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

["John E. Clifford" <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Well, sorta.  You can put any things together into an L-set (in this context this is just easier talk for me), but that does not mean that the resulting entity does everything that each of its parts does.  That depends on the rules of combination.  Call our whole (set) A, composed of b, c,  d.  There may be some things that b, c, and d do together and so A does collectively (forming a triangle, say) and all participate.  There are others that one or a few do but that the whole thereby does as well (scoring a run, for example -- because of the rules of the game).  And there things that b does alone, which are attributable to A only indirectly in a form of words: b gets drunk, but A doesn't thereby get drunk, only one part of A does.  Lojban allows us to name sets without specifying the rules.  When the specification is descriptive, a 'lo' phrase, say, some of the rules appear, but usually not all.  In the classic "three dogs bit four men'" routine, we cannot work out either how many dogs actually bit a man or how many men were bitten, yet this is a legitimate description of an event in which only one dog in the pack bit one man in the quartet, under certain rules.  But not under a different set of rules that requires that each dog get a bite in on each man.  And with different rules, different places in between.  This is one of the reasons for contracts.
Sent from my iPad

On Jul 17, 2011, at 13:58, Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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