lemur

Thanks for the link as well as for the term, "null geodesic." I was actually thinking that maybe the quantum nature of the waves could be a stabilizing factor in such a loop. I.e. if the alternating electric and magnetic fields would somehow become integrated (perhaps by attraction between the magnetic fields of the wave), then maybe they would naturally continue propagating into themselves and even resist destabilization according to the strength of their "head-tail bond." This is getting too speculative, probably, but the part I was really interested in is if such a configuration would be stabile, could it have inertia as a result of, say, resistance between the two sides of the loop to interfering with each other. Or if the thing was moving, would one side redshift and the other side blueshift, with some polarizing effects between the two sides. I'm assuming here that energy can/could transfer through the length of the EM wave as compression (blueshift) of one part would require decompression (redshift) of the other due to conservation of energy. In the case that it could, I would expect linear motion to cause the redshift/blueshift differential that would in turn create an energy-disequilibrium in the wave, which could make it behave like a particle with charged poles, maybe?

I agree with the aether/substance problem and that was not the point of my analogy. I was only using molecules to show that distance from expansion and distance from motion can be the same kind of distance albeit generated in different ways. I believe the post I was responding to suggested differentiating distance into distance from expansion and distance from motion. This is unnecessary, imo, if you can understand that distance resulting from the two causes can still add up to "net distance" by virtue of time (duration of expansion) AND motion across an expanding distance.

The issue wasn't actually to compare me with Einstein. I have no desire to be compared with anyone. The issue was whether it was an ad hominem attack akin to calling me stupid. I don't think there was any other point to comparing me with Einstein except to say that unless I am on par with Einstein, I should shut up because I'm too stupid to be talking about the things I'm talking about. That's an ad hominem attack, isn't it? Why can't I think about physics qualitatively without understanding all the math? If something I say is blatantly misguided in light of math I don't understand, is it that hard to say so without insulting me? If someone then has the ability and interest in explaining my mistake in terms of the math in language I can understand, great for me. If they don't have the time or the patience at that moment or ever, that's understandable too. Imo, a discussion should be a set of non-mandatory opportunities to interact, learn, and explore ideas through discussion so you can say whatever you want or nothing at all to a post, but I don't see what's constructive about just telling someone to go away and read. Certainly I read on these topics anyway, so really it just comes across more as a polite suggestion to go away. Why is that necessary?

I would say that the problem is exactly the opposite: i.e. that despite the enormous popularity of discourse about "paradigm shifts," not enough of the discussion was critical, or it wasn't critical enough, to result in a lucid dissection of how exactly knowledge and theory evolves. It is definitely a complex dialectical process, but the problem is that there is little mindfulness of the various levels at which the dialogue is negotiated. Ultimately, I think innovations emerge from human minds, but to reach the point where they emerge, a lot reading, discussing, and thinking (not to mention empirical research hopefully). On the other hand, there is also a complex dialectical discourse of all the disciplinary conservatism that resists innovations and challenges to institutionalized knowledge/ideas/theory. So it would also be oversimplifying to say that innovation proceeds without resistance from pro-active conservatism. What's more, this conservatism very often contributes handsomely to the emergence of innovative thought and work so it is not as simple as net progress/regress as offense and defense push against each other to see who can produce the biggest gain or loss in yardage of the other side.

If I am correct, electric current is an entropic process comparable to heat-disequilibrium where it is charge instead of temperature that is moving toward equilibrium. Voltage, I thought, refers to the strength of the current due to the level of charge disequilibrium between the electrodes. Temperature, I think, is a measure of average kinetic energy among the particles of a system or part of a system. So I think that temperature would be more like charge and voltage would be analogous to what? Is there a term for rate of heat transfer? Can it be negative except in the sense of the direction changing?

Your post reminds me of the Lenny Kravitz song, It Ain't Over Till It's Over. Of course everyone wants racism to be over but it is such an elaborate complex cultural institution (or set of institutionalized knowledges and practices) that has evolved in so many ways for so long that it is doubtful that it will be over any time soon. In fact, I think what most people imagine when they imagine social life free of racism and other group-based identities and privilege is actually very far from free of those. Imagine yourself a person who trades in cotton clothing in the 19th century, for example. Someone tells you that the cotton for your clothing is harvested by slave labor and they want to abolish slavery. You say, "great!" since you don't like the idea of slavery - but then your wholesale prices start going up and you try to raise your prices to compensate but then you lose sales. Your are losing revenue and you don't make the connection with the increase in the price of cotton in your supply chain. Let's say you end up losing your business and you get offered a job picking cotton? Do you take it? If not, who should? Some people would claim that making former slave owners pick cotton would be reverse racism, but doesn't SOMEONE have to do that job for the economic culture of cotton-clothing to continue? So ultimately I don't think racism and its healing come down to interventionary measures ending so much as a point has to be reached in socioeconomic culture where ethnicity is a random variable in who does what kinds of work, makes what kind of income, lives in what kind of house, etc. That can't be achieved by tokenism because it leads to more problems. Really what has to happen is for people to re-assess the economy and what kinds of work EVERYONE is willing to do and then reform consumption and business culture in a way that ensures no one gets stuck with undesirable work because of cultural background issues. This could mean that people have to eat out less or clean their own hotel rooms and offices, but if that would eliminate the need for certain people to get stuck doing these jobs full-time, it would be worth it imo. Everyone should have the time and freedom to pursue education and cultural refinement, imo. This is the problem with tokenism. It promotes the assumption among whites that ethnic minorities are inept, vulnerable victims of their historical cultural dominance. Using the word, "nobility" is spot-on here because it evokes (and provokes) visions of resentment of privilege and birthright that are demonized in republican (not the party) ideology. What's worse, imo, is that by making ethnic minorities into black sheep, all the other forms of birthright and privilege are camouflaged behind the veil of normalcy/naturalness. So, for example, someone who easily succeeds in law school because their father, two uncles, and an aunt are successful lawyers who always debated with them at family get-togethers is considered to have fairly won the competition against someone whose parents were trash collector and homemaker and their kid got a scholarship to go to university. That kid might have done better relative to her parents than the successful lawyer's father did relative to his parents when he was the first generation to go to college, but people will still consider her a failure who needed affirmative action because she wasn't as securely socialized into the legal culture from a young age as the person whose parents were lawyers.

So comparing me negatively with Einstein is not the same thing as saying that I'm stupid therefore I'm wrong? I wasn't just posting what I think, btw. I may be posting just what someone else thought, though, because I can't remember where I got the idea that energy can generate gravitation and why/how. Certainly people have posted that light influences spacetime curvature.

It is neither fair to whites OR hispanics, to the extent that these are even mutually exclusive classifications. As I said, however, meritocracy and economic structuring is not geared toward fairness. It is geared toward generating systematic inequalities and refining inequalities in a way that makes them seem legitimate by endowing them with some institutionalized 'fairness' or something similar. What is generally fair about some people enjoying very privileged lifestyles and other people getting stuck with the jobs that perform the work of facilitating those lifestyles? Not much, but if you create a system of merit that says people who go to school and get good grades will not be excluded from highly-privileged jobs/salaries, people will accept it as a more or less natural social order. There is a lot of criticism of class and ethnic privilege-differentiation, so one of the ways that the privileged classes resist abolishing such privileges completely is by "tokenism." Tokenism is often misinterpreted as a racist/bigoted term but what it actually refers to is the practice of creating diversity purely for the sake of legitimating a class of elite privilege. In other words, the economic elite believes that there is nothing wrong with maintaining class stratification as long as diversity is proportionately represented at each class level. They know that it would be economically impossible for everyone to enjoy the same elite privileges, but they don't want to abolish them completely, so they compromise by reducing or eliminating the effects of traditional preference and culture-differentiation on who attains an elite position. Again, this system of stratification to preserve elite privileges is not fair to anyone so even if there were no ethnic-identity differentiation in admissions, funding, hiring, promotion, etc., it would still be unfair that some people have to work to provide privileges for others. Also, if all forms of corrected ethnic/gender/class preference were removed, this would not prevent more traditional forms of favoritism and social-cultural preferences from favoring people according to the same categories. In other words, the "ivory towers" have evolved as white cultural institutions and thus white culture tends to be preferred so they would continue to favor white students until sufficient societal resistance built up against them to either halt their funding completely or modify them into a form that favors wider demographics. People would not simply go on indefinitely supporting institutions that promote whiteness unless there was some unmissable economic value, in which case they would be maintained but taxed or otherwise burdened heavily with the task of providing for the people excluded to preserve their economic function.

Kuhnian paradigmism is overly structuralist, imo. It assumes that scientists are uniformly programmed to operate within a more or less unified paradigm until such time as sufficient revolutionary force is built up to radically overturn the old paradigm with a new one. In practice, I think it makes more sense to approach this in a more "post-structural" way, meaning to look at the conceptual and linguistic institutions attributed to a particular "paradigm" and examine how patterns of thinking/research are influenced and how they are malleable through evolving application. Also, rather than assuming that paradigms are unified approaches to knowledge, I think it makes more sense to see them as constituted from hybridizing aspects of older paradigms and adding new elements. Like any other technology, new forms are usually the result of innovating older forms and then institutionalizing them as a radical break from their predecessors. This, of course, involves identity politics (how do you objectively differentiate a revolution from evolution?), and the way you define the identity of one paradigm vis-a-vis others probably influences the observations you make about the paradigms and their interactions, no? I'm sorry I didn't read the article before responding to this thread. I just thought it would be worth mentioning these caveats about the Kuhnian perspective. Is there a way to read the article without paying, or does it have to be bought?

The first thing I thought of when reading this was the possibility of a lighting bolt from the Earth to the moon or some other point in outer space. But then I wondered if energy would actually travel through a vacuum as electricity, and I don't think it can without some form of conductor or ions coming in contact with each other. So, doesn't electric potential have to get released as radiation if their is too much insulation for it to conduct elsewhere? Or can charge build up indefinitely within a vacuum without resulting in photon emissions? Sorry if this is too divergent from the OP. Maybe a more specific related question is whether negative voltage is a comparable concept to negative temperature where temperature is measured in C or some other scale whose zero-point is absolute zero?

Is any of this going to directly address the OP at some point?

Racial/ethnic identity is bound up with class distinctions that continue despite the elimination of formal slavery over a century ago. So while some people claim to want to provide better educational opportunities to certain groups, this can have mixed meanings, imo. For example, it may just be that the people who support increased education are only doing so because they want to legitimate class differences as being the result of educational achievement instead of being a modernized system of caste stratification designed to preserve class privileges across generations. If you have a working class background, regardless of your ethnic identity, you have to ask yourself whether middle and upper class people are really willing to accept it if all working class people would gain sufficient education to disqualify them for menial jobs in services and industry. After all, if everyone is well educated, who has to serve whom in restaurants, etc.? So without some broader consciousness for the relationship between education, class-differentiation, and economic structuring; I don't see how broadening educational access is going to solve any social problems. However, as I said, I don't think demographic scholarshipping in higher education is really all that concerned with economic restructuring. I think the goal is simply to get people to invest loads of money in sending their kids to college and the best way to sell people on the idea of devoting much of their life to paying for such an education is to give them one for free or at a discount. The more money you give some while they're in college, the happier their experience. So when you take someone whose parents have no experience of higher education and then you give them not only free tuition but also stipends of spending money so they can live well while leisurely consuming mind- and ego- stimulating learning materials, they will be likely to devote a great deal of time and energy to making and saving enough money to give their kids the same level of college experience they had. In short, it's marketing.

It all comes down to the R-value of the insulation and the outside temperature. Lower atmospheric density may help the situation, I think, since lower-density media seem to generally insulate better than high-density ones (vacuum being the best insulator, correct?)

Basically you are saying that consistency between observations of distinct observers proves that something exists beyond those observers that is common to them. It seems logical to you that if each individual had their own personal reality, these realities would vary in their physical laws, force-strengths, etc. But what if perception and consciousness were malleable enough to render radically diverse experiences similar in perceptual appearance? You could still claim that whatever can be agreed upon by multiple individuals is objective, but then what if multiple individuals were actually part of the same consciousness, which was just conscious of itself from multiple perspectives? Anyway, it is possible to consider all such bizarre possibilities but it doesn't really make any sense to dispute their potential validity because if existence was in fact this variable, and yet people had achieved so much conviction about the factuality of existence as it is assumed and perceived, then how difficult would it be to resist thought-conformity to become completely aware of a radically different mode of perception/consciousness? If nothing else, it would require accepting the status of insanity from the perspective of normalized thought-conformity and this would be to painful for most people to accept. It may, however, explain what is going on with catatonic schizophrenics or other people who are simply labelled and perceived as insane. Maybe, but I don't know what would govern such a correlation between "depth" and "fluidity." What do you think would determine such variability? You don't have to be convinced of solipsism to explore its implications. I think the main flaw in the way people understand solipsism comes with their assumption that the world they perceive is too complex to be an elaborate figment of their imagination. In solipsism, I think it is possible to perceive every aspect of the universe and your social reality as all being parts of an imagination that is greater even than your own capacity to have circumscribed awareness of it. Your subconscious mind would be generating potential new experiences faster than you could consume them and many would be construed and lost without you even becoming conscious of them. It is bizarre to imagine this, but it is possible to. The most bizarre part of solipsism, imo, is if you would "take the plunge off the deep end" and actually commit to believing in solipsism as the basis for all reality, would it change anything about the way you interacted with other people and physical realities as you perceive them? I don't think it would, because you would be susceptible to the same consequences from your subconscious mind that you were when you didn't perceive those consequences as coming from your mind. In other words, your mind would dominate you as effectively with you being conscious of it as if you interpreted it as independent, external people and realities.

I guess I am just locked in classical mechanical thinking. To me, objects attract and repel each other using force. Electrons only make sense to me as electrostatic fields that repel each other and are attracted to protons, which also repel each other but are attracted by nuclear force and presumably gravity to some extent, although that seems negligible at the level of the nuclear particles within a single atom. Momentum of the electrons seems to be disproven as the primary mechanism for keeping them in orbit, since they emit photons and thus lose energy-levels. However, it makes sense to me that as they would get nearer to the nucleus, electrostatic attraction from the protons would increase their momentum while their repulsion from each other would keep them bouncing off each other and changing direction. Of course, since they are fields and not well-defined solid objects, they would not directly "bounce" off each other but would "bend" around each other, which would mean a certain amount of their momentum would be expressed as shape-changing. I would then assume that this shape-changing would have some kind of fluid-dynamics like what would be involved with, say, very stretchy water balloons whose density gradates toward zero from the center toward the periphery. I know this is very classically mechanical and probably doesn't fit too well with the various shapes that form at different levels, etc., but something in my head makes me want to model these things as objects in a classical mechanical sense. It seems logical to me that they behave as objects with momentum because, for example, static electricity feels like a thin layer of gas/liquid on the surface of an object. Likewise, electric current seems to behave similarly to waves traveling through a gas/fluid medium. The solidity and volume of solid and liquid matter also seems to be accountable to the structuring of electrons according to the electrostatic field of the nuclear protons. Thinking along these lines, it is frustrating when quantum theories present a barrier to further applying classical dynamics to sub-atomic interactions. I'm aware of the various arguments why these theories are correct and why classical mechanics simply fails, but it just doesn't make sense to me to let go of all relations between forces at the atomic level and those at super-atomic levels.

Consciousness doesn't just fill in gaps. It is the interface through which all sensory impulses are translated into perceptions and cognitively processed. I'm not sure if there are other processes that are sub-conscious or unconscious that process parts of our knowledge and perception without our being aware of it but there probably are. It is a really interesting question whether consciousness could be transplanted into electronic circuitry. If it could, how would it change the way it functions from being housed in a flesh body + nervous system? It would be interesting if you could transplant to an electronic machine and then to different animals, etc. to study the difference between the way different hardwares affect the functioning of the software.

Depending on the overnight temperature, you may even need to heat the greenhouses at night. If Martian atmosphere is completely dry, any mixing between outside air and greenhouse air will result in evaporation, no? Then how do you get more water to replace it? The soil is most iron oxide, I think, which could provide a ready source of oxygen, but is there any hydrogen available?

Violence is the most effective solution where control by force is desired. The problem with this approach is that it always prolongs bad relations and slows the already arduous path to democratic relations. You can intimidate people into cooperating by force, but the question is whether the facade of superficial cooperation doesn't hide the unspoken resentment and resistance that is building up while you think you're working together. You may think "intervention" sounds like a soft word, but that's a connotation you're inferring. "Intervention" is a general word that can refer to anything from assault with WMD to diplomatic negotiations. Both actions "intervene" in people's affairs. The problem with the kind of approach you're describing, imo, is that it would require violence in excess of what is needed to apprehend suspects in a legitimate police-action type approach. Surely there is some method of policing acts of pirating that doesn't involve sinking ships? On the other hand, if you would try to apprehend individual suspects individually during attempted boardings or something like that, the people you apprehend might have been sent out under threat of death if they come back alive but unsuccessful. In that case, it may be difficult to deter future pirating even by implementing a successful system of apprehension and arrest. Nevertheless, how would it be legitimate to exercise excessive force as a deterrent to supporting further piracy? Wouldn't that be terrorist-type tactics? I'm guess all you would really need to do to reduce the "feeding grounds" for piracy recruits would be to either create economic reforms that increased the relative opportunity cost of losing people to pirating. The problem is that it is my understanding that this pirating is much more lucrative than anything you could use these people for as employees. Anyway, I think that the stakes are so high for both sides, the shipping companies and the pirating companies, that there's going to be a lot of manipulation to achieve policies that favor either side. Someone who wants to provoke a repressive assault against pirating like you describe could attempt to instigate/provoke a reaction by doing the kind of high profile attack that shocks people the way the Quest story does. If you react to this story and the emotions it stirs up by launching an indiscriminate assault on everyone in the region, don't you end up in a war of attrition where the collateral casualties are the attrition? i.e. you can't just go around profiling innocent people as potential pirates and killing them until the pirating stops, can you?

Thank you for engaging in an elaborated qualitative descriptive exercise for these models as you understand them. I've never been interested enough in Schrodinger's cat to read up on what it means; but I just did and it seems to have do with ontology of what the models are actually supposed to be describing. Wiki notes that Bohr didn't have any problem with confusion about the cat's status because he would assume that the cat's survival or death was independent of the processes of predicting and observing it. I don't mind discussion issues of what can be observed, known, and how but I just want to know when a particular concept/description is meant to refer to a data pattern and when it is meant to refer to the physical processes that are thought to be occurring independently of observation. I.e. when people are talking about what electrons do, I'm assuming that they are talking about how they think/model electrons to behave in unobserved situations. Likewise, I don't have much interest in the mathematical dynamics of equations that don't directly describe something that is considered to be directly represented by the math. E.g. momentum describes an actual object in motion while a statistical "t test" describes a logical relationship between two means (and the means are themselves mathematical abstractions from a data set). So while a t-test may have some statistical functionality, I don't like it when I can't tell in someone's analysis whether the math they're using is describing something physical or some predictive logic of an otherwise unmodeled physical behavior. While I understand that things that happen at the sub-atomic scale are not directly observable, they are still directly model-able, at least that seems to be the case from they way I am reading your descriptions.

Should this thread be in speculations? I'm using this scenario as a way to think about the relations between light, motion, and force. I hope someone's physics permits them to contemplate it.

Consciousness is strange in that it is self-evident from the perspective of the conscious subject but it can only be inferred through identification with others. So you can made associations between your own experience of consciousness and behaviors you observe in others. When you talk, for example, you know you are conscious of wanting to say something. However, when a computer talks, you know it is just synthesizing sounds from a code sequence that it is reading mechanically. You assume it is not conscious of what it is doing because you know it doesn't require consciousness for the computer to do what it does - but what if the computer or other 'non-living' objects were conscious but in a way that didn't permit them to express themselves in any way? You can assume that consciousness is a function that can only emerge from a living nervous system, but what if consciousness just uses the nervous system to orient itself to its surroundings in a certain way? Who knows, maybe you could lose all your senses and your ability to think and still experience some form of consciousness that is completely different from anything you're familiar with and impossible to communicate to beings whose conscious perception is completely oriented toward sensation, emotion, and cognition.

The point is that you should be able to know how both tools work and what the mechanics of getting a nut loose is in comparison with a screw. It's as hard to talk with math-fixated scientists about methodology as it is to talk to a mechanic about how tools, parts, etc. work when all the person can say is that you just learn from experience. It is possible to analyze the functioning of any system, physical or analytical if you are aware of how it works to do what it does. I play with them by critically reasoning from what I read and ask questions about my extrapolations. When I'm wrong, I try to understand why. What you're saying about "the electron" "occupying the whole wavefunction all the time," does that mean that each electron in an atom or molecule has its own wave? Or do multiple electrons combine in the same wave? I used the phrase "dancing around" because if an electron jumps around without continuous motion and appears randomly with a high probability of appearing more in one area than another, this seems like "dancing" or "sparkling" to me. What's more, I don't understand how long the thing actually appears for before it disappears and "tunnels" again, and whether it move continuously in a classical mechanical sense in between "tunneling maneuvres." If not, then it would seem to escape any possible form of force-transfer with other electrons, but that can't be possible for in the case of colliding-atoms, there has to be force-transfer through the electrons. Spin made sense to me at first, insofar as a moving electric charge generates a corresponding magnetic field. So the idea that the atomic electrons are moving and therefore generate a magnetic field is consistent with the empirical observation of a magnetic field generated by a current moving through a conductor. However, once Swanson started saying that this is too classically mechanical to make sense for a quantum physics concept like spin, it seemed like I must have misunderstood.

"System" is far from ambiguous, isn't it? If the math equation version of your statement expresses the same thing, I wonder if it lends itself as easily to questioning what exactly is meant by "system." In my experience, using math instead of descriptive language makes it more difficult to elaborate using concrete examples. If you say that the total momentum of a system never changes, I can come up with numerous examples of "systems" and contemplate what "total momentum" would refer to and whether all the possible momentum-transfers and transformations would always add up to the same amount. OR I could just think in terms of conservation of energy and ask where additional energy would come from or go to if the system was closed. Again, where's the unambiguity? In what sense is it a "fundamental quantity?" What does that mean exactly? What does "some angular momentum" refer to? Interacting with charge is clearer language, but also vague. How does it interact with charge? In what sense does it interact? Purely in the sense that two variables "interact" by influencing each other's outcomes by some unknown mechanism? As I noted in another post, statistics has a bad habit of using empirically-oriented words to describe mathematical relationships. Statisticians will say that education and age "interact" as variables to determine income, but "interact" doesn't mean anything except that when one variable changes, it doesn't directly change the dependent variable except as mitigated in some way by the other variable it interacts with. This tells you nothing about what is really going on when someone decides to pay someone else a certain amount of income based on their education and age. So the actual empirical "interaction" is obfuscated by using the term to refer to relations between variables in an abstract mathematical model. It's fine. They may be able to predict people's incomes with some accuracy using such a model, but it is misleading to say that there aren't actual material "interactions" occurring that aren't even considered by the model because the model relies on statistical samping/populations to make generalized predictions instead of concerning itself with what is or could be happening in actual interactions. I don't if this approximates what quantum equations are doing with data or if they are actually attempting to describe and explain concrete physical mechanics. The language is too ambiguous to tell. My understanding of a wave function is that it operates as a wave though it consists of numerous repellant fields (electrons) that "dance around" variously disappearing and appearing with a certain probability within the wave. What I don't understand is does a hydrogen molecule, for example, only have two such "dancing points/fields" and do those two move around the nucleus randomly according to the probability-gradiations of the wave-pattern? Have I completely misinterpreted what wave-function refers to? In bowling, momentum, mass, and position are experienced intuitively whether they are abstract in some philosophical context or not. Embarassment? What should anyone's ego have to do with any of this? The fact is that research communications are subject to reasonable criticism from any angle. It is easier to do with social science because social interactions are concretely observable without instrumentation, etc. So when you suggest that the problem with criticizing statistical language is that one hasn't learned statistics well enough, you're ignoring the fact that they do in fact understand it well enough to criticize it. That makes it a dodging tactic to avoid responding to that criticism by shifting the blame to the critic's comprehension of the science. In this manner, you could endlessly suppress any reasonable claim to knowledge by saying that anyone who disagrees with you has yet to meet your standards of educational status.

If you were floating at the bottom of an enormous swimming pool in the shape of an upside-down cone and that cone was slowly filling up from the bottom, your position on the surface of the water would be growing more distant from other objects on the surface. This distance-growth would correspond to an increasing number of water molecules between you and your surrounding objects but you wouldn't have to swim through the water to increase the number of water molecules between you and your beach ball. Of course, you could swim either toward or away from the beach ball, and by doing so you would increase or decrease the number of surface molecules between you and it, but the rising water level in the cone would also be contributing to your distance from it. If this is not a flawed analogy, there's no reason to differentiate between distance-increase from expansion and distance gained by object-motion.

Even if "the external world" only existed as part of your subjectivity, how would that change the way it functioned as a seemingly material entity. Would gravity suddenly be controllable by your conscious mind because you "realized" that the world you previously perceived as external was in fact only apparently so?