Post #1368991

@jdw it looks like she looked at your binary logic example and applied it to a situation where fuzzy logic would be more applicable (if we accept that one can be, say, 42% man, 58% non-man). A similar issue occurs when people try to use binary logic when talking whether something is alive or dead and then argue for hours whether e.g. viruses are alive. I think that it makes sense that aliveness is likewise a spectrum that depends on the system itself, it's environment, timescales we consider, etc. Here's an interesting paper on this topic: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11084-010-9192-3 As for your question, IDK, but I came up with another analogy: let's take a 6-sided die. 4 of them are black, 2 of them are coloured with different colours A and B, such that when illuminated with some monochromatic light, A and B are indistinguishable. So when looking at the die under white light, you can always say which colour is up. But under the monochromatic light, if the coloured side is up, you can say it was either A or B, but not one of the black sides.