(I was scooped by Wedrifid, but here’s my phrasing.)
The opposite of happiness is sadness [...] Anyone who says otherwise fails at opposites, and should probably retake the first grade.
I say otherwise. Specifically, it seems to me that the opposite of happiness is a type error; not everything has to have an opposite, and most things don’t. The purest examples of what we call opposites have a duality to them, a one-dimensional-ness: it makes sense to speak of hot and cold as opposites because temperature has an order relationship to it; if the temperature is changing, it’s either getting hotter or it’s getting colder, but not both or neither. Similar remarks could be made about left and right, or the boolean values true and false. But most useful concepts are way too complicated for this kind of duality to apply: what’s the opposite of blogging? What’s the opposite of graphite? What’s the opposite of Vernor Vinge? These questions simply have no sensible answer.
Oftentimes we like to contrast two different things, but this should really be kept conceptually distinct from those things being opposites. I would expect your star first grader, when queried about the opposite of cat, to unhesitatingly reply, “Dog!” (I haven’t actually run this experiment, but in any case I certainly wouldn’t expect her to say, “Your question is confused; I cannot answer it as stated.”) I share the intuitions that make this response seem compelling, but from the standpoint of understanding reality, it’s laughably, egregiously wrong. Cats and dogs are just two species that happen to have been domesticated by humans and commonly kept as pets in certain cultures; if people in those cultures have made a habit of contrasting them, it’s a historical accident of no inherent significance whatsoever.
Some might readily concede this point with respect to such non-opposites as cats and dogs or salt and pepper, but object that happiness and sadness are different. And, to be fair, it is true that if we were to metaphorically project the configuration space of human emotions onto the one-dimensional subspace measuring the extent to which humans will try to seek or avoid those feelings, then, yes, happiness and sadness would be on opposite ends of that line. But they’re still ultimately just these different massively complicated, historically contingent (on an evolutionary timescale) neurological phenomena. Other humans will know what you mean if you call them “opposites,” but that doesn’t mean it actually makes sense to do so.
The opposite of cat is clearly not dog, but rather cow.
After all, we don’t eat dogs or cats, but we do eat cows.
And you can keep a dog or a cat in an apartment, but you can’t keep a cow. Also, cows have horns; dogs and cats don’t.
Also, they revered cats in ancient Egypt and they revere cows in modern India; ancient and modern are opposites; and Egypt and India are on opposite sides of the navel of the world.
Wow, I think we’ve invented a new version of the Rationalization Game.
Once I have spent a train commute with my former colleague discussing what was the opposite of “cow”. I don’t remember what answer we finally agreed upon, but it certainly wasn’t “cat”.
(However I can’t rule out it was “vodka” or “to be”.)
It seems to me that an important part of a consistent definition of “opposite” is that the opposite of the opposite of something is that thing. So, if the opposite of happiness is boredom, then the opposite of boredom must be happiness—not sadness, not interest, not love. By extension, there can only be one set of equivalent things that is the opposite of any one thing. Poets might use the term in a looser sense, but I don’t see how programmers or AI philosophers can and still retain useful meaning.
I suspect it retains some use in some situations, but I also suspect those tend more towards the less-formal context like the original post here. I’m tempted to say I don’t see a specific use in highly technical discussions, however I have low confidence in my ability to make statements like that accurately. (And I think that if I thought about individual words without any context, I’d end up scratching so many off the list as to render discussion rather difficult.)
In other words: no, I cannot. On noticing this, it seems like we should taboo the word.
I’m not a programmer by any means, but it seems to me that it might indeed be useful if an AI can generalize from following directions where you want to go right at an intersection to reach your destination, so [opposite] that to left on the way back, to situations where you accelerated to a hundred meters per second to reach your traveling speed, so [opposite] that to decelerate to a stop so you don’t crash at your destination. Or if you heated a sample up by 50 degrees celsius, [opposite] that by cooling it 50 degrees celsius to reach the original temperature. Or, if it can quantify a person’s happiness, then if they lost 50 hedons when their puppy was run over, then [opposite] that to bring them back to their previous satisfaction level.
I certainly wouldn’t expect her to say, “Your question is confused; I cannot answer it as stated.”
Not with those words, but I’d assign a probability more than 5% that a randomly-chosen first-grader would answer something to that effect. (On the other hand I seem to recall homework questions I was assigned in elementary school which assumed that the antonym of sweet is bitter¹, which it clearly isn’t—water is neither and dark chocolate is both.)
Actually the Italian equivalents thereof, but I can’t think of any major difference between their denotations or connotations.
I am willing to concede that there is a meaningful sense in which happiness and sadness each do not have meaningful opposites, although for most purposes I think it’s more practical to treat them as opposed. But I deny that there is any sense in which boredom is the most appropriate “opposite” for happiness, or that dismissing an opposite candidate as being “another side of the same coin” is a creditable insight.
(I was scooped by Wedrifid, but here’s my phrasing.)
I say otherwise. Specifically, it seems to me that the opposite of happiness is a type error; not everything has to have an opposite, and most things don’t. The purest examples of what we call opposites have a duality to them, a one-dimensional-ness: it makes sense to speak of hot and cold as opposites because temperature has an order relationship to it; if the temperature is changing, it’s either getting hotter or it’s getting colder, but not both or neither. Similar remarks could be made about left and right, or the boolean values true and false. But most useful concepts are way too complicated for this kind of duality to apply: what’s the opposite of blogging? What’s the opposite of graphite? What’s the opposite of Vernor Vinge? These questions simply have no sensible answer.
Oftentimes we like to contrast two different things, but this should really be kept conceptually distinct from those things being opposites. I would expect your star first grader, when queried about the opposite of cat, to unhesitatingly reply, “Dog!” (I haven’t actually run this experiment, but in any case I certainly wouldn’t expect her to say, “Your question is confused; I cannot answer it as stated.”) I share the intuitions that make this response seem compelling, but from the standpoint of understanding reality, it’s laughably, egregiously wrong. Cats and dogs are just two species that happen to have been domesticated by humans and commonly kept as pets in certain cultures; if people in those cultures have made a habit of contrasting them, it’s a historical accident of no inherent significance whatsoever.
Some might readily concede this point with respect to such non-opposites as cats and dogs or salt and pepper, but object that happiness and sadness are different. And, to be fair, it is true that if we were to metaphorically project the configuration space of human emotions onto the one-dimensional subspace measuring the extent to which humans will try to seek or avoid those feelings, then, yes, happiness and sadness would be on opposite ends of that line. But they’re still ultimately just these different massively complicated, historically contingent (on an evolutionary timescale) neurological phenomena. Other humans will know what you mean if you call them “opposites,” but that doesn’t mean it actually makes sense to do so.
The opposite of cat is clearly not dog, but rather cow.
After all, we don’t eat dogs or cats, but we do eat cows.
And you can keep a dog or a cat in an apartment, but you can’t keep a cow. Also, cows have horns; dogs and cats don’t.
Also, they revered cats in ancient Egypt and they revere cows in modern India; ancient and modern are opposites; and Egypt and India are on opposite sides of the navel of the world.
Wow, I think we’ve invented a new version of the Rationalization Game.
Once I have spent a train commute with my former colleague discussing what was the opposite of “cow”. I don’t remember what answer we finally agreed upon, but it certainly wasn’t “cat”.
(However I can’t rule out it was “vodka” or “to be”.)
It seems to me that an important part of a consistent definition of “opposite” is that the opposite of the opposite of something is that thing. So, if the opposite of happiness is boredom, then the opposite of boredom must be happiness—not sadness, not interest, not love. By extension, there can only be one set of equivalent things that is the opposite of any one thing. Poets might use the term in a looser sense, but I don’t see how programmers or AI philosophers can and still retain useful meaning.
Can you clarify how any meaning of “opposite” is useful to programmers or AI philosophers?
I suspect it retains some use in some situations, but I also suspect those tend more towards the less-formal context like the original post here. I’m tempted to say I don’t see a specific use in highly technical discussions, however I have low confidence in my ability to make statements like that accurately. (And I think that if I thought about individual words without any context, I’d end up scratching so many off the list as to render discussion rather difficult.)
In other words: no, I cannot. On noticing this, it seems like we should taboo the word.
I’m not a programmer by any means, but it seems to me that it might indeed be useful if an AI can generalize from following directions where you want to go right at an intersection to reach your destination, so [opposite] that to left on the way back, to situations where you accelerated to a hundred meters per second to reach your traveling speed, so [opposite] that to decelerate to a stop so you don’t crash at your destination. Or if you heated a sample up by 50 degrees celsius, [opposite] that by cooling it 50 degrees celsius to reach the original temperature. Or, if it can quantify a person’s happiness, then if they lost 50 hedons when their puppy was run over, then [opposite] that to bring them back to their previous satisfaction level.
Not with those words, but I’d assign a probability more than 5% that a randomly-chosen first-grader would answer something to that effect. (On the other hand I seem to recall homework questions I was assigned in elementary school which assumed that the antonym of sweet is bitter¹, which it clearly isn’t—water is neither and dark chocolate is both.)
Actually the Italian equivalents thereof, but I can’t think of any major difference between their denotations or connotations.
I am willing to concede that there is a meaningful sense in which happiness and sadness each do not have meaningful opposites, although for most purposes I think it’s more practical to treat them as opposed. But I deny that there is any sense in which boredom is the most appropriate “opposite” for happiness, or that dismissing an opposite candidate as being “another side of the same coin” is a creditable insight.