The irrelevance of description [Archive] - SUBSIM Radio Room Forums

Takeda Shingen

08-30-06, 06:00 AM

Hot n The absence of cold
Cold n The absence of heat

We live in a climate [no pun] of absolutism. Our popular societal theory holds that if a thing exists, then it exists in a sole capacity. That is, a thing cannot be what a thing is not. A thing cannot be both light and dark. It cannot be both heavy and light. It cannot be both true and false. Therefore, the collective mind of the populace dispenses relativism, herald of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the collective waste bin of philosophical abstraction. There it will lie until recirculated again, for there is nothing new in philosophy, education, or politics.

And yet, an elephant sits in the living room. As noun and adjective, it lays: A pox on speech. A destroyer of timeliness, a cancerous anachronism that threatens the very fabric of idealistic communication; the relationship between hot and cold flies there. It is a model of relativism, constantly locked in it's symbiotic relationship: Flitting about here and there, always changing, never constant. As such, we must examine it's properties so that cucumvention would be possible.

What is cold? Cold may be well be defined as being lower than human body temperature. However, we immediately find that this definition is far too narrow, for what if the recipient of this cold is not human, and thus, has a different body temperature? It contains a different level of 'hotness', and as such, a different version of 'coldness'. Herein lies the problem: One term is only applicable when related directly with the other. In other words, hot is only as hot as it is relative to cold. The same works in the opposite direction.

Death Valley, California is one of the 'hottest' areas on earth. Let us assume, however, that you have spent the last year living on the surface of the sun. Upon moving to Death Valley, are you not tempted to cover yourself in layers, don your parka, and shout, "I freeze here! Will you not turn on the heat? It is cold." By standards, it is unquestionably true. In the same vein, if I were to spend a year frozen in an antarctic glacier, would I complain of the 'cold' of the Pennsylvanian winter?

In the cases of the relative, are they both not beyond the bounds of human body temperature? Do they not fit the definition of both? Yes, and no. For hot is only as hot as cold is cold. Yet, we know that this is not possbile, for relativism is a thing of the distant past: No longer fashionable in philosophy. What, then, is man to do? The answer lies in discomfort; in this case, most litterally.

What do hot and cold hold in common? That is, their effect on the human skin. Both degenerate the cellular structure of our epidermis. Of course, heat, which releases the potential energy of matter into light, heat and smoke, does this differently than cold, which solidifies the liquid matter of the cell. None-the-less, the effect is the same for man, who is equally uncomfortable with both heat and cold. It is in this that we have our answer: Uncomfortable.

A simple word. An obvious description. A grail of shining gold, something is either comfortable, or it is not. You either have a knife stuck in your flesh, or you do not; there are no degrees in between. Therefore, we must change our language to end confusion. There will be no more, "I had better get my coat. It is cold outside". Nay, the better is, "I had better get my coat. It is uncomfortable outside." "Jimmy, don't touch that stove, it is uncomfortable." "Wait a few minutes before you check the motor oil. You need to given the engine time to become more comfortable."

In such, we keep our objectivity squarely in hand. Relativity, the beast of the Enlightenment, is kept on it's chain, and interpretation, the fruit of relativism, is cut from the mainstream. Our speech becomes more efficient, more meaningful, more timely. We bravely, then, step out of the caverns of interpretation into the beautiful gleaming light of a world free of abstraction. 'Hot' and 'cold' have given way to 'yes' and 'no'.

TteFAboB

08-30-06, 08:50 PM

Girls just wanna have fun. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJZL40K8Bg) Even though I am not a girl, I want to have fun too.

I beg to differ. Beginning with your indefinite subjects. "We", "our popular societal theory", "the collective mind", "the populace". To plagiarize Lenin while we're on the subject of collectivity: who, whom? To go further: who, whom, what, when, how?

You didn't happen to take these abstractions from the collective waste bin of philosophical abstration, did you? In case you did, then you engage in futility, for if all dispensed things circulate, your thinking is (re?)born doomed to death and centuries long hiatus. Ideas are eternal, otherwise they wouldn't re-circulate but eventually completely disappear, however people are not, everytime different persons think or discover the same idea, as old as it may be, they fatally have to absorb it into their own existence differently. It is one thing to imagine the Earth is separated into 5 continents when you have Google Earth and another when you don't. Therefore, there is a possibility, intentional or accidental, that a re-discovered idea will give birth to a new idea. And an idea that evolved from another idea can only be re-discovered if the previous idea is also known, therefore if the technique has a forward advance instead of a cyclical pattern, the ideas are not [only] dying and re-circulating, but evolving, which necessarily means new ideas are [also] appearing. One could say it has all been thought out before and such library is simply missing. Even if it is so it is still unknown to us and hence there is still the new.

Of course, the question must be asked: when you state that we live in a climate of absolutism do you mean it absolutely or relatively? And when you say "we" and "our", do you include yourself with those who live and can only think absolutely and thus contradicts the entire rest of your post or are you just relatively part of "we" and "our"?

But is that so? Has relativism been dispensed in the 20th century? There are all kinds of people, and always were, but from my relative point of view, "We", "our popular societal theory", "the collective mind", "the populace" are as embracing to relativism as they have ever been. Not many can point absolutes and when it happens it's likely the wrong or bad idea. But I will assume you are correct and that relativism has been dispensed in the 20th century by the indefinite subjects you cite and that there is no more relativist literature in the 21st century for the sake of reaching the main argument.

The Elephant is obviously relative. You'll find languages with more or less problems of this kind. Japanese, for example, has two words for cold: samui for atmospheric cold and tsumetai for what is cold to touch and to be used in the figurative sense, this phenomenon is not limited to cold, there's also two words for good-night and many others. The living room is yours, it's English, but also any other language where the problem applies.

But now we stumble: Cold comes from the Latin calidus which means warm or hot. Cold can give you a burning feeling similar to that of heat as you describe, then what exactly are you talking about? The same phenomenon? The same feeling? I suppose you do recognize cold exists, that is, the contrary of hot, even if you disagree with the word, but you still want to combine hot and cold into a single word: discomfort. That does not tell the whole story. Acid at body-temperature, that is nor cold nor hot, will provide the same discomfortable burning feeling. Let's assume you spend a year swimming in a pool of sulfuric acid, if you are suddenly dropped in a pool of chloric acid won't you suddenly feel less corroded?

Therefore your case can only be true if you ignore everything else that can cause a discomfortable burning (hot or cold) feeling except cold and heat themselves.

Hot cannot be cold and vice-versa not because relativism is a thing of the past but because it does not matter from which point of view or relative perspective you look at it, all things that have a temperature have such temperature at that given moment and this temperature can be scaled.

How do you know that after leaving the sun and going to the desert you'll want to cover your skin and seek warmth and that after living in the south pole and moving to PA you'll feel too warm and seek refreshment? If you do so it is only because you were capable of measuring and feeling the different temperatures, not because of what you think they are, should be or want them to be or believe that "we", "our" and etc. would say them to be. Here you contradict your last paragraph and conclusion because you assume there are different degrees in between.

For example, if you dissect all the nerves and sensors of the skin responsable for feeling and transmitting the discomfortable, hot, cold and burning feelings from somebody and swap him between an industrial oven and a cryogenic chamber he will not be able to tell you which is which based on his sensorial feelings. If you blind him he also won't be able to even deduce which is which. However, when he is put in the oven his skin burns severely, no matter if the sun is warmer or if the artic is colder, his skin is burning, the temperature is X lower than the first and X higher than the latter and it is enough to cause a skin burn and the consequential feeling had his nerves not been severed. Likewise, put him in the cryogenic chamber and even though he cannot define if it is hot or cold, his entire body will freeze and cool down to X temperature, be that higher or lower than other enviroments and situations, whatever name you want to give to it, it is still that X temperature and it is colder than in the oven. More so. Why do you say in your example from the person who left the sun for the californian desert that he'd shout: "I freeze here!" Do you believe he would actually freeze in the desert? Perhaps at night, did you mean for this to happen during the night? Probably not because you mentioned the place as being one of the hottest regions on the planet and that can only be so during the day. But if he wouldn't actually freeze, wouldn't he just eventually acclimate himself to it after spending the equal amount of time he had spent in the sun? Then wasn't his expression a mere figure of speech and thus not to be confused with the literal meaning?

I do not speak this while excluding myself from the universe I talk about. My statements are valid for me. I can scale hot and cold. To me anything below 10C is cold and anything above 30C is hot, everything in the middle is nor hot nor cold but something in between depending on my relative feeling at the time and how I am letting myself be affected by the enviroment around. Let's take the hot scale. 20C is sort-of-hot, 25C is pretty-hot, 30C is hot, 35C is hotter, 40C is hotty, 45C is annoyingly-hot, 50C is unbearably-hot, 60C is really-really-hot, 70C is I-CAN'T-TAKE-IT-ANYMORE!, 80C is KILL-ME-PLEASE! and 90C is H.A.W.T. for Hell Ain't We Toasted.

While your attempt is noble, uncomfortable is not the answer. How can you even tell at which temperature an engine becomes comfortable? Is that the temperature at which it operates best at? But what if that temperature is too high for the human body, then isn't it in fact an uncomfortable temperature? Does comfortability rises as temperature rises indefinitely or is it a parabolic curve? If so how do you define the optimal temperature? Is there an optimum point or is such a point relative too? Meaning in fact you can't tell if you need to wait for the engine to become more comfortable or uncomfortable. The proper example would be: give the engine more time before checking the oil, you need to wait for the engine to become more comfortable and uncomfortable while also becoming nor comfortable nor uncomfortable, to a relative temperature impossible to define.

Take a man uncomfortably cold, give him a coat that makes him feel uncomfortable, let's say he doesn't like Pink and that's the color of the coat you give to him. Won't he feel uncomfotable wearing the coat? Won't he say: Man! I'm uncomfortable! However, one asks: are you uncomfortable because you are still feeling cold, because the coat is too warm, or because of the color of the coat? If ít's the color of the coat and he removes it he will be affected by the cold and remain uncomfortable, if so, was the coat in fact uncomfortable or not, is it more or less uncomfortable than the cold, is it preferable to be comfortably fine without wearing the unconfortable coat while feeling uncomfortable in the cold or comfortably escape the cold by wearing the uncomfortable coat?

Consider this type of situation and you'll see that you would create even more language problems than potentially solve. Somebody goes to the hospital and the Nurse asks: what's wrong? The sick man replies: I'm uncomfortable! After measuring his temperature with an ingenius apparatus called thermometer the Nurse discovers he is in hypothermia and the Doctor orders that he gets covered with blankets. After a few minutes the man shouts: I feel uncomfortable! The doctor doesn't understand, his temperature is not above or below the bounds of normal human temperature, what could it be? Failing to discover the problem the Doctor decides to give the man euthanasia to end his suffering and at the autopsy the problem is finally found: he had peed on himself.

If you want to eliminate the degrees with a simple word (even though you recognize that they exist in your examples), an obvious description, something that either is or is not because cold and hot are not satisfactory to you neither would be calidus and frigidus, then comfortable will still not do it. People may be uncomfortable to use it. Not just that, but your knife analogy is dishonest, you do not feel uncomfortable with the level of stuckness: a knife can be more or less stuck on the flesh, penetrate deeper or shallower, stop at a bone, get stuck on tendons or not. You can have a knife firmly stuck in your flesh removable only by surgery or one that is easily removable by gravity, that is, not too stuck but stuck enough.

Stuck n The absence of non-stuckness
Non-Stuck n The absence of stuckness

And to finish, I disagree with your promised better future. I've tried to make a joke to a bird that flies in the sky and speaks German, a language with little room for interpretation as there are unique words for almost anything and when there isn't two words are simply combined beyond misinterpretation, and I failed. Sure I'll assume part of the blame. But a world where you need to explain your examples and your jokes is no better place, but a very dull one, and I do not want to be a part of this wonderland where I am told to be free while my language is chained and kept into a little box, smaller than adequate.

If I were to be efficient, meaningful and timely as you demand (are you Borg?), I'd make all of this give way to one word: NUTS!

I hope to fulfil with this what the AL failed to achieve.