General Consciousness is defined by two qualities: Binding: All the information that’s part of a conscious experience is experienced at once, and from a single perspective Boundary: Any processing of the information is excluded from the conscious experience, it happens before or after the information is experienced. This kind of structure has been described as the Binding and Boundary...
Fascism: when people believe that power comes from the position of leadership itself. Most definition try to list a series of characteristics of what a fascist government does, but it’s very hard to create a consistent list that works in every situation. Instead I think it makes more sense to look at the root cause, why do all those different government act in similar ways? Like most other...
There’s been a lot of talk about the differences between capitalism and socialism (or democratic socialism or communism, etc.). Unfortunately a concrete definition of those terms is rarely part of the discussion, and even when it is the definitions that are typically used are too vague to be really uses. For example: An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of...
Imagination: a feedback loop of expectations Imagination is a difficult concept to define because it’s so tied up in our idea of what it means to be conscious, or even what it means to be human. We can imagine things that are very simple things or very in depth, and we can talk about an idea like “imagine what it would be like to imagine”, and we do these kinds of things constantly. There’s a lot...
Sandwich: Filling between top and bottom pieces of bread The most common question for Definition Mining might be “what’s a sandwich”, or maybe more specifically “is a hot dog a sandwich?” This is a great question because it really highlights a key idea of definitions, they’re supposed to reduce confusion. If you asked me for a sandwich and I brought you a hotdog, you’d probably be a little...
Masculine: Behavior caused by a combination of pessimism and self confidence Feminine: Behavior caused by a combination of optimism and caution I was standing in line at a popular bagel shop, people watching, and I noticed a lot of different groups waiting with me. Couples old and young, college kids, construction workers, and people heading off to work. Something about that diversity struck me...
I was going to try and define beauty and humor as part of the emotions article, but these two stand out from other emotions and have some similarities to each other as well. They’re different from other emotions because they’re also qualities that we tend to strongly attribute to the subjects that cause the emotions. We might say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but we also expect...
Rational: Making choices by attempting to prove yourself wrong We want to be rational, but if we don’t have a good definition for what that means, how can we tell if we’re being rational or not? In fact being rational is so tied up with the ways human think and solve problems that being irrational essentially means that it’s impossible to make progress or win an argument. If someone tells you...
Stretched dough topped with a savory sauce and cheese Pizza is a great topic for a definition, partly because everybody knows and loves it, but also because it’s so recognizable. But if it’s instantly recognizable, do we really need a definition? Honestly… probably not—pizza isn’t an idea that we can understand better by defining it. All that really matters is what it tastes like. If your...
When free people no longer have any rational fears Is utopia a worthwhile goal? You’d think it would be. Overwhelmingly in fiction, however, the idea of striving to create a utopia is often revealed to be a mistake. The outcome is almost always worse than planned, and it turns into a complete dystopia. These science-fiction stories warn us that utopias are doomed to fail. In real life, the idea...