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All hail confirmation bias!

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gepr

All hail confirmation bias!

Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail

> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the systematic problems
> plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead
> mistake this as structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of levels of
> organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation of the complexity and variability
> of our world, including the significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also
> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to imagine other contrasting
> heuristics, heuristics that may bear more in common with what our world turns out to
> actually be like. Let’s at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can
> mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that
> the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and
> usefulness of this concept.

--
☣ 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

David Eric Smith

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric

> On Apr 25, 2019, at 8:25 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
>
>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the systematic problems
>> plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead
>> mistake this as structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of levels of
>> organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation of the complexity and variability
>> of our world, including the significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also
>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to imagine other contrasting
>> heuristics, heuristics that may bear more in common with what our world turns out to
>> actually be like. Let’s at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can
>> mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that
>> the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and
>> usefulness of this concept.
>
> --
> ☣ 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

gepr

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

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

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

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

> Here is a nice example, of that onus accepted and handled clearly.
>
> https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07749
> Topic is the accretionary dependency structure in the large subunit of the ribosome.
>
> In particular, see Fig. 2, which my image-page on chrome is showing me at this URL (don’t know if these URLs produce equivalent output for different users):
> https://www.google.com/search?q=bokov+and+steinberg+ribosome&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXjfm58unhAhXKzLwKHXG5B60Q_AUIDigB&biw=1371&bih=745#imgrc=uExkhZIl02WciM:
>
> The primitive data is a set of links between locations in folded RNA, which can be assigned a directionality that is very likely a dynamically meaningful one. The result is a graph with directed links. It is an empirical question whether the graph is cyclic or acyclic, with the answer being the latter. The primitive data structure is only the acyclic graph. However, a second question is whether the nodes in the graph admit a partial order, and if so, which sets of nodes constitute each distinct level within that order. That question too has an answer in terms of the maximal extent to which the equivalence class defining a level can be extended, without violating the dependency structure in the underlying DAG. Nodes in a level need not have been historically contemporaneous, but they reflect assembly conditions, as nodes at higher levels “plug into” nodes at lower levels, and thus require them to be in place. This seems extremely likely to reflect an actual historical accretionary sequence, in which equivalence of nodes within a level quantifies the ambiguity of how they may have related in time.
>
> Lots more has been done to extend this data to a detailed module decomposition, with or without the level post-processing. Through all of it, the level decomposition continues to be salient, as levels by the analysis of the DAG also correspond roughly to horizons for generations of peptide structure. See
>
> https://watermark.silverchair.com/msx086.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAjwwggI4BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggIpMIICJQIBADCCAh4GCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMGr_TvxBlD6v5A3yIAgEQgIIB77pRGYntr9gP-GNtZajC6JIiEDLCsmZFdcSgAVoYO43dh_vul542Uzn2GyejvMgnqthKt7u3ZnQoenITwMrwvneJMWZ9n6-UlYuottaxIkpxp6lWIfiTIla83YKJqigjdIbWtQx_W2y2J2pJgAKOBdbvvTctto3COkdwh4C6VH5AARmbw0bRfaMH_gRW8IKRNw8m4Gw--SbRMDlkHqaXRY8WJlbkrN8uB-ygTiu4TL12LHhNiWlxCLH0LP3pLKPBMmBG0tKM5sMIuO2CDVltBItUIT6i91Z0q2x-l6u5yBWqPFlDfpYNok--att5kqPbtzT1H7IzZev-AsWYpq_ek2RdyHxrthXdn2rTzvhMjmUlb1JHoeJX6holXrs8j1PKzwg_pW-3wtR6cYZg3VBLM6V_cTnMlyNIMABBkyix8D9pBvq6Hj7zLWABE8Oq0nuVUH5vd0U8RVbqpF5SS1OKd2Y13BN_bq-4P7B3RKKYmoecn2SVqoYPHZBV7csmkq9duwoydMQFbcGsk8BYopz6zEti3BuZJxXa2J6YT1i1pXQNMvSTHXRKdsIntCJkSZsPRwS-q6GiM5r7BtTU9hOLZLq__67NMjBDpWUcOG7pglEYuqENH7xy4abOEoE5TusJg9aU6PE9Tj9ayBkHnIONBg
> and Fig.5 within it:
> https://www.google.com/search?q=bokov+and+steinberg+ribosome&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXjfm58unhAhXKzLwKHXG5B60Q_AUIDigB&biw=1371&bih=745#imgrc=HRSn_FYi9cUYDM:
>
> It’s great when people take on small enough questions that they have time to speak in full sentences.

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Steve Smith

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by gepr

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

I TOLEYA!

On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

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

Steve Smith

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Steve

On 4/25/19 8:53 AM, glen∈ℂ wrote:

> Yes! I can't seem to find a copy of the article. But going on your
> description and the figures, it looks like an excellent example of
> treating hierarchy as something to measure rather than impute. (The
> silverchair.com link didn't work, unfortunately.)
>
> Until I can find a copy, some of what you say is provocative. It seems
> to me that talking directly about the graph (or network, an
> alternative Potochnik mentions) is the more literal concept, where
> level and hierarchy are the more metaphorical ones. Even the concept
> of accretion (temporal layering) is, to me, more meaningful than level
> or hierarchy. So, the question remains *what* advantage do we gain
> from "zooming out" and thinking in terms of hierarchy and levels that
> we didn't already have in terms of [a]cyclic, temporal or structural,
> graphs? Is the advantage largely rhetorical and communicative,
> accounting for the variations in the way the audience and participants
> think? Or are there, eg experimental design, questions and measures we
> can take that are made more precise and testable in terms of level and
> hierarchy versus graphs?
>
> On 4/24/19 4:51 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
>> Here is a nice example, of that onus accepted and handled clearly.
>>
>> https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07749
>> Topic is the accretionary dependency structure in the large subunit
>> of the ribosome.
>>
>> In particular, see Fig. 2, which my image-page on chrome is showing
>> me at this URL (don’t know if these URLs produce equivalent output
>> for different users):
>> https://www.google.com/search?q=bokov+and+steinberg+ribosome&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXjfm58unhAhXKzLwKHXG5B60Q_AUIDigB&biw=1371&bih=745#imgrc=uExkhZIl02WciM:
>>
>>
>> The primitive data is a set of links between locations in folded RNA,
>> which can be assigned a directionality that is very likely a
>> dynamically meaningful one. The result is a graph with directed
>> links. It is an empirical question whether the graph is cyclic or
>> acyclic, with the answer being the latter. The primitive data
>> structure is only the acyclic graph. However, a second question is
>> whether the nodes in the graph admit a partial order, and if so,
>> which sets of nodes constitute each distinct level within that
>> order. That question too has an answer in terms of the maximal
>> extent to which the equivalence class defining a level can be
>> extended, without violating the dependency structure in the
>> underlying DAG. Nodes in a level need not have been historically
>> contemporaneous, but they reflect assembly conditions, as nodes at
>> higher levels “plug into” nodes at lower levels, and thus require
>> them to be in place. This seems extremely likely to reflect an
>> actual historical accretionary sequence, in which equivalence of
>> nodes within a level quantifies the ambiguity of how they may have
>> related in time.
>>
>> Lots more has been done to extend this data to a detailed module
>> decomposition, with or without the level post-processing. Through
>> all of it, the level decomposition continues to be salient, as levels
>> by the analysis of the DAG also correspond roughly to horizons for
>> generations of peptide structure. See
>>
>> https://watermark.silverchair.com/msx086.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAjwwggI4BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggIpMIICJQIBADCCAh4GCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMGr_TvxBlD6v5A3yIAgEQgIIB77pRGYntr9gP-GNtZajC6JIiEDLCsmZFdcSgAVoYO43dh_vul542Uzn2GyejvMgnqthKt7u3ZnQoenITwMrwvneJMWZ9n6-UlYuottaxIkpxp6lWIfiTIla83YKJqigjdIbWtQx_W2y2J2pJgAKOBdbvvTctto3COkdwh4C6VH5AARmbw0bRfaMH_gRW8IKRNw8m4Gw--SbRMDlkHqaXRY8WJlbkrN8uB-ygTiu4TL12LHhNiWlxCLH0LP3pLKPBMmBG0tKM5sMIuO2CDVltBItUIT6i91Z0q2x-l6u5yBWqPFlDfpYNok--att5kqPbtzT1H7IzZev-AsWYpq_ek2RdyHxrthXdn2rTzvhMjmUlb1JHoeJX6holXrs8j1PKzwg_pW-3wtR6cYZg3VBLM6V_cTnMlyNIMABBkyix8D9pBvq6Hj7zLWABE8Oq0nuVUH5vd0U8RVbqpF5SS1OKd2Y13BN_bq-4P7B3RKKYmoecn2SVqoYPHZBV7csmkq9duwoydMQFbcGsk8BYopz6zEti3BuZJxXa2J6YT1i1pXQNMvSTHXRKdsIntCJkSZsPRwS-q6GiM5r7BtTU9hOLZLq__67NMjBDpWUcOG7pglEYuqENH7xy4abOEoE5TusJg9aU6PE9Tj9ayBkHnIONBg
>>
>> and Fig.5 within it:
>> https://www.google.com/search?q=bokov+and+steinberg+ribosome&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXjfm58unhAhXKzLwKHXG5B60Q_AUIDigB&biw=1371&bih=745#imgrc=HRSn_FYi9cUYDM:
>>
>>
>> It’s great when people take on small enough questions that they have
>> time to speak in full sentences.
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

gepr

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

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

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

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

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

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

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

On 4/25/19 9:43 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> You have weighed in before on ideas like this, that "hierarchical
structure may be an illusion" (my paraphrase) and I'm at least
half-sympathetic with the point. The heritage of Classical Ontology,
Aristotle's "Categories", and the general idea of "Abstraction" all seem
to reflect or support (or both) our tendency toward hierarchical
structuring with a bias toward *strict hierarchies*.

>
> [...]
>
> In either case, our Western conception of causality admits no more than
> a DAG (to deny causal loops) and privileges strict branching
> narratives.   Similarly, Linnean Taxonomies as well as Cladistics are
> inherently strict hierarchies, the former based primarily on
> observational distinctions (birds with seed-cracking beaks vs birds with
> (insect catching vs carrion eating) beaks, etc.) or inferred
> evolutionary (multi?)bifurcations.
>
> By debunking or deflating or de-emphasizing (strict?) hierarchies, what
> types of structure remain for us to recognize?   Is this problem
> anything more than model (over?) fitting?    By starting with a
> generalized graph or network, we leave room to recognize other
> interesting structures (than strict hierarchies), does introducing
> ideas like temporal aggregation or other weak sisters to "causality"
> bring back (at least) *directed acyclic* graphs as candidate models?
> Are POsets (partially ordered sets) uniquely valuable?
>
> I'm both rusty and under-informed in this depth of analysis of knowledge
> structures. I'm hoping (you and?) others here have more up to date
> knowledge or understanding.

--
☣ uǝlƃ
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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

David Eric Smith

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by gepr

Hi Glen,

> On Apr 25, 2019, at 11:53 PM, glen∈ℂ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Yes! I can't seem to find a copy of the article. But going on your description and the figures, it looks like an excellent example of treating hierarchy as something to measure rather than impute. (The silverchair.com link didn't work, unfortunately.)
>
> Until I can find a copy, some of what you say is provocative. It seems to me that talking directly about the graph (or network, an alternative Potochnik mentions) is the more literal concept, where level and hierarchy are the more metaphorical ones. Even the concept of accretion (temporal layering) is, to me, more meaningful than level or hierarchy. So, the question remains *what* advantage do we gain from "zooming out" and thinking in terms of hierarchy and levels that we didn't already have in terms of [a]cyclic, temporal or structural, graphs? Is the advantage largely rhetorical and communicative, accounting for the variations in the way the audience and participants think? Or are there, eg experimental design, questions and measures we can take that are made more precise and testable in terms of level and hierarchy versus graphs?

Yes, only limited roles for this case.

I believe I am thinking of the levels as proxies for roughly sequential intervals of time. I can't establish any strict notion of concurrency among features within a level, but in a context where I think both chemistry and accumulating structure were in transition during the era when this molecular assembly came into existence, I think of the features that don’t have dependency relations as probably having arisen in a common horizon of this transition. If we had only RNA, it would be good to know that there was a concrete way to quantify what one was referring to, but the equivalence classes on their own might have limited weight. When we realize, however, that the proteins are also undergoing a transition that spans remarkably qualitatively different types, that each stage in that transition is recapitulated in several different proteins, that there is a clear directionality from simple to complex in the sequence, that the multiple instances at each stage roughly align with a common equivalence class in the RNA sequence, and that in addition to the structural changes that distinguish stages within the proteins, there are also changes in the way they interact with the RNA (protein side chains in the later stages start to displace Mg++ ions as the coordinators of RNA folding, which had been the sole coordinators in the earlier stages), one gets a qualitative impression of clines, which luckily it is possible to attach to quantities in a few features.

All best,

Eric

>
> On 4/24/19 4:51 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
>> Here is a nice example, of that onus accepted and handled clearly.
>> https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07749
>> Topic is the accretionary dependency structure in the large subunit of the ribosome.
>> In particular, see Fig. 2, which my image-page on chrome is showing me at this URL (don’t know if these URLs produce equivalent output for different users):
>> https://www.google.com/search?q=bokov+and+steinberg+ribosome&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXjfm58unhAhXKzLwKHXG5B60Q_AUIDigB&biw=1371&bih=745#imgrc=uExkhZIl02WciM:
>> The primitive data is a set of links between locations in folded RNA, which can be assigned a directionality that is very likely a dynamically meaningful one. The result is a graph with directed links. It is an empirical question whether the graph is cyclic or acyclic, with the answer being the latter. The primitive data structure is only the acyclic graph. However, a second question is whether the nodes in the graph admit a partial order, and if so, which sets of nodes constitute each distinct level within that order. That question too has an answer in terms of the maximal extent to which the equivalence class defining a level can be extended, without violating the dependency structure in the underlying DAG. Nodes in a level need not have been historically contemporaneous, but they reflect assembly conditions, as nodes at higher levels “plug into” nodes at lower levels, and thus require them to be in place. This seems extremely likely to reflect an actual historical accretionary sequence, in which equivalence of nodes within a level quantifies the ambiguity of how they may have related in time.
>> Lots more has been done to extend this data to a detailed module decomposition, with or without the level post-processing. Through all of it, the level decomposition continues to be salient, as levels by the analysis of the DAG also correspond roughly to horizons for generations of peptide structure. See
>> https://watermark.silverchair.com/msx086.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAjwwggI4BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggIpMIICJQIBADCCAh4GCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMGr_TvxBlD6v5A3yIAgEQgIIB77pRGYntr9gP-GNtZajC6JIiEDLCsmZFdcSgAVoYO43dh_vul542Uzn2GyejvMgnqthKt7u3ZnQoenITwMrwvneJMWZ9n6-UlYuottaxIkpxp6lWIfiTIla83YKJqigjdIbWtQx_W2y2J2pJgAKOBdbvvTctto3COkdwh4C6VH5AARmbw0bRfaMH_gRW8IKRNw8m4Gw--SbRMDlkHqaXRY8WJlbkrN8uB-ygTiu4TL12LHhNiWlxCLH0LP3pLKPBMmBG0tKM5sMIuO2CDVltBItUIT6i91Z0q2x-l6u5yBWqPFlDfpYNok--att5kqPbtzT1H7IzZev-AsWYpq_ek2RdyHxrthXdn2rTzvhMjmUlb1JHoeJX6holXrs8j1PKzwg_pW-3wtR6cYZg3VBLM6V_cTnMlyNIMABBkyix8D9pBvq6Hj7zLWABE8Oq0nuVUH5vd0U8RVbqpF5SS1OKd2Y13BN_bq-4P7B3RKKYmoecn2SVqoYPHZBV7csmkq9duwoydMQFbcGsk8BYopz6zEti3BuZJxXa2J6YT1i1pXQNMvSTHXRKdsIntCJkSZsPRwS-q6GiM5r7BtTU9hOLZLq__67NMjBDpWUcOG7pglEYuqENH7xy4abOEoE5TusJg9aU6PE9Tj9ayBkHnIONBg
>> and Fig.5 within it:
>> https://www.google.com/search?q=bokov+and+steinberg+ribosome&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXjfm58unhAhXKzLwKHXG5B60Q_AUIDigB&biw=1371&bih=745#imgrc=HRSn_FYi9cUYDM:
>> It’s great when people take on small enough questions that they have time to speak in full sentences.
> ============================================================
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Nick Thompson

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic is THAT?

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

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

I TOLEYA!

On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

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

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David Eric Smith

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important. But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

Eric

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic is THAT?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
>
> I TOLEYA!
>
> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
>>
>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of
>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation
>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the
>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also
>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to
>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more
>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s at
>>> least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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>
>
> ============================================================
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Nick Thompson

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

Eric,

Can you direct me to any particular passages or chapters in the book? I am unlikely to read the whole thing, but I want to know your thought.

I rummaged around in the Books.google site for a bit and found this:

If so, I don’t think I was saying anything this profound. I was just trying to get in on the ground floor of the “skepticaller-than-thou” battle I saw developing.

There are either, or there are not, consistencies in our experiences, in my experiences, in your experiences, and in those we represent to one another. If there are not, then we have nothing to talk about, and all talk is meaningless. If there are, If somebody cares to call these, the world, then all power to them. To announce that something is “the world” or “the real” or “true” or “exists outside experience” is only to announce that someday the speaker believes people will come to agree on it, the way we have come to agree on so many things in the last 300 years of science. If we share that belief, that’s one heluva heuristic, and it is the heuristic that makes science possible, but it is, after all, only a heuristic. I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important. But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

Eric

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic is THAT?

> N

> Nicholas S. Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University

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

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A

> Smith

> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

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

> I TOLEYA!

> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels

>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail

>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the

>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize

>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as

>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of

>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation

>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the

>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also

>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to

>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more

>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s

>>> at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College to unsubscribe

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Prof David West

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nick stated:

"I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face."

Excepting the mystic who recognizes that "ALL is illusion," has anyone drunk the full potent?

davew

On Sun, Jul 28, 2019, at 9:23 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this
> foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic
> is THAT?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
>
> I TOLEYA!
>
> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> > Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
> > https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
> >
> >> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
> >> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
> >> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
> >> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of
> >> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation
> >> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the
> >> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also
> >> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to
> >> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more
> >> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s at
> >> least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
>
> ============================================================
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>
>
> ============================================================
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>

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

< I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face. >

One fix I’ve observed to exist in an actual medical protocol is to make the dose adequate for a 100 kilogram man. A 50 kilogram woman will get a bigger dose than she needs but the job will be done.

Marcus

David Eric Smith

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Hi Nick,

The part of the book that prompted me to forward it to the list was most of the first 3 (short) chapters.

I think there are two parallel discourses going on, which are not about the same thing, and which probably are not incompatible, but which also may not be part of a cognitively unified sense of understanding.

One thread concerns the choice or construction of whatever specifics we wish to regard as “true”, and what we take to be the source of confidence in those choices. For Pierce’s characterization of scientific method, inter-subjective observation and stress-testing, etc., as the distillation of the better parts of common empirical practice, all of what you say in your later paragraph is stuff I agree with and think is correct.

The other thread, which is where I think Ortega is writing, is closer to the phenomenologists, as represented (to the extent that I understand the approach) in Husserl. In the early chapters, to set up a system for understanding why countries that had undergone the enlightenment would choose to throw it away, Ortega argues that the Homo sapiens characterization of man is slightly off the point. For his purposes, man is not all that good at knowing very much, nor is the knowing the most central thing that sets him apart. Instead, Ortega argues, a better starting point in thinking about what humans are is the relentless need to construct a domain of experience that gives guidance in what to do next. Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human nature and behavior. The awareness that there is such an edifice, and that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window. The assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”. These frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us, or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.

I am taking my characterization of Husserl’s position at second hand from people who have put in time with him that I have not, but I think he argues that for Experience, in this formal sense, to occupy a place outside awareness and to not be recognized as its own thing in our thought system, is a source of distortion or potential inconsistency. I don’t know in how far that is true, since I don’t think Husserl, or Ortega, or anybody modern, has an important objection to the Piercian system for choosing which things to label “true” about empirical matters. I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness. Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one relevant such concept.

This is not my day job, and thank god for that, so all of the above is “grain of salt” commentary. Fortunately, the books exist as things-in-themselves, and anybody can start fresh with them.

Best,

Eric

On Jul 29, 2019, at 12:00 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

Can you direct me to any particular passages or chapters in the book? I am unlikely to read the whole thing, but I want to know your thought.

I rummaged around in the Books.google site for a bit and found this:

<image002.jpg>

If so, I don’t think I was saying anything this profound. I was just trying to get in on the ground floor of the “skepticaller-than-thou” battle I saw developing.

There are either, or there are not, consistencies in our experiences, in my experiences, in your experiences, and in those we represent to one another. If there are not, then we have nothing to talk about, and all talk is meaningless. If there are, If somebody cares to call these, the world, then all power to them. To announce that something is “the world” or “the real” or “true” or “exists outside experience” is only to announce that someday the speaker believes people will come to agree on it, the way we have come to agree on so many things in the last 300 years of science. If we share that belief, that’s one heluva heuristic, and it is the heuristic that makes science possible, but it is, after all, only a heuristic. I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important. But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

Eric

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic is THAT?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A
> Smith
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
>
> I TOLEYA!
>
> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
>>
>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of
>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation
>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the
>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also
>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to
>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more
>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s
>>> at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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>
>
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Prof David West

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

Eric,

Your commentary below re: Husserl made we wonder about ways to effectively use, as metaphor or thought experiment tool, the notion of "augmented reality." There is some interesting slipperyness: is the 'augment' the objective reality superimposed on the subjective Reality; is the 'augment' our personal idiosyncratic perception of Reality projected on the objective Real outside?

davew

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019, at 12:15 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:

Hi Nick,

The part of the book that prompted me to forward it to the list was most of the first 3 (short) chapters.

I think there are two parallel discourses going on, which are not about the same thing, and which probably are not incompatible, but which also may not be part of a cognitively unified sense of understanding.

One thread concerns the choice or construction of whatever specifics we wish to regard as “true”, and what we take to be the source of confidence in those choices. For Pierce’s characterization of scientific method, inter-subjective observation and stress-testing, etc., as the distillation of the better parts of common empirical practice, all of what you say in your later paragraph is stuff I agree with and think is correct.

The other thread, which is where I think Ortega is writing, is closer to the phenomenologists, as represented (to the extent that I understand the approach) in Husserl. In the early chapters, to set up a system for understanding why countries that had undergone the enlightenment would choose to throw it away, Ortega argues that the Homo sapiens characterization of man is slightly off the point. For his purposes, man is not all that good at knowing very much, nor is the knowing the most central thing that sets him apart. Instead, Ortega argues, a better starting point in thinking about what humans are is the relentless need to construct a domain of experience that gives guidance in what to do next. Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human nature and behavior. The awareness that there is such an edifice, and that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window. The assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”. These frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us, or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.

I am taking my characterization of Husserl’s position at second hand from people who have put in time with him that I have not, but I think he argues that for Experience, in this formal sense, to occupy a place outside awareness and to not be recognized as its own thing in our thought system, is a source of distortion or potential inconsistency. I don’t know in how far that is true, since I don’t think Husserl, or Ortega, or anybody modern, has an important objection to the Piercian system for choosing which things to label “true” about empirical matters. I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness. Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one relevant such concept.

This is not my day job, and thank god for that, so all of the above is “grain of salt” commentary. Fortunately, the books exist as things-in-themselves, and anybody can start fresh with them.

Best,

Eric

On Jul 29, 2019, at 12:00 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

Can you direct me to any particular passages or chapters in the book? I am unlikely to read the whole thing, but I want to know your thought.

I rummaged around in the Books.google site for a bit and found this:

<image002.jpg>

If so, I don’t think I was saying anything this profound. I was just trying to get in on the ground floor of the “skepticaller-than-thou” battle I saw developing.

There are either, or there are not, consistencies in our experiences, in my experiences, in your experiences, and in those we represent to one another. If there are not, then we have nothing to talk about, and all talk is meaningless. If there are, If somebody cares to call these, the world, then all power to them. To announce that something is “the world” or “the real” or “true” or “exists outside experience” is only to announce that someday the speaker believes people will come to agree on it, the way we have come to agree on so many things in the last 300 years of science. If we share that belief, that’s one heluva heuristic, and it is the heuristic that makes science possible, but it is, after all, only a heuristic. I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important. But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

Eric

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic is THAT?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A
> Smith
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
>
> I TOLEYA!
>
> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
>>
>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of
>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation
>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the
>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also
>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to
>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more
>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s
>>> at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
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> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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>
>
> ============================================================
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> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
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David Eric Smith

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

Hi Dave,

Your commentary below re: Husserl made we wonder about ways to effectively use, as metaphor or thought experiment tool, the notion of "augmented reality." There is some interesting slipperyness: is the 'augment' the objective reality superimposed on the subjective Reality; is the 'augment' our personal idiosyncratic perception of Reality projected on the objective Real outside?

Or are they things of different kinds, peers, each confined to its own space, yet somehow mapped? Language is (among other things) a set of representations in the minds of language users, which admits certain structure-preserving maps to events-in-matter or events-in-the intersubjective. Yet language as the domain of such maps is not the same kind of system as the events in matter or in the intersubjective.(footnote) When to say either is projected onto the other could be yet a third question (?). How should we understand that things can be of different kinds but admit structure-preserving maps? On one hand, that is a dumb question by this time, because so much math has been built up around structure preservation across representations. But in the domain you are talking about, while it is nice to know that math exists, it is not clear we know how to use it to get at the things we want to describe.

Eric

Footnote: (In other respects, of course it is, but not the respect relevant to this level of abstraction and this view of the structure-preserving map.)

davew

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019, at 12:15 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
Hi Nick,

The part of the book that prompted me to forward it to the list was most of the first 3 (short) chapters.

I think there are two parallel discourses going on, which are not about the same thing, and which probably are not incompatible, but which also may not be part of a cognitively unified sense of understanding.

One thread concerns the choice or construction of whatever specifics we wish to regard as “true”, and what we take to be the source of confidence in those choices. For Pierce’s characterization of scientific method, inter-subjective observation and stress-testing, etc., as the distillation of the better parts of common empirical practice, all of what you say in your later paragraph is stuff I agree with and think is correct.

The other thread, which is where I think Ortega is writing, is closer to the phenomenologists, as represented (to the extent that I understand the approach) in Husserl. In the early chapters, to set up a system for understanding why countries that had undergone the enlightenment would choose to throw it away, Ortega argues that the Homo sapiens characterization of man is slightly off the point. For his purposes, man is not all that good at knowing very much, nor is the knowing the most central thing that sets him apart. Instead, Ortega argues, a better starting point in thinking about what humans are is the relentless need to construct a domain of experience that gives guidance in what to do next. Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human nature and behavior. The awareness that there is such an edifice, and that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window. The assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”. These frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us, or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.

I am taking my characterization of Husserl’s position at second hand from people who have put in time with him that I have not, but I think he argues that for Experience, in this formal sense, to occupy a place outside awareness and to not be recognized as its own thing in our thought system, is a source of distortion or potential inconsistency. I don’t know in how far that is true, since I don’t think Husserl, or Ortega, or anybody modern, has an important objection to the Piercian system for choosing which things to label “true” about empirical matters. I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness. Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one relevant such concept.

This is not my day job, and thank god for that, so all of the above is “grain of salt” commentary. Fortunately, the books exist as things-in-themselves, and anybody can start fresh with them.

Best,

Eric

On Jul 29, 2019, at 12:00 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

Can you direct me to any particular passages or chapters in the book? I am unlikely to read the whole thing, but I want to know your thought.

I rummaged around in the Books.google site for a bit and found this:

<image002.jpg>

If so, I don’t think I was saying anything this profound. I was just trying to get in on the ground floor of the “skepticaller-than-thou” battle I saw developing.

There are either, or there are not, consistencies in our experiences, in my experiences, in your experiences, and in those we represent to one another. If there are not, then we have nothing to talk about, and all talk is meaningless. If there are, If somebody cares to call these, the world, then all power to them. To announce that something is “the world” or “the real” or “true” or “exists outside experience” is only to announce that someday the speaker believes people will come to agree on it, the way we have come to agree on so many things in the last 300 years of science. If we share that belief, that’s one heluva heuristic, and it is the heuristic that makes science possible, but it is, after all, only a heuristic. I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important. But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

Eric

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic is THAT?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A
> Smith
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
>
> I TOLEYA!
>
> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
>>
>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of
>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation
>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the
>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also
>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to
>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more
>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s
>>> at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College 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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============================================================
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Nick Thompson

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by Prof David West

Dave,

"All is illusion" is exactly the kind of partial draught that I am complaining about. It clings to the very hope it mocks. If skepticism is what you desire, then there is no warrant to speak of anything beyond experience, and experience is "of" nothing except other experiences. So the only question becomes, To what extent is experience organized. Or is experience merely random. If by "all is illusion" you mean there are no consistencies in experience, then, of course, you are welcome to that view, in the same way you are welcome to the view that all the molecules in the lovely Dutch beer sitting in front of you will instantaneously leap out of the glass, roll across the table, and jump into your mouth without any assistance from your hands. But I wouldn't bet on it. If I wanted some of that beer, I would reach for it.

Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2019 2:18 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

Nick stated:

"I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face."

Excepting the mystic who recognizes that "ALL is illusion," has anyone drunk the full potent?

davew

On Sun, Jul 28, 2019, at 9:23 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this
> foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic
> is THAT?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A
> Smith
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
>
> I TOLEYA!
>
> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> > Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
> > https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
> >
> >> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
> >> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
> >> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
> >> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept
> >> of levels of organization has, I think, contributed to
> >> underestimation of the complexity and variability of our world,
> >> including the significance of causal interaction across scales.
> >> This has also inhibited our ability to see limitations to our
> >> heuristic and to imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics
> >> that may bear more in common with what our world turns out to
> >> actually be like. Let’s at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College 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
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>

Steve Smith

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Eric -

Great weigh-in as usual!

> Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what
> to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being
> superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly
> constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human
> nature and behavior. The awareness that there is such an edifice, and
> that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s
> arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a
> transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but
> it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things
> we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window. The
> assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is
> our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to
> function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are
> I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is
> distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”. These
> frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract
> choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us,
> or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.

I appreciate the subtlety and thoroughness of this description but want
to seek some parallax between the experience of "homo sapiens" and any
other perceiving consciousness.   I do believe that humans (and perhaps
other species like cetaceans and elephants and apes) have a significant
self-awareness *capability* which helps us stand somewhat apart from the
other creatures (including plants, micorbiota, etc.).   We *can* know
something of *how we think we know what we know* and even have a sense
of *knowing that there are things we don't know* up to and including the
stunning incompleteness of formal systems as exposed by Kurt Godel.

Life itself (consciousness) seems to be a self-organized collection of
coherence-maintaining, gradient-seeking self-perpetuating subunits.
Each subunit (whether it be individual organism, colony, tribe, culture,
species, etc.) seems to have as it's main (only?) tactic a skill at
predicting it's environment as a phase space of relevant qualities...
sense organs, hormonal/endocrinal systems, appetites, desires, hopes,
fears, dreams, stories, disciplines of knowledge, religions, all seem to
be artifacts contrived to support effective prediction of the subunits
trajectory.    To the extent that the only sure thing (besides taxes) in
life is death, all these trajectories ultimately terminate in the
decoherence of the individual, whether that be you or me, the mosquito I
just smooshed on my arm, the multi-element organism that is the aspen
grove on the side of the mountain or the Roman (or US) Empire, the
project is a failure. On the other hand, these multiple trajectories
are perhaps illusory (at least in their distinctness) and join together
in a piecewise plurality of trajectories... which when admitting the
smallest/simplest (dancing quarks?) to the largest, most complex
(supergalactic clusters?) into this description, becomes "the World".
Yet each subsystem with a "map of the world" embedded in itself (e.g.
somewhere among the state-space of the 302 nerve-cell system of C.
Elegans or the ~40,000 cells dancing biochemically within a tardigrade).

We watch other species make what appear to be devastatingly bad
decisions for themselves (as individuals or groups... like lemmings, or
suicidal drone-bees, or beaching pilot whale pods) but with enough
introspection and study can usually discover how these "bad decisions"
are "adaptive" at *some level*.

Of course "we humans" seem more psychotic than most with our incessant
warfare and polluting/collapsing our local (now unto global) ecosystems,
etc. To whatever extent we are "the first of our kind" it seems very
optimistic to imagine that we are likely to "get it right" the first
time.   How many "living fossils" were "the first of their kind"?   Were
they more likely all but a fluke side-shoot of a "good idea turned bad"
which happened to find/maintain a niche for itself in the larger milieu?

> I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to
> give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness.
> Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important
> source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss
> empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing
> Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one
> relevant such concept.

Very fascinatingly packed set of observations... I hope there is more
conversation here to try to help me unpack it more.

- Steve

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Prof David West

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Perforce, I am experiencing confusion.

Sensations are impinging on the organism, the organism "organizes and interprets" them and, in some mysterious way presents a "coherent formulation" of them to a specialized aspect of the organism which, in turn, meta-interprets them as "an experience."

Although the "experience" is in the foreground it is not dissociated from the "coherent formulation" which is context for the "experience;" nor is "experience" apart from the raw sensations which are context for the "coherent formulation." Indeed all is a whole.

For whatever reason, the organism has learned to "notice" consistencies, i.e. approximations of the "same whole" that "recur" with some regularity. (Notice the need to invent linear time here, without any justification except that in the step following we come to believe in time as a shared experience.)

Somewhere in the mists of prehistory another aspect of the organism "puts words" to the "experience" allowing multiple organisms to exchange words and discourse at great length as to whether or not they are sharing the same "experiences" and, if so, does such collective experiencing suggest a "provisional shared interpretation?"

Enter the skeptic.

The first thing I doubt is that word "provisional." I have been observing for a long time and I do not believe you are truly sincere about it - you use the verb "to be" far too frequently and with too much conviction to believe you. You are also way to comfortable equating the improbable with the impossible.

The next thing I doubt are your words. There is a whole treatise here, but I will simply point to Gladstone's essay on "color in the age of Homer" and numerous writings on the "truth" behind the fallacy of Sapir--Whorfism.

Then I doubt the "coherent formulation" noting that the construction of same is highly idiosyncratic and its "consistency" an artifact of laziness - "just send the old formulation along instead of making the effort to construct a new one from the data of the instant."

Then I doubt the sensations, especially their origin apart from the sensory element of the organism that claimed to have been impinged.

In parallel, of course, I have doubted the implicit "I" that is inescapable when "words" come into the picture.

Ultimately I doubt whether the totality of the "provisionally shared interpretations" (including of course all of science) can definitively be differentiated from the result of God on an eternal (instead of 15 minute) DMT trip.

The skeptic merely doubts. The mystic claims that EXPERIENCE is a possibility - unmediated by "I" or sensation, or coherent formulations or words or provisional shared interpretations. Is this the "hope" being "mocked?"

davew

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019, at 4:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Dave,
>
> "All is illusion" is exactly the kind of partial draught that I am
> complaining about. It clings to the very hope it mocks. If skepticism
> is what you desire, then there is no warrant to speak of anything
> beyond experience, and experience is "of" nothing except other
> experiences. So the only question becomes, To what extent is
> experience organized. Or is experience merely random. If by "all is
> illusion" you mean there are no consistencies in experience, then, of
> course, you are welcome to that view, in the same way you are welcome
> to the view that all the molecules in the lovely Dutch beer sitting in
> front of you will instantaneously leap out of the glass, roll across
> the table, and jump into your mouth without any assistance from your
> hands. But I wouldn't bet on it. If I wanted some of that beer, I
> would reach for it.
>
>
> Nick
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
> Sent: Monday, July 29, 2019 2:18 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> Nick stated:
>
> "I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and
> then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its
> face."
>
> Excepting the mystic who recognizes that "ALL is illusion," has anyone
> drunk the full potent?
>
> davew
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2019, at 9:23 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> > While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this
> > foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic
> > is THAT?
> >
> > N
> >
> > Nicholas S. Thompson
> > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A
> > Smith
> > Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> > To: [hidden email]
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
> >
> > I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
> >
> > I TOLEYA!
> >
> > On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> > > Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
> > > https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
> > >
> > >> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
> > >> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
> > >> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
> > >> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept
> > >> of levels of organization has, I think, contributed to
> > >> underestimation of the complexity and variability of our world,
> > >> including the significance of causal interaction across scales.
> > >> This has also inhibited our ability to see limitations to our
> > >> heuristic and to imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics
> > >> that may bear more in common with what our world turns out to
> > >> actually be like. Let’s at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> > at St. John's College 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
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> >
>
> ============================================================
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>

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

I find this conversation depressing. Carry on.

-----------------------------------
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, Jul 29, 2019, 11:23 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Perforce, I am experiencing confusion.

Sensations are impinging on the organism, the organism "organizes and interprets" them and, in some mysterious way presents a "coherent formulation" of them to a specialized aspect of the organism which, in turn, meta-interprets them as "an experience."

Although the "experience" is in the foreground it is not dissociated from the "coherent formulation" which is context for the "experience;" nor is "experience" apart from the raw sensations which are context for the "coherent formulation." Indeed all is a whole.

For whatever reason, the organism has learned to "notice" consistencies, i.e. approximations of the "same whole" that "recur" with some regularity. (Notice the need to invent linear time here, without any justification except that in the step following we come to believe in time as a shared experience.)

Somewhere in the mists of prehistory another aspect of the organism "puts words" to the "experience" allowing multiple organisms to exchange words and discourse at great length as to whether or not they are sharing the same "experiences" and, if so, does such collective experiencing suggest a "provisional shared interpretation?"

Enter the skeptic.

The first thing I doubt is that word "provisional." I have been observing for a long time and I do not believe you are truly sincere about it - you use the verb "to be" far too frequently and with too much conviction to believe you. You are also way to comfortable equating the improbable with the impossible.

The next thing I doubt are your words. There is a whole treatise here, but I will simply point to Gladstone's essay on "color in the age of Homer" and numerous writings on the "truth" behind the fallacy of Sapir--Whorfism.

Then I doubt the "coherent formulation" noting that the construction of same is highly idiosyncratic and its "consistency" an artifact of laziness - "just send the old formulation along instead of making the effort to construct a new one from the data of the instant."

Then I doubt the sensations, especially their origin apart from the sensory element of the organism that claimed to have been impinged.

In parallel, of course, I have doubted the implicit "I" that is inescapable when "words" come into the picture.

Ultimately I doubt whether the totality of the "provisionally shared interpretations" (including of course all of science) can definitively be differentiated from the result of God on an eternal (instead of 15 minute) DMT trip.

The skeptic merely doubts. The mystic claims that EXPERIENCE is a possibility - unmediated by "I" or sensation, or coherent formulations or words or provisional shared interpretations. Is this the "hope" being "mocked?"

davew

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019, at 4:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Dave,
>
> "All is illusion" is exactly the kind of partial draught that I am
> complaining about. It clings to the very hope it mocks. If skepticism
> is what you desire, then there is no warrant to speak of anything
> beyond experience, and experience is "of" nothing except other
> experiences. So the only question becomes, To what extent is
> experience organized. Or is experience merely random. If by "all is
> illusion" you mean there are no consistencies in experience, then, of
> course, you are welcome to that view, in the same way you are welcome
> to the view that all the molecules in the lovely Dutch beer sitting in
> front of you will instantaneously leap out of the glass, roll across
> the table, and jump into your mouth without any assistance from your
> hands. But I wouldn't bet on it. If I wanted some of that beer, I
> would reach for it.
>
>
> Nick
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
> Sent: Monday, July 29, 2019 2:18 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> Nick stated:
>
> "I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and
> then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its
> face."
>
> Excepting the mystic who recognizes that "ALL is illusion," has anyone
> drunk the full potent?
>
> davew
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2019, at 9:23 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> > While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this
> > foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic
> > is THAT?
> >
> > N
> >
> > Nicholas S. Thompson
> > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A
> > Smith
> > Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> > To: [hidden email]
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
> >
> > I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
> >
> > I TOLEYA!
> >
> > On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> > > Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
> > > https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
> > >
> > >> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
> > >> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
> > >> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
> > >> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept
> > >> of levels of organization has, I think, contributed to
> > >> underestimation of the complexity and variability of our world,
> > >> including the significance of causal interaction across scales.
> > >> This has also inhibited our ability to see limitations to our
> > >> heuristic and to imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics
> > >> that may bear more in common with what our world turns out to
> > >> actually be like. Let’s at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> > at St. John's College 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
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>
>
> ============================================================
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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>

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Nick Thompson

Re: All hail confirmation bias!

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Hi, Eric,

As often, I am overwhelmed by what you write. Makes me wish I were younger. Still, I was able to muster a couple of “lardings” below:

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 David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2019 6:16 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

Hi Nick,

The part of the book that prompted me to forward it to the list was most of the first 3 (short) chapters.

[NST==>So, the question is, what are the cues in experience for experiences that are likely to endure. <==nst]

[NST==>”should chose to throw it away”: This sentence chilled my heart as no sentence has done in a very long time. We are in an age, now, when we are choosing to throw the enlightenment away. There must be a thousand books on the origins of the enlightenment; how many are there on the origins of its jettisoning. Don’t we need to be reading them urgently? <==nst]

Ortega argues that the Homo sapiens characterization of man is slightly off the point. For his purposes, man is not all that good at knowing very much, nor is the knowing the most central thing that sets him apart. Instead, Ortega argues, a better starting point in thinking about what humans are is the relentless need to construct a domain of experience that gives guidance in what to do next. Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human nature and behavior.

[NST==>This works, but I am having a little trouble with distinguishing it from what you wrote above, which seemed also to work. <==nst]

The awareness that there is such an edifice, and that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window. The assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”. These frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us, or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.

[NST==>But doesn’t it make a difference if those choices turn out well for us, and doesn’t that take us back to what you wrote above? <==nst]

This is not my day job, and thank god for that, so all of the above is “grain of salt” commentary. Fortunately, the books exist as things-in-themselves, and anybody can start fresh with them.

[NST==>Thanks, Eric, for taking a shot at it. I see all these positions as groping toward an experience-monism of some sort, and that seems the only kind of position that makes any damned sense at all. <==nst]

Best,

Eric

On Jul 29, 2019, at 12:00 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

Can you direct me to any particular passages or chapters in the book? I am unlikely to read the whole thing, but I want to know your thought.

I rummaged around in the Books.google site for a bit and found this:

<image002.jpg>

If so, I don’t think I was saying anything this profound. I was just trying to get in on the ground floor of the “skepticaller-than-thou” battle I saw developing.

There are either, or there are not, consistencies in our experiences, in my experiences, in your experiences, and in those we represent to one another. If there are not, then we have nothing to talk about, and all talk is meaningless. If there are, If somebody cares to call these, the world, then all power to them. To announce that something is “the world” or “the real” or “true” or “exists outside experience” is only to announce that someday the speaker believes people will come to agree on it, the way we have come to agree on so many things in the last 300 years of science. If we share that belief, that’s one heluva heuristic, and it is the heuristic that makes science possible, but it is, after all, only a heuristic. I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:19 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.

I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important. But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.

Eric

> On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world." What sort of heuristic is THAT?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A
> Smith
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>
> I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
>
> I TOLEYA!
>
> On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels
>> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail
>>
>>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the
>>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize
>>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as
>>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of
>>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation
>>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the
>>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also
>>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to
>>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more
>>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s
>>> at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College 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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> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
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