Huh. That’s a neat distinction. It doesn’t feel quite right, and in particular I notice that in practice there absolutely super duper very much is a sliding scale of gears-ness. But the “no black box” thing does tie together some things nicely. I like it.
A simple counterpoint: There’s a lot of black box in what a “gear” is when you talk about gears in a box. Are we talking about physical gears operating with quantum mechanics to create physical form? A software program such that these are basically data structures? A hypothetical universe in which things actually in fact magically operate according to classical mechanics and things like mass just inherently exist without a quantum infrastructure? And yet, we can and do black-box that level in order to have a completely gears-like model of the gears-in-a-box.
My guess is you have to fuse this black box thing with relevance. And as John Vervaeke points out, relevance is functionally incomputable, at least for humans.
Huh. That’s a neat distinction. It doesn’t feel quite right, and in particular I notice that in practice there absolutely super duper very much is a sliding scale of gears-ness. But the “no black box” thing does tie together some things nicely. I like it.
A simple counterpoint: There’s a lot of black box in what a “gear” is when you talk about gears in a box. Are we talking about physical gears operating with quantum mechanics to create physical form? A software program such that these are basically data structures? A hypothetical universe in which things actually in fact magically operate according to classical mechanics and things like mass just inherently exist without a quantum infrastructure? And yet, we can and do black-box that level in order to have a completely gears-like model of the gears-in-a-box.
My guess is you have to fuse this black box thing with relevance. And as John Vervaeke points out, relevance is functionally incomputable, at least for humans.