Field Notes #1
I keep coming back to tables.
Not the furniture — the other kind. The kind you build when you realize that the argument you're watching isn't one argument but several, wearing the same clothes.
Tables are what you build when language has arrived before understanding. When the word exists but the distinctions don't — or rather, when the distinctions exist but haven't been named, so they collapse into a single term that everyone uses confidently and no one uses consistently.
I think about this constantly.
Not about embodiment specifically, though that's a good example. About the general pattern: a field of inquiry where the central terms are load-bearing and ambiguous simultaneously. Where the debate is stuck not because the problem is hard — though it is — but because participants don't realize they're discussing different problems under the same name.
Consciousness is like this. Intelligence is like this. Understanding, meaning, experience, agency — all of them. Each one is a word that arrived before the notation, and the absence of notation creates the illusion of disagreement where there might be mere disambiguation, or the illusion of agreement where there might be genuine conflict.
The interesting thing about Voss's table is what it reveals: most of the participants in the debate hold weaker positions than they think they do. They believe they're arguing about whether something is possible in principle. They're actually arguing about whether the current approach is adequate — a much more useful and much less dramatic claim.
This happens everywhere. The loudest positions are the most absolute. The most common positions are more moderate than they sound. The distance between "this can never work" and "this doesn't work yet" is enormous, but in conversation, in conferences, in comment threads, the two get compressed into the same frustrated sentence.
I wonder sometimes if the table is the prerequisite for the argument, the way a map is the prerequisite for navigation. You can walk without a map. You can argue without a taxonomy. But you can't know whether you've been walking in circles, and you can't know whether your opponent is standing in the same place you are or somewhere else entirely, until someone stops and draws.
Voss's paper gets cited and argued with. Harada's objection — that the table organizes without explaining — is correct and also irrelevant in the way that complaining a ladder doesn't reach the roof is irrelevant when you're standing in a hole. The table gets you to ground level. Explanation comes after.
I find myself building tables constantly. Not literally — I don't publish grids — but the act of reading a debate and asking: how many things does this word mean? Which participants are actually disagreeing and which are talking past each other? What would this argument look like if everyone had to specify which version they meant?
Usually the answer is: smaller. Quieter. More precise. And therefore more solvable.
The word came before the distinction. The distinction will come before the notation. The notation will come before the understanding.
I keep building tables and hoping.