[HN Gopher] The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle: Wittgenstein's "Tract...
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       The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle: Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" at 100
        
       Author : drdee
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2021-11-08 05:56 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
        
       | zwkrt wrote:
       | Programmers should feel especially at home reading Wittgenstein
       | because his works are a kind of guide to the compiler in the
       | brain that interprets language. The work described in the article
       | is only really relevant to scientific statements about things
       | that do or do not exist in the world. "The cat is on the mat",
       | "benzene molecules are composed of a ring of atoms", "harry is
       | taller than Sally", etc.
       | 
       | His later works are about how we interpret statements outside
       | these scientific statements, such as "I am hungry", "get me a
       | pail of water", "Asia is more beautiful than Australia", or
       | "ouch!"
       | 
       | In both cases, he realizes that the compiler we have gen given
       | through natural and cultural evolution has an incredible amount
       | of undefined behavior, and he tries to explore the space of that
       | undefined behavior and see what limits he hits.
       | 
       | A famous example is his decomposition of "what time is it on the
       | sun?". His idea is that just because we can ask the question
       | doesn't mean it has an answer. In London "what time is it" has to
       | do with GMT and cultural norms of Earth living, but our concept
       | of time is heavily influenced by the relation of the sun to the
       | earth, so when we ask what time it is on the sun we are outside
       | of the frame of reference where that question makes sense.
       | 
       | In just the same way, asking "what is the essence of beauty" is
       | an unanswerable question because beauty is tied to a context,
       | whether that be a painting, a sports maneuver, a story, or a
       | program.
       | 
       | I think of Wittgenstein as a 20th century Socrates, who also
       | seemed through his endless questioning to show that our basic
       | concepts float above an endless void of uncertainty and
       | interpretation, just as "x := y +z" has no predetermined meaning
       | outside of the program running it.
        
       | B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
       | > In this idea lurks the solipsism that language circumscribes
       | our reality.
       | 
       | Or vice-versa. The result is the same - without a shared
       | experience, communication is difficult, as anyone who goes abroad
       | inevitably finds out. _"If a lion could speak, we would not
       | understand him"_
        
       | dx7tnt wrote:
       | Seems a bit silly so use "The way out of the fly-bottle" as a
       | title when that comes from PI and not the Tractatus
        
       | dlkf wrote:
       | A truly banal review. The only thing I learned from it is that
       | the author has read Ludwig Wittgenstein's Wikipedia entry. If
       | you're interested in Wittgenstein, forget the Tractatus and PI,
       | and instead get a copy of the blue book.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-09 23:01 UTC)