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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8701118" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It is passive in the way that passive learning is passive.It doesn't mean you take no actions whatsoever. It means you are simply not being overt or focused on the activity of perceiving things. Humans necessarily perceive things at all times while they are conscious, this is not an intentional act, it simply happens as a consequence of being aware of our surroundings. It is in fact almost exactly the same sense as what we use for things like "passive [solar] heating," where there are no moving parts or electronic systems that create or collect heat, and instead the heating system is based on being good at collecting the ambient heat in winter and reflecting it away during the summer. Or consider "passive income," which refers to income sources that do not require direct engagement to continue providing returns, e.g. if you rent out your property to others, that is a form of passive income even though you are technically "doing" something. Royalties would be another example of passive income, since you don't need to do any further work to earn money from them (ensuring the enforcement of copyright being separate from actually making new works that can have copyright.)"Passive" does not exclusively mean "inert." It also means "not having intentional effort." "Passive observation," for example, is a formal term in science for collecting data purely through looking at things (or in other ways just observing them) rather than doing any form of experiment or prediction per se. It is usually contrasted against active experiment, but could also be contrasted against predictive modeling, which lies somewhere between the two. Passive observation still requires you to take actions, like recording video or audio or making detailed notes. It just doesn't involve the observer actively participating in the physical situation themselves. Most of astronomy and cosmology, for example, consists of passive observation and predictive modeling, because we cannot construct new proto-stars and wait out the formation of planetary accretion disks and such. Yet to do that we have to take a great many complex actions, like designing, building, and launching the JWST.</blockquote>

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