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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