On 5/28/20 9:32 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote: > Steve, > > After thinking about them I think curved manifolds are real just as > right triangles. Perhaps my introspection deludes me. I think manifolds "just are", to call them "curved" is to place them in the reference frame of Euclidean. To a creature who lives on the surface of a sphere or a torus, a euclidean straight line or poly-gon/hedron would be "just wrong". Euclidean straight lines are now curved and vice-versa. The problem is that *we* are mostly experienced/habituated to thinking in Euclidean Straight lines (what light (nearly)travels along at the scale of gravitational flux we live in). In another post I appeal to global scale navigation for an alternative, and in my orbital mechanics dreams I claim that I *experience* a (pseudo) complex manifold *directly* (following the isoclines of "least action" in Guerin's terminology?) or conserved/budgeted Delta-V. > I think you agree with me about thinking without language. > Sometimes. In the morning I don't think, "Now I am going to open this > cabinet to get a bowl..."
I think I agree that on a good day this happens (otherwise I'd not have coffee and my avocado-toasted-bagel until later in the day). I had a friend/tenant living in my house for couple of years (2016-2018) who had a brain injury 30 years ago which was treated with a variety of physical and talk therapy, psychotropics, ECTs, and other "mind bending" things like EMDR and bilateral-something-or other. He had a horrible problem with "sequencing". Once he DID formulate something in language he would be stuck with that formulation... and if interrupted while executing or if someone tried to inject into or reorder his formulation , he would get stalled and all but have to "start over" and talk himself through his formulated steps until he got to the point where he had been derailed. Things he had done habitually in his life (driving, cooking his favorite chile, etc. were mostly immune to this...) I will agree that there are many familiar/practiced sequences of impulses and actions that we atomize to the point that it takes virtually no conscious attention to execute them. For example, not long after I learned to type, my ability to translate language into pixels (ink, ???) is entirely subconscious. If I *think* too much about what my fingers are doing, I get fumbly and have to do a lot of backing up and starting again. My orbital dreams felt like I was training myself to "gesture in 3D delta-V phase space"... I don't claim that anything I've done in my dreams is particularly registered to real orbital mechanics (though it resembles it in some ways as best I can tell), only that it is (was) becoming subliminal/subconscious/embodied. I believe you are also a tennis player (you current, me long-since deprecated skill) so you know the huge "lexicon" of motions/trajectories/gestures your body knows how to execute in phase space... from your serve to a "rush to the net" or an "overhead slam" or a variety of top, side, back-spin ways to stroke the ball. I can *still* without a racquet in my hand for decades or a foot on a court "feel" these things in my body... which allows me to watch Tennis on TV (mirror neurons) in a way I will (and have) never been able to watch any other sport... even though I've thrown a few spiral passes, kicked a few soccer balls, hit a few home runs (or pop flys), and sunk a few freethrows/3pointers/layups in my life, they never really got fully encoded the way a decade or more of (weakly) competitive tennis did. I *think* this is the level of "sensorial grounding out" that Lakoff/Nunez appeal to at the bottom of their own "metaphors all the way down" conception. In deference to my trying to allow some of the layers to be analogies, models and mappings, I suppose I might say "it is mappings all the way down" until it hits the hardware (wetware) where I contend there are still "mappings" but rather different than the ones we think of in the "mappings" from metaphorical target to source domains. The grounding under the ground are the kinds of ion-channels described recently in his Touch/Pressure/Temperature/Proprioception paper link. I hope Glen will agree with me (not so that I feel I am *right* only because I *think* this captures/resolves a lot of what we have argued here and offline?) somewhat on this alternative of "maps" all the way down? I think your sense that space-time is "bent" or "curved" is an example of where the metaphor (mapping) has been atomized. To your conception (I suggest) absolute space is Cartesian and the *real* topology of space is "curved" in that frame of reference. I say this because I think until I started working with global-scale navigation and more recently dreaming in orbital mechanics, I pretty much felt the way you describe the "shape of space". I think it is similar to the duality I've described here before between *believing* or *understanding* or *knowing* that the moon orbits the earth while the earth-moon system orbits the sun whilst *experiencing* it as "the sun and moon, each on their own schedule, rise in the east and set in the west. Every day!". The earth doesn't spin at all (the sky does!). Mumble, - Steve -- --- .-. . .-.. --- -.-. -.- ... -..-. .- .-. . -..-. - .... . -..-. . ... ... . -. - .. .- .-.. -..-. .-- --- .-. -.- . .-. ... FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
