Friam

Intention (was emergence seminar)

classic Classic list List threaded Threaded
♦
♦
 2 messages Options
Russ Abbott
Reply | Threaded
Open this post in threaded view
♦
♦
|

Intention (was emergence seminar)

Russ Abbott
I think we're asking the same question. I want people to ask themselves why they are asking about emergence. What is it that brings them to that point. Isn't that what you're saying?

In any event, I have read EVO-DEVO. Very good book -- as are his other books.


On a completely different subject, although this may be a bit off the track of your experience as a research scientist, I wonder if you can offer some insight and instinct and intention. I've been thinking lately about the line between them.

Clearly some animal behavior is robotic instinct.  (I know I've heard of some good examples of cases in which you interrupt an insect that looks like it is building a nest and put it down a few inches away, and it starts all over again -- or something like that. The goose egg behavior on this page is another example. I'm surprised that I haven't been able to find more.)

And clearly (at least to those of us who are willing to attribute intention to animals) some animal behavior is intentional. There were some recent experiments in which chimps(?) had to figure out that they could retrieve a stick from a container which they could then use to retrieve a reward. This is new, innovative behavior, not a learned trick.

So my question is, have biologists identified where one sort of behavior becomes the other -- or probably better, where the lowest level intentional behavior has been observed?

-- Russ


On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 7:55 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi, Russ,
 
It's my least favorite of the seven questions.  To me, the question my be recast as, "What light's your wick in the world to which the label emergence has been attached.?"  I know you wouldn't know if from my posts on Friam but I spent most of my career working as a research scientist on forms of communication ... bird song, babies cries, whining, for instance.  As a dyed in the wool materialist, I have always been fascinated by the question of how things come into being and why they have come to take the form that they do.  Rather than using the question to build a wall around emergence, I would hope that we will use it to develop a list of all the things labeled emergent that have challenged the imagination of group members. 
 
Have you read Sean Carroll's book on EVO DEVO?  For years I sat in a psychology department listening to sterile arguments concerning nature and nurture.  And now, by god, we know how it works, and neither nature nor nurture -- in the sense that their protagonists understood them -- had anything to do with it.  I am so glad that I lived to learn how nature makes an organism. 
 
nick
 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 9/9/2009 6:20:13 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Emergence Seminar

Since I won't be there, let me suggest a pre-requisite activity.

Discuss why do you (or anyone else) want to define emergence?

In saying that I'm not suggesting that emergence should not be defined -- although I now think that it is unfortunate that the word has become so widely used. What I want to do is to prompt you to talk about what it is that leads you to want to define emergence in the first place.  It seems to me that it's impossible even to begin to answer the questions listed below until one has developed for oneself an intuitive idea about what it is that one wants the word emergence to capture. That's where I would suggest you start: what is your possibly vague sense of the sorts of things you want the word emergence to refer to. Once you have clarified that for yourself I think the questions below will be easier to deal with -- as will the papers in the book.

-- Russ



On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

All,
 
The emergence seminar, such as it is, will have its first meeting this thursday (tomorrow) at Downtown Subcription (which is at Garcia and Agua Fria).  I suggest that we devote the seminar, at least in its early stages, to the collection, EMERGENCE.  Why a collection?  Why a seminar?  Because, as I keep saying (sorry), I want to articulate the different views on the subject.  One thing I noticed about academics is their desire to exclude ways of thinking from discussions.  So academics tend to scoff.  I think the mark of a truly educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is the ability to hold more than one idea in his or her head at once..... to compare and contrast.  Bedau and Humphreys, in their introduction, invite us to engage in this kind of analysis by bearing in mind a set of seven questions, as we read each of the authors.  These are:
 
1. How should emergence be defined? (by reference to irreducibility, unpredictability, ontological novelty, conceptual novelty, and.or supvenience (whatever that is?)
2.  What can be emergent: properties, substances, processes, phenomena, patterns laws, or something else?
3.  What is the scope of actual emergent phenomena?  (Is emergence a rare phenomenon, or broadly distributed in physics and biology as well as in psychology?)
4. Is emergence an objective feature of the world, or is it merely in the eye of the beholder.
5. Should emergence be viewed as static and synchronic, or as dynamic and diachronic, or are both possible? 
6. Does emergence imply or require the existence of new levels of phenomena with their new causes and effects?
7. In what ways are emergent phenomena autonomous from their emergent bases? 
 
Tomorrow, as a warm up; it would be interesting to see what preconceptions we hold on these questions. 
 
 
Nick
 
 
 
 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology an d Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
 
 
 


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org



============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Nick Thompson
Reply | Threaded
Open this post in threaded view
♦
♦
|

Re: Intention (was emergence seminar)

Nick Thompson
Russ,
 
In his article, The Companion in Bird's Life, Konrad Lorenz took after MacDougall for his failure to realize that while behavior is directed, and behavior has a function, it is never the function toward which behvior is directed. W Powers makes a very similar point in his analysis of control systems, although he is on your side concerning mind, I think.   
 
Please take a look at Lorenz's law in the following publication.
 
 
At the time, I was using the word purpose for what I think you have in mind when you use the word intention. I think there are many classic examples of the kind of thing you are looking described in the article.  The bibliography sucks.  I am sorry. 
 
I have written quite a lot about intentionality.  As you may know, it has two quite distinct (but related) meanings, one referring to the object of directed action, and the other to a more technical philosophical meaning which you can find referred to in
 
 
Pretty much all of my work is up in the website
 
 
The lowest level is an abstract of each of the cited papers in Published Work.  If you click on the abstract, the entire paper should down load.  For some reason I never bothered to explain that in the site.  One of these days..... 
 
Now you know everything I know.
 
Nick
 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
To: [hidden email]
Sent: 9/9/2009 9:23:29 PM
Subject: Intention (was emergence seminar)

I think we're asking the same question. I want people to ask themselves why they are asking about emergence. What is it that brings them to that point. Isn't that what you're saying?

In any event, I have read EVO-DEVO. Very good book -- as are his other books.


On a completely different subject, although this may be a bit off the track of your experience as a research scientist, I wonder if you can offer some insight and instinct and intention. I've been thinking lately about the line between them.

Clearly some animal behavior is robotic instinct.  (I know I've heard of some good examples of cases in which you interrupt an insect that looks like it is building a nest and put it down a few inches away, and it starts all over again -- or something like that. The goose egg behavior on this page is another example. I'm surprised that I haven't been able to find more.)

And clearly (at least to those of us who are willing to attribute intention to animals) some animal behavior is intentional. There were some recent experiments in which chimps(?) had to figure out that they could retrieve a stick from a container which they could then use to retrieve a reward. This is new, innovative behavior, not a learned trick.

So my question is, have biologists identified where one sort of behavior becomes the other -- or probably better, where the lowest level intentional behavior has been observed?

-- Russ


On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 7:55 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi, Russ,
 
It's my least favorite of the seven questions.  To me, the question my be recast as, "What light's your wick in the world to which the label emergence has been attached.?"  I know you wouldn't know if from my posts on Friam but I spent most of my career working as a research scientist on forms of communication ... bird song, babies cries, whining, for instance.  As a dyed in the wool materialist, I have always been fascinated by the question of how things come into being and why they have come to take the form that they do.  Rather than using the question to build a wall around emergence, I would hope that we will use it to develop a list of all the things labeled emergent that have challenged the imagination of group members. 
 
Have you read Sean Carroll's book on EVO DEVO?  For years I sat in a psychology department listening to sterile arguments concerning nature and nurture.  And now, by god, we know how it works, and neither nature nor nurture -- in the sense that their protagonists understood them -- had anything to do with it.  I am so glad that I lived to learn how nature makes an organism. 
 
nick
 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 9/9/2009 6:20:13 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Emergence Seminar

Since I won't be there, let me suggest a pre-requisite activity.

Discuss why do you (or anyone else) want to define emergence?

In saying that I'm not suggesting that emergence should not be defined -- although I now think that it is unfortunate that the word has become so widely used. What I want to do is to prompt you to talk about what it is that leads you to want to define emergence in the first place.  It seems to me that it's impossible even to begin to answer the questions listed below until one has developed for oneself an intuitive idea about what it is that one wants the word emergence to capture. That's where I would suggest you start: what is your possibly vague sense of the sorts of things you want the word emergence to refer to. Once you have clarified that for yourself I think the questions below will be easier to deal with -- as will the papers in the book.

-- Russ



On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

All,
 
The emergence seminar, such as it is, will have its first meeting this thursday (tomorrow) at Downtown Subcription (which is at Garcia and Agua Fria).  I suggest that we devote the seminar, at least in its early stages, to the collection, EMERGENCE.  Why a collection?  Why a seminar?  Because, as I keep saying (sorry), I want to articulate the different views on the subject.  One thing I noticed about academics is their desire to exclude ways of thinking from discussions.  So academics tend to scoff.  I think the mark of a truly educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is the ability to hold more than one idea in his or her head at once..... to compare and contrast.  Bedau and Humphreys, in their introduction, invite us to engage in this kind of analysis by bearing in mind a set of seven questions, as we read each of the authors.  These are:
 
1. How should emergence be defined? (by reference to irreducibility, unpredictability, ontological novelty, conceptual novelty, and.or supvenience (whatever that is?)
2.  What can be emergent: properties, substances, processes, phenomena, patterns laws, or something else?
3.  What is the scope of actual emergent phenomena?  (Is emergence a rare phenomenon, or broadly distributed in physics and biology as well as in psychology?)
4. Is emergence an objective feature of the world, or is it merely in the eye of the beholder.
5. Should emergence be viewed as static and synchronic, or as dynamic and diachronic, or are both possible? 
6. Does emergence imply or require the existence of new levels of phenomena with their new causes and effects?
7. In what ways are emergent phenomena autonomous from their emergent bases? 
 
Tomorrow, as a warm up; it would be interesting to see what preconceptions we hold on these questions. 
 
 
Nick
 
 
 
 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology an d Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
 
 
 


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org



============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Free forum by Nabble Edit this page