Re: [lojban] girzu gi'i gunma gi'i se gunma

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 4:45 AM, tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Fried eggs are "whites jo'u yolks", while omelettes are "whites joi
> yolks", according to their relative easiness and difficulty of
> separating the two cooked components. But the criteria for such
> easiness / difficulty can well be subjective. It doesn't seem to ever
> have a rigorous logical basis. Whole milk, another example, could be
> said to be "cream joi zo'e", since removing all the cream from the
> finished product is not something that often occurs to most people;
> but such removal is trivially done by skimmed milk producers, for whom
> "cream jo'u zo'e" could be a more accustomed perception.

I think what you are describing is some situations where describing
something as a mass is *sensible*.  It makes more sense to consider
things jointly when they are less easily separated.  But I believe
Lojban allows you to make and discuss masses whether or not they are
reasonable.

The creation of a mass is an attribution of responsibility.  Any
action taken by any of the parts of the mass, whether individually or
collectively, is considered to be done by the entire mass.  It's not a
distinct class of entities; anything can be considered as a
composition of elements.  For instance we're used to referring to
things like "people", which are responsible for the actions of all of
their parts (a person lifts everything lifted by their hands and sees
everything seen by their eyes), or "cars", which are responsible for
the actions of all of their parts (a car hits anything that any of its
parts hit and carries anything that any of its parts carry).  The only
difference is that you can explicitly create a mass of anything.

For instance I can create a mass out of my left pinkie and a bug
crawling on a leaf in a rainforest in South America, tie those things
up with a {joi} and throw them in {ko'a}, and now I've got this
strange entity I can discuss.  It's nothing that wasn't there before;
it's nothing more or less than my pinkie and that bug, considered
together.  But now that we're talking about ko'a we can discuss its
various strange properties.  Right now ko'a is typing the letter "a"
in the very pro-sumti that refers to it, while simultaneously using
its six legs to crawl across the leaf.  The oddness of masses is that
ko'a has both a fingernail and six legs, and spans both North and
South America at once, simply because that's how I defined it.

Considered as a universally applicable abstraction that might seem
bizarre, but then consider again that innocent case of {mi joi do}.
What it does is pull out two people out of everything in the universe
to consider them together.  Whenever either of us picks something up,
mi joi do is lifting it.  Because of our ability to communicate and
work cooperatively, a mass that could otherwise be a bizarre
collection of elements becomes a reasonable abstraction in predicting
and discussing the world.  Who knows what aggregations of elements
might sometime be sensible to consider together?  We had best keep our
options open.

For instance in my story I'm working on called {mafro'i}, there's a
rock which remembers things it's put on top of.  It remembers
everything it's ever been put on top of, but more strongly the longer
it's left there.  Even if the objects later move, the rock can feel
where they are, and you can use it to guide you to them.  So in this
story there's a mass that's reasonable to discuss consisting of all
the things that that rock has ever been set on top of, including lots
of random leaves and sticks and animals and people.  You could put all
of them together and call them {fo'i}, and then say of them "by
touching the rock, she could feel that fo'i wasn't nearby."

mi'e la stela selckiku
mu'o

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