Mixing-up is-a and has-a is a fundamental software design error. It is so consequential that some languages don’t even allow subtyping of concrete types. Now it seems essential, but just wait…
On Apr 1, 2022, at 9:42 PM, David Eric Smith <[email protected]> wrote: On Mar 31, 2022, at 3:24 AM, Roger Critchlow <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: And I suppose the back side of the trap is that we have an innate essentialist heuristic which we use for organizing essentially everything we encounter in the world. You know, in reading this now, I am suddenly put back in mind of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, and a category distinction he makes between “family resemblances” and “predicates”. (Not that there is any privilege to this reference; only that I have seen so few things that I often come back to it.) If “family resemblance” and “predicate” are even categories, maybe one should add to them “essences” as a third category. What would any of those categories be? Postures toward perceiving? Or “experiencing”? The language that philosophers seem to like that “it is like” something “to be alive” (or whatever; to be a bat) — I have sympathy for their need to have some verbal locution, though I have no impulse to follow them in using that one — seems to have an origin something like the origin of terms like “quailia”. Or to be off somehow in the same general quadrant. So okay, we can do a lot, and we want verbal conventions for signals to put each other into various states of mind or frames of reference. The language isn’t analytic in any sense, but if people think they mostly agree on it, maybe it does whatever we put weight on language to do, to some degree. Cues to coordinate states of mind. When Vygotsky uses the term “predicate”, he doesn’t mean it only (or maybe at all) in the logician’s sense of existence of a partition of a collection into non-overlapping classes. He is referring to something somehow perceptual, so that from an early “family resemblance”, where maybe most of the blocks in a set are the red ones, or maybe most of them are the triangles, etc., we settle on taking “red” as a “property” on the basis of which to assign set membership. Somehow it is that investing of things with properties or aspects, as a cognitive-developmental horizon, that he means as the shift to assigning them predicates. Is it a mode of perception? A cast of mind, among many in which perceptions might take place or be enacted? Is “experiencing something” as “being of some essence” then, in any similar sense, a mode of perception or an orientation, disposition, or posture toward things that partly forms what we take from the interaction with them? That is my attempt to re-say REC’s “innate essentialist heuristic”. Is perceiving-in-essences a distinct disposition from perceiving-as-having-properties? Or are they two names for the same thing? Linguistically, we seem to use them differently. At least in English, one is strongly attached to the verb “is” and the other to the verb “has”, and there seem to be few instances in which we would regard the two as substitutes. (Though I can think of constructions involving deictics and existential where apparently the same usage can shift which verb carries it across languages.) Would the linguistic form strongly prejudice the semantic domain, or does it entrain on a semantic domain that is mostly language- and culture-invariant? I guess the psychologists and the philosophers have all this worked out. Or maybe the contemplatives have systems for it. But those are literatures I don’t cover. Eric So in certain contexts -- mechanics, chemistry, thermodynamics, electronics, computation -- we have refined our naive essentialism into categories and operations which essentially solve or are in the process of solving the context. And in other contexts, we have lots of enthusiastic application of naive essentialist theories, lots of ritualistic imitations of the procedures employed in the contexts which are succeeding, and lots of proposals of ways that the unresolved contexts might be reduced to instances of the solved. EricS's dimensional analysis in a nutshell, which is an essential description of a successful essential analysis of a context, leaves a lot of problems for the reader to work out if taken as a recipe for action. How do you identify the units of aggregation? What are the rules for forming larger aggregates from smaller and vice versa? What is entropy, anyway, and what is the correct entropy (*dynamic potential) in this context? Thermodynamic state functions as derivatives with respect to entropy are all over JW Gibb's On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances. It is the point. PW Bridgman's Dimensional Analysis essentially summarizes all of physics up to 1922 as a problem of combining and factoring units of measurement, one of my favorite library discoveries as an undergraduate. Both available in the internet archive. -- rec -- On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 12:12 PM Marcus Daniels <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Here is a situation I frequently experience with software development where I try to adopt some code, even my own. I stare at the code and.. 1) It becomes clear how to assemble it into to what I want 2) I become confused or frustrated. As a ritual, I remove it from my sight and open a blank editor window to start over. Sometimes I must walk away from the screen to think, until I want to type. I think the reason I dwell in #2 space is because I believe in #1. That is, when I have just the right combinator library things just snap into place. I seem to spend a lot of time trying to convince myself of why it can't work, and whether it is a bad fit or something that needs to be fixed in the platform. What is important, in this value system, is that platforms are good, not that this or that problem gets solved. I think it is basically the Computer Science value system in contrast to the Computational Science value system. To [re]abstract and [re]concretize can be expensive and those who don't do it have a productivity advantage, as well as the benefit of having particulars to work from. I don’t think it is a case of confusing the sign for the object. It is a question of what kind of problem one wants to solve. In contrast, I have met several very good computational people that hate abstraction and indirection. They want code to be greppable even if it that means it is baroque and good for nothing else. -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> On Behalf Of glen Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2022 8:40 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] To repeat is rational, but to wander is transcendent Of all the words being bandied about (quality, property, composition, domain, continuity, intensity, general, special, iteration, etc.) EricC's "contextless" stands out and reflects EricS' initial target of dimension analysis. The conversation seems to be about essentialism. Maybe that's a nice reflection that we're sticking to the OG topic "analytic idealism". But maybe it's Yet-Another example of our pareidolia to see patterns in noise and then to *reify* those patterns. [Re]Abstracting and [re]concretizing heuristics across contexts may well be what separates us from other life forms. But attributions of the "unreasonable effectiveness" of any body of heuristics is the most dangerous form of reification. The superhero ability to [re]abstract and [re]concretize your pet heuristics convinces you they are "properties" or "qualities" of the world, rather than of your anatomy and physiology. Arguing with myself, perhaps Dave's accusation is right. Maybe this is an example of swapping the sign for the object, or reworded prioritizing for the description over the referent, confusing the structure of the observer with the structure of the observed. Those of us with less ability tend to attribute (whatever haphazard heuristics they've landed on) to the world *early*. Those of us with more ability continue the hunt for Truth, delaying attribution to the world until we get too old to play that infinite game any more. I think Possible Worlds helps, here, too: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/ Patterns are simply (non-degenerate) quantifiers over possible worlds. Regardless, I'd like to ask whether the formulation of intensive properties as derivatives of entropy w.r.t. extensive properties is formalized somewhere? If so, I'd be grateful for pointers. I'm used to the idea that the intensives divide out the extensives. But I haven't seen them formulated as higher order derivations from entropy. Thanks. -glen On 3/29/22 14:37, David Eric Smith wrote: > [snip] > 1. One first has to have a notion of a macrostate; all these terms > only come into existence with respect to it. (They are predicates of > what are called “state variables” — the intensive ones and the > extensive ones — and that is what the “state” refers to.) > > 2. One needs some criterion for what is likely, or stable, which in general > terms is an entropy (extending considerably beyond the Gibbs equilibrium > entropy, but still to be constructed from specific principles), and on the > macrostates _only_, the entropy function (which may be defined on many other > states besides macroststates as well) becomes a _state function_. > > 3. Then (actually, all along since the beginning of the construction) > one needs to talk about what kind of aggregation operator we can apply > to systems, and quantities that do accumulate under aggregation become > the arguments of the state-function entropy, and the extensive state > variables. (I say “accumulate” in favor of the more restrictive word > “add”, because what we really require is that they are what are termed > “scale factors” in large-deviation language, and we can admit a > somewhat wider class of kinds of accumulation than just addition, > though addition is the extremely common one.) > > 4. Once one has that, the derivatives of the entropy with respect to the > extensive variables are the intensive state variables. It is precisely the > duality — that one is the derivative of a function with respect to the other, > which is the argument of that function — that makes it not bizarre that both > exist and that they are different. But as EricC rightly says, if one just > uses phenomenological descriptions, why any of this should exist, and why it > should arrange itself into such dual systems, much less dual systems with > always the same pair-wise relations, seems incomprehensible. For some of the > analogistic applications, there may not be any notions of state, or of a > function doing what the entropy does, or of aggregation, or an associated > accumulation operation, or gradients, or any of it. Some of the > phenomenology may seems to kinda-sorta go through, but whether one wants to > pin oneself down to narrow terms, is less clear. > > [snip] > >> On Mar 30, 2022, at 5:04 AM, Eric Charles >> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> >> <mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>> >> wrote: >> >> That is a bizarre distinction, that can only be maintained within some sort >> of odd, contextless discussion. If you tell me the number of atoms of a >> particular substance that you have smushed within a given space, we can, >> with reasonable accuracy, tell you the density, and hence the "state of >> matter". When we change the quantity of matter within that space, we can >> also calculate the expected change in temperature. >> -- Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - . 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