[FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

[Nick Thompson]

For those of you wise enough to skip reading my rant, here is the question I
got to at the end.  I would love some help with it tomorrow.

 

What does a Turing Machine know? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 


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Re: [FRIAM] What Are We Monists Moaning About?

[Nick Thompson]

Russell, 

 

THANK you.  Courtesy of Google (and Dodgson)

 

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe 
impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. 
"When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes 
I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

 

As for your second point, my understanding of materialism is, “Everything real 
consists of matter and it’s relations. “ So, your crossed spear, a good example 
of a material relation, is consistent with diehard materialism.  

 

Remember, I said I was a rejected Harvard English Major.  I made my first 
materialist stand when I said in that I preferred Dreiser to James.  The tutor, 
a James scholar, I later discovered, pulled himself up to his full height 
(which must have been at least 5’7”  and said, “NOBODY who could utter those 
words deserves to be an English Major at Hhvud.”  And that was that.  Had I 
stayed another year, I might have lost entirely my capacity for scientific 
thought.  

 

I like the sound of “Amoeba’s Secret” and will try to put my hands on it.   I 
was particularly tantalized by this passage, gleaned from “Look Inside”:  

 



 

Russell, I wish you could be here to meet with us tomorrow.

 

All the best, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Russell Standish
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 9:35 PM
To: Friam 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What Are We Monists Moaning About?

 

If you read the section of my book entitled "Other 'isms in Philosophy of the 
Mind", I examine the theory outlined earlier in the book (Theory of Nothing) to 
see how it fitted into Chalmer's 7 classifications of the theory of the mind.

 

I concluded that actually I held 6 out of the 7 positions simultaneously.

 

I think it is quite possible to be both a dualist and a monist simultaneously. 
Even a hardcore materialist will admit that relationships between things (eg 
the angle made by crossing two spears) are distinctly nonmaterial things.

 

Of course, YMMV.

 

As for what a Turing machine may know, you could take a look at Bruno Marchal's 
theory, which is developed in terms of modal logic. His book I translated 
"Amoeba's Secret" is probably the gentlest introduction. Not sure what an 
English major might make of it though :).

 

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 12:45:43PM -0600, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Dear Friammers,

> 

>  

> 

> The subject line is the title of an article I am thinking about writing for 
> the

> Annals of Geriatric Maundering, and I want your help.   If you think that I am

> offering you an opportunity to waste your time, in service of advancing my

> career, you are, of course exactly correct.   Some of you have accused me of

> starting a fight on FRIAM when a good scholar would actually check out 

> large, heavy books from the library.  That criticism is precise and 

> apt.  My excuse is I have two disabilities for true scholarship: my 

> eyesight sucks, and I am lazy.  So, here we go.

> 

>  

> 

> To be a monist is first and foremost to be NOT a dualist.  The most 

> familiar form of dualism is the mind/body dualism, which is so 

> embedded in our language that it is hard to speak without depending on 

> it.  According to this dualism, there are two kinds of stuff, mind and 

> matter.  Dualists like to talk about the interaction of these two 

> kinds of stuff, and are delighted when they discover isomorphisms 

> between events in consciousness and events in the brain.  They like to 

> discuss such topics as “information” and “representation”.  Dualists 

> are fond of the subject object distinction, and are enthralled by the 
> mysteries of “inner” states.  They like to talk about inverted spectrums.  
> They hail the

> Privacy of Mind.   Most of you are closet dualists.  You LIKE to think you are

> materialists, but if you were materialists you would have to be 

> monists, and you wouldn’t like that, as you will plainly see.  I should 
> confess that

> dualists, particularly closet dualists, drive me crazy.   Just sayin’.  And as

> I have assured you many times, I love you all anyway.  In fact, 

> probably would have died years ago, if you had not kept me active.

> 

>  

> 

> Dualists are flanked on one side by pluralists and on the other by monists. 

> Pluralists are plainly crazy, and, besides, I don’t know any, so we 

> won’t bother with pluralism.  Monism is clearly the way to go.  There 

> are two familiar kinds of monism: idealism and materialism.  An 

> idealist insists that everything real consists of ideas and relations 

> between ideas; a materialist insists that everything real consists of 

> matter and its relations.  If you ask an idealist about matter and 

> s/he will say, 

Re: [FRIAM] What Are We Monists Moaning About?

[Russell Standish]

If you read the section of my book entitled "Other 'isms in Philosophy
of the Mind", I examine the theory outlined earlier in the book
(Theory of Nothing) to see how it fitted into Chalmer's 7
classifications of the theory of the mind.

I concluded that actually I held 6 out of the 7 positions simultaneously.

I think it is quite possible to be both a dualist and a monist
simultaneously. Even a hardcore materialist will admit that
relationships between things (eg the angle made by crossing two spears)
are distinctly nonmaterial things.

Of course, YMMV.

As for what a Turing machine may know, you could take a look at Bruno
Marchal's theory, which is developed in terms of modal logic. His book
I translated "Amoeba's Secret" is probably the gentlest
introduction. Not sure what an English major might make of it though
:).

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 12:45:43PM -0600, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Dear Friammers,
> 
>  
> 
> The subject line is the title of an article I am thinking about writing for 
> the
> Annals of Geriatric Maundering, and I want your help.   If you think that I am
> offering you an opportunity to waste your time, in service of advancing my
> career, you are, of course exactly correct.   Some of you have accused me of
> starting a fight on FRIAM when a good scholar would actually check out large,
> heavy books from the library.  That criticism is precise and apt.  My excuse 
> is
> I have two disabilities for true scholarship: my eyesight sucks, and I am
> lazy.  So, here we go. 
> 
>  
> 
> To be a monist is first and foremost to be NOT a dualist.  The most familiar
> form of dualism is the mind/body dualism, which is so embedded in our language
> that it is hard to speak without depending on it.  According to this dualism,
> there are two kinds of stuff, mind and matter.  Dualists like to talk about 
> the
> interaction of these two kinds of stuff, and are delighted when they discover
> isomorphisms between events in consciousness and events in the brain.  They
> like to discuss such topics as “information” and “representation”.  Dualists
> are fond of the subject object distinction, and are enthralled by the 
> mysteries
> of “inner” states.  They like to talk about inverted spectrums.  They hail the
> Privacy of Mind.   Most of you are closet dualists.  You LIKE to think you are
> materialists, but if you were materialists you would have to be monists, and
> you wouldn’t like that, as you will plainly see.  I should confess that
> dualists, particularly closet dualists, drive me crazy.   Just sayin’.  And as
> I have assured you many times, I love you all anyway.  In fact, probably would
> have died years ago, if you had not kept me active.
> 
>  
> 
> Dualists are flanked on one side by pluralists and on the other by monists. 
> Pluralists are plainly crazy, and, besides, I don’t know any, so we won’t
> bother with pluralism.  Monism is clearly the way to go.  There are two
> familiar kinds of monism: idealism and materialism.  An idealist insists that
> everything real consists of ideas and relations between ideas; a materialist
> insists that everything real consists of matter and its relations.  If you ask
> an idealist about matter and s/he will say, “What is this “matter” of which 
> you
> speak? All we have is ideas about matter.  If you ask a materialist about
> ideas, he will say, “What are these “ideas” of which you speak? Ideas are just
> arrangements of matter”  Of the two, I prefer materialism.  It is easier for 
> me
> to reduce ideas to relations amongst matter than it is to reduce matter to
> relations among ideas. But neither of these forms of monism seem quite honest
> to me, because each implies the other.  To put it bluntly, realists and
> materials are all closet dualists.
> 
>  
> 
> The remaining option is “neutral” monism.  Being a neutral monist is very hard
> because people demand that you answer the question, “Of what does everything
> real consist?”  It is VERY hard to answer that question without becoming a
> closet dualist.  The answer requires some sort of noun (or gerund) and
> therefore, any response implies its opposite or absence, and thus relapses 
> into
> closet dualism. 
> 
>  
> 
> One possibility I have considered is “event monism” .  Everything real 
> consists
> of events and their relations.  I like the concept of event because it does 
> not
> conjure up its opposite or absence quite so relentlessly.  What is a non-event
> or the absence of an event, really?  It’s an event in itself, right?  We speak
> of days when nothing happened, but we don’t really mean it.  Something DID
> happen; it just wasn’t very interesting. On the other hand, it does not
> accommodate “relations” talk very well.
> 
>  
> 
> A extreme solution is to take a kind of mathematical notational approach and
> just go for the relations:  “Everything that is real consists of [   ] and its
> relations”; i.e., everything real consists of [   ]…]….]….] etc. ad
> infinitum.  In 

Re: [FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy

[Frank Wimberly]

Thanks for your comments, Jochen and Pam.  When he mentions the quotation
on pages 6 and 7 Jochen is referring to a journal my great-grandmother
wrote as she was traveling by covered wagon on the Santa Fe Trail in 1877.

As for appreciation by family members, some of my cousins were thrilled.
It amazes me how little the rest of my family knows about our history and
origins.  I guess they just weren't interested when our parents and
grandparents told their stories.  At least they don't argue with me the way
my grandfather and his siblings did


Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 2:33 PM Jochen Fromm  wrote:

> It doesn't have to be a big piece of national history if it is well told,
> which is of course an art. I think Robert McKee's book "Story" contains a
> lot of good ideas.
>
> It also depends if you have good material, for example personal journals
> or diaries. Personal journals are priceless. The part on page 6/7 where a
> journal entry is a quoted feels real and authentic, a bit as if you
> experience "Wild Cat Creek" yourself.
>
>
>  Original message 
> From: Pamela McCorduck 
> Date: 4/26/19 01:16 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy
>
> Your kids, and especially your grandchildren, will so appreciate this kind
> of memoir. Often, local historical societies welcome a copy too, because
> the memoir is fine-grained enough to appeal to somebody doing local
> history, even if it isn’t a big piece of national history.
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 25, 2019, at 12:20 PM, Jochen Fromm  wrote:
>
> Today the book from Frank arrived, after I ordered it at Amazon recently,
> and I have read it in the evening. When I read the name "Kayser" of the
> grandparents I thought they must have a German background, since "Kaiser"
> is the German word for emperor. (One of my German colleagues is named
> Kaiser too). And a few pages later I read that they are indeed descendants
> of German immigrants. Fascinating. It was also interesting to read about
> the USS Baltimore. I like the idea of writing down the story of the own
> family to preserve it for future generations. The digital world is so
> short-lived and temporary.
>
> Cheers,
> Jochen
>
>
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

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Re: [FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy

[Steven A Smith]

I am in the midst of copy-editing my partner's  (Mary) own memoir of
about 300 pages, she has been a spotty journal keeper throughout her
adult life, but the sections where she IS able to include quotes from
"that moment" are acutely real.   She is also a poet, so various poems
written at those moments or inspired by the events add another dimension.  

My own grandfather was a chronic journaler, starting at age 18 with a
small pocket-journal he scribbled observations in from Europe at the end
of WWI.   It is shockingly real to see the pencil marks this man made a
good 60 years before I ever saw them.   I was told I reminded people a
lot of him, though all I knew of him in person was a "grumpy old man"
that I only saw every few years.  I think he was 60 when I was born.  He
was not particularly introspective, but a lifetime of observations about
the world around him painted a picture as much of the artist as the
subjects.

As part of this exercise, we have read a lot of memoirs and memoiresque
essays, mostly by poets and other writers who are reflecting on their
own writing process.   I have been very impressed with these
self-expose's.  Stephen King's "On Writing" and several of Mary Karr's
memoiresque collections come to mind.

- Steve

On 4/25/19 2:33 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> It doesn't have to be a big piece of national history if it is well
> told, which is of course an art. I think Robert McKee's book "Story"
> contains a lot of good ideas.
>
> It also depends if you have good material, for example personal
> journals or diaries. Personal journals are priceless. The part on page
> 6/7 where a journal entry is a quoted feels real and authentic, a bit
> as if you experience "Wild Cat Creek" yourself. 
>
>
>  Original message 
> From: Pamela McCorduck 
> Date: 4/26/19 01:16 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> 
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy
>
> Your kids, and especially your grandchildren, will so appreciate this
> kind of memoir. Often, local historical societies welcome a copy too,
> because the memoir is fine-grained enough to appeal to somebody doing
> local history, even if it isn’t a big piece of national history.
>
>
>
>
>> On Apr 25, 2019, at 12:20 PM, Jochen Fromm > > wrote:
>>
>> Today the book from Frank arrived, after I ordered it at Amazon
>> recently, and I have read it in the evening. When I read the name
>> "Kayser" of the grandparents I thought they must have a German
>> background, since "Kaiser" is the German word for emperor. (One of my
>> German colleagues is named Kaiser too). And a few pages later I read
>> that they are indeed descendants of German immigrants. Fascinating.
>> It was also interesting to read about the USS Baltimore. I like the
>> idea of writing down the story of the own family to preserve it for
>> future generations. The digital world is so short-lived and temporary.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Jochen
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy

[Steven A Smith]

Frank -

I'm glad to see a resurgence of interest in your memoir.  It is a
testimony to the ease of self-publication that you were able to do this
so well and seamlessly.   I don't know what kind of editing help you had
but the result was very good for something self-published.   Typography,
layout, spelling, and even grammar "expertise" have been significantly
addressed by modern electronic publishing, but proper editing is a bit
trickier.  I suppose there will soon be AI's capable of editing various
genre's to a certain degree.

- Steve

On 4/25/19 5:16 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
> Your kids, and especially your grandchildren, will so appreciate this
> kind of memoir. Often, local historical societies welcome a copy too,
> because the memoir is fine-grained enough to appeal to somebody doing
> local history, even if it isn’t a big piece of national history.
>
>
>
>
>> On Apr 25, 2019, at 12:20 PM, Jochen Fromm > > wrote:
>>
>> Today the book from Frank arrived, after I ordered it at Amazon
>> recently, and I have read it in the evening. When I read the name
>> "Kayser" of the grandparents I thought they must have a German
>> background, since "Kaiser" is the German word for emperor. (One of my
>> German colleagues is named Kaiser too). And a few pages later I read
>> that they are indeed descendants of German immigrants. Fascinating.
>> It was also interesting to read about the USS Baltimore. I like the
>> idea of writing down the story of the own family to preserve it for
>> future generations. The digital world is so short-lived and temporary.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Jochen
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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Re: [FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy

[Jochen Fromm]

It doesn't have to be a big piece of national history if it is well told, which 
is of course an art. I think Robert McKee's book "Story" contains a lot of good 
ideas.It also depends if you have good material, for example personal journals 
or diaries. Personal journals are priceless. The part on page 6/7 where a 
journal entry is a quoted feels real and authentic, a bit as if you experience 
"Wild Cat Creek" yourself. 
 Original message From: Pamela McCorduck  
Date: 4/26/19  01:16  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity 
Coffee Group  Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy Your 
kids, and especially your grandchildren, will so appreciate this kind of 
memoir. Often, local historical societies welcome a copy too, because the 
memoir is fine-grained enough to appeal to somebody doing local history, even 
if it isn’t a big piece of national history.On Apr 25, 2019, at 12:20 PM, 
Jochen Fromm  wrote:Today the book from Frank arrived, 
after I ordered it at Amazon recently, and I have read it in the evening. When 
I read the name "Kayser" of the grandparents I thought they must have a German 
background, since "Kaiser" is the German word for emperor. (One of my German 
colleagues is named Kaiser too). And a few pages later I read that they are 
indeed descendants of German immigrants. Fascinating. It was also interesting 
to read about the USS Baltimore. I like the idea of writing down the story of 
the own family to preserve it for future generations. The digital world is so 
short-lived and 
temporary.Cheers,JochenFRIAM
 Applied Complexity Group listservMeets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's 
Collegeto unsubscribe 
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.comarchives back to 2003: 
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by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: [FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy

[Pamela McCorduck]

Your kids, and especially your grandchildren, will so appreciate this kind of 
memoir. Often, local historical societies welcome a copy too, because the 
memoir is fine-grained enough to appeal to somebody doing local history, even 
if it isn’t a big piece of national history.




> On Apr 25, 2019, at 12:20 PM, Jochen Fromm  wrote:
> 
> Today the book from Frank arrived, after I ordered it at Amazon recently, and 
> I have read it in the evening. When I read the name "Kayser" of the 
> grandparents I thought they must have a German background, since "Kaiser" is 
> the German word for emperor. (One of my German colleagues is named Kaiser 
> too). And a few pages later I read that they are indeed descendants of German 
> immigrants. Fascinating. It was also interesting to read about the USS 
> Baltimore. I like the idea of writing down the story of the own family to 
> preserve it for future generations. The digital world is so short-lived and 
> temporary.
> 
> Cheers,
> Jochen
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[FRIAM] New Mexico Legacy

[Jochen Fromm]

Today the book from Frank arrived, after I ordered it at Amazon recently, and I 
have read it in the evening. When I read the name "Kayser" of the grandparents 
I thought they must have a German background, since "Kaiser" is the German word 
for emperor. (One of my German colleagues is named Kaiser too). And a few pages 
later I read that they are indeed descendants of German immigrants. 
Fascinating. It was also interesting to read about the USS Baltimore. I like 
the idea of writing down the story of the own family to preserve it for future 
generations. The digital world is so short-lived and temporary.Cheers,Jochen
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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[FRIAM] What Are We Monists Moaning About?

[Nick Thompson]

Dear Friammers, 

 

The subject line is the title of an article I am thinking about writing for
the Annals of Geriatric Maundering, and I want your help.   If you think
that I am offering you an opportunity to waste your time, in service of
advancing my career, you are, of course exactly correct.   Some of you have
accused me of starting a fight on FRIAM when a good scholar would actually
check out large, heavy books from the library.  That criticism is precise
and apt.  My excuse is I have two disabilities for true scholarship: my
eyesight sucks, and I am lazy.  So, here we go.  

 

To be a monist is first and foremost to be NOT a dualist.  The most familiar
form of dualism is the mind/body dualism, which is so embedded in our
language that it is hard to speak without depending on it.  According to
this dualism, there are two kinds of stuff, mind and matter.  Dualists like
to talk about the interaction of these two kinds of stuff, and are delighted
when they discover isomorphisms between events in consciousness and events
in the brain.  They like to discuss such topics as "information" and
"representation".  Dualists are fond of the subject object distinction, and
are enthralled by the mysteries of "inner" states.  They like to talk about
inverted spectrums.  They hail the Privacy of Mind.   Most of you are closet
dualists.  You LIKE to think you are materialists, but if you were
materialists you would have to be monists, and you wouldn't like that, as
you will plainly see.  I should confess that dualists, particularly closet
dualists, drive me crazy.   Just sayin'.  And as I have assured you many
times, I love you all anyway.  In fact, probably would have died years ago,
if you had not kept me active. 

 

Dualists are flanked on one side by pluralists and on the other by monists.
Pluralists are plainly crazy, and, besides, I don't know any, so we won't
bother with pluralism.  Monism is clearly the way to go.  There are two
familiar kinds of monism: idealism and materialism.  An idealist insists
that everything real consists of ideas and relations between ideas; a
materialist insists that everything real consists of matter and its
relations.  If you ask an idealist about matter and s/he will say, "What is
this "matter" of which you speak? All we have is ideas about matter.  If you
ask a materialist about ideas, he will say, "What are these "ideas" of which
you speak? Ideas are just arrangements of matter"  Of the two, I prefer
materialism.  It is easier for me to reduce ideas to relations amongst
matter than it is to reduce matter to relations among ideas. But neither of
these forms of monism seem quite honest to me, because each implies the
other.  To put it bluntly, realists and materials are all closet dualists. 

 

The remaining option is "neutral" monism.  Being a neutral monist is very
hard because people demand that you answer the question, "Of what does
everything real consist?"  It is VERY hard to answer that question without
becoming a closet dualist.  The answer requires some sort of noun (or
gerund) and therefore, any response implies its opposite or absence, and
thus relapses into closet dualism.  

 

One possibility I have considered is "event monism" .  Everything real
consists of events and their relations.  I like the concept of event because
it does not conjure up its opposite or absence quite so relentlessly.  What
is a non-event or the absence of an event, really?  It's an event in itself,
right?  We speak of days when nothing happened, but we don't really mean it.
Something DID happen; it just wasn't very interesting. On the other hand, it
does not accommodate "relations" talk very well. 

 

A extreme solution is to take a kind of mathematical notational approach and
just go for the relations:  "Everything that is real consists of [   ] and
its relations"; i.e., everything real consists of [   ].]..]..] etc.
ad infinitum.  In words, "Everything real consists of relations and their
relations.  

 

Neither of these solutions is very satisfying and both are rhetorically
ungainly.  By default, have started to call  myself as an "Experience
Monist".  When people look at me slyly and ask, "Experience of what?" I say,
"Of other experiences".   And when they inevitably ask, "What was the first
experience of?", I ask them , "How many first experiences were there?" After
they say, "One," I ask. "And how many subsequent experiences have there
been?"  And when they answer, "Oh, gosh, lots.  Almost an infinite number."
I say, "Well, then let's deal with the first one after we have dealt with
all the others, m?"  You call this cheap sophistry, but I think the line
of argument is fair because our obsession with "origins" (or "oranges", for
that matter) smacks of theology, and I am thoroughly fed up with theology.
"Let's begin in the middle," I say, "And not spend so much time worrying
about the beginning and the end."

 

And now we get to the crazy bit, the part where I imagine 

Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

[uǝlƃ ☣]

These are wonderful questions. In the past, we've even questioned whether it's 
right/True to disallow causal loops. 

My tendency, I think, lies in the foundational distinction between "fields" vs. 
objects. I feel coerced into my broken record repetition of "artificial 
discretization" (which is one reason why Owen's post of Wolpert et al's work 
was so cool -- the 2nd reason comes into play for temporal vs. spatial 
layering).  I've mentioned BC Smith's Origin of Objects stuff several times, I 
think.  His concept of permature registration must have evoked something deep 
in my history because it stuck like glue.

For example, when you talk about the GO or Classical Ontology and such, my 
reaction is simply that such _things_ (objects, artificially imputed units) are 
an artifact of the lens/attention/focus with which the fluid-millieu is viewed. 
They are not, ontologically, units/objects/things at all.

Granted, a LOT of us are triggered/snapped into/catalized to perceive the 
thingness (and the subsequent linking of those things). So, for someone like me 
who doesn't seem to snap into that right away, the onus is on me to come up 
with an alternative. And the one I trot out most is along the lines of 
cross-species mind-reading. A good example is how, say, cats distinguish 
objects versus the way humans distinguish objects. I could easily be wrong. But 
my ignorance allows me to think that cats rely more on motion-based object 
discrimination and humans rely more on color-based discrimination. I often see 
my cats engaged in a kind of triangulation, where if they're looking out the 
window and seem to think they see something, they'll bob their head this way 
and that, seemingly trying to thingify whatever juicy milieu they see. In my 
limited experience, I've never seen a human do that. Of course, we have more 
intellectually justified things we do (e.g. guidance laws, etc.) that rely on 
the same principle. But it can't be as *literal* as how my cats are thinking 
when they do it.

So, to answer as closely as I can, we start with infinitely extensible *fluid* 
and only register objects when doing so gives us a more powerful model. But 
even if/when we arrive at a more powerful model (like the Standard Model), it 
should still be challengable by alternative thingified models. To be clear, by 
"fluid", I can also doubt continuous valued orthogonal bases/dimensions of high 
dimensional spaces.  I think we have plenty of evidence that the universe 
doesn't (necessarily) adhere to our artificially dimensionalized constructs 
like Euclidean space, either.

I hope that's not too much nonsensical gibberish. I'm trying to be less 
self-indulgent in my posts. 8^)


On 4/25/19 9:43 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> You have weighed in before on ideas like this, that "hierarchical
structure may be an illusion" (my paraphrase) and I'm at least
half-sympathetic with the point.   The heritage of Classical Ontology,
Aristotle's "Categories", and the general idea of "Abstraction" all seem
to reflect or support (or both) our tendency toward hierarchical
structuring with a bias toward *strict hierarchies*.
> 
> [...]
> 
> In either case, our Western conception of causality admits no more than
> a DAG (to deny causal loops) and privileges strict branching
> narratives.   Similarly, Linnean Taxonomies as well as Cladistics are
> inherently strict hierarchies, the former based primarily on
> observational distinctions (birds with seed-cracking beaks vs birds with
> (insect catching vs carrion eating) beaks, etc.) or inferred
> evolutionary (multi?)bifurcations.
> 
> By debunking or deflating or de-emphasizing (strict?) hierarchies, what
> types of structure remain for us to recognize?   Is this problem
> anything more than model (over?) fitting?    By starting with a
> generalized graph or network, we leave room to recognize other
> interesting structures (than strict hierarchies),  does introducing
> ideas like temporal aggregation or other weak sisters to "causality"
> bring back (at least) *directed acyclic* graphs as candidate models? 
> Are POsets (partially ordered sets) uniquely valuable?  
> 
> I'm both rusty and under-informed in this depth of analysis of knowledge
> structures.  I'm hoping (you and?) others here have more up to date
> knowledge or understanding.


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -

I find this discussion very provocative in the best way as well.  When I
was working on the problem of helping researchers visualize the Gene
Ontology, we were trying to do several things at once, though I'm not
sure we were that clear on that as we did it.   We were a small
heterogenous team and we were trying to find hidden and subtle structure
within a complex "aggregate" structure. 

I think Ontologies like the GO provide a good study in what we are
discussing here.  Something like the GO is a mashup of *all* the extant
knowledge of Genes and their gene products (Proteins and RNA) across all
species (which includes all Kingdoms, or more accurately Domains) and
with it comes potential errors and biases that might have been
introduced by the researchers from many fields.   In some ways,
superposing the knowledge from highly disparate disciplines both
increases the scope/parallax and "muddies" things.   In some ways,
modern ontologies seem like the best of things, worst of things for
understanding this phenomenon.

In your response to Eric's contribution, you acknowledge "accretion"
(temporal layering) as a possibly more meaningful abstraction than mere
"hierarchy".

You have weighed in before on ideas like this, that "hierarchical
structure may be an illusion" (my paraphrase) and I'm at least
half-sympathetic with the point.   The heritage of Classical Ontology,
Aristotle's "Categories", and the general idea of "Abstraction" all seem
to reflect or support (or both) our tendency toward hierarchical
structuring with a bias toward *strict hierarchies*.  

It seems that at the very basis of most physical science, we have the
ideal of "strict causality", possibly inherited from formal logic?   We
think in terms of A causes B which in turn causes C & D, etc.  with a
cascading "light cone" of consequences of every action.   Maybe less
obvious is the awareness of the construction of "golden threads" where
in hindsight, we recognize the number of fortuitous precondiitons that
were met to arrive at some observed event.  "if my parents had not met
at a picnic in 1943, they would not have courted, married, concieved and
birthed me", "if my mother had not had a stoic, man-of-the-earth father,
she would not have been captured by my father's dream of 'moving west'
and I might have been born and raised in deep Appalachia instead of the
wide open West, or perhaps not been born at all".  "If my Paternal
Grandfather had not written letters to my Grandmother while in Europe
during WWI, she might have met and married another man...", etc. 

In either case, our Western conception of causality admits no more than
a DAG (to deny causal loops) and privileges strict branching
narratives.   Similarly, Linnean Taxonomies as well as Cladistics are
inherently strict hierarchies, the former based primarily on
observational distinctions (birds with seed-cracking beaks vs birds with
(insect catching vs carrion eating) beaks, etc.) or inferred
evolutionary (multi?)bifurcations.

By debunking or deflating or de-emphasizing (strict?) hierarchies, what
types of structure remain for us to recognize?   Is this problem
anything more than model (over?) fitting?    By starting with a
generalized graph or network, we leave room to recognize other
interesting structures (than strict hierarchies),  does introducing
ideas like temporal aggregation or other weak sisters to "causality"
bring back (at least) *directed acyclic* graphs as candidate models? 
Are POsets (partially ordered sets) uniquely valuable?  

I'm both rusty and under-informed in this depth of analysis of knowledge
structures.  I'm hoping (you and?) others here have more up to date
knowledge or understanding.

- Steve

On 4/25/19 8:53 AM, glen∈ℂ wrote:
> Yes!  I can't seem to find a copy of the article.  But going on your
> description and the figures, it looks like an excellent example of
> treating hierarchy as something to measure rather than impute. (The
> silverchair.com link didn't work, unfortunately.)
>
> Until I can find a copy, some of what you say is provocative. It seems
> to me that talking directly about the graph (or network, an
> alternative Potochnik mentions) is the more literal concept, where
> level and hierarchy are the more metaphorical ones. Even the concept
> of accretion (temporal layering) is, to me, more meaningful than level
> or hierarchy.  So, the question remains *what* advantage do we gain
> from "zooming out" and thinking in terms of hierarchy and levels that
> we didn't already have in terms of [a]cyclic, temporal or structural,
> graphs?  Is the advantage largely rhetorical and communicative,
> accounting for the variations in the way the audience and participants
> think? Or are there, eg experimental design, questions and measures we
> can take that are made more precise and testable in terms of level and
> hierarchy versus graphs?
>
> On 4/24/19 4:51 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
>> Here is a nice example, of that onus accepted and handled 

Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

[Steven A Smith]

I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!

I TOLEYA!

On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
>
>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the 
>> systematic problems
>> plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize structure we’re imposing on 
>> the world, to instead
>> mistake this as structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the 
>> concept of levels of
>> organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation of the complexity 
>> and variability
>> of our world, including the significance of causal interaction across 
>> scales. This has also
>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to imagine 
>> other contrasting
>> heuristics, heuristics that may bear more in common with what our world 
>> turns out to
>> actually be like. Let’s at least entertain the possibility that the 
>> invocation of levels can
>> mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs 
>> them. I suggest that
>> the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the 
>> well-foundedness and
>> usefulness of this concept.


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

[glen∈ℂ]

Yes!  I can't seem to find a copy of the article.  But going on your 
description and the figures, it looks like an excellent example of treating 
hierarchy as something to measure rather than impute. (The silverchair.com link 
didn't work, unfortunately.)

Until I can find a copy, some of what you say is provocative. It seems to me that talking 
directly about the graph (or network, an alternative Potochnik mentions) is the more 
literal concept, where level and hierarchy are the more metaphorical ones. Even the 
concept of accretion (temporal layering) is, to me, more meaningful than level or 
hierarchy.  So, the question remains *what* advantage do we gain from "zooming 
out" and thinking in terms of hierarchy and levels that we didn't already have in 
terms of [a]cyclic, temporal or structural, graphs?  Is the advantage largely rhetorical 
and communicative, accounting for the variations in the way the audience and participants 
think? Or are there, eg experimental design, questions and measures we can take that are 
made more precise and testable in terms of level and hierarchy versus graphs?

On 4/24/19 4:51 PM, Eric Smith wrote:

Here is a nice example, of that onus accepted and handled clearly.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07749
Topic is the accretionary dependency structure in the large subunit of the 
ribosome.

In particular, see Fig. 2, which my image-page on chrome is showing me at this 
URL (don’t know if these URLs produce equivalent output for different users):
https://www.google.com/search?q=bokov+and+steinberg+ribosome=lnms=isch=X=0ahUKEwjXjfm58unhAhXKzLwKHXG5B60Q_AUIDigB=1371=745#imgrc=uExkhZIl02WciM:

The primitive data is a set of links between locations in folded RNA, which can 
be assigned a directionality that is very likely a dynamically meaningful one.  
The result is a graph with directed links.  It is an empirical question whether 
the graph is cyclic or acyclic, with the answer being the latter.  The 
primitive data structure is only the acyclic graph.  However, a second question 
is whether the nodes in the graph admit a partial order, and if so, which sets 
of nodes constitute each distinct level within that order.  That question too 
has an answer in terms of the maximal extent to which the equivalence class 
defining a level can be extended, without violating the dependency structure in 
the underlying DAG.  Nodes in a level need not have been historically 
contemporaneous, but they reflect assembly conditions, as nodes at higher 
levels “plug into” nodes at lower levels, and thus require them to be in place. 
 This seems extremely likely to reflect an actual historical accretionary 
sequence, in which equivalence of nodes within a level quantifies the ambiguity 
of how they may have related in time.

Lots more has been done to extend this data to a detailed module decomposition, 
with or without the level post-processing.  Through all of it, the level 
decomposition continues to be salient, as levels by the analysis of the DAG 
also correspond roughly to horizons for generations of peptide structure.  See

https://watermark.silverchair.com/msx086.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAjwwggI4BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggIpMIICJQIBADCCAh4GCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMGr_TvxBlD6v5A3yIAgEQgIIB77pRGYntr9gP-GNtZajC6JIiEDLCsmZFdcSgAVoYO43dh_vul542Uzn2GyejvMgnqthKt7u3ZnQoenITwMrwvneJMWZ9n6-UlYuottaxIkpxp6lWIfiTIla83YKJqigjdIbWtQx_W2y2J2pJgAKOBdbvvTctto3COkdwh4C6VH5AARmbw0bRfaMH_gRW8IKRNw8m4Gw--SbRMDlkHqaXRY8WJlbkrN8uB-ygTiu4TL12LHhNiWlxCLH0LP3pLKPBMmBG0tKM5sMIuO2CDVltBItUIT6i91Z0q2x-l6u5yBWqPFlDfpYNok--att5kqPbtzT1H7IzZev-AsWYpq_ek2RdyHxrthXdn2rTzvhMjmUlb1JHoeJX6holXrs8j1PKzwg_pW-3wtR6cYZg3VBLM6V_cTnMlyNIMABBkyix8D9pBvq6Hj7zLWABE8Oq0nuVUH5vd0U8RVbqpF5SS1OKd2Y13BN_bq-4P7B3RKKYmoecn2SVqoYPHZBV7csmkq9duwoydMQFbcGsk8BYopz6zEti3BuZJxXa2J6YT1i1pXQNMvSTHXRKdsIntCJkSZsPRwS-q6GiM5r7BtTU9hOLZLq__67NMjBDpWUcOG7pglEYuqENH7xy4abOEoE5TusJg9aU6PE9Tj9ayBkHnIONBg
and Fig.5 within it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=bokov+and+steinberg+ribosome=lnms=isch=X=0ahUKEwjXjfm58unhAhXKzLwKHXG5B60Q_AUIDigB=1371=745#imgrc=HRSn_FYi9cUYDM:

It’s great when people take on small enough questions that they have time to 
speak in full sentences.


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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