Back to irreducible complexity (PART TWO) (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 09:35 (5386 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT, replying to my post of 11 February at 11.02: I apologize for how much time this took. It appears I had another of my "episodes" where a line of thought snaked in and I followed it assuming that you could read my brain. -I have a similar problem, on which I blame my failure to write the symphonies and concertos the world has been waiting for. -We're in agreement on the subject of determinate language, though I remain puzzled by Nietzsche's cross-eyed focus on subject and predicate when the problem of linguistic determinacy arises out of the whole process of finding words to denote realities. I didn't know the Hawaiians had no word for "goodbye". I thought they used "aloha" for both hello and goodbye (it should be obvious from the situation which is which). There's no special word in my wife's native language either (Urhobo). It would be a lot more significant, though, if a culture had never developed a word for "evil", or "god". Come to think of it, goodbye is actually "God be with you" (a bit like "adieu" and "adiòs"). Yet another example of how terms become established and we forget about their actual meaning. At this rate, atheists should never say goodbye! -I can see that the selfishness surrounding the "I" (a pronoun, by the way, not an article) is a barrier to Buddhist enlightenment, in which case the ego has to exercise control over the id. Re-reading our original posts, though, I think my difficulty was in seeing how you linked this to the philosophy of "here and now". Probably not important. -You say "all things we view as causes and effects are as such because we built them to appear that way". Doesn't that negate about 90% of science? I agree, of course, that "the objects in a language are never to be considered the same thing as the entity they describe", but that's not quite the same argument, is it?