Good point. If you mean the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the structure of a
language shapes and influences its speakers' worldview, cognition, and
perception of reality then I would assign it to the cultural part b)-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Prof David West <[email protected]>
Date: 10/6/26 4:09 PM (GMT+01:00) To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [FRIAM]
A field theory of understanding Maybe just a curiosity, but; because you
mention color as an irreducible physical part—If a human perceives a color,
acknowledges its existence, would you not expect the language used by that
human would include a name for that color? - languages with only two color
terms exist, and those colors, always, are black and white, or closer to 'warm'
and 'cold'. - languages with exactly three color terms exist and those colors,
always, are black, white, and red - languages with exactly four color terms
exist and those colors, always, are black, white, red, and green - languages
with exactly five color terms exist and those colors, always, are black, white,
red, green, and brown - languages with exactly six color terms exist and those
colors, always, are black, white, red, green, brown, and purple after that
there is no patternSimilar differences in the areas of pain/pleasure and the
five(six) tastes.This would suggest, to me, that the physical can be no more
than 'signal" [ on | off ] and anything other than that, linguistic term or
expressed perception, e.g., "ouch" is probably cultural, definitely not simply
physical.davewOn Mon, Oct 5, 2026, at 5:13 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:I also see
only some emails. Don't know why. Yes, a subjective experience is always linked
to a specific subject. I would say we can divide subjective experience intoa) a
physical part that depends on molecular biology and genes: receptors for pain
and pleasure, for red, green and blue colors or sweet, salty, sour and bitter
taste. this part is irreducible and depends on our speciesb) a cultural part
that defines subjective meaning (in China for example the colors white and red
have different meaning than in Europe)c) a personal part that depends on the
history of a personThe mathematics used in the proofs describes more the
personal part c) and perhaps part b) if we model the history of whole
countries.-J.-------- Original message --------From: Santafe
<[email protected]>Date: 10/5/26 8:08 PM (GMT+01:00)To: The Friday Morning
Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A field
theory of understandingFor whatever reason, Jochen’s posts don’t forward to me,
so I only see them in the later context of somebody else’s replies. In this
case EricC’s, on Nick’s. I will clip to the focal sentence (acknowledging all
that was clipped):> Claude was not happy about the theorem proofs that Gemini
created. > And Jon also mentioned that they are not waterproof. So I asked
Claude > and Gemini if they could write a new proof. They could. I asked them >
if we could use gauge theory to explain subjective experience - gauge >
invariance to describe objectivity, and symmetry breaking for > subjectivity.I
think there was a time when I had enthusiasm for using these
mathematical-physics metaphors. Something has apparently happened. I probably
said, a while ago (so if you feel like it, forgive the repetition), that since
I don’t know what philosophers mean by objective and subjective, I could take
the more defensive posture of being a linguistic semanticist, which to me seems
like a more pragmatist standing-point anyway, leaving many further mistakes for
the future rather than making them all at once.I could take “objective” and
“subjective” to be two speech registers, in an ordinary
lexical/grammatical-semantics sense. A sentence in an “objective” register is
one that I can parse to a meaning (in the everyday sense; not in some formal
logic that everyday speech doesn’t use and that would need to be invented)
without needing as input who said it. A sentence in a “subjective” register is
one that cannot be parsed to a meaning without reference to some speaker (in
whatever representation; maybe more or less explicit), which must thus be
supplied._Why_ we use those registers, why we have been handed them down from
past speakers innumerable, and how our experienced lives reward or discourage
the adoption of such registers, looks to me like a question that can to some
degree (as good a degree as anything in semantics) be separated or factored
from the classification of the locutions.Eric.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - .
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