Contrary to the saying, this old dog learned a new trick recently.
Or rather, this old dog learned he’d been doing the trick wrong all these years and finally learned how it’s supposed to be done.
Learning an error of my ways is good but here I lose a distinction I’ve long enjoyed making between a connoisseur and a gourmet.
Hard to define…
It’s very easy for discussions to get hung up on definitions, so a serious approach to debating a subject begins with synchronizing everyone’s vocabulary watches. Accurate and nuanced communication requires mutually understood ideas and terminology for expressing those ideas.
Yet some concepts seem almost impossible to define clearly. The idea of “consciousness” is notorious for being a definition challenge, but “morality” or “justice” or “love” are also very difficult to pin down. At the same time, we seem to share mutual basic intuitions of these things.
So the question today is: why are some concepts so hard to define?
Another note that surfaced, this one actually dated: 1/17/79. Apparently, for some reason, I was moved to jot down a personal definition of innocence (as opposed to incense, which is defined by smell rather than words).
“Innocence: Trusting first rather than mistrusting. Thinking someone is right first rather than wrong.”
Sadly, tragically, life has a way of destroying that trust and changing that thinking.
On the note’s flip side…
Posts pertaining to programming!
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