Humans must label stuff; that's how we communicate and propagate knowledge/develop technology, etc.
The "stuff" itself, is nothing but a snapshot of a very global, very gradual, and very subtle, change of everything.
That applies to
everything under the sun, including such (apparently) dramatically-distinct events as life and death. Arguments about "when does life begin?" are as old as they are countless and futile, an it is all because it is not a single "binary"/instantaneous event, but a gradual transition involving a great number of different "smaller" events.
More and more research is coming out how, in the exact same way, death isn't a binary event but a gradual collection of many very different physiological events. You just need to
"zoom in" closely-enough.
For a less politically- and religiously-charged example
, binary/digital signals aren't nearly as clear-cut and pretty in reality as they are on paper. On paper we draw a few beautiful perfect straight lines at perfect right angles to one another, where one horizontal line is '0', the other is '1', and the vertical lines between them indicate instantaneous changes from one state to the other. However, in reality things aren't nearly as pretty --
once you "zoom in" enough:
So for simplicity's sake, we slap labels on those and have a
range of voltages define each label, where (using the above image) any voltage between 0 and 0.5 V is considered a binary '0' signal, and between 2.8 and 3.3 V is a binary '1' signal. But in reality, there exist those pesky little/short stretches between 0.5 and 2.8, which for sanity's sake and for all practical purposes, are ignored when we are answering the question "what's a binary '1' signal?"
And that's just a binary 0/1 signal; highly-complex questions like "what's taijiquan" or "what's classical music", where do they start or end, are infinitely more involved and complex and, for all practical purposes, unanswerable in any globally, objectively-satisfying manner.
This thread's question will have as many answers as there are labels that different people may be willing to place on that "graph". Some will argue the binary '1' signal starts at 2.85 V and other that we should start registering it at 2.78 V.
Labels are an artifact, a human concept/invention to help organize and quantify things.
The universe has no labels or names; there is only change.
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