Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!rutgers!uwm.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!landman@hanami.Eng.Sun.COM From: landman@hanami.Eng.Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: "Space" -- apology and clarification Message-ID: <141594@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 30 Aug 90 19:58:50 GMT References: <9007250107.AA01311@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu> <19539@well.sf.ca.us> <1990Aug20.204814.3479@cs.cmu.edu> Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca. Lines: 52 Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu >In article <19539@well.sf.ca.us>, apple!well.sf.ca.us!well!on@uunet.UU.NET (Owen Rowley) writes: >|> My experiments and results are subjective in nature and only valuable to me. In article <1990Aug20.204814.3479@cs.cmu.edu> matt@MAPS.CS.CMU.EDU (Matthew Diamond) writes: >Owen, your "subjective experiments" sound a lot like drugs. If not, >could you be more specific? Maybe you should read what Richard Feynman >had to say >about subjective experiments. He was drawing all sorts of conclusions >about the >nature of thought from his experiences in an isolation tank, but he >suddenly realized that NO CONCLUSIONS COULD BE DRAWN. His subjective >reality COULD be reality, he realized, but there is no way of telling. >Anything >experienced (time slowing/reversing, etc.) could easily just be a hallucination >with no basis in reality whatsoever. I think there are counterexamples to this line of reasoning. Namely, any physical disciplines (like yoga, martial arts, etc.) that have a large "internal" component. The key features of science are that it is empirical (you do experiments to find out the answers) and objective (it deals with truths that are "out there" in the real world independent of any particular observer). But there are many useful disciplines (subjective sciences?) which don't qualify as science because they include a subjective component, but may nevertheless be largely empirical. Training in a martial art is mainly attempting to duplicate someone else's techniques (experimental results) in a "laboratory" which includes your own body and someone else's. The truths which result have components which are measurable in normal scientific terms (speed, force, position, acceleration, etc.), but because every system under study contains a person, the results are not "independent of any particular observer". They're not scientific. The results are "reproducible" in the sense that most people are capable, with sufficient study and assuming no particular handicaps, of achieving similar abilities. That very few people can catch arrows in their bare hands does not lessen the validity of this statement - very few people can create and observe intermediate vector bosons either. In science it is traditional to ignore subjective effects, but they are there nevertheless. I used to have an organic synthesis teacher who was routinely able to achieve 85% yields in a reaction that no one else could seem to get over 60% yields for. The difference lies in all the "black magic" stuff that's impossible to write down - exactly how you clean and dry your glassware, how tightly you assemble the fittings of your apparatus, what the humidity in the lab is, and so forth. Even studying under such a person for a year does not guarantee that you will pick up more than a small fraction of this kind of knowledge or technique. -- Howard A. Landman landman@eng.sun.com -or- sun!landman