I think it should be possible to break the culinary categorisation down to chemistry. That doesn’t tell you anything about the “why” but it’s definitely not random and definitely not all in our heads.
I agree with what you mean in kind of a broad-strokes way, but as individuals our subjective experiences of flavors can vary pretty wildly. There’s genetics, neurology, age, and habit/experience that influence our taste in terms of actually sensing the chemicals. Then there’s what we see, taste, and smell just prior or during tasting that severely impact our interpretation of that chemical sense.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Oh, this is actually a perfect example of the arbitreity of mapping systems!
A looong time ago on reddit, I got into an argument with someone who was doing that thing where you confuse the map for the object itself. We were mostly talking about the chemistry table. But anyway, he just could not see how a change in motivation, that is what the map designer finds useful, could change how the map is arranged.
I mean, I don’t think this would convince him: he would just say the culinary version isn’t real. But still, I really like it.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I mean that’s a pretty big difference right?
Like, the periodic tables mapping isn’t arbitrary or alternate.
Like you can’t actually map the periodic a different way and it’s in a sense “self evident” in a way arbitrary mappings aren’t.
The periodic table itself is a kind of proof of quantum theory, or at least, strong supporting evidence. While it can be displayed differently, actually couldn’t be arranged differently and the things we know about physics hold true.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Ah, there he is!
Just kidding.
The extreme usefulness of the one periodic table as we know it is why this is so hard to talk about. Philosophically, it isn’t any different: it is arranged by human values for human consumption. I think there is likely a strong reason that alien values would converge here, but that doesn’t really affect its arbitreity. The elements don’t have value unto themselves, they just are.
And there are plenty of different ways to arrange it. For one, if all you care about are the metals for some reason, you can arrange the nonmetals out of it completely. You could keep a linear, alphabetical list because whatever work you’re doing is derived from chemistry but does not actually care about atomic values.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 day ago
yeah. you don’t understand the periodic table.
borf@lemmynsfw.com 1 day ago
Hey, that guy is a troll and a pretty good one. Block and move on, you’re worth it
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Neither the biology nor culinary mappings are arbitrary.
Did you know that there’s quite extreme agreements on what metals are? Chemists will tell you one thing and not be particularly unified in their response around the topic of semimetals, while astrophysicists have a very simple definition of metals: Anything that has more protons than helium.
Who is right? This has nothing to do with metaphysics (I’ve read a bit down the thread) as in “what is beyond physics, god, and stuff”, but how we interpret our (scientific) observations. Neither definition of metals is more correct than the other, they’re both maps drawn by scientists caring about vastly different things.
Back to the periodic table itself: Defining elements by protons has quite some predictive power but at the same time it’s a vast oversimplification of what actually goes on, ask any quantum chemist. It is rooted in quite hard science, but that doesn’t make it ground reality. Actual reality is something we can’t observe because to observe anything we first have to project it into our minds. All perception is modelling: Ask any neuroscientist. Or, for that matter, Plato.