bbleeker comments on Rationality Quotes Thread February 2016 - Less Wrong
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It seemed to me that Korzybski meant it the other way round.
Elementalistic thinking is focusing on things separately; having a list of nouns and trying to assign adjectives to each of them independently. Non-elementalistic thinking is focusing on relations between things; because sometimes the meaningful explanation requires some interaction between them.
That is, in elementalistic thinking we talk about space separately, and time separately, and we cannot invent the theory of relativity. Also we speak about intellect separately (creating the idea of "Vulcan rationality"), and emotions separately, etc. As long as we have "intellect" and "emotions" as separate concepts, we are able to produce wisdom like "well, intellect is important, but emotions are also very important" (i.e. both the noun "intellect" and the noun "emotion" have the attribute "important"). We are "handicapped by semantic blockages" that prevent us from speaking e.g. about rational and irrational emotions.
I understood it as: our nervous system is capable of understanding the nature when using the language of math and physics (not just literally the equations, but generally the way the scientifically literate people speak), but we lose that capacity when using the inexact language of metaphors, or insisting on using concepts that don't correspond to the real world (such as Newton's absolute time).