“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
- Isaac Newton
That’s a fantastic quote.
I always enjoyed it because it’s very significant coming from Isaac Newton. Even he admitted that he had only scratched the surface with all the work that he had done and that there was way more out there in the universe that we don’t know about yet.
The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.
-J.B.S. Haldane
If you collect and learn all languages that ever existed, then perhaps you would gain a better understanding of the world. I’m not a linguist, but I am fascinated with the fact that languages each have their own unique quirks and words untranslatable to another language. These quirks and words which are only unique to a language reflects the value of the culture speaking that language. For example, Austronesian languages are gender neutral. There is no “he” or “she” pronouns. That reflects the largely gender egalitarian value of Austronesians. The Japanese have another word for a shade of blue, which most other people won’t easily recognise except the Japanese. Some African greetings say “I see you”, which is not only a salutation, but is recognising the person being greeted as an individual.
The quirks about colors are especially interesting to me.
Like English is one of the few that makes a distinction between pink and red. In Russian, they draw a similar a distinction between what we would consider light blue and dark blue. I don’t remember which it is, but I recall that some languages merge orange and brown. I think yellow/green is another one.
Eff the ineffable!
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As always, I’d like to make the comment that if something cannot be described it is not relevant to be described.
It’s impossible to tell whether you see the same qualia I do when I see the color blue. However, it would only be relevant to know that if for some reason I had to know it. If there was an application for that knowledge then there would be a testable way to prove it right or wrong. In which case, there’d be a way for me to know it because either I get it right or get it wrong.
Secondly, if there is any measurable/testable property to be known, then it can be described.
The most fundamental form of “measurement” or description is simply difference. If you experience anything, if there exists some thing as part of existence, then it must in some way be different than something else which also exists. Otherwise they’d be the same thing.
Can you understand the term “difference” ? Can you create names/words/references to things? Congratulations you can describe everything that can possibly exist.
(You can construct the words/ideas of sameness, properties, classes, etc. from the idea of difference which makes language much easier and less verbose than using only the word “difference” over and over and over again lol)
