I understand the idea of trading one things for another e.g. sleep for pleasure and I understand the idea that if you break something complex down into components and understand those components you understand the whole (reductionism). What I do not understand is the relation between the two things. Could someone explain it differently? It feels like the “Lego principle” section is disconnected and could have been omitted without losing anything.
I’m struggling to make the connection too. Things are made of parts, and by spending $12 on dinner I’m trading money for nutrients and satisfaction and time saved by not making dinner myself. So what’s the thing in this context and what are the parts? Is the thing the act of buying dinner, the parts the $12 I put in and the good things I get out? If I put the $12 to something else, I also lose the nutrients and satisfaction and time, so that doesn’t work out.
Maybe the currencies are the things, and the parts are whatever unit is appropriate for that currency? Money is made out of dollars (or pounds, etc), time is made out of seconds/minutes/etc, pleasure is subjective, but you could still imagine units of pleasure, and so on. By buying an ice cream, I can take a chunk off my block of money and attach it to my block of pleasure, and during this action the money chunk gets converted into a pleasure chunk, I guess?
I understand the idea of trading one things for another e.g. sleep for pleasure and I understand the idea that if you break something complex down into components and understand those components you understand the whole (reductionism). What I do not understand is the relation between the two things. Could someone explain it differently? It feels like the “Lego principle” section is disconnected and could have been omitted without losing anything.
I’m struggling to make the connection too. Things are made of parts, and by spending $12 on dinner I’m trading money for nutrients and satisfaction and time saved by not making dinner myself. So what’s the thing in this context and what are the parts? Is the thing the act of buying dinner, the parts the $12 I put in and the good things I get out? If I put the $12 to something else, I also lose the nutrients and satisfaction and time, so that doesn’t work out.
Maybe the currencies are the things, and the parts are whatever unit is appropriate for that currency? Money is made out of dollars (or pounds, etc), time is made out of seconds/minutes/etc, pleasure is subjective, but you could still imagine units of pleasure, and so on. By buying an ice cream, I can take a chunk off my block of money and attach it to my block of pleasure, and during this action the money chunk gets converted into a pleasure chunk, I guess?