Dear EricS,
So much here, and yet I wanted to take baby steps.
Let me just announce something personal, in case it’s relevant. I never had a
religion. My father was an announced a-religonist (i.e., he asserted his right
not to give a damn about any of that crap) and my mother an announced agnostic.
My closest pass to religion was when – in lieu of a baby sitter and because
there were cookies I liked – she took me to an occasional hymn-singing, hosted
by different neighbors “on The Road” who had a piano where hymns were sung and
psalms were read because she liked the words and the music. {She was,
literally, tone deaf.} So, for me, in my childhood, there was literally no
organization outside my immediate family that claimed any authority. I say
this because many of the people who have said they don’t understand me ….
Including some of my collaborators, by the way … were beaten by nuns in their
childhood, or some spiritual equivalent. I say this not to spur a response,
but to identify an area in which I simply don’t share much of human experience.
I am religiously deaf and dumb. I say this so that you will not suppose that
I am pushing for any Establishment. I would have no idea what an
Establishment was.
Moving right along … baby steps. I am going to annotate your note below as
plainly as I can until I get too confused or run out of steam and then stop, so
I don’t blather. So, I will see you below.
N
Nick Thompson
<mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]
<https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2021 12:55 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Could this possibly be true?
Hi Nick,
It’s such a broom of things going on, that it is hard to respond to with
orderly thought.
0. If I had a motto, it would probably be something like “Nothing is
impossible; everything is hard.” But that oversimplifies too much, so I don’t
have mottos.
[NST===>I do have mottos and that is one of them. <===nst]
1. To have people unable to understand you seems to me like the default
expectation. So, from Dylan: No reason to get excited. Or from Pete
Townshend: This is not a social crisis.
[NST===>No, but it is a kind of call to action when somebody whom I respect
disagrees with me. <===nst]
2. Before commenting on resolutions, maybe a comment more to clarify the
experience of the problem. The use of some of these words in the various posts
leads to a reading experience for me that is like garden path sentences. So it
is not so simple as “defining” a term. It is that the semantic work the usage
of a certain term does in someone’s mind percolates down to lots of levels in
the forming and the reading of text
[NST===>I think what you PERHAPS identify as a FRIAM bug, here, is actually a
feature. Words are like flotation devices which, when abused, can deliver one
to unsafe depths and leave one to drown. But I find the challenge of that
really exciting and was largely missing from University life. <===nst]
.
3, Often, there are cadences in your use of the term function that feel
familiar to me from evolutionists, whose use of it also is a garden-path
sentence for me. So for that I know you are at most partly idiosyncratic, or
that the behaviorist conventions are only partly distinctive. Some of this
goes back a level in generality and community. Since the evolutionists don’t
use the word “goal” the way you do, the things in that that seem strange to me
are more particular to this discourse.[NST===>My confusions arise, it turns
out, from those of Edward Chase Tolman, famed “cognitive” psychologist and
freedom of speech advocate. When I arrived at Berkeley, he had just died, and
I got an extremely heavy (but inexplicit) dose of his thought from a mourning
faculty. Tolman was raised in the same New England milieu that I was and even
though I never met him, I seem somehow to have identified with him. I say that
Tolman was confused because his roots were in the Neo-Realist and neutral
monist movement of the Harvard Teens, but for reasons I have never understood,
those roots were cut off and any shoots sprayed with herbicide after James
died. I say “cognitive” with scare-quotes because those should have
predisposed Tolman to be against the very ideas for which he became famous much
later on. Tolman was, in this sense, a deracinated thinker. <===nst]
4. Many things in the evolutionists’ discourse feel neo-Platonist to me.
[NST===>Let’s say, ex hypothesi, that you called me an ignoramous, and,
further, that I did not know what an ignoramus was. Would my lack of knowledge
of the word, keep me from being one? Absolutely not. So, I can be a
“neo-platonist” even though I have no idea what a neo-platonist is. 15 minutes
in Wikipedia did not improve that condition, seeming to suggest that it is a
tradition, not a set of ideas. So, perhaps I should just ask you what “being a
neo-platonist” means to you, because the evidence seems rather strong that it
is not a “true category”, i.e., a “real.” Note that this, like all good
discussions, is in danger of becoming and example of itself<===nst]
Whether they “are” that or not I am not claiming. I am saying that I
experience them that way. So I wanted to cheer for Glen’s “no epiphenomena”
post, which (again, perhaps alone, and due to my bias), I read as a pushback
against the neoplatonist habits.
[NST===>I need to know what these habits are. Were you flogged my
neoplatonists in your youth? Point these people out, and I will have them
killed. Is it is a concern with what can and cannot be done with the logic of
categories? Is it an over-valorization of word-“play” at the expense of “real”
experience? Or is THIS it?: The relentless search for “generals” that endure
over time and space (consistencies) and <===nst]
Of course, the evolutionists would assert loudly, as the last thing before
executing me, that they are nothing of the sort. Afterward, they would feel
bad and say that was a mistake; that I wasn’t worth having explained
to.[NST===><===nst] r
4a. I happen to feel like this is something I run into in the “beyond fitness”
exercise. So in being concrete I can allow others to tell me how I am
misunderstanding everything they say. I experience the evolutionists as
thinking about things like sporophytes, gametophytes, spores, gametes, etc. —
the various objects in the lifecycle of ferns — as epiphenomena of the
fitnesses of units of selection. As for Plato, the Unit of Selection, and its
Fitness, are the true Forms, and all those objects and transitions are just
shadows on the cave wall. The “no epiphenomena” is for me the pushback that
says: No, start with the things that are there and do stuff; whether it fits
the frame you want to put on it (Glen’s pre-emptive registration) can come
later, or not at all, as appropriate. Of course for the narrow cases I treat
it is easy, like Godel’s demonstration of the limitations of arithmetic was
easy because explicit constructions can be made: that the Platonic Form of
fitness and the unit of selection to which they wish to make everything else
epiphenomenal can be shown to exclude quite concrete and specific things that
are included if one starts with just what happens and constructs, to find that
other registrations are consistent while the fitness and the unit of selection
are not. I know this is not germane to the topic you were discussing, but I
cannot help have it as part of the experience set that parses styles of
speaking.
5. I assume the resolution is a sort of AA resolution: to admit the
conversation has a problem. Probably to expect, too, that the problem doesn’t
really go away. So one just deals with it one day at a time.
I have to comment that in one other post, you gave three assertions that made
me sure (and also probably wrong) why DaveW says you are a mystic, whether you
will admit it or not. They are not entirely out of context of the above. You
said:
I don't know what world you are talking about if you [think you] are talking
about a world beyond experience.
I don't know what existence you are talking about if you [think you] are
talking about existence apart from experience.
I don't know what fidelity you are talking about if you [think you] are talking
about fidelity apart from experience.
I think that hits my neoplatonist triggers too. It’s an interesting exercise
for me to try to find a locution that captures the right concept. The visceral
response, which I also have to religious people, and which makes the
contemplatives angry when I tell them they are hitting the same triggers as the
religious ones do, is to scream at them IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU. The religious
ones don’t want to live in a world that isn’t all about them. I think the
mystics and the contemplatives want to say they are not that breed of cat. I
will take them at their word, but I can’t picture myself doing a good job of
arguing on their behalf, which is usually the measure for whether I understand
something.
But what then is the careful version?
Well, my discourse can never happen except within the larger field of my
experience, and I would do well to always keep that in mind. That seems good.
But what is there of the language I produce, and that we produce together? It
is generated within behavior, it is transacted in experience, indeed. But what
forms is it desirable for me to endow it with, or in which to try to use it and
develop it? Suppose it is capable of having forms that refer to an existence
in ways such that that referral doesn’t care how my experience is or isn’t
involved. A biosphere could have sprung up on this planet, with all these
insects and plants and fish and so forth, and with never people to comment
about them. They would be no less themselves. A language capable of
expressing (or aspiring to express) that frame is one I would like to use. To
conceive of a language that has structures in common with a world beyond
experience, even though my talking in it is an event within behavior or
experience, does not seem to me obviously logically incoherent. Any more than
living in a world that would have been much the same if I hadn’t been living in
it seems incompatible with the inherent coherence — of a thing’s being
whatever-all that thing is — of existing.
The question of “how would I know whether the language had ever achieved such
an alignment, since my knowing takes place within experience” is of course fine
to pursue. But I think I can express a preference for trying for a language
with that overall form, even if I don’t know how to answer the question about
validation. There is the issue of how I participate in a language, given
whatever it is and whatever I am. I have a mode of participation in, or
engagement with, or use or receipt of, a language that refers to a world beyond
experience, that I imagine I would not have if it didn’t.
That didn’t buy you any of what you came for, I know. Hopefully not time lost
down a well, even so.
Eric
On Sep 17, 2021, at 6:52 AM, <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> > <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
Hi, EricS
You faith in my consistency is touching (};-)].
I know that, in response to this, Nick will reply with a sequence of
English-language words that I find even more unparseable than the ones above.
Frankly, you shouldn’t have any faith that my average psychology colleague will
rescue me. 90% of them, directly or indirectly, make their living off The Hard
Problem.
EricC and JonZ might do so, but they are probably too busy.
Given that I find my inability to communicate with you alarming and
distressing, and given that you find what I write so exasperating, is there any
way forward?
Please understand that I am not fooling around, here.
Are there any baby steps we could take? If I can’t communicate with you guys,
small chance I will be able to communicate with ordinary mortals.
Nick
Nick Thompson
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,7DujyKj5BlPA-iLJk3HDHbbYf60pN4x1wLc2-4y8BhU7T98FngpaBqZeRQ7hpECyZN4GzK-mPCBf7x_afUfzbyUr1CYriZXSYMJPqZQk&typo=1>
From: Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On
Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2021 5:32 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Could this possibly be true?
This is where there is a style of use of language that may be unique to Nick
among all humans, or may be a tribal custom among the psychologists, but which
the common man needs to be aware exists, so that he knows that the way
Nick/psychologists use words will be directly opposed to the way the common man
has always used them.
If that question disappears for you under those circumstances, then I can
simply admit that a pleasure is just the behavioral transition that occurs upon
the achievement of set of circumstances, and escape the tautology by defining
a goal as the organization of behavior that points to a set of circumstances.
So, in archery, the way the archer points the bow (organization of behavior) is
the “goal”, and the event of an arrow’s hitting a bullseye is somehow not a
goal. Nick didn’t happen to use the word “function” in the clip above; I have
no idea what he would say a “function” is, but in the earlier posts, it was as
bizarrely glossed to me as this glossing of goal, so I can’t even come up with
a guess for how to imitate it.
The plugging in of an address for the supermarket to the GPS while sitting in
the car in the driveway (organization of behavior) is the goal, not the event
of my arriving at the supermarket.
For me as a mechanic, the bullseye as a position for arrows is the goal
(applied to an object), or the event of the arrow’s arriving there is a goal
(applied to an outcome of a behavior) that serves as a selection criterion
among directions in which a bow might be pointed. My pointing the bow one way
versus another is to me a function for attaining that goal. The event of
arriving at a supermarket is the goal that serves as a criterion for selection
of which GPS location I plug in; the act of plugging in that address is then a
function for attaining that goal.
I know that, in response to this, Nick will reply with a sequence of
English-language words that I find even more unparseable than the ones above.
The meditators do this too. If I comment that, as a mechanic, I am interested
in what would get people to be more restrained in the use of excesses of power
when they find themselves in possession of such, to try to unwind the death
spiral that is leading to the dissolution of the society, I know that the
meditators will say “Poor child, lost in samsara, he doesn’t realize that all
these things he refers to are just illusion.” If I say to them that this is
what I expect them to say, the meditators get annoyed at me because they think
I am insulting them. They say “when we say, over and over again, in the first
pages of every piece of our literature, and again every three pages after that,
that `all that is illusion’ “, we don’t mean that all that is illusion. You
strawman us. Seriously?
I guess that’s how either discipline-specific or idiosyncratic speech habits
work. What is unexplainably self-evident to one person is mystifying to
somebody else.
Eric
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