Now when B left the room, A felt the air is dense again.
The problem: We cannot tell experimentally whether A's feeling is due to his minds playing tricks on him or there is some ghosty presence which only felt by A, but is nevertheless scared away by B
Therefore, let's modify the scenario as follows:
Suppose you receive a machine from your friend which does one thing: It gives out flashing green light at periodic intervals
Now, you have a sensor mounted on a wheel:
The sensor will move closer to the machine until the frequency of flashing (correcting for delay) changes
and after that, it will just stop in place
So, we have an interesting system that models a notion of subjective experience:
The machine that is given to you is said to made flashes based on sensing some kind of stimulus (e.g. very low frequency sound that typical machines don't pick up because they are not designed to detect those low frequencies)
However, you have no way to check whether this is the case (As opening up the machine does not give much information and you are not good at circuits) thus you can only trust the machine is working as intended
Now, the sensor with the robotic wheel is actually made of a special material that reflect the low frequency sound waves
and therefore if it move closer to the machine, the machine flashes less frequent because the low frequency sound is less
and therefore, this model suggests that since we cannot even tell what an arbitrary machine is responding to, or why it is having that kind of behaviour, what is the hope of experimentally detecting ghosts and the paranormal?
I am trying to use some machine analogy to describe how hard it is in general to verify an ancedote, which is a common way to record events for purported paranormal communities or religious communities etc.
in some sense, unless you know how the machine works, you cannot understand what the machine is perceiving about the world, and hence what it is recording and responding
More generally, it is just as hard to understand the world in the eyes of a machine as in the eyes of a bee
Subjective experience, in some sense, is private, only you can perceive it and you cannot share it
Call me jaded but I can't really entertain that discussion in my head, my brain just screams at me that science has it's limits, and finding out whether supernatural things do or don't exist is something that no scientific model will be able to do
"My external sensations are not less private to my self than are my thought or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it ....In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the world for each is peculiar and private to that soul."
The inability to see even a machine's private world in general has real significance in AI researches: There are discussions going on how to make their black box more understandable to humans so that we knew whether it has actually done the task properly, such as whether a neuro network have identify its targets correctly
with regards to philosophy, my standpoint is largely that while it's certainly possible to think you're doing physics without philosophy---well, you're wrong
I think the larger point is that, even if you conclude that Putin is an autocrat, it's not a matter of "oh Russia was so great and democratic, and then Putin came around"
"In [L5] we employed this hitherto unexpected degree of control over the elliptic analy- sis on H \ ΣH to establish the broader framework of a scal > 0-heredity with surgery."
have been wrestling with this n-d coupled PDE for awhile and finding it very difficult to come up with an answer, but am wondering if there is some elusive "trick". have looked through various books with standard forms and havent seen it yet. the context is something of a long story but the eqn i...
If i take a weightless box (negligible mass) made up of ideal mirrors (reflecting light almost perfectly) and i fill this box with photons bouncing off of the mirrors, such that about the same amount of photons bounce of each side per second. When i accelerate this box and let it rest after, do the photons inside the box keep the same energy as before the acceleration within the box's rest frame?
