Part 1
I can imagine a device which intends to capture the sensory experience of being afraid of heights. Imagine a wrist band which attempts to objectively capture the experience when one is standing at a height and looking down. It measures your rate of perspiration, your heart beat. It measures your height with various technical mechanisms. It detects when you yell and scream and measures the volume. It detects shaking and wobbling frequencies in the movements of your body. It measures the amount of adrenaline coursing through your veins. It measures all of these things and tries to capture the experience as objectively as possible. If your numbers are high, the device knows your scared at the height your at. Call it an “Aerophobia Meter.”
Part 2
There is a lot about the experience of fear of heights that cannot be captured by this device. For example, although physiological phenomena like heart rate can be indicative of fear, they can also indicate excitement, exercise induced blood flow, or even a heart condition. When someone yells and screams at the cliff, they could be one of these guys just getting pumped up for the jump! Even the flow of adrenaline could be ruled out similarly.
What can be measured to quantify fear is only physiological. These measurements are not an exact science. There are people who don’t respond in the same physiological manner when they get scared. Some people don’t sweat. Some people don’t scream. Some people shake when they’re cold, not because they’re scared. Some elderly people have heart attacks if they get scared! There’s only so much that a device can do to capture this experience. I’ve thought it through, and I can’t think of another thing to measure. Fear is simply a mental phenomenon and cannot be reduced to information. Perhaps if one knew everything there is to know about a brain, like where fear takes place and what neural synapses fire and that sort of thing, an “Aerophobia Meter” could be placed in your brain. But even then we get to what’s called the “mind-body problem” — the experience of the mind is much more than simple electrical signals. There is an experience which is the accumulation of all that is going on in the brain at any given time, and to measure only the fear center would be misleading. Perhaps there are many other neural processes that we call “fear” which are really the same neural processes that occur during sadness, excitement, or arousal. The “machine vision” is limited in its scope in a surprising way; it cannot even accurately capture the everyday experience of fear.
Charles Golden 