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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

The person I see in a mirror is a human being. The person I see in a mirror is me. What do you think a mirror is?

If you do not think there is a difference between "your reflection in a mirror" and "you", it opens so many fascinating questions. I'm curious:

- Do you think a live video, shown on a phone screen, of you, is "you"?

- Do you think a still photograph of you is "you"?

- Do you think a set of bytes representing that photograph (or video) digitally is "you"?

- Do you think a compressed version of that photograph is "you"? Is there a limit to how much I can size down the image or compress it until it's no longer "you"?

- Do you think the base-10 number equivalent to that digitized picture is also "you"? Can I memorize "you" if I learn all the digits of that number? Can I write "you" on a piece of paper from memory? Is Pi a person?

- There is a very large number of reflecting surfaces in the world. How many of you are there?

- Does the "you" in the mirror persist if you walk off the frame and can no longer see yourself in the mirror? What happened to him? Does he live in a left-handed world? What happens if I shatter or paint over the mirror?

- If I draw you, is my drawing "you"? Does the accuracy of the drawing influence whether it is really "you" or not? If so, then does the accuracy/quality of the mirror influence whether it is "you" or not in the reflection? Are "you" fatter or slimmer, depending if the mirror is warped?

- If you're standing far from the mirror, but I'm close to it and I can see "you", why can I talk or signal to you and you don't respond?

> Is Pi a person?

Not only that! Does the decimal representation of π (which is infinite in length) contain all persons who ever existed, and will ever exist? Since π itself is a known reason, but its decimal representation is infinite, it means π cannot contain itself. So if it can contain every person that ever existed, but can't contain itself (which could conceivably contain everyone), then what does that even mean?

Aaargghh.

I do love the idea that Pi contains all of us. It means everytime you put on a wedding ring, time a pendulum, look at a rainbow, or land on a spherical planet, you can whip out your ruler and get access to every single human that ever lived or will live. What a concept!

Spot me after the next rain. I'll be in the color indigo, right above the pot of gold, waving back.

The image you see in the mirror is a reflection of a human. Or, more precisely, a 2-dimensional projection of the frontal outer surface of a human.

One half of one dimension less than a human. But sure looks convincing on the surface.

Technically it's you in the past. Just slightly.

Suppose if we wanted to get philosophical it could go in the "ceci n'est pas une pipe" direction but I agree

Then why is he left-handed?

Because the primary is right handed.

I enjoy asking my grandkids why mirrors reflect left to right and not top to bottom.

They do "reflect top to bottom".

Hold a written word in front of your eyes to read it.

Now flip it to the mirror to read the reflection:

Did you flip it horizontally? Then it reflected left-to-right.

Did you flip it vertically? Then it reflected top-to-bottom.

I think "reflect top to bottom" is intended to mean "swap top and button". A mirror reflects left, right, top and bottom perfectly. It's front and back that it swaps.

Someone saying that a mirror swaps left and right is comparing it to a photograph, and only because we, as bipedal creatures, really prefer to orient images of other humans with heads up.

Someone saying that a mirror is swapped left and right is because they rotated themselves 180 degrees about the vertical axis to face the vertically aligned mirror. If they used a horizontal axis instead, they would have swapped top and bottom. And if the mirror is horizontally mounted on the floor, anything goes. You'd probably say it swaps up and down, which is front and back from the mirror's point of view.

> It's front and back that it swaps.

This sub-thread is becoming unfairly more interesting than the main conversation at this point.

You know, I never thought about that.

This was my small "mind expansion moment" for today. Thanks!

So he is not the primary?

Call him Bob.

Nomenclature is just a convention of convenience and can be ever so judgemental.

Particle / anti-Particle ... way to lead the jury, hey?

What we do know is that when Bob walks up to a mirror he sees adastra22.

The glass is likely there to stop them touching and spawning a new universe.

Notice how in your own example, the anti-particle is not the particle, and Bob is not adastra22.

I did notice that these things are labels and not objects.

Good point.

And it would revolutionize our current understanding of physics to find out that p = p̄

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