when you try to figure out what it means for words to mean things, you quickly are sucked into a rabbithole of infinite regress; upon what do you base meaning? all which seems solid melts away upon closer examination, leaving naught but metaphysical dust

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RT @pee_zombie
@sonyasupposedly imo every metaphysics is ultimately tautological, as it must ultimately be rooted in some article of faith, whether it is "my perception of sensory …
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1394026344795758593

without a grounding upon which to construct your system, you can't even begin to answer the question posed; semantics deals with the intersections of language and meaning, the latter of which, paradoxically, does not inherently possess itself

one approach is that of Descartes

while seeking to answer certain unanswerable questions, he realized that it would be rather difficult to build a coherent system of thought from within his extant cognitive structure of dubious origin; without a grounding, how could he trust anything he had previously thought??

his approach was to start w/ one simple, tautological axiom; cogito, ergo sum. he was experiencing a reasoning process, therefore something must have been generating it. from that self-generating ground, he set out to reconstruct his entire belief system

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RT @pee_zombie
@rothosphere @RealtimeAI @a_manifolder @dinglevery a major problem with this argument is that it rests on unsound foundations. the logical basis for "my experience i…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1342379102096027649

he built a sort of cognitive lean-to on this ground, to temporarily inhabit until such a time that he had reconstructed the cathedral of his mind brick by grounded brick; an axiom, a few simple logical rules, & the evidence of his senses; all thats needed to carry out his project

clearly, his project succeeded, leaving behind a rich intellectual legacy, but it was a rather... extreme approach. a binary one, splitting the world in two. a sort of dualism, one might say, even. you wouldn't be remiss to suggest his conclusions were a function of his process.

one might compare his approach to the Big Rewrite antipattern infamous to software engineers, wherein a team, frustrated with the legacy pile of machinery they have inherited, effectively ragequit to build a shiny new pile, swearing to not make the mistakes of their forebearers

ofc, unless they've actively sought out the root causes (often cultural issues), they naturally replicate the same assumptions, ontological pathologies, & blind spots in the design of the shiny new cruft pile. and so, Cartesian dualism was inevitable for a Christian scholar.

that was a bit unfair, but forgive me, I couldn't resist; I do so love mocking dualists. it's one of my many vices.

there are ways to avoid this failure mode, but instead of explaining, I'll direct you to the software architecture canon. it addressees this very problem in depth.

if you find this hard to believe, consider that there is an isomorphism between the dualistic models of code/data and agent/object, both of which lie at the heart of their fields' respective challenges. dualism is a useful but deeply flawed model, no matter where it is applied.