If you’re attracted to or repelled by something, are you compelled to/from it by largely internal forces from within, or are you compelled to/from it by largely external forces from without? Take a ball and the ground. When the ball is released, it falls to the ground. What prompted the fall? Was it largely the ball that prompted the fall, was the ball responsible, or was it largely the ground that prompted the fall, was the ground reponsible, or were both the ball and the ground equally responsible, were they were both necessary prerequistes for the ball’s fall? If both, then what of a human and food? Subtract the human from the equation, and the human is not prompted to eat the food because they’re not there, subtract the food from the equation, and the human is not prompted to eat the food because it’s not there. Alter the condition of the man - If he’s not hungry, he won’t eat the food. Alter the condition of the food, if it’s not palatable, he won’t eat the food.
It’s common to say we’re attracted to things like food, but what if it’s the other way around, what if things like food are attracting us, what if it’s causing us to eat it - external causation of desire rather than inernal? If true, then attractiion and desire are objective phenomena, or partly objective phenomena. Maybe we can’t say… myabe we don’t have to. Is the ball attracted to the ground, or is the ground attracting the ball? Could be both, could be one, could be the other. In the case of humans and objects or humans and other subjects, it seems it could also be both, one or the other. Perhaps whether we attribute the phenomena of attraction and desire to internal forces within the subject or to external forces within the object or the other subject, says more about the psychology of the culture and the language, the individual and the race, than it does about reality.
Subject and object is an artificial division placed upon reality, upon our perceptions of reality.
It is entirely artificial. It doesn’t quite fit into cause and effect.
You’re touching on interpretation, which is my philosophy. Forces and attraction can be seen in all kinds of different ways, often contradictory or otherwise incompatible yet equally plausible, such that it is absurd to say that anything is being said about reality more than psychology. I say do away with the modernist wild goose chase for ultimate truth, for it is a symptom of ignorance and lack of creativity.
The ball is attracted to the Earth and the Earth is attracted to the ball. The ball doesn’t just fall towards the Earth. The Earth moves (very slightly) towards the ball and meets it.
Certain foods evolved together with animals. Plants changed to be desirable for the animals. Fruit trees, for example, depends on animals taking the fruit and thus distributing the seeds away from the parent tree.
Bees get food from flowers and in the process pollinate the plants. Mutual benefits.
Web of life. Not a simple cause and effect which we like to visualize.
You guys don’t know about this?
Though admittedly I don’t know if it’s been tested through experiment.
The Earth accelerates directly towards a falling ball and hits it with the same force. If the ball bounces, so does the earth.
But what do you mean “the area adjacent the ball”? Why would it accelerate towards a location next to a falling ball?
Don’t you mean towards the ball, not towards a location next to a falling ball?
Whether or not it happens, think of the earth as like a balloon - deformable. A force exerted on a balloon wouldn’t just attract or repel the balloon as a whole, it would deform it as well.
Yes. The “location next to a falling ball” query was in reference to what statik said:
Yes, a ball would deform the earth in line with its force. Pressure comes into this one (force/area), and the internal attractive forces within the respective objects that bind it together.
Unless I’m just totally confused, I think Statik asked if only the area of the earth adjacent to the ball would move towards the ball - if the earth would deform, or if the whole earth would move.
I still don’t know the answer. If I just think about it intuitively, I get confused about various things.
Oooooh. Well technically it’s the centres of mass that gravitate towards one another. Not without deformation, yes, but not so neatly that ONLY some cylindrical volume of earth accelerated towards a falling object, for example. It moves as a whole, just not perfectly rigidly.
It’s odd, I can’t help but think of the ball as part of the earth - kind of as a starting point to thinking about mass, gravity, etc. That probably sounds dumb, but I feel like thinking about this is bugging me out a bit. Hard to explain my whole train of thought though.
Well the distinctions between ball and earth aren’t as clearcut as a simplified scientific thought experiment could easily make out. Obviously there’s the earth’s atmosphere that surrounds the ball and there’s also the philosophical issue of what constitutes a separation between objects when there are no physically existing dividing lines between anything.
I don’t think that what I make of your train of thought is dumb at all. In fact I love hearing about non-physicists talk about what they don’t quite understand about physics - their confusion is always highly justified. On reflection, I only understood physics through blind acceptance of simplistic modelling and formulae. It probably becomes closer to a more intuitive understanding as you progress and it gets more complicated, but I didn’t pursue it to university level and beyond.
Perhaps this links back to the original OP - I’m sure EitD didn’t want his thread to be all about the traditional scientific understanding of objectivity. The traditional scientific understanding of attraction and forces isn’t the only one, and you’re hardly required to have a flawless understanding of it in order to function perfectly fine in the world.
The Earth moves and distorts as well. All atoms in the Earth experience a gravitational force. The atoms closer to the ball experience a greater force that those on the opposite side of the Earth which makes it distort.
The gravitational attraction of the moon causes water levels to rise and fall in the form of tides.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant. “Adjacent” may have been a bit ambiguous, so I can understand the confusion. I think phyllo answered it though. But, yeah, I don’t remember learning this in the past for some reason. I’ve probably heard it before, but never thought critically about it.
It’s really difficult to think about if you consider all of the objects falling toward the Earth simultaneously at any given moment. I can picture it if I think of the Earth “deforming”, as anon put it, but not if the whole Earth moves toward each falling object.
I’m a subject, I can interpret, misinterpret and reinterpret the world, a ball cannot.
I move to/from objects and other subjects based on survivability, balls move to/from objects arbitrarily, impersonally, according to the laws of physics and proportion.
I’m not entirely for you or against you on this. I think just because we’ve seemingly proven in one case that it’s objectively arbitrary whether we assign causal power to the ball or to the ground, or to the subject or to the object, doesn’t mean all (meta)physical, philosophical and scientific matters are completely arbitrary and subjective, and our assertions about them mere overinterpretations. It seems you’re for making philosophy more like an art than a science. That’s all well and good for you, but for me, I’m more interested in it’s objectivity than it’s creativity, however I don’t see why art and science have to be so mutually exclusive.
What would assinging causal power or attraction or desire or like more to the subject than the object say about a culture or an individual? Would it say they like to think of themselves as autonomous, sovereign, free agents, unbound by reality? Is there something free and therefore Judeochristian about it, even if this freedom and self-determination isn’t conceived as truly free or random in the conventional Judeochristian sense? Perhaps people and cultures that like to think of themselves as free and independent, are drawn to subjective accounts of attration and conversely those who like to think of themselves as slaves to reality are drawn to objective accounts of attraction.
I’m not so sure it does. One, I have no empirical proof that it does. Two, as a ball falls to the ground, an innumerable (more than trillions) number of other objects some heavier and some lighter simultaneously fall to the ground on the same side of the earth, and conversely an innumberable number of objects some heavier and some lighter simultaneously fall to the ground on the other side of the earth. Of course there’s no sides of the earth, but you get the idea, we’re using sides here purely for convenience. So if true, if the sum total of objects falling on one of side of the earth was greater than the sum total of objects falling on the other side of the earth, perhaps the earth would would wobble or, even continuoulsy move in the direction of the greater sum total of falling objects. However, t’would be impossible for the earth to continually move in that direction, as the gravity of the sun must cancel out whatever gravitational force the falling objects are exerting, otherwise the earth would veer off course.
Exactly, so some plants change their nature in order to attract us, so it seems we’re being just as pulled by them as much as we’re pushing ourselves to them. The phenomenon of attraction requires two, a subject and an object, to tango, not just one. So why do we assign causal power to ourselves, to internal forces from within, and not to others, to external forces from without? Whether I like x is not merely depedent on me, my nature, it’s also depdendent on x, its nature. This is a more interactive, fuller account of reality than our present one, don’t you think? Like is just as objective as it is subjective.