Could you give me a paraphrase of what you think my argument is? Your expression “switching levels of solipsism” makes me think you’re interpreting it in a way I didn’t intend.
As for paraphrasing your argument, that’s the thing, I can’t, my point here is that you don’t have an argument, you are abusing language without realizing it.
I’m not saying you’re doing so maliciously or because you lack understanding of English, what I call “abuse” here would pass in most other essays but in this case, the abuse ends up throwing a bunch of unsolvable phenomenological issues that would normally raise to oppose your viewpoint under the rug.
Let me try to give a few examples:
from behind their eyes; but they are actually aware of the sensation, as opposed to being aware from it
The English language lacks the concept of “being aware from a sensation”, actually, the English language lacks any concept around “sensation” other than “experiencing it”.
“I am experiencing the world from behind my eyes” and “I am experiencing a pain in my foot” are the exact same in terms of “self” that is “having” a “sensation”. This is very important, since in many languages, such as those that created various contemplative religion, “body” and “soul” are different things with “soul” seeing and “body” feeling and “self” being “soul” (I’m not a pali scholar, just speculating as to why the sort of expression above might have made sense to ancient hindus/budhists). In English languages (and presumably in English speakers, since otherwise, they’d feel the need for two terms) this idea is not present. The same “I” is seeing the world and experiencing pain.
Maybe you disagree, fine, but you have to use an expression that is syntactically correct in the English language, at least, instead of saying:
being aware from a sensation
This is a minimum amount of rigor necessary, it’s not the most rigorous you can get (that would be using a system of formal logic), but it’s the minimum amount of rigor necessary.
***
Another example, more important to your overall argument but the mistake here is less suttle:
It is a computational representation of a location, rather than being the location itself
First, very important, what is “It”, the subject of this sentence, try to define “It” and you see the problem vanishes or the sentence no longer makes sense. But one way you can see this is by examining the phrase:
“being the location itself”
A {location} can’t {be}, not in the sense you are using {be} as {conscious as the}.
***
Etc, these sort of mistakes are present throughout this paragraph and neighboring ones, and I think they go unnoticed because usually, it’s acceptable to break a few syntactic rules in order to be more poetic or fast in what you’re communicating, but in this case, breaking the rules of syntax you end up subtly saying things that make no sense and can make no sense no matter how much you’d try to make them so. Hence why I’m trying to encourage you to try to be more explicit.
First, just try to put the whole text into a basic syntax checker (e.g. Grammarly) and make it syntactically correct, and I’m fairly sure you will be enlightened by this exercise.
***
I’d speculate that the generator of the spelling mistakes is the fact that you are subtly shifting in your thinking from a perspective that says “An external world exists in a metaphysical way completely separated from my brain” and one that says “Everything in the external world, including my body, is an appearance in consciousness”. And while both of these views are valid on their own, using both viewpoints in a unified argument is ignoring a few “hard problems of {X}”.
But maybe I’m mistaken that this is what you are doing, I can’t see inside your mind. However, I am fairly certain that simply try to be syntactically correct will show you that whatever you are trying to express makes no sense in our language. And if you try to go deeper, blame the language, and abstract it with a system of formal logic… then you will either run into an inconsistency or became the most famous neuroscientist (heck, scientist) in the history of mankind.
The English language lacks the concept of “being aware from a sensation”, actually, the English language lacks any concept around “sensation” other than “experiencing it”.
Not sure if I’m understanding you correctly, but that sounds like it might be part of the exact issue I’m pointing at? That the concept of a sensation is something that one experiences (“being aware of”), but that in the phenomenological experience something happens to make the experience into one of something that we don’t have a word for (“experiencing from”) - and which doesn’t even really make sense when you think about it.
I acknowledge that “being aware from a sensation” isn’t an expression that exists, in standard English—exactly because the concept is incongruent. But if I am trying to suggest that the mind tends to create an experience that is logically impossible when you think about it, I’m not sure how to do that without using an expression that doesn’t exist in standard English exactly because we don’t usually talk about logically impossible things?
When you say that I am making mistakes that usually go unnoticed because they don’t usually matter so we don’t pay close attention—that’s kind of similar to what I’m saying is happening in the mind. That the mind usually makes some mistaken assumptions which generally go unnoticed because one doesn’t stop to closely examine them, but once one does start closely examining their own experience, one may start noticing something odd.
Often what happens is that the confusion kind of shifts around—since the mistaken assumption implies a logical impossibility, an attempt to look at it shifts the assumption to a slightly different location, that you are not currently looking at… but you can at least become aware of the fact that your experience was just modified on-the-fly to hide the logical inconsistency, and if you move your attention to where the inconsistency relocated, it moves again.
Alternatively, the system can try to correct the inconsistency by flipping into a state that genuinely doesn’t have it, in a way that puts you into something of an altered state of consciousness. But if you stop looking for the inconsistency, it’s easy to flip back into one that does have it.
First, very important, what is “It”, the subject of this sentence, try to define “It” and you see the problem vanishes or the sentence no longer makes sense.
The ‘it’ was defined in the immediately preceding sentence so I’m a little confused by this suggestion, but I can define it in the sentence itself too: “The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of your location, rather than being the location itself.”
Hmm… thinking about your comment about two different levels, it occurs to me that what you could interpret me to mean by such a sentence would be something like
“The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of your location (appearance in consciousness), rather than being the location (external world) itself”
or some similar mixing of two perspectives. If so, I don’t think that I am mixing the levels; rather, this is intended to stay solely on the level of “everything in the external world is an appearance in my consciousness”. Here’s an attempted rewrite of the sentence to avoid the possibility for ambiguity:
“The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of the location from which you are viewing that what you are seeing, but since the sensation is embedded in ‘that which you are seeing’, your actual perspective—to the extent that “perspective” is a meaningful term—must be external to the sensation of looking at the world.”
Grammarly seems to clear that paragraph as syntactically correct. :)
I can’t say something is right or wrong or probable unless I have a system of logic to judge those under.
Language is a good proxy for a system of logic, though sometimes (e.g. math and science) it’s not rigorous enough. But for most discussion it seems to do kind of fine.
If you are introducing new concepts that can’t be expressed using the grammar and syntax of the English language, I’m not sure there’s a point in discussing the idea.
Using new terms or even syntax to “reduce” a longer idea is fine, but you have to be able to define the next terms or syntax using the old one first.
Doesn’t that seem kind of obvious?
Just to be clear here, my stance is that you can actually describe the feeling of “being self” in a way that makes sense, but that way is bound to be somewhat unique to the individual and complicated.
Trying to reduce it to a 10 word sentence results in something nonsensical because the self is a more complex concept, but one’s momentary experience needn’t be invalid because it can’t be explained in a few quick words.
Nor am I denying introspection as powerful, but introspection in the typical Buddhist way that you prescribe seems to simplist to me, and empirically it just leads to people contempt with being couch potatoes.
If you tried solving the problem, instead of calling paradox based on a silly formulation, if you tried rescuing the self, you might get somewhere interesting...or maybe not, but the other way seems both nonsensical (impossible to explain in a logically consistent way) and empirically leads to meh ish result unless your wish in life is to be a meditation or yoga teacher.
If you tried solving the problem, instead of calling paradox based on a silly formulation, if you tried rescuing the self,
Why do you say that I’m not trying to solve the problem? Solving the problem is much of what this sequence is about; see this later post in particular.
Well, suppose you had never seen the color red, and I wanted us to have a discussion of what red looks like. You would tell me that in order to know what red looks like, I need to first define it in terms of the concepts you are already familiar with.
This makes sense, but if we had to do that with every concept, it wouldn’t work, because then we wouldn’t have any concepts to start out from. And if you’ve never seen anything reddish, I can’t give you an explanation that would let you derive red from the concepts you are already familiar with.
So instead I might tell you “see that color that my finger is pointing at? That’s red.” And then you could look, and hopefully say “oh, okay, I get it now.”
I’m trying to do the same thing here. Of course, the problem is, I’m trying to point at an aspect of internal experience, rather than anything in the external world.
But I’ve done the best I can to give you pointers towards the thing that I expect to be found within your experience if you just know where to look. To extend the color analogy, this is as if I knew there was a line of increasingly reddish objects arrayed somewhere, and I told you to go find the first object and follow along the line and watch them getting increasingly red, and then at the end, you would know what red looks like.
You said that the Kaj/Harris/Kelly/etc. thing is a rather bad philosophy. It is if you evaluate it in terms of a philosophy that is supposed to have a self-contained argument! But that’s not its purpose—or at least not the starting point. The purpose is to give you a set of instructions that are hopefully good enough to point out the thing it’s talking about, and then when you’ve looked at your experience and found it, you’ll get what the rest is trying to say.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about. Maybe I have a vague impression from years of meditation as to what you are referring to...or maybe not, maybe whatever you had in your experience is much more different and we are discussing two completely different things, but since we are very vague when referring to them, we think we have a disagreement in what we see, when instead we’re just looking in completely different places.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
No? I am trying to point you to something in your subjective experience, exactly because it is something that exists in your experience, and which seems like an integral part of how minds are organized. I’m definitely not going to argue that you are a fool for having it, because by default everyone has it.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But my claim is not “there’s a concept in your experience that you can’t define in words”… I defined it in words in my article! I even explained it in third-person terms, in the sense of “if a computer program made the same mistake, what would be the objectively-verifiable mistake in that.”
I am just saying that while the mistake is perfectly easy to define in third-person terms, I cannot give you a definition that would directly link it up to your first-person experience. Because while words can be used to point at the experience, they cannot define the experience in a way that would create it.
We can see where a computer program that committed this mistake would go wrong, but we do not see ourselves from a third-person perspective, so I cannot give you a third-person explanation that would cause the third-person explanation and the first-person experience to link up directly. But I can suggest ways in which you can examine your first-person experience, and then when you have the third-person explanation, the two can link up.
(Note that I am explicitly deviating from the Buddhist writers who say that it’s intrinsically impossible to understand what’s going on. I get why they are saying that: the Buddhists of old didn’t know about computers or simulations, so they didn’t have a third-person framework in which the thing can be explained. But we do, and that’s why I’ve explicitly given you the third-person framework, or at least tried to.)
A person who is shown red for the first time could also say “oh, right, that’s red; you’re right that I couldn’t have defined it in words”, but unlike your comment suggests, the “I couldn’t have defined it in words” isn’t the important part of the “oh”. The important part is “oh, now I can assign a meaning to your sentence in a way that causes its odd syntax to make sense, and now I can think more clearly about what something like ‘seeing red’ means”.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about.
If I may ask, how much time did you spend actually following the suggestions in the post and trying to find what the thing that I’m pointing at?
It’s certainly not “literally impossible”. Some are lucky enough to find it the moment they are pointed towards it. Others may have difficulty, and of course, given the fact that human minds vary and some people lack universal experiences, I cannot disprove the possibility that there could some people who naturally lack this experience at all.
But I do expect that most people can find it—maybe it takes a minute, maybe ten, maybe a year, I have no idea of what the average and the median here might be. But you have to actually try looking for it.
The English language lacks the concept of “being aware from a sensation”, actually, the English language lacks any concept around “sensation” other than “experiencing it”
English isn’t a programming language. It doesn’t have fixed semantics, and one of the ways the envelope can be pushed us through use of metaphor.
( ‘Push the envelope’ is itself a fairly recent metaphor:-
To attempt to extend the current limits of performance. To innovate, or go beyond commonly accepted boundaries.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Push the envelope’?
This phrase came into general use following the publication Tom Wolfe’s book about the space programme—The Right Stuff, 1979:
“One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was ‘pushing the outside of the envelope’… [That] seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test”)
I can reduce “pushing the envelope” to other pre existing concepts. It’s a shorthand not a whole new invention (which really would make little sense, new language is usually created to describe new physical phenomenon or to abstract over existing language, maybe and exception or two exist, but I assume they are few)
Can you give me one example of an invention that couldn’t be communicated using the language of the time ?
For example, “a barrel with a fire and tiny wheel inside that spins by exploiting the gust of wind drawn towards the flame after it consumes all inside, and using an axel can be made to spin other wheels”… Is a barbaric description of a 1 chamber pressure based steam engine (and I could add more paragraphs worth of detail), but it’s enough to explain it to people 2000 years before the steam engine was invented.
It is part of the problem though, it’s actually THE problem here.
You can use normal language to describe anything that would be of use to me, anything relevant about the world that I do not understand, in some cases (e.g. an invention) real-world examples would also be required, but in others (e.g. a theory), words, almost by definition ought to be enough.
“The world” is just “inside my brain”, but that world the includes the physical representation of my body, which is part of it, and that physical representation is still “outside and looking out at the world”.
do you mean something like “Imagine that you were building a robot to navigate in a world, and to have an internal 3D representation of its location relative to its surroundings. If something like manipulation of physical objects was important for the robot, then the robot’s representation of the world would also include a simulated 3D body that corresponded to its real physical body, and it would be correct to represent that body as looking at the surrounding world”?
Could you give me a paraphrase of what you think my argument is? Your expression “switching levels of solipsism” makes me think you’re interpreting it in a way I didn’t intend.
As for paraphrasing your argument, that’s the thing, I can’t, my point here is that you don’t have an argument, you are abusing language without realizing it.
I’m not saying you’re doing so maliciously or because you lack understanding of English, what I call “abuse” here would pass in most other essays but in this case, the abuse ends up throwing a bunch of unsolvable phenomenological issues that would normally raise to oppose your viewpoint under the rug.
Let me try to give a few examples:
The English language lacks the concept of “being aware from a sensation”, actually, the English language lacks any concept around “sensation” other than “experiencing it”.
“I am experiencing the world from behind my eyes” and “I am experiencing a pain in my foot” are the exact same in terms of “self” that is “having” a “sensation”. This is very important, since in many languages, such as those that created various contemplative religion, “body” and “soul” are different things with “soul” seeing and “body” feeling and “self” being “soul” (I’m not a pali scholar, just speculating as to why the sort of expression above might have made sense to ancient hindus/budhists). In English languages (and presumably in English speakers, since otherwise, they’d feel the need for two terms) this idea is not present. The same “I” is seeing the world and experiencing pain.
Maybe you disagree, fine, but you have to use an expression that is syntactically correct in the English language, at least, instead of saying:
This is a minimum amount of rigor necessary, it’s not the most rigorous you can get (that would be using a system of formal logic), but it’s the minimum amount of rigor necessary.
***
Another example, more important to your overall argument but the mistake here is less suttle:
First, very important, what is “It”, the subject of this sentence, try to define “It” and you see the problem vanishes or the sentence no longer makes sense. But one way you can see this is by examining the phrase:
“being the location itself”
A {location} can’t {be}, not in the sense you are using {be} as {conscious as the}.
***
Etc, these sort of mistakes are present throughout this paragraph and neighboring ones, and I think they go unnoticed because usually, it’s acceptable to break a few syntactic rules in order to be more poetic or fast in what you’re communicating, but in this case, breaking the rules of syntax you end up subtly saying things that make no sense and can make no sense no matter how much you’d try to make them so. Hence why I’m trying to encourage you to try to be more explicit.
First, just try to put the whole text into a basic syntax checker (e.g. Grammarly) and make it syntactically correct, and I’m fairly sure you will be enlightened by this exercise.
***
I’d speculate that the generator of the spelling mistakes is the fact that you are subtly shifting in your thinking from a perspective that says “An external world exists in a metaphysical way completely separated from my brain” and one that says “Everything in the external world, including my body, is an appearance in consciousness”. And while both of these views are valid on their own, using both viewpoints in a unified argument is ignoring a few “hard problems of {X}”.
But maybe I’m mistaken that this is what you are doing, I can’t see inside your mind. However, I am fairly certain that simply try to be syntactically correct will show you that whatever you are trying to express makes no sense in our language. And if you try to go deeper, blame the language, and abstract it with a system of formal logic… then you will either run into an inconsistency or became the most famous neuroscientist (heck, scientist) in the history of mankind.
I appreciate the extended reply!
Not sure if I’m understanding you correctly, but that sounds like it might be part of the exact issue I’m pointing at? That the concept of a sensation is something that one experiences (“being aware of”), but that in the phenomenological experience something happens to make the experience into one of something that we don’t have a word for (“experiencing from”) - and which doesn’t even really make sense when you think about it.
I acknowledge that “being aware from a sensation” isn’t an expression that exists, in standard English—exactly because the concept is incongruent. But if I am trying to suggest that the mind tends to create an experience that is logically impossible when you think about it, I’m not sure how to do that without using an expression that doesn’t exist in standard English exactly because we don’t usually talk about logically impossible things?
When you say that I am making mistakes that usually go unnoticed because they don’t usually matter so we don’t pay close attention—that’s kind of similar to what I’m saying is happening in the mind. That the mind usually makes some mistaken assumptions which generally go unnoticed because one doesn’t stop to closely examine them, but once one does start closely examining their own experience, one may start noticing something odd.
Often what happens is that the confusion kind of shifts around—since the mistaken assumption implies a logical impossibility, an attempt to look at it shifts the assumption to a slightly different location, that you are not currently looking at… but you can at least become aware of the fact that your experience was just modified on-the-fly to hide the logical inconsistency, and if you move your attention to where the inconsistency relocated, it moves again.
Alternatively, the system can try to correct the inconsistency by flipping into a state that genuinely doesn’t have it, in a way that puts you into something of an altered state of consciousness. But if you stop looking for the inconsistency, it’s easy to flip back into one that does have it.
The ‘it’ was defined in the immediately preceding sentence so I’m a little confused by this suggestion, but I can define it in the sentence itself too: “The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of your location, rather than being the location itself.”
Hmm… thinking about your comment about two different levels, it occurs to me that what you could interpret me to mean by such a sentence would be something like
“The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of your location (appearance in consciousness), rather than being the location (external world) itself”
or some similar mixing of two perspectives. If so, I don’t think that I am mixing the levels; rather, this is intended to stay solely on the level of “everything in the external world is an appearance in my consciousness”. Here’s an attempted rewrite of the sentence to avoid the possibility for ambiguity:
“The sensation of looking at the world from behind your eyes is a computational representation of the location from which you are viewing that what you are seeing, but since the sensation is embedded in ‘that which you are seeing’, your actual perspective—to the extent that “perspective” is a meaningful term—must be external to the sensation of looking at the world.”
Grammarly seems to clear that paragraph as syntactically correct. :)
I can’t say something is right or wrong or probable unless I have a system of logic to judge those under.
Language is a good proxy for a system of logic, though sometimes (e.g. math and science) it’s not rigorous enough. But for most discussion it seems to do kind of fine.
If you are introducing new concepts that can’t be expressed using the grammar and syntax of the English language, I’m not sure there’s a point in discussing the idea.
Using new terms or even syntax to “reduce” a longer idea is fine, but you have to be able to define the next terms or syntax using the old one first.
Doesn’t that seem kind of obvious?
Just to be clear here, my stance is that you can actually describe the feeling of “being self” in a way that makes sense, but that way is bound to be somewhat unique to the individual and complicated.
Trying to reduce it to a 10 word sentence results in something nonsensical because the self is a more complex concept, but one’s momentary experience needn’t be invalid because it can’t be explained in a few quick words.
Nor am I denying introspection as powerful, but introspection in the typical Buddhist way that you prescribe seems to simplist to me, and empirically it just leads to people contempt with being couch potatoes.
If you tried solving the problem, instead of calling paradox based on a silly formulation, if you tried rescuing the self, you might get somewhere interesting...or maybe not, but the other way seems both nonsensical (impossible to explain in a logically consistent way) and empirically leads to meh ish result unless your wish in life is to be a meditation or yoga teacher.
Why do you say that I’m not trying to solve the problem? Solving the problem is much of what this sequence is about; see this later post in particular.
Well, suppose you had never seen the color red, and I wanted us to have a discussion of what red looks like. You would tell me that in order to know what red looks like, I need to first define it in terms of the concepts you are already familiar with.
This makes sense, but if we had to do that with every concept, it wouldn’t work, because then we wouldn’t have any concepts to start out from. And if you’ve never seen anything reddish, I can’t give you an explanation that would let you derive red from the concepts you are already familiar with.
So instead I might tell you “see that color that my finger is pointing at? That’s red.” And then you could look, and hopefully say “oh, okay, I get it now.”
I’m trying to do the same thing here. Of course, the problem is, I’m trying to point at an aspect of internal experience, rather than anything in the external world.
But I’ve done the best I can to give you pointers towards the thing that I expect to be found within your experience if you just know where to look. To extend the color analogy, this is as if I knew there was a line of increasingly reddish objects arrayed somewhere, and I told you to go find the first object and follow along the line and watch them getting increasingly red, and then at the end, you would know what red looks like.
You said that the Kaj/Harris/Kelly/etc. thing is a rather bad philosophy. It is if you evaluate it in terms of a philosophy that is supposed to have a self-contained argument! But that’s not its purpose—or at least not the starting point. The purpose is to give you a set of instructions that are hopefully good enough to point out the thing it’s talking about, and then when you’ve looked at your experience and found it, you’ll get what the rest is trying to say.
Your metaphor doesn’t quite work, because you are trying really hard to show me the color red, only to then argue I’m a fool for thinking there is such a thing as red.
As in, it might be that no person on Earth has such a naive concept of subjective experience, but they are not used to expressing it in language, then when you try to make them express subjective experience in language and/or explain it to them, they say
Oh, that makes no sense, you’re right
Instead of saying:
Oh yeah, I guess I can’t define this concept central to everything about being human after 10 seconds of thinking in more than 1 catchphrase.
But again, what I’m saying above is subjective, please go back and consider my statement regarding language, if we disagree there, then there’s not much to discuss (or the discussion is rather much longer and moves into other areas), because at the end of the day, I literally can not know what your talking about. Maybe I have a vague impression from years of meditation as to what you are referring to...or maybe not, maybe whatever you had in your experience is much more different and we are discussing two completely different things, but since we are very vague when referring to them, we think we have a disagreement in what we see, when instead we’re just looking in completely different places.
No? I am trying to point you to something in your subjective experience, exactly because it is something that exists in your experience, and which seems like an integral part of how minds are organized. I’m definitely not going to argue that you are a fool for having it, because by default everyone has it.
But my claim is not “there’s a concept in your experience that you can’t define in words”… I defined it in words in my article! I even explained it in third-person terms, in the sense of “if a computer program made the same mistake, what would be the objectively-verifiable mistake in that.”
I am just saying that while the mistake is perfectly easy to define in third-person terms, I cannot give you a definition that would directly link it up to your first-person experience. Because while words can be used to point at the experience, they cannot define the experience in a way that would create it.
We can see where a computer program that committed this mistake would go wrong, but we do not see ourselves from a third-person perspective, so I cannot give you a third-person explanation that would cause the third-person explanation and the first-person experience to link up directly. But I can suggest ways in which you can examine your first-person experience, and then when you have the third-person explanation, the two can link up.
(Note that I am explicitly deviating from the Buddhist writers who say that it’s intrinsically impossible to understand what’s going on. I get why they are saying that: the Buddhists of old didn’t know about computers or simulations, so they didn’t have a third-person framework in which the thing can be explained. But we do, and that’s why I’ve explicitly given you the third-person framework, or at least tried to.)
A person who is shown red for the first time could also say “oh, right, that’s red; you’re right that I couldn’t have defined it in words”, but unlike your comment suggests, the “I couldn’t have defined it in words” isn’t the important part of the “oh”. The important part is “oh, now I can assign a meaning to your sentence in a way that causes its odd syntax to make sense, and now I can think more clearly about what something like ‘seeing red’ means”.
If I may ask, how much time did you spend actually following the suggestions in the post and trying to find what the thing that I’m pointing at?
It’s certainly not “literally impossible”. Some are lucky enough to find it the moment they are pointed towards it. Others may have difficulty, and of course, given the fact that human minds vary and some people lack universal experiences, I cannot disprove the possibility that there could some people who naturally lack this experience at all.
But I do expect that most people can find it—maybe it takes a minute, maybe ten, maybe a year, I have no idea of what the average and the median here might be. But you have to actually try looking for it.
English isn’t a programming language. It doesn’t have fixed semantics, and one of the ways the envelope can be pushed us through use of metaphor.
( ‘Push the envelope’ is itself a fairly recent metaphor:-
To attempt to extend the current limits of performance. To innovate, or go beyond commonly accepted boundaries.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Push the envelope’? This phrase came into general use following the publication Tom Wolfe’s book about the space programme—The Right Stuff, 1979:
“One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was ‘pushing the outside of the envelope’… [That] seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test”)
I can reduce “pushing the envelope” to other pre existing concepts. It’s a shorthand not a whole new invention (which really would make little sense, new language is usually created to describe new physical phenomenon or to abstract over existing language, maybe and exception or two exist, but I assume they are few)
So how do you communicate entirely new inventions? Or should you not?
Can you give me one example of an invention that couldn’t be communicated using the language of the time ?
For example, “a barrel with a fire and tiny wheel inside that spins by exploiting the gust of wind drawn towards the flame after it consumes all inside, and using an axel can be made to spin other wheels”… Is a barbaric description of a 1 chamber pressure based steam engine (and I could add more paragraphs worth of detail), but it’s enough to explain it to people 2000 years before the steam engine was invented.
I don’t suppose you or be able to explain a quantum computer to a caveman.
No, and a caveman would have no use for them.
I’d instead try to explain brick making or crop selection or reaching high temperatures using clay or maybe some geometry (?)
But if your claim is “What I have here is a technique so powerful that it’s akin to inventing computing in prehistoric times”
Then it begs the question: “So why aren’t you emperor of the world yet?”
That was not part of the original problem.
It isnt.
It is part of the problem though, it’s actually THE problem here.
You can use normal language to describe anything that would be of use to me, anything relevant about the world that I do not understand, in some cases (e.g. an invention) real-world examples would also be required, but in others (e.g. a theory), words, almost by definition ought to be enough.
But anyway, as far as I can see we’re probably in part talking past each other, not due to ill intention, and I’m not exactly sure how, but I was recently quite immersed reading the comment chains here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mELQFMi9egPn5EAjK/my-attempt-to-explain-looking-insight-meditation-and && https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tMhEv28KJYWsu6Wdo/kensh, and it seems like we’re probably talking past each other in very similar ways.
Why not say so, then?
Most people don’t know how their phones work.
That makes more sense if I use the term “phenomenological frameworks”
Okay. When you write this,
do you mean something like “Imagine that you were building a robot to navigate in a world, and to have an internal 3D representation of its location relative to its surroundings. If something like manipulation of physical objects was important for the robot, then the robot’s representation of the world would also include a simulated 3D body that corresponded to its real physical body, and it would be correct to represent that body as looking at the surrounding world”?