Language shapes thought

Many problems in our world are not real problems, but imaginary problems stemming from language limitations. Unfortunately, to a large extent, thought is shaped by language, and where language is misleading, thought is invalid.

So, many problems, when analyzed, turn out to not exist at all, but only appear to be problems because the language makes them so.

For example, you can solve the classic chicken and egg problem like this:

Phil: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
Me: "The egg. Eggs evolved first. Fish were laying them millions of years before birds existed."
Phil: "No, I mean the chicken egg. Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?"
Me: "Define chicken egg. Is it an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg from which a chicken hatches?"

Notice that by simply defining the terms that are supposed to be understood, we elimiate the problem.

Next, the silent tree problem.

Phil: "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
Me: "Yes."
Phil: "But how can it make a sound if nobody hears it?"
Me: "There is no tree. You just made it up. An imaginary tree cannot make a sound, unless it makes an imaginary sound, and if you imagine the tree falling, you can also imagine the sound."

So many of life's problems are nothing more than problems with the language. Because the language limits how you think about the problem, the solution, which would otherwise be obvious, eludes.

So, next time you find that you are facing an apparently insoluble problem, remind yourself: "There is no tree."

Expectation of privacy

I have heard this expression several times in the last few years: "There is no expectation of privacy."

The phrase concerns me for several reasons. The main reason is that we have been given to thinking of abstractions as real things. This is called reification, and it is a distortion in thinking that most people have and do not realize. It is a distortion that allows all manner of frauds and deceptions to live and thrive in human minds.

Expectation can only exist in a human mind. There is no way that an expectation can exist in any other way. The phrase "there is no expectation of privacy" suggests that one should be able to see "expectation" floating around somewhere, like a ghost, independent of any individual mind conceiving it. That is absurd.

Second, if someone is doing something private, then it is clear that that person expects privacy. That should be self-evident. So, wherever someone is doing something private, there is, by definition, an expectation of privacy.

Some people might say: "Well, to that person, there might be an expectation of privacy, but in the realm of public opinion, that expectation does not exist."

To that I say: there is no such thing as public opinion. Public opinion is another reification. We are conditioned to believe in such fallacies because they enable people to control us.

Opinions are held by individual minds. An opinion can only exist in an individual mind. The "Public" is an abstraction. It is an imaginary boundary that defines a group of individuals. To say that such an imaginary group can have an opinion is absurd. The "public" does not have a mind, much less an opinion.

What you might think is "public opinion" is nothing more than the opinion of a person who is able to convey that opinion over the media. The opinion might represent a majority of people who have answered surveys, but more likely, it is the opinion held by a small minority of people who are in control of the media, or more likely, it is a fabricated opinion that is not held by any real person, but which is portrayed as the opinion of "Joe Public" (a non-existent character in popular mythology) even though no one person actually has it, and even though it might actually be the opposite of the opinions held by most of the people who constitute the public.

In short, Public Opinion is a myth promoted for propaganda purposes.

So, the expectation of privacy cannot be a matter of public opinion, because public opinion is a fallacy.

The expectation of privacy exists whenever and wherever someone expects privacy.

No paradoxes

I am convinced that there are no paradoxes in nature, just as there are no spelling errors in the alphabet.