E_Ransom comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: elharo 01 May 2014 09:45AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (294)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 02 May 2014 07:14:01PM *  10 points [-]

The reason why the thing can't be expressed is that it's too definite for language.

This feels like a combination of words that are supposed to sound Wisely, but don't actually make sense. (I guess Lewis uses this technique frequently.)

How specifically could being "definite" be a a problem for language? Take any specific thing, apply an arbitrary label, and you are done.

There could be a problem when a person X experienced some "qualia" that other people have never experienced, so they can't match the verbal description with anything in their experience. Or worse, they have something similar, which they match instead, even when told not to. And this seems like a situation described in the text. -- But then the problem is not having the shared experience. If they did, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label, and somehow make sure they refer to the same thing when using the label. The language would have absolutely no problem with that.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 May 2014 09:10:26PM 7 points [-]

Since any attempt to defend the quote itself will only come off as a desire to shoehorn my chosen author into the rationality camp, I'll just give the simple reason why I chose to include that quote instead of stopping with the two previous:

I felt it touched on the subject of inferential distance and discussing reality using labels in a manner that was worthy of attention.