Dave,
You have every reason to expect me to know about this, but I don’t. Whazzat? Nick Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Prof David West Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 2:09 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden Would Jung's alchemical approach to dreams be nomothetic? davew On Tue, May 19, 2020, at 2:02 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote: Dreams: A *lot* of clinical (idiographic) reading would be obligatory to do it right. I am skeptical that a nomothetic approach would be possible or useful. --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Tue, May 19, 2020, 1:41 PM <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Hi, all, Before it gets buried and institutionalized in the thread, the term is “idiographic”, not “ideographic”. It doesn’t have to do with ideas but with the study of events that are thought of as inherently individual, one-off, non-repeatable. Case histories are idiographs. The contrast class is nomothetic, having to do with the discovery of laws that relate classes of objects or events. A full on double blind controlled experiment is an example of nomothetic research. Psychology Departments can tear themselves apart arguing about which is the most worthy. I think the distinction is worth bearing in mind, although common sense dictates that an experience that cannot be assigned to a class and does not imply some lawful relation is impossible. So what about the FRIAM study of dreams? Nick Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 1:28 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden > I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience > either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an in Psychoanalysts have been working on this for over a century but scientists reject their methodology and many of their conclusions. They reject them qua scientists but many embrace them personally if they live in a place where psychodynamic therapy is available. Nothing could be more ideographic than an extremely deep investigation of an individual's "inner life" including her dreams, fantasies, and memories of childhood pains and joys. Based on living in Pittsburgh where there are two major universities I can say, tentatively, that there are high energy physicists and even behaviorists who have benefitted from this approach. --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Tue, May 19, 2020, 12:49 PM <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: EricS, Glen, David, Frank, Steve, EricC Old Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all, Let me again thank you all for allowing me to sharpen my thinking against your whetstone. I am perhaps at my most uneasy arguing against EricS, but here goes. Speaking of whetstones, let’s start with Glen’s most recent post, because it set’s a limit to how far I am willing to push the argument I have been making: With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words. My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible. I.e., a scientific understanding. But I am an imagination-pluralist. For instance, one of my favorite sayings is, “No person should be denied the pleasures of imagining heaven because s/he happens to be an atheist.” I routinely suggested to graduate students that they should stop trying to cram their ideas into a scientific format and go write a novel, since the idea they were trying to expose was more suitable to that format. So, if we are arguing about the right of humans to take sustenance from any form of thinking that pleases them, then let the argument cease. But whenever informal thinking shapes formal thinking (which it always does, to some extent), then I think we need to talk about it in a formal way.) Thus, if you change Glen’s “practical” above to “Practicial” (= of, or related to, scientific practice), I agree with him entirely. That said, if you’re not exhausted, you might have a look at the larding of EricS’s note, below: Thanks again, all, Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of David Eric Smith Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 10:26 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden As I read this,I am reminded of the 20th century (seems to long ago), in which the high-energy physicists dug a social pit for themselves, from which the ones they offended do not want ever to let them escape. Keyword is Reductionism. The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science) [NST===>I am a reductionist, but let me be precise about what that means to me. To me, a concept has been reduced when anybody asserts that there is only one key into it (to use the Metaphor Glen and I have been exploring.) The traditional forms of reduction are reductions in scale, as when somebody asserts that the mind is just brain activity or behavior is just muscle twitches. I abhor this kind of reductionism, and think it is the worst kind of misdirection and obscurantism. I am an “up-reductionist”. My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in. Our minds are something about us, not something within us. <===nst] HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks. ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do. HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly. ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.) HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that. ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting. HEP: In Principle we understand all that. ROS: You are a robot. And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks. Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives. [NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst] The behaviorists sound _so_ much like the reductionists sounded, and it is not for me to say whether they want to sound that way or not. [NST===>Well, sure. I guess some behaviorists have sounded that way. But not Tolman, and certainly not Peirce, for instance. <===nst] They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO) [NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF? In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.” <===nst] that they sound like they are claiming a scope of knowledge including all the things about which they don’t have anything particularly satisfying to say. They are sure, in the end, They Know what science will consist of, at least In Principle. They may actually be right on parts of that, but to assert that your system of understanding will, you are confident, subsume all the future problems about which, for the present, you are unable to say anything actually elucidating, is of questionable utility. [NST===>There’s a huge difference between agreeing to try to build such a system (knowing you will almost certainly fail), and asserting that one already has one. <===nst] It’s fine to believe that, but if it does no work for you, it is not easily distinguishable from a not-even-wrong claim. At the most benign, it substitutes putting a lot of energy into defending the turf (of what? of “materialism”? or is that now such an overused term that we would like something fresh to characterize the non-spiritualist, non-vitalist position?), instead of engaging with where the other person wants the discussion to be, which is to say “Hey, there is some distinct cognitive or experiential primitive here, which I don’t know how to characterize in a satisfying way; would you like to help me think about it?” [NST===>Great! Let’s do that work! * Is this the same as saying “hey, we seem to share some productive patterns of thought, here, which we have not articulated, let alone integrated into our larger system. How can we do that? But to the extent that spiritual means not amenable to integration into the practices of science, we are blocked from having any systematic conversation about spirit. <===nst] My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity. And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work. In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations. Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure. Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search. The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is its own kind of thing that occupies science in addition to the system that characterizes the building blocks and the local rules for their combination. All the systems that characterize all the irreducible patterns are compatible with the building blocks, but precisely because each of them captures something different, the system for the building blocks doesn’t extract any of them _in its particularity_, and it is getting at that particularity that the whole rest of science is occupied with. [NST===> Is a cake irreduceable? I think it is. If you agree on that point, then I really don’t have to say anything other than that I agree with all of the above. To the extent that I see you-all exploring a mathematical or algorithmic reduction of the irreducible, I wait outside your conference room for news of your success. <===nst] (Btw, the rabid Darwinists do the same thing. That is what enables Richard Dawkins to take what would otherwise be completely reasonable positions, and turn them into an overall offensive posture. [NST===>Dawkins does not have a consistent or comprehensive view of evolution, let along anything else. He flagrantly abuses the Darwinian metaphor. So please don’t hang that particular dead chicken around my neck. Any Darwinist who did not get on the evo-devo train, was left at the station a generation ago. <===nst] And the character of the deflection is the same. If Darwinism contains everything, then it isn’t doing the work for you of extracting some further, particular thing.)[NST===>I agree that anything that claims to be everything is probably nothing. That does not keep me from – as a matter of method – attempting to “push” a line of thought as far as it takes me. I see that this is contradictory. [sigh].<===nst] Sorry for the meta-commentary on conversation analysis (or opinionizing). I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an interesting investigation. [NST===>Well, only if it’s not understood as “that which we cannot investigate.” <===nst] [NST===>* I have decided to adopt Glen’s footnote practice. OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams. How would we go about it? I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did. <===nst] Eric On May 19, 2020, at 12:15 PM, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: You have a life for which, at the moment, only you hold the key. That’s the furthest I am prepared to go. N Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 9:13 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden Then quit saying I don't have an inner life. The inner expeeiences are the memories I have in the present and at various times in the past and the wondering about whatever became of her (and others). --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Mon, May 18, 2020, 8:48 PM <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Frank, There are many things that you have experienced that I have not, and vv, but no value is added by calling these “inner.” I can sort of go along with Glen’s gloss on “inside”, but when you metamorphose it to “inner”, I get antsy. But I think we have tilled this ground for all it is worth, for the moment. Nick Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 8:02 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden Forget covariant tensors (again). There was a beautiful, talented girl in my sixth grade class. She could dance ballet, draw striking pictures, etc. I thought of her occasionally over the decades. When Google search became available I discovered that she was married to a celebrity. When you say that my inner life isn't private, Nick, do you mean you could figure out her name given what I've just written? As I think of her face, can you "see" it well enough to recognize her photo? I just don't understand what you mean when you question that I have a private inner life. Frank --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Mon, May 18, 2020, 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Frank, Glen, Nick, Glen writes: `... in last week's Zoom, I mentioned to Jon (in response to his query to Frank about RSA-encryption::mind) that I think homomorphic encryption is a better analogy (to mind).` Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for why his mind may be private. Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of transformations which will allow us to know his mind, it may be the case that those transformations are not accessible to us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank, his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable. As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind. Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine once said that rememberings were morphisms between forgettings. We are often ok with the idea that memory is lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting something fundamentally different. The remembering is always between different forgettings. Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts. Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our conversation. It seemed a good idea to try. On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the book Steganographia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganographia> . I had originally read about it in some part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has since found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in 1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography. What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography. I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was doubly hidden from me as I neither had the deciphering key nor can I read Latin ;) Jon †: If any members of the group would like to form a reading group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE <https://www.bookdepository.com/Fully-Homomorphic-Encryption-Scheme-Craig-Gentry/9781243663139> , I would gladly participate. †† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect, work beginning with Margherita Beloch <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margherita_Piazzola_Beloch> (and culminating with the Huzita-Hatori <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huzita%E2%80%93Hatori_axioms> axioms) show that origami would have been a more powerful choice! -- --- .-. . .-.. --- -.-. -.- ... -..-. .- .-. . -..-. - .... . -..-. . ... ... . -. - .. .- .-.. -..-. .-- --- .-. -.- . .-. ... 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