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FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

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gepr

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Well, to be clear, my comment was intended to agree with Vladimyr's point that I kinda like being _deluded_. When you finally remove all the meaning from the math notation and just manipulate the markings, it can be very hypnotic. What would otherwise seem to be meaningless syntax takes on a meaning of its own, regardless of any _symbolic_ intent. (We _can_ coherently ask the question "What is it like to be a zombie".) We can hold both [non-]Platonic positions, because that state depends on the context. Remove all the a priori symbolism, and I become a Platonist. Ground even a single term and I become a constructivist.

As for being in the zone socially, I disagree, though I don't particularly care about any jargonal co-option of the term. During hearty arguments, mostly with religious people, I definitely lose myself in exactly the same way I lose myself after that 3rd mile when running. I have no illusions that my zone is in any way shared by the people I'm arguing with, though ... no more than I think you and I share internal constructs mediated by the word "blue".

I enjoyed Eric's comment on representation precisely because I can't quite buy into the idea that we rely so heavily on "symbolic reference". It relies way too much on the assumption that what goes on in our head is anything like what goes on out there in the ambience.

On 02/21/2017 12:46 PM, Robert Wall wrote:
> Why I bring this up at all is that Whitehead thinks that what integrates these two modes into the whole of what we perceive is *Symbolic Reference*. Symbolic reference is kind of like how we tag bits of our real-world immersion for building a largely symbolic but sustainable--for us individually--worldview. Most time these symbolic references are provided to us--inculcated--by others like with a religion or by our parents. Most are satisfied with that. In your friend's case, I believe it is possible that y' all were unsettling--challenging--his worldview ... or, he challenging yours.
>
> Flow is not likely to be aroused in a social context. [...]
>
> Is mathematics invented or discovered? This is a perennial topic that arises within my philosophy group. It never really gets resolved, but how could it be? It is the ultimate of symbolic reference systems because of its precision in predicting the way the world manifests itself to our perception. [...]
>
> As I often do, I kind of resonate with Vladimyr's thought, which you included in your post. It is very Csikszentmihalyi-est. I do think that simulations can lure us into thinking that they are an exact dynamic facsimile of the reality which they try to abstract into an analytical model. There are all kinds of things about simulations that can lead us astray. [...]
>
> But, as Vladimyr muses, maybe this is the best we can do ... and symbolic reference is what nature served up for us to cope, concerning what we are perceiving. But, as with all smart systems, a smart entity will always try to challenge and refine those symbols with continuous feedback--FLOW. However, in the larger scheme of things, it really doesn't matter if mathematics was invented or discovered. I mean, where did the concept of a hammer come from? 🤔

--
☣ glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

gepr

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by Vladimyr Burachynsky

Tesselation vs. approximation: Ah, right. I was sloppy with my language. Sorry.

What you say in the blurb below is questionable because it implies something about the representations ... something like an equivalence of expressive power or somesuch. If there is such a thing as expressive power, then a stronger representation should not be recoverable from a weaker one. But I suppose if they all are built from the same type of basis set, then multiple weak ones allow recovery of strong ones.

I'm always fascinated by the emphasis we (all) place on coherence and internal consistency. It seems like some sort of rhetorical fallacy, perhaps the fallacy fallacy. Perhaps we can arrive at the truth in spite of completely flawed (e.g. self-inconsistent) representations? Even a broken clock (Trump) is right (a)periodically.

On 02/21/2017 01:09 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
> In some manner every representation whatever default settings have been applied should be recoverable with every other representation and coherent.
> The more coherent viewpoints the closer the approximation of Truth.

--
☣ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by gepr

My almost five-year old grandson definitely likes being deluded in that sense, I think, when he plays Minecraft. The appeal is obvious: he can wander around the world without adults saying "don't go there", he acquires and manages his "inventory", he can build amazing structures, he can dig deep into the earth, he can explode huge quantities of TNT. We limit him to about an hour a day.

Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email] [hidden email]
Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2017 2:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Well, to be clear, my comment was intended to agree with Vladimyr's point that I kinda like being _deluded_. When you finally remove all the meaning from the math notation and just manipulate the markings, it can be very hypnotic. What would otherwise seem to be meaningless syntax takes on a meaning of its own, regardless of any _symbolic_ intent. (We _can_ coherently ask the question "What is it like to be a zombie".) We can hold both [non-]Platonic positions, because that state depends on the context. Remove all the a priori symbolism, and I become a Platonist. Ground even a single term and I become a constructivist.

As for being in the zone socially, I disagree, though I don't particularly care about any jargonal co-option of the term. During hearty arguments, mostly with religious people, I definitely lose myself in exactly the same way I lose myself after that 3rd mile when running. I have no illusions that my zone is in any way shared by the people I'm arguing with, though ... no more than I think you and I share internal constructs mediated by the word "blue".

I enjoyed Eric's comment on representation precisely because I can't quite buy into the idea that we rely so heavily on "symbolic reference". It relies way too much on the assumption that what goes on in our head is anything like what goes on out there in the ambience.

On 02/21/2017 12:46 PM, Robert Wall wrote:

> Why I bring this up at all is that Whitehead thinks that what integrates these two modes into the whole of what we perceive is *Symbolic Reference*. Symbolic reference is kind of like how we tag bits of our real-world immersion for building a largely symbolic but sustainable--for us individually--worldview. Most time these symbolic references are provided to us--inculcated--by others like with a religion or by our parents. Most are satisfied with that. In your friend's case, I believe it is possible that y' all were unsettling--challenging--his worldview ... or, he challenging yours.
>
> Flow is not likely to be aroused in a social context. [...]
>
> Is mathematics invented or discovered? This is a perennial topic that arises within my philosophy group. It never really gets resolved, but how could it be? It is the ultimate of symbolic reference systems because of its precision in predicting the way the world manifests itself to our perception. [...]
>
> As I often do, I kind of resonate with Vladimyr's thought, which you
> included in your post. It is very Csikszentmihalyi-est. I do think
> that simulations can lure us into thinking that they are an exact
> dynamic facsimile of the reality which they try to abstract into an
> analytical model. There are all kinds of things about simulations
> that can lead us astray. [...]
>
> But, as Vladimyr muses, maybe this is the best we can do ... and
> symbolic reference is what nature served up for us to cope, concerning
> what we are perceiving. But, as with all smart systems, a smart
> entity will always try to challenge and refine those symbols with
> continuous feedback--FLOW. However, in the larger scheme of things,
> it really doesn't matter if mathematics was invented or discovered. I
> mean, where did the concept of a hammer come from? 🤔

--
☣ glen

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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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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Vladimyr Burachynsky

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by Robert Wall

Thanks for the structure of thought .

So am I an Iconoclast because I am all too aware of the misuse of Icons ( simulations). I taught FEM and CAD and

saw puzzlement on the, soon to be, engineers faces. I have watched engineers sneak out of the lecture hall when I started showing slides of

summation of stacked matrices flying across the screen.

So this alludes to a possible intrinsic Tautology or Loopiness in our brains. The representation is conflated with the speculative but unknown reality (since it is never completely understood anyway) Switching from one state to the other might be called metaphysical thinking. A wonderful source of confusion.

Being totally immersed in a computer game might be said to be in the groove but when one man fights another and we call that being in the groove then are we conflating two models. If one is slaughtering the enemies on a game platform one can say he is free of ethics or morality. When Bruce Lee does the same on film

many thought it real. but those who actually fought in life knew it was BS on constrained/elevated ropes.

If the mirror neurons discussed at length do as described then they must occupy configurations near identical to neurons trained by self discovery (learning)

Then actual differentiation would seem very difficult.

I have a daughter formally trained as a M.Sc. BioMedical Artist and we used to argue about symbolic thinking , she pro and I con. But the strangest part is that I am also or was considered a fair artist and illustrator for a time. Indeed I use symbols very well but mistrust others with lesser skill. Yet the most skillful are the most dangerous at least in engineering. She would regularly remark that I sketched in perspective complex machinery that did not yet exist and then built the working prototypes. Nothing elegant but functional. She claimed only to draw what already really existed dead or alive, I always thought those arguments were small expeditions into some form of knowledge about human thinking. She thought otherwise unfortunately, but I have never had the fortune to meet another with her combination of talents. Somewhere in this quasi-church may be others lurking in the shadows.

I admit to being a rather visual thinker so data visualization is my hobby now. And understanding Normal People, since they are so many...

Perhaps this is not exactly the correct thread but miss the song of larks on the prairie fields. A few notes brings back so many memories and the smells

of clover and honey.

vib

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Robert Wall
Sent: February-21-17 2:46 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Hi Glen,

What you describe as flow or being in the zone has been precisely written and talked about by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as the Optimal Experience. No one will experience this quite the same way, as the flow experience requires both skill and challenge in an area where flow will occur. By his own statements, Einstein is said to have been in flow when he synthesized the concept of General and Special Relativity. At the time he was arguably very skilled in math and physics and, of course, very challenged.

However, I prefer Alfred North Whitehead's (et al.) concept that we are all always in flow. We just don't alway realize it. In his Process Philosophy, as conveyed in his Process and Reality, he writes about the two modes of perceptual experience: (1) Presentational Immediacy [the bits of data that get presented to us through our senses--or imagination] and (2) Causal Efficacy [the conditioning of the present by the past]. Curiously, Csikszentmihalyi says that we can only process data from our senses at a rate of 110 bit/sec. Reading this post likely will chew up 60 bits/sec. of that bandwidth. 😴

Why I bring this up at all is that Whitehead thinks that what integrates these two modes into the whole of what we perceive is Symbolic Reference. Symbolic reference is kind of like how we tag bits of our real-world immersion for building a largely symbolic but sustainable--for us individually--worldview. Most time these symbolic references are provided to us--inculcated--by others like with a religion or by our parents. Most are satisfied with that. In your friend's case, I believe it is possible that y' all were unsettling--challenging--his worldview ... or, he challenging yours.

Flow is not likely to be aroused in a social context. It is an inner state ... what the Greeks and Csikszentmihalyi would say is the entering into an alternate reality devoid of our sense of self. Your existence melts away in such a state. So our symbols get challenged or, perhaps, disappear as well. French social philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze also talk about symbolism, but it was at a social level. As far as I am concerned, Flow can't be achieved at the level of society ... but, boy I wish that that were not so. Csikszentmihalyi talks about the opposite of Flow that occurs on a social level that often occurs when society has been thrown into a chaos as with war or Trumpism. 🤔

Is mathematics invented or discovered? This is a perennial topic that arises within my philosophy group. It never really gets resolved, but how could it be? It is the ultimate of symbolic reference systems because of its precision in predicting the way the world manifests itself to our perception. This is not so true of our other symbols or abstractions. So are they any different? In a way, they are because mathematical symbols form from an axiom-driven language. But, notwithstanding Jerry Fodor's "built-in" syntactic language of thought, languages are human inventions based on metaphors [if you like George Lakoff]. Languages work among cultures because they are more or less conventional (acceptable) to a culture. The fact that they can be translated into other languages is because we are all immersed in the same reality. In this way, I tend to think of mathematics as invented. If you are a Platonist--a worldview--you will likely disagree.

As I often do, I kind of resonate with Vladimyr's thought, which you included in your post. It is very Csikszentmihalyi-est. I do think that simulations can lure us into thinking that they are an exact dynamic facsimile of the reality which they try to abstract into an analytical model. There are all kinds of things about simulations that can lead us astray. Fidelity is one thing, obviously. But, I think that the worst thing--and this is often the fate of a simulator because of time and funding--is when they get so complicated that no one understands the process for how the results were computed. This--like with many neural networks--is when the simulator just become an Oracle. This is kind of what happened with Henry Markam's Blue Brain Project, building a simulation of something for which they didn't know the first principles. I think also this is what John Horgan wrote about concerning what was going on at the Santa Fe Institute in his SA article From Complexity to Perplexity.

But, as Vladimyr muses, maybe this is the best we can do ... and symbolic reference is what nature served up for us to cope, concerning what we are perceiving. But, as with all smart systems, a smart entity will always try to challenge and refine those symbols with continuous feedback--FLOW. However, in the larger scheme of things, it really doesn't matter if mathematics was invented or discovered. I mean, where did the concept of a hammer come from? 🤔

Cheers

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:13 AM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

There's no doubt that there's some kernel of truth to the concept of "flow" or "in the zone". I always make the mistake of thinking others have had similar experiences to mine. But at our journal club a few weeks ago, while discussing whether math is invented or discovered, one guy kept conflating mathematical symbols with their semantic grounding. A couple of us kept trying to make the point that after you've abstracted all the symbols away from their grounding, so that you're just manipulating the symbols, you get into the state where you start to think of the math, itself, as having an ontological existence. You're "in the zone", so to speak, where the math becomes real as opposed to a proxy for the real. That the other guy couldn't grok it could be a sign that he's never entered that zone, hamstrung by his grounding to physical reality.

Or, he could have simply felt defensive because he thought we kept attacking him ... you never know how some people interpret the milieu.

On 02/20/2017 10:44 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
> Some music allows some people to focus longer. Maybe Taser jolts work for others. The simulation lures us into fantasy lands. Which I kinda like sometimes.
> Time links these sims of mine but temporality is a coincidence not a true cause and we don't live long enough to test every contingency, so we make do with delusions. There seems no path out of this box. The box just grows with us.
> vib
>
> So why did evolution place so much emphasis on time...

--
☣ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Vladimyr Burachynsky

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen,
You are assuming that a very elaborate sophisticated machine based model will work better than swarms of microbots stitching micro sized jpegs together.

Evolution by its persistence seems to prove that some small part is working correctly. This gives me some faith that we are not a lost cause. Furthermore the Impact of civilization has been underestimated. Writing allows the distant dead to still contribute to current investigations making their insights almost contemporary. I read the announcements of Google's "Deep Think" and "TensorFlow" this week and was delighted to hear that this is Open Source Code.

I have a sense that AI's will become a stabilizing foundation of civilization and memory will no longer be limited to a single life time. Or a single POV.

A swarm of gnats with digital cameras and microphones may make a difference to all of us sooner than a grand Nova Zeus machine.

Oh goody more Code to play with.
vib

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: February-21-17 4:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Tesselation vs. approximation: Ah, right. I was sloppy with my language. Sorry.

What you say in the blurb below is questionable because it implies something about the representations ... something like an equivalence of expressive power or somesuch. If there is such a thing as expressive power, then a stronger representation should not be recoverable from a weaker one. But I suppose if they all are built from the same type of basis set, then multiple weak ones allow recovery of strong ones.

I'm always fascinated by the emphasis we (all) place on coherence and internal consistency. It seems like some sort of rhetorical fallacy, perhaps the fallacy fallacy. Perhaps we can arrive at the truth in spite of completely flawed (e.g. self-inconsistent) representations? Even a broken clock (Trump) is right (a)periodically.

On 02/21/2017 01:09 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
> In some manner every representation whatever default settings have been applied should be recoverable with every other representation and coherent.
> The more coherent viewpoints the closer the approximation of Truth.

--
☣ glen

============================================================
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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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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

gepr

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

I don't know anything about Minecraft. But I do play some video games. And although I dig the "strategy" games most, I also like those with lots of side quests and territory to explore. The main reason is because I enjoy estimating the underlying axioms. E.g. I recently found a cool bug in Assassin's Creed Rogue where you can fall through the ground and swim to any place on the map. I liken that to a singularity in our world. If I could just find that sliver where the tilings don't quite match up, I could slip through the cosmic egg and become a demigod. 8^) This is, of course, why the squares made the psychedelics illegal ... they don't want you wandering around exploring the cracks in the cosmic egg.

On 02/21/2017 03:05 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> My almost five-year old grandson definitely likes being deluded in that sense, I think, when he plays Minecraft. The appeal is obvious: he can wander around the world without adults saying "don't go there", he acquires and manages his "inventory", he can build amazing structures, he can dig deep into the earth, he can explode huge quantities of TNT. We limit him to about an hour a day.

--
␦glen?

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

Robert Wall

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by Vladimyr Burachynsky

Hi Vladimyr,

Nice to chat with you on the glen-channel. :-) I guess I came late to the chat without fully understanding the how it was vectored. It happens ... age ...

Wrt conflating the two models of "being in the groove," y' all seem to be focused on the, perhaps, unintentional fusing of the real with the symbols we assign to the real for analysis or other purposes. This issue works on many levels. Csikszentmihalyi discusses this "being in the zone" in a positive way where creativity happens and what is really lost is our sense of self in the process. Whitehead writes about this as a continuous process change that largely is motivated by "feeling." But there is another side that you and Glen seem to be discussing that presents a more destructive side, where one loses the understanding that the representational is not the represented. We give too much meaning to the symbols such that they migrate from epistemological to ontological. The question becomes are the symbols real? So this is more one of delusion. Okay ... I think I am "in the groove" now. :-)

You draw an interesting distinction between war-oriented computer games and real war engagements. The distinction, however, seems to be fading away in the drone-engagement wars. The representational becomes the grounded reality. An emulation and not a simulation. One of the combatants--the targeted--are but mere symbols, like on a heads-up display in a military fighter plane or just images on a computer monitor. Empire can go to war without actually going to war ... at least not until you have to own and occupy what Empire has destroyed: the livelihoods of the newly-minted refugees and the newly-minted enemies. Killing becomes painless and remorseless and danger-free. It becomes like a war-oriented computer game in that no one is shooting back at the guy who is pulling the trigger or at the "joy" stick.

For a time, I used to build educating simulators for propositional war games that were used tactically in the field and strategically in a so-called war college. But these were still the kind where the assets and weapons were symbolic and just representational of possible eventualities. The goal was war training with only cyber-oriented risk ... kind of like a flight simulator. But now, these simulators seem to have been weaponized and the risk all but eliminated.

When you finally remove all the meaning from the math notation and just manipulate the markings, it can be very hypnotic.

Yes. For the triggermen, the process is kind of like the one Glen describes where the symbols have become ungrounded, valueless, meaningless. But, in reality, the "game" is no longer a simulation (a model) but an emulation (a surrogate for something real) operating in real time. And, for the targets, the process is the opposite of the one Glen describes where the symbols are very much grounded. Is the corollary that the triggermen are Platonists and the targeted combatants are Constructivists?

Most of my time working under the rubric of systems engineering, though, was in building simulators for decision support. This I much preferred. This seemed more constructive than destructive or combative, even if still only a simulator. But are we deluded to believe these models, or any model, to be reasonable facsimiles of the modeled, at least in the context of its range of applicability? Is face validity enough? I mentioned some issues concerning this in the previous post.

With the FEM and CAD background, I suspect you were or are a structural engineer by profession. In fact, educationally, FEM is being used to analyze Minecraft structural models. But, these FEM models--like with, say, NASTRAN--are quite accurate at predicting the behavior of mechanical or structural devices under the expected stresses. We could predict where they would break. Had to be accurate to have any value.

So I guess the point of all of this is that there is quite a spectrum of simulators to consider. In turn, there is a spectrum of the strength of binding between the representational and the speculative or represented. Analytical simulators are of no value if they are not believable, which comes about through the rigor of verification and validation.

On the other hand, computer games are inherently unbelievable as they are just for entertainment. But, I have known some folks who get totally lost in cult-like internet games like Dungeons and Dragons, which is what ... forty-years old now? Yeah, this is loopiness and possibly dangerously tautological. But delusions can be fun. An escape to an alternate reality. Good that Frank limits this to an hour/day for his grandson. :-)

As for being in the zone socially, I disagree, though I don't particularly care about any jargonal co-option of the term. During hearty arguments, mostly with religious people, I definitely lose myself in exactly the same way I lose myself after that 3rd mile when running. I have no illusions that my zone is in any way shared by the people I'm arguing with, though ... no more than I think you and I share internal constructs mediated by the word "blue"

To be clear, Glen, I was referring to a society being "in the zone" as a whole. Maybe this could mean an alignment of symbolic references. Not sure, but, like you, somewhat dubious that this could happen. Within my philosophy group, we have discussed the idea of conscious evolution--becoming, say, wiser, by being "in the zone" so to speak--with respect to the individual. And I do see this as kind of a Csikszentmihalyi-est "being in the zone," a period of selfless awareness of a task or challenge. It's a neurological phenomenon. The objective is to make the period last as long as possible. Society is not very good at being selfless, even for a moment.

Perhaps with the assistance of Hebbian learning, say, over time this is possible for individuals who work at it to remain in this state longer than is typical. It becomes a skill or practice. But bubbling this up to the level of a society does not seem possible. Religion hasn't and won't do it because that's a model that requires blind credulity to the provided surreal symbols. Even in the context of Hebbian learning, where are the "societal neurons" that need to be rewired from their inculcated states? They tend to be imbued in the laws and in the prevailing morality memes. But these are just things to be gamed to ensure a face validity with our self-full life simulations.

The key component to any smart system is feedback. But, we live in a society that is running open loop. Another form of loopiness or delusion, I guess ... believing that everything will work out in the long run. We are exceptional. We have democratic elections ... Hmmm, I think the awakening is happening. Maybe there is hope? Is that a drone I hear above ... Oh, it's just an Amazone delivery ... or is it? :-)

Cheers

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 6:45 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks for the structure of thought .

So am I an Iconoclast because I am all too aware of the misuse of Icons ( simulations). I taught FEM and CAD and
saw puzzlement on the, soon to be, engineers faces. I have watched engineers sneak out of the lecture hall when I started showing slides of
summation of stacked matrices flying across the screen.

So this alludes to a possible intrinsic Tautology or Loopiness in our brains. The representation is conflated with the speculative but unknown reality (since it is never completely understood anyway) Switching from one state to the other might be called metaphysical thinking. A wonderful source of confusion.
Being totally immersed in a computer game might be said to be in the groove but when one man fights another and we call that being in the groove then are we conflating two models. If one is slaughtering the enemies on a game platform one can say he is free of ethics or morality. When Bruce Lee does the same on film
many thought it real. but those who actually fought in life knew it was BS on constrained/elevated ropes.

If the mirror neurons discussed at length do as described then they must occupy configurations near identical to neurons trained by self discovery (learning)
Then actual differentiation would seem very difficult.

I have a daughter formally trained as a M.Sc. BioMedical Artist and we used to argue about symbolic thinking , she pro and I con. But the strangest part is that I am also or was considered a fair artist and illustrator for a time. Indeed I use symbols very well but mistrust others with lesser skill. Yet the most skillful are the most dangerous at least in engineering. She would regularly remark that I sketched in perspective complex machinery that did not yet exist and then built the working prototypes. Nothing elegant but functional. She claimed only to draw what already really existed dead or alive, I always thought those arguments were small expeditions into some form of knowledge about human thinking. She thought otherwise unfortunately, but I have never had the fortune to meet another with her combination of talents. Somewhere in this quasi-church may be others lurking in the shadows.

I admit to being a rather visual thinker so data visualization is my hobby now. And understanding Normal People, since they are so many...
Perhaps this is not exactly the correct thread but miss the song of larks on the prairie fields. A few notes brings back so many memories and the smells
of clover and honey.
vib

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Robert Wall
Sent: February-21-17 2:46 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Hi Glen,

What you describe as flow or being in the zone has been precisely written and talked about by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as the Optimal Experience. No one will experience this quite the same way, as the flow experience requires both skill and challenge in an area where flow will occur. By his own statements, Einstein is said to have been in flow when he synthesized the concept of General and Special Relativity. At the time he was arguably very skilled in math and physics and, of course, very challenged.

However, I prefer Alfred North Whitehead's (et al.) concept that we are all always in flow. We just don't alway realize it. In his Process Philosophy, as conveyed in his Process and Reality, he writes about the two modes of perceptual experience: (1) Presentational Immediacy [the bits of data that get presented to us through our senses--or imagination] and (2) Causal Efficacy [the conditioning of the present by the past]. Curiously, Csikszentmihalyi says that we can only process data from our senses at a rate of 110 bit/sec. Reading this post likely will chew up 60 bits/sec. of that bandwidth.

Why I bring this up at all is that Whitehead thinks that what integrates these two modes into the whole of what we perceive is Symbolic Reference. Symbolic reference is kind of like how we tag bits of our real-world immersion for building a largely symbolic but sustainable--for us individually--worldview. Most time these symbolic references are provided to us--inculcated--by others like with a religion or by our parents. Most are satisfied with that. In your friend's case, I believe it is possible that y' all were unsettling--challenging--his worldview ... or, he challenging yours.

Flow is not likely to be aroused in a social context. It is an inner state ... what the Greeks and Csikszentmihalyi would say is the entering into an alternate reality devoid of our sense of self. Your existence melts away in such a state. So our symbols get challenged or, perhaps, disappear as well. French social philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze also talk about symbolism, but it was at a social level. As far as I am concerned, Flow can't be achieved at the level of society ... but, boy I wish that that were not so. Csikszentmihalyi talks about the opposite of Flow that occurs on a social level that often occurs when society has been thrown into a chaos as with war or Trumpism.

Is mathematics invented or discovered? This is a perennial topic that arises within my philosophy group. It never really gets resolved, but how could it be? It is the ultimate of symbolic reference systems because of its precision in predicting the way the world manifests itself to our perception. This is not so true of our other symbols or abstractions. So are they any different? In a way, they are because mathematical symbols form from an axiom-driven language. But, notwithstanding Jerry Fodor's "built-in" syntactic language of thought, languages are human inventions based on metaphors [if you like George Lakoff]. Languages work among cultures because they are more or less conventional (acceptable) to a culture. The fact that they can be translated into other languages is because we are all immersed in the same reality. In this way, I tend to think of mathematics as invented. If you are a Platonist--a worldview--you will likely disagree.

As I often do, I kind of resonate with Vladimyr's thought, which you included in your post. It is very Csikszentmihalyi-est. I do think that simulations can lure us into thinking that they are an exact dynamic facsimile of the reality which they try to abstract into an analytical model. There are all kinds of things about simulations that can lead us astray. Fidelity is one thing, obviously. But, I think that the worst thing--and this is often the fate of a simulator because of time and funding--is when they get so complicated that no one understands the process for how the results were computed. This--like with many neural networks--is when the simulator just become an Oracle. This is kind of what happened with Henry Markam's Blue Brain Project, building a simulation of something for which they didn't know the first principles. I think also this is what John Horgan wrote about concerning what was going on at the Santa Fe Institute in his SA article From Complexity to Perplexity.

But, as Vladimyr muses, maybe this is the best we can do ... and symbolic reference is what nature served up for us to cope, concerning what we are perceiving. But, as with all smart systems, a smart entity will always try to challenge and refine those symbols with continuous feedback--FLOW. However, in the larger scheme of things, it really doesn't matter if mathematics was invented or discovered. I mean, where did the concept of a hammer come from?

Cheers

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:13 AM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

There's no doubt that there's some kernel of truth to the concept of "flow" or "in the zone". I always make the mistake of thinking others have had similar experiences to mine. But at our journal club a few weeks ago, while discussing whether math is invented or discovered, one guy kept conflating mathematical symbols with their semantic grounding. A couple of us kept trying to make the point that after you've abstracted all the symbols away from their grounding, so that you're just manipulating the symbols, you get into the state where you start to think of the math, itself, as having an ontological existence. You're "in the zone", so to speak, where the math becomes real as opposed to a proxy for the real. That the other guy couldn't grok it could be a sign that he's never entered that zone, hamstrung by his grounding to physical reality.

Or, he could have simply felt defensive because he thought we kept attacking him ... you never know how some people interpret the milieu.

On 02/20/2017 10:44 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
> Some music allows some people to focus longer. Maybe Taser jolts work for others. The simulation lures us into fantasy lands. Which I kinda like sometimes.
> Time links these sims of mine but temporality is a coincidence not a true cause and we don't live long enough to test every contingency, so we make do with delusions. There seems no path out of this box. The box just grows with us.
> vib
>
> So why did evolution place so much emphasis on time...

--
glen

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

jon zingale

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Thank you, those responsible for the

discussion regarding simulation and

the real. Here is a competition currently

sponsored by MIT where competitors write

AI to perform automated war: BattleCode.

Jon Zingale

gepr

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by Robert Wall

Right, I think I got that you meant society being in the zone. You expressed doubt and I disagree with you -- meaning only that I have less doubt. 8^) I think society can (and does, often) get into a zone/groove/flow. Some symptoms that are often complained about are "mob behavior", "groupthink", etc. Some symptoms that are lauded are "wisdom of crowds", "negative freedoms" (freedom to _not_ be mugged, etc.), low unemployment, etc.

My reference to my individual state of mind when I'm engaged in social activity was probably misleading, however. What I should have referred to is something like stigmergy or the co-constructed landscape, infrastructure. Some of us complain about the entitlement of the younger generations. But really it's a good thing that they feel entitled ... entitled to walk down dark alleys without being killed ... entitled to buy a state of the art automobile for only $25k ... entitled to drive that automobile and experience the (waning) culture of Route 66. Etc.

These are "society in a groove". And it's a good thing for the most part. There are risks, e.g. populism, riots, the absence of critical thinking ... not knowing how to start a fire without a lighter, etc.

Anyway, so I disagree with the idea that society, as a group, can't be "in the zone". But I believe that the thoughts inside the members of the society are not really _shared_ thoughts. The societal groove does not depend on isomorphic relationships between the insides of the members' heads. (holography again) And the extent to which individuals' grooves map to societal grooves is unclear (and probably complex).

On 02/22/2017 12:18 PM, Robert Wall wrote:

>> As for being in the zone socially, I disagree, though I don't particularly
>> care about any jargonal co-option of the term. During hearty arguments,
>> mostly with religious people, I definitely lose myself in exactly the same
>> way I lose myself after that 3rd mile when running. I have no illusions
>> that my zone is in any way shared by the people I'm arguing with, though
>> ... no more than I think you and I share internal constructs mediated by
>> the word "blue"
>
>
> To be clear, Glen, I was referring to a society being "in the zone" as a
> whole. Maybe this could mean an alignment of symbolic references. Not
> sure, but, like you, somewhat dubious that this could happen. Within my
> philosophy group, we have discussed the idea of *conscious
> evolution*--becoming,
> say, wiser, by being "in the zone" so to speak--*with respect to the
> individua*l. And I do see this as kind of a Csikszentmihalyi-est "being in
> the zone," a period of selfless awareness of a task or challenge. It's a
> neurological phenomenon. The objective is to make the period last as long
> as possible. Society is not very good at being selfless, even for a moment.
>
> Perhaps with the assistance of Hebbian learning, say, over time this is
> possible for individuals who work at it to remain in this state longer than
> is typical. It becomes a skill or practice. But bubbling this up to the
> level of a society does not seem possible. Religion hasn't and won't do it
> because that's a model that requires blind credulity to the provided
> surreal symbols. Even in the context of Hebbian learning, where are the
> "societal neurons" that need to be rewired from their inculcated states?
> They tend to be imbued in the laws and in the prevailing morality memes.
> But these are just things to be gamed to ensure a *face validity* with our
> self-full life simulations.
>
> The key component to any smart system is feedback. But, we live in a
> society that is running open loop. Another form of loopiness or delusion,
> I guess ... believing that everything will work out in the long run. We
> are exceptional. We have democratic elections ... Hmmm, I think the
> awakening is happening. Maybe there is hope? Is that a drone I hear above
> ... Oh, it's just an Amazone delivery ... or is it? :-)

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Vladimyr Burachynsky

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Glen,

I think Robert Wall is nudging close to an idea that he failed to adequately clarify but you may have nailed it while trying to deny it (this I call a backhanded strike). Last week there was a strange article about groups of people having the same memory that have no contact with each other. That shared memory was in fact demonstrably false. It was regarding a misperceived memory of a TV show called Shazaam and some comedian called Sinbad... My mind retains utter garbage sometimes.

I never saw it but then it never actually happened. The investigators explained that so many of the false memory components overlapped reality
that the subjects truly believed some occurrence that was categorically disproved. So a society may well share memories of fictional events and act on delusions ie mobs.

If an individual may fall into a groove then how else can mass insanity be better explained. I always recall that in history strange things happen on mass scale. For instance during the heated animosity between the Greeks and Latins a feud broke out over religious icons. West was Iconophilic and the east was Iconoclastic. The Latins were so pissed they assembled an armada in Rimini or Ravenna and sailed this monstrosity down the Adriatic to defend the faith. Somewhere between Brindisi and Corfu the greatest historical storm destroyed the entire fleet of ships sparing Byzantium a certain defeat. So Leo made a few compromises and things sort of settled down but then another group of serious iconoclasts made trouble the Paulicians. Then the Muslims came along and the world is still fractured in many ways. It always struck me as the height of insanity to go to war over Symbols and I think Monty Python once made a skit out of crusaders and muslims beating the crap out of each other with religious banners and gilded reliquaries. While the armed knights and Saracens looked on in amazement. Whether this ever happened , I do not know, but can guess. Perhaps " the groove" has a darkside a suicidal aspect, such as the Battle of Gallipoli, as well as the neutral individual features we love to discuss openly.

I always suspected that Hatred is transmitted from mothers to children as is influenza propagation. I recall some very strange conversations between my German Mother and Ukrainian Aunt that bordered on the rabid hatred of mad dogs. Then they just continued serving Christmas dinner in total silence, when the men returned to the dinner table. My Uncle a devout Catholic and former Ukrainian Cavalry Officer would think nothing of Beheading Russians long after he was defeated in the 1920's. Indeed he was otherwise a rational Civil Engineer with a penchant for Botany but he hated anything that sounded affiliated with Russia or Eastern Orthodoxy. I could never tell the difference except for the slanted foot support on the crucifix. Hardly enough reason for bloodshed.

But Dylan Rouffe and Alexandre Bisonette slaughtered defenseless congregations and showed no shame nor regret. They may be said to have been proud of what they did. Anders Brevijk may well have been in a dark trench at the time of his methodical depredations of children, again no shame. No one mentions that that slaughter by a single man exceeded anything in the Old Testament perhaps a Cuiness World Record. Populism may well be a filthy outpouring of bottled up hatred. And the perverted demagogues revel in the delusion that they can manipulate it to their personal benefits.

It is not a welcome insight into human nature, I apologize for disturbing the peace.

Well Canada is sending taxis to the border to rescue Somali's ignorant of our cold. Now our old ladies think the sky is falling because of a few refugees trying to run from Trump. Back in the 1960's and 70's we took in hundreds of American draft dodgers and the sun remained in Orbit.

I must admit that I had some fun today speaking to a millennial visitor that could no longer abide liberal visciousness in the media. Left or right they are both resorting to fascistic techniques. He expected me to support the right but i laughed it off, I am more of a centrist anarchist I confessed, the other side of the sphere, so there was no need to abuse my hospitality.

vib

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: February-23-17 5:12 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Right, I think I got that you meant society being in the zone. You expressed doubt and I disagree with you -- meaning only that I have less doubt. 8^) I think society can (and does, often) get into a zone/groove/flow. Some symptoms that are often complained about are "mob behavior", "groupthink", etc. Some symptoms that are lauded are "wisdom of crowds", "negative freedoms" (freedom to _not_ be mugged, etc.), low unemployment, etc.

My reference to my individual state of mind when I'm engaged in social activity was probably misleading, however. What I should have referred to is something like stigmergy or the co-constructed landscape, infrastructure. Some of us complain about the entitlement of the younger generations. But really it's a good thing that they feel entitled ... entitled to walk down dark alleys without being killed ... entitled to buy a state of the art automobile for only $25k ... entitled to drive that automobile and experience the (waning) culture of Route 66. Etc.

These are "society in a groove". And it's a good thing for the most part. There are risks, e.g. populism, riots, the absence of critical thinking ... not knowing how to start a fire without a lighter, etc.

Anyway, so I disagree with the idea that society, as a group, can't be "in the zone". But I believe that the thoughts inside the members of the society are not really _shared_ thoughts. The societal groove does not depend on isomorphic relationships between the insides of the members' heads. (holography again) And the extent to which individuals' grooves map to societal grooves is unclear (and probably complex).

On 02/22/2017 12:18 PM, Robert Wall wrote:

>> As for being in the zone socially, I disagree, though I don't
>> particularly care about any jargonal co-option of the term. During
>> hearty arguments, mostly with religious people, I definitely lose
>> myself in exactly the same way I lose myself after that 3rd mile when
>> running. I have no illusions that my zone is in any way shared by
>> the people I'm arguing with, though ... no more than I think you and
>> I share internal constructs mediated by the word "blue"
>
>
> To be clear, Glen, I was referring to a society being "in the zone" as
> a whole. Maybe this could mean an alignment of symbolic references.
> Not sure, but, like you, somewhat dubious that this could happen.
> Within my philosophy group, we have discussed the idea of *conscious
> evolution*--becoming, say, wiser, by being "in the zone" so to
> speak--*with respect to the individua*l. And I do see this as kind of
> a Csikszentmihalyi-est "being in the zone," a period of selfless
> awareness of a task or challenge. It's a neurological phenomenon. The
> objective is to make the period last as long as possible. Society is
> not very good at being selfless, even for a moment.
>
> Perhaps with the assistance of Hebbian learning, say, over time this
> is possible for individuals who work at it to remain in this state
> longer than is typical. It becomes a skill or practice. But bubbling
> this up to the level of a society does not seem possible. Religion
> hasn't and won't do it because that's a model that requires blind
> credulity to the provided surreal symbols. Even in the context of
> Hebbian learning, where are the "societal neurons" that need to be rewired from their inculcated states?
> They tend to be imbued in the laws and in the prevailing morality memes.
> But these are just things to be gamed to ensure a *face validity* with
> our self-full life simulations.
>
> The key component to any smart system is feedback. But, we live in a
> society that is running open loop. Another form of loopiness or
> delusion, I guess ... believing that everything will work out in the
> long run. We are exceptional. We have democratic elections ... Hmmm,
> I think the awakening is happening. Maybe there is hope? Is that a
> drone I hear above ... Oh, it's just an Amazone delivery ... or is it?
> :-)

Vladimyr Burachynsky

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by jon zingale

To the congregation,

Oops, someone is watching….

I had Better pull up my trousers and get a shave

Jeez, I was only running off at the mouth about getting into TensorFlow code.

vib

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: February-23-17 12:29 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Thank you, those responsible for the

discussion regarding simulation and

the real. Here is a competition currently

sponsored by MIT where competitors write

AI to perform automated war: BattleCode.

Jon Zingale

Nick Thompson

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by Vladimyr Burachynsky

All—

If you want to find the Dylan Roof key on your own emotional piano, think about the last time you indulged yourself in road rage. According to one kind of evolutionary psychology, road rage is an instance of "altruistic punishment". Altruistic punishment is selected at the group level. When in that groove, we are so possessed that we are willing to risk our own lives to support the norms of our perceived in-group.

Altruistic rage is by far the most dangerous emotion we experience. Not how Trump works tirelessly to create the conditions that will foster it. Every genocide is preceded by “conditioning” to suppose that it is our highest duty to defend our values against those who do not share them.

Nick Thompson

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 Vladimyr Burachynsky
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2017 7:59 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Glen,

I think Robert Wall is nudging close to an idea that he failed to adequately clarify but you may have nailed it while trying to deny it (this I call a backhanded strike). Last week there was a strange article about groups of people having the same memory that have no contact with each other. That shared memory was in fact demonstrably false. It was regarding a misperceived memory of a TV show called Shazaam and some comedian called Sinbad... My mind retains utter garbage sometimes.

I never saw it but then it never actually happened. The investigators explained that so many of the false memory components overlapped reality that the subjects truly believed some occurrence that was categorically disproved. So a society may well share memories of fictional events and act on delusions ie mobs.

If an individual may fall into a groove then how else can mass insanity be better explained. I always recall that in history strange things happen on mass scale. For instance during the heated animosity between the Greeks and Latins a feud broke out over religious icons. West was Iconophilic and the east was Iconoclastic. The Latins were so pissed they assembled an armada in Rimini or Ravenna and sailed this monstrosity down the Adriatic to defend the faith. Somewhere between Brindisi and Corfu the greatest historical storm destroyed the entire fleet of ships sparing Byzantium a certain defeat. So Leo made a few compromises and things sort of settled down but then another group of serious iconoclasts made trouble the Paulicians. Then the Muslims came along and the world is still fractured in many ways. It always struck me as the height of insanity to go to war over Symbols and I think Monty Python once made a skit out of crusaders and muslims beating the crap out of each other with religious banners and gilded reliquaries. While the armed knights and Saracens looked on in amazement. Whether this ever happened , I do not know, but can guess. Perhaps " the groove" has a darkside a suicidal aspect, such as the Battle of Gallipoli, as well as the neutral individual features we love to discuss openly.

I always suspected that Hatred is transmitted from mothers to children as is influenza propagation. I recall some very strange conversations between my German Mother and Ukrainian Aunt that bordered on the rabid hatred of mad dogs. Then they just continued serving Christmas dinner in total silence, when the men returned to the dinner table. My Uncle a devout Catholic and former Ukrainian Cavalry Officer would think nothing of Beheading Russians long after he was defeated in the 1920's. Indeed he was otherwise a rational Civil Engineer with a penchant for Botany but he hated anything that sounded affiliated with Russia or Eastern Orthodoxy. I could never tell the difference except for the slanted foot support on the crucifix. Hardly enough reason for bloodshed.

But Dylan Rouffe and Alexandre Bisonette slaughtered defenseless congregations and showed no shame nor regret. They may be said to have been proud of what they did. Anders Brevijk may well have been in a dark trench at the time of his methodical depredations of children, again no shame. No one mentions that that slaughter by a single man exceeded anything in the Old Testament perhaps a Cuiness World Record. Populism may well be a filthy outpouring of bottled up hatred. And the perverted demagogues revel in the delusion that they can manipulate it to their personal benefits.

It is not a welcome insight into human nature, I apologize for disturbing the peace.

Well Canada is sending taxis to the border to rescue Somali's ignorant of our cold. Now our old ladies think the sky is falling because of a few refugees trying to run from Trump. Back in the 1960's and 70's we took in hundreds of American draft dodgers and the sun remained in Orbit.

I must admit that I had some fun today speaking to a millennial visitor that could no longer abide liberal visciousness in the media. Left or right they are both resorting to fascistic techniques. He expected me to support the right but i laughed it off, I am more of a centrist anarchist I confessed, the other side of the sphere, so there was no need to abuse my hospitality.

vib

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?

Sent: February-23-17 5:12 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

My reference to my individual state of mind when I'm engaged in social activity was probably misleading, however. What I should have referred to is something like stigmergy or the co-constructed landscape, infrastructure. Some of us complain about the entitlement of the younger generations. But really it's a good thing that they feel entitled ... entitled to walk down dark alleys without being killed ... entitled to buy a state of the art automobile for only $25k ... entitled to drive that automobile and experience the (waning) culture of Route 66. Etc.

These are "society in a groove". And it's a good thing for the most part. There are risks, e.g. populism, riots, the absence of critical thinking ... not knowing how to start a fire without a lighter, etc.

Anyway, so I disagree with the idea that society, as a group, can't be "in the zone". But I believe that the thoughts inside the members of the society are not really _shared_ thoughts. The societal groove does not depend on isomorphic relationships between the insides of the members' heads. (holography again) And the extent to which individuals' grooves map to societal grooves is unclear (and probably complex).

On 02/22/2017 12:18 PM, Robert Wall wrote:

>> As for being in the zone socially, I disagree, though I don't

>> particularly care about any jargonal co-option of the term. During

>> hearty arguments, mostly with religious people, I definitely lose

>> myself in exactly the same way I lose myself after that 3rd mile when

>> running. I have no illusions that my zone is in any way shared by

>> the people I'm arguing with, though ... no more than I think you and

>> I share internal constructs mediated by the word "blue"

> To be clear, Glen, I was referring to a society being "in the zone" as

> a whole. Maybe this could mean an alignment of symbolic references.

> Not sure, but, like you, somewhat dubious that this could happen.

> Within my philosophy group, we have discussed the idea of *conscious

> evolution*--becoming, say, wiser, by being "in the zone" so to

> speak--*with respect to the individua*l. And I do see this as kind of

> a Csikszentmihalyi-est "being in the zone," a period of selfless

> awareness of a task or challenge. It's a neurological phenomenon. The

> objective is to make the period last as long as possible. Society is

> not very good at being selfless, even for a moment.

> Perhaps with the assistance of Hebbian learning, say, over time this

> is possible for individuals who work at it to remain in this state

> longer than is typical. It becomes a skill or practice. But bubbling

> this up to the level of a society does not seem possible. Religion

> hasn't and won't do it because that's a model that requires blind

> credulity to the provided surreal symbols. Even in the context of

> Hebbian learning, where are the "societal neurons" that need to be rewired from their inculcated states?

> They tend to be imbued in the laws and in the prevailing morality memes.

> But these are just things to be gamed to ensure a *face validity* with

> our self-full life simulations.

> The key component to any smart system is feedback. But, we live in a

> society that is running open loop. Another form of loopiness or

> delusion, I guess ... believing that everything will work out in the

> long run. We are exceptional. We have democratic elections ... Hmmm,

> I think the awakening is happening. Maybe there is hope? Is that a

> drone I hear above ... Oh, it's just an Amazone delivery ... or is it?

> :-)

☣ glen

============================================================

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

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

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

gepr

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by Vladimyr Burachynsky

I think I anticipated your backhanded strike. >8^D I did this with my (badly mangled) reference to (and skepticism about) the holographic principle ... or behaviorism in psychology ... or hidden markov models ... or state space reconstruction methods ... or by any of a huge number of other symbols.

A many to one projection from a complicated space to a simple space _facilitates_ shared delusion because it makes the complicated things _seem_ similar even though they're not. That is what explains your shared delusions like Shazaam. It's a mistake to infer that the complicated spaces (the deluded people's minds/brains/bodies/culture) are the same just because their projections (the things they say and do) are the same.

Although you're invocation of Occam's razor seems appropriate, your assertion (similarities in the low dimension space are caused by similarities in the high dimension space) is not the simplest explanation at all. The simplest explanation is the one identified in that paper about the fractal dimension of Rorcshach blots (still on topic!) and that identified by Lakoff about Trump's language. A medium with low dimension allows the high dimension participants to "fill in the gaps".

On 02/23/2017 06:58 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
> I think Robert Wall is nudging close to an idea that he failed to adequately clarify but you may have nailed it while trying to deny it (this I call a backhanded strike). Last week there was a strange article about groups of people having the same memory that have no contact with each other. That shared memory was in fact demonstrably false. It was regarding a misperceived memory of a TV show called Shazaam and some comedian called Sinbad... My mind retains utter garbage sometimes.
>
> I never saw it but then it never actually happened. The investigators explained that so many of the false memory components overlapped reality
> that the subjects truly believed some occurrence that was categorically disproved. So a society may well share memories of fictional events and act on delusions ie mobs.

--
␦glen?

============================================================
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
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

gepr

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by jon zingale

Thanks for the link, Jon.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/battlecode-releases-2017/releases/specs-1.6.2.html
> In a race to be the most benevolent, factions must either donate the most to the cause, or destroy anyone more altruistic than they are.

That last part is hilarious. It reminded me of the libertarian nonsense of "effective altruism": http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Effective_altruism ... an N-entendre for the word "gaming".

On 02/23/2017 10:29 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> Thank you, those responsible for the
> discussion regarding simulation and
> the real. Here is a competition currently
> sponsored by MIT where competitors write
> AI to perform automated war: BattleCode <https://www.battlecode.org/>.

--
☣ glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Robert Wall

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by gepr

It's a mistake to infer that the complicated spaces (the deluded people's minds/brains/bodies/culture) are the same just because their projections (the things they say and do) are the same.

Yeah, and that is not the same as what I meant for a society being in the zone as a whole, though Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi does initiate his talk with examples of a kind of mass hysteria brought about by cataclysmic events when introducing a topic he calls the Optimal Experience. Presumably, he used mass hysteria for contrast, but I think clumsily because he doesn't relate an Optimal Experience at the level of society. The examples of folks who demonstrate the phenomenon he is relating are individuals like Albert Einstein. So what is he talking about? What am I talking about? What are y' all talking about? The symbols seem the same, but we seem to be talking past one another. It happens ...

Trying to be a bit clearer here and not at all retaliating with any backhand strike😊, the idea I am nudging forth is one that seems to be rare even among individuals, nevermind societies. We recognize its occurrence in the works of others we often describe as geniuses, but that may belie its true rate of occurrence. It is metaphorically called "Flow." It's a positive effect and not a hysterical one, which perhaps is the opposite of the "flow" that Vladimyr describes through historical accounts. I see Flow as the place to find wisdom, understanding, craft, art, poetry ... not mayhem. In his essay The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger effectively sees Flow as the way to save us from what he calls technological enframement ... the ultimate sociological delivery system of debilitating symbolic references. [not saying technology is bad, but that enframement is a danger].

In a recent discussion about Henri Bergson, the preeminent French philosopher of the early twentieth century, I came to dwell on some writing about Bergson's comparing intuition to intellect:

Science promises us well-being, or, at the most, pleasure, but philosophy, through the Intuition to which it leads us, is capable of bestowing upon us Joy. The future belongs to such an intuitive philosophy, Bergson holds, for he considers that the whole progress of Evolution is towards the creation of a type of being whose Intuition will be equal to his Intelligence. Finally, by Intuition we shall find ourselves in—to invent a word—"intunation" with the élan vital, with the Evolution of the whole universe, and this absolute feeling of "at- one-ment" with the universe will result in that emotional synthesis which is deep Joy, which Wordsworth [ Lines "composed above Tintern Abbey, 1798.] describes as:

"that blessed mood
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy
We see into the life of things."

"... a type of being whose Intuition will be equal to his Intelligence." This is Heidegger with his Dasein. Is it also Nietzsche with his Übermensch?

Is the problem with societies that they cannot behold the world intuitively ... without symbols? This may be impossible even ... because we humans are led by the rational ... tainted, of course, by self-interest. The rational perspective ultimately leads to the conclusion that the universe is nothing but a bunch of particles, as it has Steven Weinberg. We relate to each other mostly symbolically. To relate on an intuitive level, well that's called empathy, sympathy, understanding, ... love. None of these properties can be embraced rationally. They are beyond language.

Bergson insists as well, and correctly I think, that we are often misled by the imprecision of language, something he doesn't trust as getting things adequately conveyed to others because language is loaded with, well, symbolic reference. And this leads to a "Tower of Babel" phenomenon at the level of society as manifest in all social media. The quote I used at the beginning of this post by Glen is tantamount to saying the same thing ... complicated spaces presumed to be the imperfectly shared sets of symbolic references we would call worldviews. Islamaphobia, for one, is not a what I would call an Optimal Experience. Nor does it approach wisdom on any level.

A parable: In concert with the roots of this thread--is being in the zone delusional?--Bergsonian view of this situation may see society as multiple billion organic simulators crawling the planet, who have evolved far enough to loosely self-organized into tribes and set up a system of patterned utterances to communicate within tribal sets of other such simulators. For each simulator, this provides a comforting feeling of not being alone and so, safe. What emerges, though, is a dependency on the rule-based axioms [or grammar] that underlie the pattern of utterances and concepts, and they go about rationalizing everything they come in contact with in accordance with the ever expanding "knowledgebase."

But they do this at a cost--the proverbial bite from the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, as it were--because as the world the simulators see now becomes ever more epistemologically "known," it is also becoming ever more ontologically meaningless. As this happens, the tribal individual simulators start to "feel" ever more sociologically alone and unsafe. Have we been expelled from the Garden of Eden?

And they begin to wonder about the meaning of it all. And in Self-defense, they start to turn to surreal, other-world symbols to help them to rationalize their current state of unhappiness. But, others, more reflective among them, who have been contemplating this phenomenology--philosophers--are saying things like "What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors." "There are no facts, only interpretations." "Every word is a prejudice." "The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking." It's disturbing ... What are we missing?! What was the true cost of this "emergence," which took root at the same time that language and, perhaps, intellect and civilization did?

Perhaps, the individual simulators have been deluded into thinking that their worldview is real, immutable, ... and that the everything else in the world was put there for their exploitation and happiness. They think that those are just things outside of themselves, objectified things with names that are wholly unrelated to other things. The only really important thing is the Self. Embodied experience. But, is it? ... And what is really important at the level of society and how does that thing get accomplished? To be sure, it doesn't get accomplished by chaos. It might happen through harmony, but I don't think it will be a harmony of symbolic references alone ...

This has been a thinker among some of us for some time. It just doesn't seem resolvable without effective feedback at the level of a society.

Let's make that great (again?).

And, so, that's why I don't think that society as a whole will likely find itself in the zone. Now I hope that's clear. 😴

Cheers 😎

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 7:52 AM, ┣glen┫ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think I anticipated your backhanded strike. >8^D I did this with my (badly mangled) reference to (and skepticism about) the holographic principle ... or behaviorism in psychology ... or hidden markov models ... or state space reconstruction methods ... or by any of a huge number of other symbols.

A many to one projection from a complicated space to a simple space _facilitates_ shared delusion because it makes the complicated things _seem_ similar even though they're not. That is what explains your shared delusions like Shazaam. It's a mistake to infer that the complicated spaces (the deluded people's minds/brains/bodies/culture) are the same just because their projections (the things they say and do) are the same.

Although you're invocation of Occam's razor seems appropriate, your assertion (similarities in the low dimension space are caused by similarities in the high dimension space) is not the simplest explanation at all. The simplest explanation is the one identified in that paper about the fractal dimension of Rorcshach blots (still on topic!) and that identified by Lakoff about Trump's language. A medium with low dimension allows the high dimension participants to "fill in the gaps".

On 02/23/2017 06:58 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
> I think Robert Wall is nudging close to an idea that he failed to adequately clarify but you may have nailed it while trying to deny it (this I call a backhanded strike). Last week there was a strange article about groups of people having the same memory that have no contact with each other. That shared memory was in fact demonstrably false. It was regarding a misperceived memory of a TV show called Shazaam and some comedian called Sinbad... My mind retains utter garbage sometimes.
>
> I never saw it but then it never actually happened. The investigators explained that so many of the false memory components overlapped reality
> that the subjects truly believed some occurrence that was categorically disproved. So a society may well share memories of fictional events and act on delusions ie mobs.

--
␦glen?

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gepr

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Perhaps you did not see my previous response where I outlined what I think exhibit societal states (yes, at the societal layer, as a whole) of being in the zone. If so, could you explain whether you agree or disagree that those are examples of what you discuss below? If you didn't get the email, which happens to me often enough, the response is here:

http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2017-February/048807.html

To be clear, my refutation of the claim that low-D spaces are similar because high-D space are similar was not intended as a referent for your society in the zone as a whole. But I did proffer the examples listed above (e.g. stigmergy) as referents.

And when you say "/complicated spaces/ presumed to be the imperfectly shared sets of symbolic references we would call worldviews", that is definitely not tantamount to the same as what I said. My refutation was about the _presumption_. The assertion is if P then Q, where P = lowD spaces are similar and Q = highD spaces are similar. I'm not really trying to say anything other than not(P=>Q). If the complicated internal spaces of people do match up or are shared in some way, then we need a different way of showing that they are shared (perhaps fMRI?).

And to be clear that we're still on topic, whether or not the fractality of birds' songs is or can be related to the fractality of their landscapes is a question about the soundness of P=>Q and how/whether the similarity of bird brains can be established.

On 02/24/2017 10:45 AM, Robert Wall wrote:

> It's a mistake to infer that the complicated spaces (the deluded people's minds/brains/bodies/culture) are the same just because their projections (the things they say and do) are the same.
>
>
> Yeah, and that is not the same as what I meant for a society being /in the zone/ as a whole, though Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi does initiate his talk with examples of a kind of mass hysteria brought about by cataclysmic events when introducing a topic he calls the Optimal Experience. Presumably, he used mass hysteria for contrast, but I think clumsily because he doesn't relate an Optimal Experience at the level of society. The examples of folks who demonstrate the phenomenon he is relating are individuals like Albert Einstein. So what is he talking about? What am I talking about? What are y' all talking about? The symbols seem the same, but we seem to be talking past one another. It happens ...
>
> Trying to be a bit clearer here and not at all retaliating with any backhand strike😊, the idea I am nudging forth is one that seems to be rare even among individuals, nevermind societies. We recognize its occurrence in the works of others we often describe as geniuses, but that may belie its true rate of occurrence. It is metaphorically called "Flow." It's a /positive /effect and not a hysterical one, which perhaps is the opposite of the "flow" that Vladimyr describes through historical accounts. I see Flow as the place to find wisdom, understanding, craft, art, poetry ... not mayhem. In his essay /The Question Concerning Technology/, Martin Heidegger effectively sees Flow as the way to save us from what he calls technological enframement ... the ultimate sociological delivery system of debilitating symbolic references. [not saying technology is bad, but that enframement is a danger].
>
> In a recent discussion about Henri Bergson, the preeminent French philosopher of the early twentieth century, I came to dwell on some writing about Bergson's comparing intuition to intellect:
>
> Science promises us well-being, or, at the most, pleasure, but philosophy, through the Intuition to which it leads us, is capable of bestowing upon us Joy. The future belongs to such an intuitive philosophy, Bergson holds, for he considers that the whole progress of Evolution is towards the creation of a type of being whose Intuition will be equal to his Intelligence. Finally, by Intuition we shall find ourselves in—to invent a word—"intunation" with the /élan vital/, with the Evolution of the whole universe, and this absolute feeling of "at- one-ment" with the universe will result in that emotional synthesis which is deep Joy, which Wordsworth* [* /Lines "composed above Tintern Abbey, 1798./*]* describes as:
>
> "that blessed mood
> In which the burthen of the mystery,
> In which the heavy and the weary weight
> Of all this unintelligible world,
> Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
> In which the affections gently lead us on,—
> Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
> And even the motion of our human blood
> Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
> In body, and become a living soul:
> While with an eye made quiet by the power
> Of harmony and the deep power of joy
> We see into the life of things."
>
> "... a type of being whose Intuition will be equal to his Intelligence." This is Heidegger with his /Dasein <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein>/. Is it also Nietzsche with his /_Übermensch_/?
>
> Is the problem with societies that they cannot behold the world intuitively ... without symbols? This /may /be impossible even ... because we humans are led by the rational ... tainted, of course, by self-interest. The rational perspective ultimately leads to the conclusion that the universe is nothing but a bunch of particles, as it has Steven Weinberg. We relate to each other mostly symbolically. To relate on an intuitive level, well that's called empathy, sympathy, understanding, ... love. None of these properties can be embraced rationally. They are beyond language.
>
> Bergson insists as well, and correctly I think, that we are often misled by the imprecision of language, something he doesn't trust as getting things adequately conveyed to others because language is loaded with, well, /symbolic reference/. And this leads to a "Tower of Babel" phenomenon at the level of society as manifest in all social media. The quote I used at the beginning of this post by Glen is tantamount to saying the same thing ... /complicated spaces/ presumed to be the imperfectly shared sets of symbolic references we would call worldviews. Islamaphobia, for one, is not a what I would call an Optimal Experience. Nor does it approach wisdom on any level.
>
> *A parable*: In concert with the roots of this thread--is /being in the zone/ delusional?--Bergsonian view of this situation may see society as multiple billion organic simulators crawling the planet, who have evolved far enough to loosely self-organized into tribes and set up a system of patterned utterances to communicate within tribal sets of other such simulators. For each simulator, this provides a comforting feeling of not being alone and so, safe. What emerges, though, is a dependency on the rule-based axioms [or grammar] that underlie the pattern of utterances and concepts, and they go about rationalizing everything they come in contact with in accordance with the ever expanding "knowledgebase."
>
> But they do this at a cost--the proverbial bite from the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, as it were--because as the world the simulators see now becomes ever more epistemologically "known," it is also becoming ever more ontologically meaningless. As this happens, the tribal individual simulators start to "feel" ever more sociologically alone and unsafe. Have we been expelled from the Garden of Eden?
>
> And they begin to wonder about the meaning of it all. And in Self-defense, they start to turn to surreal, other-world symbols to help them to /rationalize /their current state of unhappiness. But, others, more reflective among them, who have been contemplating this phenomenology--philosophers--are saying things like "What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors." "There are no facts, only interpretations." "Every word is a prejudice." "The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not /thinking/." It's disturbing ... What are we missing?! What was the true cost of this "emergence," which took root at the same time that language and, perhaps, intellect and civilization did?
>
> Perhaps, the individual simulators have been *deluded *into thinking that their worldview is real, immutable, ... and that the everything else in the world was put there for their exploitation and happiness. They think that those are just things outside of themselves, objectified things with names that are wholly unrelated to other things. The only really important thing is the Self. Embodied experience. But, is it? ... And what is really important at the level of society and how does that thing get accomplished? To be sure, it doesn't get accomplished by chaos. It might happen through /harmony/, but I don't think it will be a harmony of symbolic references alone ...
>
> This has been a thinker among some of us for some time. It just doesn't seem resolvable without effective *feedback *at the level of a society.
>
> Inline image 1 Let's make that great (again?).
>
> And, so, that's why I don't think that society as a whole will likely find itself /in the zone/. Now I hope /*that's*/ clear. 😴

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Robert Wall

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Anyway, so I disagree with the idea that society, as a group, can't be "in the zone". But I believe that the thoughts inside the members of the society are not really _shared_ thoughts. The societal groove does not depend on isomorphic relationships between the insides of the members' heads. (holography again) And the extent to which individuals' grooves map to societal grooves is unclear (and probably complex).

I did get your email, and my takeaway of what you said seems to be summarized in your concluding paragraph above from that post. Then, to be constructive at seeking understanding, couple that with the quote I used to introduce my last post and perhaps we can examine where there is a better meeting of the minds on the topic of being in the groove at the level of a society.

It's a mistake to infer that the complicated spaces (the deluded people's minds/brains/bodies/culture) are the same just because their projections (the things they say and do) are the same.

The last quote, to me, says that a group acting toward a common goal in, say the way an individual in that group would, does not imply that the "symbolic references" used to act rationaly in the world are all in align or even perhaps in synchopation under an fMRI. YES! I can agree with this. And I don't think that I disagreed. Our symbolic references are only how we have objectified the world since birth. Even if aligned--highly unlikely--we have individual free will and intentionality to determine out behavior. This can explain how folks sometimes come across knowing how to appear moral and how to game morality at the same time toward less moral goals. The Pope recently implied it is better to be an atheist than a a crappy Christian. I think he was referring to being committed in mind and action. Apparently, in his view, this doesn't seem to be happening at the level of society as a whole.

And I do even agree with you that there are examples of goups that do act as if with "one mind" and even benevolently. Market-oriented co-ops are such a phenomenon, which I discussed in another thread, especially with Marcus who seemed to see these as an bane to society as unmanaged enterprises, which they are not. Perspective is sharpened by exposure. My company transitionsed to an ESOP, but the intended economic benefit was eventually corrupted by the management team that used this preferred organizational form to basically enrich themselves at the expense of what the ERISA originally intended--cooperative, community-oriented corprorate behavior. Stakeholders in the welfare of the community. At the grassroots, it was enything but a co-operative. It was a vehicle to enrich the corporate management. But where it works, it is beautiful.

But I do kind of see where a "meeting of the minds" between us may have been derailed here about what we each mean concerning being in the zone" at a level of society. And I fault myself for this in joining the underlying threaded thoughts late, perhaps, and not being more clear in the distinctions. It has to do with the phrase "as a whole." I will use market-oriented co-ops again as a useful example to make my point a bit more clear. Cooperatives cannot seem to take root here in this country [e.g., public banks] because of another blocking cultural, Hayekian meme: "a free market under capitalism will save us all." This meme has been forcefully in play for the last thirty-five years with it's high priest being Milton Friedman and the Chicgo School of Economics. What have been the results?

Which of these memes could be equivalent to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's [and I don't mean to push this guy forward, but only this idea] Optimal Experience at the level of society as a whole: (1) profit-driven coorporatism or (2) community-oriented cooperatism? First off, I am exclusively talking about the behavioral end that leans toward what is good for society--the whole tribe, such that the tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense. Arguably, as a tribe we are not moving in any such direction. But there are pockets of co-operative behavior like we saw at Standing Rock. But, what happened? The pipe got laid anyway and the planet weeps. Your take on "effective altruism" is another example, I think, of how we as a society would rather game the moral landscape to give the illusion of being "for the people." I really do not mean to be so pessimistic and my analysis will hopefully bear this out.

What this comes down to is this. To be in the zone at the level of a society as a whole in a similar way as could happen at the level of an individual--such that we would say there is a Flow characterized as an Optimal Experience, we would NOT expect there to be an alignment of symbolic references. Precisely the opposite, if we are to regard the thoughts of the many philosophers and linguists on this topic to be wise. What we would expect instead is the supersession of our language-based symbolic references with something akin to Intuition or Empathy ... something beyond words such that wisdom emeges on the scale of a society [and why I use capitalization of those terms]. So far, anyway, I do not see this as being not only possible, but not evident.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that being in the zone seems to occur when an individual has both great skill and great challenge in a particular area. When Flow happens, it is when the Self tends to evaporate from consciousness and there is only the task. The individual is said to be empathically connected with [in love with] the work: artist of all stripes "feel" this. Therefore, I say that this cannot happen at the level of a society as a whole when the majority of individuals are only trying to game the other players in that society.

We have not as a whole or on many individual levels been able to supercede the animal. Nietzsche was not hopeful. Begson was, sort of, and says this will be eventually possible when we--presumably as a species--evolve to a level where the Intuitive matches the Intellect in dominance.

I hope that this is a bit more clear, but to address you question directly now, I am not in disagreement with you--never was--but also I stand firm on what I meant, with which you said you are dubious. But maybe that was a matter of talking past one another. A language-based phenomenon. Intent distinguishes the phenomena of being in the zone. Scale distinguishes the level of its achievement. To be sure, symbolic references have little to nothing to do with the kind of being in the zone to which I was referring. It's kind of like what Timothy Gallwey was trying to convey in his book The Inner Game of Tennis. Thinking is gone.

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 12:13 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Perhaps you did not see my previous response where I outlined what I think exhibit societal states (yes, at the societal layer, as a whole) of being in the zone. If so, could you explain whether you agree or disagree that those are examples of what you discuss below? If you didn't get the email, which happens to me often enough, the response is here:

http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2017-February/048807.html

To be clear, my refutation of the claim that low-D spaces are similar because high-D space are similar was not intended as a referent for your society in the zone as a whole. But I did proffer the examples listed above (e.g. stigmergy) as referents.

And when you say "/complicated spaces/ presumed to be the imperfectly shared sets of symbolic references we would call worldviews", that is definitely not tantamount to the same as what I said. My refutation was about the _presumption_. The assertion is if P then Q, where P = lowD spaces are similar and Q = highD spaces are similar. I'm not really trying to say anything other than not(P=>Q). If the complicated internal spaces of people do match up or are shared in some way, then we need a different way of showing that they are shared (perhaps fMRI?).

And to be clear that we're still on topic, whether or not the fractality of birds' songs is or can be related to the fractality of their landscapes is a question about the soundness of P=>Q and how/whether the similarity of bird brains can be established.

On 02/24/2017 10:45 AM, Robert Wall wrote:
> It's a mistake to infer that the complicated spaces (the deluded people's minds/brains/bodies/culture) are the same just because their projections (the things they say and do) are the same.
>
>
> Yeah, and that is not the same as what I meant for a society being /in the zone/ as a whole, though Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi does initiate his talk with examples of a kind of mass hysteria brought about by cataclysmic events when introducing a topic he calls the Optimal Experience. Presumably, he used mass hysteria for contrast, but I think clumsily because he doesn't relate an Optimal Experience at the level of society. The examples of folks who demonstrate the phenomenon he is relating are individuals like Albert Einstein. So what is he talking about? What am I talking about? What are y' all talking about? The symbols seem the same, but we seem to be talking past one another. It happens ...
>
> Trying to be a bit clearer here and not at all retaliating with any backhand strike😊, the idea I am nudging forth is one that seems to be rare even among individuals, nevermind societies. We recognize its occurrence in the works of others we often describe as geniuses, but that may belie its true rate of occurrence. It is metaphorically called "Flow." It's a /positive /effect and not a hysterical one, which perhaps is the opposite of the "flow" that Vladimyr describes through historical accounts. I see Flow as the place to find wisdom, understanding, craft, art, poetry ... not mayhem. In his essay /The Question Concerning Technology/, Martin Heidegger effectively sees Flow as the way to save us from what he calls technological enframement ... the ultimate sociological delivery system of debilitating symbolic references. [not saying technology is bad, but that enframement is a danger].
>
> In a recent discussion about Henri Bergson, the preeminent French philosopher of the early twentieth century, I came to dwell on some writing about Bergson's comparing intuition to intellect:
>
> Science promises us well-being, or, at the most, pleasure, but philosophy, through the Intuition to which it leads us, is capable of bestowing upon us Joy. The future belongs to such an intuitive philosophy, Bergson holds, for he considers that the whole progress of Evolution is towards the creation of a type of being whose Intuition will be equal to his Intelligence. Finally, by Intuition we shall find ourselves in—to invent a word—"intunation" with the /élan vital/, with the Evolution of the whole universe, and this absolute feeling of "at- one-ment" with the universe will result in that emotional synthesis which is deep Joy, which Wordsworth* [* /Lines "composed above Tintern Abbey, 1798./*]* describes as:
>
> "that blessed mood
> In which the burthen of the mystery,
> In which the heavy and the weary weight
> Of all this unintelligible world,
> Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
> In which the affections gently lead us on,—
> Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
> And even the motion of our human blood
> Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
> In body, and become a living soul:
> While with an eye made quiet by the power
> Of harmony and the deep power of joy
> We see into the life of things."
>
> "... a type of being whose Intuition will be equal to his Intelligence." This is Heidegger with his /Dasein <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein>/. Is it also Nietzsche with his /_Übermensch_/?
>
> Is the problem with societies that they cannot behold the world intuitively ... without symbols? This /may /be impossible even ... because we humans are led by the rational ... tainted, of course, by self-interest. The rational perspective ultimately leads to the conclusion that the universe is nothing but a bunch of particles, as it has Steven Weinberg. We relate to each other mostly symbolically. To relate on an intuitive level, well that's called empathy, sympathy, understanding, ... love. None of these properties can be embraced rationally. They are beyond language.
>
> Bergson insists as well, and correctly I think, that we are often misled by the imprecision of language, something he doesn't trust as getting things adequately conveyed to others because language is loaded with, well, /symbolic reference/. And this leads to a "Tower of Babel" phenomenon at the level of society as manifest in all social media. The quote I used at the beginning of this post by Glen is tantamount to saying the same thing ... /complicated spaces/ presumed to be the imperfectly shared sets of symbolic references we would call worldviews. Islamaphobia, for one, is not a what I would call an Optimal Experience. Nor does it approach wisdom on any level.
>
> *A parable*: In concert with the roots of this thread--is /being in the zone/ delusional?--Bergsonian view of this situation may see society as multiple billion organic simulators crawling the planet, who have evolved far enough to loosely self-organized into tribes and set up a system of patterned utterances to communicate within tribal sets of other such simulators. For each simulator, this provides a comforting feeling of not being alone and so, safe. What emerges, though, is a dependency on the rule-based axioms [or grammar] that underlie the pattern of utterances and concepts, and they go about rationalizing everything they come in contact with in accordance with the ever expanding "knowledgebase."
>
> But they do this at a cost--the proverbial bite from the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, as it were--because as the world the simulators see now becomes ever more epistemologically "known," it is also becoming ever more ontologically meaningless. As this happens, the tribal individual simulators start to "feel" ever more sociologically alone and unsafe. Have we been expelled from the Garden of Eden?
>
> And they begin to wonder about the meaning of it all. And in Self-defense, they start to turn to surreal, other-world symbols to help them to /rationalize /their current state of unhappiness. But, others, more reflective among them, who have been contemplating this phenomenology--philosophers--are saying things like "What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors." "There are no facts, only interpretations." "Every word is a prejudice." "The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not /thinking/." It's disturbing ... What are we missing?! What was the true cost of this "emergence," which took root at the same time that language and, perhaps, intellect and civilization did?
>
> Perhaps, the individual simulators have been *deluded *into thinking that their worldview is real, immutable, ... and that the everything else in the world was put there for their exploitation and happiness. They think that those are just things outside of themselves, objectified things with names that are wholly unrelated to other things. The only really important thing is the Self. Embodied experience. But, is it? ... And what is really important at the level of society and how does that thing get accomplished? To be sure, it doesn't get accomplished by chaos. It might happen through /harmony/, but I don't think it will be a harmony of symbolic references alone ...
>
> This has been a thinker among some of us for some time. It just doesn't seem resolvable without effective *feedback *at the level of a society.
>
> Inline image 1 Let's make that great (again?).
>
> And, so, that's why I don't think that society as a whole will likely find itself /in the zone/. Now I hope /*that's*/ clear. 😴

--
☣ glen

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gepr

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

OK. Yes, thanks, that helps. But I do think you disagree with me, only I may not have made myself clear enough for you to realize we disagree. I'll interleave in the hopes of making my objections in context.

On 02/24/2017 01:44 PM, Robert Wall wrote:
> The last quote, to me, says that a group acting toward a common goal in, say the way an individual in that group would, does *not *imply that the "symbolic references" used to act rationaly in the world are all in align or even perhaps in synchopation under an fMRI. YES! I can agree with this. And I don't think that I disagreed.

But that's not what I'm saying. Perhaps you're making what I'm saying much stronger. Or perhaps what you're saying is entirely different. I can't tell because you're leaping too far. I'm only saying that if the stuff that causes our behavior is aligned, we need something _other_ than our behavior to demonstrate that alignment. I'm trying to focus on the difference between thought and action. You seem to be conflating that with the difference between individuals and groups.

The thought vs. action dichotomy is critical to my rhetoric about individuals vs. groups. But it's more fundamental and must be made before (independently) of any rhetoric about individual vs. group.

> And I do even agree with you that there are examples of goups that do act as if with "one mind" and even benevolently.

Again, I don't think I said that. I don't think even an individual's thoughts matter. (This is why Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" is useless and annoying to me.) It's pure nonsense to talk of mind at all. So, it's nonsense to say that societies act as if with one mind. But that does not mean they can't be "in the zone", because being in the zone has nothing to do with one's mind.

> Market-oriented co-ops are such a phenomenon, which I discussed in another thread, especially with Marcus who seemed to see these as an bane to society as unmanaged enterprises, which they are not. Perspective is sharpened by exposure. My company transitionsed to an ESOP, but the intended economic benefit was eventually corrupted by the management team that used this preferred organizational form to basically enrich themselves at the expense of what the ERISA originally intended--cooperative, community-oriented corprorate behavior. Stakeholders in the welfare of the community. At the grassroots, it was enything but a co-operative. It was a vehicle to enrich the corporate management. But where it works, it is beautiful.

If you see these co-ops as technological innovations, then I'd argue that their use and ABUSE can both be examples of society being "in the zone". The same is true of the cell phone and space travel. It's totally irrelevant whether the co-ops relate to the beliefs, desires, and intentions of the humans involved (if such things exist). What would matter is the society's beliefs, desires, and intentions (if such exists). The only stakeholder is society. The individuals are as expendable as sand, or fossil fuel, or bacteria.

> But I do kind of see where a "meeting of the minds" between us may have been derailed here about what we each mean concerning /being in the zone/" at a level of society. And I fault myself for this in joining the underlying threaded thoughts late, perhaps, and not being more clear in the distinctions. It has to do with the phrase "as a whole." I will use market-oriented co-ops again as a useful example to make my point a bit more clear. Cooperatives cannot seem to take root here in this country [e.g., public banks] because of another blocking cultural, Hayekian meme: "a free market under capitalism will save us all." This meme has been forcefully in play for the last thirty-five years with it's high priest being Milton Friedman and the Chicgo School of Economics. What have been the results?

No worries about joining late or miscomm. or anything. That's why we're here. But I disagree about _why_ co-ops can't take root. A) They have taken root ... at least up here in the PacNW. But B) any inability to take root has nothing to do with shared ideologies like that from Hayek or whoever. They fail to take root because of _behavior_, not thought/ideas.

> Which of these memes could be equivalent to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's [and I don't mean to push this guy forward, but only this idea] Optimal Experience at the level of society as a whole: (1) profit-driven coorporatism or (2) community-oriented cooperatism? First off, I am exclusively talking about the behavioral end that leans toward what is good for society--the whole tribe, such that the tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense. Arguably, as a tribe we are not moving in any such direction. But there are pockets of co-operative behavior like we saw at Standing Rock. But, what happened? The pipe got laid anyway and the planet weeps. Your take on "effective altruism" is another example, I think, of how we as a society would rather game the moral landscape to give the illusion of being "for the people." I really do not mean to be so pessimistic and my analysis will hopefully bear this out.

Again in this paragraph, you seem to conflate individuals with groups. When you say "tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense", I get confused. Egalitarian at the tribe layer requires similarities between tribes. And if there are multiple tribes, then society consists of a group of tribes. I would not want to conflate what's good for a tribe with what's good for the population of tribes.

> What this comes down to is this. To be /in the zone/ at the level of a society as a whole in a similar way as could happen at the level of an individual--such that we would say there is a Flow characterized as an Optimal Experience, we would NOT expect there to be an alignment of symbolic references. Precisely the opposite, if we are to regard the thoughts of the many philosophers and linguists on this topic to be wise. What we would expect instead is the _supersession_ of our language-based symbolic references with something akin to Intuition or Empathy ... something beyond words such that wisdom emeges on the scale of a society [and why I use capitalization of those terms]. So far, anyway, I do not see this as being not only possible, but not evident.

OK. Again, Csikszentmihalyi's conception is useless to me because we cannot talk about an Optimal Experience in purely action/behavior terms. And since (P=>Q) is untrustworthy, we can't talk objectively about qualia at all. That means we can't do it at the individual or collective layers. Csikszentmihalyi's "zone" is a detrimental fiction.

But we can talk about the actions of a collective or individual, and various measures of those actions (e.g. speed of some repetitive action like applying rivets, or how fast someone talks, or whatever). As a society, we can talk about technology (not science so much because that implies thoughts/ideas more so than tech). We can measure things like legal systems and city sizes, etc.

> We have not as a whole or on many individual levels been able to supercede the animal.

Oh, I couldn't disagree more. We are not only building our environment more (and more intensely and more rapidly) than all the other animals combined, but we regularly demonstrate our ability/facility to quickly return to our core animal states ... and back to our higher/later states at will. So, we're not merely a new animal that is bound by, restricted to its built environment (cities, airplanes, etc.) We can walk the entire spectrum, something no other animal can do.

Our actions (not our thoughts) clearly demonstrate how we are distinct from the other animals.

> *Intent *distinguishes the phenomena of /being in the zone/. *Scale *distinguishes the level of its achievement. To be sure, symbolic references have little to nothing to do with the kind of/being in the zone/ to which I was referring. It's kind of like what Timothy Gallwey was trying to convey in his book /The Inner Game of Tennis/. Thinking is gone.

And a final repeat of my disagreement: If intent is required for your "being in the zone", then we're not talking about the same thing at all. For me, intent doesn't even exist. It's only what happens that can be measured and talked about. So, whether some one or group is in the zone must be measurable by different properties of their actions, one of which might be scale.

Whew! OK. Back to work.

--
☣ glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Vladimyr Burachynsky

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Gentlemen and audience,

The tempest ( Glen) and the captain of a small vessel (Robert) lashed to the mast. Are not in any form of disagreement by their own admissions.
OK, from my vantage point in the cold inhospitable North Lands , I sense a salient exchange of cannon fire.

Let's look at events Robert Wall introduced a novel idea Flow affecting individuals.
Vladimyr suggested that the description of Flow might be extended to Society or Social Groups. And that multiple low dimensional view points could recover higher dimensional realities.

Glen strongly protests this assertion.
Robert got backhanded when Glen denied that Flow could be extended from the original individual to a group of individuals. I don't think Robert knew it was coming. If I am asked to judge this I will
accuse Vladimyr of Meddling give points to Glen and a yellow flag for bending the rules of discourse. The two remain at the same point score and Vladimyr was told to leave the arena or shut up and just watch.
So complying with the judges warning...

he goes into the recesses of the internet and presents a coup against one of Glen's points about low and high dimensionality.
This was a past attempt to compile two or more complex ideas into his personal self study device having no external value until Glen's position was declared.
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AjdC7pqwzaUUkxz3QBcDOoGZ2Lop
https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=14A5CDB09AEE4237&id=14A5CDB09AEE4237%212460&parId=14A5CDB09AEE4237%212223&o=OneUp
both links to same site. It demonstrates Geometric Projection as a tool developed by early Renaissance Artists.

Next Vladimyr will demonstrate a complex system reduced to a lower dimension raising a point suggesting that complex ideas may be reduced to simple but dynamic neural structures and shared with other minds as memes.
https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=14A5CDB09AEE4237&id=14A5CDB09AEE4237%212236&parId=14A5CDB09AEE4237%212223&o=OneUp
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AjdC7pqwzaUUkTzqvvk6JnRRFJX2
again both links to same display.
Vladimyr is trying to demonstrate the imminent feasibility of mapping complex ideas from higher dimensions into lower dimensions that all humans do daily.
This process of mapping to neural networks is a new area of science. Currently being investigated by Dr. Kate Jeffery here is an essay from Aeon
https://aeon.co/essays/how-cognitive-maps-help-animals-navigate-the-world?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6652cf6dd1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-6652cf6dd1-69341065

So complexity can be represented in lower dimensions as human beings do so all the time. Maps from lower dimensions can be re-constructed to display higher dimensionality admittedly subject to losses known or unknown depending on protocol. Back and forth.
But Glen and all of us now must shift discussion to protocols and measures of veracity.

So where does this leave Robert Wall, relax sir , you may feel blasted but you are in a congregation and Flow is a useful symbol but needs more deliberation.
I have read your links for hours and rankle at the looseness of the pertinent details I wish for more at a neurological level.
And just what does a detachment from moral restrictions mean when like many misanthropes , I think they never existed in the first place.

Perhaps society shapes our young brains and only the obstreperous, misanthropic, autotelic, defiant bewhiskered cranks act as contradictory forces. Are we contributing to a renormalization of society? or simply amusing ourselves in our twilight years.
the next Bell clang starts a new round of intellectual pugilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_boxing
Well Robert do you actually think the Flow is always positive, melodious or beneficent...
Joy has taken on a kind of Christian mantle and now dissociates itself from the Joys of victory or triumph. I recall Obama's announcement of bin Laden's
assassination and the explosion of unrestrained American Joy....

Flow is probably best described with multiple orders of derivatives within the human minds. Let's work on this .

vib

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: February-24-17 4:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

OK. Yes, thanks, that helps. But I do think you disagree with me, only I may not have made myself clear enough for you to realize we disagree. I'll interleave in the hopes of making my objections in context.

On 02/24/2017 01:44 PM, Robert Wall wrote:
> The last quote, to me, says that a group acting toward a common goal in, say the way an individual in that group would, does *not *imply that the "symbolic references" used to act rationaly in the world are all in align or even perhaps in synchopation under an fMRI. YES! I can agree with this. And I don't think that I disagreed.

But that's not what I'm saying. Perhaps you're making what I'm saying much stronger. Or perhaps what you're saying is entirely different. I can't tell because you're leaping too far. I'm only saying that if the stuff that causes our behavior is aligned, we need something _other_ than our behavior to demonstrate that alignment. I'm trying to focus on the difference between thought and action. You seem to be conflating that with the difference between individuals and groups.

The thought vs. action dichotomy is critical to my rhetoric about individuals vs. groups. But it's more fundamental and must be made before (independently) of any rhetoric about individual vs. group.

> And I do even agree with you that there are examples of goups that do act as if with "one mind" and even benevolently.

Again, I don't think I said that. I don't think even an individual's thoughts matter. (This is why Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" is useless and annoying to me.) It's pure nonsense to talk of mind at all. So, it's nonsense to say that societies act as if with one mind. But that does not mean they can't be "in the zone", because being in the zone has nothing to do with one's mind.

> Market-oriented co-ops are such a phenomenon, which I discussed in another thread, especially with Marcus who seemed to see these as an bane to society as unmanaged enterprises, which they are not. Perspective is sharpened by exposure. My company transitionsed to an ESOP, but the intended economic benefit was eventually corrupted by the management team that used this preferred organizational form to basically enrich themselves at the expense of what the ERISA originally intended--cooperative, community-oriented corprorate behavior. Stakeholders in the welfare of the community. At the grassroots, it was enything but a co-operative. It was a vehicle to enrich the corporate management. But where it works, it is beautiful.

If you see these co-ops as technological innovations, then I'd argue that their use and ABUSE can both be examples of society being "in the zone". The same is true of the cell phone and space travel. It's totally irrelevant whether the co-ops relate to the beliefs, desires, and intentions of the humans involved (if such things exist). What would matter is the society's beliefs, desires, and intentions (if such exists). The only stakeholder is society. The individuals are as expendable as sand, or fossil fuel, or bacteria.

> But I do kind of see where a "meeting of the minds" between us may have been derailed here about what we each mean concerning /being in the zone/" at a level of society. And I fault myself for this in joining the underlying threaded thoughts late, perhaps, and not being more clear in the distinctions. It has to do with the phrase "as a whole." I will use market-oriented co-ops again as a useful example to make my point a bit more clear. Cooperatives cannot seem to take root here in this country [e.g., public banks] because of another blocking cultural, Hayekian meme: "a free market under capitalism will save us all." This meme has been forcefully in play for the last thirty-five years with it's high priest being Milton Friedman and the Chicgo School of Economics. What have been the results?

No worries about joining late or miscomm. or anything. That's why we're here. But I disagree about _why_ co-ops can't take root. A) They have taken root ... at least up here in the PacNW. But B) any inability to take root has nothing to do with shared ideologies like that from Hayek or whoever. They fail to take root because of _behavior_, not thought/ideas.

> Which of these memes could be equivalent to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's [and I don't mean to push this guy forward, but only this idea] Optimal Experience at the level of society as a whole: (1) profit-driven coorporatism or (2) community-oriented cooperatism? First off, I am exclusively talking about the behavioral end that leans toward what is good for society--the whole tribe, such that the tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense. Arguably, as a tribe we are not moving in any such direction. But there are pockets of co-operative behavior like we saw at Standing Rock. But, what happened? The pipe got laid anyway and the planet weeps. Your take on "effective altruism" is another example, I think, of how we as a society would rather game the moral landscape to give the illusion of being "for the people." I really do not mean to be so pessimistic and my analysis will hopefully bear this out.

Again in this paragraph, you seem to conflate individuals with groups. When you say "tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense", I get confused. Egalitarian at the tribe layer requires similarities between tribes. And if there are multiple tribes, then society consists of a group of tribes. I would not want to conflate what's good for a tribe with what's good for the population of tribes.

> What this comes down to is this. To be /in the zone/ at the level of a society as a whole in a similar way as could happen at the level of an individual--such that we would say there is a Flow characterized as an Optimal Experience, we would NOT expect there to be an alignment of symbolic references. Precisely the opposite, if we are to regard the thoughts of the many philosophers and linguists on this topic to be wise. What we would expect instead is the _supersession_ of our language-based symbolic references with something akin to Intuition or Empathy ... something beyond words such that wisdom emeges on the scale of a society [and why I use capitalization of those terms]. So far, anyway, I do not see this as being not only possible, but not evident.

OK. Again, Csikszentmihalyi's conception is useless to me because we cannot talk about an Optimal Experience in purely action/behavior terms. And since (P=>Q) is untrustworthy, we can't talk objectively about qualia at all. That means we can't do it at the individual or collective layers. Csikszentmihalyi's "zone" is a detrimental fiction.

But we can talk about the actions of a collective or individual, and various measures of those actions (e.g. speed of some repetitive action like applying rivets, or how fast someone talks, or whatever). As a society, we can talk about technology (not science so much because that implies thoughts/ideas more so than tech). We can measure things like legal systems and city sizes, etc.

> We have not as a whole or on many individual levels been able to supercede the animal.

Oh, I couldn't disagree more. We are not only building our environment more (and more intensely and more rapidly) than all the other animals combined, but we regularly demonstrate our ability/facility to quickly return to our core animal states ... and back to our higher/later states at will. So, we're not merely a new animal that is bound by, restricted to its built environment (cities, airplanes, etc.) We can walk the entire spectrum, something no other animal can do.

Our actions (not our thoughts) clearly demonstrate how we are distinct from the other animals.

> *Intent *distinguishes the phenomena of /being in the zone/. *Scale *distinguishes the level of its achievement. To be sure, symbolic references have little to nothing to do with the kind of/being in the zone/ to which I was referring. It's kind of like what Timothy Gallwey was trying to convey in his book /The Inner Game of Tennis/. Thinking is gone.

And a final repeat of my disagreement: If intent is required for your "being in the zone", then we're not talking about the same thing at all. For me, intent doesn't even exist. It's only what happens that can be measured and talked about. So, whether some one or group is in the zone must be measurable by different properties of their actions, one of which might be scale.

Whew! OK. Back to work.

--
☣ glen

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============================================================
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
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Robert Wall

Re: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

In reply to this post by gepr

(This is why Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" is useless and annoying to me.) It's pure nonsense to talk of mind at all. So, it's nonsense to say that societies act as if with one mind.

Wow! Try to be consistent at least. Eh? Who is saying that except you with your previous groupthink examples? Not me. That was my point. They can't. The "as if" was the key. The "as if" alludes to the behavioral manifestation. Yes?

And, you seem to be easily annoyed and this is just one example with this latest load of shit you have dropped on my attempt to explain. I notice that you seem to use the words "useless" and "nonsense" [usually with the adjective utter ] a lot when you post replies. Not sure if you mean to be insulting or annoying, but you achieved it here this time. Another backhand strike? So, you lost me half way through this reply. A sense of hopelessness set in very early.

In a strange way, though, throughout this whole thread, you actually make my point. Thanks! Language can be a problem. Symbolic reference. Imprecision. But the bottom-line is that I feel you really didn't (even try to) understand anything I said, and, apparently, I don't really understand anything you have said in as much as I have tried. And I am not sure it is because of the imprecision of language, though. It is something else that leads you to just find disagreement. As often said, it is much easier to sound smart by tearing something down than to constructively build on something. Maybe that applies here. Not sure. Hope not.

Just taking the example of my "superseding the animal," I am talking about superseding our "animal nature" and not talking about our distinctiveness with other animals in terms of accomplishments or anything else like that. How did you come up with that?! I thought the context would have made what I was saying abundantly clear.

Actually, in this, humans are both the same and distinctive from other animals, but not in the way you counter, which is arguably a non-sequitur. This from Psychology Today: Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animal Nature (2016):

The big take-home message is that the emotional drives and instincts of humans and other animals are remarkably similar. Where things become very different -- and we have to admit that modern humans live very differently than other animals -- is when those drives and instincts interact with the social environment to create behavior. Since humans have an exceedingly complex cultural history that is additive over the generations, that is a very different social milieu in which our drives give rise to behaviors. But the drives themselves are not so different.

So my bringing other animals into the discussion could be considered an insult to all other animals. Yes, we are actually distinctive, but to my point, in our behavioral differences with these other animals. Animals are incapable of evilness in the same way that we say humans can be evil. I am sure, for example, that the author of the article titled "Man's more enlightened, Human Nature versus our "more animal than human nature" would have understood what I was talking about in the context of this discussion (it's not difficult to find other examples of others wondering how to get society to stop shitting in their nest, so to speak. And, we are arguably approaching a time where we need an answer.):

Why is the world in such a terrible state, with so much crime, corruption, violence, injustice, material and spiritual poverty, and in general such a shameful testament to man's capacity for evil, indifference and stupidity? Notwithstanding that many of us - for the moment, at least - lead such pleasant and privileged lives.

Things were no better in the past either; in many ways they were even worse (not for the privileged few, perhaps, as now, but certainly for the majority). The history of "civilisation", from its very beginnings to the present, not withstanding its great achievements, has largely been the history of violent conflict, injustice and of man's inhumanity towards and exploitation of his fellow man.

Having an answer to this most important (and vital) of questions is essential if we are to meet man's most pressing challenge: the creation of diverse, just, humane, peaceful and sustainable human societies on our finite and vulnerable planet, Spaceship Earth.

The answer, in fact, has been staring us in the face for more than 100 years: since the publication of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the scientific recognition of man's animal origins. Although lip service is paid to this most profound piece of scientific knowledge, for all practical, political, social, economic and ecological purposes we have yet to face up to it.

This short opinion article is an emulation of what I have been trying to explain to you but perhaps it does a much better job at explaining it. Give it a go ... Utter nonsense? Annoying?

At this point, not only do I think that Flow can not likely be achieved at the level of a society as a whole, I do not now think that there can be a meeting of the minds between us in this discussion. Where I look in the crevices where can find agreement--in spite of the imprecision of the symbolic references that can pepper language--you, line by line here even, have looked for disagreement only. On an intuitive level, we do not seem to be the same social animal. Not a social crime, of course, unless you are just "gaming" me with some unnecessary display of intellectual peacock feathers; but regretfully I see no way to make headway [e.g., congruity of thought] here as it seems clear that we seem to have very opposing objectives in this discussion.

I, nor Csikszentmihalyi, will annoy you no further ...

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 3:48 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

OK. Yes, thanks, that helps. But I do think you disagree with me, only I may not have made myself clear enough for you to realize we disagree. I'll interleave in the hopes of making my objections in context.

On 02/24/2017 01:44 PM, Robert Wall wrote:
> The last quote, to me, says that a group acting toward a common goal in, say the way an individual in that group would, does *not *imply that the "symbolic references" used to act rationaly in the world are all in align or even perhaps in synchopation under an fMRI. YES! I can agree with this. And I don't think that I disagreed.

But that's not what I'm saying. Perhaps you're making what I'm saying much stronger. Or perhaps what you're saying is entirely different. I can't tell because you're leaping too far. I'm only saying that if the stuff that causes our behavior is aligned, we need something _other_ than our behavior to demonstrate that alignment. I'm trying to focus on the difference between thought and action. You seem to be conflating that with the difference between individuals and groups.

The thought vs. action dichotomy is critical to my rhetoric about individuals vs. groups. But it's more fundamental and must be made before (independently) of any rhetoric about individual vs. group.

> And I do even agree with you that there are examples of goups that do act as if with "one mind" and even benevolently.

Again, I don't think I said that. I don't think even an individual's thoughts matter. (This is why Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" is useless and annoying to me.) It's pure nonsense to talk of mind at all. So, it's nonsense to say that societies act as if with one mind. But that does not mean they can't be "in the zone", because being in the zone has nothing to do with one's mind.

> Market-oriented co-ops are such a phenomenon, which I discussed in another thread, especially with Marcus who seemed to see these as an bane to society as unmanaged enterprises, which they are not. Perspective is sharpened by exposure. My company transitionsed to an ESOP, but the intended economic benefit was eventually corrupted by the management team that used this preferred organizational form to basically enrich themselves at the expense of what the ERISA originally intended--cooperative, community-oriented corprorate behavior. Stakeholders in the welfare of the community. At the grassroots, it was enything but a co-operative. It was a vehicle to enrich the corporate management. But where it works, it is beautiful.

If you see these co-ops as technological innovations, then I'd argue that their use and ABUSE can both be examples of society being "in the zone". The same is true of the cell phone and space travel. It's totally irrelevant whether the co-ops relate to the beliefs, desires, and intentions of the humans involved (if such things exist). What would matter is the society's beliefs, desires, and intentions (if such exists). The only stakeholder is society. The individuals are as expendable as sand, or fossil fuel, or bacteria.

> But I do kind of see where a "meeting of the minds" between us may have been derailed here about what we each mean concerning /being in the zone/" at a level of society. And I fault myself for this in joining the underlying threaded thoughts late, perhaps, and not being more clear in the distinctions. It has to do with the phrase "as a whole." I will use market-oriented co-ops again as a useful example to make my point a bit more clear. Cooperatives cannot seem to take root here in this country [e.g., public banks] because of another blocking cultural, Hayekian meme: "a free market under capitalism will save us all." This meme has been forcefully in play for the last thirty-five years with it's high priest being Milton Friedman and the Chicgo School of Economics. What have been the results?

No worries about joining late or miscomm. or anything. That's why we're here. But I disagree about _why_ co-ops can't take root. A) They have taken root ... at least up here in the PacNW. But B) any inability to take root has nothing to do with shared ideologies like that from Hayek or whoever. They fail to take root because of _behavior_, not thought/ideas.

> Which of these memes could be equivalent to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's [and I don't mean to push this guy forward, but only this idea] Optimal Experience at the level of society as a whole: (1) profit-driven coorporatism or (2) community-oriented cooperatism? First off, I am exclusively talking about the behavioral end that leans toward what is good for society--the whole tribe, such that the tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense. Arguably, as a tribe we are not moving in any such direction. But there are pockets of co-operative behavior like we saw at Standing Rock. But, what happened? The pipe got laid anyway and the planet weeps. Your take on "effective altruism" is another example, I think, of how we as a society would rather game the moral landscape to give the illusion of being "for the people." I really do not mean to be so pessimistic and my analysis will hopefully bear this out.

Again in this paragraph, you seem to conflate individuals with groups. When you say "tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense", I get confused. Egalitarian at the tribe layer requires similarities between tribes. And if there are multiple tribes, then society consists of a group of tribes. I would not want to conflate what's good for a tribe with what's good for the population of tribes.

> What this comes down to is this. To be /in the zone/ at the level of a society as a whole in a similar way as could happen at the level of an individual--such that we would say there is a Flow characterized as an Optimal Experience, we would NOT expect there to be an alignment of symbolic references. Precisely the opposite, if we are to regard the thoughts of the many philosophers and linguists on this topic to be wise. What we would expect instead is the _supersession_ of our language-based symbolic references with something akin to Intuition or Empathy ... something beyond words such that wisdom emeges on the scale of a society [and why I use capitalization of those terms]. So far, anyway, I do not see this as being not only possible, but not evident.

OK. Again, Csikszentmihalyi's conception is useless to me because we cannot talk about an Optimal Experience in purely action/behavior terms. And since (P=>Q) is untrustworthy, we can't talk objectively about qualia at all. That means we can't do it at the individual or collective layers. Csikszentmihalyi's "zone" is a detrimental fiction.

But we can talk about the actions of a collective or individual, and various measures of those actions (e.g. speed of some repetitive action like applying rivets, or how fast someone talks, or whatever). As a society, we can talk about technology (not science so much because that implies thoughts/ideas more so than tech). We can measure things like legal systems and city sizes, etc.

> We have not as a whole or on many individual levels been able to supercede the animal.

Oh, I couldn't disagree more. We are not only building our environment more (and more intensely and more rapidly) than all the other animals combined, but we regularly demonstrate our ability/facility to quickly return to our core animal states ... and back to our higher/later states at will. So, we're not merely a new animal that is bound by, restricted to its built environment (cities, airplanes, etc.) We can walk the entire spectrum, something no other animal can do.

Our actions (not our thoughts) clearly demonstrate how we are distinct from the other animals.

> *Intent *distinguishes the phenomena of /being in the zone/. *Scale *distinguishes the level of its achievement. To be sure, symbolic references have little to nothing to do with the kind of/being in the zone/ to which I was referring. It's kind of like what Timothy Gallwey was trying to convey in his book /The Inner Game of Tennis/. Thinking is gone.

And a final repeat of my disagreement: If intent is required for your "being in the zone", then we're not talking about the same thing at all. For me, intent doesn't even exist. It's only what happens that can be measured and talked about. So, whether some one or group is in the zone must be measurable by different properties of their actions, one of which might be scale.

Whew! OK. Back to work.

--
☣ glen

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