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

[Jon Zingale]

Eric,
I have some concern that once we *decide* the dead duck was not behaving,
that we would avoid the dropped coin. I get that we wouldn't want to
apply the verb *flailing* to the coin except perhaps in a moment of poetry.
This is the season to witness cottonwood drifts, though. Better might
be the helicopter like motions of maple seedpods. These adaptations,
which carry the future of the species, are shaped so that they behave
meaningfully when coupled with their environment. Would you hesitate
to call the motions of the cottonwood seedpod, in its environment, behavior?
Is it too early in this conversation, or even inappropriate to ask whose
behavior it would be?

Frank,
Thank you for mentioning covariant tensors, I enjoyed walking
around my neighborhood thinking of them and of a response to you.
While it seems to me that a coffee cup is less abstract than a covariant
tensor, the latter isn't free of material or phenomenal foundation. If I
witness a grade schooler attempting to *pushforward* what I know to be
a covariant tensor, then I know that they are not likely thinking about a
covariant tensor, even if they wished that they were. If on the other hand,
they were clear on *pullingback* whatever it is they believed acted like a
covariant tensor, then I would likely believe they had a covariant tensor
in mind. Where the coffee cup, arguably is *just* a thing. A covariant
tensor is a thing which obeys strict rules of behavior. For example, while
I could use a coffee cup as a hammer, I am not convinced that I could
use a covariant tensor as a hammer. It may be the case that to resolve a
covariant tensor with an fMRI, we would need to witness one thinking of
a covariant tensor through time.

Glen,
Maybe we could also use the term *bracketed* for those things which
we wish to keep outside of the Bekenstein bound. Like yourself, I am
not really a stickler for what terms we use. I would and have claimed
that *this is how the inductor behaves in this circuit* while explaining
to family or friends how one of my synthesizers works. What I would
like to glean in the context of this conversation is whether or not this
attribution to the inductor is a metaphor. If it is a metaphor here, then
I would like to understand why.
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