Existence needs a name

To exist, you need a name. This is true for everything — feelings, inanimate objects, humans, animals. If you are just part of a group or collection of things (a lion is part of the group of “lions,” which is a type of cat, etc.), then you do not have an identity.

While this may seem frivolous at first, it’s interesting because it makes a big difference in many things.

Example: feelings.

• You just discovered an old photo from your college days and it makes you feel nostalgic.

• However, if “nostalgic” didn’t exist as a word, you’d still be feeling nostalgic but would have to classify the feeling in your head as its nearest proxy — which may be sad or happy.

• By giving your feeling the name of the nearest proxy, you are also changing the way you actually feel. Nostalgia changes to sadness or happiness, which isn’t actually what you were feeling to begin with.

• This is powerful, and there are likely thousands of emotions that different people feel every day that end up proxying to the nearest neighbor and changing how people feel.

• Schadenfreude is a German word which means deriving pleasure in someone else’s pain. This is not the same as cruel or sadistic. The actual closest word is epicaricacy, which a lot of folks may not know. So when you’re feeling this and don’t know how to express it, you end up feeling cruel or sadistic instead, which has different repercussions on the self than feeling schadenfreude.

This is true for all things. So now the question is: who should have the power to give things a name? And how should that evolve as we look forward in the world of generative AI?