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The difference between labels and things
At some point in my life, I stopped caring so much about labels for things. What's a thing called? It doesn't matter: the label is not the thing, it's only a mental symbol for the thing. Well, this is a problem if the thing is a person and a label is that person's name. What's ironic is that, as a software developer, I'm constantly creating "things" (variables and objects) in code and assigning labels (variable names) to these things. But, my problem with labels might be a direct consequence of the arbitrariness that I find in the naming of things. If I have a piece of plastic, and I call it a "spoon", is there anything about the plastic, other than my naming of it, that reflects some inner "spoonness" that exists outside of my mind? Ok, if I use the thing to lift soup up to my mouth, maybe there is something that you could say about my label: Yes, the thing I call a "spoon" actually matches the intended behavior that is summed up in the commonly-used English word "spoon". So what's the problem? I have a great unease with these labels, and I can't really pinpoint it. It's not just labels, really, it's the gap between the symbolic world that exists in the mind and is expressed through words, and the "actual" reality that these symbols and words are supposed to apply to. There is a gap, and I think some people believe in their symbols more than they believe in the world itself. To me, reality trumps the symbols. For example, a friend approaches me with a companion and introduces me to the person (whose name is "Herman" it turns out). He tells me, "this person is a convicted felon who murdered someone three years ago". So I have a conception of Herman that puts a label of "criminal" or "felon" on the actual human being. A week later, I find out that my friend was only joking and that Herman has never been arrested in his life. The label I had was false. Of course, had my friend been telling the truth, I might have altered my behavior in a useful way: I maybe would avoid being alone with Herman for long periods of time, for example. But my label clearly did not reflect reality. Another example: Someone hands me a full water balloon and tells me it is not full of water, but instead is full of hydrogen peroxide. The label I have for the contents of the balloon is either true or not, but it does not matter one bit to the actual contents of the balloon whether I am right about my own perception of its contents: it's either water or it's something else. Symbols clearly allow us to make useful adjustments to our behavior as we travel through our lives in the world. We avoid things we believe to be poisonous, for example. But the same symbol-belief system is subject to corruption by others, either on purpose or by accident. People were accused of being witches in early America. The label "witch" caused people to kill other people. The actual human beings that the labels were applied to were victims of labels imposed by others on them. The label was more powerful than the actual person's denial that they deserved the label. The label was more powerful than physical evidence. If someone had made an accusation at that period of history for reasons other than a real belief that the person was an actual witch, then that person has corrupted others' symbol-belief systems on purpose. A paranoid person may begin to believe that someone close to them is a spy. This label --"Spy"-- is a corruption of the person's own symbol-belief system. If the paranoid person believes that label too much, they will act on their belief. Imagine a person who thinks that all Muslims are terrorists. Another discomfort I'm having with labels in the world is the imposing of edges on a universe that I see as much more continuous. Sure, the label "spoon" applies to this piece of plastic today, but just a week ago, this was a big pot of chemical soup (which was formed and hardened later into this shape), and just three months ago what we are labeling a "spoon" was labeled "crude oil". Watch this trick: I take this piece of plastic, insert it into this cylindrical cannister, and now the label changes to "trash". Gestalt theory talks about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. I have problems with this because I don't believe that there is a reality-based distinction between the thing we might see as a "whole" and any given "part". These are just concepts that reflect the way our brains / minds interpret the universe, but they don't reflect the universe itself. For example, we have names for the interactions between land, water, and gravity:
All these concepts are human-imposed labels to visible subsets of the continuum of a water cycle interacting with the topology of land. I could invent a new concept for a different subset. My new word is "watertree" and it refers to all the waterways in total that branch out from a delta to the source of every tributary. The shape produced looks like a tree, so I call this concept "watertree". The world cannot be seen for what it is if you believe in labels too strongly.
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