(March 26, 2018 at 9:48 am)bennyboy Wrote:(March 26, 2018 at 6:27 am)Khemikal Wrote: If this doesn't satisfy us, then we haven't observed electricity, or temperature, or any other x in-kind either...and we find ourselves in the conceptual black hole all over again.
Temperature isn't really a thing or a property of a thing except at the macro level, so let me skip that. Electricity, though. . . that is something very interesting indeed. We can catalogue massive amounts of data around and near it. But the thing itself-- that is more elusive than ever before.
It is my belief that science, good hard science, has reached a point where it's much better at telling us what reality ISN'T than what it IS, n'est-ce pas? I can say that to a very large degree my ideas about mind and the Universe are closely connected to my first inquiries into QM maybe 30 or so years ago, and that newer science seems to be taking us farther and farther into a wilderness of uncertainty.
This is partly why I am allergic to the notion of 'the thing itself' separated from the information we have about it.
Temperature and electricity are both macroscopic phenomena: temperature is related to the average kinetic energy of the atoms and molecules while electricity is related to the motion of charges.
Now, you can reasonably ask what an electric field is. or what a magnetic field is. Or even what mass is. Or energy. But *all* are operationally defined. The meaning of those terms is *defined* by how we can take measurements of them. At no point is it even reasonable to talk about the 'thing itself'. ALL we can do is model what we observe. We go beyond that only in models we create to understand and predict future observations.
