As usual, there's too much in your post for me to follow a thread. But I can cherry-pick
this one: affect - or what it is to be about/for something. An option is to think in
terms of soft types such that the lower order objects over which the higher order
operators ... uh, operate, have some "flex and slop", allowing the higher order
operators to become schema and the lower order objects to constitute (nearly? ... quasi?)
equivalence classes.
The ontological status "engrams"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology)> came up recently in another
context. I'm told they're quite *specific*. But I'm not convinced. I think they can be specific
(e.g. the efficacy of things like a Memory Palace). But I also think they can be accidentally
invoked in non-specific or specific, but various ways. The non-specificity might provide for
variation in stimulus (memory triggered by something different, different part of the body,
smell vs taste, etc.) or components (memory of a visual scene versus that of a somatic context).
All my speculation is subject to falsifying or validating data, of which I have none. But
whatever. My point, here, is that overly simple hypotheses for the spread of (largely)
cultural or psychological behaviors are so impoverished that they feel like just-so
stories to me. E.g. Dawkin's memes ... or Hanson's "innovation" ... or the
nihilistic mode-switching facility of cult-members.
Deutsch's "hard to vary" constraint for good scientific theories comes to mind, I guess. Call me contrarian if you
want. But in order for a "theory" to convolve into all the other "theories" wallowing out there in the
ambience, it has to percolate into the unoccupied interstitial spaces left blank by the others. And that requires them to have a
little flex and slop, allowing them to "be about" or "be for" things other than what you might think they're
about or for.
Abuse seems to be the norm, not the exception.
On 10/6/23 09:28, Steve Smith wrote:
Another fancy word I've come to like is /"Ententional"/ which combines the ideas of what something
is "about" with what it is "for".
This leads me around to Deacon's "Teleodynamics" which might be obliquely related to your
invocation recently of a physics "Lagrangian vs Eulerian" rather than the Anthropological
"Emic vs Etic" axis of understanding first-third person, reductionist-holistic, nominal-real
perspectives? This also leads me back around to the (nearly) ineffable discussion of Stationary Action
revisited from time to time here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle#Disputes_about_possible_teleological_aspects
--
glen
-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
