Glen - Without trying to convince you of anything, but trying to practice (learn) empathic listening, and surely coming up far short of a steelman of your position:
You seem to be saying that (in my example) what I have applied the terms "songline" to are (might be?) (only/mostly?) someone's reification of some thoughts they had? I *do* understand that the (dead white guy/gal - Boas, Benedict, Mead, et alia) field of Western Anthropology might well impose onto the Cosmology of a population such as the "first peoples" who lived on the continent we call "Australia", our *own* projection of what they are about with what we have com eot "reify"? under the title of "songline" or "dream track". In fact, I am given to understand that within that cosmology, these "lines" are the tracks of creator-beings within the Dreamtime, all of which is perhaps too foreign for me to do more than recite these terms about. But that leaves the question of whether what *they* (if there is even a they-there?) use their version of these terms for something that is "simply a mish-mash of junk from which no sense can be inferred?". I realize you were using that phrase to describe an extrema of a spectrum, and perhaps were not even thinking of the specific example I put forward. (trying to take any idea that I'm throwing up a strawman here). I don't know if it helps to try to address (so we can factor it out?) this Western/Anthropological *interpretation/projection* from the *aggregation/abstaction* of trying to treat a people as presumably diverse as the entire (pre-colonial?) population of the continenet we call Australia, as a single culture. We have acknowledged something *like* 250 distinct languages (pre-colonization) but also imagine/pretend that their collective spirituality/mythology/culture was significantly more homogenous than that encountered, for example, in the Americas with a vaguely-parallel timeline (first "discovered" just over 100 years later). You acknowledge Stigmergy and (thereby?) allude to spontaneous order and further afield perhaps spandrels and exaptation. Just to be clear, I'm not *trying* to "throw dookey in the fan" here (aka "generate thread-splatter"), but looking for an arc/trajectory/envelope in it that makes sense to me. What you say about "Scientific Practice" sounds to me like you are saying the "object" we point at is more like an ephemeral cloud (from another thread) whose boundaries are not what we think they are. That is "porous", possibly "fractalish", and not so much objectish, or easily pointed at except as a distribution, or maybe an envelope (bounding volume?) in higher dimensional space? Maybe this is another example of how "communication is an illusion"... but Frank's recent cartoon of communication that I took to be a stylized form of projection -> serialization -> transition -> deserializatoin -> reprojection, seems relevant. chicken-egg::gumflap::threadsplatter ? - Steve On 6/8/20 1:00 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote: > No, I reject both your and Dave's concepts (for the sake of argument). In > both the story-conception and the songline-recitation, there's a sense that > there's something underlying the actual stuff ... some idea(s) that drive, > guide, cause, modify, the things ... some *coherence* that can be > well-inferred. In Dave's conception, the collapse integrates/coheres into an > ephemeral story. In the classroom, there's a sense of "training", > "indoctrination", "learning", etc. This is what I mean when I say people > *reify* their thoughts. > > I *imagine* there are pathological, accidentally accreted "trajectories" that > are not even identifiable as trajectories (or meshes, or lineage trees, > etc.). They're simply an accidental mish-mash of junk from which no sense can > be inferred. > > Now, it would be a spectrum, of course. Stigmergy is a word we use to > describe the mostly accidental coming together of some accreted thing into > perceivable patterns like a cityscape. Jon's idea of the Equisite Corpse is > another. But if we allow a spectrum, then we should allow both extremes, > which would include collections of speech acts that don't ever cohere. > > Your example of scientific training does evoke, however, scientific > *practice*, which I think lands more toward the incoherent side of the > spectrum. That it's less coherent than philosophers of science try to make it > seem is a frequent topic. > > On 6/8/20 9:26 AM, Steve Smith wrote: >> Scientific training has a strong parallel? Classroom study being a >> bit like learning to recite a songline, and lab work a bit like "walking >> the talk" and new discoveries ranging from correcting a misphrase or >> accomodating a nuanced change in the environment or adding a side-jaunt >> up a different canyon to a never-before (or not in this songline) >> explicated bit of territory? > On 6/8/20 8:36 AM, Prof David West wrote: >> To me this suggests that the speech act is, in itself, nothing more than >> 'gum-flapping' but when a collection of 'flaps' are inter-connected / >> integrated into a conversation, or, more accurately, a story; the story has >> an emergent property of "meaning." >> >> 'Flaps' have no "meaning." Stories do. > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . 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/
