Wittgenstein: die Grenzen meiner Sprache sind die Grenzen meiner Welt.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
134 points (96.5% liked)
Funny
14700 readers
716 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The universe is eminently describable with language - thats the whole point of mathematics.
It's not: see Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.
I am at a loss as to what they have to do with this, do you mean to say that the universe is not exhaustively describable?
Okay. Describe a flower using mathematics. It better entail every detail of the flower and all of its virtues.
Oh you seem fun. The vast body of mathematics describes flowers, from growth patterns to genetic structure to the effect it has on human neurology when observing the patterns made by them. However I am curious; please explain what a virtue is!
Youre a fucking idiot dude
Being intentionally disrespectful for clout like that is the lamest move around
Missing the nuance on purpose to seem smarter then you are is a close second
Do you mean the person who tried to use a cliche'd gotcha as a result of their misunderstanding of what mathematics is? Or me who was unimpressed by the aforementioned cliche'd anti-intellectualism in their comment? Because there is no nuance here that I have missed - they pulled out the deeply tired idea that mathematics, which is a descriptive language, has not yet comprehensively described all of what constitutes a "flower" and thus cannot conceivably do that - which is a patently absurd requirement that belies an utter lack of understanding of the fundemental purpose of mathematics or the function of language in general.
While qualia are not directly communicable, even they are labelable. All that can be differentiated can be labeled, if only by reference to its differences from other things (or other relations to other things). And if something cannot be differentiated, then there’s no need to have a word/label for it.
We don’t have separate words for red-green and yellow because we perceive them the same way. If we ran into aliens that didn’t, then it’d be relevant to create a word for it, and I just did by calling it “red-green”
When we need a word for something new we create one. And sure sometimes it takes science a while to refine definitions, and yeah, in natural languages words have really blurry definitions which obscures communication, but that’s not a property of the universe or a fundamental flaw in all languages, just our limited experiences and non-formal languages.
Point is: all that is relevant to be communicated via language could be communicated via some language.
And then there's people thinking if we feed computers enough language, they will be able to solve everything
If we can simply train these machines on all the writings of straight white first-world men, then they'll be free of all bias and produce only objective facts!
>Using words to undermine using words
No, language is trying to sort the water.
Yuuup. And then we turn the words into numbers and run a few bajillion matrix multiplications on em to produce some sentences that bear a similarity to the sentences we make, and go “omg! It understands the way a human does!”
Also, MFs in the comments relitigating privacy of consciousness and Mary the color scientist lmao