As the word suggests, the ideal of communication is to come to a common or mutual understanding: to commune. One hopes to find oneself on the same literal page as an author, or in the same world as a speaker. It doesn’t always happen. I read a lot of academic material that is frankly over my head. Even some online video presentations I cannot hope to understand—in the strict sense of comprehension that entails reproducing in my brain the exact thoughts that occur in the presenter’s brain. But, given that we are individuals, why should that be expected? My purpose in accessing the material, written or spoken, is to stimulate my own thoughts rather than to reproduce those of someone else. For this, it is not necessary to completely understand the argument or presentation as put forward, let alone to agree with it. One is free to look for the takeaway that suits one’s purpose. But that presumes having a purpose.

It probably helps to be interested in the same questions or topics as the presenter; but even this is not strictly required. What is required, of course, is to be interested in something : to have something on your mind—even unconsciously—upon which inputs from others can work. Famous problems have been solved in dreams, on the toilet, or in the bath. “Angel Cards” and other deliberately random inputs are designed to function this way—to supply a seemingly irrelevant and miscellaneous thought that might felicitously bear in some novel way on a person’s preoccupations. This is also how brainstorming works. One is looking for new connections, almost at random, which can then be filtered or pruned during a more critical phase.

It no doubt also helps to try to understand. That means, first of all, to focus. But it also means to not focus too much, even while striving earnestly to understand. It often happens that the inability to follow some detail in a (supposedly) logical argument derails comprehension. Or, that some unfamiliar technical term or concept becomes a distraction or even a stumbling block, and one becomes hopelessly lost. In such instances, it is as though one is unable to find the inner move that would be the right move in the game the presenter is playing. The mind tenses up and becomes momentarily paralyzed. The antidote is to relax, to bracket the uncomprehended part and carry on with the flow of the rest. This requires patience, and faith that something may come of an apparently fruitless process. (Text has the advantage you can return to it at will; lectures often have question periods that follow.) The key is to be playing one’s own game, in which the presenter’s ideas may or may not be appropriate moves. This requires a certain arrogance. On the other hand, it makes agreement or disagreement secondary or irrelevant.

A reciprocal problem is encountered in material that is, so to speak, below one’s head. Many book length works have only one or two or three important ideas, fluffed out by some misguided obligation to entertain. (Yes, people like stories. But some  people like it when the author gets to the point!) Here too patience is required—and, importantly, the ability to skim, which is to sift quickly through fluff in search of the few nuggets. Whether too complex or too simple, whether one is overwhelmed or underwhelmed, the potential baby must emerge from the bathwater. This requires a certain humility.

Obviously, there are situations where one is required to be on the same page with others. (There is an objective reality.) In the military, one must obey orders and must understand them clearly to do so. The same applies, perhaps to a lesser degree, in other hierarchies, such as governments, corporations, and symphony orchestras. Formal languages are designed for the clarity that supposedly objective realities demand. Mathematicians understand in common the symbols and syntax of math, which may be Greek to the lay person. Yet, we lay persons can have faith that even mathematics derives ultimately from common experience, so that we are entitled to expect esoteric arguments and pursuits to relate back somehow to common sense and to our interests as living beings.  The rantings of mathematicians, superior officers, employers, and demagogues can then be assessed in the terms of their relevance to your own quest.

There is no guarantee that you will fulfill your quest or find meanings that can satisfyingly be shared with others, who are reciprocally in the same position of trying to understand you. There is no built-in obligation—and perhaps no need—to understand the world or one’s own existence in some ultimate terms. Despite the  prospect of passively bumbling through life with no direction at all, there is some respectability in the notion of living in the moment, day to day. That could involve an attitude of general openness or curiosity that is not focused on some goal or project. (Indeed, this is the very attitude of relaxation, recommended above, that favours gleaning something from apparently indecipherable material.) Yet, the risk is that being-here-now can lapse into inertia; openness and indirection can lapse into entertainment. That word literally means ‘holding between.’ Entertainment serves to hold us (comfortingly?) between birth and death. Entertainment used to be inherently social. Even monetized and individualized, it still retains communal meaning.  Entertainment holds us together. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on where the herd is running.

In communicating to others, one should do one’s best to be clear. The shoe is on the other foot when you are trying to anticipate where your audience may get lost. This requires awareness of the multiple meanings and associations of words and the deeper mechanics of language, as well as the inherent elusiveness of many ideas. On the other hand, installing your precise thoughts into another’s brain is not the only possible goal for writing or orating. To stimulate brains is served as well by ambiguity as by clarity. Hence, poetry.

Perhaps the important thing is to be clear in one’s own thinking. On can then be deliberately ambiguous for the sake of responsibly expanding the discussion. Otherwise, what would be the good of merely communicating one’s own befuddlement, except to invite correction by others? We return to the idea that communication is a communal effort. We are in it together, for a result that potentially benefits all. Yet, one navigates between extremes. On the one hand, my personal understanding of reality cannot be merely private and idiosyncratic, for I share the world with others. (I am free to make up stories but not the reality we hold in common.) On the other hand, information is useless to me for which I can find no personal significance whatever, and I am loath to call it knowledge.

Since we are organisms,  it is plausible that knowledge has its roots in biological existence—that is, in our shared nature as organisms. Physics and mathematics cannot eliminate biology from our understanding of the universe.  The dream of a final theory of everything shoots itself in the pseudopod, so to speak, for no account of the object can be complete without including the subject. Even scientific theories can be entertaining as well as useful and enlightening. They hold us, provisionally, in the same void between pure invention and inscrutable mystery where we all unavoidably live. Perhaps we cannot hope to understand the mystery of existence, only—with some effort—to be stimulated by it.