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Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

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gepr

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

There is no need to distinguish between behavior and non-behavior movement. It's a distraction. That's part of my position in this discussion. To play fair, though, I'll take your example of the live vs. dead duck. I don't care whether the duck is alive or dead. I don't distinguish between dead duck behavior and live duck behavior. There is no such thing as "trying to escape the fox" behavior. There is only "darting this way", "sprinting that way", etc.

*You*, the observer impute the "trying to escape the fox" intention onto the behavior much the same way a mystic might impute a "returning to mother earth" intention onto a dead duck falling from the sky.

There is no behavioral difference between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color. There *is* behavioral difference between the *mechanisms* inside the paper towel and the mechanisms inside the celery. Rocks don't have intention when they fall from a cliff and humans don't have intention when they wink sarcastically. Intention is an illusory imputation. All I care about is the action and the boundary between the measuring device and the thing measured (which Nick targets nicely in the next post, to which I'll reply).

But please remember that I'm trying to steelman what I infer is *your* (and you claim is Nick's) position. It's a testament to my incompetence that I've failed so spectacularly to repeat what I inferred to be your own position back to you.

On 5/12/20 7:55 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Ok.... so how do we distinguish behavior from non-behavior movements within the system you are proposing? In what way do we distinguish the dead duck from the living duck? Or, to stick with the example you prefer, the changing color of the celery from the changing color of a paper towel placed part-way into the same solution?
>
> I'm also not sure what you mean to refer to with "holographic principle." My assertion is that psychologists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about internal processes. That claim is similar to the claim that chemists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about the inside of atoms. Or that Newton, in formulating his physics, was not trying to infer about the inside of planets. The phenomenon in question can be taken apart if you want, but that is a fundamentally different path of inquiry. A rabbit trying to escape a fox is made up of cells, but the cracking open its skulls and looking inside won't tell you that it is /trying to escape the fox/. The /trying-to-escape/ is not inside it's head, it is in the rabbit's behavior relative to the fox, and can be observed. When someone says "Hey, come quick! Look, that rabbit is trying to get away from that fox!", they are not making some mysterious inference about a hidden state within the rabbit, they are
> describing what they are observing.

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gepr

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

EricC introduced the word "visible". I'm fine with it. Y'all can use whatever word you choose. Iggitybiggity would be just as fine. My choice is "hidden".

I *also* reject the concept of "interiority", as I infer it. There is only the boundary between the seer and the seen, the measurer and the measured, the beginning of the probe and the thing probed. The peeker and the peeked. The poker and the poked. [sigh] Will I ever toss out enough metaphors so you can parallax toward the thing I actually mean?

Stop, for awhile, talking about hard things like consciousness and thought and think, temporarily about celery and antennas. When an antenna is sitting next to your cell phone, *something* happens inside (or more accurately on the surface of) that antenna ... something you cannot see with your naked eye, nor feel when you put your finger on it.

So, if you're just an arbitrary dork sitting there wondering "I wonder if there's anything going on inside that antenna?" (Fine, you don't like "inside" ... how about "I wonder if there's anything going on within epsilon distance of the metal surface?")

How do *you* refer to the hypothetical "thing going on inside the antenna"? Then let's say you find a way to measure the current from one end to the other of the antenna, a meter of some kind. Then you move the cell phone back and forth and watch your meter sway this way and that. Then we (people like me) say the antenna's behavior is a result of moving the cell phone.

That's it. That's all there is to any concrete example I might lay out. Replace the antenna with celery, or a duck, or a human, or whatever you want. But the setup is the same.

On 5/12/20 10:40 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Visible, here, is, I take it, a metaphor. I reject, I think, the fundamental notion of “hidden” and perhaps of the entire black box idea. The trouble with the black box model is that it implies that we experience the outside of the box directly but have to infer what we learn about the insides of the box. But all experience is the product of inference, including everything we know about the outside of the box as well as everything we know about the inside of the box. To say that some inferences are to inner things and some to outer things is to say SOMETHING, but I have never understood exactly what. What is this dimension of “interiority”? Does it refer to anything except our difficulty at getting at whatever we take ourselves to be talking about?
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Steve Smith

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by gepr

glen -

I try to resist sticking my fat foot (face, keyboard?) into these
discussions.   A few weeks back at the beginning of this (or perhaps a
precursor to this) thread, I felt as if you and Nick (and maybe Eric?)
were having an exchange almost indistinguishable (in form, not detail)
from the one between Vizzini and Dread Pirate Roberts now infamously
known as "the Iocane Powder Battle of Wits".    I will leave it to the
reader to judge who I imaged as Vizzini and who Roberts, but let me
clarify that I was relieved when both parties emerged from the exchange
alive (or so I impute from your continued textual engagement via this
mail list, which given some of this discussion might actually be worth
questioning as sufficient for that imputation?).

I will niggle at your statement that "there is no behavioral difference
between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color" though I
accept that the (more) interesting distinction is between the mechanisms
in each.   Replace your celery stalk with a giant sequoia and make your
paper towel roll equally tall, and maybe you sense my issue.   By
observing the (behavioural) difference between the sequoia's leaves
taking up fuscia dye at it's crown and the paper towel roll only taking
it up a few meters high (postulate a waterproof and very strong
core-roll to keep it from sagging/breaking with the added weight), we
might *then* impute that their dyed-water uptake is based on differing
mechanisms.   At this scale/context of observation, I think the
*mechanism* (or it's behaviour) is hidden whilst the
macro-(quantitatively and qualitatively?) behaviour is exposed (visible).

As for Nick's use of "black box" and your own niggling with that, I will
*try* to follow your lead on thread hygiene and respond inline to that
response/post (next).

- Steve

> There is no need to distinguish between behavior and non-behavior movement. It's a distraction. That's part of my position in this discussion. To play fair, though, I'll take your example of the live vs. dead duck. I don't care whether the duck is alive or dead. I don't distinguish between dead duck behavior and live duck behavior. There is no such thing as "trying to escape the fox" behavior. There is only "darting this way", "sprinting that way", etc.
>
> *You*, the observer impute the "trying to escape the fox" intention onto the behavior much the same way a mystic might impute a "returning to mother earth" intention onto a dead duck falling from the sky.
>
> There is no behavioral difference between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color. There *is* behavioral difference between the *mechanisms* inside the paper towel and the mechanisms inside the celery. Rocks don't have intention when they fall from a cliff and humans don't have intention when they wink sarcastically. Intention is an illusory imputation. All I care about is the action and the boundary between the measuring device and the thing measured (which Nick targets nicely in the next post, to which I'll reply).
>
> But please remember that I'm trying to steelman what I infer is *your* (and you claim is Nick's) position. It's a testament to my incompetence that I've failed so spectacularly to repeat what I inferred to be your own position back to you.
>
> On 5/12/20 7:55 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> Ok.... so how do we distinguish behavior from non-behavior movements within the system you are proposing? In what way do we distinguish the dead duck from the living duck? Or, to stick with the example you prefer, the changing color of the celery from the changing color of a paper towel placed part-way into the same solution?
>>
>> I'm also not sure what you mean to refer to with "holographic principle." My assertion is that psychologists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about internal processes. That claim is similar to the claim that chemists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about the inside of atoms. Or that Newton, in formulating his physics, was not trying to infer about the inside of planets. The phenomenon in question can be taken apart if you want, but that is a fundamentally different path of inquiry. A rabbit trying to escape a fox is made up of cells, but the cracking open its skulls and looking inside won't tell you that it is /trying to escape the fox/. The /trying-to-escape/ is not inside it's head, it is in the rabbit's behavior relative to the fox, and can be observed. When someone says "Hey, come quick! Look, that rabbit is trying to get away from that fox!", they are not making some mysterious inference about a hidden state within the rabbit, they are
>> describing what they are observing.

gepr

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

Of course. Sorry for *hiding* it. But when I said one "changing color" isn't different from another "changing color", I was focusing on color changes. That's why I said the full clause "changing color" after both examples. I'm sorry for not trying to make that more clear... maybe all caps ... or asterisks.

On 5/13/20 8:22 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> I will niggle at your statement that "there is no behavioral difference
> between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color" though I
> accept that the (more) interesting distinction is between the mechanisms
> in each.   Replace your celery stalk with a giant sequoia and make your
> paper towel roll equally tall, and maybe you sense my issue.   By
> observing the (behavioural) difference between the sequoia's leaves
> taking up fuscia dye at it's crown and the paper towel roll only taking
> it up a few meters high (postulate a waterproof and very strong
> core-roll to keep it from sagging/breaking with the added weight), we
> might *then* impute that their dyed-water uptake is based on differing
> mechanisms.   At this scale/context of observation, I think the
> *mechanism* (or it's behaviour) is hidden whilst the
> macro-(quantitatively and qualitatively?) behaviour is exposed (visible).

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jon zingale

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

Eric,

I have some concern that once we decide the dead duck was not behaving,

that we would avoid the dropped coin. I get that we wouldn't want to

apply the verb flailing to the coin except perhaps in a moment of poetry.

This is the season to witness cottonwood drifts, though. Better might

be the helicopter like motions of maple seedpods. These adaptations,

which carry the future of the species, are shaped so that they behave

meaningfully when coupled with their environment. Would you hesitate

to call the motions of the cottonwood seedpod, in its environment, behavior?

Is it too early in this conversation, or even inappropriate to ask whose

behavior it would be?

Frank,

Thank you for mentioning covariant tensors, I enjoyed walking

around my neighborhood thinking of them and of a response to you.

While it seems to me that a coffee cup is less abstract than a covariant

tensor, the latter isn't free of material or phenomenal foundation. If I

witness a grade schooler attempting to pushforward what I know to be

a covariant tensor, then I know that they are not likely thinking about a

covariant tensor, even if they wished that they were. If on the other hand,

they were clear on pullingback whatever it is they believed acted like a

covariant tensor, then I would likely believe they had a covariant tensor

in mind. Where the coffee cup, arguably is just a thing. A covariant

tensor is a thing which obeys strict rules of behavior. For example, while

I could use a coffee cup as a hammer, I am not convinced that I could

use a covariant tensor as a hammer. It may be the case that to resolve a

covariant tensor with an fMRI, we would need to witness one thinking of

a covariant tensor through time.

Glen,

Maybe we could also use the term bracketed for those things which

we wish to keep outside of the Bekenstein bound. Like yourself, I am

not really a stickler for what terms we use. I would and have claimed

that this is how the inductor behaves in this circuit while explaining

to family or friends how one of my synthesizers works. What I would

like to glean in the context of this conversation is whether or not this

attribution to the inductor is a metaphor. If it is a metaphor here, then

I would like to understand why.

gepr

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

Excellent idea! "Bracket[ed|ing]" is a great term. I worry a bit about relying too much on jargon, since I think the mapping I'm trying to make (from deep, thinking human to shallow passive circuit element like a copper wire) might get lost in that jargon. For example, talking about the bracketed items being observables _outside_ the bound might be weird if the audience thinks of sets, where the brackets are around things _inside_ some boundary. I'll have to think about it.

No, I am not using any metaphors when talking about the inductor. I mean it in the way an electrician would use it. E.g. why not put a capacitor in there instead of an inductor? Because the capacitor does something totally different from what an inductor does. Behavior is simply the stuff that happens.

On 5/13/20 10:06 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> Maybe we could also use the term *bracketed* for those things which
> we wish to keep outside of the Bekenstein bound. Like yourself, I am
> not really a stickler for what terms we use. I would and have claimed
> that *this is how the inductor behaves in this circuit* while explaining
> to family or friends how one of my synthesizers works. What I would
> like to glean in the context of this conversation is whether or not this
> attribution to the inductor is a metaphor. If it is a metaphor here, then
> I would like to understand why.

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Steve Smith

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen, ( Nick, Eric ) -

EricC introduced the word "visible". I'm fine with it. Y'all can use whatever word you choose. Iggitybiggity would be just as fine. My choice is "hidden".

I'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that tone?). Maybe I'm missing something. HAD you (or Eric) used IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation sideways? Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd?

I *also* reject the concept of "interiority", as I infer it. There is only the boundary between the seer and the seen, the measurer and the measured, the beginning of the probe and the thing probed. The peeker and the peeked. The poker and the poked. [sigh] Will I ever toss out enough metaphors so you can parallax toward the thing I actually mean?

Just to continue my niggling. Interiority would seem to make perfect sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober and the object (seen/measured/probed)? To the subject, there is a boundary between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector photons/phonons/nerf-balls). Visible light mostly bounces off the surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through... thus yielding a different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?) interiority/exteriority...

This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and objectness? I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up?

The antenna example is near and dear to my heart as it was perhaps one of the earliest "physics" constructs that I tried to understand intuitively. My parents gifted me a crystal radio kit which was little more than two coils of wire and a bit of crystalline form iron-sulfide (galena?). The "little more" was a magic, industrially produced diaphragm-coil earphone that pretty much quit working as soon as I disassembled it (went inside of it) to see how it worked. To the point of your example I spent more than a little time in my bedroom "tickling" the galena crystal with the wire "whisker" designed to make it "easy" to find the right contact point on the lead-sulfide crystal to create a rectifying diode, whilst trying to imagine what the hell might be going on in that antenna and the tuning coil and the diode.

My father's attempts to explain this "magic" was complicated by his own hillbilly animistic tendency to think/describe things teleologically. It DID help me in a way I later recognized as similar to Einstein's often lauded explanation of how he came to some of his nascent intuition about relativity.

"...a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems to be no such thing, however, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations. From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest. For how should the first observer know or be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion? One sees in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained."

My own introspections/extrospections on this apparatus/phenomenon were much less articulate and feeble than Einstein's of course... but the key to it (for me) was to almost seek an *emphathetic* relationship to the *imagined* behaviour of the elements (antenna, coil, PbS crystal, wire whisker...) as well as an even-more imagined element being the transmitter/antenna that was *creating* (inducing?) the signals I was detecting. I even remember a discussion with my father who *assumed* that a heavier gauge wire-antenna would somehow provide stronger coupling... (re: the epsilon distance from the surface point).

So I WAS that "arbitrary dork just sitting there wondering..." and that style of wondering comes back/up to me often.


Stop, for awhile, talking about hard things like consciousness and thought and think, temporarily about celery and antennas. When an antenna is sitting next to your cell phone, *something* happens inside (or more accurately on the surface of) that antenna ... something you cannot see with your naked eye, nor feel when you put your finger on it.

So, if you're just an arbitrary dork sitting there wondering "I wonder if there's anything going on inside that antenna?" (Fine, you don't like "inside" ... how about "I wonder if there's anything going on within epsilon distance of the metal surface?")

How do *you* refer to the hypothetical "thing going on inside the antenna"? Then let's say you find a way to measure the current from one end to the other of the antenna, a meter of some kind. Then you move the cell phone back and forth and watch your meter sway this way and that. Then we (people like me) say the antenna's behavior is a result of moving the cell phone.

That's it. That's all there is to any concrete example I might lay out. Replace the antenna with celery, or a duck, or a human, or whatever you want. But the setup is the same.

- Steve

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gepr

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

On 5/13/20 11:17 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of
> words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that
> tone?). Maybe I'm missing something. HAD you (or Eric) used
> IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation
> sideways? Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the
> day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd?

Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way. I literally couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer implications (connotations?). Behavior is a very laden word. Since we're talking in the midst of a conversation about psychology, it's a seriously BAD word to use. And since EricC and Nick have *explicitly* challenged the concept of "inside", that makes "inside" a bad word, too. It would be very cool if we could use neutral terms like X and Y. But then we'll devolve into mathematics, which some people think they don't like. (I'd argue everyone likes math; they just don't know they like math.)

I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and "hidden" is absurd. But I AM asking EricC and Nick to treat words as ambiguous, with multiple meanings, wiggle room, and to make some effort to read what I *mean*, not whatever immediate constructs pop into their heads when they first read the words. I've talked about this as "steelmanning" and "listening with empathy" a lot. I know it's difficult. I fail all the time. The conversation will be permanently *dead* (to me) when/if we lock down a jargonal definition of any word. If you force someone to read 800 page scribbles by old dead guys in order to understand what a single word means, then you've lost the game.

> Just to continue my niggling. Interiority would seem to make perfect
> sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober and the
> object (seen/measured/probed)? To the subject, there is a boundary
> between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever
> mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly
> perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector
> photons/phonons/nerf-balls). Visible light mostly bounces off the
> surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through... thus yielding a
> different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?)
> interiority/exteriority...

No. I've purposefully stopped implying that the boundary closes a space because I thought that was interfering with my steelmanning EricC's position. The position involves a kind of "projection" from the object's actions (flapping wings or whatever) out to a (possibly imaginary) objective. And that projection is important to the categorization of the *types* of behavior they want to talk about (motivated, intentional, etc.). That projection to the objective is what founds the claim that all (valid) questions about the object's actions can be empirically studied, because the behavior is, ultimately, embedded in the object-objective relationship ... the agent lives in an environment and the environment is a kind of reflection of everything that agent may do.

So, I attempted to remove the "interiority" from my language by stopping my talk about inside and sticking with boundaries. That boundary can be closed (like a sphere with an inside and outside) or it could be a plane or a wavy manifold or like a slice of Swiss cheese or whatever. So, "interiority" is *not* what I'm going for. In fact it's a distraction from what I am going for, which is the *distance* (think network hop-distance) between the subject and object and the *medium* (think intermediate transforms as nodes/edges) through which signals go from subject to object and vice versa.

The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible cut-points. E.g. a telescope has parts like mirrors and lenses, twists and turns. Any one of those could be THE important cut-point, the boundary. The boundary is the cut-point beyond which our ability to infer or distinguish stops. So, for a telescope, THE important cut-point is whatever distance 2 pin-pricks of light blur together, such that we need a more powerful telescope to distinguish the 2 pin-prick lights.

> This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and
> objectness? I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand
> here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up?

Yes, this conversation is a DIRECT descendant from the conversation that cited Fontana, BC Smith, Chalmers, path integrals, Necker cubes, verbs as duals of nouns, etc. Luckily, Marcus assures us that e-ink is cheap. 8^D

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Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

I was just outside sawing up dead branches. I noticed a large ant struggling to carry a piece of vegetation larger than it was over obstacles in a general direction which did not change notwithstanding the obstacles. It was very hard not to feel the ant's intentionality and determination. I was experiencing the ant as the ant. Extreme empathy.

Frank

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:58 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 5/13/20 11:17 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of
> words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that
> tone?).   Maybe I'm missing something. HAD you (or Eric) used
> IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation
> sideways? Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the
> day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd?

Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way. I literally couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer implications (connotations?). Behavior is a very laden word. Since we're talking in the midst of a conversation about psychology, it's a seriously BAD word to use. And since EricC and Nick have *explicitly* challenged the concept of "inside", that makes "inside" a bad word, too. It would be very cool if we could use neutral terms like X and Y. But then we'll devolve into mathematics, which some people think they don't like. (I'd argue everyone likes math; they just don't know they like math.)

I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and "hidden" is absurd. But I AM asking EricC and Nick to treat words as ambiguous, with multiple meanings, wiggle room, and to make some effort to read what I *mean*, not whatever immediate constructs pop into their heads when they first read the words. I've talked about this as "steelmanning" and "listening with empathy" a lot. I know it's difficult. I fail all the time. The conversation will be permanently *dead* (to me) when/if we lock down a jargonal definition of any word. If you force someone to read 800 page scribbles by old dead guys in order to understand what a single word means, then you've lost the game.

> Just to continue my niggling. Interiority would seem to make perfect
> sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober and the
> object (seen/measured/probed)?   To the subject, there is a boundary
> between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever
> mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly
> perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector
> photons/phonons/nerf-balls).   Visible light mostly bounces off the
> surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through... thus yielding a
> different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?)
> interiority/exteriority...

No. I've purposefully stopped implying that the boundary closes a space because I thought that was interfering with my steelmanning EricC's position. The position involves a kind of "projection" from the object's actions (flapping wings or whatever) out to a (possibly imaginary) objective. And that projection is important to the categorization of the *types* of behavior they want to talk about (motivated, intentional, etc.). That projection to the objective is what founds the claim that all (valid) questions about the object's actions can be empirically studied, because the behavior is, ultimately, embedded in the object-objective relationship ... the agent lives in an environment and the environment is a kind of reflection of everything that agent may do.

So, I attempted to remove the "interiority" from my language by stopping my talk about inside and sticking with boundaries. That boundary can be closed (like a sphere with an inside and outside) or it could be a plane or a wavy manifold or like a slice of Swiss cheese or whatever. So, "interiority" is *not* what I'm going for. In fact it's a distraction from what I am going for, which is the *distance* (think network hop-distance) between the subject and object and the *medium* (think intermediate transforms as nodes/edges) through which signals go from subject to object and vice versa.

The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible cut-points. E.g. a telescope has parts like mirrors and lenses, twists and turns. Any one of those could be THE important cut-point, the boundary. The boundary is the cut-point beyond which our ability to infer or distinguish stops. So, for a telescope, THE important cut-point is whatever distance 2 pin-pricks of light blur together, such that we need a more powerful telescope to distinguish the 2 pin-prick lights.

> This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and
> objectness? I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand
> here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up?

Yes, this conversation is a DIRECT descendant from the conversation that cited Fontana, BC Smith, Chalmers, path integrals, Necker cubes, verbs as duals of nouns, etc. Luckily, Marcus assures us that e-ink is cheap. 8^D

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Steve Smith

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen -
> Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way.
I was asking because it seemed to have that tone, but I also know you to
be pretty literal, so appreciate this clarity (as below as well).
> I literally couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer implications (connotations?).
I think that is meritable
> Behavior is a very laden word. Since we're talking in the midst of a conversation about psychology, it's a seriously BAD word to use. And since EricC and Nick have *explicitly* challenged the concept of "inside", that makes "inside" a bad word, too. It would be very cool if we could use neutral terms like X and Y. But then we'll devolve into mathematics, which some people think they don't like. (I'd argue everyone likes math; they just don't know they like math.)
I will try to concede here to you what *I* believe to be one of the
major perils of the broad and free use of metaphor and that is that we
end up applying what I think you call "excess meaning".   And I am
sympathetic with wanting to couch it in entirely arbitrary symbols (even
X and Y often connote a Euclidean Grid and Orientation).
> I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and "hidden" is absurd.
Excellent... and I in return am sorry for letting that tack distract
me... I *am* trying to align more better with the conversation and this
helps.
> But I AM asking EricC and Nick to treat words as ambiguous, with multiple meanings, wiggle room, and to make some effort to read what I *mean*, not whatever immediate constructs pop into their heads when they first read the words.
Yes, much discussion (especially on e-mail) seems to be at risk to
devolving into a cascade of triggers (in a broad sense, not just the
PTSD sense).   I also agree (if I'm understanding what you *mean*) that
meaning is carried in the white space, between the words, in the total
context/construct of the words and their arrangement and their embedding
in a larger conversation.
> I've talked about this as "steelmanning" and "listening with empathy" a lot.
I appreciate your making the connection between these two explicit.   It
enhances my empathy (I think) for what you are trying to do when you
"steelman".   We can discuss that entire idiom separately if I continue
to mis(sub?) understand it.   I think your use of "straw" and "steel" in
the sense of "antipathy" and "empathy" (perhaps) is very helpful to me
at least, as I begin to catch up (more) on how you mean/use those terms.
> I know it's difficult. I fail all the time. The conversation will be permanently *dead* (to me) when/if we lock down a jargonal definition of any word. If you force someone to read 800 page scribbles by old dead guys in order to understand what a single word means, then you've lost the game.

And I *think* this is part of the larger discussion alluded to with your
invocation of "holographic".   A LOT can be inferred in a hologram from
a small subset of the arrangements of silver-halide (or the varying
thickness of a light-propogating substance), but no single atom or even
crystal really tells you much at all, and the MORE of the original
holographic recording that is maintained/referred to, the MORE fidelity
is obtained.    I don't know if this is an acutely useful observation in
this exchange, but I hope so.

>> thus yielding a
>> different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?)
>> interiority/exteriority...
> No. I've purposefully stopped implying that the boundary closes a space because I thought that was interfering with my steelmanning EricC's position.
Thanks... again I apologize for asking dumb questions to "come up to speed".
> The position involves a kind of "projection" from the object's actions (flapping wings or whatever) out to a (possibly imaginary) objective. And that projection is important to the categorization of the *types* of behavior they want to talk about (motivated, intentional, etc.). That projection to the objective is what founds the claim that all (valid) questions about the object's actions can be empirically studied, because the behavior is, ultimately, embedded in the object-objective relationship ... the agent lives in an environment and the environment is a kind of reflection of everything that agent may do.
I DO usually try to read (listen) empathetically but your reference
above was a good reminder and I *think* helps in engaging in these types
of discussoins.   Another tangent you might be able to prune for me
trivially is the question of teleology.   We normally allow things with
agency to have objectives whilst we do not those without.   Drop a
human-scale (weight and dimension) mannequin with loose clothing from an
airplane and it may well "flap it's arms and legs" all the way to impact
which may look like hysterical panic if exhibited by a conscious human
*with agency*.
> So, I attempted to remove the "interiority" from my language by stopping my talk about inside and sticking with boundaries. That boundary can be closed (like a sphere with an inside and outside) or it could be a plane or a wavy manifold or like a slice of Swiss cheese or whatever. So, "interiority" is *not* what I'm going for. In fact it's a distraction from what I am going for, which is the *distance* (think network hop-distance) between the subject and object and the *medium* (think intermediate transforms as nodes/edges) through which signals go from subject to object and vice versa.
Yes, I think this is both helpful and registers well on what I have been
trying to understand using Judea Pearl's "Causal Diagrams".
> The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible cut-points.
Agreed. And similarly many possible levels of aggregation of the graph
of object-object relations?
>> This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and
>> objectness? I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand
>> here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up?
> Yes, this conversation is a DIRECT descendant from the conversation that cited Fontana, BC Smith, Chalmers, path integrals, Necker cubes, verbs as duals of nouns, etc. Luckily, Marcus assures us that e-ink is cheap. 8^D

Yeh... but is "cheap" a proxy for "nearly worthless"? 8^D

- Steve

BTW, your adoption (if only temporarily or self-consciously) of my use
of "quotes" and CAPS and *asterisked-bold* and occasionally
_italics-underscore_ had pretty good fidelity to my own as I read it.
It *did* add some cadence and emphasis that (I think) helped *me* (if
nobody else) read a little more empathetically. I think it was
effective for reasons beyond the mere NLP "mirroring" that can evoke
something similar as I understand it. I suspect you did NOT adopt my
layered (parenthetical) stylization because it maybe doesn't add
anything *for you* when you read me, or it *is not* the way your thought
processes work. My typographic conventions are primarily about emphasis
while my parenthetical stylizing is more of a reflection of the way I
have a hard time pruning the branching narratives in my head when
reading/thinking/responding and wanting to *share* some of those
branches at least as remaining stubs.   Any observation you have on how
well that works (or how badly it distracts) would be of interest to me.
I tend to trust most people to skip/skim my parentheticals as they are
there more for disambiguation (rather than elaboration) than anything.

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Steve Smith

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Frank -
> I was just outside sawing up dead branches. I noticed a large ant
> struggling to carry a piece of vegetation larger than it was over
> obstacles in a general direction which did not change notwithstanding
> the obstacles. It was very hard not to feel the ant's intentionality
> and determination. I was experiencing the ant as the ant. Extreme
> empathy.

Just reading this made my jaws (mandibles) ache (horizontally)!

But I couldn't really image the third pair of appendages (middle for me,
between my hind/forelimbs) helping me struggle.

But I did have a (likely highly mistargeted) olphactory analog of
pheremone trails/fields in that image. It came through more as a taste
than a smell.

And as the ant, did you have any apprehension of that *huge* mammal
dragging dead branches around and waving a saw?

- Steve

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Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

"And as the ant, did you have any apprehension of that *huge* mammal
dragging dead branches around and waving a saw? "

No. I could feel his determination to deal with the branches and felt (my feeling as the mammal) that he was uninterested in me. But that empathic experience of lack of empathy was apparently mistaken. Who is speaking?

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 2:01 PM Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank -
> I was just outside sawing up dead branches. I noticed a large ant
> struggling to carry a piece of vegetation larger than it was over
> obstacles in a general direction which did not change notwithstanding
> the obstacles. It was very hard not to feel the ant's intentionality
> and determination. I was experiencing the ant as the ant. Extreme
> empathy.

Just reading this made my jaws (mandibles) ache (horizontally)!

But I couldn't really image the third pair of appendages (middle for me,
between my hind/forelimbs) helping me struggle.

But I did have a (likely highly mistargeted) olphactory analog of
pheremone trails/fields in that image. It came through more as a taste
than a smell.

And as the ant, did you have any apprehension of that *huge* mammal
dragging dead branches around and waving a saw?

- Steve

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Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

thompnickson2

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Hi, Uncle Steve,

For me, the problem with Pirate Roberts was that he seemed to hold the view that nobody who did not know everything should say anything. (i.e, that there is no value in discourse on any technical matter that is not expert discourse.) My own view is that there is value in any discourse that is honest and respectful. Respectful means that you take the other guy's words seriously; honest means you take your own seriously. Taking the other guy's seriously is hard enough; taking one's own seriously that's -- oh my -- a whole different level.

Taking one's words seriously amounts to caring intensely about the integrity of one's thought. One CARES whether the thing one said yesterday about X has the same predicates or implications as the thing one said today about Y. I don't know about you guys, but this conversation has me right out at my limits of integrity. Even though I have studied and thought about behavior for 60 years, it has me flailing. I am trying to find a place to stand so that I will not have to shift my ground every time you, or Glen, or Marcus, or EricS, or EricC, or Frank asks me a question. You have me at one of those boundaries that Steve G. likes to talk about, where creativity sometimes happens. I hope and pray that I am doing the same for you.

I think I am sympathetic with the notion that the dead duck is behaving, it's just displaying "dead-behavior." The alternative I reject when I agree to that formulation is to require all behavior to be telic (i.e., goal-directed). That just seems to heap too much on the language for it to bear. True, most of what EricC and I talk about is telic behavior, so it's understandable that he would try to exclude the dead duck, but I think that exclusion is just too troublesome for speech.

So how do we get out of this mess? Let me lay out a general perspective which is Holtian and Peircean and, I think, ultimately Glenian. Any assertion of the existence of something requires THREE "arguments?": the thing seen, what it is seen AS, and the point of view from which it is seen that way. The nice thing about the "point of view" metaphor is that it gives assigns reality both to the observer and to the thing observed. Every point of view tells you something about what is observed, and yet, what is observed from that point of view is determined by the thing observed. Knowledge advances as we compared the information gathered from our various points of view to agree upon a point of view that is more nearly universal.

This convergence toward agreement depends, of course, on our prior agreement that, in any one conversation, we are all looking at the same object. And THAT agreement requires us to adopt a meta-point of view, one in which the world is divided into objects of observation. For something to be an object, it has, somehow, to endure and separate itself from its background. One way for that sort of separation to occur is parallax, which Glen keeps asking us to talk about. That is when we see the near mountain as separate from the mountain range behind it because as we move, it moves in relation to the range. The most common way, however, for objects to designate themselves is by moving, themselves, even tho we, the observers, and the background, remain still. I think I am happy to call such motion, behavior. So, yes, rocks rolling down mountain sides are behaving. Dead ducks behave. But remember, all of this requires that we isolate the object of which we are speaking BEFORE we begin to describe it's behavior. Thus my suspicion about some of the argument going on between EricC and Glen is equivocation concerning what it is that is behaving, not disagreement about whether behavior is going on.

This is why I find the discussion of tornadoes so fascinating. Please see again Frank's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gQutQQiuAI&feature=youtu.be . At the risk of summoning Doug out of the ground to once again dunk my head in a toilet, I want to try to understand if tornadoes behave. At first blush, they seem to: there is the tornado, it is writhing across the ground and it us acting on its environment. It is definitely moving, both in parallax and on its own. But is a proper object? That, to me, is the much harder question.

To be an object, irreducibly, what ever we are talking about has to have boundaries and persist in time. A tornado persists in time, but what is its boundary? Is the tornado an object in itself or is it just an appendage of the supercell that generates it? Indeed, is the supercell an object in itself or is IT just an appendage of the synoptic situation that makes it possible. Indeed, is that synoptic situation an object in itself or just an appendage the meso-convective complex that embraces it, and is that, in turn just an appendage of the of the energy gradient generated by the sun on the surface of the earth, as Steve G. would have it? And so forth. Is there only one "object", the big bang, and are we all--tornadoes, people, celery, and dead ducks--appendages of that object.

If I agree to the last proposition, I have plainly cornered myself in gagaland. But point of view can rescue us, I hope. From the point of view of the farmer on the ground, the tornado is plainly the object that behavior. It is the exact motions and variations in strength that will determine the future of that farmer's barn. From the point of view of the tornado-chaser, it is the super cell he needs to pay attention to. Over- focus on the tornado fading away in front of him may distract him from the on-coming tornado being generated behind him by super cell over him. From the point of view of the severe storms forecaster, it is the meso-convective complex that are the relevant objects, because those are the likely objects to persist into the next forecast period. Each point of view isolates different objects and gathers information about those objects that has predictive power for the concerns of the observer.

Before letting this fly, I want to address a meta, meta, metameta, concern that I sense lurking in the shadows around this discussion. SHOULD (note the use of modal language!) ==>should<== we be trying to come to an agreement on either facts or terminology and, if we fail, should we be discouraged. I would say yes on the first, and no on the second. I think we should constantly try for agreement, because that effort produces the tension that leads to change and growth, no matter how ephemeral that agreement ever proves to be.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 9:23 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

glen -

I try to resist sticking my fat foot (face, keyboard?) into these discussions. A few weeks back at the beginning of this (or perhaps a precursor to this) thread, I felt as if you and Nick (and maybe Eric?) were having an exchange almost indistinguishable (in form, not detail) from the one between Vizzini and Dread Pirate Roberts now infamously known as "the Iocane Powder Battle of Wits". I will leave it to the reader to judge who I imaged as Vizzini and who Roberts, but let me clarify that I was relieved when both parties emerged from the exchange alive (or so I impute from your continued textual engagement via this mail list, which given some of this discussion might actually be worth questioning as sufficient for that imputation?).

I will niggle at your statement that "there is no behavioral difference between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color" though I accept that the (more) interesting distinction is between the mechanisms in each. Replace your celery stalk with a giant sequoia and make your paper towel roll equally tall, and maybe you sense my issue. By observing the (behavioural) difference between the sequoia's leaves taking up fuscia dye at it's crown and the paper towel roll only taking it up a few meters high (postulate a waterproof and very strong core-roll to keep it from sagging/breaking with the added weight), we might *then* impute that their dyed-water uptake is based on differing mechanisms. At this scale/context of observation, I think the
*mechanism* (or it's behaviour) is hidden whilst the macro-(quantitatively and qualitatively?) behaviour is exposed (visible).

As for Nick's use of "black box" and your own niggling with that, I will
*try* to follow your lead on thread hygiene and respond inline to that response/post (next).

- Steve

> There is no need to distinguish between behavior and non-behavior movement. It's a distraction. That's part of my position in this discussion. To play fair, though, I'll take your example of the live vs. dead duck. I don't care whether the duck is alive or dead. I don't distinguish between dead duck behavior and live duck behavior. There is no such thing as "trying to escape the fox" behavior. There is only "darting this way", "sprinting that way", etc.
>
> *You*, the observer impute the "trying to escape the fox" intention onto the behavior much the same way a mystic might impute a "returning to mother earth" intention onto a dead duck falling from the sky.
>
> There is no behavioral difference between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color. There *is* behavioral difference between the *mechanisms* inside the paper towel and the mechanisms inside the celery. Rocks don't have intention when they fall from a cliff and humans don't have intention when they wink sarcastically. Intention is an illusory imputation. All I care about is the action and the boundary between the measuring device and the thing measured (which Nick targets nicely in the next post, to which I'll reply).
>
> But please remember that I'm trying to steelman what I infer is *your* (and you claim is Nick's) position. It's a testament to my incompetence that I've failed so spectacularly to repeat what I inferred to be your own position back to you.
>
> On 5/12/20 7:55 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> Ok.... so how do we distinguish behavior from non-behavior movements
>> within the system you are proposing? In what way do we distinguish the dead duck from the living duck? Or, to stick with the example you prefer, the changing color of the celery from the changing color of a paper towel placed part-way into the same solution?
>>
>> I'm also not sure what you mean to refer to with "holographic
>> principle." My assertion is that psychologists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about internal processes. That claim is similar to the claim that chemists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about the inside of atoms. Or that Newton, in formulating his physics, was not trying to infer about the inside of planets. The phenomenon in question can be taken apart if you want, but that is a fundamentally different path of inquiry. A rabbit trying to escape a fox is made up of cells, but the cracking open its skulls and looking inside won't tell you that it is /trying to escape the fox/. The /trying-to-escape/ is not inside it's head, it is in the rabbit's behavior relative to the fox, and can be observed. When someone says "Hey, come quick! Look, that rabbit is trying to get away from that fox!", they are not making some mysterious inference about a hidden state within the rabbit, they are describing what they are observing.

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Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 9:23 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

glen -

I try to resist sticking my fat foot (face, keyboard?) into these discussions. A few weeks back at the beginning of this (or perhaps a precursor to this) thread, I felt as if you and Nick (and maybe Eric?) were having an exchange almost indistinguishable (in form, not detail) from the one between Vizzini and Dread Pirate Roberts now infamously known as "the Iocane Powder Battle of Wits". I will leave it to the reader to judge who I imaged as Vizzini and who Roberts, but let me clarify that I was relieved when both parties emerged from the exchange alive (or so I impute from your continued textual engagement via this mail list, which given some of this discussion might actually be worth questioning as sufficient for that imputation?).

I will niggle at your statement that "there is no behavioral difference between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color" though I accept that the (more) interesting distinction is between the mechanisms in each. Replace your celery stalk with a giant sequoia and make your paper towel roll equally tall, and maybe you sense my issue. By observing the (behavioural) difference between the sequoia's leaves taking up fuscia dye at it's crown and the paper towel roll only taking it up a few meters high (postulate a waterproof and very strong core-roll to keep it from sagging/breaking with the added weight), we might *then* impute that their dyed-water uptake is based on differing mechanisms. At this scale/context of observation, I think the
*mechanism* (or it's behaviour) is hidden whilst the macro-(quantitatively and qualitatively?) behaviour is exposed (visible).

As for Nick's use of "black box" and your own niggling with that, I will
*try* to follow your lead on thread hygiene and respond inline to that response/post (next).

- Steve

> There is no need to distinguish between behavior and non-behavior movement. It's a distraction. That's part of my position in this discussion. To play fair, though, I'll take your example of the live vs. dead duck. I don't care whether the duck is alive or dead. I don't distinguish between dead duck behavior and live duck behavior. There is no such thing as "trying to escape the fox" behavior. There is only "darting this way", "sprinting that way", etc.
>
> *You*, the observer impute the "trying to escape the fox" intention onto the behavior much the same way a mystic might impute a "returning to mother earth" intention onto a dead duck falling from the sky.
>
> There is no behavioral difference between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color. There *is* behavioral difference between the *mechanisms* inside the paper towel and the mechanisms inside the celery. Rocks don't have intention when they fall from a cliff and humans don't have intention when they wink sarcastically. Intention is an illusory imputation. All I care about is the action and the boundary between the measuring device and the thing measured (which Nick targets nicely in the next post, to which I'll reply).
>
> But please remember that I'm trying to steelman what I infer is *your* (and you claim is Nick's) position. It's a testament to my incompetence that I've failed so spectacularly to repeat what I inferred to be your own position back to you.
>
> On 5/12/20 7:55 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> Ok.... so how do we distinguish behavior from non-behavior movements
>> within the system you are proposing? In what way do we distinguish the dead duck from the living duck? Or, to stick with the example you prefer, the changing color of the celery from the changing color of a paper towel placed part-way into the same solution?
>>
>> I'm also not sure what you mean to refer to with "holographic
>> principle." My assertion is that psychologists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about internal processes. That claim is similar to the claim that chemists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about the inside of atoms. Or that Newton, in formulating his physics, was not trying to infer about the inside of planets. The phenomenon in question can be taken apart if you want, but that is a fundamentally different path of inquiry. A rabbit trying to escape a fox is made up of cells, but the cracking open its skulls and looking inside won't tell you that it is /trying to escape the fox/. The /trying-to-escape/ is not inside it's head, it is in the rabbit's behavior relative to the fox, and can be observed. When someone says "Hey, come quick! Look, that rabbit is trying to get away from that fox!", they are not making some mysterious inference about a hidden state within the rabbit, they are describing what they are observing.

George Duncan-2

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Monday, I did a video of such an ant carrying a leaf multiples of his size. I wonder if this is a season for such activity.

George Duncan

Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
georgeduncanart.com

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My art theme: Dynamic exposition of the tension between matrix order and luminous chaos.

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From "Notes to myself on beginning a painting" by Richard Diebenkorn.

"It's that knife-edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our truest power." Joanna Macy.

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:44 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I was just outside sawing up dead branches. I noticed a large ant struggling to carry a piece of vegetation larger than it was over obstacles in a general direction which did not change notwithstanding the obstacles. It was very hard not to feel the ant's intentionality and determination. I was experiencing the ant as the ant. Extreme empathy.

Frank

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:58 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
On 5/13/20 11:17 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of
> words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that
> tone?).   Maybe I'm missing something. HAD you (or Eric) used
> IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation
> sideways? Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the
> day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd?

Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way. I literally couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer implications (connotations?). Behavior is a very laden word. Since we're talking in the midst of a conversation about psychology, it's a seriously BAD word to use. And since EricC and Nick have *explicitly* challenged the concept of "inside", that makes "inside" a bad word, too. It would be very cool if we could use neutral terms like X and Y. But then we'll devolve into mathematics, which some people think they don't like. (I'd argue everyone likes math; they just don't know they like math.)

I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and "hidden" is absurd. But I AM asking EricC and Nick to treat words as ambiguous, with multiple meanings, wiggle room, and to make some effort to read what I *mean*, not whatever immediate constructs pop into their heads when they first read the words. I've talked about this as "steelmanning" and "listening with empathy" a lot. I know it's difficult. I fail all the time. The conversation will be permanently *dead* (to me) when/if we lock down a jargonal definition of any word. If you force someone to read 800 page scribbles by old dead guys in order to understand what a single word means, then you've lost the game.

> Just to continue my niggling. Interiority would seem to make perfect
> sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober and the
> object (seen/measured/probed)?   To the subject, there is a boundary
> between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever
> mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly
> perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector
> photons/phonons/nerf-balls).   Visible light mostly bounces off the
> surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through... thus yielding a
> different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?)
> interiority/exteriority...

No. I've purposefully stopped implying that the boundary closes a space because I thought that was interfering with my steelmanning EricC's position. The position involves a kind of "projection" from the object's actions (flapping wings or whatever) out to a (possibly imaginary) objective. And that projection is important to the categorization of the *types* of behavior they want to talk about (motivated, intentional, etc.). That projection to the objective is what founds the claim that all (valid) questions about the object's actions can be empirically studied, because the behavior is, ultimately, embedded in the object-objective relationship ... the agent lives in an environment and the environment is a kind of reflection of everything that agent may do.

So, I attempted to remove the "interiority" from my language by stopping my talk about inside and sticking with boundaries. That boundary can be closed (like a sphere with an inside and outside) or it could be a plane or a wavy manifold or like a slice of Swiss cheese or whatever. So, "interiority" is *not* what I'm going for. In fact it's a distraction from what I am going for, which is the *distance* (think network hop-distance) between the subject and object and the *medium* (think intermediate transforms as nodes/edges) through which signals go from subject to object and vice versa.

The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible cut-points. E.g. a telescope has parts like mirrors and lenses, twists and turns. Any one of those could be THE important cut-point, the boundary. The boundary is the cut-point beyond which our ability to infer or distinguish stops. So, for a telescope, THE important cut-point is whatever distance 2 pin-pricks of light blur together, such that we need a more powerful telescope to distinguish the 2 pin-prick lights.

> This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and
> objectness? I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand
> here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up?

Yes, this conversation is a DIRECT descendant from the conversation that cited Fontana, BC Smith, Chalmers, path integrals, Necker cubes, verbs as duals of nouns, etc. Luckily, Marcus assures us that e-ink is cheap. 8^D

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thompnickson2

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

George,

I, too, watched such an ant. At any one moment, it was struggling ahead in a single direction carrying an elmseed; but over the whole ten minutes that I watched it, it went around in three large circles. This sort of thing is why I am so reluctant to encumber the notion of behavior with the notion of goal-direction. I happy to say that from my point of view the ant was behaving, despite having no idea what the ant was trying to achieve by that behavior.

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of George Duncan
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 2:17 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

Monday, I did a video of such an ant carrying a leaf multiples of his size. I wonder if this is a season for such activity.

George Duncan

Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
georgeduncanart.com

See posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Land: (505) 983-6895

Mobile: (505) 469-4671

My art theme: Dynamic exposition of the tension between matrix order and luminous chaos.

"Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion."

From "Notes to myself on beginning a painting" by Richard Diebenkorn.

"It's that knife-edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our truest power." Joanna Macy.

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:44 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I was just outside sawing up dead branches. I noticed a large ant struggling to carry a piece of vegetation larger than it was over obstacles in a general direction which did not change notwithstanding the obstacles. It was very hard not to feel the ant's intentionality and determination. I was experiencing the ant as the ant. Extreme empathy.

Frank

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:58 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
On 5/13/20 11:17 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of
> words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that
> tone?).   Maybe I'm missing something. HAD you (or Eric) used
> IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation
> sideways? Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the
> day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd?

Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way. I literally couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer implications (connotations?). Behavior is a very laden word. Since we're talking in the midst of a conversation about psychology, it's a seriously BAD word to use. And since EricC and Nick have *explicitly* challenged the concept of "inside", that makes "inside" a bad word, too. It would be very cool if we could use neutral terms like X and Y. But then we'll devolve into mathematics, which some people think they don't like. (I'd argue everyone likes math; they just don't know they like math.)

I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and "hidden" is absurd. But I AM asking EricC and Nick to treat words as ambiguous, with multiple meanings, wiggle room, and to make some effort to read what I *mean*, not whatever immediate constructs pop into their heads when they first read the words. I've talked about this as "steelmanning" and "listening with empathy" a lot. I know it's difficult. I fail all the time. The conversation will be permanently *dead* (to me) when/if we lock down a jargonal definition of any word. If you force someone to read 800 page scribbles by old dead guys in order to understand what a single word means, then you've lost the game.

> Just to continue my niggling. Interiority would seem to make perfect
> sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober and the
> object (seen/measured/probed)?   To the subject, there is a boundary
> between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever
> mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly
> perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector
> photons/phonons/nerf-balls).   Visible light mostly bounces off the
> surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through... thus yielding a
> different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?)
> interiority/exteriority...

No. I've purposefully stopped implying that the boundary closes a space because I thought that was interfering with my steelmanning EricC's position. The position involves a kind of "projection" from the object's actions (flapping wings or whatever) out to a (possibly imaginary) objective. And that projection is important to the categorization of the *types* of behavior they want to talk about (motivated, intentional, etc.). That projection to the objective is what founds the claim that all (valid) questions about the object's actions can be empirically studied, because the behavior is, ultimately, embedded in the object-objective relationship ... the agent lives in an environment and the environment is a kind of reflection of everything that agent may do.

So, I attempted to remove the "interiority" from my language by stopping my talk about inside and sticking with boundaries. That boundary can be closed (like a sphere with an inside and outside) or it could be a plane or a wavy manifold or like a slice of Swiss cheese or whatever. So, "interiority" is *not* what I'm going for. In fact it's a distraction from what I am going for, which is the *distance* (think network hop-distance) between the subject and object and the *medium* (think intermediate transforms as nodes/edges) through which signals go from subject to object and vice versa.

The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible cut-points. E.g. a telescope has parts like mirrors and lenses, twists and turns. Any one of those could be THE important cut-point, the boundary. The boundary is the cut-point beyond which our ability to infer or distinguish stops. So, for a telescope, THE important cut-point is whatever distance 2 pin-pricks of light blur together, such that we need a more powerful telescope to distinguish the 2 pin-prick lights.

> This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and
> objectness? I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand
> here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up?

Yes, this conversation is a DIRECT descendant from the conversation that cited Fontana, BC Smith, Chalmers, path integrals, Necker cubes, verbs as duals of nouns, etc. Luckily, Marcus assures us that e-ink is cheap. 8^D

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140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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gepr

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

On 5/13/20 12:56 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> On 5/13/20 11:58 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible cut-points.
> Agreed. And similarly many possible levels of aggregation of the graph
> of object-object relations?

Yes! And this point will play into my answer to Nick's post just now.

There are many other things in your post I should respond to. But I'd like to try to focus a bit. I've tagged it to come back to later.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

It's appendages all the way up.

---
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140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, May 13, 2020, 2:26 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 5/13/20 12:56 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> On 5/13/20 11:58 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible cut-points.
> Agreed. And similarly many possible levels of aggregation of the graph
> of object-object relations?

Yes! And this point will play into my answer to Nick's post just now.

There are many other things in your post I should respond to. But I'd like to try to focus a bit. I've tagged it to come back to later.

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gepr

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

On 5/13/20 1:14 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Thus my suspicion about some of the argument going on between EricC and Glen is equivocation concerning what it is that is behaving, not disagreement about whether behavior is going on.

Maybe. But for my part, I'm arguing that the question "Who is behaving?" is unnecessary (or maybe simply prejudicial, pre-emptive registration). I'll try something completely different, playing off Steve's generalization of the subject-object chain into an object-object mesh.

If you imagine the universe as an irregular mesh of little nodes where filament intersects, then you can imagine that mesh being more tightly bunched up in some places and more loosely gauzy in others. Given such a mesh, you can also imagine some super-creature who floats along grabbing bunches of the mesh in its fist (or claws, or mouth, or whatever), thereby *forcing* its idea of what constitutes a distinguishable *glob* of the mesh from other parts of the mesh. That super-creature is not part of the mesh, it's a kind of deus ex machina (or maybe demiurge ex machina), if I'm using that phrase correctly.

What you guys seem (to me) to be doing is acting as those super-creatures ... trying to force your clumping of the mesh on everyone else.

What I'm trying to do is *stop* such ex machina clumping. If we assume the nodes (connections between filaments) are real things, then we can move along a filament from one intersection to another and keep doing that for as long as we want ... walking the graph. Now, if the mesh were regular, certain properties of the graph would be true. E.g. Given any 2 intersections, we could walk from one to the other. As an irregular mesh, maybe that's not true. Maybe there are some pairs of intersections where you simply cannot get from one to the other. Or, maybe not every intersection has 2 (or whatever N) filaments crossing at that point? Maybe as we're walking the graph, at one intersection we have 2 directions we could go, but at other intersections we have 50 directions we could go.

What I'd like this conversation to be about is to discuss the conditions by which, when at an intersection, there is no way to choose a direction. I.e. that intersection has to be the *last* one visited ... the end of the graph ... the end of the transforms we can make to "see further down the mesh".

It's not a matter of "who behaves". It's a matter of "what conditions obtain that *prevent* us from inferring anything more". (This is why I keep talking about entropy, apparent randomness, etc.) The position EricC has taken might be rephrased as: the mesh is *regular enough* and any question about infinite-valence intersections or no-valent intersections is nonsense. Alternatively, he might be saying that there exist infinite-valence (or no-valent) intersections and when we get to that point, we recognize we have to stop talking because nothing we say will make any sense.

But *both* of those statements would be fine with me. The middle ground might be something like "the mesh has an inherently interesting structure (not totally ordered, not totally random) where, if you find yourself at an infinite-valence or no-valent intersection, XYZ is what you do to *continue* walking the graph."

> But is [it] a proper object? That, to me, is the much harder question.

I would argue there is no such thing as a "proper object".

> Each point of view isolates different objects and gathers information about those objects that has predictive power for the concerns of the observer.

If I reword this, you and I could agree completely. I'd say: Each point of view registers a different ontology, works with that ontology until they get tired of it, then registers another ontology and works with that until they tire of that.

> Before letting this fly, I want to address a meta, meta, metameta, concern that I sense lurking in the shadows around this discussion. SHOULD (note the use of modal language!) ==>should<== we be trying to come to an agreement on either facts or terminology and, if we fail, should we be discouraged. I would say yes on the first, and no on the second. I think we should constantly try for agreement, because that effort produces the tension that leads to change and growth, no matter how ephemeral that agreement ever proves to be.

I'd argue the answers are "a little bit" to the first one and "a little bit" to the second one. If agreement is admittedly *temporary*, then I'm all for it. But if one party wants to chisel that agreement in stone and suffer it for the rest of their lives and for every situation, then I reject it entirely. In fact, I think people ought to juggle, keep up in the air, as MANY different "agreements" as they can possibly stand and strive to mate and evolve them till their dying breath. Similarly, if you find yourself in a discussion with contract-written-in-stone people, you should try to shatter their ontology and help them build more dynamic, co-evolving ones. When you meet another person with a dynamic ecology of inter-coopetitive boilerplate contract-lets and you *fail* to find a (temporary) match, you should be a bit embarrassed that your ecology doesn't have that species in it and do your best to remedy that.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

thompnickson2

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

Glen,

I like your Deus Ex Meshina. More later.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 3:04 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

On 5/13/20 1:14 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Thus my suspicion about some of the argument going on between EricC and Glen is equivocation concerning what it is that is behaving, not disagreement about whether behavior is going on.

Maybe. But for my part, I'm arguing that the question "Who is behaving?" is unnecessary (or maybe simply prejudicial, pre-emptive registration). I'll try something completely different, playing off Steve's generalization of the subject-object chain into an object-object mesh.

If you imagine the universe as an irregular mesh of little nodes where filament intersects, then you can imagine that mesh being more tightly bunched up in some places and more loosely gauzy in others. Given such a mesh, you can also imagine some super-creature who floats along grabbing bunches of the mesh in its fist (or claws, or mouth, or whatever), thereby *forcing* its idea of what constitutes a distinguishable *glob* of the mesh from other parts of the mesh. That super-creature is not part of the mesh, it's a kind of deus ex machina (or maybe demiurge ex machina), if I'm using that phrase correctly.

What you guys seem (to me) to be doing is acting as those super-creatures ... trying to force your clumping of the mesh on everyone else.

What I'm trying to do is *stop* such ex machina clumping. If we assume the nodes (connections between filaments) are real things, then we can move along a filament from one intersection to another and keep doing that for as long as we want ... walking the graph. Now, if the mesh were regular, certain properties of the graph would be true. E.g. Given any 2 intersections, we could walk from one to the other. As an irregular mesh, maybe that's not true. Maybe there are some pairs of intersections where you simply cannot get from one to the other. Or, maybe not every intersection has 2 (or whatever N) filaments crossing at that point? Maybe as we're walking the graph, at one intersection we have 2 directions we could go, but at other intersections we have 50 directions we could go.

What I'd like this conversation to be about is to discuss the conditions by which, when at an intersection, there is no way to choose a direction. I.e. that intersection has to be the *last* one visited ... the end of the graph ... the end of the transforms we can make to "see further down the mesh".

It's not a matter of "who behaves". It's a matter of "what conditions obtain that *prevent* us from inferring anything more". (This is why I keep talking about entropy, apparent randomness, etc.) The position EricC has taken might be rephrased as: the mesh is *regular enough* and any question about infinite-valence intersections or no-valent intersections is nonsense. Alternatively, he might be saying that there exist infinite-valence (or no-valent) intersections and when we get to that point, we recognize we have to stop talking because nothing we say will make any sense.

But *both* of those statements would be fine with me. The middle ground might be something like "the mesh has an inherently interesting structure (not totally ordered, not totally random) where, if you find yourself at an infinite-valence or no-valent intersection, XYZ is what you do to *continue* walking the graph."

> But is [it] a proper object? That, to me, is the much harder question.

I would argue there is no such thing as a "proper object".

> Each point of view isolates different objects and gathers information about those objects that has predictive power for the concerns of the observer.

If I reword this, you and I could agree completely. I'd say: Each point of view registers a different ontology, works with that ontology until they get tired of it, then registers another ontology and works with that until they tire of that.

> Before letting this fly, I want to address a meta, meta, metameta, concern that I sense lurking in the shadows around this discussion. SHOULD (note the use of modal language!) ==>should<== we be trying to come to an agreement on either facts or terminology and, if we fail, should we be discouraged. I would say yes on the first, and no on the second. I think we should constantly try for agreement, because that effort produces the tension that leads to change and growth, no matter how ephemeral that agreement ever proves to be.

I'd argue the answers are "a little bit" to the first one and "a little bit" to the second one. If agreement is admittedly *temporary*, then I'm all for it. But if one party wants to chisel that agreement in stone and suffer it for the rest of their lives and for every situation, then I reject it entirely. In fact, I think people ought to juggle, keep up in the air, as MANY different "agreements" as they can possibly stand and strive to mate and evolve them till their dying breath. Similarly, if you find yourself in a discussion with contract-written-in-stone people, you should try to shatter their ontology and help them build more dynamic, co-evolving ones. When you meet another person with a dynamic ecology of inter-coopetitive boilerplate contract-lets and you *fail* to find a (temporary) match, you should be a bit embarrassed that your ecology doesn't have that species in it and do your best to remedy that.

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Steve Smith

Re: Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Frank Wimberly wrote:

> It's appendages all the way up.

Shades of Kafka...

When this pandemic began to ramp up, I started experiencing that idiom
"waiting for the other shoe to fall", but in this case it was with a
Centipede.

Appendages all the way up/down/sideways for sure!

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