What's the point of conversation?

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Well, it's my hypothesis anyway. Feel free to come to your own conclusions. As to "intellectual understanding," heck, I need to couch conversation in terms of dogs sniffing each others butts, so your not alone in not getting "it."



"You are required to do nothing, least of all, believe!" ---Flemeth, Dragon Age: Origins.

Anyway, like I said, it's just my current working hypothesis. My special interest is animals, so I tend to see them everywhere. Personally, I never cared for the idea that humans spend such an inordinate amount of time engaged in utterly useless actvity.



Pardon my crudeness. I have very little sense of what others find "crude," and even when I do, I tend to sacrifice social graces for the purpose of getting my point across.

--XFG

There are too many different kinds of conversation, to sum up a broad explanation of its purpose. Often a different purpose exists for each different conversation.

You'd have to specifically define the exact kind of conversation which you want explained to you before anyone could accurately explain its purpose, otherwise the only responses you can really get are responses about the specific (yet unstated) type of conversation which the replying posters have in mind at the time, and naturally they'll often be different kinds and will result in different responses because of that.

You need to be specific.

Ah, but they do care whether or not you pee on trees. That's the thing. The "if only" statements just don't cut it. There is "what is real", and there is "what is not real".

If only you could stick to what was real, whether or not you or the tigers or anyone else liked it or not, there would be no problem. Well, there might be, but you'd be on your way to drilling a hole through that problem rather than idly wishing for a fantasy world where no one cared if you did or not.

Here's a few that I can name:

1. To share or to recieve information
2. To establish relationships
3. To develop your personality and personal interests, etc
4. For entertainment
5. To challenge your beliefs or others' beliefs/debate about certain topics (similar to first reason).
6. To develop/improve linguistic skills (a bit of all the points I made).

That's all I can think of at the moment.

*claps for MrXxx*

I have done the whole "go outside and find a random person" thing too, just as in that well written description by Janissy. It was after an earthquake, the likes of which we never have around here.

Much of conversation is indeed about sharing a viewpoint in order to make certain a particular viewpoint or belief is accurate or valid. In that respect, our habit of presenting information in chunks to NTs (that's how they see it) is entirely valid (thats how I see it) since we usually are quite knowledgable in the fields we tend to 'go on' about. However, people prefer 'digestible' sized conversation bites, and that's where the give and take is expected - time for the other person to interject their feedback or opinion on the topic you are presenting. We don't have that need for feedback or interjection from the other person because we have already fully researched the topic in question (though you should consider that they might have another idea on the topic, sometimes others have an interesting feedback with their personal perspective, or can suggest new avenues of related pursuit which you never considered!).

Spontaneous "small talk" is sometimes a "test" to see if someone is willing to listen to you (or the initiator) speaking about... anything. It is like the lights going out before the movie starts: When the lights dim, people start to settle down and prepare to enjoy the film. When someone asks "how are you" it's an attempt to "catch your attemtion" and see if you want to stick around for the feature presentation.

Of course, by the time most of them get to the first preview I'm usually convinced they're brainless twits.

---


Ps -
I wish I could take my own observations and apply them to my actions.
I've shown time and again that I can't.

There's not one single point.

Two points come to mind.

Communication.

To connect with each other (a social thing).

Twas all in jest. I like to play with metaphors.