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Re: Direct conversation

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Russ Abbott

Re: Direct conversation

Hi Steve,

I'm curious about your last paragraph.

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 9:11 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think that Russ was righteously trying to get Nick to "nail down" a couple of words or concepts which Nick (also righteously) avoided as to do so would very likely disturb the real point he was trying to make.

I will acknowledge that sometimes one makes a point by acting in a certain way rather than by speaking directly. I find it frustrating, though, when someone attempts to make a point to me by refusing to be clear about terms but not acknowledging doing that. It would seem much simpler (and less frustrating for me) simply to say that certain terms cannot be defined precisely than to act as if one were being clear but intentionally being unclear.

In saying the preceding, I'm not criticizing Nick. He and I have been around the bush too many times to start again. But I am interested in your point. Do you really want to be treated as I described? I don't.

I take it as a basic value to be as clear as possible as much as possible and to be clear that one is not being clear when that is the case. Having written that I can think of situations (e.g., negotiations) when a dollop of ambiguity helps. But I think that's a different situation.

-- Russ

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glen e. p. ropella-2

Re: Direct conversation

But there are many lessons, perhaps _most_, that are best communicated
with things like koans. And, in fact, given the inherent ambiguity
(multi-valence) of natural language, one could argue that _all_
communication is a generalized koan, with no clear description. Talking
about ambiguous descriptions is like talking about non-elephant
zoology... to borrow from Ulam.

A mandated method to be clear as possible as much as possible would be
just as effective and efficient as a mandate to be as vague as possible
as much as possible. To be clear, I claim that neither conviction is
more effective or efficient than the other. Particular methods must be
chosen for the proper context.

Russ Abbott emitted this, circa 09-06-22 11:18 AM:

> I will acknowledge that sometimes one makes a point by acting in a
> certain way rather than by speaking directly. I find it frustrating,
> though, when someone attempts to make a point to me by refusing to be
> clear about terms but not acknowledging doing that. It would seem much
> simpler (and less frustrating for me) simply to say that certain terms
> cannot be defined precisely than to act as if one were being clear but
> intentionally being unclear.
>
> In saying the preceding, I'm not criticizing Nick. He and I have been
> around the bush too many times to start again. But I am interested in
> your point. Do you really want to be treated as I described? I don't.
>
> I take it as a basic value to be as clear as possible as much as
> possible and to be clear that one is not being clear when that is the
> case. Having written that I can think of situations (e.g., negotiations)
> when a dollop of ambiguity helps. But I think that's a different situation.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com

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

Re: Direct conversation

Glen,

That seems so defeatist. When one can't be clear, there may not be anything one can do about it at the time. But it seems to me that the positive arc of science, technology, philosophy, politics, culture, etc. (and I think it has been overall a positive arc) has been driven by the imperative to be as clear as possible as much as possible. Feynman famously said "Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is. " Are you really objecting to that as a goal? (It certainly won't work as a software development strategy!) I would have thought that this list especially would value clarity.

-- Russ

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:54 AM, glen e. p. ropella <[hidden email]> wrote:

A mandated method to be clear as possible as much as possible would be
just as effective and efficient as a mandate to be as vague as possible
as much as possible.

Nick Thompson

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Russ, and Glen, and Steve, n all

Ironically, I am with Russ on this one! I believe both in the possibility and the benefits of clarity.

I expected that when Russ and I were done, we would be able to agree on an articulation of our positions, where they are similar, where different, etc. In fact, one of the skills I most revere is the ability to state another person's position to that person's satisfaction. And, in fact, at one point, I thought I had achieved such an articulation, only to have Russ tell me I had got it wrong. My guess is that Russ has his feet deeply in Kant, and I have neither boots nor courage high enough to go in there after him. My son, who is a philosopher, has as good as looked me in the eye and said, "You aint man enough to read Kant!"

I dont think Russ and I are done. I think we are ... resting. One of the lurkers made the suggestion that we had bitten off too large a project, and that we needed, if we were going to seek clarity, to try to be clear about a smaller piece of the puzzle.

In thinking about these matters, I can use all the help I can get, and I am still looking for help on how and when and in which context, computers gather information about themselves (or parts of themselves).

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

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

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

Sent: 6/22/2009 1:35:48 PM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation

Glen,

That seems so defeatist. When one can't be clear, there may not be anything one can do about it at the time. But it seems to me that the positive arc of science, technology, philosophy, politics, culture, etc. (and I think it has been overall a positive arc) has been driven by the imperative to be as clear as possible as much as possible. Feynman famously said "Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is. " Are you really objecting to that as a goal? (It certainly won't work as a software development strategy!) I would have thought that this list especially would value clarity.

-- Russ

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:54 AM, glen e. p. ropella <[hidden email]> wrote:

A mandated method to be clear as possible as much as possible would be
just as effective and efficient as a mandate to be as vague as possible
as much as possible.

glen e. p. ropella-2

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Ugh! It's not defeatist at all! In fact, I tend to believe that until
and unless we (most of us 6 bil ppl) have relatively accurate formalisms
for handling ambiguity, we should embrace the poetry of natural language.

I.e. until we all are fluent in math, ambiguity will be (is)
well-handled by natural languages in all their vagaries.

Further, the ambiguities (e.g. double meanings, irony, satire, etc) are
some of the best opportunities for synthetic beauty!

That's not defeatist at all.

As for Feynman's quote, there's nothing in that quote that contradicts
the idea that scientific methods, including prosaic descriptions of
models, can/should be ambiguous. In fact, most of science is unclear
and ambiguous because science is primarily falsificationist, which by
definition allows for multi-valence.

Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:
>That seems so defeatist. When one can't be clear, there may not be anything
>one can do about it at the time. But it seems to me that the positive arc of
>science, technology, philosophy, politics, culture, etc. (and I think it has
>been overall a positive arc) has been driven by the imperative to be as
>clear as possible as much as possible. Feynman famously said "Science is
>what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world
>is. " Are you really objecting to that as a goal? (It certainly won't work
>as a software development strategy!) I would have thought that this list
>especially would value clarity.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com

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

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

I've been following the thoughts on conscious experience of self and have nearly dipped in a couple of times, but lack of clarity on my own thoughts keeps on preventing me. (And Russ, I do love clarity and direct communication.)

I'm still torn between various aspects of the points of view that, mostly, Nick and Russ presented. Though clarity still eludes me, I would like to share the following before it just slips away unused again.

I think things pretty much work as Nick painted them. Still, this set of interacting structures and processes that I think of as myself, can't quite banish from it's processing space the nagging awareness of something like the experiencer that Russ argues for. I wonder if it might arise in the manner outlined below.

I'll start from Nick's model. My brain has learned to turn back it's third-person perception and modelling functionality on a subset of the environment that is always present, i.e. self.

Semi-aside: there is something added in the case of self -- richer sensory data that is not available on other people: touch, pressure, pain, temperature from skin, breathing and heart rate, proprioception, stress and pain in joints, vestibular sense, stretch receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, etc. I do think all of this enriches the model of self to the point where the experience might be qualitatively different from the models of other people.

But more significant is the fact that I can create an abstracted model of myself (i.e. imagine myself) and that the model can be made to interact with a model of the environment, other people, and even internally created models with no counterpart in direct experience. Consider that usually this model's usefulness is in projecting it into the future (and, I think, into the past, when we reconstruct events from memory).

Now, what happens when that model is dragged back into real-time, and held right next to the more direct perceptual awareness of self? It seems like one might end up with two selves, and I'm wondering if that experience might not account for that elusive experience that Russ is referring to.

Regards,

Rikus

Eric Charles

Example and... a definition! - Re: Intentionality

Yay! Steve gave us an example to work with. I have a hunch that – at least as far as this example goes – Ross would grant Steve his interpretation. Nick and I would disagree. Steve said:

“A simple but profound (to me) example, I have already given.   Lying in

the grass on a lazy summer day "intending" to get up and not being able

to actually "act"on the up-getting until "I" (that ever-present illusion

of unique-selfness) quit "intending" and some other magical mechanism

kicked in and viola!  I am UP!”

To begin, I will state that Freud’s major contribution to psychology was convincing people that a trained professional could know a person’s mind better than its owner could. Freud thought that the trained professional could do this by observing very large swaths of behavior. For example, at the dinner table you may tell me that you never get enough food, and that your stealing food off your sister’s plate merely represents intention to eat more food. However, if I observe your behavior and find that your food-stealing-behavior does not end after some amount is eaten, but rather ends when your sister starts crying, I have authority to say “Actually, your real intention is to make your sister cry”. -- The entire notion of insight during psychotherapy is that you can come to know your own intentions better than you knew them before. (“I know see that my striving for more money isn’t about making me happy, its about making my long dead mother happy”, “I now see that I seek out abusive relationships because my father abused me and all I ever wanted was his affection”, etc.) In other words, by definition, to “have an intention” is to “have your behavior oriented towards a given goal (or set of goals)”. Tolman, or rat maze fame, phrased it slightly differently, claiming that intentionality was a “continuing until”.

With that in mind, I assert that at the start of Steve’s story, though he professed that he intended to get up, and might have believed he intended to do so (leaving aside exactly what that would mean), he clearly had no intention to do so. If he had intended to do so, he would have, nothing was stopping him. In fact, he was even nice enough to put scare quotes around the word for us, does this maybe indicate that he knew something was amiss in his verbal report? As much as Steve would like to think that he intended to get up, observing his own behavior (from that weird third-person perspective from which he watches himself) he to could see that what he really intended to do was to continue basking in the sun. At some point, some combination of environmental and physiological changes happened, Steve’s intention changed, and he stood up. From the weird third-person perspective, it was like magic.

If you grant that it is possible to not know your own intentions, and that some third party watching you could know your intentions by observing your behavior, and that said third party could point out to you how you are acting, and that then you could see that your intentions were not what you thought they were…. well, then we should all be in agreement. As, I assert, all of us have been both first-person and third-person parties to such interactions, we should all be in agreement. Among the things we should agree on: 1) There is nothing privileged about the first-person position, except perhaps that you are around yourself more than other people are around you. 2) To accurately know what someone intends you need to see them do a lot, and you need to know how they act in various circumstances. 3) It is at least plausible that many, if not all, other so-called mental terms are really macro-behavioral terms. 4) Though say other things in strange conversations about “what exactly” intentionality is, the definition suggested here is in complete agreement with normal linguistic uses of the words – that is, lay sentences make sense if we define intentionality in this way.

I believe the rest of Steve’s email largely demonstrates an agreement with the above points. Steve argued, for example, that if the rest of the list knew the larger context of his actions in various circumstances, they would not have mistaken his talk of recursion as a criticism. He also seems implicitly to admit that under some circumstances the list members observations could have lead him to see that he really was intending criticism, even when he did not think that was his intention.

Eric

P.S. Steve’s metaphor with preparing food is excellent!

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by glen e. p. ropella-2

glen e. p. ropella wrote:
> Further, the ambiguities (e.g. double meanings, irony, satire, etc) are
> some of the best opportunities for synthetic beauty!
>
One of the few opportunities for innovation, I'd say.

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

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

thanks, Rikus, for your thoughts.

I find myself in agreement with a lot that you say. It is not controversial to me to say that the viewpoint that is you has your body within its field of view, and that you can "see" some things about you that I cannot see. . I only want to insist that your experience of your "inner mind" is arrived at by the same cognitive means as your experience of my "inner mind". It is less a direct experience than a cognitive achievement. I ask you only to recmember that I can "see" many things about you that you cannot see. One aspect of you that (when I am in the room with you) I can see better than you is the arrangement of your body with respect to people and objects in the room. Your deployment of your body, so to speak. Your staging is something much better seen by the audience than by the actor himself.

Most of psychology has been taken up with understanding the contradiction between our understandings of what a person is about that we can derived from what they say about themselves, and our understanding of what a person is about derived from our own observation of him.

It is wonderful to hear from you.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

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

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

Sent: 6/22/2009 3:14:42 PM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation

I've been following the thoughts on conscious experience of self and have nearly dipped in a couple of times, but lack of clarity on my own thoughts keeps on preventing me. (And Russ, I do love clarity and direct communication.)

I'm still torn between various aspects of the points of view that, mostly, Nick and Russ presented. Though clarity still eludes me, I would like to share the following before it just slips away unused again.

I think things pretty much work as Nick painted them. Still, this set of interacting structures and processes that I think of as myself, can't quite banish from it's processing space the nagging awareness of something like the experiencer that Russ argues for. I wonder if it might arise in the manner outlined below.

I'll start from Nick's model. My brain has learned to turn back it's third-person perception and modelling functionality on a subset of the environment that is always present, i.e. self.

Semi-aside: there is something added in the case of self -- richer sensory data that is not available on other people: touch, pressure, pain, temperature from skin, breathing and heart rate, proprioception, stress and pain in joints, vestibular sense, stretch receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, etc. I do think all of this enriches the model of self to the point where the experience might be qualitatively different from the models of other people.

But more significant is the fact that I can create an abstracted model of myself (i.e. imagine myself) and that the model can be made to interact with a model of the environment, other people, and even internally created models with no counterpart in direct experience. Consider that usually this model's usefulness is in projecting it into the future (and, I think, into the past, when we reconstruct events from memory).

Now, what happens when that model is dragged back into real-time, and held right next to the more direct perceptual awareness of self? It seems like one might end up with two selves, and I'm wondering if that experience might not account for that elusive experience that Russ is referring to.

Regards,

Rikus

Steve Smith

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Russ -

Hi Steve,

I'm curious about your last paragraph.

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 9:11 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think that Russ was righteously trying to get Nick to "nail down" a couple of words or concepts which Nick (also righteously) avoided as to do so would very likely disturb the real point he was trying to make.

I will acknowledge that sometimes one makes a point by acting in a certain way rather than by speaking directly. I find it frustrating, though, when someone attempts to make a point to me by refusing to be clear about terms but not acknowledging doing that. It would seem much simpler (and less frustrating for me) simply to say that certain terms cannot be defined precisely than to act as if one were being clear but intentionally being unclear.

I can only guess at Nick's intentions, but I did not interpret his non-responsiveness as particularly deliberate. It seemed to me that he was simply focusing on the part of the discussion that he was focused on (pardon the tautology).

In saying the preceding, I'm not criticizing Nick. He and I have been around the bush too many times to start again. But I am interested in your point. Do you really want to be treated as I described? I don't.

I'm used to people ignoring things I say or even ask directly... it can be quite irritating and depending on how I perceive their intentions, I may even be offended. Sometimes (usually upon reflection), I recognize it as reflecting a different focus.

I take it as a basic value to be as clear as possible as much as possible and to be clear that one is not being clear when that is the case. Having written that I can think of situations (e.g., negotiations) when a dollop of ambiguity helps. But I think that's a different situation.

Brainstorming is a common situation where people are not responsive to other's statements/questions... perhaps this is a form of negotiation... negotiating over what the topic is...

I hope this was responsive.

- Steve

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Steve Smith

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by glen e. p. ropella-2

glen e. p. ropella uttered/spake/emitted/gurgitated:

> But there are many lessons, perhaps _most_, that are best communicated
> with things like koans. And, in fact, given the inherent ambiguity
> (multi-valence) of natural language, one could argue that _all_
> communication is a generalized koan, with no clear description. Talking
> about ambiguous descriptions is like talking about non-elephant
> zoology... to borrow from Ulam.
>
> A mandated method to be clear as possible as much as possible would be
> just as effective and efficient as a mandate to be as vague as possible
> as much as possible. To be clear, I claim that neither conviction is
> more effective or efficient than the other. Particular methods must be
> chosen for the proper context.
>

I sympathize with your characterization of "_all_ communication as a
generalized koan" but I am not sure I agree on your followup point. I'm
not sure the two examples (clear as possible vs vague as possible) are
reciprocal (complementary?). I am sympathetic with Russ (and others)
who want for well-defined terms in a conversation, but I believe for
various reasons that this is much harder than it sounds... (appealing
back to your "generalized koan" description of natural language).

I am working on a project to aid scientists from disparate disciplines
collaborate on an inter-disciplinary project (e.g. ecologists,
biologists, meteorologists, economists, urban/regional planners
collaborating on Climate Change). These folks all have pretty "clear"
terms and concepts among their own peers, but these terms might very
well have somewhat similar or wildly different meanings in the contexts
of other disciplines. Sometimes trying really hard to be clear about a
simple term in one discipline leads to a long and elaborate explanation
in the terms of another discipline. If the members of both disciplines
do NOT have a lot of shared terms or even concepts (e.g. Meteorology vs
Economy) this can be even harder.

- Steve

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

Steve Smith

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Russ Abbott wrote:

> Glen,
>
> That seems so defeatist. When one can't be clear, there may not be
> anything one can do about it at the time. But it seems to me that the
> positive arc of science, technology, philosophy, politics, culture,
> etc. (and I think it has been overall a positive arc) has been driven
> by the imperative to be as clear as possible as much as possible.
> Feynman famously said "Science is what we have learned about how not
> to fool ourselves about the way the world is. " Are you really
> objecting to that as a goal? (It certainly won't work as a software
> development strategy!) I would have thought that this list especially
> would value clarity.

I used to reject Freeman Dyson's aphorism "It is better to be wrong than
vague" out of hand. I now accept it conditionally. I accept this
statement as a value judgement about "clarity" rather than one about
quantifying accuracy and uncertainty.

I specialize (personally and professionally) in trying to understand new
concepts outside of familiar paradigms. This sometimes requires
embracing ambiguity or even ignorance. I believe that many scientific
breakthroughs (leading to paradigm shifts) involved a great deal of
(temporary) lack of clarity. I doubt that many understood Relativity
(general or special) or Quantum Theory on their first listen/read.... to
them the extant explanations were anything but clear... but to quote
Einstien... the were perhaps "as simple as possible but no simpler".

"Is it a wave or is it a particle?" seems like a pretty clear question
with (one of two) pretty clear answer(s). But if you understand quantum
theory, you appreciate why this is not such a simple question.

All that said, I think most people here in most discussions are seeking
clarity. I myself sometimes might be deliberately *expanding* the
ambiguity of a discussion or point with the goal of avoiding various
(potential) local minima in understanding. I'm not as likely to be
exercising my zen-master impression with Koans, but I suspect a few here
of being good enough to do that.

- Steve

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

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Russ, and Glen, and Steve, n all

Ironically, I am with Russ on this one! I believe both in the possibility and the benefits of clarity.

I expected that when Russ and I were done, we would be able to agree on an articulation of our positions, where they are similar, where different, etc. In fact, one of the skills I most revere is the ability to state another person's position to that person's satisfaction. And, in fact, at one point, I thought I had achieved such an articulation, only to have Russ tell me I had got it wrong. My guess is that Russ has his feet deeply in Kant, and I have neither boots nor courage high enough to go in there after him. My son, who is a philosopher, has as good as looked me in the eye and said, "You aint man enough to read Kant!"

I studied Kant when I was too young and foolish to know better... but then I had been raised on folks like Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein so Kant was no challenge. Today I think I would find Kant a bit intimidating.

I am curious about the implications of "one of the skills I most revere is the ability to state another person's position to that person's satisfaction". It seems to have implications on the root discussion... The two ways I can obtain a high degree of confidence that I am communicating with another is if I can articulate their position to their satisfaction and vice versa... I prefer the former over the latter... in the sense that I am almost never satisfied in their articulation... at most I accept it with some reservations. But if they can keep a straight face while I reel off my version of their understanding of a point, then I try hard not to think too hard about it and call it good. How (if at all) does this fit into the 3rd/1st person discussion this all started with?

- Steve

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

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Rikus Combrinck

Rikus -

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;" href="file://C:%5CUsers%5CRikus%5CDocuments%5CMy%20Stationery%5C">
I'll start from Nick's model. My brain has learned to turn back it's third-person perception and modelling functionality on a subset of the environment that is always present, i.e. self.

This is a fairly clear (to me) description of how I interpret Nick's point... I'm not as clear that this is _the way things are_ but I can hold it along with the other 5 impossibleish things I had for breakfast with the Red Queen.

Semi-aside: there is something added in the case of self -- richer sensory data that is not available on other people: touch, pressure, pain, temperature from skin, breathing and heart rate, proprioception, stress and pain in joints, vestibular sense, stretch receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, etc.

This seems somewhat contrived, but without using up another one of my 6 impossibles over breakfast, I accept this as well.

I do think all of this enriches the model of self to the point where the experience might be qualitatively different from the models of other people.

I agree that if "all is Third Person" then this is a reasonable explanation why the "First Person Illusion" is so compelling.

But more significant is the fact that I can create an abstracted model of myself (i.e. imagine myself) and that the model can be made to interact with a model of the environment, other people, and even internally created models with no counterpart in direct experience. Consider that usually this model's usefulness is in projecting it into the future (and, I think, into the past, when we reconstruct events from memory).

And I contend that it is unique compared to say my "abstracted model of other people interacting with a model of the environment ...." because *I* can run experiments directly on myself which are somewhere between difficult and impossible with others. Learning our environment (when we first see our own hand in front of our face as a baby, or when we first leave home and face the vagaries of living in the world as an independent adult) appears to be a continuous series of hypothesis generation and testing with that ability to intentionally do "this and that".

Now, what happens when that model is dragged back into real-time, and held right next to the more direct perceptual awareness of self? It seems like one might end up with two selves, and I'm wondering if that experience might not account for that elusive experience that Russ is referring to.

Interesting. Having experimented with my 1st person experience a lot in my life, I do have a related experience. It renders in my life as a sense of multiple-personalities. I have multiple models of myself based on how I imagine/believe I am perceived by various individuals or groups. This is more of a past-tense experience (I experience it as remembering being different people in different circumstances) more than a present-tense one (returning from a predictive model of self to an immediate experience of self).

- Steve

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Nick Thompson

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Steve,

You asked

"How (if at all) does this fit into the 3rd/1st person discussion this all started with?"

To be honest, I never tried to fit them together before. You are demanding reflexivity here ... that my principles concerning how to conduct a discussion be consistent with the argument I am presenting within the discussion. Always a useful demand. The best I can say is that both seem to embody my belief that in all matters of the mind, if we are willing to work hard enough, we can stand shoulder to shoulder and look at the same thing.

By the way, a couple of you have indicated that you didn't get answers to questions you directed at me, and you rose to my defense. I confess I got a bit over whelmed there for a while and started selecting questions for answer that I thought I could handle cleanly (as opposed to muddily). Please if there were lose ends, push them at me again.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

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

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email];[hidden email]

Sent: 6/22/2009 10:13:50 PM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation

Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Russ, and Glen, and Steve, n all

Ironically, I am with Russ on this one! I believe both in the possibility and the benefits of clarity.

I expected that when Russ and I were done, we would be able to agree on an articulation of our positions, where they are similar, where different, etc. In fact, one of the skills I most revere is the ability to state another person's position to that person's satisfaction. And, in fact, at one point, I thought I had achieved such an articulation, only to have Russ tell me I had got it wrong.   My guess is that Russ has his feet deeply in Kant, and I have neither boots nor courage high enough to go in there after him. My son, who is a philosopher, has as good as looked me in the eye and said, "You aint man enough to read Kant!"

I studied Kant when I was too young and foolish to know better... but then I had been raised on folks like Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein so Kant was no challenge.   Today I think I would find Kant a bit intimidating.

I am curious about the implications of "one of the skills I most revere is the ability to state another person's position to that person's satisfaction". It seems to have implications on the root discussion...   The two ways I can obtain a high degree of confidence that I am communicating with another is if I can articulate their position to their satisfaction and vice versa...    I prefer the former over the latter... in the sense that I am almost never satisfied in their articulation... at most I accept it with some reservations.   But if they can keep a straight face while I reel off my version of their understanding of a point, then I try hard not to think too hard about it and call it good. How (if at all) does this fit into the 3rd/1st person discussion this all started with?

- Steve

Steve Smith

Re: Example and... a definition! - Re: Intentionality

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:

Yay! Steve gave us an example to work with. I have a hunch that – at least as far as this example goes – Ross would grant Steve his interpretation. Nick and I would disagree. Steve said:

I'm not sure what you are agreeing/disagreeing with in my example. It is just my experience as clearly as I can articulate my memory of it... I'm not sure there is anything to agree or disagree with? I understand if you say that you have or have not had this experience (or one similar enough for the purpose).

“A simple but profound (to me) example, I have already given.   Lying in

the grass on a lazy summer day "intending" to get up and not being able

to actually "act"on the up-getting until "I" (that ever-present illusion

of unique-selfness) quit "intending" and some other magical mechanism

kicked in and viola!  I am UP!”

To begin, I will state that Freud’s major contribution to psychology was convincing people that a trained professional could know a person’s mind better than its owner could. Freud thought that the trained professional could do this by observing very large swaths of behavior.

I would grant that a "trained professional" might be able to "fit" a person's actions/behavior to a generally agreed-upon model.

For example, at the dinner table you may tell me that you never get enough food, and that your stealing food off your sister’s plate merely represents intention to eat more food. However, if I observe your behavior and find that your food-stealing-behavior does not end after some amount is eaten, but rather ends when your sister starts crying, I have authority to say “Actually, your real intention is to make your sister cry”.

This might be why I don't spend any time with psychotherapists. I could agree with an observation (sans any specific authority) that "your intentions might include trying to make your sister cry". I would be more than a little offended if I were told what my intentions are... and in fact, I am generally offended when people tell me what my intentions are. If perchance the teller succeeds in reflecting back to me things I might already know/suspect then I might accept their "telling" with only a modest amount of irritation.

-- The entire notion of insight during psychotherapy is that you can come to know your own intentions better than you knew them before. (“I know see that my striving for more money isn’t about making me happy, its about making my long dead mother happy”, “I now see that I seek out abusive relationships because my father abused me and all I ever wanted was his affection”, etc.) In other words, by definition, to “have an intention” is to “have your behavior oriented towards a given goal (or set of goals)”. Tolman, or rat maze fame, phrased it slightly differently, claiming that intentionality was a “continuing until”.

At least for myself, intentions can change as I "continue until"... even so radically that I sometimes find myself a bit lost in the middle of my loop. For example, I can start a post here with the intention of defending a point I (or someone else has made) and find myself wanting to make a completely new and different point.

With that in mind, I assert that at the start of Steve’s story, though he professed that he intended to get up, and might have believed he intended to do so (leaving aside exactly what that would mean), he clearly had no intention to do so. If he had intended to do so, he would have, nothing was stopping him.

Nope... I went through this many times... with those kinds of (attempted) insights in mind... I wondered quite deeply as to why the mere "intention" was not enough. My "scare quotes" (beware recursion here) were for the audience... to accept/acknowledge that *I might not know what intention really is*.

In fact, he was even nice enough to put scare quotes around the word for us, does this maybe indicate that he knew something was amiss in his verbal report? As much as Steve would like to think that he intended to get up, observing his own behavior (from that weird third-person perspective from which he watches himself) he to could see that what he really intended to do was to continue basking in the sun.

This is where the psychotherapist gets dumped. It is a perfectly reasonable "accusation" to suggest that I "really just wanted to continue basking in the sun", but it is not related to my intentions (overt or covert) at all. If I had a covert intention, it was the one I am exposing here... my intention to "get up" was somehow "trumped" by my intention to observe the mechanism of moving from "intention" to "action", short-circuiting the very mechanism I was looking for.

At some point, some combination of environmental and physiological changes happened, Steve’s intention changed, and he stood up. From the weird third-person perspective, it was like magic.

As reported (I think), the change was that I quit intending to *observe* the transition from intention to action at which point the original intention to get up played through and out.

If you grant that it is possible to not know your own intentions, and that some third party watching you could know your intentions by observing your behavior, and that said third party could point out to you how you are acting, and that then you could see that your intentions were not what you thought they were…. well, then we should all be in agreement.

I grant that it is possible to misunderstand or be unaware of my full intentions. I grant that a third party watching me might see patterns in my actions that suggest intentions I am unaware of or misunderstanding. If the third party were to metaphorically "hold up a mirror for me" to my own actions and how they (might) relate to my intentions, then I might very well come to a new understanding which might or might not align with said third-party's interpretation of my intentions. Given all my conditions here, I don't think we are in agreement. I think there is a huge gulf between the "third person expert" being adept at holding up a mirror and the same person actually "seeing me more clearly than I see myself". More objectively perhaps, but not more clearly.

As, I assert, all of us have been both first-person and third-person parties to such interactions, we should all be in agreement.

I have *imagined* that I understood other's intentions better than they, but in fact, I don't believe I understood them *better* but rather from a perspective that they had a hard time obtaining themselves. My perspective (on a good day) when offered to them, might very well improve their self-understanding, but that is not the same as actually believing that I understood them better than they did. I was simply privy to a POV that was not natural for them.

Among the things we should agree on: 1) There is nothing privileged about the first-person position, except perhaps that you are around yourself more than other people are around you.

I'm not there yet.

2) To accurately know what someone intends you need to see them do a lot, and you need to know how they act in various circumstances.

Adding more data points to the fit of a model does not make the model a better model, it just makes the fit better. One of the most common errors I see in psychology (professional and popular) is "overfitting the model" to the point that while the professed model (explanation of the subjects intentions) might fit past data perfectly, it has no predictive, much less explanatory power to speak of.

3) It is at least plausible that many, if not all, other so-called mental terms are really macro-behavioral terms.

I agree that when I talk/think about anyone's intentions except my own, and except what they profess to be their intentions, that I am restricted to macro-behavioral (if I understand the term correctly) descriptions. But I am quite attached to the first-person experience I have around my own intentions, even though I have reported direct experience in short-circuiting said intentions (lying in the grass).

4) Though say other things in strange conversations about “what exactly” intentionality is, the definition suggested here is in complete agreement with normal linguistic uses of the words – that is, lay sentences make sense if we define intentionality in this way.

For all purposes except understanding myself, I agree. I can use this definition as a working definition for explaining other peoples intentions and actions... but my own direct experience does not support it and by extension, I suspect very few others find this to be an acceptable way to have *their* intentions defined.

This may be colored by the fact that most of the time when anyone else has tried to tell me what my *real intentions* were, they were not only dead wrong, but generally I could ascribe *nefarious intentions of of their own* to them for their mis-statement of *my* intentions. Blame is the most obvious case. I find humans generally very quick to blame... and blame generally takes the form of determining *for someone else* what their *real intentions* are. Another obvious case is *force-fitting a model* which I suspect you of here. You (might) have a model of "the way things work" here and you (might) be ascribing intentions to me that fit that model, and thereby (if I am correct) you validate your own model with your own *made up data*.

I believe the rest of Steve’s email largely demonstrates an agreement with the above points. Steve argued, for example, that if the rest of the list knew the larger context of his actions in various circumstances, they would not have mistaken his talk of recursion as a criticism.

My intention in describing that was not to suggest that "if they only knew the context" but rather the contrapositive of "realizing that they *don't* know the context". The difference might be subtle, but the important features are that A) I assumed that the context was obvious (until Nick responded in a way that suggested it was not) and B) I realized that even with more context, the error in understanding my intentions was still possible/likely. If anything, I would say "If I had understood Nick's (and by extension other's) context (or lack of it), I would have avoided the statement for fear of it being misunderstood in this way".

He also seems implicitly to admit that under some circumstances the list members observations could have lead him to see that he really was intending criticism, even when he did not think that was his intention.

I admit that sometimes I have multiple intentions and mask some of them from myself. Generally, however, my multiple intentions are a weighted vector and "snarky" or "critical" components usually have a pretty low weight. I'm not above these motives, but they are rarely my prime motive.

I could also caste the bones for the I Ching, or consult the Stars, or read the Entrails of a Goat and get some parallax on my own intentions... and in fact, I do occasionally use Oracles (I Ching being my preferred) for this purpose. I don't need to believe that these Oracles know a single thing that I don't, I only believe that in their infinite ignorance (but great wisdom?) they can offer me a mirror, an opportunity to interpret my own intentions and actions through a different lens than I normally do. Other people can be "smart mirrors" offering (sometimes) more apt alternate perspectives, but I don't really believe that even the most highly trained/skilled/practiced therapist can do more than help you see things you might already know. They cannot, for example, "know more about my intentions than I do", they can only (on a good day) reflect back to me aspects of my intentions that I might be ignoring or deliberately obscuring from myself. If I am *willfully ignorant* enough of my own intentions, it might very well appear to them, to others and even (maybe) to me that they have some magic juju in this regard.

Tonight I am not avoiding specific deadlines... I am instead avoiding thinking of the several deadlines that will soon be looming!

- Steve

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Nick Thompson

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Steve,

You have identified a regress that I find troubling. What is in the view of the Viewpoint that is me. Are my toes? Well yes. Fingers? yes? Skin between my shoulder blades? Well, yes, in the extended meaning of viewpoint? Are my joints and muscles? Is my hypothalamus? This regress bothers me because I want to make a distinction between physiology and psychology and I want the brain to be the mediator of psychological facts, not one of them.

In trying to work this out I am inclined to look for systems that are dedicated to information gathering -- eyes and ears, etc. -- and include within the Viewpoint the results of that information gathering. I wonder what I would say if you could demonstrate some sort of specialized center in the cortex that is connected to specialized sensors in the lower brain that monitor activity there. I would have to include the lower brain in the world that I am looking at. Notice that this is stronger than the claim that the lower brain effects the cortex. That is undeniable. A can be affected by B without B sensing a. Here, I admit, it all starts to get crazy. What would have to be shown is that the higher brain PERCEIVES the lower brain. Frankly, these are the things I would rather not talk about, preferring to focus on all that lovely data from self-attribution theorists that demonstrates that it is easy as pie to get you to change your reported view of yourself either by asking you to do things or putting you in situations that are in conflict with your stated views . these studies seem to demonstrate dramatically that is that your view on yourself is determined by things the rest of us can see just as well as you can.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

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

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

Sent: 6/22/2009 10:25:21 PM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation

Rikus -

I'll start from Nick's model. My brain has learned to turn back it's third-person perception and modelling functionality on a subset of the environment that is always present, i.e. self.
This is a fairly clear (to me) description of how I interpret Nick's point... I'm not as clear that this is _the way things are_ but I can hold it along with the other 5 impossibleish things I had for breakfast with the Red Queen.

Semi-aside: there is something added in the case of self -- richer sensory data that is not available on other people: touch, pressure, pain, temperature from skin, breathing and heart rate, proprioception, stress and pain in joints, vestibular sense, stretch receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, etc.
This seems somewhat contrived, but without using up another one of my 6 impossibles over breakfast, I accept this as well.

I do think all of this enriches the model of self to the point where the experience might be qualitatively different from the models of other people.
I agree that if "all is Third Person" then this is a reasonable explanation why the "First Person Illusion" is so compelling.

But more significant is the fact that I can create an abstracted model of myself (i.e. imagine myself) and that the model can be made to interact with a model of the environment, other people, and even internally created models with no counterpart in direct experience. Consider that usually this model's usefulness is in projecting it into the future (and, I think, into the past, when we reconstruct events from memory).
And I contend that it is unique compared to say my "abstracted model of other people interacting with a model of the environment ...." because *I* can run experiments directly on myself which are somewhere between difficult and impossible with others. Learning our environment (when we first see our own hand in front of our face as a baby, or when we first leave home and face the vagaries of living in the world as an independent adult) appears to be a continuous series of hypothesis generation and testing with that ability to intentionally do "this and that".

Now, what happens when that model is dragged back into real-time, and held right next to the more direct perceptual awareness of self? It seems like one might end up with two selves, and I'm wondering if that experience might not account for that elusive experience that Russ is referring to.
Interesting. Having experimented with my 1st person experience a lot in my life, I do have a related experience. It renders in my life as a sense of multiple-personalities. I have multiple models of myself based on how I imagine/believe I am perceived by various individuals or groups. This is more of a past-tense experience (I experience it as remembering being different people in different circumstances) more than a present-tense one (returning from a predictive model of self to an immediate experience of self).

- Steve

Nick Thompson

Re: Example and... a definition! - Re: Intentionality

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

Oh, I totally think that it is up for grabs whether I, or others, know my intentions better than I, in any given situation.

This is part of why perceptive spouses and teenaged children make life so difficult.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

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

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

Sent: 6/22/2009 11:17:12 PM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Example and... a definition! - Re: Intentionality

ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:

Yay! Steve gave us an example to work with. I have a hunch that at least as far as this example goes Ross would grant Steve his interpretation. Nick and I would disagree. Steve said:

I'm not sure what you are agreeing/disagreeing with in my example.   It is just my experience as clearly as I can articulate my memory of it... I'm not sure there is anything to agree or disagree with?   I understand if you say that you have or have not had this experience (or one similar enough for the purpose).

A simple but profound (to me) example, I have already given.   Lying in
the grass on a lazy summer day "intending" to get up and not being able
to actually "act"on the up-getting until "I" (that ever-present illusion
of unique-selfness) quit "intending" and some other magical mechanism
kicked in and viola! I am UP!

To begin, I will state that Freuds major contribution to psychology was convincing people that a trained professional could know a persons mind better than its owner could. Freud thought that the trained professional could do this by observing very large swaths of behavior.
I would grant that a "trained professional" might be able to "fit" a person's actions/behavior to a generally agreed-upon model.

For example, at the dinner table you may tell me that you never get enough food, and that your stealing food off your sisters plate merely represents intention to eat more food. However, if I observe your behavior and find that your food-stealing-behavior does not end after some amount is eaten, but rather ends when your sister starts crying, I have authority to say Actually, your real intention is to make your sister cry.
This might be why I don't spend any time with psychotherapists.   I could agree with an observation (sans any specific authority) that "your intentions might include trying to make your sister cry".   I would be more than a little offended if I were told what my intentions are... and in fact, I am generally offended when people tell me what my intentions are.   If perchance the teller succeeds in reflecting back to me things I might already know/suspect then I might accept their "telling" with only a modest amount of irritation.

-- The entire notion of insight during psychotherapy is that you can come to know your own intentions better than you knew them before. (I know see that my striving for more money isnt about making me happy, its about making my long dead mother happy, I now see that I seek out abusive relationships because my father abused me and all I ever wanted was his affection, etc.) In other words, by definition, to have an intention is to have your behavior oriented towards a given goal (or set of goals). Tolman, or rat maze fame, phrased it slightly differently, claiming that intentionality was a continuing until.
At least for myself, intentions can change as I "continue until"... even so radically that I sometimes find myself a bit lost in the middle of my loop.   For example, I can start a post here with the intention of defending a point I (or someone else has made) and find myself wanting to make a completely new and different point.

With that in mind, I assert that at the start of Steves story, though he professed that he intended to get up, and might have believed he intended to do so (leaving aside exactly what that would mean), he clearly had no intention to do so. If he had intended to do so, he would have, nothing was stopping him.
Nope... I went through this many times... with those kinds of (attempted) insights in mind... I wondered quite deeply as to why the mere "intention" was not enough.   My "scare quotes" (beware recursion here) were for the audience... to accept/acknowledge that *I might not know what intention really is*.

In fact, he was even nice enough to put scare quotes around the word for us, does this maybe indicate that he knew something was amiss in his verbal report? As much as Steve would like to think that he intended to get up, observing his own behavior (from that weird third-person perspective from which he watches himself) he to could see that what he really intended to do was to continue basking in the sun.
This is where the psychotherapist gets dumped.   It is a perfectly reasonable "accusation" to suggest that I "really just wanted to continue basking in the sun", but it is not related to my intentions (overt or covert) at all.   If I had a covert intention, it was the one I am exposing here... my intention to "get up" was somehow "trumped" by my intention to observe the mechanism of moving from "intention" to "action", short-circuiting the very mechanism I was looking for.

At some point, some combination of environmental and physiological changes happened, Steves intention changed, and he stood up. From the weird third-person perspective, it was like magic.
As reported (I think), the change was that I quit intending to *observe* the transition from intention to action at which point the original intention to get up played through and out.

If you grant that it is possible to not know your own intentions, and that some third party watching you could know your intentions by observing your behavior, and that said third party could point out to you how you are acting, and that then you could see that your intentions were not what you thought they were. well, then we should all be in agreement.
I grant that it is possible to misunderstand or be unaware of my full intentions.   I grant that a third party watching me might see patterns in my actions that suggest intentions I am unaware of or misunderstanding.   If the third party were to metaphorically "hold up a mirror for me" to my own actions and how they (might) relate to my intentions, then I might very well come to a new understanding which might or might not align with said third-party's interpretation of my intentions.   Given all my conditions here, I don't think we are in agreement. I think there is a huge gulf between the "third person expert" being adept at holding up a mirror and the same person actually "seeing me more clearly than I see myself". More objectively perhaps, but not more clearly.

As, I assert, all of us have been both first-person and third-person parties to such interactions, we should all be in agreement.
I have *imagined* that I understood other's intentions better than they, but in fact, I don't believe I understood them *better* but rather from a perspective that they had a hard time obtaining themselves.   My perspective (on a good day) when offered to them, might very well improve their self-understanding, but that is not the same as actually believing that I understood them better than they did. I was simply privy to a POV that was not natural for them.

Among the things we should agree on: 1) There is nothing privileged about the first-person position, except perhaps that you are around yourself more than other people are around you.
I'm not there yet.

2) To accurately know what someone intends you need to see them do a lot, and you need to know how they act in various circumstances.
Adding more data points to the fit of a model does not make the model a better model, it just makes the fit better.   One of the most common errors I see in psychology (professional and popular) is "overfitting the model" to the point that while the professed model (explanation of the subjects intentions) might fit past data perfectly, it has no predictive, much less explanatory power to speak of.

3) It is at least plausible that many, if not all, other so-called mental terms are really macro-behavioral terms.
I agree that when I talk/think about anyone's intentions except my own, and except what they profess to be their intentions, that I am restricted to macro-behavioral (if I understand the term correctly) descriptions.   But I am quite attached to the first-person experience I have around my own intentions, even though I have reported direct experience in short-circuiting said intentions (lying in the grass).

4) Though say other things in strange conversations about what exactly intentionality is, the definition suggested here is in complete agreement with normal linguistic uses of the words that is, lay sentences make sense if we define intentionality in this way.
For all purposes except understanding myself, I agree. I can use this definition as a working definition for explaining other peoples intentions and actions... but my own direct experience does not support it and by extension, I suspect very few others find this to be an acceptable way to have *their* intentions defined.

This may be colored by the fact that most of the time when anyone else has tried to tell me what my *real intentions* were, they were not only dead wrong, but generally I could ascribe *nefarious intentions of of their own* to them for their mis-statement of *my* intentions. Blame is the most obvious case. I find humans generally very quick to blame... and blame generally takes the form of determining *for someone else* what their *real intentions* are. Another obvious case is *force-fitting a model* which I suspect you of here. You (might) have a model of "the way things work" here and you (might) be ascribing intentions to me that fit that model, and thereby (if I am correct) you validate your own model with your own *made up data*.

I believe the rest of Steves email largely demonstrates an agreement with the above points. Steve argued, for example, that if the rest of the list knew the larger context of his actions in various circumstances, they would not have mistaken his talk of recursion as a criticism.
My intention in describing that was not to suggest that "if they only knew the context" but rather the contrapositive of "realizing that they *don't* know the context".   The difference might be subtle, but the important features are that A) I assumed that the context was obvious (until Nick responded in a way that suggested it was not) and B) I realized that even with more context, the error in understanding my intentions was still possible/likely.   If anything, I would say "If I had understood Nick's (and by extension other's) context (or lack of it), I would have avoided the statement for fear of it being misunderstood in this way".

He also seems implicitly to admit that under some circumstances the list members observations could have lead him to see that he really was intending criticism, even when he did not think that was his intention.
I admit that sometimes I have multiple intentions and mask some of them from myself.   Generally, however, my multiple intentions are a weighted vector and "snarky" or "critical" components usually have a pretty low weight.   I'm not above these motives, but they are rarely my prime motive.

I could also caste the bones for the I Ching, or consult the Stars, or read the Entrails of a Goat and get some parallax on my own intentions... and in fact, I do occasionally use Oracles (I Ching being my preferred) for this purpose. I don't need to believe that these Oracles know a single thing that I don't, I only believe that in their infinite ignorance (but great wisdom?) they can offer me a mirror, an opportunity to interpret my own intentions and actions through a different lens than I normally do.   Other people can be "smart mirrors" offering (sometimes) more apt alternate perspectives, but I don't really believe that even the most highly trained/skilled/practiced therapist can do more than help you see things you might already know.   They cannot, for example, "know more about my intentions than I do", they can only (on a good day) reflect back to me aspects of my intentions that I might be ignoring or deliberately obscuring from myself. If I am *willfully ignorant* enough of my own intentions, it might very well appear to them, to others and even (maybe) to me that they have some magic juju in this regard.

Tonight I am not avoiding specific deadlines... I am instead avoiding thinking of the several deadlines that will soon be looming!

- Steve

glen e. p. ropella-2

Re: Direct conversation

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Thus spake Steve Smith circa 06/22/2009 08:57 PM:

> glen e. p. ropella uttered/spake/emitted/gurgitated:
>> A mandated method to be clear as possible as much as possible would be
>> just as effective and efficient as a mandate to be as vague as possible
>> as much as possible. To be clear, I claim that neither conviction is
>> more effective or efficient than the other. Particular methods must be
>> chosen for the proper context.
>>
> I sympathize with your characterization of "_all_ communication as a
> generalized koan" but I am not sure I agree on your followup point. I'm
> not sure the two examples (clear as possible vs vague as possible) are
> reciprocal (complementary?).

My point was not that the mandate to be vague is the inverse of the
mandate to be clear (though I think one could make that argument easily
enough). My point was that, when communicating, sometimes it is useful
to be clear and sometimes it is useful to be vague.

What I was objecting to was Russ' _conviction_ to a single communication
mandate. I've found that it's counterproductive to commit oneself to a
sole approach to the world. It's like Russ' conviction to clarity is a
willful decision to always hold a hammer so that everything around him
looks like a nail. Single-minded convictions like that are always a red
flag for me.

Of course I appreciate clarity and attempts to be clear. But I just
don't make it a fixed conviction. I'm open to all forms of
communication, including being vague when that seems most appropriate.

If necessary, I can come up with some examples where being vague is a
better method for communicating ideas than attempting to be clear. But
I don't think it's necessary. I imagine everyone on this list can come
up with examples themselves. [grin]

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com

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

Re: Direct conversation

glen e. p. ropella produced:

I sympathize with your characterization of "_all_ communication as a
generalized koan" but I am not sure I agree on your followup point.  I'm
not sure the two examples (clear as possible vs vague as possible) are
reciprocal (complementary?).


My point was not that the mandate to be vague is the inverse of the
mandate to be clear (though I think one could make that argument easily
enough).

upon re-reading, I find that you were quite clear in your statement and it was I who was vague in my understanding.

My point was that, when communicating, sometimes it is useful
to be clear and sometimes it is useful to be vague.

I agree and would like to suggest (re-stating an earlier point) that a great deal of communication happens between lines, in the negative space, what is not said explicitly. I am not sure that is the same (intentionally) as "vague" but it is often received as "vague". For example, requiring work and careful attention by the reader or the listener has some intrinsic value in many situations. Vagueness (or more often terseness) can evoke active listening where elaborate attempts at clarity (my weakness) can bore and lull the listener/reader into passive listening or worse.

What I was objecting to was Russ' _conviction_ to a single communication
mandate.  I've found that it's counterproductive to commit oneself to a
sole approach to the world.  It's like Russ' conviction to clarity is a
willful decision to always hold a hammer so that everything around him
looks like a nail.  Single-minded convictions like that are always a red
flag for me.

I interpreted Russ' stridency as an attempt to get over the frustration of thinking Nick was deliberately ignoring his questions. I think you are correct that most here (including Russ) are quite familiar with situations where "less is more".

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