samwik: "thanks Tim for proving the point about how important our definitions are to seeing the truth"

Very often, even our most carefully worded definitions can be nothing more than hazy representations of our understanding or experience. Short of telepathy, we can only hint at what we mean by using various symbols, metaphors and analogies. At the end of a conversation we may feel that we've succeeded in conveying a message accurately, only to discover later that we failed completely.

As a teenager, I was just getting into classical music in a big way. At that age, your hearing is at its best, so real 'listening' can take you to other worlds. Anyway, I would sometimes be experiencing one of these abstract 'other worlds' when one of my family would enter the room and say something like "ooh, that's nice, it makes you think of the Himalayas". I don't know why I should have been so exasperated, but I was. Maybe because my personal experience seemed to me to be several orders of magnitude better than any mundane vision. The point is, we just can't assume that everything that's going on in the world outside of our minds is interpreted in remotely the same way in the minds of others.

It's hard isn't it. No wonder some people like mathematics. When we say 2 + 2 = 4, no one asks us what we mean by "2"!

"Time is what prevents everything from happening at once" - John Wheeler