[panic]

As usual, this is a philosophical "problem" caused by overanalysis of language. A cloud exists when someone can say "that's a cloud" and a listener thinks "yes, that is a cloud", or that fact is somehow meaningful to them in their life.

If you're a pilot, a cloud is a way to talk about something that reduces your visibility and causes turbulence. If you aren't carrying an umbrella, a cloud may be a sign you're about to get wet. The fact that these phenomena share the name "cloud" is only meaningful to the extent that they arise from the same sort of physical processes. But trying to rigidly assign a particular arrangement of physical processes to a single entity "cloud" leads to the nonsense you see here.

Nobody using the word "cloud" cares about this assignment. They care about whether there'll be turbulence, or whether they're likely to get wet, or whether the cloud looks like a bunny rabbit or whatever. The solution to the paradox is to realize that not all concepts are analyzable to this degree, and that that's OK.

[Houshalter]

>Many philosophers—particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient philosophers—share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky

[spacehome]

Eliezer is right, and I would add a corollary that you almost always run into trouble trying to fit objects into human-defined abstract categories.

[cgio]

I will disagree and note that over-analysis of language is needed when language becomes arbitrary, such as in your statement:

rigidly assign a particular arrangement of physical processes to a single entity "cloud" leads to the nonsense you see here.

I have difficulty understanding what you mean and therefore I will need to analyse your use of terminology if I am to respect your opinion. You make some implicit assumptions which are very challenging. E.g. you say

A cloud exists when someone can say "that's a cloud" and a listener thinks "yes, that is a cloud", or that fact is somehow meaningful to them in their life.

I am getting the sense of a consensus argument, but then you have to address when does the listener actually exists.

I am not saying these concepts are interesting to everyone, or that they definitely can be given a complete unquestionable answer, but to call them nonsense and turn your back is not needed when you can just turn your back.

[panic]

over-analysis of language is needed when language becomes arbitrary

I'm not sure I understand why over-analysis is needed. The "cloud" concept isn't entirely arbitrary. Most clouds (unless they're in a photograph or painting or being described abstractly using language) arise from the same physical processes and behave similarly (raining, darkening the sky and so on). This is how "cloud" gets its meaning in everyday language: there really is a shared phenomenon there.

The error happens when we try to understand the individual physical processes underlying a particular phenomenon as part of a single object. Even though the concept of separate objects is useful in everyday life, it no longer has meaning when you start trying to decide which cloud a given raindrop belongs to. Why not just abandon the now-useless concept of cloud and start talking about the raindrops as individual entities with their own behavior? Of course, we could look closely at the raindrops and see they are made of molecules: really the concept of "raindrop" is just another useful but ultimately imprecise bit of language. And so on...

[cgio]

You misunderstood; the arbitrariness I address is not in the term cloud, rather in your definition which tries to somehow bundle processes that surround your perception of an entity and the existence of the entity. I am not saying it is not a valid approach, but still it could be as nonsense as the nonsense you ascribe to the detailed approach. How individual droplets become clouds, the outsiders' definition and possibly the insiders' too could be a very illustrative example in the discussion about societies etc.

[kijin]

Philosophically, I think you're right.

Practically, this is a problem that computers encounter whenever they are given an image and told to identify the boundaries of some object depicted in it. Instead of water droplets, we have pixels, and we have to figure out exactly which pixels are part of which objects (and to what degree, in case of partial transparency).

Having said that, I don't have high hopes that solving this philosophical "problem" will help us come up with better image processing algorithms. What we need is a scientific explanation of how human brains process visual stimuli, not a philosophical explanation of what we mean when we say there's a cloud.

[wodenokoto]

Actually a lot of this philosophy has laid the ground for a lot machine learning and language processing.

[kijin]

Laid the ground? Yes, of course! Philosophy is very good at asking important questions and inspiring research.

But helping to solve them? Don't get your hopes up. We still haven't really solved any of the questions that Socrates came up with 2400 years ago.