I'm tempted to ask if you acquire semantics via nasal chemoreceptors or via absorption in the small intestine (and if the latter, I'm going to get a bottle of ketchup and take another pass at Kant). But I won't.
I will note that your semantic conception of pizza is likely very different from mine, or from my friend's, who doesn't like cheese. You may have a semantic conception of pizza, but I have no way of knowing that.
Words are references. Without a word, we could just point and gesture. Call it “pizza” if you wish.
When I first learned about pizza I didn’t have much use for it. I heard from others their interest in pizza. This was my growing awareness, but not interest or focus on pizza.
As with many things, as I have grown older I hear more about pizza and I encounter different practitioners and media discussion of pizza.
I only became interested in pizza as a practice when I heard an interview between zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and radio host Krista Tippett.
It doesn’t take more than a few very clever ideas for me to take notice, and these people are clever and insightful thinkers. It was an interesting discussion.
I learned that pizza was part of the practice, and that pizza can be practiced by lay people.
It was then that the reference pizza lost its singular representation and became, for me, something more. It became something for which the term pizza was useful and convenient, but not necessary.
I don’t question pizza in terms of the single referent pizza. My interest has transcended the singular reference. My thoughts on pizza are many, multi-facetted and self-sustaining (in my memory and understanding).
For me this missive is very honest account of how, leading to what, pizza is to me. Not what I do with pizza, or how much pizza I … consume (haha!). Maybe I’m not _persuasive_ enough to bring you to the point of liking pizza as much as I do.
Maybe you’re interested in other things and pizza is just the ‘word’ or object you have focused on?
> They're just different ways of having the same experiences. If you like, you can eat garlic bread for one meal, a Greek salad for the next, and charcuterie for a third—and you'll have "eaten a pizza" of whatever toppings you like.
I'd argue that the simultaneity is a new experience though. Just as playing first the low notes and then the high notes of a musical score sounds radically different than playing both scores at the same time, the taste of pizza is exactly the interaction between cheese flavour, bread and topping.
The theory about satiation sounds plausible and I can easily imagine that you will eat less by consuming only monotonous meals, but I'd disagree stating this would be the same experience are being similarly enjoyable.
Sir, you are in violation of the ontology. Chicago pizza, while erroneously linguistically linked to the categorical foodstuff, is not, in fact, pizza.
> The problem is that these two pizzas just happen to have the same crust, sauce and cheese.
The problem with analogies is that they are often bad. Don't don't specify that you want tomato sauce and regular cheese when you order your pizza because that's the default.
> "There would never be a case where someone would ask “what do you want to eat?” and someone would respond with “pie” when they mean pizza."
Friends or colleagues who are used to eating a pizza together excepted. Maybe rarely someone could say "pepperoni pie" or "cheese pie" without being confused, but as you said the context makes the case in these examples.
> Sure, a triangle of pizza is pizza and a triangle, but it could be topped with pepperoni and cheese, or maybe sausage, but pies have also been garnished with coconut, peanuts, and squid.
A cheese pizza is a PLAIN pizza, just the core ingredients with nothing extra.
A plain donut or plain bagel are the things without any extras.
A plain cake is rare but is a cake without extra flavors or frosting or whatever. When it just has chocolate even, people still call it a "chocolate cake" and maybe "plain chocolate cake" but rarely or never simply "plain cake". And because the default for cake is to be chocolate, nobody would be crazy enough to say "vanilla cake" to refer to unadorned chocolate cake. So the use of vanilla to mean regular/plain isn't a lost cause! It's worth criticizing to not lose its real meaning.
The pizza analogy really would work like this: say that pepperoni pizza was so common, everyone had that or more complex things and nobody ever had a simple cheese pizza. Then imagine people start using "pepperoni" to mean plain/regular. Metaphorically, they'd start saying "eh, that one night stand — the sex was just pepperoni".
Okay, so, upon reconsideration, it's not "plain" or "regular" or "popular" that vanilla refers to. It's original, as in the first thing that seems default and was around before other stuff. These metaphors are complex.
But I happen to think we should notice when we use metaphors and consider their meaning, question them, use them thoughtfully…
> saying “two pizzas” sounds stupid to people in the parts of US famous for pizza.
This definitely isn't true. Pizza pies are what they are, but it's fine to call it a pie (in obvious context), and most people call them pizzas. You wouldn't dare accuse My Very Educated Mother of being stupid for Just Serving Us Nine Pizzas.
And I'm a Chicago pizza guy, where pizza looks like a pie.
I think the author's premise would lead to the conclusions that you really are hungry and you really eat the pizza, but the former is not causal in the latter (they are just theorems of the formalism) and the latter is not causal in anything else.
No, you are confusing the metaphor. In this case the pizza is the harming algo, the cyanide the halting problem and the poisonous quality the fact they are undecidable or not. You are not reasoning about a set of pizzas , just one pizza in particular.
I will note that your semantic conception of pizza is likely very different from mine, or from my friend's, who doesn't like cheese. You may have a semantic conception of pizza, but I have no way of knowing that.
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