Now to depart slightly from the most aimless thoughts that I have entertained in a while, let us talk about life.

A lot comes to mind, doesn’t it?  However, in a rush of thoughts, ideas rarely come in perfectly accessible packages; they are probable to come as figurative blobs, abstract rantings of gobbledygook.  Especially when one considers something like life – something purely indescribable and indefinable other than by saying “life” – one really can’t say much, but will be – if genuinely in thought – wide-eyed, making weird facial expressions, and scratching one’s head in distracted fashion.

So anyways, back to our discussion about life.  Well, I often frown upon people who provide a selection of quotes, uttered by ubiquitously-known individuals, in the vain attempt to increase their credibility; I mean, do Einstein and Roosevelt know more about life than my septuagenarian grandmother?  Of course not – but admittedly quotes can be extremely interesting, and it’s not only the smart people who say them.  Here are a few:

• Life is like pizza; when it’s good, It’s really good. When it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. (Unknown)
• If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. (Joan Collins – Golden Globe Award-winning English actress and bestselling author)
• God does not play dice with the universe. (Albert Einstein – Nobel Prize-winning physicist)
• May you live all the days of your life. (Jonathan Swift – Irish author, most famed for his work in the satirist genre)

Perhaps whatever these quotes mean are clear enough for one to be inspired, and yet still invoke some thought.  Again, just another couple of things to think about.

Well, for four months, this blog has been untouched and, of course, rather empty.  And so, I considered it almost a necessity to come back to the world of cyber-enlightenment and what not, and so here I am, talking about what the most of us call “thought experiments.”  Let us entertain a well-known example.

Imagine that there is a planet, somewhere in the universe, that is EXACTLY the same as Earth.  All of its characteristics, natural and man-made, are identical to those on Earth; every species of living things that exist on Earth also exist upon this “Twin-Earth.”  And thus, perhaps most importantly, human beings and their manifestations exist on Twin-Earth also.  In fact, all is the same – except for one difference.  There is no water on Twin-Earth; that is, no H2O exists on the planet.  Instead, there is some other substance, that we can chemically call ABC, and ABC gives the inhabitants of Twin-Earth all of the nourishment that water – H2O – gives us.  Indeed, those who speak English on Twin-Earth (yes, languages are the same too) call this substance “water.”  This begs the question: when a person on Earth, say Chris, and his Twin-Earth equivalent – let’s call him Twin-Chris – says “water,” do they mean the same thing?

Well, sort of, I guess.  Maybe.  Not too sure.

Credited to philosopher Hilary Putnam and his studies on semantic externalism (whatever that may be), this experiment provokes one to use a head to some extent.  If H2O and ABC both serve the same purpose to Chris and Twin-Chris respectively, and are even called the same thing, is there a need to differentiate the two?  Maybe so.  Although the psychological states of Chris and Twin-Chris were the same – they were both considering water – H2O and ABC are decidedly different things.  Then again, Chris and Twin-Chris may have been considering different things.  Chris may have been considering H2O; Twin-Chris, ABC.  We might even have to consider what water means in the first place – or rather, we might have to consider what Chris and Twin-Chris mean by water.  One could argue that this usage of water just indicates any substance that is water-like – meaning that Chris and Twin-Chris are meaning the same thing.

Just something to think about and mull over.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Earth_thought_experiment