For example, why do we say “Your pupils are dilated”. They aren’t. It’s the iris aperture that is dilated.
Oh boy. Don’t look too deep into philosophy of language, or you might become convinced that “the iris” is just as nonexistent — or that all nouns are really about a symbolic existence as a relationship, for which measurable physical matter is inconsequential.
I mean we have lots of words for varying degrees and styles of “nothing”.
A chasm is the empty space between two chunks of the earths crust.
A void is just an empty space well… Void of all things.
An interval is just the time between two events. Technically it’s nothing.
Still a good shower thought. There aren’t a ton of words dedicated to the same phenomenon, but we have a handful.
Also just
“Space” as a place to go
Good ol fashion space.
Pretty good number of them if you count things like intermission. Slit, slot, crack, aperture, interlude, gap, breach, etc. Others, too.
When I said “handful” I more so meant in all of language yeah there are probably hundreds of words for the empty space between certain things, but in all of human language that’s probably a pretty small number.
This is a great point! Humans can put names on things that aren’t there, such as holes!
This ‘naming of hole-like concepts’ may sound trivial, but there have been entire cultures that didn’t have ‘hole-like’ concepts and this stunted their ability to make certain discoveries. For example, the ancient Greeks could not have developed calculus; they did not have a concept of zero that they could use for mathematical manipulation. This shows an unfortunate reality: you can’t mentally manipulate ideas that you don’t have.
However, once you do have those ideas, they may seem obvious. This is a well documented human bias: the curse of knowledge. Once you understand something, it is very difficult to imagine not knowing that. For us, knowers of pupils, holes, zeros, and chasms, it may seem absurd to not have names for pupils, holes, zeros, and chasms. We take them for granted, when in reality it was not an easy road to arrive at them.
Really makes ya think what obvious things we might be missing. Maybe all you need to make FTL travel possible is to dinglepop all your schleem using a household plumbus?
Could it not be said that “nothing” is actually a thing? 🤔
- Me, trying to persuade my philosophy prof that by not turning in my assignment, I have actually turned in an assignment.
Null and zero are two different things.
A hole is a thing.
Never call someone a massive asshole, call them massless.
Same situation with assholes and anal sphincters.
I think both the hole and sphincter are included in “asshole”. It’s a packaged deal
Except don’t we usually mean the sphincter itself when we say asshole?
Isn’t that the same as iris and pupil?
I didn’t think so? When I say Iris, I mean the colored ring. When I say pupil, I mean the hole. When I say asshole, I mean the ring, not the hole. I can’t remember ever wanting to refer to the actual hole. Maybe “gape?”
I’d say it’s more than just a hole. I had an eye injury when I was a teenager that caused a detached iris. I didn’t have a massive pupil, I had 2 small, irregularly shaped pupils. After surgery, I now have a permanently dilated pupil shaped like a teardrop
Out of curiosity, does a different shaped pupil change your vision? I equate a pupil to a camera lens aperture; the smaller it gets, the less light gets through. Have you noticed a difference?
Well after all these years I’ve gotten used to it, but my vision is very blurry in that eye. There’s also injury to the macula so there’s a giant gray spot in my near vision. It’s kinda like a giant peripheral vision, but I’m also more sensitive to big changes in brightness
Wait until I tell you about this weird concept, the zero…
I’ll have none of your witchcraft here, thank-you-very-much.
