Some sensations are more compelling than others, recall that Ernst Mach says that perceptions are connected to "volitions". So even when perceptions have the same sensory magnitude they may still be distinguished by their vividness or affect. Maybe a feeling is attractive or scary; perhaps pleasant, or possibly painful. Anyway let us call this quality the sensory urgency and try to clarify it by reflecting on the following thought experiment.
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| Tatibin. Paminggir people, Sumatra 19th century, 93 x 41 cm. Ship motif. From the library of Darwin Sjamsudin, Jakarta. Photograph by D Dunlop. |
First select some acoustic sensation that is not necessarily a heartbeat. Call it the thermometric reference sensation. Represent it using a positive number noted as kT . Compare hearing this thermometric reference sensation with the Anaxagorean sensation associated with seed Z. Determine the numbers a and b such that hearing a copies of the thermometric reference sensation produces the same sensory urgency as b copies of Z. Report the result as
The number วจ is called the thermal energy of the seed Z. So the thermal energy is interpreted as a ratio of sensations. It is always greater than zero because a, b and kT are all positive numbers.
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| Next step: conjugate symmetry. |
