Comment:

Yes, that's what Lee and Caleb were eating earlier this morning - bites like a warm loaf of bread, bursts like a million tiny Gushers into cool smoothie in the mouth, with the solids instantly disappearing like cotton candy in water. And yes, "gamma-baked" means that the nanomatrix of kelp starch is flash-cooked with gamma radiation. Don't ask me how it works, they've invented something.

And Doc is right - this epistemology question, like many similar dilemmas, is actually about definitions of words, not the actual things those words represent.

Take a so-called "controversy" I've seen referenced on social media: the existence and validity of "bi/pan lesbians". If one defines "lesbian" as "a female-identifying person who is sexually attracted exclusively to female-presenting people", then yes, "bisexual lesbians" don't and can't exist. If one defines "lesbian" as "a member of the community and culture that grew up around and signifies female homosexuality", then, obviously, they do and can exist.

The correct take, as always, is that "how someone identifies is none of your goddamn business unless you're actively trying to establish a romantic or sexual relationship with them, in which case you should probably communicate and clarify with them about that beyond what you see in their social media bio".

(Furthermore, my position is that terms like "asexual"/"pansexual"/"androsexual" etc should refer exclusively to actual sexual orientation, whereas terms like "gay"/"queer"/"lesbian" etc refer to the associated mindset/culture/aesthetic, which is why I commonly refer to myself as "straight pansexual".)

For anyone who thinks that these types of squabble aren't important - have you ever heard of the Eastern Orthodox church?

In 1054 CE, 463 years before Martin Luther's protests created Protestants, there were two great centers of Christian thought: Rome and Byzantium (aka Constantinople, aka Istanbul, though how the Turks define themselves isn't any of my business). In Rome, official churchy people primarily spoke Latin, and in Byzantium, they primarily spoke Greek.

The Byzanteenies were having a typically byzantine argument about the nature of Christ's humanness/divinity, and they argued about it in Greek. The pope in Rome, asserting his ex cathedra authority, sent a letter with what he believed was a definitive answer... an answer that was written in Latin, and thus lacked the nuances and specificity of the Greek terms being used, and thus didn't answer the damn question at all.

This led to the 'teenies rejecting the authority of the pope, and, a millenium later, that's why you sometimes see churches with an extra little diagonal bit on the cross.

Linguistic imprecision can often work as a backdoor way to slide an actual ideological assertion into an otherwise uncontroversial statement, and can be exploited by hypocrites who, without calling attention to it, swap between definitions freely. Think of the casual way someone might use "unborn baby" as a synonym for "fetus", or use the term "violence" to mean "something someone does that results in me being hurt", or how "poor people", in casual conversation, are folks who don't have enough money, but the "poverty line" is defined by how much money a household makes per year.

(Remember, plebs, it's "income inequality", not "wealth inequality" - the problem isn't that oligarchs own more than you, it's that you don't earn enough! Focus on that, not disturbing the status quo!)

Doc is right: if a language were sufficiently precise and the exact definitions of all its terms were agreed upon by everyone, and those terms encompassed everything that anyone could ever need to communicate, a lot of "problems" would simply disappear immediately.

Surely, this is a solved problem in 2167, right?

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HIGAI Show

Transcript:

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0380– 2167/07/07/11:33- LC’s apartment, living room
Doc: Hmm, it seems that the relative profundity of these epistemological dilemmas is dependent on the Sapir-Whorf Law. They’re just “is a blendie a sandwich” questions.
LC: How do you mean, Doc?
Doc: Some human languages don’t have distinct words for “blue” and “green”, so, when you show someone who only speaks that language a colour anywhere between zero-zero-F-F-zero-zero and zero-zero-zero-zero-F-F, they think of it as the same hue because that’s how their semantic memory encodes it.
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Doc: If that human then incorporates more adjectives, like “teal” and “aquamarine”, their mind becomes capable of encoding more precise information. The same is true of apparent paradoxes about terms like “information” and “learning”.
Doc: As long as the definition of “learn” is nebulous, your Gigahorden scenario can be a matter of debate. If we establish two differently defined verbs, though; “learn” for “gain information from sensory experience” and “derive” for “figure out information logically from data that is correct”, the debate vanishes.
Doc: Jaxxon learned, but did not derive. Simple.
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Zoa: So it’s not a question of how learning works, it’s a question of how we describe what learning is.
Doc: Yes, and as long as we have sufficient vocabulary and a central authority like the Harvard English dictionary to regulate it, that’s not actually a problem.
Zoa: So the real dilemma Aristotle had was that Harvard didn’t publish a dictionary of ancient Greek.
LC: I’m still stuck on why a blendie would be a sandwich. It’s not a sandwich, it’s a blendie!
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Doc: It’s an emulsion suspended in a gamma-baked kelp starch matrix to make it stable and handheld. On a nanoscopic level, it’s messy food contained between carbs.
LC: Yeah, but it doesn’t go in the “sandwich” section of the menu! It’s under “beverages”!
Zoa: The cafeteria on Harvard’s Martian campus agrees, and we’ve apparently decided that they’re the experts, so...
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