We tend to describe the pupil as though it's its own actual separate part of the eye. It's almost strange to think about the fact that it's really just a hole in the Iris.

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A hole is a thing.

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I'd say it's more than just a hole. I had an eye injury when I was a teenager that caused a detached iris. I didn't have a massive pupil, I had 2 small, irregularly shaped pupils. After surgery, I now have a permanently dilated pupil shaped like a teardrop

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This is a great point! Humans can put names on things that aren't there, such as holes!

This 'naming of hole-like concepts' may sound trivial, but there have been entire cultures that didn't have 'hole-like' concepts and this stunted their ability to make certain discoveries. For example, the ancient Greeks could not have developed calculus; they did not have a concept of zero that they could use for mathematical manipulation. This shows an unfortunate reality: you can't mentally manipulate ideas that you don't have.

However, once you do have those ideas, they may seem obvious. This is a well documented human bias: the curse of knowledge. Once you understand something, it is very difficult to imagine not knowing that. For us, knowers of pupils, holes, zeros, and chasms, it may seem absurd to not have names for pupils, holes, zeros, and chasms. We take them for granted, when in reality it was not an easy road to arrive at them.

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Never call someone a massive asshole, call them massless.

Hemingways_Shotgun

Out of curiosity, does a different shaped pupil change your vision? I equate a pupil to a camera lens aperture; the smaller it gets, the less light gets through. Have you noticed a difference?

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Wait until I tell you about this weird concept, the zero…

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Really makes ya think what obvious things we might be missing. Maybe all you need to make FTL travel possible is to dinglepop all your schleem using a household plumbus?

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Well after all these years I've gotten used to it, but my vision is very blurry in that eye. There's also injury to the macula so there's a giant gray spot in my near vision. It's kinda like a giant peripheral vision, but I'm also more sensitive to big changes in brightness

Hemingways_Shotgun

I'll have none of your witchcraft here, thank-you-very-much.

AFK BRB Chocolate

Pretty good number of them if you count things like intermission. Slit, slot, crack, aperture, interlude, gap, breach, etc. Others, too.

AFK BRB Chocolate

Except don't we usually mean the sphincter itself when we say asshole?

Rhynoplaz

Isn't that the same as iris and pupil?

Majorllama

When I said "handful" I more so meant in all of language yeah there are probably hundreds of words for the empty space between certain things, but in all of human language that's probably a pretty small number.

AFK BRB Chocolate

I didn't think so? When I say Iris, I mean the colored ring. When I say pupil, I mean the hole. When I say asshole, I mean the ring, not the hole. I can't remember ever wanting to refer to the actual hole. Maybe "gape?"

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Also just

“Space” as a place to go

Kalcifer

Could it not be said that "nothing" is actually a thing?

Majorllama

Good ol fashion space.

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I think both the hole and sphincter are included in "asshole". It's a packaged deal

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Oh boy. Don’t look too deep into philosophy of language, or you might become convinced that “the iris” is just as nonexistent — or that all nouns are really about a symbolic existence as a relationship, for which measurable physical matter is inconsequential.

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Me, trying to persuade my philosophy prof that by not turning in my assignment, I cave actually turned in an assignment.