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Re: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}
On 7/11/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
On 7/11/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
> The issue I have still stands. We're claiming
> something about something, yes?
Not about some one thing, about many things, yes.
> That something, to me, is the students
> treated as a single entity. How are you claiming it about the multiple
> things? That it's true of them when you're considering them as a mass,
> but not when they're apart?
I don't need to consider them as one thing to make a claim about them.
You must be absolutely uncanny at memory games like match the cards,
simon, etc. The average human has trouble keeping 10 numbers floating
in their head for more than some seconds without losing some, I find
it amazing that you can keep 100 individual student-entities in the
conscious mind long enough to relate each directly.
A logical language should be a reflection of thought, and not a
general approximation. It's true that when we say "dogs" we mean "at
least 2 dogs", but this is an effect, and not the thing that affects.
You may, if you want to, consider them as one thing. It makes no difference
for this particular case. It only makes a difference when we want to
combine distributive and non-distributive claims in the same sentence.
> Perhaps a ..."visual" explanation of the model of thought that I'm
> using would help. Imagine that you have singular 'things' (identities)
> floating around up there, and relationship-strand-things connect them
> to each other/abstractions. So when you think of "humanity", a certain
> singular thing is brought up, and you know by following some very
> strong strands that it's composed of many humans, and so on. When
> someone says "the students", a single thing is created, and then
> perhaps they tell you that there were 100 of them, and a strand is
> spun from that thing to that number.
>
> Now, when you tell me that something is predicated of 100 singular
> things, and nothing else is involved, but that none of those 100
> things has a little strand (or a series of strands) connecting it
> somehow to the building, I have to wonder what the heck's being
> related. And really, speaking of these 100 singular things seems
> aburd: unless you're a savant, I doubt that you're capable of keeping
> that many things simultaneously in your mind in the first place. My
> brain seems to go with two: the fact that they're students, and the
> fact that there are 100 of them.
How does your mind manage to process:
ro le panono tadni cu dasni lo mapku
then?
There are 2 identities (X and Y), both are plurals. X is the students,
Y is the hats. X, the thing that is the students has 100 of them. They
are related with 'wears' non-distributively (which I know to mean that
if a new identity was a 'component' of X, then it would follow that it
would be wearing some component of Y). Furthermore, I assume that the
non-distributive relationship is 1to1: during the time that we care to
communicate about, students probably aren't switching 2 hats amongst
themselves, and each student has their own hat.
I don't think the kind of pictures we can raise in our minds are relevant.
Analogies are quite effective, and so is visualization. This isn't
just a picture, but something that approximates what I imagine goes on
in my mind. I think that this sort of thing could be helpful, since it
seems that other options have been exhausted.
How do you imagine your mind to work?
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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