covenants extorted by fear are valid

so says hobbes in Leviathan. but this is a tautology. in some sense every covenant is extorted by fear. when you do something because of so-called "positive reinforcement" you're doing it because you fear you won't get the reward if you don't. both factors are in play simultaneously, and further, are inextricably related. which demonstrates the same error i see made on any random page of this book that i open up to. the design and construction of nature was not informed by these linguistic cubbyholes. on a separate page he was explaining the distinction between simple imagination and complex imagination. these concepts do not exist within linear, quantifiable boundaries.

the largest quantifiable, mutually exclusive nodes of information that exists in our minds relates directly to the logical state of historical synaptic activity. the complex relationship between historical sequences of synaptic activity is what forms the basis of our minds' intellectually observable content.

moreover, since anything a word can describe is technically associated with an infinite amount of other things to varying degrees, words as we understand them do not have a scope that is compatible with nature. that's why dictionaries are often forced to define words only in terms of other similar words. words describe a target which is moving not only person-to-person, but with each moment within a single person.

the assimilation of any information into the mind affects all other pre-existing information in the mind to varying degrees. depending on the degree, the effect may or may not be recognizable. when you encounter an apple, you can easily observe how that experience changes your perception of the concept "apple" from that point forward. what you probably cannot observe is how that experience affected your perception of the concept "book" because the degree of affection is too slight.

since the associative nature of the mind guarantees its vulnerability to the observer effect, i am confident that man will remain unable to define the mind's contents in absolute terms. hobbes certainly did not.