From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 04:28:15 MDT
On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, Lee Corbin wrote:
> I have a couple of simple questions for you.
>
> 1. Do you believe that there is a big hot ball of gas
> about 8 light minutes from the Earth that we call
> "the sun"?
>
> (And I dearly pray that this can be answered with a simple
> "yes" or "no" and not four paragraphs of academic, uh, er,
> something.)
Damien will answer this question with yes, most probably.
However, a very large fraction of people on Earth won't (even if you
translate that question in a language they can understand -- can be rather
tough with the congenitally blind/deaf). The concept of lightminutes is
meaningless for the vast majority of people on this planet, and the notion
that it's a ball of plasma is equally outlandish.
You would have to rephrase this at a lowest common denominator, invoking
basic sensoric modalities such as "do you see/perceive that big
bright/warm thing in the sky yonder". All of the concepts should be
familiar to surface-dwellers, and in >90% of all cases the answer will be
yes (the rest would lie, suspect a trick question, or be insane, or
similiar).
However, as soon as you start departing from basic modalities, the amount
of overlap rapidly diminishes.
> 2. If the answer to the first question is "yes", then I
> announce to the world that from now on my statements
> about the sun are to be *taken* as referring to that
> ball of gas, and *not* any possibly weird thing going
> on in people's brains.
>
> Lee
>
> P.S. Not only that, but you must be aware that 99.99%
> of everyone else's statements are *also* about
> that thing out there, and *not* about culturally
> derived constructs of one damn sort or another. Jeez.
You have a very orderly mind, Lee.
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