Encyclopedia

A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P R S T U V W
Ma Me Mi Mo
Mea Met

Meaning

People think they understand what the other person means by what he says. According to NLP this is an illusion. Communication is always miscommunication. We think we understand what the other person is saying, but we don’t. We create our own interpretation of what the other is saying. There are three processes here at work in both the speaker and the listener: deletion, distortion and generalization.

A ‘thing-in-itself just as wrong-headed as a ‘meaning-in-itself, a
‘significance-in-itself. There is no ‘fact-in-itself; instead,for there to be a fact, a meaning must always first be projected in. The question ‘What is that?’ is the positing of a meaning from the viewpoint of something else. ‘Essence’, ‘essential being’, is something perspectival and presupposes multiplicity. At bottom there is always the question ‘What is that for me?’ (for us, for everything that lives, etc.). A thing would be determined only when all beings had asked of it, and answered, their ‘What is that?’ If just one being, with its own relations to and perspectives on all things, were missing, then the thing wouldn’t yet be ‘defined’.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 149

Metamodel

The metamodel is a model for communicating in order to get more clarification. It has three categories: deletion, distortion and generalization; and twelve rules or guidelines: simple deletion, comparative deletion, lack of referential index, unspecified verb, nominalization, cause and effect, mind reading, complex equivalence, lost performative, universal quantifier, modal operators of necessity or possibility and presuppositions.

The strength of the metamodel lies in the fact that it is also a model of how the brain store information. Everything you learned from experience about the world can be said to be stored in the brain in your world model. Whenever you describe something honestly then the way you phrase it reflects your world model. If you violate one of the rules of the metamodel this indicates an issue where your world model can be improved, because  there is something that either has been deleted, distorted or generalized.

On psychology and theory of knowledge. I maintain that the inner world is phenomenal as well: everything me become conscious of has first been thoroughly trimmed, simplified, schematized, interpreted – the real process of inner ‘perception’, the causal association between thoughts, feelings, desires is absolutely hidden from us, like that between subject and object- and may be just a figment of our imagination. This ‘apparent inner world’ is managed with quite the same forms and procedures as the ‘outer’ world. We never encounter ‘facts’: pleasure and unpleasure are late and derivative phenomena of the intellect … ‘Causality’ escapes us; to assume an immediate, causal bond between thoughts, as logic does, is the consequence of the crudest and clumsiest observation. Between two thoughts there are, in addition, all sorts of affects at play: but they move so fast that we mistake them, we deny them … ‘Thinking’, as posited by the theorists of knowledge, simply doesn’t occur: it is a quite arbitrary fiction achieved by selecting one element from the process and subtracting all the others, an artificial trimming for the purpose of intelligibility … The ‘mind’, something that thinks: maybe even ‘the mind absolute, pure, unmixed’ – this conception is a derivative, second consequence ofthe false self-observation that believes in ‘thinking’: here first an act is imagined that doesn’t occur, ‘thinking’, and secondly a subject-substratum is imagined in which every act of this thinking, and nothing else, originates; i.e., both doing and doer are fictions.

Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 113

Metaprogram

In NLP we have so called metaprograms. A metaprogram is a brain filter. Our senses produce way too much data. For instance a single eye produces about one million signals per second. Within psychology there is a dubious experiment that tries to show that our consciousness is only capable of processing two hundred signals per second. Even if we take this figure with a pinch of salt, the way our brain works by more and more abstracting data a lot of data is lost. NLP describes this loss as metaprograms. Although there aren’t specific metaprograms in the brain we as human interpreters of the lost data can name certain parts  of this lost data to single that part out to use within specific NLP techniques and NLP strategies. For that reason it is important to note that metaprograms are made up rather than found. And that, although you can make up hundreds of metaprograms, there are only a handful that are helpful.

Our perceptions, as we understand them: i.e., the sum of all those perceptions the becoming conscious of which has been useful and essential to us and to the whole organic process before us; not, then, all perceptions in general (e.g., not the electrical ones). That is: we have senses only for a certain range of perceptions – those we have to be concerned with in order to preserve ourselves. Consciousness exists to the extent that consciousness is useful. There is no doubt that all sensory perceptions are entirely suffused with value judgments (useful or harmful- consequently pleasant or unpleasant). A particular color simultaneously expresses a value for us (although we seldom admit this to ourselves, or only after a single color has operated on us for a long time, e.g., for prison inmates or lunatics). This is why insects react differently to different colors: some they love, e.g., ants.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 95