I’ve probably already talked about this, but I think one of the reasons that discussions about politics and religion often end in arguments is that English is not a good language for talking about such things.<\/p>\n
It has some basic flaws – the biggest one, by far, is the overloads, Not as big, but also frustrating, is that there’s no great way to speak of relative certainty of a statement of truth without adding a lot of words.<\/p>\n
The overloads thing is a serious problem. There are many, many neural symbols that map the word ‘God’, for example, and many, many that map the word ‘Love’. So the statement ‘God is Love’ can map out all sorts of ways in different people’s minds as far as what the actual meaning, in neural symbols – ultimately the most real post-linguistic definition you can have – in different minds. And ultimately, as my friend Tory reminded me repeatedly, you can end up with semantic arguments – which waste a lot of energy and do not move the ball down the field.<\/p>\n
For those of you who are not programmers, a overload is when one function call can execute more than one set of code. In programming languages, overloads are type constrained – that is, you can only have one overload for String Foo(String Bar) – you could have a String Foo(Int Bar), but not a second String Foo(String Bar). English has no such constraints, nor does it have any easy way short of a lot of discussion – such as I often have with $future-person[0] – about *which* exact meaning for Love and God you have – to nail down exactly what is meant by what. Linguistically, overloads are just asking for trouble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve probably already talked about this, but I think one of the reasons that discussions about politics and religion often end in arguments is that English is not a good language for talking about such things. It has some basic flaws – the biggest one, by far, is the overloads, Not as big, but also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3268"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3269,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3268\/revisions\/3269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}