect, an aspect that according to my reading of my framework lies more closely upon symbol direction heading (y).

We ever increasingly pick a slightly better, slightly ’more right’ direction until we achieve a symbol functionality equal to our purpose, a symbol functionality arrived at via previous interior symbol definitions and based upon coherence with previous interior symbols’ definitions.

We use our compass sense of framework fitted-ness, we use the knowledge we’ve discerned about what are not accurate symbol directions, and we use why they aren’t accurate, in a process of discovery that wades through the ambiguity of unknown territory to arrive at a metaphoric extension of our interior framework that represents accurate knowledge. It is a subjective self knowledge at the least yet through the process of mapping reality (with somewhat less certainty) such an extension of our interior framework may represent objective knowledge as well.

Thus, in an intimate relationship:

 …by the constant orientation of the interior compass upon love, and not simply upon the symbols of love, that a lover’s loyalty is maintained.
~ OH, The Maintenance of Loyalty

The center and soul of our relationship cannot be summed by any one word or phrase; it is a nexus between us, a matrix of our combined gravities, a complexity of love we can know only by its direction on our individual interior compass rose.
~OH, Active and Passive Pleasure

And thus for the individual:

And when we don’t listen to our self knowledge, our interior compass, things usually end badly.
~OH, Intuitive, Instinctive, Gradual Change

Redaction

There’s a fascinating redactive quality to rereading my essays here and attempting to assign them a coherent codification of categories and tags. After all I wasn’t thinking in terms of the new category and tag names and labels at the time I wrote these past essays. Of course this bothers me because the new ‘frame’ I am imposing might detract from the flavor (or worse the meaning) of the essay as it was written at the time, and thus detract from the compact experience I had at that time.

The reframing nature of this redactive project was further illustrated by the fact the sidebar page containing the contents map, the page that is the new improvised framework, kept showing up first in any site search because it had the most recent date. Since the point of a search is to find content not a framework, with some humorous irony I solved this problem by redacting the page date of the contents map to a time before every essay here so that it showed up last in any search. Thus in order to function well, in this case the redactive framework itself had to be redacted.