Posted: Apr 12, 2017 3:23 am
These are all really questions of convention, via questions of identity. Linguistically we identify certain things in ways that don't necessarily have referents.
For example I know that the Earth goes around the sun and you know that the Earth goes around the sun. We think of the fact that the Earth goes around the sun as a separate piece of information that would persist even if neither you nor I knew it. Out of convenience we talk about this information as though it had some existence beyond its instantiation in my head and in your head.
Most of us realise as kids that this is just something we say and that it doesn't require some absolutist interpretation of this thing we talk about having a literal existence. The cynical part of me says that people who stumble on this basic idea later in life are much more impressed with it than they ought to be.
This thread is about a phrase that amounts to "a representation is not the thing it represents", a concept so advanced that it requires grasping that a stick figure isn't actually a human being with hopes, dreams, parents, a job and a pet dog that can love, laugh, cry and die.
We're all overthinking it way too much.
For example I know that the Earth goes around the sun and you know that the Earth goes around the sun. We think of the fact that the Earth goes around the sun as a separate piece of information that would persist even if neither you nor I knew it. Out of convenience we talk about this information as though it had some existence beyond its instantiation in my head and in your head.
Most of us realise as kids that this is just something we say and that it doesn't require some absolutist interpretation of this thing we talk about having a literal existence. The cynical part of me says that people who stumble on this basic idea later in life are much more impressed with it than they ought to be.
This thread is about a phrase that amounts to "a representation is not the thing it represents", a concept so advanced that it requires grasping that a stick figure isn't actually a human being with hopes, dreams, parents, a job and a pet dog that can love, laugh, cry and die.
We're all overthinking it way too much.