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

[Steven A Smith]

Glen, ( Nick, Eric ) -
> 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'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of
words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that
tone?).   Maybe I'm missing something.  HAD you (or Eric) used
IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation
sideways?  Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the
day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd?
> 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?

Just to continue my niggling.  Interiority would seem to make perfect
sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober  and the
object (seen/measured/probed)?   To the subject, there is a boundary
between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever
mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly
perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector
photons/phonons/nerf-balls).   Visible light mostly bounces off the
surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through...  thus yielding a
different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?)
interiority/exteriority...  

This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and
objectness?  I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand
here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up?

The antenna example is near and dear to my heart as it was perhaps one
of the earliest "physics" constructs that I tried to understand
intuitively.   My parents gifted me a crystal radio kit which was little
more than two coils of wire and a bit of crystalline form iron-sulfide
(galena?).   The "little more" was a magic, industrially produced
diaphragm-coil earphone that pretty much quit working as soon as I
disassembled it (went inside of it) to see how it worked.   To the point
of your example I spent more than a little time in my bedroom "tickling"
the galena crystal with the wire "whisker" designed to make it "easy" to
find the right contact point on the lead-sulfide crystal to create a
rectifying diode, whilst trying to imagine what the hell might be going
on in that antenna and the tuning coil and the diode. 

My father's attempts to explain this "magic" was complicated by his own
hillbilly animistic tendency to think/describe things teleologically.  
It DID help me in a way I later recognized as similar to Einstein's
often lauded explanation of how he came to some of his nascent intuition
about relativity.

    "...a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If
    I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a
    vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic
    field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems to be no
    such thing, however, neither on the basis of experience nor
    according to Maxwell's equations. From the very beginning it
    appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of
    such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the
    same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at
    rest. For how should the first observer know or be able to
    determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion? One sees in
    this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already
    contained."

My own introspections/extrospections on this apparatus/phenomenon were
much less articulate and feeble than Einstein's of course... but the key
to it (for me) was to almost seek an *emphathetic* relationship to the
*imagined* behaviour of the elements (antenna, coil, PbS crystal, wire
whisker...) as well as an even-more imagined element being the
transmitter/antenna that was *creating* (inducing?) the signals I was
detecting.   I even remember a  discussion with my father who *assumed*
that a heavier gauge wire-antenna would somehow provide stronger
coupling... (re: the epsilon distance from the surface point).

So I WAS that "arbitrary dork just sitting there wondering..." and that
style of wondering comes back/up to me often.


>
> 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.
>
- Steve
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