The intended recipient of a solicitation for attention is made aware of the situation, and of their role in it, through means other than just the solicitor-spoken words.
Consider five people standing in a semi-circle formation, equidistant from, and with backs facing, a sixth person who shouts "Hey, you!" For ease of communicating the point, give the five semi-circulars different color shirts, and let the sixth person's exclamation be an address to the semi-circular wearing the green upper. Even though the outburst contains no words specifying which of the five it is directed towards, the green shirt wearer will have a stronger sense than the others that s/he is being spoken to.
This means that information is being encoded and transferred in more ways than by spoken language alone. On the surface, this conclusion should come as no surprise, as the sizable niche carved into common awareness for the notion of nonverbal communication can attest. Still, for all that the term could encompass based on a by definition perspective, in popular usage it refers singly to visible communication information.
But the green shirt wearer's strong sense that they're being spoken to can't be chalked up to visually captured information because they, like the other semi-circulars, have their back to the speaker. There's something else happening, neither auditory nor visual. It's akin to telekinesis' 2nd cousin.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Sea Life With Life Jackets and Fuselage
If you're drinking water, it feels like a liquid. Alternately, if you managed to escape through an emergency exit the cabin of a doomed ocean-crossing airplane but forgot to locate an unsupplied parachute, the calm waves feel more like cement when you land.
Let's take it to eleven: a sea otter floating on his back still feels as though he's partially submerged in a liquid, even as he watches your body splatter flat on the surface as if you had jumped out of a skyscraper and landed on Broadway Avenue. This example illustrates the concept of regions of experience, which I like to think of as a far-reaching phenomena that is at play in a great many areas. For example, I would consider the portion of special relativity dealing with the frames of reference of objects in motion to intersect the regions of experience phenomena. And, more than an intersection, the sea otter thought experiment belongs to a subset of the phenomena dealing with the perspective-dependence of water's state of matter. I don't know whether it's significant that the intersection and subset share speed as a fundamental component, but it's probably worth noting.
Establishing the fact that a person's perception of water as a liquid or solid depends on their speed prompts two questions:
1. If a person's body could withstand the hardships of flying hundreds of miles per hour through a large cloud, would the person feel as though they were underwater?
2. Does a high velocity object create an as yet undiscovered state of matter when it collides with a solid?
These questions assume that increasing velocity corresponds to the perception of matter moving in the gas-->liquid-->solid direction, as is suggested by what we know to be true in the falling airplane passenger case.
A note of clarification on question 2: given that the sea otter in the airplane example never perceives the water as a solid, any new state of matter beyond solid resulting from an object's collision with a solid would only be perceptible to the object itself.
If the answer to question 1 is true, one may wonder by extension whether flying through the cloud many times faster would result in traversing all the way to the other side of the states of matter spectrum, so that the perception was of colliding with a solid. If this is also true, and it likely is, then one can definitively say that a person can perceive a gas as any of the principle states of matter naturally occurring on earth and that their perception is a function of their speed relative to it. I add the 'principle states of matter' and 'naturally occurring on earth' qualifiers because plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe but accommodating it in this post would require excessive writing for only a small return on investment.
A final comment. We know that decreasing velocity doesn't correspond to the perception of matter in the solid-->liquid-->gas direction. Usually, you can obtain a physical behavior's opposite by reversing the math governing the behavior, but even adding a minus sign and making the velocity negative doesn't help in this case because we know that the speed-dependent gas-->liquid-->solid state of matter flow is independent of the direction of the person moving through the matter. Maybe Stephen Hawking can solve this asymmetry.
Let's take it to eleven: a sea otter floating on his back still feels as though he's partially submerged in a liquid, even as he watches your body splatter flat on the surface as if you had jumped out of a skyscraper and landed on Broadway Avenue. This example illustrates the concept of regions of experience, which I like to think of as a far-reaching phenomena that is at play in a great many areas. For example, I would consider the portion of special relativity dealing with the frames of reference of objects in motion to intersect the regions of experience phenomena. And, more than an intersection, the sea otter thought experiment belongs to a subset of the phenomena dealing with the perspective-dependence of water's state of matter. I don't know whether it's significant that the intersection and subset share speed as a fundamental component, but it's probably worth noting.
Establishing the fact that a person's perception of water as a liquid or solid depends on their speed prompts two questions:
1. If a person's body could withstand the hardships of flying hundreds of miles per hour through a large cloud, would the person feel as though they were underwater?
2. Does a high velocity object create an as yet undiscovered state of matter when it collides with a solid?
These questions assume that increasing velocity corresponds to the perception of matter moving in the gas-->liquid-->solid direction, as is suggested by what we know to be true in the falling airplane passenger case.
A note of clarification on question 2: given that the sea otter in the airplane example never perceives the water as a solid, any new state of matter beyond solid resulting from an object's collision with a solid would only be perceptible to the object itself.
If the answer to question 1 is true, one may wonder by extension whether flying through the cloud many times faster would result in traversing all the way to the other side of the states of matter spectrum, so that the perception was of colliding with a solid. If this is also true, and it likely is, then one can definitively say that a person can perceive a gas as any of the principle states of matter naturally occurring on earth and that their perception is a function of their speed relative to it. I add the 'principle states of matter' and 'naturally occurring on earth' qualifiers because plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe but accommodating it in this post would require excessive writing for only a small return on investment.
A final comment. We know that decreasing velocity doesn't correspond to the perception of matter in the solid-->liquid-->gas direction. Usually, you can obtain a physical behavior's opposite by reversing the math governing the behavior, but even adding a minus sign and making the velocity negative doesn't help in this case because we know that the speed-dependent gas-->liquid-->solid state of matter flow is independent of the direction of the person moving through the matter. Maybe Stephen Hawking can solve this asymmetry.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
The Archer Missed The Apple
There are often many ways of modeling the same thing. Models are inherently inaccurate, but the best are those which combine an acceptable degree of inaccuracy with a significant reduction in complexity. It's obvious that the theorized output of a system depends on the model used to represent the system, but it's nonetheless an important point. It's a point that makes choosing a model akin to medical researchers brainstorming clinical trial designs or fiction writers selecting from an array of metaphors: each available option will alter the results in a unique way, will emphasize some aspect of the output.
And with that introduction, check out my drawings of arrows pointing towards and away from a brain.
This first image represents the brain functioning under normal conditions. The incoming arrows originating from the left represent sensory stimuli, the incoming arrows originating from the brain itself represent internal thoughts, and the outgoing arrows represent speech, muscle movement, or some other interaction with the external environment. The real attraction of using models is the ease of exploring the results of what would be prohibitively expensive, immoral, or physically impossible in the real world. For example, consider the drawing below, which represents the expected result of instantaneously placing the test subject in a sensory deprivation chamber.
The incoming arrows representing sensory stimuli have necessarily disappeared. The shock of the transition has also resulted in the absence of the arrows representing interaction with the external environment. The presence of internal thoughts is unchanged and, while the nature of the thoughts has probably changed in reaction to the new environment, this model doesn't reflect that level of detail. The dashed lines and question marks shouldn't be interpreted to represent the likely state of the test subject "what the hell just happened?" Instead, I drew them in to personify the brain receptors/order issuers who are normally occupied receiving/sending signals throughout the nervous system. This intermediate and unstable state leads to the final drawing, which exemplifies the adaptability of the brain in seeking to achieve a state approaching normalcy.
Visually, the coarseness of these models suggests that there is no difference in capability between the receptors/order issuers and those portions of the brain involved in internal thought. It follows, then, that increasing internal thoughts, as illustrated above, satisfies the question marks of the previous illustration by requiring the participation of both the receptors and order issuers. The outgoing arrows are included for good measure to account for the possibility of the subject beginning to talk to themselves after several hours in the chamber.
And with that introduction, check out my drawings of arrows pointing towards and away from a brain.
This first image represents the brain functioning under normal conditions. The incoming arrows originating from the left represent sensory stimuli, the incoming arrows originating from the brain itself represent internal thoughts, and the outgoing arrows represent speech, muscle movement, or some other interaction with the external environment. The real attraction of using models is the ease of exploring the results of what would be prohibitively expensive, immoral, or physically impossible in the real world. For example, consider the drawing below, which represents the expected result of instantaneously placing the test subject in a sensory deprivation chamber.
The incoming arrows representing sensory stimuli have necessarily disappeared. The shock of the transition has also resulted in the absence of the arrows representing interaction with the external environment. The presence of internal thoughts is unchanged and, while the nature of the thoughts has probably changed in reaction to the new environment, this model doesn't reflect that level of detail. The dashed lines and question marks shouldn't be interpreted to represent the likely state of the test subject "what the hell just happened?" Instead, I drew them in to personify the brain receptors/order issuers who are normally occupied receiving/sending signals throughout the nervous system. This intermediate and unstable state leads to the final drawing, which exemplifies the adaptability of the brain in seeking to achieve a state approaching normalcy.
Visually, the coarseness of these models suggests that there is no difference in capability between the receptors/order issuers and those portions of the brain involved in internal thought. It follows, then, that increasing internal thoughts, as illustrated above, satisfies the question marks of the previous illustration by requiring the participation of both the receptors and order issuers. The outgoing arrows are included for good measure to account for the possibility of the subject beginning to talk to themselves after several hours in the chamber.
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