I am new to this wiki (first post even) so I might be missing something, but is it really that hard a lesson to process? If I called a monkey a garp it’d still be exactly the same creature, therefore words are labels and have no meaning of themselves. Quite a simple train of thought. And I can’t think of a single emotional reason why anyone wouldn’t want to adopt this belief, since most people don’t care about words. Right?
I am going to assume that by now you’ve read enough of the Sequences to recognize your possible hindsight bias, in your post.
In any case, merely saying that “words are labels” is akin to the guessing the teacher’s password; people have said it for ages (e.g., “a rose by any other name” from Romeo and Juliet), yet most people (in my opinion) do not truly understand it.
I’m loving these semantics/logic posts. Well done.
The easy solution is just to realize that words are labels and nothing more—end of story. It’s just that that’s quite a hard lesson to internalize.
I am new to this wiki (first post even) so I might be missing something, but is it really that hard a lesson to process? If I called a monkey a garp it’d still be exactly the same creature, therefore words are labels and have no meaning of themselves. Quite a simple train of thought. And I can’t think of a single emotional reason why anyone wouldn’t want to adopt this belief, since most people don’t care about words. Right?
I am going to assume that by now you’ve read enough of the Sequences to recognize your possible hindsight bias, in your post.
In any case, merely saying that “words are labels” is akin to the guessing the teacher’s password; people have said it for ages (e.g., “a rose by any other name” from Romeo and Juliet), yet most people (in my opinion) do not truly understand it.