Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

[Marcus Daniels]

Vladimyr writes:

"If the referents are robustly entrenched in formalism then likely so are the 
artifacts."

I work on source-to-source compilers.   There's no real-world referent.  Just 
transformations between representations.  

Marcus


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Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

[Vladimyr]

>Marcus wrote " Others are just involved in collective performance art in
the hopes of pushing their citation count higher."

They profit since so many are seduced by crappy graphics. My last academic
supervisor was one of these characters. But knowing that I finally completed
my sentence in academic prison.

Gentlemen don't retreat. Most children go through a stage when they
experiment with watercolor paints.
Parents dote on these kids. With little success.

Once I condemned an artist for choosing a small easel, low expectations.
But many artists choose self constraining media that they can easily master.
They impose self restrictions on themselves yet seem to desire a great
reputation.

Glen's referents are salient and possibly very useful. These referents enter
the neural landscape
and transform the very connections of neurons. London Cabbies are famous
world-wide for their
mental skills and neuro-anatomy. Their rigorous mental models are
astonishing.

The artwork of most humans rarely progresses beyond flat 2D scribbles, and
yet teaching them anything
about the matter is almost useless.

Some brains can create artifacts of surprising elegance and other brains
make caca.
And then there are the Economists that prefer the later.

If the referents are robustly entrenched in formalism then likely so are the
artifacts.
vib



-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: April-23-17 11:14 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN
server

Heh, it amuses and frustrates me the pressure to publish when one could
instead do something useful like develop and share code.   Those "mental
models" scribbled down on paper obviously have less value than tools to
solve the general problem (i.e. working through all the boring but necessary
cases to make it all computable), both as formalisms and from a utilitarian
point of view.   Nonetheless, I hear all the time from theory types that
they "have it in their head and just have to write it down".Some of them
I believe.  Others are just involved in collective performance art in the
hopes of pushing their citation count higher.  Hmm, I seem to be down on
academics today.

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

[Eric Charles]

Hm. while I don't disagree with Nick, I also don't think he
answered the question. It might well be that when we ask what a thinking
man is doing in any particular instance, we are missing the point. And yet,
as the man sits for longer and longer in his thoughts, that argument seems
itself to have become more remote with regards to our concerns. Further, it
seems empirically true that the man who gets up from thinking is sometimes
different than the man who sat down to begin his pondering. What is THAT
about?

There is not a good answer to this question. I wrote a chapter with British
experimental psychologists Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka about the
problem recently, in a collected volume on American Philosophy and the
Brain. We lamented the lack of a good language with which to talk about
what the brain does, arguing that cognitive-psychology speak is inadequate
and was holding back the field. (Nothing too novel in that.) We also made
some solid suggestions about what the new language would need to look like
- drawing from ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, and the like
- even though we couldn't commit on its final form. Much of the text can be
found here, and I'll get the full text if anyone is interested:
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en==TvgqAwAAQBAJ=fnd=PA127=charles+andrew+sabrina+neuropragmatism=F-EM6R_Zq1=xa9EbE82QAxAXQVrtad64a-w6Ds#v=onepage=charles%20andrew%20sabrina%20neuropragmatism=false


The answer has to be something of the form: He is reconfiguring himself.

To the extent that he is "consciously thinking": He is responding to the
fact that he is reconfiguring himself. He is like a man "psyching" himself
up to lift a heavy weight, in that he has a "sense" of whether his body
(brain included) is ready for the task ahead or not.

To elaborate: Humans show a remarkable capacity to rapidly reconfigure into
different types of "task-specific devices" (TSDs). That is, we are well
tuned to (relatively) skillfully do one thing at one moment, and a
different thing at a different moment. After contemplation, our thinking
man is a different dynamic system than he was before, and he now connects
to the larger dynamic system of himself-in-his-environment differently than
he did before - he is sensitive to different variables, and responds to
variables differently than before. While physiological psychology covers a
wide range of systems, including hormonal systems, gut physiology, and
lymphatic response, such processes are generally slow, operating on the
scope of minutes to days. More rapid reconfiguration suggests
that alteration of neuronal mechanisms is the best explanation for the
changes observed during a typical bout of "thinking."

These changes in neuronal mechanisms are a key component in a change in the
habits (relatively predictable responses) one is prepared to display based
on surrounding events.

The question of self-awareness, then, is a question of how one re-cognizes
what one is predisposed to do. This relates to the issue of apparent
"higher-order" self-regulation by which one keeps one's self reconfiguring
until one is ready to act, or until some additional factor pressures
action. The principles that apply on that "higher" level, ought to be
expressible in the same terms as those which operate on the "lower" levels.
The skill of knowing when one is ready to answer a math problem, or give
the public speech, or drive to work, etc., should be viewed as equivalent
to the skill of knowing when one is ready to lift a given weight. Some
weights are light enough that one is essentially always ready, some are
close enough to the limits of one's ability that being (as much as is
possible) the right type of task-specific device is crucial, and still
other weights are so heavy that no amount of effort towards
rapid reconfiguration will suffice. So it is with solving math problems,
nailing a speech, or navigating dangerous roads in a vehicle.  I fully
acknowledge that lifting the near-limit weight will also rely on several of
those minute-scaled bodily changes (blood oxygen, adrenaline, etc.).
However, the key point is that whatever language we come to agree upon most
allow us to highlight the similarities between that situation and the more
typical examples of "thinking", rather than making it seem as if there is a
an uncrossable gulf between the two activities.







---
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps


On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 5:19 PM, Nick Thompson 
wrote:

> Hi, Frank,
>
>
>
> Heluva Question, there!
>
>
>
> Allow me to skip to what seems to be the core question you are asking:
>
>
>
> *“Nick: What is it that you Peirceian’s think I am doing when I think I am
> modeling stuff in my head*.”
>
>
>
>
>
> Gilbert Ryle put this in an even more succinct manner.
>
>
>
> *What is **Le Penseur doing?*
>
>
>
> Now, you of all people, Frank, know how troubling this question 

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

[gepr]

Although I really like and agree with Nick's answer, his is a little dense. So 
I'll try for something more pedestrian.

Your math concepts are the result of many iterations between the measurement of 
marks on paper and the evolving concepts in your physiology. From your first 
sight of some math markings on paper or a chalkboard, you took measure of those 
markings and the words spoken or written by teachers or in books. You 
eventually made good use of your generic computer and abstracted out the core 
concepts, the patterns of glucose consumption, that allow you to recapitulate 
the markings, even if the language or other parts of the context has changed.

As such, the concepts and the marks on the paper are mutually referent. Without 
the markings, your concepts are ungrounded, meaningless. Without the patterns 
of glucose consumption, the markings are ungrounded, meaningless.


On April 23, 2017 10:32:13 AM PDT, Frank Wimberly  wrote:
>So it's easy to substitute the word 'conceptual' for the word 'mental'
>whenever I talk to you (or Nick).
>
>I'm curious.  My qualifying exam in real analysis consisted of 10
>questions
>(stimuli, inputs?) like "State and prove the Heine-Borel Theorem". The
>successful response was a written version of a valid proof.  I hadn't
>memorized the proofs but I had memorized conceptualizations of them.
>How
>does that fit?  Would the referents​ be the proofs in the text or as
>presented in class?
>
>I passed.
>
>Frank
>
>Frank Wimberly
>Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>On Apr 23, 2017 10:00 AM, "┣glen┫"  wrote:
>
>>
>> I've made this same point 10s of times and I've clearly failed.  I'll
>try
>> one last time and then take my failure with me.
>>
>> When you assert that there's a dividing line between rigorous and
>> whimsical mental models, what are you saying?  It makes no sense to
>me,
>> whatsoever.  Rigor means something like detailed, accurate, complete,
>etc.
>> Even whimsical implies something active, real, behavioral, physical. 
>In
>> other words, neither word belongs next to "mental".  When you string
>> together mutually contradictory words like "rigorous mental model" or
>> "whimsical mental model", your contradiction prevents a predictable
>> inference.
>>
>> At least the word "concept" allows one to talk coherently about the
>> abstraction process (abstraction from the environment in which the
>brain is
>> embedded).  It preserves something about the origins of the things,
>the
>> concepts.  When you talk of "mental models", then you're left talking
>about
>> things like "mental constructs" or whatever functional unit of mind
>you
>> have to carve out, register, as it were.  What in the heck is a
>"mental
>> construct"?  Where did it come from?  What's the difference between a
>> mental construct and, say, a physical construct?  What _is_ a "mental
>> model"?  How does it differ from any other "mental" thing?  Is there
>a
>> difference between a "mental foot" and a "mental book"?  What if my
>"mental
>> books" are peach colored clumps of "mental flesh" with 10 "mental
>toes"?
>> It's ridiculous.  Contrast that with the terms "conceptual foot" or
>> "conceptual book".
>>
>> So, in the end, I simply disagree.  The term "conceptual" does much
>to
>> illuminate.
>>
>>
>> On 04/22/2017 08:35 PM, Vladimyr wrote:
>> > there exists a dividing line between rigorous and whimsical mental
>models
>> >
>> > that the term “conceptual” does little to illuminate.
>>
>> --
>> ␦glen?
>>
>> 
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

-- 
⛧glen⛧


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