Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 18 August 2011 14:58, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> I do not say that something must have at least a brain and eyes in order to
> be lo viska. I said that the eyes are not what sees.
> What I will say is that
> in order to be lo viska, the thing in question must be capable of seeing. A
> blind man has both eyes and brain, but the blind man does not see.

Right, so the part-whole relation is not essential to the selbri's
meaning. And what ultimately determines what X is, is not what X 'is'
but what X does, how X functions, i.e. what occurs. Something is lo
viska if it represents the event of potential or actual see-ing as a
subject. We don't need presuppositions like "eyes are not lo viska
because eyes do not include a brain".


> As to the rest of your arguments, I didn't bother reading them, because,
> quite honestly, I don't care what you have to say on the subject, because I
> just don't care enough about the subject to waste that much time on it. I'm
> not going to read that. I'm just going to say this- As far as I'm concerned,
> you are being way too technical and nit-picky. While such inane
> detail-oriented blather might be relevant in scientific discussions, it is
> not so in everyday conversation. Apologies for the rudeness of the last
> statement, I'm at a loss for a way to say that more politely at the moment.

Distinguishing everyday practicality from physical reality was quite my point.

If we literally get down to the bottom of the physical things, we will
see that there is no boundary between anything. But that's not the
paradigm our everyday conversation takes place in. We cannot talk
about things without misrepresenting the undivided as divided things.
We cannot say of physical reality what is X and not Y without a
non-physical framework, without going above the physical into the
meta-physical. Such frameworks are arbitrary and various. Usefully so.
We use different meta-physical frameworks to talk about reality from
different perspectives, to configure perceptions in different ways.
"mi" is sometimes a bag of flesh, sometimes a group of dyes embedded
in a photographic film, sometimes the executive system of a thought,
sometimes a memory stored over a neural network, sometimes a sound
file recorded on a computer, sometimes a cultural icon impersonated by
other people, sometimes a set of impulses causing someone to cry, and
so on.

What I wanted to suggest is that we could realize and accept degrees
of arbitrariness when we say "X is a brain", "a rhino is X", etc., and
be not too serious about whether the physical reality of a "rhino" is
such that it must be more than a "brain".

mu'o

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