Comment on Fossils
notabot@lemm.ee 5 months agoThat argument seems to boil down to whether or not a thing can be a member of a category before that category is described and named by humans, or presumably any sentient entity. You seem to ne arguing that it can’t, I would say it can.
Considered anything that existed before humans. Let’s take dinosaurs. They existed, but before humans came up with the name ‘dinosaur’ were they dinosaurs? I would say that the category existed even though there were no humans to describe it. Likewise with aesthetic categories, the entity exists and either fits within the category, or it does not, even if the category has not been described by humans. Thus, if you consider fossils to be poetry, they are, indeed, poetry older than words.
If we’re nit picking the meme I would instead take issue with the concept of fossils being a memory of bones. We have fossils of plants, boneless creatures and even soft tissue from creatures with bones. Despite that, I think the meme is reasonable enough, and a fair way to look at things.
kwomp2@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Okay I dont know much about dino categorization, but let’s say: The category “dinosaur” is a sum of descriptions of objective properties of dinosaurs and their relation to other species’ properties (idk, no milk, thus no mammal…). Those properties and relations existed as the dinosaur existed. So I would agree: to that extend the categories existed, without us.
Let’s say the category “poetry” describes a relational phenomenon that occurs when a combination of words or an arrangement of things (sunset, fossils) sparks an aesthetic experience.
This is not just discovered and described by humans, but it can exclusively happen when humans are present. As with dinos: the category “poetry” didn’ exist before us. The difference I’m all about: What the category describes also did’t exist before humans. Yes, there were fossils, but they alone would have never evolved to be a part of poetry without humans, the way dinos were dinos without humans.
notabot@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I think I understand your point of view, but I would argue that even an aesthetic category such as ‘poetry’ can exist without sentient beings to experience it. Ultimately the category is not defined by the things in it, but by the criteria that define what is in it, and so the category of ‘poetry’ is populated by everything that fits a definition along the lines of: combinations of words or arrangements of things that would spark an aesthetic experience, rather than things that do spark such an experience. This is necessary if we wish to include works that have been created, and which presumably do not generate precisely those feelings in the author, but which have not yet been experienced by others yet. I would suggest we should include such works from creation, rather than them suddenly becoming poetry when first experienced by an audience. If we use the latter definition, who creates the poety, the author or the first audience?