Monday, I did a video of such an ant carrying a leaf multiples of his size. I wonder if this is a season for such activity.
George Duncan Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University georgeduncanart.com See posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Land: (505) 983-6895 Mobile: (505) 469-4671 My art theme: Dynamic exposition of the tension between matrix order and luminous chaos. "Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion." >From "Notes to myself on beginning a painting" by Richard Diebenkorn. "It's that knife-edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our truest power." Joanna Macy. On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:44 PM Frank Wimberly <[email protected]> wrote: > I was just outside sawing up dead branches. I noticed a large ant > struggling to carry a piece of vegetation larger than it was over obstacles > in a general direction which did not change notwithstanding the obstacles. > It was very hard not to feel the ant's intentionality and determination. I > was experiencing the ant as the ant. Extreme empathy. > > Frank > > On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:58 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 5/13/20 11:17 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: >> > I'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of >> > words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that >> > tone?). Maybe I'm missing something. HAD you (or Eric) used >> > IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation >> > sideways? Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the >> > day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd? >> >> Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way. I literally >> couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer >> implications (connotations?). Behavior is a very laden word. Since we're >> talking in the midst of a conversation about psychology, it's a seriously >> BAD word to use. And since EricC and Nick have *explicitly* challenged the >> concept of "inside", that makes "inside" a bad word, too. It would be very >> cool if we could use neutral terms like X and Y. But then we'll devolve >> into mathematics, which some people think they don't like. (I'd argue >> everyone likes math; they just don't know they like math.) >> >> I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and >> "hidden" is absurd. But I AM asking EricC and Nick to treat words as >> ambiguous, with multiple meanings, wiggle room, and to make some effort to >> read what I *mean*, not whatever immediate constructs pop into their heads >> when they first read the words. I've talked about this as "steelmanning" >> and "listening with empathy" a lot. I know it's difficult. I fail all the >> time. The conversation will be permanently *dead* (to me) when/if we lock >> down a jargonal definition of any word. If you force someone to read 800 >> page scribbles by old dead guys in order to understand what a single word >> means, then you've lost the game. >> >> > Just to continue my niggling. Interiority would seem to make perfect >> > sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober and the >> > object (seen/measured/probed)? To the subject, there is a boundary >> > between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever >> > mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly >> > perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector >> > photons/phonons/nerf-balls). Visible light mostly bounces off the >> > surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through... thus yielding a >> > different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?) >> > interiority/exteriority... >> >> No. I've purposefully stopped implying that the boundary closes a space >> because I thought that was interfering with my steelmanning EricC's >> position. The position involves a kind of "projection" from the object's >> actions (flapping wings or whatever) out to a (possibly imaginary) >> objective. And that projection is important to the categorization of the >> *types* of behavior they want to talk about (motivated, intentional, etc.). >> That projection to the objective is what founds the claim that all (valid) >> questions about the object's actions can be empirically studied, because >> the behavior is, ultimately, embedded in the object-objective relationship >> ... the agent lives in an environment and the environment is a kind of >> reflection of everything that agent may do. >> >> So, I attempted to remove the "interiority" from my language by stopping >> my talk about inside and sticking with boundaries. That boundary can be >> closed (like a sphere with an inside and outside) or it could be a plane or >> a wavy manifold or like a slice of Swiss cheese or whatever. So, >> "interiority" is *not* what I'm going for. In fact it's a distraction from >> what I am going for, which is the *distance* (think network hop-distance) >> between the subject and object and the *medium* (think intermediate >> transforms as nodes/edges) through which signals go from subject to object >> and vice versa. >> >> The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible >> cut-points. E.g. a telescope has parts like mirrors and lenses, twists and >> turns. Any one of those could be THE important cut-point, the boundary. The >> boundary is the cut-point beyond which our ability to infer or distinguish >> stops. So, for a telescope, THE important cut-point is whatever distance 2 >> pin-pricks of light blur together, such that we need a more powerful >> telescope to distinguish the 2 pin-prick lights. >> >> > This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and >> > objectness? I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand >> > here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up? >> >> Yes, this conversation is a DIRECT descendant from the conversation that >> cited Fontana, BC Smith, Chalmers, path integrals, Necker cubes, verbs as >> duals of nouns, etc. Luckily, Marcus assures us that e-ink is cheap. 8^D >> >> -- >> ☣ uǝlƃ >> >> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... >> .... . ... >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam >> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC> >> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> > > > -- > Frank Wimberly > 140 Calle Ojo Feliz > Santa Fe, NM 87505 > 505 670-9918 > .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... > .... . ... > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >
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