[ExI] Free will was: Everett worlds

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Mon Sep 14 18:35:31 UTC 2020


I am not a linguist, but of course there is a problem defining abstractions
such as love.  You look up love and get affection, caring, and so on
-synonyms.  That's why in psych we use operational definitions:  words,
such as IQ, are defined in terms of the operations used to measure them -
an IQ test.  The way out of the circularity is to establish correlations
between the IQ score and meaningful other things such as school grades,
among many others.

So, gimme an example of love.  Is 'making love' an example of love?  How
about getting married?  Gimme one.

bill w

On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 1:24 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 4:10 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> > Do you think, John, that kids cannot define the words they use?
>>
>
> I couldn't. I remember as a kid having great difficulty providing a
> definition to common words that would satisfy my English teacher even
> though I used those words many times a day. I kept giving her instances
> of the word in use and she kept saying those were just examples and she
> wanted definitions.
>
> > I am peculiar, as we all know.
>>
>
> Yes, that must be hard, thank goodness there's nothing strange about me.
> Mr.Normal they call me, for some reason they're always laughing when they
> say that, I'm not sure why but I guess they're just in a joyous mood.
>
>  > I spent a good deal of my life, and still a part of it, with my nose
>> in a dictionary, preferably a big one - right now I have three large tomes
>> of the OED
>>
>
> The trouble is every single one of the definitions in the OED is made of
> words, and every one of those words have definitions that are also in the
> OED, and every one of those definitions are also made of words.... and
> round and round it goes. The only reason language is not just circular
> nonsense is because of physical examples not definitions. A parent points
> to a tall thing with lots of green stuff on top and says "tree", and
> children get the idea.
>
> John K Clark
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
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>
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