Abduction
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Thanks for this Glen,
To your points below: I don’t want to sound like I am propounding some totalizing system, or even the position that one exists, much less that I could say what it is. I am very strongly on the side of heterarchy, and I fully concur with the arguments you put behind the preference for “layers” over “levels”. My hope — which never comes across well because when one tries to make a point about a particular finite thing, leaving out all the other things that are also present in the world, it sounds as if those were not also valued — was to offer examples of the “why would a discourse about what is ‘real’ need to mostly invoke abstractions?” question. Typically, just because they are what I understand most and what physics has a pretty good formal system built around, I have hierarchies of equilibrium phase transitions in the theory of matter in the back of my mind, and the renormalization-group understanding of how they fit together as a conceptually consistent system. To me they are the best explanation physics currently has of how a finite closed analytical system can be applied to a description that is by construction coarse-grained. Moreover they provide an argument that any closed analytical system should _only_ ever be expected to be possible for entities that are coarse-grained. I think before the renormalization group had been mostly understood through 1954 (Gell-Mann + Low), 1974 (Wilson and Kogut) and 1984 (Polchinski), a careful physicist should have worried whether it would be possible to speak concreately about anything when it was not possible to know about everything. Writers like Fermi (1930s) were at pains to emphasize that classical thermodynamics of state variables should be learned and used as a self-consistent system without reference to the statistical mechanics that is now used to justify it. However, when Fermi was writing, it was at best an empirical description of his toolkit, and a hope, that such closed systems were really reliable in a formal sense. Having said that, however, I would not want to claim that the hierarchy of matter is a framework subordinate to whose levels all other descriptions can be nested, or that it addresses all questions of pattern that are as fundamental even in physics as the equilibrium hierarchy of the vacuum and matter within it. There can be many other hierarchies that are, each for its own set of patterns, real hierarchies worth recognizing, but which cross-cut the equilibrium matter hierarchy, and many other patterns that exist (metaphorically speaking) at “points” in the question space, maybe not embedded within hierarchies. Again, my mental metaphor for thinking about their role in the landscape of sense-making is the work by (I think) Cris Moore and Mark Newman of characterizing networks that are not treelike by giving a list of which trees can be overprinted on them, each of which accounts for some part of the overall connectivity. The levels within each tree are by construction nested, but multiple trees are needed for reticulated networks because no single nesting hierarchy can describe a reticulated topology. A second thing, re. Nick and Eric(C). I understand what is plain on the face of it, too: my comments about relations between “abstraction” and either equivalence relations or predicates doesn’t even address the question of “what is ‘real’ “ which is where the main conversation is being carried out. In most of my speech, if I were a phenomenologist (philosophical sense, not the physicist’s sense) I would have to admit that “real” in sentences is a structural placeholder for certain semantic and syntactic conventions. The substantivev content of the sentence is mostly concentrated at other points, where there is some operational description of what one does and what one expects to see as a result. The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing that action. I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that could carry philosophical weight. Best to all, Eric(S) > On Dec 27, 2018, at 12:58 PM, ∄ uǝʃƃ <[hidden email]> wrote: > > > First, by saying you and Eric(C) *attribute* so-and-so to Peirce, I'm not suggesting you're wrong. I'm expressing my ignorance. But I don't want to (falsely) accuse Peirce of anything, since he's not here to defend himself. So, I can only respond to what you say about what he said. I'm very grateful for your attempts to suss it all out and serve it on a platter for people like me. > > Second, in that same vane (Ha!), I haven't put in the effort to grok your "Natural Designs". So, when I'm wrong, feel free to simply call me ignorant and move on. I'm cool with that. > > But on to the meat: When you say > > On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: >> But we have to be careful not to mix up levels when we talk. In any particular conversation, we must not equivocate about levels, confuse things within us, with things 'of' us" > > I believe you're (implicitly) committing an error. I've failed to call it out before. You're asserting that the hierarchy is *strict*, which MAY be wrong. As Eric(S)'s post reflects (I think), higher order comprehensions (in the sense of "set comprehension" or quantifications like ∃ and ∀) are context-dependent and *may* even be dynamic. That was my point about the inadequacy of "levels" (where N is stable but N+1 is unstable). This is why "layer" is a better concept, because it's *softer*, weaker. > > If you imagine an onion, some of the layers are like levels, thick and impenetrable. And some of them (in some regions on the surface) are thin and mixed with the layers just inside or just outside. The layers are heterarchical, not hierarchical. If you really must use "level", we can say that some things in the level N comprehension are also contained in the level N+1 comprehension ... perhaps it helps to think of multiplying a scalar against a matrix, where the scalar is multiplied by each element of the matrix. The scalar is of level 1, but the matrix is of level N+1 and it still makes sense to combine the two into something like a level 0.5 (or 1.5 ... or whatever) ... a fractional leveling. > > Eric(S)'s discussion of equivalence, as dynamically regenerable coarse comprehensions of finer grained elements allows for this, whereas I'm not sure your "convergence to the real" does. > > But my layer prejudice criticism of both your and Eric(S)'s conceptions applies, I think, because it's direction-independent. While Eric(S) seems prejudiced to the fine-grain (inferred from his idea that the coarse equivalences should be robust to refinement), yours seems prejudiced to the coarse-grain (inferred from your "convergence to the real", and bolstered by your statement below about Natural Designs). Which direction one is biased toward is less relevant to me than the assumption of a strict hierarchy. > > And particular responses below: > > On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: >> On 12/25/18 7:02 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote: >>> Why can't both the fine and coarse things have the same ontological status? The example of the unicorn is unfortunate, I think, because the properties of unicorns are essentially stable. >> >> */[NST==>Well, that’s sort of why I bring it up. I think it’s possible that inquiry might converge on what a unicorn IS without there ever having been a unicorn. Obviously, a unicorn is a white horse with a luxurious mane and tail and a narwhale horn in the middle of its nose and on its back a damsel with long flowing golden locks, a garland crown, and a white gown. Obviously. We all agree on THAT, don’t we? <==nst] /* > > You forgot the sparkles and the rainbows! > >> [...] > >>> And if we admit to a multi-level hierarchy, perhaps level N is unstable, level N+1 is stable, and level N+2 is (again) unstable? Why not? >> >> */[NST==>Oh wow I agree with all of THAT. But I don’t think Peirce, or Eric (Charles), or I are level-chauvinists in the way you need us to be. I think Peirce thought it was signs all the way down, i.e., he would be as happy talking about sign relations in the retina as in a supermarket window. See my Nesting and Chaining <http://www.behavior.org/resources/146.pdf> paper, if you can stand it. <==nst] /* > > But both your treatment of 1) statements about unicorns and 2) convergence to the real *seem* to imply that this isn't true, that you *are* layer prejudiced in the way I infer you are. With (1) why would comprehensions be more or less real/true than their components? Are matrices more or less real than scalars? Why wouldn't we eventually settle out that unicorns are just as real as statements about unicorns? With (2) why can't temporary things be just as real as permanent things ... or perhaps more accurately, why can't intermediate states (stepping stones) be just as primary as the limit points they approach? Considering a furniture maker, is the chair any more real than the hammer? What if, after the chair is finished, on a lark, she nails the hammer she used to make the chair, to the back of that chair? The time-ignorant compositional circularity should be obvious, here. > > -- > ∄ uǝʃƃ > > ============================================================ > 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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In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2
Ha! In light of the g-conjecture news, you sent me on an interesting journey trying to find out why a philosopher of science would have contributed to simplicial complexes. The answer is Adolf ≠ Branko! 8^)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branko_Gr%C3%BCnbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Gr%C3%BCnbaum On December 27, 2018 5:25:59 PM PST, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote: >There was a philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh named >Adolph Grunbaum whose career was partly defined by his writings on "is >psychoanalysis science?" ============================================================ 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
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2
Hi, Everybody, I have been writing this email for most of the last week. While I am loath to argue with Frank on matters of logic and mathematics, I think his solution violates Peirce’s project by making our understanding of truth dependent on our understanding of Real, rather than, as Peirce would have it, the other way around. So Frank is surely correct on his own terms, but not Peircean, if you see what I mean. So, let me take a step back. Here is Thompson’s History of Modern Philosophy. Once upon a time there was God. All-seeing, all-knowing God. What God saw was Real and the Real was real whether or not anything, anybody, other than God could see it. Then God died. “Sad”, as Trump would say. But still there was Descartes’s (pronounced “day cart sez”) brain in a vat. Everything that we experience could be like phantom limb experiences. Phantom legs, phantom hands, phantom, sounds, phantom sights, phantom me, phantom you, phantom thoughts, phantom WORLD. So, here we sit, you and I, two brains in two vats, side by side. The devil tickles your nerves and you see something you call, “horse”. So your motor nerves are excited and you stimulate my auditory nerves with “horse”. Now unless the Devil happens to simulate my nerves with exactly the same pattern as he stimulated yours before you said “horse”, there is no possible way we could know if we are talking about the same thing. And remember, that’s the thing about The Devil (as we have recently learned), he has no commitment to the Truth. (Notice how in this story God dies, yet the devil lives on; interesting; very sad) . Ok. What to do? Well, we could admit that we are screwed and define truth as that which is beyond all experience. But this is nonsense, right? If truth is beyond all experience, how do we come to be talking about it. If Truth is that which we cannot talk about, then and any statement that we make about it is necessarily untrue. What to do? Well, we could sneak a little God back in. We could talk about true intuitions that come from the spirit world, etc. Many people talk like that. Sometimes, I think of some of you talk like that, tho I won’t name names. For me, that’s not a starter. So, Truth must be defined in terms of experience. Some kinds of experiences are more enduring than others. They are the sorts of experiences that repeat themselves day after day. They are the sorts of experiences that when you tell them to other person, that person says, “Oh yeah, that happened to me.” More formally, they are the sort of experiences that survive experiments, both formal experiments and the little day to day experiments we try on the world around us. Does the computer run on battery even when it is plugged in? Run the battery down to zero, plug it in, and the computer won’t start right away. Hmmm. Seems like. Does my love still love me? Oh, I will come home from a business trip a day early and see if her eyes light up. Or perhaps if a foreign car is parked in the driveway and the lights are out. Love, power supplies, it’s all the same. It’s T.O.T.E, all the way down. The most enduring experiences are those generated by communities of inquiry, working at the same questions through rigorous experimentation and debate and concerning themselves with abstract realities, force, momentum, lithium, etc. After all, look at how the 19th Century produced the periodic table! Let’s define Truth as the asymptote of that convergence. Truth is where the community of inquiry will converge in the very long run. And real objects can be something like, anything that is taken for granted by a true proposition. The existence of unicorns is definitely NOT taken for granted by the proposition, “No Unicorn Exists”, so that let’s us out of that box. Now nothing about this implies that there is a truth concerning all matters. Peirce’s notion of truth is ultimately statistical and based on the central limit theorem. He cheerfully admits that the world we live in is essentially random. However, if some things are not random, if there is systematic pattern in our experience with regard to some things (such as, say, saber-toothed tigers) then it would be extraordinarily useful to know it, and the cognitive systems around today would tend to be those that had not been eaten by tigers, right? Ach! You protest! What kind of a lilly-livered reality is this?! We can never know for sure whether some particular string of experiences is real or not, whether it will endure to the endtimes, or whatever! Yup. That’s right. The day you decide the stock is a good bet is the day it may fall 20 percent. That’s pragmatism for you. We start in the middle, there are no firm foundations, and everything is fallible. But what pragmatism tells you is what Darwinian experience tells you: you bet your life everyday, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Those that bet right tend to be the ones who are here to tell the story. And science is privileged because, on the whole, over the long run, it has proved itself to be the best at making those sorts of bets. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real". I suspect that either begs the question or becomes a tautology. Compare: Wouldn't it make more sense to say green things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is green". Though it seems convoluted, I think "Unicorns are not real" is best understood as the assertion "Beliefs about unicorns are not true", which unpacks to something like: "Beliefs about the category 'unicorns' will not converge," which itself means, "if a community was to investigate claims about unicorns, they would not evidence support of those claims over the long haul." For that to work, we can't allow "nonexist" to be "a property." That is, we have to distinguish ideas about unicorns from ideas about not-unicorns. On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 11:06 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:
============================================================ 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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"The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing that action. I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that could carry philosophical weight."
Wait! Slow down! Why not see what happens when we ask that to carry philosophical weight? What would get you to change your habits? Presumably a failure of the "act without too much doubt" plan to work out as desired would eventually get you to change how you act, right? What if you saw others acting without doubt in the same way, and they got screwed as a result? Would that cause some doubt? If we follow this train if thought long enough, do we eventually end up realizing it isn't just about what works for me-in-this-moment. Rather we end up with something like: "Real" is how we awkwardly try to refer to the those things we think will hold up over the long run of lots off people acting without doubting it. Now THAT sounds like it might be able carry some weight AND be true to your intuition. On Fri, Dec 28, 2018, 7:43 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:
============================================================ 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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Sorry, Eric, Am missing the post to which this was a response. L Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles "The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing that action. I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that could carry philosophical weight." Wait! Slow down! Why not see what happens when we ask that to carry philosophical weight? What would get you to change your habits? Presumably a failure of the "act without too much doubt" plan to work out as desired would eventually get you to change how you act, right? What if you saw others acting without doubt in the same way, and they got screwed as a result? Would that cause some doubt? If we follow this train if thought long enough, do we eventually end up realizing it isn't just about what works for me-in-this-moment. Rather we end up with something like: "Real" is how we awkwardly try to refer to the those things we think will hold up over the long run of lots off people acting without doubting it. Now THAT sounds like it might be able carry some weight AND be true to your intuition. On Fri, Dec 28, 2018, 7:43 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:
============================================================ 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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In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2
Hi Eric:
> On Dec 30, 2018, at 9:33 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote: > > "The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing that action. I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that could carry philosophical weight." > > Wait! Slow down! Why not see what happens when we ask that to carry philosophical weight? > > What would get you to change your habits? Presumably a failure of the "act without too much doubt" plan to work out as desired would eventually get you to change how you act, right? > > What if you saw others acting without doubt in the same way, and they got screwed as a result? Would that cause some doubt? > > If we follow this train if thought long enough, do we eventually end up realizing it isn't just about what works for me-in-this-moment. Rather we end up with something like: "Real" is how we awkwardly try to refer to the those things we think will hold up over the long run of lots off people acting without doubting it. Yes; all this seems like the completely right development of the idea to me. > Now THAT sounds like it might be able carry some weight AND be true to your intuition. I am happy with this too. Indeed if I were given time to, and compelled to, argue in a more structured way, I think this is the way I would find it natural to argue. I watch most of what transpires on this thread (and others) about the Pierce construction of truth, and find myself in agreement with it as a description of certainly my professional work, but also most of my casual modes of action. I guess I don’t want to pretend to be making a philosophical claim, when I understand that real philosophical arguments involve a lot of checking for formal consistency, and I know that my speech and action is dense with events that were never subjected to that effort. Conversational hygeine, or something like that. Many thanks, Eric > > > > > > > On Fri, Dec 28, 2018, 7:43 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote: > Hi, Everybody, > > > > I have been writing this email for most of the last week. > > > > While I am loath to argue with Frank on matters of logic and mathematics, I think his solution violates Peirce’s project by making our understanding of truth dependent on our understanding of Real, rather than, as Peirce would have it, the other way around. So Frank is surely correct on his own terms, but not Peircean, if you see what I mean. > > > > So, let me take a step back. Here is Thompson’s History of Modern Philosophy. Once upon a time there was God. All-seeing, all-knowing God. What God saw was Real and the Real was real whether or not anything, anybody, other than God could see it. Then God died. “Sad”, as Trump would say. But still there was Descartes’s (pronounced “day cart sez”) brain in a vat. Everything that we experience could be like phantom limb experiences. Phantom legs, phantom hands, phantom, sounds, phantom sights, phantom me, phantom you, phantom thoughts, phantom WORLD. So, here we sit, you and I, two brains in two vats, side by side. The devil tickles your nerves and you see something you call, “horse”. So your motor nerves are excited and you stimulate my auditory nerves with “horse”. Now unless the Devil happens to simulate my nerves with exactly the same pattern as he stimulated yours before you said “horse”, there is no possible way we could know if we are talking about the same thing. And remember, that’s the thing about The Devil (as we have recently learned), he has no commitment to the Truth. (Notice how in this story God dies, yet the devil lives on; interesting; very sad) . > > > > Ok. What to do? Well, we could admit that we are screwed and define truth as that which is beyond all experience. But this is nonsense, right? If truth is beyond all experience, how do we come to be talking about it. If Truth is that which we cannot talk about, then and any statement that we make about it is necessarily untrue. What to do? Well, we could sneak a little God back in. We could talk about true intuitions that come from the spirit world, etc. Many people talk like that. Sometimes, I think of some of you talk like that, tho I won’t name names. For me, that’s not a starter. > > > > So, Truth must be defined in terms of experience. Some kinds of experiences are more enduring than others. They are the sorts of experiences that repeat themselves day after day. They are the sorts of experiences that when you tell them to other person, that person says, “Oh yeah, that happened to me.” More formally, they are the sort of experiences that survive experiments, both formal experiments and the little day to day experiments we try on the world around us. Does the computer run on battery even when it is plugged in? Run the battery down to zero, plug it in, and the computer won’t start right away. Hmmm. Seems like. Does my love still love me? Oh, I will come home from a business trip a day early and see if her eyes light up. Or perhaps if a foreign car is parked in the driveway and the lights are out. Love, power supplies, it’s all the same. It’s T.O.T.E, all the way down. The most enduring experiences are those generated by communities of inquiry, working at the same questions through rigorous experimentation and debate and concerning themselves with abstract realities, force, momentum, lithium, etc. After all, look at how the 19th Century produced the periodic table! Let’s define Truth as the asymptote of that convergence. Truth is where the community of inquiry will converge in the very long run. And real objects can be something like, anything that is taken for granted by a true proposition. The existence of unicorns is definitely NOT taken for granted by the proposition, “No Unicorn Exists”, so that let’s us out of that box. > > > > Now nothing about this implies that there is a truth concerning all matters. Peirce’s notion of truth is ultimately statistical and based on the central limit theorem. He cheerfully admits that the world we live in is essentially random. However, if some things are not random, if there is systematic pattern in our experience with regard to some things (such as, say, saber-toothed tigers) then it would be extraordinarily useful to know it, and the cognitive systems around today would tend to be those that had not been eaten by tigers, right? > > > > Ach! You protest! What kind of a lilly-livered reality is this?! We can never know for sure whether some particular string of experiences is real or not, whether it will endure to the endtimes, or whatever! Yup. That’s right. The day you decide the stock is a good bet is the day it may fall 20 percent. That’s pragmatism for you. We start in the middle, there are no firm foundations, and everything is fallible. But what pragmatism tells you is what Darwinian experience tells you: you bet your life everyday, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Those that bet right tend to be the ones who are here to tell the story. And science is privileged because, on the whole, over the long run, it has proved itself to be the best at making those sorts of bets. > > > > Nick > > > > > Nicholas S. Thompson > > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology > > Clark University > > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > > > From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles > Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 6:29 AM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction > > > > Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real". > > > > I suspect that either begs the question or becomes a tautology. Compare: Wouldn't it make more sense to say green things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is green". > > > > Though it seems convoluted, I think "Unicorns are not real" is best understood as the assertion "Beliefs about unicorns are not true", which unpacks to something like: "Beliefs about the category 'unicorns' will not converge," which itself means, "if a community was to investigate claims about unicorns, they would not evidence support of those claims over the long haul." > > > > For that to work, we can't allow "nonexist" to be "a property." That is, we have to distinguish ideas about unicorns from ideas about not-unicorns. > > > > > > > > On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 11:06 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote: > > Thanks, Frank. I thought at first that was a cheat, but it seems to work, actually. It makes The Real dependent on The True, which is how Peirce thinks it should be. > > > > I guess that’s why they paid you the big bucis. > > > > Nick > > > > Nicholas S. Thompson > > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology > > Clark University > > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > > > From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly > Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 5:10 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction > > > > Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real". > > ----------------------------------- > 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 Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 4:57 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote: > > Thanks, Eric, > > > > I think you have everything right here, and it is very well laid out. Thank you. > > > > One point that nobody seems to quite want to help me get a grip on is the grammar of the two terms. True seems to apply only to propositions, while real only to nouns. Now the way we get around that is by saying that the real things are the objects of true proposition. But that leads to what I call the unicorn problem. “Unicorns don’t exist” is a true proposition that does not, however, make “unicorns” real. > > > > This seems like the kind of problem a sophomore might go crazy ab0ut in an introductory philosophy course, so I am a bit embarrassed to be raising it. For my philosophical mentors, it is beneath their contempt. > > > > Nick > > > > Nicholas S. Thompson > > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology > > Clark University > > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > > > From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles > Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:02 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction > > > > I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real. > > > > When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies? > > > > However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular". Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type. > > > > I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above. > > > > Now, however, we must work our way backwards: > > * The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions, > > * the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out, > > * that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real. > > * Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions. > > > > In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real." > > > > (I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.) > > > > > ----------- > Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. > Supervisory Survey Statistician > > U.S. Marine Corps > > > > > > On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote: > > Nick, > > > > Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about. > > > > Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same. > > > > We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor. > > > > First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?" > > > > Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right. > > > > Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real." > > > > If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make: > > > > - some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or, > > - the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.) > > > > Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things? > > > > Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term. > > > > But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed. > > > > The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.] > > > > It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'. Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction. > > > > Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?" > > > > At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'. > > > > Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question. > > > > dave west > > > > > > On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > > Hi, Everybody, > > Yes. St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday. And then, not again until the 3rd of January. I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. > > Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write. Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece. > > I need help with another article I am working with. Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract. Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract. However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. > > I would argue the point in the following way: Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.” This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it. Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded? We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. > > Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River. But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true. Fair enough. But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? > > I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table. > > Nick > > Nicholas S. Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology > Clark University > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > ============================================================ > > 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 > > Email had 1 attachment: > > • BP 2018 (Thompson) (in press).pdf > 640k (application/pdf) > > > > ============================================================ > 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 > 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 > 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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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
On 12/28/18 4:43 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Ok. What to do? Well, we could admit that we are screwed and define truth as that which is beyond all experience. But this is nonsense, right? If truth is beyond all experience, how do we come to be talking about it. If Truth is that which we cannot talk about, then and any statement that we make about it is necessarily untrue. What to do? Well, we could sneak a little God back in. We could talk about true intuitions that come from the spirit world, etc. Many people talk like that. Sometimes, I think of some of you talk like that, tho I won’t name names. For me, that’s not a starter. > > So, Truth must be defined in terms of experience. We authentically part ways, here. I agree with the no spirit world thing, but disagree that we *must* define Truth in terms of experience. I'm only saying this so that you know that I'm "playing along". For this conversation, I'll playing along with your idea that Truth must be defined in terms of experience. > Some kinds of experiences are more enduring than others. > [...] > Now nothing about this implies that there is a truth concerning all matters. Peirce’s notion of truth is ultimately statistical and based on the central limit theorem. He cheerfully admits that the world we live in is essentially random. However, if some things are not random, if there is systematic pattern in our experience with regard to some things (such as, say, saber-toothed tigers) then it would be extraordinarily useful to know it, and the cognitive systems around today would tend to be those that had not been eaten by tigers, right? > [...] > And science is privileged because, on the whole, over the long run, it has proved itself to be the best at making those sorts of bets. And herein lies the problem. This picture gives us ZERO efficacy. If the method allows for a proposition/object to hold for, e.g., 5 billion years - i.e. it was real before earth and remains real after earth - this metaphysics tells us ZERO about whether or not that proposition/object is really real or whether it's just the transient brain fart of a super charismatic lineage of hucksters from ... somewhere. Worse yet, it gives us ZERO sense of *how many* things are real versus how many things are fiction. Is |real| << |fiction|? Is |real| >> |fiction|? How about |real| = |fiction|? Even worser yet, all results of science depend fundamentally on the method of inquiry (all observations are taken from a theoretical perspective and vice versa). So, BY DEFINITION, this convergence theory of the real will only ever suggest |real| << |fiction| because it would take more computation than atoms and lifetime of the universe to establish |real| = |fiction|, much less |real| >> |fiction|. Hence, it (worthy of a mathematician!) is inherently elitist. Elite facts only accessible to elite organisms/organizations that can live long enough to ensconce their self-fulfilling observational procedure. In the end, a methodologically-Peircian perspective is the best you can hope for, right? I.e. *acting* like a Peircian is fantastic. But it's not clear whether we can extrapolate such a "way of living" into a metaphysical claim. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Glen, Oh Joy. Oh Rapture! SOMEBODY understands me. A new day is dawning. A new year has begun! In the end, a methodologically-Peircian perspective is the best you can hope for, right? I.e. *acting* like a Peircian is fantastic. But it's not clear whether we can extrapolate such a "way of living" into a metaphysical claim. Yes. Even stronger. It is clear that we can NOT extrapolate .* Unless you regard “Given normal error, the mean of the population, μ, probably lies within +/- s/n, the standard error” as metaphysics. That’s the absolute best you can hope for. Somebody once called it, “A kiss from your aunt” realism. Ok, Glen. So now that you understand me, how can I understand you? How do you break free from the he fact that when we speak of truth beyond human experience we inevitably extrapolate from human experience and that such extrapolations are inevitably human experiences? Honest. I am not trying to be a jerk, here. I just can’t see my way out of that box, given the brain-in-the-vat. By the way, instincts, being the result of natural selection, are also taken as products of human experience. Happy New Year, Nick * Some might claim that This Claim is self-contradictory. In other words, I can be an agnostic about metaphysics but not an atheist. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- On 12/28/18 4:43 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Ok. What to do? Well, we could admit that we are screwed and define truth as that which is beyond all experience. But this is nonsense, right? If truth is beyond all experience, how do we come to be talking about it. If Truth is that which we cannot talk about, then and any statement that we make about it is necessarily untrue. What to do? Well, we could sneak a little God back in. We could talk about true intuitions that come from the spirit world, etc. Many people talk like that. Sometimes, I think of some of you talk like that, tho I won’t name names. For me, that’s not a starter. > > So, Truth must be defined in terms of experience. We authentically part ways, here. I agree with the no spirit world thing, but disagree that we *must* define Truth in terms of experience. I'm only saying this so that you know that I'm "playing along". For this conversation, I'll playing along with your idea that Truth must be defined in terms of experience. > Some kinds of experiences are more enduring than others. > [...] > Now nothing about this implies that there is a truth concerning all matters. Peirce’s notion of truth is ultimately statistical and based on the central limit theorem. He cheerfully admits that the world we live in is essentially random. However, if some things are not random, if there is systematic pattern in our experience with regard to some things (such as, say, saber-toothed tigers) then it would be extraordinarily useful to know it, and the cognitive systems around today would tend to be those that had not been eaten by tigers, right? > [...] > And science is privileged because, on the whole, over the long run, it has proved itself to be the best at making those sorts of bets. And herein lies the problem. This picture gives us ZERO efficacy. If the method allows for a proposition/object to hold for, e.g., 5 billion years - i.e. it was real before earth and remains real after earth - this metaphysics tells us ZERO about whether or not that proposition/object is really real or whether it's just the transient brain fart of a super charismatic lineage of hucksters from ... somewhere. Worse yet, it gives us ZERO sense of *how many* things are real versus how many things are fiction. Is |real| << |fiction|? Is |real| >> |fiction|? How about |real| = |fiction|? Even worser yet, all results of science depend fundamentally on the method of inquiry (all observations are taken from a theoretical perspective and vice versa). So, BY DEFINITION, this convergence theory of the real will only ever suggest |real| << |fiction| because it would take more computation than atoms and lifetime of the universe to establish |real| = |fiction|, much less |real| >> |fiction|. Hence, it (worthy of a mathematician!) is inherently elitist. Elite facts only accessible to elite organisms/organizations that can live long enough to ensconce their self-fulfilling observational procedure. In the end, a methodologically-Peircian perspective is the best you can hope for, right? I.e. *acting* like a Peircian is fantastic. But it's not clear whether we can extrapolate such a "way of living" into a metaphysical claim. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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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Ha! Dude. I feel like I've said it over and over again. Nothing is real. To do what you've (or Peirce's) done and simply redefine the word "real" is iffy, at best. Why not simply *admit* that nothing is real and move on? The answer to your question is that there's something that lies, within you, apparently, that is not comfortable with the idea that there is no real. Those of us who are comfortable with the idea that there is nothing that's real can't really provide the answer you want. Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to some Bach? I don't know.
But I can *simulate* someone like you, I think. And the answer my simulation provides is either embodied-situated cognition or something like panpsychism. I.e. the brain-in-a-vat is a useless game and nobody should be playing it. Most of it devolves into persnickety redefinitions of "experience". So, because you just said "instincts are a result of natural selection and are products of experience", I can extend that claim to claims like: Dopamine, part of the generative system for human behavior, is a product of human experience. Is 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine a part of human experience, defined in terms of human experience? Or is it an objective chemical whose reality existed before/after/independent of humans? I'd claim this sort of question *requires* our inference to handle causal loops. It's simultaneously a generator and a phenomenon of human experience. Is this a (flat) tautology? Would it require modal logic? Etc. These are the answers my simulations of people like you provide. And if our inference engine can't handle loops, then we're screwed. (Note that if I *stop* playing along and allow that Truth and Reality can come from something outside experience - human or not -, then the answers can change.) A little particular word-salad included below: On 12/31/18 11:21 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Oh Joy. Oh Rapture! SOMEBODY understands me. A new day is dawning. A new year has begun! But Eric(S) already (however implicitly) brought up methodological-Peircianism. I often worry that others really do understand *me* even if/when I feel like I haven't been understood. It's based, I suppose, on reflection. When someone repeats what they thought I said in words I would never have used, does it mean they do or don't understand me? > Yes. Even stronger. It is clear that we can NOT extrapolate .* Unless you regard “Given normal error, the mean of the population, μ, probably lies within +/- s/n, the standard error” as metaphysics. That’s the absolute best you can hope for. Somebody once called it, “A kiss from your aunt” realism. Yes, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone (making money outside an ivory tower or outside their Church) who would claim to *know* anything more than that. Pluralism is the rule, not the exception. > Ok, Glen. So now that you understand me, how can I understand you? How do you break free from the he fact that when we speak of truth beyond human experience we inevitably extrapolate from human experience and that such extrapolations are inevitably human experiences? Honest. I am not trying to be a jerk, here. I just can’t see my way out of that box, given the brain-in-the-vat. By the way, instincts, being the result of natural selection, are also taken as products of human experience. As may be obvious from my first paragraphs in this post, I may not be very clear on what you mean by "break free from the fact". You're playing a weird game where you have access to a fact that a Peircian has no access to. I'm starting to think Kellyanne Conway (with her "alternate facts") and Rudy Giuliani (with his "truth is not truth") are Peircians, too. >8^D You can break free from it by a) admitting it's not a fact - e.g. there are lots of people who don't make the extrapolation, b) there are no such things as "facts", or c) the driving force for such a demiurge is *not* experience. I'm sure there are other ways to break free of it, too. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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At CMU I implemented an algorithm called CCD (cyclic causal discovery) which could infer feedback in causal graphs from observational data. Is that relevant? Spirtes, P., Glymour, C., and Scheines, R. Kauffman, S.,Aimale, V., & Wimberly, F. (2001). Constructing Bayesian Network Models of Gene Expression Networks from Microarray Data, in Proceedings of the Atlantic Symposium on Computational Biology, Genome Information Systems and Technology, Duke University, March. ----------------------------------- 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 Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 12:59 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email] wrote: Ha! Dude. I feel like I've said it over and over again. Nothing is real. To do what you've (or Peirce's) done and simply redefine the word "real" is iffy, at best. Why not simply *admit* that nothing is real and move on? The answer to your question is that there's something that lies, within you, apparently, that is not comfortable with the idea that there is no real. Those of us who are comfortable with the idea that there is nothing that's real can't really provide the answer you want. Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to some Bach? I don't know. ============================================================ 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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In reply to this post by gepr
"Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to some Bach? " Always the answer! LSD in a sensory deprivation tank, ala Timothy Hurt in the movie Altered States, was, for me, even better. davew On Mon, Dec 31, 2018, at 12:59 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote: > Ha! Dude. I feel like I've said it over and over again. Nothing is > real. To do what you've (or Peirce's) done and simply redefine the word > "real" is iffy, at best. Why not simply *admit* that nothing is real > and move on? The answer to your question is that there's something that > lies, within you, apparently, that is not comfortable with the idea that > there is no real. Those of us who are comfortable with the idea that > there is nothing that's real can't really provide the answer you want. > Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to > some Bach? I don't know. > > But I can *simulate* someone like you, I think. And the answer my > simulation provides is either embodied-situated cognition or something > like panpsychism. I.e. the brain-in-a-vat is a useless game and nobody > should be playing it. Most of it devolves into persnickety > redefinitions of "experience". So, because you just said "instincts are > a result of natural selection and are products of experience", I can > extend that claim to claims like: > > Dopamine, part of the generative system for human behavior, is a > product of human experience. > > Is 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine a part of human experience, defined in > terms of human experience? Or is it an objective chemical whose reality > existed before/after/independent of humans? I'd claim this sort of > question *requires* our inference to handle causal loops. It's > simultaneously a generator and a phenomenon of human experience. Is > this a (flat) tautology? Would it require modal logic? Etc. > > These are the answers my simulations of people like you provide. And if > our inference engine can't handle loops, then we're screwed. (Note that > if I *stop* playing along and allow that Truth and Reality can come from > something outside experience - human or not -, then the answers can > change.) > > A little particular word-salad included below: > > On 12/31/18 11:21 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > > Oh Joy. Oh Rapture! SOMEBODY understands me. A new day is dawning. A new year has begun! > > But Eric(S) already (however implicitly) brought up methodological- > Peircianism. I often worry that others really do understand *me* even > if/when I feel like I haven't been understood. It's based, I suppose, > on reflection. When someone repeats what they thought I said in words I > would never have used, does it mean they do or don't understand me? > > > Yes. Even stronger. It is clear that we can NOT extrapolate .* Unless you regard “Given normal error, the mean of the population, μ, probably lies within +/- s/n, the standard error” as metaphysics. That’s the absolute best you can hope for. Somebody once called it, “A kiss from your aunt” realism. > > Yes, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone (making money > outside an ivory tower or outside their Church) who would claim to > *know* anything more than that. Pluralism is the rule, not the > exception. > > > Ok, Glen. So now that you understand me, how can I understand you? How do you break free from the he fact that when we speak of truth beyond human experience we inevitably extrapolate from human experience and that such extrapolations are inevitably human experiences? Honest. I am not trying to be a jerk, here. I just can’t see my way out of that box, given the brain-in-the-vat. By the way, instincts, being the result of natural selection, are also taken as products of human experience. > > As may be obvious from my first paragraphs in this post, I may not be > very clear on what you mean by "break free from the fact". You're > playing a weird game where you have access to a fact that a Peircian has > no access to. I'm starting to think Kellyanne Conway (with her > "alternate facts") and Rudy Giuliani (with his "truth is not truth") are > Peircians, too. >8^D You can break free from it by a) admitting it's > not a fact - e.g. there are lots of people who don't make the > extrapolation, b) there are no such things as "facts", or c) the driving > force for such a demiurge is *not* experience. I'm sure there are other > ways to break free of it, too. > > -- > ☣ uǝlƃ > > ============================================================ > 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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In reply to this post by gepr
"And the answer.... embodied-situated cognition " Well... I think that if THAT work is to be coherent, it needs to be grounded in pragmatism.... so I think that's a great answer. Trying to lay embodied cognition on any other foundation is going to result in collapse. Alas, only a few people have joined me in writing about such things, and none of those writings sweep the full logical arc. Sigh. (Incidentally, it doesn't help that Peirce is incoherent when writing about psychology or that James died after only taking us a short way down the path.) On Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 2:59 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email] wrote: Ha! Dude. I feel like I've said it over and over again. Nothing is real. To do what you've (or Peirce's) done and simply redefine the word "real" is iffy, at best. Why not simply *admit* that nothing is real and move on? The answer to your question is that there's something that lies, within you, apparently, that is not comfortable with the idea that there is no real. Those of us who are comfortable with the idea that there is nothing that's real can't really provide the answer you want. Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to some Bach? I don't know. ============================================================ 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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In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2
The link doesn't work for me. But I suspect: Yes! In all my posts, I've tried to push for "True as far as it goes" ... or "true for now, maybe not true later", "true over here but not over there", etc. Time is an important, but not the only factor. Feedback often assumes time. But all it really needs is some monotonically increasing parameter. If Perician metaphysics hinges on the stability and uniqueness of the limit points, then it seems a lot like ToEs in physics, it may explain some very persnickety parts of reality, but it'll struggle with things like unicorns or, say, racism.
On 12/31/18 12:15 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote: > At CMU I implemented an algorithm called CCD (cyclic causal discovery) > which could infer feedback in causal graphs from observational data. Is > that relevant? > > Spirtes, P., Glymour, C., and Scheines, R. Kauffman, S.,Aimale, V., & > Wimberly, F. (2001). Constructing Bayesian Network Models of Gene > Expression Networks from Microarray Data > <http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/scheines/bnforgenes.pdf>, in *Proceedings > of the Atlantic Symposium on Computational Biology, Genome Information > Systems and Technology*, Duke University, March. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Try this link. Now I remember that Thomas Richardson first described the algorithm and Danks and I implemented it. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.3599&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm23iOsgxDPx5eHVIU1aXYbP1yc_ZA&nossl=1&oi=scholarr ----------------------------------- 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 Mon, Dec 31, 2018, 1:28 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email] wrote: The link doesn't work for me. But I suspect: Yes! In all my posts, I've tried to push for "True as far as it goes" ... or "true for now, maybe not true later", "true over here but not over there", etc. Time is an important, but not the only factor. Feedback often assumes time. But all it really needs is some monotonically increasing parameter. If Perician metaphysics hinges on the stability and uniqueness of the limit points, then it seems a lot like ToEs in physics, it may explain some very persnickety parts of reality, but it'll struggle with things like unicorns or, say, racism. ============================================================ 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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In reply to this post by Prof David West
We're getting closer EVERY DAY!
https://psi-2020.org/ Oh, and if anyone needs a charity to toss some 2018 money at: https://maps.org/ On 12/31/18 12:18 PM, Prof David West wrote: > > > "Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to some Bach? " > > Always the answer! > > LSD in a sensory deprivation tank, ala Timothy Hurt in the movie Altered States, was, for me, even better. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2
Dear Erics, C. and S., I got lost for a moment, here, but now am caught up. I hope. Eric Charles is correct. Eric Smith’s first sentence is about as unvarnished statement of pragmatism as one can imagine. The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing that action. But then there is again, that plaintive lament, that hapless dream of a warrantee for a permanent, unshakeable belief in a reality not only undoubted but forever beyond the reach of doubt: . I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that could carry philosophical weight." But this is nonsense! In the first place, because you misrepresent yourself. As a scientist put your philosophical weight on the scientific method every day. In the second place, because you, as a human being, have no where else to put it! Unless, of course, you put it in God. Now, No-one will ever deny me the pleasures of talking to God, or imagining heaven, on the slim premise that I happen to be a lifelong atheist. If I want to get up each morning and thank God for the day, I will do so because it makes me feel good, and makes me a better person. And I might even abduce from that fact, that God exists. But I would do so wrongly because I have much better explanations for that experience. (It’s a plain psychological fact that expressing gratitude makes people feel good; expressing bitterness makes them feel lousy. Darwinian Group selection explanation to follow, if needed.) As I listen to people talk at Friam, I sense that most of us have a hankering after God. It expresses itself in many ways, some subtle. One of the subtle ways is in the idea of a truth beyond experience. But whenever people start to import that thought back into their science, they begin to talk non-sense. Literally: NON SENSE, right? Outside the senses and their elaborations in thought. Once long ago, I had the daughter of a Famous Person as a freshman in a Writing-Across-The-Curriculum class. The students got to write on any subject they chose, and my role was as facilitator, not as an expert. She announced in class one day that she wanted to write about her voices. Now, even though I have always been an experimental psychologist, I did go to school with a lot of clinicians, and I did think I knew that Hearing Voices Is A Bad Sign. So, first I tried to gently steer her away from that topic, and when she resisted firmly, I went to see one of the clinicians in my department, a man named Mort, to get advice on what to do. He looked at me in that way shrinks look at a client on the first visit and asked, “And what do you WANT to do, Nicholas.” After resisting the impulse to crush his head with the snow globe on his desk, I only said, “Mort. Cut that crap out! You know as well as I do that hearing voices is a sign of serious mental illness and that I have an obligation to do something, and certainly not to encourage it.” He replied: “No. I don’t know that! I do know that people whose voices tell them to do bad things often end up in trouble. We don’t hear from the people whose voices tell them to do good things. Do her voices tell her to do bad things. “ “No. On the contrary! They say things like, “Atta Girl! Keep up the good work!” Or, “Take it easy! You have time.” “Sounds like good advice to me. Leave the poor girl alone.” So I left her alone. In the end she wrote a paper about something else, got a good grade, and went on to graduate in 4 years. So. In conclusion, Brethren and Sisteren: Cultivate your illusions, but no matter how functional they may prove to be, never, never confuse them with reality. Thus Spake Father Thompson Happy New Year N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles "The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing that action. I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that could carry philosophical weight." Wait! Slow down! Why not see what happens when we ask that to carry philosophical weight? What would get you to change your habits? Presumably a failure of the "act without too much doubt" plan to work out as desired would eventually get you to change how you act, right? What if you saw others acting without doubt in the same way, and they got screwed as a result? Would that cause some doubt? If we follow this train if thought long enough, do we eventually end up realizing it isn't just about what works for me-in-this-moment. Rather we end up with something like: "Real" is how we awkwardly try to refer to the those things we think will hold up over the long run of lots off people acting without doubting it. Now THAT sounds like it might be able carry some weight AND be true to your intuition. On Fri, Dec 28, 2018, 7:43 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:
============================================================ 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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In reply to this post by gepr
Hi, Everybody, I am having WAY too much fun, here, and should pull back. Before I do, just a word of caution. I always forget that Peirce's definition is an asserting of the meaning of Truth and Real, not an assertion of their existence. These definitions flow from the pragmatic maxim, which is Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. So what effects to we conceive a truth to have: It would be that in the very long run, the community of inquiry will in the very long run, in asymptote-time, agree on it. That, Peirce argues, is all we can mean by True. Notice that nothing at all could ever be true, and this definition could still represent what we mean by true. So Glen and Peirce may agree after all. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- We're getting closer EVERY DAY! Oh, and if anyone needs a charity to toss some 2018 money at: On 12/31/18 12:18 PM, Prof David West wrote: > > > "Maybe the answer is to take a fistful of magic mushrooms and listen to some Bach? " > > Always the answer! > > LSD in a sensory deprivation tank, ala Timothy Hurt in the movie Altered States, was, for me, even better. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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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In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2
Thanks for that paper. It forced me to remember (and look up) the discussion in Pearl's book ("Causality" 2000) about the Markov assumption and latent structure reduction. Part of my reaction to John's statement about trying to find a time series that cannot be generated by a sequential machine was a result of Pearl's discussion. The question I'm now worried about is the facility/frequency with which cyclic graphs can be "simulated" by DAGs (which is why I implied that everywhere we think there might be a convergence to something "real" would require a monotonic parameter).
On 12/31/18 12:35 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote: > Try this link. Now I remember that Thomas Richardson first described the > algorithm and Danks and I implemented it. > > http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.3599&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm23iOsgxDPx5eHVIU1aXYbP1yc_ZA&nossl=1&oi=scholarr -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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In reply to this post by gepr
Glen said "
In all my posts, I've tried to push for "True as far as it goes" ... or
"true for now, maybe not true later", "true over here but not over
there", etc. " This leads me to believe that we have lost track of Peirce being a well established scientist, making contributions to several fields. "True as far as it goes" is a crappy place for a scientist's work to end, but "True as far as it goes, and let me tell you how far it goes" is a an ideal place for the the scientist to end up! That is: The progression of a series of scientific claims is often movement towards claims of exactly the type Glen mentions. Chemical X mixed with chemical Y makes chemical Z. No, that's not quite right. Chemical X mixed with three parts chemical Y makes one part chemical Z. No, that isn't quite right either, the stated reaction takes place only when we use a solution that has in it a certain amount of oxygen (oxy-gen meaning the acid-generating chemical). No, actually, oxygen isn't crucial after all, that Lavoisier has acid stuff all wrong; any solvent within a certain range of PH will do. Also, the reaction is dependent upon the addition of heat. Well, pressure works to, so let's create an equation to specify the necessary range of heat-pressure combinations. Etc. Etc. Etc. And by just such a series of discoveries (Peirce believes), the scientific method progresses us towards beliefs that are ever-more stable, and... least some of the time... towards a belief that will hold up across all potential tests. When a belief is found wanting, we call it "not true". As such, it follows, that "true" is what we call beliefs that are not be found wanting. In practice, the labeling of something as "true" is more of a bald assertion, or expression of hope, or bold conjecture, or something like that --- as in practice it cannot be an expression of having completely established the truth of the belief --- but however you want to phrase that: To believe that something is true (with a high degree of clarity about the belief) is to believe that it will ultimately not be found wanting. To believe that it is "locally true", without further elaboration, should therefore means something like: It will not be found wanting here, and though that suggests a larger relationship to be discovered, frankly I'm comfortable not trying to figuring out what the relevant properties of "here" are. But, of course, the game of science is largely a game of being deeply unsatisfied with beliefs that we have noticed are "merely" of local utility; the science game is a quest to find the higher-order belief that connects the "locally true" beliefs into a "closer to globally true" belief. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Supervisory Survey Statistician U.S. Marine Corps On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 3:28 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote: The link doesn't work for me. But I suspect: Yes! In all my posts, I've tried to push for "True as far as it goes" ... or "true for now, maybe not true later", "true over here but not over there", etc. Time is an important, but not the only factor. Feedback often assumes time. But all it really needs is some monotonically increasing parameter. If Perician metaphysics hinges on the stability and uniqueness of the limit points, then it seems a lot like ToEs in physics, it may explain some very persnickety parts of reality, but it'll struggle with things like unicorns or, say, racism. ============================================================ 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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I think I'm posting too frequently. But I'm compelled to make one comment:
On 12/31/18 2:28 PM, Eric Charles wrote: > And by just such a series of discoveries (Peirce believes), the scientific > method progresses us towards beliefs that are ever-more stable, and... > least some of the time... towards a belief that will hold up across all > potential tests. When I read your caveat progression, I do not hear "ever-more stable". I hear "ever-more detailed". It's not the stability of the core concept (whatever that may mean). It's the *context* that matters. And statements like "over here, but not over there" or "now but not later" ARE context. So, what you're describing the scientist doing (and with which I agree) is controlled experimentation. Remove the experimental details and you remove whatever Truth they may have contained. The methods section is the most interesting part of the paper, right? -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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