Glen -
What a great cascade here... I'm not sure anyone but you and I are
properly enjoying it however <grin>.
The delete key suffices. And, in the spirit of "hiding in plain
sight", we have to populate caches like Arlo's with _something_ to
lower the SNR. Personally, I feel successful enough if I can stump
ht://Dig <http://www.htdig.org/>. I'm sure Arlo's got a better
indexer for his cache, though.
I'm not sure how he indexes... I'll ask him when I see him... he's got
some wonderfully idiosyncratic ways of doing things that I feel like I
can learn from. I think he just lets his FRIAM mail back up when he's
busy with other things (like the Summer Complexity And Modeling Camp)
and then runs through it post-hoc, giving us a little benefit of
hindsight into our own foibles.
This deserves it's own entire thread... "what means creativity?". And
perhaps, "is creativity just another name for emergent?".
Ouch. No way. The concept of emergence is largely vapid, I think.
It can be unavoidable at times. But I try hard to avoid it.
I think it is a wonderfully elusive topic which is it's boon and it's
bane. It is absolutely overused and misused.
Creativity is the Twitch, which I think reduces to randomness, a
generative wiggle that initiates causal flows. We then perceive novel
acts and artifacts through hindsight.
I find "creativity" similarly elusive and over/misused. But then I'm
married to an "outsider artist" who clashes gleefully with "insider
artists" all the time in my presence. She owns an impressive array of
melee weapons for discussing creativity and art. The field is always a
mess when she walks off of it.
I do suspect that "creativity" and possibly "emergent phenomena" are as
much in the eye of the beholder as is "beauty". But even as illusions
or consensual hallucination, they fascinate me, possibly all the more
for their ephemerality.
But none of that makes it any easier to "talk about" fruitfully.
My direct involvement in this work, tangential (direct for me,
tangential for the domain itself) suggests that it is very young and
immature, that it often takes itself too seriously, etc. I'm naturally
interested in "ontologies" as low-fidelity, distorted snapshots in time
from a specific perspective of something much grander. Unfortunately
that line of consideration risks being yet-less mature and yet-more
self-aggrandizing-worthy not unlike classical Platonic Idealism.
I don't know. If you could recast what you're saying in terms of the
much more ancient sensory-motor complex presented by (mammalian?)
anatomy and physiology, then you could tie into something much more
mature and much more reality-based than the fluid brain farts that
constitute our language.
Ah yes, the battle of the petards...
I *am* very interested in making the connection you describe and
Lakoff/Nunez's and other's work in Embodiment of Mind seem to provide a
decent "stalagmite" growing up from the grounding of said mammalian
sensory-motor (and biochemical stew?) toward my hanging "stalagtites" of
abstractions precipitated out of the fog of brain farts you reference...
As an aside, my metaphor of stalagite/stalagmite is flawed in at least
one obvious way that is relevant to this conversation... in
calcium-carbonate cave evolution, there is a "downward causation"...
stalagmites form opposite stalagtites from the drips... in my analogy,
I don't intend to suggest that our "higher" (in the sense of level of
abstraction) conceptual structures in any way cause the development of
your "lower" sensory motor structures, although since our development of
language and the extreme extensions of our phenotype that may have been
leveraged by language (tools, weapons, conveyances, agriculture,
architecture, industry, etc.) may in fact have begun to adjust our
sensory-motor structures...
I have always had a very complicated relationship with postmodernism
myself. I'm knee-jerk suspicious of any movement whose fundamental
nature is deconstructionistic... that is the central power/theme of
"criticism". It's easy to tear something down, not so easy to build
something (and then defend it from entropy itself and those who would
tear it down for tearing-down sake). That said, I'm naturally
sympathetic with those who question the existing order which is (by
definition?) held in place by authority/intimidation/momentum...
I don't think of it as deconstructionist at all.
Of course you don't! <grin>.
I think of it as a more -urgic construction. Modernism is too
cerebral. Postmodernism is more arbitrary, attempting to construct
new stuff from whatever garbage happens to be laying around at the time.
I concede that this is a key aspect. Some postmodernism seems to grow
out of the presumption that modernism itself has (or is or will)
collapsed under it's own loftiness, and the "urgic" part of
postmodernism can do it's juxtaposing/folding/collaging thing with the
rich detritus created by an (overly) structured fore-bearer.
Post-modernism, as the term suggests, requires there to have been a
modernism to provide the elements for it's creativity... Possibly as
the post-Cambrian stew could not have been brewed without the
pre-Cambrian building blocks and starting points.
But, that's probably me just stamping it with my own "do what thou
wilt" ethic (come to think of it, Crowley could be thought of as a
postmodern occultist... hmmm).
I first encountered this concept in the context of Quakers... it may
have been a tangent or outlier... but I'm always shocked to be reminded
that this came from the Occultists (postmodern Crowley I suppose?).
I think you are describing the problem of rut-following and creation?
One often doesn't recognize the ruts they are running in until they
manage to jump them, or more likely get high-centered when they get too
deep. Me, I'm dragging a LOT of shit with my undercarriage despite
having jumped and/or cut across ruts many times.
I typically think of "ruts" as behavior oriented. Personally, I
seriously enjoy doing the same thing day in, day out. I find a kind
of Taoist mindfulness to that. What I don't like are canalized
patterns of _thought_. I think the real secret to happiness lies in
being able to do the exact same thing an infinite number of times, yet
thinking something entirely different each time you do it, different
yet woven/coherent with the rest of the possible paths in the swath.
I will join you in splitting that hair between behaviour and thought,
the rut/vehicle metaphor and the canalization/landscape metaphor. I'm
a fan (though a lousy practicioner) of chop-wood/carry-water... though I
am in the throes this month of bringing in my winter's wood (sorting,
stacking, splitting, etc.). I would enjoy it much less if it was
required year-round. A month of preparation and a few months of the
mindful/mindless feeding of fires, emptying of ashes, polishing and
seasoning of cast iron is still a welcome ritual.
I depend on the combination of seed crystals of thought/ideas here on
FRIAM and the indulgence of all (with or without liberal use of the
delete key) for my cogitations out loud to help me change the erosion
patterns of my mind, or if you prefer jump my ruts.
I can guess this is one reason Deutsch's concept of the multiverse is
interesting to me.
If I appreciate Duetsch's particular type of multiverse, it is the
ensemble of configuration states within a single physic, a superposition
of the adjacent (and not so adjacent) possibles. Biting on your
suggestion here, I have to admit that my own poorly articulated model of
how creativity works, if it is anything more than an illusion, is that
it is embodied in the particular choices of our consciousness regarding
which part of said multiverse one might choose to exist within...
those with expanded minds (your reference to psychoactives, to
meditation, etc.) and quite possibly our own Rich Murray and others who,
in their expanded mind-state are the ultimate lurkers here manage to not
restrict themselves to a single, low-dimensional existence within that
multiverse...
I know I'm mumbling here, but I'm trying to say (I think) that
consciousness is an epiphenomenon of this multiverse, riding on an edge
between coherence and decoherence. The expanded mind is less coherent
(in a good way) than the unexpanded mind? The perfectly
linear/rational mind can only be creative in hindsight (observing the
path through the evolving ensemble as a series of creative choices) and
the perfectly expanded, non-dualistic (Rich's term) mind approaches our
idealized conception of godness (all knowing, all-being)
embracing/inhabiting/being the entire (infinite?) ensemble?
WHEW! That is just a bit too heady and wild, even for me.
My yard alone tells me there should be some useful fungus around here
somewhere. ;-) It seems like those drugs are an established mechanism
for "cracking the cosmic egg", as it were.
I think their efficacy is intrinsically faith-based... there probably is
no objective way to determine whether the subjective experience induced
by them (immediate and latent) is "real" or not.
Hm. You seem to have taken an odd turn, there.
That is how I roll oftentimes!
Since I put little stock in reality, it should be clear that I put
even less stock in the subjective experiences of any one animal.
Granted.
The point of psych drugs, in my opinion, wouldn't be to find a new
reality outside the cracked egg. It would simply be to destroy
whatever reality you _think_ you've found as a result of your
mind-rut. Anyone who has faith in anything should be prescribed high
doses of psychedelics as a cure for that debilitating illness. 8^)
postmodernism at it's best? No, I agree... in the sense that while we
are still full of ourselves, we have no capacity to take in anything
new. In the context of my multiverse riff above, I do believe that
there are many ways to chemically (and behaviourally and sensorially)
force some (temporary) decoherence which may open the way to a more long
lasting version. I think that perhaps those damaged by over/misuse of
psychadelics (or religion or sensory deprivation or ...) simply cannot
return to enough coherence to relate effectively with the rest of us.
Sometimes that is benign (for them) as long as they exist in a context
that can tolerate them, and sometimes not (neglected or persecuted or
"treated" for their "psychosis" in ways that are not compatible with
their particular less-than-coherent state).
In my own case, my own maturing has lead me *away* from a strong or deep
belief in any of the specific, accepted classification systems. If
anything I've become more interested in a wider variety of them and
intuitive as well as formal comparative analysis of them. My
professional work in the area is informed by that as well... I'm
interested in how this plenitude of related classification systems are
related to eachother and whether one can combine or superpose them,
interpolate between them, etc.
I'm trying to fight this battle against SBML <http://sbml.org> as we
speak. Actually, that's not right. I'm a fan of SBML (especially
-multi). But it's a bit like Christianity ... I'm a fan of Jesus,
just not his followers.
SBML was just coming together last I worked close to bio-ontologies...
it is where I was first introduced professionally to ontologies. Doing
a tiny bit of checking, I find that one tool being used for visualizing
ontologies in that world ( http://arena3d.org/ ) looks frightfully
familiar (
http://bio-ontologies.man.ac.uk/2006/download/Joslyn2EtAlSpindleviz.pdf )
I suspect the ontologies you're talking about are probably less about
the automatic description and specification of models. But I tend to
think of them as the same, or more similar than do the spooks I've
interacted with.
Well, it is all pretty fuzzy in the sense that the customers (when we
have them) are focused on some pretty specific goals with some pretty
specific constraints. I haven't worked directly for spooks on this but
it is clear that the DTRA sponsors were interested in feeding the spooks
with our results. The specific customers *were* using intelligence
analysis models, but their overt goals were to understand the strategic
issues surrounding WMDs, drawing information from open-source data.
Describing a biological system at a fine scale like that treated by
SBML shouldn't be that much different from describing at a coarse
scale like that treated in social systems. But SBML is very use case
fragile, I think, which is where my criticism lies. Luckily, I have
some allies who are much more credible than I'll ever be.
I am woefully out of date on any particular groups doing this kind of
work, being afloat in the stew of independent consulting convolved with
product development, I don't have the time or focus to keep up well in a
larger milieu. When I was at LANL proper, I had a lot more "experts"
nearby to walk down the hall and talk to... now I have to schedule weeks
in advance and then probably buy them lunch or a beer... and too many
of them have wandered off to other pursuits in the meantime (PNNL, ORNL,
NREL, private industry, full retirement)!
I'd look forward to more specific discussion (probably offline) with you
on this topic from a more technical standpoint. I'll read up a bit on
SBML and try to articulate some specific questions.
- Steve
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