Re: [FRIAM] Work! Fer Gawd and Newton's sake!
In the true spirit of FRIAM, I propose that we generalize what we mean by generalize. And then we could perhaps steer the discussion in the direction of how to produce a generalizable ABM. Said ABM could be made aware of it's computing host, therefore further generalizing its computation capability, accordingly. (Depending on what was meant by computation, of course). Just a thought. --Doug On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:23 PM, plissa...@comcast.net wrote: Come on, Peoples! Work is DEFINED in Newtonian mechanics as being done when a force moves its point of application. Thass all - and plenty enuff! So you lift a box up to a shelf - you doing work, as defined by Isaac, the Laborers Union and most Plain Folks. You put a whiskey jigger on a pool table - it and the table move, a very leetle bit, and work be done by gravity. Railroad lines represent useful constraints to freight cars. Thanks to them the car becomes an object that moves in predestinate grooves! The car is subject to acceleration due to all forces acting on it, but the rails try to keep it from cross track motion. They does their best - to the extent that they are capable. You may generalize the technical terms force, work and constraint as far as you like. After all, they had meaning in language long before they were defined by Newton and La Grange for specific mechanical concepts. St. Paul (2 nd Corinthians III, 14) said: The love of Christ constraineth us. I dunno what he meant, but the nice thing about the Bible is that you can choose for yourself what it means! It seems helpful to note that the tracks constrain the response of the cars to applied forces (more or less!). It's useful and human to employ the word in a more general sense, and it probably means roughly the same thing to most people. And if not, who cares? What's in a name? as someone said! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Work! Fer Gawd and Newton's sake!
I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, or if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleas'd not the million, 'twas caviare to the general. In general, I agree. -R On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:34 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.netwrote: In the true spirit of FRIAM, I propose that we generalize what we mean by generalize. And then we could perhaps steer the discussion in the direction of how to produce a generalizable ABM. Said ABM could be made aware of it's computing host, therefore further generalizing its computation capability, accordingly. (Depending on what was meant by computation, of course). Just a thought. --Doug On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:23 PM, plissa...@comcast.net wrote: Come on, Peoples! Work is DEFINED in Newtonian mechanics as being done when a force moves its point of application. Thass all - and plenty enuff! So you lift a box up to a shelf - you doing work, as defined by Isaac, the Laborers Union and most Plain Folks. You put a whiskey jigger on a pool table - it and the table move, a very leetle bit, and work be done by gravity. Railroad lines represent useful constraints to freight cars. Thanks to them the car becomes an object that moves in predestinate grooves! The car is subject to acceleration due to all forces acting on it, but the rails try to keep it from cross track motion. They does their best - to the extent that they are capable. You may generalize the technical terms force, work and constraint as far as you like. After all, they had meaning in language long before they were defined by Newton and La Grange for specific mechanical concepts. St. Paul (2 nd Corinthians III, 14) said: The love of Christ constraineth us. I dunno what he meant, but the nice thing about the Bible is that you can choose for yourself what it means! It seems helpful to note that the tracks constrain the response of the cars to applied forces (more or less!). It's useful and human to employ the word in a more general sense, and it probably means roughly the same thing to most people. And if not, who cares? What's in a name? as someone said! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Work! Fer Gawd and Newton's sake!
Agreed! Work, constraint, cause, etc. were all words long before Newton (if we are willing to translate them, many centuries before). Newton gave them very technical meanings in his system, but the technical meanings were just a matter of making more strict the common meanings. We could, if we wanted to, try to find psychological analogs closest to Newton's meanings, or we could try use the looser (but related) common meanings. In either case, the short answer to Vladimyr's question is that people using these terms to talk about psychological systems want them to mean the same things they mean when talking about physical systems. So, some want them want the words to be very technical terms, others want them to carry the connotation of general usage. It should be obvious to anyone using the terms that any such usage is highly metaphorical; should be, but for some reason it is not. Beyond that, as Nick pointed out, they weren't my words of choice. Personally, I think psychology would be a lot better off if we minimized such talk as much as possible. Claims like beliefs constrain intentions seem strange and potentially vacuous to me. Even if it is not totally vacuous, the amount of intellectual work we would have to do to unpack the claim makes me think it is not worth it, and I would suspect that there was probably a much more straightforward and empirically tractable claim that the claimant could make instead (maybe something like; Past experience determines a large proportion of the variance in future actions, or verbal behavior is a somewhat reliable predictor of the way future actions will be directed). I am reminded of the long arguments psychologists have over whether some third factor is a moderator or a mediator of a known effect. Surely this is a useful distinction, but probably not one worth the amount of time and effort put into it. Further, the problem could probably be solved completely by dedicating a full sentence to the role of the third factor, rather than trying to come to consensus on magical one-word specialized terms. Eric On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 02:23 PM, plissa...@comcast.net wrote: Come on, Peoples! Work is DEFINED in Newtonian mechanics as being done when a force moves its point of application. Thass all - and plenty enuff! So you lift a box up to a shelf - you doing work, as defined by Isaac, the Laborers Union and most Plain Folks. You put a whiskey jigger on a pool table - it and the table move, a very leetle bit, and work be done by gravity. Railroad lines represent useful constraints to freight cars. Thanks to them the car becomes an object that moves in predestinate grooves! The car is subject to acceleration due to all forces acting on it, but the rails try to keep it from cross track motion. They does their best - to the extent that they are capable. You may generalize the technical terms force, work and constraint as far as you like. After all, they had meaning in language long before they were defined by Newton and La Grange for specific mechanical concepts. St. Paul (2 nd Corinthians III, 14) said: The love of Christ constraineth us. I dunno what he meant, but the nice thing about the Bible is that you can choose for yourself what it means! It seems helpful to note that the tracks constrain the response of the cars to applied forces (more or less!). It's useful and human to employ the word in a more general sense, and it probably means roughly the same thing to most people. And if not, who cares? What's in a name? as someone said! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Work! Fer Gawd and Newton's sake!
Railroad lines represent useful constraints to freight cars A clear application of the 3rd law depending on the frame of reference of the static rail system. So would the frame itself constitute a constraint ? On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:53 PM, plissa...@comcast.net wrote: Come on, Peoples! Work is DEFINED in Newtonian mechanics as being done when a force moves its point of application. Thass all - and plenty enuff! So you lift a box up to a shelf - you doing work, as defined by Isaac, the Laborers Union and most Plain Folks. You put a whiskey jigger on a pool table - it and the table move, a very leetle bit, and work be done by gravity. Railroad lines represent useful constraints to freight cars. Thanks to them the car becomes an object that moves in predestinate grooves! The car is subject to acceleration due to all forces acting on it, but the rails try to keep it from cross track motion. They does their best - to the extent that they are capable. You may generalize the technical terms force, work and constraint as far as you like. After all, they had meaning in language long before they were defined by Newton and La Grange for specific mechanical concepts. St. Paul (2 nd Corinthians III, 14) said: The love of Christ constraineth us. I dunno what he meant, but the nice thing about the Bible is that you can choose for yourself what it means! It seems helpful to note that the tracks constrain the response of the cars to applied forces (more or less!). It's useful and human to employ the word in a more general sense, and it probably means roughly the same thing to most people. And if not, who cares? What's in a name? as someone said! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Work! Fer Gawd and Newton's sake!
Eric , Please do not disengage just yet, first. I did not know if the mysterious Writer wished to use engineering terms or to simply capitalize on Cache. It does not matter either way. The fact is the brain cobbled together all these terms long before Newton Leibniz and Descartes. So why why would it do so… It is I believe now that we experience the world exactly as through those crappy little words with no dimensions. Everywhere I look the psychological expressions people use daily are dimensionless. Why I ask. The answer seems to me to be a bit like the abacus or the Go Board . It is some kind of matrix slash image machine. It simply has no need for units as long as it remains self referential ; there is no need for zero or even numerals. It seems essential to have a memory , clock and pain, Booze and Smokes optional. So for now I suggest you have a little patience and we begin to discuss a new computational engine model without units or numbers. I was not prepared for this when I responded and we got stuck in the mud so to speak. Accidentally I gave you the concept of strain energy, also a form of work . I noticed then Force, the Newton, was a strange little beasty while everyone was ragging on Work in the classical system. But the Newton of Force is always painful for me and I actually despise the beasty, no disrespect for Newton. I thought I knew what force was when I felt it and was trained to ignore that with no success. So I looked at my past and realized I never measured Newtons in my life! I do not even think there is a Newton meter. We measure stress changes as resistance or strain, then we calculate Force only by also measuring something different such as Area. In an odd way this was revealing. I am a scientist and a shitty engineer, so I always cheated and worked with pounds because as a kid I worked in a butcher shop and could eyeball a pound of ground beef within grams. How the heck could I do that without a scale, again I must have used strain in a muscle set and a distinctive memory of the sensation at exactly 1 pound. Years later I learned engineering and all about units. Strain is just displacement and there are specialized proprioceptors with a uncanny resemblance to a standard foil type microstrain gauge. To measure two pounds I did it twice but could not accomplish it in one go. As a psychologist I would love to pick through your rubbish heap when I have time. But in principle the brain has established these engineering values in an alternative manner but self referentially. There in lies the revolution that forced us to put words to self referential concepts that did not match a little child or a 200lb plus heavy weight. To communicate we needed more fixed externalreferences, we needed universals or so it looks. Newton took some time in arriving. But we already had some in place. We universally know the sun is above and the earth below. The deer flesh is best freshly killed and water and hot go together.Without externals we get trapped as Solipsists or Existentialists, heaven forbid even romantics. I am trying to suggest that we can in theory translate bodily sensations into many of the engineering values not the other way round as initially assumed was to be the case. I hope you can support my belief that we use something like matrices when thinking or maps. Considering primitive animals have uncanny navigational equipment on board I assumed we also had similar rudimentary capabilities. Philosophically we are now faced with a multiplicity of self referential universes and a universal language under construction and a reality constantly causing havoc . Plus we have a lot of crotchety old men who think they understand everything and old ladies who are convinced we are all fools. Now occasionally the mathematics has produced unimaginable creatures such as the Newton,Currie , the Coulomb and when we look closely we notice something completely new manifest itself with no conceivable sensory equivalent. Lift for example. Somehow we learned to fly and that is very remarkable and worth a little patience and a plea for indulgence perhaps even mercy( I always ask for more than I need and settle for a little less) Thank you gentlemen and Ladies. Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky PhD vbur...@shaw.ca Sky Drive Site 120-1053 Beaverhill Blvd. Winnipeg,Manitoba, R2J3R2 Canada (204) 2548321 Land (204) 8016064 Cell From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of ERIC P. CHARLES Sent: March-16-11 7:42 PM To: plissa...@comcast.net Cc: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Work! Fer Gawd and Newton's sake! Agreed! Work, constraint, cause, etc. were all words long before Newton (if we are willing to translate them, many centuries before). Newton gave them very technical meanings in his system, but the technical meanings were just
