The Problem with Overunity. A different approach.

[exxcomm0n]

Hi all,

@ Hans

A very interesting thread you've started here about language, concepts, and thought.

I did want to put in a cautionary caveat about words though.
Sometimes they are the BEST way to derail/devert thought.

I read a story once that described the economy of words as something that can hinder the full understanding of a concept or thing.
It used the analogy of a child finding an insect outside, putting it in a jar, and taking it home and asking what it is. The child was told that it was a "BUG".
Proud of his new found knowledge the child proceeded to find a label and print "BUG" on it and put it on the glass of the jar covering the ability to see inside and put it on their bedstand to keep it as a pet.
As children sometimes do, the child forgot about the "BUG" until a few days later when a friend was over and asked what was in the jar called "BUG". The child proudly cried "My new pet!"
The other child, never having seen a bug, asked to look at it so the children went over to the jar, looked inside, and found the bug dead.
The other child said, "That's dead."
So the child took out another label and wrote "DEAD" on it and put it over the other one that said "BUG", put the lid on the jar, and put it back on the bedstand.

See the allegory?

Sometimes a thought/thing comes along that needs volumes of other words to describe, and the economy of using only one word for this thing/thought keeps people from truly understanding it.

You used the example of a "chair" and gave good arguments as to why the word can help with the conveyance of a concept.

<snip>Take the word chair for instance. Everyone knows what that is. Even if you show some modernistic avant guard version of it to someone, they will eventually figure out it?s a chair.

Now try to define chair with a descriptor that matches all possible forms of chair and all you can come up with is ?Something to sit on?, which is of course idiotic and meaningless, since you can sit on all sorts of things.

In order to define chair you have to show a whole variety of them to get the concept across, from a dolls house chair to a Chippendale and so forth.

In spite of all these difficulties we can work with the concept ?chair?.

We do this with all kinds of things, old and well known, or just thought of.

This is not where the problem lies in my view. The problem comes in when we want to do something with the words, like thinking of, or communicating a CONCEPT.

Now we are bound by the rigid rules of sentence construction, like grammar and punctuation for instance. It is here where we are fettered and have nowhere near the flexibility we have with words.

In other words, more often than not, we arrive at a certain conclusion because of the way it is put rather than because of the words that were used to convey it.

This is where I see our mental prison.
</snip>

But humans (though sometimes capable of 3rd person perspective) personalize everything, and usually will not imagine the entire range of types of chairs they know, but will visualize their favorite, or what they thought, were taught, or assumed something was.

I was helping my girlfriend go through her deceased mothers things. Her mother had been a learned woman that spoke/read latin and greek (as well as other languages) fluently and had the interest of the translations of the bible not for religious reasons, but in interest of how many times and ways it had been interpreted throughout time until today and how true was it to the original focus of the 1st written account.

She asked me to set a bunch of greek books on the curved table.
I was puzzled as all the tables I could see had square tops. I said so.
Dropping what she was doing she came over and led me to a wooden object sitting next to a window.

It was a Roman chair.

See what I mean? I knew it by it's proper (popular) name and googled it for her to see when we were near a PC (although I had to wade through a lot of fitness equipment to get to it. I probably should have used curule chair. I had always seen the chair used in book illustrations with high ranking roman officials seated upon them so that term made sense to me. I ASSUMED she would know it's proper name having been her mothers daughter and would have learned it growing up.

Had she said "the wooden thing with the curved top" I probably still would have been puzzled.

Had she said "the wooden thing that looks like a table with a curved surface" I would have still had to look for it and ask her, "Is it next to the window?"

Had she said "the wooden thing next to the window in the dining room that looks like some sort of short table" I would have seen it and known.

But she did not. She used a term that had come about when her daughters were at a very young age and they labeled it that. It was a very specific term and meant exactly that thing.

If they had seen another they would have said "this thing that looks like grandma's curved table" and as long as it was between them it would have meant 1 specific object. Anyone else would have had to play 20 questions with them to find out what that was.

Just a personal lesson on how words can be slippery I had recently.

[hansvonlieven]

G'day all,

I am happy that this little thread of mine is of interest to you. It is fascinating to see how the limitations of language can distort concepts. It is easiest to observe in primitive languages that are restricted by simple structures and a small vocabulary. Let me give you an example.

Years ago I was working on a project in the highlands of New Guinea. The lingua franca there is Pidgin, a primitive and basic form of English. I do not remember what the conversation was about but the man I was talking to mentioned a "house killim picaninni" ( the house that kills children). Thinking I had stumbled on some sort of human sacrifice or something of that nature I became curious and enquired as to where and what that house was.

The man explained to me that there was a house where pregnant women could enter and when they left the house the growing child was gone. He was talking about an abortion clinic!

The interesting thing here is that in the man?s view it was the HOUSE that killed the children. Other houses did not do this. In normal houses pregnant women entered pregnant and were still pregnant when they left. Not in this place though!

The events in the house that facilitated the abortion were of no interest to him. He was convinced that it was the house that was doing the killing or at the very least that only in that house something like this could occur.

I tried to explain to him how this worked but he was adamant that I was ignorant of the workings of nature and that we ?whities? had a lot to learn about good and evil places.

He seemed to be totally at a loss to think outside his cultural frame of reference and grasp concepts that the primitive language he was using did not allow.

Perhaps we are in a similar bind.

Hans von Lieven

[jeanna]

What wonderful stories and insights are in this thread.

Here is an overunity thought.

I started a thread yesterday about a brilliant design that can be built of primitive materials and, if built, can eliminate all the electricity usage from a plug in refridgerator.

Now, a fridge is one of the most electricity hungry items in our homes.

By eliminating those KWH's from our monthly account, we are essentially creating them.

Except we are not really creating them. We need to put energy into an appliance and get more out of it than we put into it for it to be worthy of the label overunity.

hmmm

So, is doing something that used to take electricity from the grid that no longer needs any electricity - not even from solar or other alternative sources- not overunity?

Put nothing in and keep your meat cold - even frozen if the cooler is big enough- IS an overunity of sorts.

And yet, It doesn't fit the word overunity.

jeanna

[Pirate88179]

@ All:

Overunity is not just a word, it is a concept.  The problem with concepts is they are based on one's prior experience, upbringing, sometimes religion, etc.  Hans and I had a discussion a while back on what might be, or not be considered overunity.  I agreed with all of his replies.  After hearing these replies it was apparent that there is not one single definition of the word.  This is a problem.  We are all looking for this wonderful thing, but to Hans, me, Jeanna, et al, it may mean something different.  I guess the bottom line here is if we all can't agree on what it is we are searching for, how the hell are we going to find it and/or know it when we do find it?

I think one example Hans gave was setting a match to a pool of oil.  Much more energy out than in.  This would fit some folk's definition of OU.  There is much to learn here.

Bill

[Rosphere]

Quote from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

"One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is also no problem about changing the course of history-the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst you are actually travelling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own father or mother.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be"