On Myth and Physical Fact

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (S1) ◽  
pp. 111-116
Author(s):  
Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro
Keyword(s):  
Physical Fact

scholarly journals What is a Physical Fact?

1898 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 645-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Thorndike
Keyword(s):  
Physical Fact

The myth of visual depth cues IV: Shape-from-shading

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Maniatis
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Shape From Shading ◽  
Visual Depth ◽  
Depth Cues ◽  
Depth Cue ◽  
Physical Fact

The popular idea that “shading” is a shape and depth “cue” is the result of a failure to appreciate that neither shading as a physical fact nor shading as a perceptual fact can serve to explain the process leading to visual experience, because the description “shading” does not apply to the proximal stimulation, where this process begins. Both perceived shape and perceived illumination are products of figural constraints.

scholarly journals Artificial Consciousness, Meta-Knowledge, and Physical Omniscience

2020 ◽  
Vol 07 (02) ◽  
pp. 199-215
Author(s):  
Ron Chrisley
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Argument ◽  
Machine Consciousness ◽  
Artificial Consciousness ◽  
First Time ◽  
Physical Fact

Previous work [Chrisley & Sloman, 2016, 2017] has argued that a capacity for certain kinds of meta-knowledge is central to modeling consciousness, especially the recalcitrant aspects of qualia, in computational architectures. After a quick review of that work, this paper presents a novel objection to Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument (KA) against physicalism, an objection in which such meta-knowledge also plays a central role. It is first shown that the KA’s supposition of a person, Mary, who is physically omniscient, and yet who has not experienced seeing red, is logically inconsistent, due to the existence of epistemic blindspots for Mary. It is then shown that even if one makes the KA consistent by supposing a more limited physical omniscience for Mary, this revised argument is invalid. This demonstration is achieved via the construction of a physical fact (a recursive conditional epistemic blindspot) that Mary cannot know before she experiences seeing red for the first time, but which she can know afterward. After considering and refuting some counter-arguments, the paper closes with a discussion of the implications of this argument for machine consciousness, and vice versa.

scholarly journals V. On the present amount of westerly magnetic declination [variation of the compass] on the Coasts of Great Britain, and its annual changes

1872 ◽  
Vol 20 (130-138) ◽  
pp. 434-435
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Coast Line ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Magnetic Declination ◽  
Annual Changes ◽  
Magnetic Observatories ◽  
Physical Fact

The rapidly accelerating value within the last few years of the annual decrease of the westerly magnetic declination over the whole area of the United Kingdom and the adjacent seas, as observed at the fixed magnetic observatories of Greenwich, Kew, Brussels, Paris, and also at Christiania in Norway, is a subject of importance in practical navigation as affecting the compass-bearings derived from charts and those laid down for the guidance of pilots. The attention of the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty has been constantly directed to this interesting physical fact; and as the duties of Her Majesty’s surveying-vessels employed on our shores between the years 1866 and 1870 embraced nearly the whole extent of coast-line, advantage was thus taken, undert he orders of Rear-Admiral Richards, C. B., F. R. S., the Hydrographer, to determine, with great attention to accuracy, the magnetic declination at widely spread and favourable localities.

Vol. I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Shelley
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Physical Fact

The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin,1 and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield....

scholarly journals Separation of solids in the surface-layers of solutions and ‘suspensions’ (observations on surface-membranes, bubbles, emulsions, and mechanical coagulation).—Preliminary account

1904 ◽  
Vol 72 (477-486) ◽  
pp. 156-164 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Surface Layers ◽  
Free Surfaces ◽  
Egg Albumin ◽  
Surface Evaporation ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Preliminary Account ◽  
Physical Fact

In a paper published in Du Bois Reymond’s ‘Archiv für Anat. und Physiologie’ in 1894, I showed that mere agitation of various proteid solutions brought about a separation of some of their contained proteid in the form of fibrous or membrano-fibrous solids, and that it was possible in this way to coagulate and remove the whole of the proteid from solutions of egg-albumin. It was proved also that these de-solutions and coagulations of proteid were not due to the action of enzymes, heat, or surface evaporation, and were not appreciably affected by the nature of the gas in contact with the liquid or of the vessel in which the agitation was effected. A prolonged series of further experiments, undertaken with a view of ascertaining the precise cause of this phenomenon, has led me to the discovery of an important, but hitherto unnoticed physical fact:—namely, that, quite apart from evaporation, solid or highly viscous coatings are spontaneously, and more or less rapidly formed on the free surfaces of all proteid solutions.

scholarly journals XIII. Illustrations of the viscous theory of glacier motion

1846 ◽  
Vol 136 ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Hydrostatic Pressure ◽  
Glacier Motion ◽  
Physical Fact

When Gruner proposed the explanation of glacier motion by the sliding of the ice over its bed, and De Saussure illustrated and confirmed it by considerations drawn from the lubricating action of the earth’s heat melting the ice in contact with the soil, there is no reason to suppose that either of them thought it necessary to take into account the varying form of the channel through which the glacier had to pass, and the consequently invincible harrier presented to the passage of a rigid cake of ice through a strait or narrow aperture when it occurred. This is the more remarkable, because he conceives that the inequalities of the bed or bottom may be overcome by the hydrostatic pressure of the water, which he supposes may be impri­soned between the rock and the ice, so as absolutely to heave the latter over the resisting obstacles. I believe that in no part of De Saussure’s writings will there be found any, the slightest reference to the possibility of the glacier when fairly formed moulding itself to the inequalities of the surfaces over which gravity urges it; nor is there any trace of the correlative fact of an unequal motion of the sides and centre of the ice, which may in some sense be considered as the geometrical statement of the preceding physical fact. The fact of plasticity was suspected by Basil Hall, and more distinctly announced by Rendu, as shown in the first part of this paper; but it could not be proved until the geometrical fact of the swifter motion of the centre of the glacier relatively to the sides was established in 1842. The contrary opinion at that time generally entertained would have been conclusive against the hypothesis of plasticity called forth by the gravity of the mass.

scholarly journals II.—The Recent and Rapid Elevation of the American Cordillera

1891 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 441-450
Author(s):  
Henry H. Howorth
Keyword(s):  
Vertebral Column ◽  
Eastern Asia ◽  
Ural Mountains ◽  
Geological Feature ◽  
Isthmus Of Panama ◽  
Geological Origin ◽  
Essential Unity ◽  
North And South ◽  
Physical Fact ◽  
Geological Magazine

In some papers which have lately appeared in the Geological Magazine, I have endeavoured to show that the Ural Mountains, and also the great masses of high land in Eastern Asia from the Altai to the Himalayas, are of very recent geological origin, and that it was probably their rapid elevation which caused the great diluvial movement of which traces are to be found all over the Siberian plains. I now wish to call attention to some of the evidence which points to the American Cordillera being also a very recent geological feature, and dating from the same period of cataclysmic revolution which closed the Mammoth age.It is a curious fact that one name, America, connotes both of the great continents hung together by the isthmus of Panama. The cause of this is of course purely historical, and yet it coincides with a great physical fact, namely, their essential unity in more than one respect. The generic unity of the old inhabitants of both continents is a peculiar fact in ethnography; but the unity is even more remarkable in this, that the vertebral column which runs north and south through the two Americas is essentially one backbone.

“Home at Grasmere”: Ecological Holiness

PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Kroeber
Keyword(s):  
Physical Environment ◽  
Natural Process ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
The One ◽  
Physical Fact

Wordsworth's “Home at Grasmere,” the one completed book of The Recluse, expresses a conception of home as a territorial sanctuary. The holiness of Grasmere Vale as a dwelling place consists in the possibility for ecological wholeness which it provides. The enclosure of the valley liberates the poet's psychic potency, because there he is encouraged to be receptive to multiple dimensions of experience. Through such openness he is consciously able to reintegrate his being into the enduring rhythms of natural existence, thereby articulating his unique individuality. “Home at Grasmere,” then, embodies Wordsworth's ideal of what poetry should be, namely, the realization through language of the intrinsic poeticalness of commonplace actuality. This true poetry, which is characterized by interplay between physical “fact” and mental “fancy,” liberates man from the prison of mere perception, revealing how individuals'—by fitting themselves to nature and fitting nature to themselves—can give unique expression to the unified, interdependent wholeness which is life, the expression being a fulfillment rather than a negation of fundamental inherent tendencies of natural process. In so celebrating such interaction of art and nature, Wordsworth raises questions about some current presuppositions of what constitutes basic interrelations among literature, civilization, and the physical environment.

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