Exactly. With conceptions like "Did Pink actually feel scared? Or was it performative?"; "Were the behaviors of the wife and the ex indicative of a threat to the husband-wife relationship?", the very first question should be what part is the *sensor* and what part is inference from the sensor.
I haven't done any circuit design in ... like decades. But I have attempted some debugging and reverse engineering more recently. There's a palpable intelligent designer one can infer from an extant circuit, similar to what you've done with your artifacts. How do you know *if* you're bending/abusing it? Like any [ahem] *good* video game, the designers often program in some flex and slop so that you can bend it, and feel like you've escaped the matrix into the Cheese. I suppose in DIY circles (or even credible engineering outfits where they've chosen Fast and Cheap to the detriment of Quality), it's easier to bend it. With biology, I'm fairly doubtful. All the just-so rhetoric about purpose, exaptation, spandrels, etc. just don't carry the day. And *that's* the key to the information hygiene problem arising in both the Pink and Husband cases. A complex system is best analyzed through specification curve analysis, not a preemptively registered hammer that makes everything look like a nail. As for the keys on the KPiano, I'd argue they're pressure sensors. Bumpers on bumper cars? Do modern bumper cars transmit signals to a computer of some kind? I doubt it. So I'd argue they're neither sensors nor receptors. But I suppose, in an analog computing sense, if they're mounted by gas or fluid plungers or springs, where a little/slow pressure meets gradual feedback but a lot/fast pressure meets stiff feedback, then they're more like a sensorimotor interface. They're sensors as received by the driver and actuators only as part of the action flow from those further in like the pedals. If there's no springiness to them, then like someone hitting you with a baseball bat, the bat is not the sensor. >8^D On 9/27/26 4:27 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
I think there’s something to your feedback, one-to-many, and misinterpretation criteria. I spent part of this afternoon circuit-bending my Big Muff, which got me thinking about an old job I had as a synthesizer tech in Austin. Part of what I enjoy about analog synths and guitar pedals is their immediacy, their sensitivity. I often work on them while they’re plugged into an amplifier, so I can hear the effects of what I’m doing in real time. Press on a transistor or capacitor in the right part of a circuit, and the sound warps and wraps around its new embodied reality. Of course, one can constrain a transistor to behave as a digital switch. I suspect a transistor is still a sensor even if its response is constrained to that limit. Positive feedback on a NOT gate makes for a cheap and ready square-wave generator, and is pretty tolerant to perturbation. There was one time when a client brought in a Kurzweil digital piano. I opened it to find one big chip. The design was clearly oriented toward control. If the circuit was set for the piano to make trumpet sounds, well, that’s the sound it was going to make. Press on the chip and you’d be more likely to break something before pressure became an interesting control signal. The Kurzweil is designed so that the components are insensitive to perturbation and shielded from the world. I’m not sure how I would classify its keys. Are they actuators or sensors? A sensorimotor interface? What about bumper cars?
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