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Glen, ( Nick, Eric ) -<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:7ad876bc-4380-e033-ea0a-56735a2ecefb@gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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".</pre>
</blockquote>
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?<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:7ad876bc-4380-e033-ea0a-56735a2ecefb@gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
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?</pre>
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<p>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... <br>
</p>
<p>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?<br>
</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, arial,
helvetica, helve, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style:
normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps:
normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2;
text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none;
white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255,
255, 255); text-decoration-style: initial;
text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important;
float: none;">"...a paradox upon which I had already hit at
the age of sixteen:<span> </span></span><font size="-2"><span
class="popout" style="font-size: 16.8px; background:
rgb(255, 221, 221); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:
Verdana, arial, helvetica, helve, sans-serif; font-style:
normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps:
normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans:
2; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; text-transform:
none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style:
initial; text-decoration-color: initial;">If I pursue a beam
of light</span></font><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);
font-family: Verdana, arial, helvetica, helve, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures:
normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify;
text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;
background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-style:
initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline
!important; float: none;"><font size="-2"><span> </span></font>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."</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, arial,
helvetica, helve, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style:
normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps:
normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2;
text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none;
white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255); text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color:
initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">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).<br>
</span></p>
<p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, arial,
helvetica, helve, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style:
normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps:
normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2;
text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none;
white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255); text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color:
initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">So I WAS that
"arbitrary dork just sitting there wondering..." and that style
of wondering comes back/up to me often.<br>
</span></p>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:7ad876bc-4380-e033-ea0a-56735a2ecefb@gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
- Steve<br>
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