Right; it’s probably because I’m not enlightened, but the correct answer just seems to be a password. My intuition is that if you properly carved reality at its joints then ‘clap’ would not make sense in this context; it’d be a meaningless question.
The most benevolent scenario I can come up with is that the Chinese word that was in the place of “clapping” doesn’t map 1:1 to English “to clap”, and that there was, if not wisdom, at least some wit in the subset of its meaning that was left behind.
Restate the problem while tabooing “to clap” and it disappears.
Right; it’s probably because I’m not enlightened, but the correct answer just seems to be a password. My intuition is that if you properly carved reality at its joints then ‘clap’ would not make sense in this context; it’d be a meaningless question.
The most benevolent scenario I can come up with is that the Chinese word that was in the place of “clapping” doesn’t map 1:1 to English “to clap”, and that there was, if not wisdom, at least some wit in the subset of its meaning that was left behind.