• ZoopZeZoop@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Humans (like most living things) like to put things in boxes to make navigating their environment simpler. Temperatures aren’t really opposites because they’re on a continuum, but we talk about hot and cold as opposites to bring order to environmental navigation. The same with presence and absence of light and bright/dark. So, extending this logic, the opposite of cat is the absence of cat, but that doesn’t really make sense. If you cut a cat in half, are you halfway on a continuum from cat to the opposite of cat? If the cat is whole but has died, is it cat, opposite of cat, something else entirely? I have no idea, and no one else really does either. Brains are weird.