[lit-ideas] Re: Do ideas exist before being articulated?
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 08:54:58 -0700
John -- if you didn't have a word for "red" would you still see the
colour
of an apple, a tomato, blood? Or, because you didn't have the word for
it,
would your brain simply stop processing data?
There are a few tribes that don't have names for colors. They distinguish
colors in two groups: bright or dark. Red is dark. Green is dark. To them,
red and green are the same "color", or better said, they are both dark.
So they don't "have a word" for the color red and don't see red. They see
dark.
This isn't an odd idea. It happens in our world all the time.
If I show (for example, Julie) a long page of computer code, she only sees
random characters (many of which are misspelled), lots of "<" and ">", and
so on. Her brain sees alphabetical characters, but not the meaning. To me, I
see the structure of the code and what it does. Julie doesn't have "a word
for it" (actually, she probably does have a word for it, but it's not a
polite word) and "can't see" it.
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
