[FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[uǝlƃ ☣]

EricC introduced the word "visible". I'm fine with it. Y'all can use whatever word you choose. Iggitybiggity would be just as fine. My choice is "hidden".

I *also* reject the concept of "interiority", as I infer it. There is only the boundary between the seer and the seen, the measurer and the measured, the beginning of the probe and the thing probed. The peeker and the peeked. The poker and the poked. [sigh] Will I ever toss out enough metaphors so you can parallax toward the thing I actually mean?

Stop, for awhile, talking about hard things like consciousness and thought and think, temporarily about celery and antennas. When an antenna is sitting next to your cell phone, *something* happens inside (or more accurately on the surface of) that antenna ... something you cannot see with your naked eye, nor feel when you put your finger on it.

So, if you're just an arbitrary dork sitting there wondering "I wonder if there's anything going on inside that antenna?" (Fine, you don't like "inside" ... how about "I wonder if there's anything going on within epsilon distance of the metal surface?")

How do *you* refer to the hypothetical "thing going on inside the antenna"? Then let's say you find a way to measure the current from one end to the other of the antenna, a meter of some kind. Then you move the cell phone back and forth and watch your meter sway this way and that. Then we (people like me) say the antenna's behavior is a result of moving the cell phone.

That's it. That's all there is to any concrete example I might lay out. Replace the antenna with celery, or a duck, or a human, or whatever you want. But the setup is the same.

On 5/12/20 10:40 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Visible, here, is, I take it, a metaphor.  I reject, I think, the fundamental notion of “hidden” and perhaps of the entire black box idea.  The trouble with the black box model is that it implies that we experience the outside of the box directly but have to infer what we learn about the insides of the box.  But all experience is the product of inference, including everything we know about the outside of the box as well as everything we know about the inside of the box.  To say that some inferences are to inner things and some to outer things is to say SOMETHING, but I have never understood exactly what.  What is this dimension of “interiority”?  Does it refer to anything except our difficulty at getting at whatever we take ourselves to be talking about?
-- 
☣ uǝlƃ