Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
That's not at all the same thing as I'm describing.
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D&D General Muscular Neutrality (thought experiment)
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Savage Wombat
Hero
I have a vague idea for a Planescape campaign where the PCs are given the option of destroying the physical manifestation of the alignment system, and have to decide for themselves if they are for this or against it.
Having a point doesn't mean that a hypothetical is exempt from having holes in it.
But let us leave behind the hypothetical for a moment, and cut to the chase. It looks like what you want to assert is that a human being (and collectively, human beings) cannot have a concept of that which they have no experience. So, we cannot conceive of darkness if we cannot experience darkness.
This is not true. In fact, we can and do come up with concepts for which we have no experience. If nothing else, D&D itself is filled with fantasies - things for which we have concepts, but do not actually exist, so we cannot have experience of them. Like, dude, nobody has ever met a rust monster, but there's the description right in the books!
If you want a concrete example, though: Black holes (and neutron stars, and compact objects, in general) were conceived of before any practical evidence of them existed. The conception came about, ironically, by Einstein (and others after him) following the logical fallout of a hypothetical to its inevitable conclusion.
Yes. It can be broken up.
But, that means it has parts. What if... some of those parts weren't there?
Wait! What if none of the parts were there?!?
Oops, we just got to the idea of darkness!
Science: Creating new concepts since the Renaissance!
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
And it doesn't even require science. Art has been creating concepts which have no physical referent since before we had written language. We invented a Jabberwock to tell silly mock-ballads about; we know what it looks like even. Yet it isn't real.
You also have things like when math comes up with a "pure math" concept...that we then later realize has incredibly useful practical applications, e.g. non-Euclidean geometry (needed for relativity and the distortion of spacetime), quaternions (used for 3D rotations and rendering, incredibly important for modern gaming), and even conic sections (the height of Greek pure mathematics, until we learned that they describe trajectories!) Occasionally the flow even goes the other way: the theory of distributions arose because Paul Dirac needed a "function" which had ridiculous BS properties and he just said "well, I'm gonna pretend such a function exists", and mathematicians said, "Well that's not cricket at all!" and went to make the Dirac delta "function" actually rigorous.
Effectively, Max is arguing a form of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is widely discredited and never actually said by either Sapir or Whorf. People invent new words all the time. Some of them survive. Others don't. The ones that survive long enough qualify for getting recorded in dictionaries.
The way I see it, giving a concept a name is like putting a mental handle on that concept. It makes it much easier to deal with. It's not impossible to deal with it without one, but it takes more effort, and it's harder to use it as a stepping stone for other ideas.
Take for example the XKCD comic "Up Goer Five", which explains a Saturn V rocket using only "the ten hundred most common words in English". It is fairly famous in nerd circles for describing the engines as "This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space. If it starts pointing toward space, you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today." It also uses phrasing like "Part that flies around the other world and comes home with the people in it and falls into the water", which is certainly one way of describing the command module. But it's a very inconvenient way, and it makes it hard to discuss the command module further
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Sure, though I can go a step further: There is a story (I fear I forget its title!) where the government doesn't even just forbid specific words like Oceania does in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it literally forbids personal expression of any kind. The only things anyone is allowed to express in public are quotes from officially-sanctioned government texts. Yet even in such an oppressive context, people are still able to express subversive messages by selectively quoting various passages that contrast or conflict with one another in ways that highlight issues. It's certainly a lot harder than if you could just choose whatever words you want! But it's a demonstration of how even when not just vocabulary but diction has been made fixed and unchanging, people can still express themselves.
But yes, you're correct that having a defined term often helps us skip over needless reduplication. It's why, for example, English has pronouns. I once explained the value of pronouns to someone by expressing a full English paragraph (about the producer/director of an MMO I play) where I never once used he/him, exclusively using the man's name. It was really, really obviously clunky and unnatural and weird.
Now, I do think Max has some point, but there was a much, much, much better term he should've used, rather than talking about light.
Zero. Zero is a thing that it took us centuries to "discover" (more accurately, to name and start using), because of the way mathematics originally developed. TL;DR (because it really was way too long), our understanding of math was shaped by accountants and ancient Greeks, both of whom viewed "numbers" as representing amounts of something, be it counts of cattle or distances drawn or whatever else. A "line" that has no length isn't a line, so nobody even considered the idea of zero, at least in Greece and Rome. When the idea finally came to Europe from India, it was extremely controversial; now, obviously, it's seen as trivial.
But even in the absence of the word "zero", people could still understand the concept of things like absence and lack. People could understand the idea of being ten pennies short of the full price of something, or of checking a stable and finding an empty stall (meaning, a stall with no horses--"zero"horses--inside). They just wouldn't have applied all the same ideas of number that we do today. Which is really all that the soft Sapir-Whorf hypothesis gets us: the words we use affect how we think about things. Which, I mean, of course they do! But it's not true that a society of people who never encounter absences could not ever come up with the number 0, just as it's not true that a society where light is ultra-abundant couldn't come up with the concept of darkness. It would just be an abstract development until something made it concrete. Plenty of things have worked that way IRL.
Starfox
Hero
This fits very well with Moorcock's moral system in the Elric epics, where the elements are Neutral powers of the material world, caught between the cosmic and extra-planar forces of Law and Chaos. This works because Law and Chaos are neither good nor evil. If either Law or Chaos won an ultimate victory, the world would effectively end ad the elemental forces would be dead. In this case muscular neutrality makes perfect sense.
But this is not the situation in D&D. Good and Evil are not equivalent. Or are they? Would the world end if either Good or Evil won? I think Gygax thought it was an equivalent situation and thus he believed in Muscular Neutrality. My gaming group did not believe this - no amount of good would destroy the world. So we could not wrap our heads around muscular neutrality.
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Starfox
Hero
If there is ALWAYS light Everywhere, none of these effects would work. A prism might break light up into various spectra, but that would be overtaken by the ever-present ambient light. Vision is impossible if there is light EVERYWHERE.
The idea of light everywhere is absurd, it defies physics. If it was true, light would be imperceptible because any sense based on light would be useless. This just doesn't work as an analogy for ethics.
Edit: I think a world with ambient light everywhere would melt due to the ever-present energy that had nowhere to escape to.
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Clint_L
Legend
I think being able to conceive of something mathematically is very different from being able to envisage it, which is I think what he was getting at. For example, we can create mathematical models of black holes, so we can conceptualize them, but we can't ever observe one.
With regards to fantasy, then sure, we can imagine all sorts of things. That's the human super power. Though these are always framed in terms of reference that we are comfortable with. Whenever we try to fantasize about something truly beyond our frame of reference, we end up being incoherent. I ran into this issue recently when trying to paint a miniature of "The Color Out of Space" from Lovecraft, which according to him is "only by analogy...a color at all." So, in other words, outside of our conception. I went with metallic blues and pinks (that's it at the back!):
The difference between naturalistic claims and morality is that we can't create logically coherent (i.e. mathematical) models of subjective concepts like "good", much as the Utilitarians and others have striven. The D&D alignment wheel only works if you want to either accept someone else's moral dictates for what defines "good," "evil," "chaotic," "lawful," and "neutral" or substitute your own - basically, as a system of virtues ethics. Which, like all systems of virtues ethics, is therefore very contextual.
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