hidden

[gepr]

You jumped close to where I was about to go! Now that we have some conception of how this principle is holographic (everything's there on the surface, all we need is the way to read it), I'd like to demonstrate that we don't *need* "interiority" to argue for privacy. But my argument differs a bit from yours below. Yours below argues that the keys/ways to read the surface may be inaccessible. My argument is that there are *many* ways to read the surface, some of which may even be mutually exclusive [†]. Further, I think there's a no-go result lurking beneath that we might get to if we get past the lower order results.

I'll start with comprehension of strings to work my way to the simplest form of privacy. Stronger forms might follow. Given the string "tin", what ways are there to transform the string? And by what ontology do we decide which of those transforms produce something meaningful? Obviously, an English speaker would land upon the reverse() function, reverse(tin) => "nit". A programmer might use cons(cdr(),car()) => "int". Someone who triggers on "interiority" might use the simpler cdr() => "in". >8^D A chemist include selecting just the first 2 to get Ti. We could elide the middle to get TN, Tennessee. Etc.

The idea is that when a *surface* presents itself, what are all the possible ways to *decode* that data? And, further, which decoding processes produce meaningful results? (I'd argue this is the definition of intrusion detection, anti-virus software, code breaking, etc.) If a super simple example like the string "tin" shows an explosion of possible transformations, what can we get from a more realistic example like finding Waldo in a kid's book? Or (Satan help me) interpreting an ink blot?

Given that combinatorial explosion, it is practically infeasible [‡] to slice/rebundle the possibly meaningful transforms down into a collection that can be handled in any small amount of time/resources. Hence we get the simplest form of privacy: "privacy through obscurity". None of us will ever know Frank's image of some childhood friend because there are simply too many ways to parse the data. David Icke can always recant some silly conspiracy theory by saying "that's not what I meant". Trump can avoid responsibility by claiming he said something sarcastically. Etc. There's no way for us to know, for sure, that a chosen decoder isn't the wrong decoder.

Of course, this raises the question of big data, AI, Moore's Law, etc. With enough time/resources, we can brute force our way through it. With enough crafty logic, we can winnow the space down. So, if anyone cares, we can take further steps to establish higher order privacy. Note that I'm *still* assuming that everything's there on the surface. I'm trying to use the position I infer from EricC and Nick to *demonstrate* privacy.


[†] I've lazily made this argument a lot by referring to Rosen's defn of complexity or von Neumann's extrapolation of Gödel, Wolpert's limits of info, etc. But nobody seems to acknowledge those and/or show me how I'm wrong about them. [sigh]

[‡] And perhaps impossible in principle.

On 5/18/20 6:46 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:

> I will attempt to switch sides and argue for why his mind may be private.
>
> Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of
> /transformations/ which will allow us to know his mind, it may
> be the case that those transformations are not accessible to
> us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the
> case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize
> the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are
> able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank,
> his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't
> entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable.
> As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve
> a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek
> antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory
> before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind.

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[gepr]

I think you've hit this squarely, probably because I read it as confirming my bias *against* monism and for pluralism. A while back, I tried to call out the difference between abstraction and unification. Abstraction ignores particularities (even if carefully), whereas unification facilitates the reconstruction of those particularities. I think David Deutsch says this well with his "hard to vary" conception of explanatory power. We're all sympathetic with reduction when and where it works. If we can make the reduction into a smaller/shorter expression without truncating its expressive power, then it's universally a good thing. And that's not to say that particulars-ignoring abstraction isn't also (often) a good thing. But it's not universally a good thing.

I really wish more people would/could permanently install a "methodological" qualifier in front of every -ism they advocate. So, if you call yourself a monist, are you a methodological monist? And if not, if you're ideal-monist but methodological-pluralist, then I don't particularly care about your idealism. I care about your methods more than your thoughts. At least then, when someone foists a reduction on us, we can, in practice, find if/where they've ignored or assumed away some particulars.

With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words.


ps Sorry if my aggressive clipping clipped too much. But I rely on everyone being able to use a threaded mail client or browse nabble for more context.

On 5/18/20 9:26 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> Keyword is Reductionism.  The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science)
> [...]
> My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity.  And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work.  In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations.  Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure.  Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search.  The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is


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[Steve Smith]

Glen -

> You jumped close to where I was about to go! Now that we have some conception of how this principle is holographic (everything's there on the surface, all we need is the way to read it)
I appreciate this (added) exposure of your (hidden/interior) meaning of
"holographic".   My own experience has me "reading" your use to imply
something *slightly* different.  I see with this expression that you are
focusing on the dimension-reduction (from 3D to 2D nominally?) whilst
maintaining (near?) completeness/homogeneity in sampling?  In practice,
*light holography* is only capable of transferring the radiosity from
the surfaces of 3D objects to another surface (photographic plane/plate,
photographic emulsion on an arbitrary surface).     The key point to my
observation is that only "occlusion" is obviated, not "interiority".   I
accept that the way you are using holographic might derive from a more
cosmological view and the "things being imaged" are not prone to obscure
or occlude others... 
> , I'd like to demonstrate that we don't *need* "interiority" to argue for privacy. But my argument differs a bit from yours below. Yours below argues that the keys/ways to read the surface may be inaccessible. My argument is that there are *many* ways to read the surface, some of which may even be mutually exclusive [†]. Further, I think there's a no-go result lurking beneath that we might get to if we get past the lower order results.

Following the (light) holography analogy, it is the re-illumination of
the hologram with the same wavelength of coherent light that reproduces
the surface characteristics of the object (somewhat) faithfully.   If we
illuminate with (not necessarily coherent but modestly collimated) white
light, or another pure frequency of coherent light, we get distortions
of the original image (the first method is convenient and yields what
most of us would call "rainbow" holograms, while the second yields
*scale* shifts which is often used to effectively resize/scale the
hologram).   Knowing the original setup of the hologram recording
(frequency/phase  and spatial location of the source and reference beam)
(when used for metrology for example) allows for more complete/accurate
reproduction.   This is similar to doing decryption with an exact copy
of the codebook.   Code breaking and even practical
encryption/decryption in the field admits for the possibility of
incomplete codebooks (e.g. using different editions of a phonebook or a
bible or other widely distributed book.)

> I'll start with comprehension of strings to work my way to the simplest form of privacy. Stronger forms might follow. Given the string "tin", what ways are there to transform the string? And by what ontology do we decide which of those transforms produce something meaningful? Obviously, an English speaker would land upon the reverse() function, reverse(tin) => "nit". A programmer might use cons(cdr(),car()) => "int". Someone who triggers on "interiority" might use the simpler cdr() => "in". >8^D A chemist include selecting just the first 2 to get Ti. We could elide the middle to get TN, Tennessee. Etc.
These are all examples of selecting or valuating transformations
(letter-scrambles and elisions) based on the relative entropy yielded in
a secondary lexicon?
> The idea is that when a *surface* presents itself, what are all the possible ways to *decode* that data? And, further, which decoding processes produce meaningful results? (I'd argue this is the definition of intrusion detection, anti-virus software, code breaking, etc.)
thus something like entropy relative to the target domain of some model
or another?

>  If a super simple example like the string "tin" shows an explosion of possible transformations, what can we get from a more realistic example like finding Waldo in a kid's book? Or (Satan help me) interpreting an ink blot?
>
> Given that combinatorial explosion, it is practically infeasible [‡] to slice/rebundle the possibly meaningful transforms down into a collection that can be handled in any small amount of time/resources. Hence we get the simplest form of privacy: "privacy through obscurity".

> None of us will ever know Frank's image of some childhood friend because there are simply too many ways to parse the data. David Icke can always recant some silly conspiracy theory by saying "that's not what I meant". Trump can avoid responsibility by claiming he said something sarcastically. Etc. There's no way for us to know, for sure, that a chosen decoder isn't the wrong decoder.
And there IS an art to plausible ambiguity, which Trump seems
particularly adept at.   I think that was roughly what Dave did when he
declared "the end of the Pandemic".   While such slip-slideyness ( a
variation on moving the goalposts?) can be maddening, it can also be
fascinating.   My father taught my sister and I to play "Battleship" on
a simple pad of gridded paper (long before I ever saw the Mattel plastic
board-game, and a cousin taught me a meta-game on that same theme,
principle, which was where each side was allowed to *move* it's ships
after each shot was fired.   So this made it a more symmetric game where
the one can in real time decode the *intentions* of the other player as
they design a pattern of fire.   A good "defensive" player could in
principle avoid being hit right up until there are "no places left to
hide".   The game played this way was probably   just a complicated
version of tic-tac-toe with only "bad play" not any particular "good play".
>
> Of course, this raises the question of big data, AI, Moore's Law, etc. With enough time/resources, we can brute force our way through it. With enough crafty logic, we can winnow the space down. So, if anyone cares, we can take further steps to establish higher order privacy. Note that I'm *still* assuming that everything's there on the surface. I'm trying to use the position I infer from EricC and Nick to *demonstrate* privacy.

And you aren't even invoking quantum computing, which throws a whole
other wrench into, no?

I don't know if anyone else here (besides Marcus) has watched the
streaming series "Devs"?   It has some ugly flaws in it by my measure
but overall it is a good study on the question of the (a?) multiverse
and the possibilities implied by bid data and AI and of course, quantum
computing?


- Steve



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[thompnickson2]

EricS, Glen, David, Frank, Steve, EricC Old Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all,

 

Let me again thank you all for allowing me to sharpen my thinking against your whetstone. 

 

I am perhaps at my most uneasy arguing against EricS, but here goes.

 

Speaking of whetstones, let’s start with Glen’s most recent post, because it set’s a limit to how far I am willing to push the argument I have been making:

 

With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words.

My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible.  I.e., a scientific understanding.  But I am an imagination-pluralist.  For instance, one of my favorite sayings is, “No person should be denied the pleasures of imagining heaven because s/he happens to be an atheist.”  I routinely suggested to graduate students that they should stop trying to cram their ideas into a scientific format and go write a novel, since the idea they were trying to expose was more suitable to that format.  So, if we are arguing about the right of humans to take sustenance from any form of thinking that pleases them, then let the argument cease.   But whenever informal thinking shapes formal thinking (which it always does, to some extent), then I think we need to talk about it in a formal way.)  Thus, if you change Glen’s “practical” above to “Practicial” (= of, or related to, scientific practice), I agree with him entirely. 

 

That said, if you’re not exhausted, you might have a look at the larding of EricS’s note, below:

 

Thanks again, all,

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 10:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

As I read this,I am reminded of the 20th century (seems to long ago), in which the high-energy physicists dug a social pit for themselves, from which the ones they offended do not want ever to let them escape.

 

Keyword is Reductionism.  The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science)

[NST===>I am a reductionist, but let me be precise about what that means to me.    To me, a concept has been reduced when anybody asserts that there is only one key into it (to use the Metaphor Glen and I have been exploring.)  The traditional forms of reduction are reductions in scale, as when somebody asserts that the mind is just brain activity or behavior is just muscle twitches.  I abhor this kind of reductionism, and think it is the worst kind of misdirection and obscurantism.  I am an “up-reductionist”.  My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in.   Our minds are something about us, not something within us.   <===nst]

 

HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks.

ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do.

HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly.

ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.)

HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that.

ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting.

HEP: In Principle we understand all that.

ROS: You are a robot.

 

And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks.  Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives.

[NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst]

 

 

The behaviorists sound _so_ much like the reductionists sounded, and it is not for me to say whether they want to sound that way or not.

[NST===>Well, sure.  I guess some behaviorists have sounded that way.  But not Tolman, and certainly not Peirce, for instance.  <===nst]

  They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO)

[NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF?  In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.”    <===nst]

 that they sound like they are claiming a scope of knowledge including all the things about which they don’t have anything particularly satisfying to say.  They are sure, in the end, They Know what science will consist of, at least In Principle.  They may actually be right on parts of that, but to assert that your system of understanding will, you are confident, subsume all the future problems about which, for the present, you are unable to say anything actually elucidating, is of questionable utility.

[NST===>There’s a huge difference between agreeing to try to build such a system (knowing you will almost certainly fail), and asserting that one already has one.  <===nst]

 It’s fine to believe that, but if it does no work for you, it is not easily distinguishable from a not-even-wrong claim.  At the most benign, it substitutes putting a lot of energy into defending the turf (of what? of “materialism”? or is that now such an overused term that we would like something fresh to characterize the non-spiritualist, non-vitalist position?), instead of engaging with where the other person wants the discussion to be, which is to say “Hey, there is some distinct cognitive or experiential primitive here, which I don’t know how to characterize in a satisfying way; would you like to help me think about it?” 

[NST===>Great!  Let’s do that work! * Is this the same as saying “hey, we seem to share some productive patterns of thought, here, which we have not articulated, let alone integrated into our larger system.  How can we do that? But to the extent that spiritual means not amenable to integration into the practices of science, we are blocked from having any systematic conversation about spirit.  <===nst]

 

My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity.  And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work.  In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations.  Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure.  Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search.  The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is its own kind of thing that occupies science in addition to the system that characterizes the building blocks and the local rules for their combination.  All the systems that characterize all the irreducible patterns are compatible with the building blocks, but precisely because each of them captures something different, the system for the building blocks doesn’t extract any of them _in its particularity_, and it is getting at that particularity that the whole rest of science is occupied with.

[NST===> Is a cake irreduceable?  I think it is.  If you agree on that point, then I really don’t have to say anything other than that I agree with all of the above.  To the extent that I see you-all exploring a mathematical or algorithmic reduction of the irreducible, I wait outside your conference room for news of your success.  <===nst]

 

(Btw, the rabid Darwinists do the same thing.  That is what enables Richard Dawkins to take what would otherwise be completely reasonable positions, and turn them into an overall offensive posture.

[NST===>Dawkins does not have a consistent or comprehensive view of evolution, let along anything else.  He flagrantly abuses the Darwinian metaphor.  So please don’t hang that particular dead chicken around my neck.  Any Darwinist who did not get on the evo-devo train, was left at the station a generation ago. <===nst]

 And the character of the deflection is the same.  If Darwinism contains everything, then it isn’t doing the work for you of extracting some further, particular thing.)[NST===>I agree that anything that claims to be everything is probably nothing.  That does not keep me from – as a matter of method – attempting to “push” a line of thought as far as it takes me. I see that this is contradictory.   [sigh].<===nst]  

 

 

Sorry for the meta-commentary on conversation analysis (or opinionizing).  I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an interesting investigation.

[NST===>Well, only if it’s not understood as “that which we cannot investigate.”  <===nst]

 

[NST===>* I have decided to adopt Glen’s footnote practice.  OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams.  How would we go about it?  I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did.  <===nst]

Eric

 

On May 19, 2020, at 12:15 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

You have a life for which, at the moment, only you hold the key.   That’s the furthest I am prepared to go. 

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 9:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Then quit saying I don't have an  inner life.  The inner expeeiences are the memories I have in the present and at various times in the past and the wondering about whatever became of her (and others).

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 8:48 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

There are many things that you have experienced that I have not, and vv, but no value is added by calling these “inner.”  I can sort of go along with Glen’s gloss on “inside”, but when you metamorphose it to “inner”, I get antsy.  

 

But I think we have tilled this ground for all it is worth, for the moment.  

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 8:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Forget covariant tensors (again).  There was a beautiful, talented girl in my sixth grade class.  She could dance ballet, draw striking pictures, etc.  I thought of her occasionally over the decades.  When Google search became available I discovered that she was married to a celebrity.

 

When you say that my inner life isn't private, Nick, do you mean you could figure out her name given what I've just written?  As I think of her face, can you "see" it well enough to recognize her photo?

 

I just don't understand what you mean when you question that I have a private inner life.

 

Frank

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Glen, Nick,

 

Glen writes:

`... in last week's Zoom, I mentioned to Jon (in response

to his query to Frank about RSA-encryption::mind) that I

think homomorphic encryption is a better analogy (to mind).`

 

Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally

had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus

on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen

for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to

differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that

Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for

why his mind may be private.

 

Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of

transformations which will allow us to know his mind, it may

be the case that those transformations are not accessible to

us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the

case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize

the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are

able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank,

his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't

entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable.

As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve

a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek

antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory

before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind.

 

Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should

actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine

once said that rememberings were morphisms between

forgettings. We are often ok with the idea that memory is

lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least

with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time

Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting

something fundamentally different. The remembering is

always between different forgettings.

 

Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts.

Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our

conversation. It seemed a good idea to try.

 

On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the

book Steganographia. I had originally read about it in some

part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has since

found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in

1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography.

What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of

itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is

on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to

find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography.

I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library

at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was

doubly hidden from me as I neither had the deciphering

key nor can I read Latin ;)

 

Jon

 

†: If any members of the group would like to form a reading

group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE, I would gladly

participate.

†† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about

the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect,

work beginning with Margherita Beloch (and culminating

with the Huzita-Hatori axioms) show that origami would

have been a more powerful choice!

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[gepr]

I'd like to avoid your (more accurate) use of holography in talking about this "holographic principle". While the technical details of actual holography are interesting, it adds noise to the idea I'm offering. (Again, I don't believe this idea, myself. I'm offering it as a rewording of what I heard EricC say.) So, I'm offering an analogy to the Bekenstein bound or the holographic principle in physics. I probably should never have used that word "holographic". I'm regretting it, now.

On 5/19/20 11:16 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> These are all examples of selecting or valuating transformations
> (letter-scrambles and elisions) based on the relative entropy yielded in
> a secondary lexicon?

I haven't, yet, invoked entropy in my attempt to reconstruct privacy from the bare concept of hidden with which I started this thread. I did invoke it earlier, in other threads, because I *do* think it will apply with higher order forms of privacy. But for "privacy through obscurity" all we need is the combinatorial explosion.

> thus something like entropy relative to the target domain of some model
> or another?

Not yet, no. You *could* argue that a particular target, like Frank, could be identified and attacked via the class inferred from that particularity. In principle, I think this is what therapy does. It's definitely what industrial espionage is about. Some cute girl moves into the apartment next to the young engineer with a newly minted yellow badge and she proceeds to *decrypt* the engineer. She would definitely use some conception of entropy relative to the "young engineer" domain.

But we don't need that for privacy through obscurity.

> And there IS an art to plausible ambiguity, [...]

Yes. In an adversarial co-evolution, it's relatively easy to exploit privacy for some gain. And a skilled hacker will be able to eliminate implausible decoders based on implausible results they generate. But, like with the above, adversarial systems imply targets. And this lowest order privacy doesn't need that for its justification.

> And you aren't even invoking quantum computing, which throws a whole
> other wrench into, no?

Well, I did by implication. QC simply exploits time/space tradeoffs, at least for my purposes, here. And by "With enough time/resources, ..." and the "etc.", I tried to imply QC along with all the other issues surrounding computational power limitations. We don't really need QC to puncture privacy through obscurity. Targeting will suffice. Frank can't be obscure if we can surveil him in particular ... like some psychodynamic stalker.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

 > I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an in

Psychoanalysts have been working on this for over a century but scientists reject their methodology and many of their conclusions.  They reject them qua scientists but many embrace them personally if they live in a place where psychodynamic therapy is available.  Nothing could be more ideographic than an extremely deep investigation of an individual's "inner life" including her dreams, fantasies, and memories of childhood pains and joys.  

Based on living in Pittsburgh where there are two major universities I can say, tentatively, that there are high energy physicists and even behaviorists who have benefitted from this approach.

On Tue, May 19, 2020, 12:49 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS, Glen, David, Frank, Steve, EricC Old Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all,

 

Let me again thank you all for allowing me to sharpen my thinking against your whetstone. 

 

I am perhaps at my most uneasy arguing against EricS, but here goes.

 

Speaking of whetstones, let’s start with Glen’s most recent post, because it set’s a limit to how far I am willing to push the argument I have been making:

 

With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words.

My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible.  I.e., a scientific understanding.  But I am an imagination-pluralist.  For instance, one of my favorite sayings is, “No person should be denied the pleasures of imagining heaven because s/he happens to be an atheist.”  I routinely suggested to graduate students that they should stop trying to cram their ideas into a scientific format and go write a novel, since the idea they were trying to expose was more suitable to that format.  So, if we are arguing about the right of humans to take sustenance from any form of thinking that pleases them, then let the argument cease.   But whenever informal thinking shapes formal thinking (which it always does, to some extent), then I think we need to talk about it in a formal way.)  Thus, if you change Glen’s “practical” above to “Practicial” (= of, or related to, scientific practice), I agree with him entirely. 

 

That said, if you’re not exhausted, you might have a look at the larding of EricS’s note, below:

 

Thanks again, all,

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 10:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

As I read this,I am reminded of the 20th century (seems to long ago), in which the high-energy physicists dug a social pit for themselves, from which the ones they offended do not want ever to let them escape.

 

Keyword is Reductionism.  The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science)

[NST===>I am a reductionist, but let me be precise about what that means to me.    To me, a concept has been reduced when anybody asserts that there is only one key into it (to use the Metaphor Glen and I have been exploring.)  The traditional forms of reduction are reductions in scale, as when somebody asserts that the mind is just brain activity or behavior is just muscle twitches.  I abhor this kind of reductionism, and think it is the worst kind of misdirection and obscurantism.  I am an “up-reductionist”.  My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in.   Our minds are something about us, not something within us.   <===nst]

 

HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks.

ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do.

HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly.

ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.)

HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that.

ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting.

HEP: In Principle we understand all that.

ROS: You are a robot.

 

And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks.  Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives.

[NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst]

 

 

The behaviorists sound _so_ much like the reductionists sounded, and it is not for me to say whether they want to sound that way or not.

[NST===>Well, sure.  I guess some behaviorists have sounded that way.  But not Tolman, and certainly not Peirce, for instance.  <===nst]

  They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO)

[NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF?  In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.”    <===nst]

 that they sound like they are claiming a scope of knowledge including all the things about which they don’t have anything particularly satisfying to say.  They are sure, in the end, They Know what science will consist of, at least In Principle.  They may actually be right on parts of that, but to assert that your system of understanding will, you are confident, subsume all the future problems about which, for the present, you are unable to say anything actually elucidating, is of questionable utility.

[NST===>There’s a huge difference between agreeing to try to build such a system (knowing you will almost certainly fail), and asserting that one already has one.  <===nst]

 It’s fine to believe that, but if it does no work for you, it is not easily distinguishable from a not-even-wrong claim.  At the most benign, it substitutes putting a lot of energy into defending the turf (of what? of “materialism”? or is that now such an overused term that we would like something fresh to characterize the non-spiritualist, non-vitalist position?), instead of engaging with where the other person wants the discussion to be, which is to say “Hey, there is some distinct cognitive or experiential primitive here, which I don’t know how to characterize in a satisfying way; would you like to help me think about it?” 

[NST===>Great!  Let’s do that work! * Is this the same as saying “hey, we seem to share some productive patterns of thought, here, which we have not articulated, let alone integrated into our larger system.  How can we do that? But to the extent that spiritual means not amenable to integration into the practices of science, we are blocked from having any systematic conversation about spirit.  <===nst]

 

My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity.  And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work.  In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations.  Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure.  Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search.  The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is its own kind of thing that occupies science in addition to the system that characterizes the building blocks and the local rules for their combination.  All the systems that characterize all the irreducible patterns are compatible with the building blocks, but precisely because each of them captures something different, the system for the building blocks doesn’t extract any of them _in its particularity_, and it is getting at that particularity that the whole rest of science is occupied with.

[NST===> Is a cake irreduceable?  I think it is.  If you agree on that point, then I really don’t have to say anything other than that I agree with all of the above.  To the extent that I see you-all exploring a mathematical or algorithmic reduction of the irreducible, I wait outside your conference room for news of your success.  <===nst]

 

(Btw, the rabid Darwinists do the same thing.  That is what enables Richard Dawkins to take what would otherwise be completely reasonable positions, and turn them into an overall offensive posture.

[NST===>Dawkins does not have a consistent or comprehensive view of evolution, let along anything else.  He flagrantly abuses the Darwinian metaphor.  So please don’t hang that particular dead chicken around my neck.  Any Darwinist who did not get on the evo-devo train, was left at the station a generation ago. <===nst]

 And the character of the deflection is the same.  If Darwinism contains everything, then it isn’t doing the work for you of extracting some further, particular thing.)[NST===>I agree that anything that claims to be everything is probably nothing.  That does not keep me from – as a matter of method – attempting to “push” a line of thought as far as it takes me. I see that this is contradictory.   [sigh].<===nst]  

 

 

Sorry for the meta-commentary on conversation analysis (or opinionizing).  I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an interesting investigation.

[NST===>Well, only if it’s not understood as “that which we cannot investigate.”  <===nst]

 

[NST===>* I have decided to adopt Glen’s footnote practice.  OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams.  How would we go about it?  I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did.  <===nst]

Eric

 

On May 19, 2020, at 12:15 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

You have a life for which, at the moment, only you hold the key.   That’s the furthest I am prepared to go. 

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 9:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Then quit saying I don't have an  inner life.  The inner expeeiences are the memories I have in the present and at various times in the past and the wondering about whatever became of her (and others).

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 8:48 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

There are many things that you have experienced that I have not, and vv, but no value is added by calling these “inner.”  I can sort of go along with Glen’s gloss on “inside”, but when you metamorphose it to “inner”, I get antsy.  

 

But I think we have tilled this ground for all it is worth, for the moment.  

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 8:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Forget covariant tensors (again).  There was a beautiful, talented girl in my sixth grade class.  She could dance ballet, draw striking pictures, etc.  I thought of her occasionally over the decades.  When Google search became available I discovered that she was married to a celebrity.

 

When you say that my inner life isn't private, Nick, do you mean you could figure out her name given what I've just written?  As I think of her face, can you "see" it well enough to recognize her photo?

 

I just don't understand what you mean when you question that I have a private inner life.

 

Frank

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Glen, Nick,

 

Glen writes:

`... in last week's Zoom, I mentioned to Jon (in response

to his query to Frank about RSA-encryption::mind) that I

think homomorphic encryption is a better analogy (to mind).`

 

Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally

had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus

on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen

for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to

differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that

Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for

why his mind may be private.

 

Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of

transformations which will allow us to know his mind, it may

be the case that those transformations are not accessible to

us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the

case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize

the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are

able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank,

his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't

entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable.

As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve

a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek

antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory

before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind.

 

Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should

actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine

once said that rememberings were morphisms between

forgettings. We are often ok with the idea that memory is

lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least

with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time

Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting

something fundamentally different. The remembering is

always between different forgettings.

 

Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts.

Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our

conversation. It seemed a good idea to try.

 

On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the

book Steganographia. I had originally read about it in some

part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has since

found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in

1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography.

What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of

itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is

on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to

find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography.

I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library

at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was

doubly hidden from me as I neither had the deciphering

key nor can I read Latin ;)

 

Jon

 

†: If any members of the group would like to form a reading

group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE, I would gladly

participate.

†† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about

the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect,

work beginning with Margherita Beloch (and culminating

with the Huzita-Hatori axioms) show that origami would

have been a more powerful choice!

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[thompnickson2]

Hi, all,

 

Before it gets buried and institutionalized in the thread, the term is “idiographic”, not “ideographic”.  It doesn’t have to do with ideas but with  the study of events that are thought of as inherently individual, one-off, non-repeatable.  Case histories are idiographs.  The contrast class is nomothetic, having to do with the discovery of laws that relate classes of objects or events.  A full on double blind controlled experiment is an example of nomothetic research.  Psychology Departments can tear themselves apart arguing about which is the most worthy.  I think the distinction is worth bearing in mind, although common sense dictates that an experience that cannot be assigned to a class and does not imply some lawful relation is impossible. 

 

So what about the FRIAM study of dreams?

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 1:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

 > I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an in

 

Psychoanalysts have been working on this for over a century but scientists reject their methodology and many of their conclusions.  They reject them qua scientists but many embrace them personally if they live in a place where psychodynamic therapy is available.  Nothing could be more ideographic than an extremely deep investigation of an individual's "inner life" including her dreams, fantasies, and memories of childhood pains and joys.  

 

Based on living in Pittsburgh where there are two major universities I can say, tentatively, that there are high energy physicists and even behaviorists who have benefitted from this approach.

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Tue, May 19, 2020, 12:49 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS, Glen, David, Frank, Steve, EricC Old Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all,

 

Let me again thank you all for allowing me to sharpen my thinking against your whetstone. 

 

I am perhaps at my most uneasy arguing against EricS, but here goes.

 

Speaking of whetstones, let’s start with Glen’s most recent post, because it set’s a limit to how far I am willing to push the argument I have been making:

 

With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words.

My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible.  I.e., a scientific understanding.  But I am an imagination-pluralist.  For instance, one of my favorite sayings is, “No person should be denied the pleasures of imagining heaven because s/he happens to be an atheist.”  I routinely suggested to graduate students that they should stop trying to cram their ideas into a scientific format and go write a novel, since the idea they were trying to expose was more suitable to that format.  So, if we are arguing about the right of humans to take sustenance from any form of thinking that pleases them, then let the argument cease.   But whenever informal thinking shapes formal thinking (which it always does, to some extent), then I think we need to talk about it in a formal way.)  Thus, if you change Glen’s “practical” above to “Practicial” (= of, or related to, scientific practice), I agree with him entirely. 

 

That said, if you’re not exhausted, you might have a look at the larding of EricS’s note, below:

 

Thanks again, all,

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 10:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

As I read this,I am reminded of the 20th century (seems to long ago), in which the high-energy physicists dug a social pit for themselves, from which the ones they offended do not want ever to let them escape.

 

Keyword is Reductionism.  The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science)

[NST===>I am a reductionist, but let me be precise about what that means to me.    To me, a concept has been reduced when anybody asserts that there is only one key into it (to use the Metaphor Glen and I have been exploring.)  The traditional forms of reduction are reductions in scale, as when somebody asserts that the mind is just brain activity or behavior is just muscle twitches.  I abhor this kind of reductionism, and think it is the worst kind of misdirection and obscurantism.  I am an “up-reductionist”.  My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in.   Our minds are something about us, not something within us.   <===nst]

 

HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks.

ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do.

HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly.

ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.)

HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that.

ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting.

HEP: In Principle we understand all that.

ROS: You are a robot.

 

And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks.  Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives.

[NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst]

 

 

The behaviorists sound _so_ much like the reductionists sounded, and it is not for me to say whether they want to sound that way or not.

[NST===>Well, sure.  I guess some behaviorists have sounded that way.  But not Tolman, and certainly not Peirce, for instance.  <===nst]

  They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO)

[NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF?  In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.”    <===nst]

 that they sound like they are claiming a scope of knowledge including all the things about which they don’t have anything particularly satisfying to say.  They are sure, in the end, They Know what science will consist of, at least In Principle.  They may actually be right on parts of that, but to assert that your system of understanding will, you are confident, subsume all the future problems about which, for the present, you are unable to say anything actually elucidating, is of questionable utility.

[NST===>There’s a huge difference between agreeing to try to build such a system (knowing you will almost certainly fail), and asserting that one already has one.  <===nst]

 It’s fine to believe that, but if it does no work for you, it is not easily distinguishable from a not-even-wrong claim.  At the most benign, it substitutes putting a lot of energy into defending the turf (of what? of “materialism”? or is that now such an overused term that we would like something fresh to characterize the non-spiritualist, non-vitalist position?), instead of engaging with where the other person wants the discussion to be, which is to say “Hey, there is some distinct cognitive or experiential primitive here, which I don’t know how to characterize in a satisfying way; would you like to help me think about it?” 

[NST===>Great!  Let’s do that work! * Is this the same as saying “hey, we seem to share some productive patterns of thought, here, which we have not articulated, let alone integrated into our larger system.  How can we do that? But to the extent that spiritual means not amenable to integration into the practices of science, we are blocked from having any systematic conversation about spirit.  <===nst]

 

My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity.  And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work.  In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations.  Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure.  Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search.  The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is its own kind of thing that occupies science in addition to the system that characterizes the building blocks and the local rules for their combination.  All the systems that characterize all the irreducible patterns are compatible with the building blocks, but precisely because each of them captures something different, the system for the building blocks doesn’t extract any of them _in its particularity_, and it is getting at that particularity that the whole rest of science is occupied with.

[NST===> Is a cake irreduceable?  I think it is.  If you agree on that point, then I really don’t have to say anything other than that I agree with all of the above.  To the extent that I see you-all exploring a mathematical or algorithmic reduction of the irreducible, I wait outside your conference room for news of your success.  <===nst]

 

(Btw, the rabid Darwinists do the same thing.  That is what enables Richard Dawkins to take what would otherwise be completely reasonable positions, and turn them into an overall offensive posture.

[NST===>Dawkins does not have a consistent or comprehensive view of evolution, let along anything else.  He flagrantly abuses the Darwinian metaphor.  So please don’t hang that particular dead chicken around my neck.  Any Darwinist who did not get on the evo-devo train, was left at the station a generation ago. <===nst]

 And the character of the deflection is the same.  If Darwinism contains everything, then it isn’t doing the work for you of extracting some further, particular thing.)[NST===>I agree that anything that claims to be everything is probably nothing.  That does not keep me from – as a matter of method – attempting to “push” a line of thought as far as it takes me. I see that this is contradictory.   [sigh].<===nst]  

 

 

Sorry for the meta-commentary on conversation analysis (or opinionizing).  I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an interesting investigation.

[NST===>Well, only if it’s not understood as “that which we cannot investigate.”  <===nst]

 

[NST===>* I have decided to adopt Glen’s footnote practice.  OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams.  How would we go about it?  I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did.  <===nst]

Eric

 

 

On May 19, 2020, at 12:15 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

You have a life for which, at the moment, only you hold the key.   That’s the furthest I am prepared to go. 

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 9:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Then quit saying I don't have an  inner life.  The inner expeeiences are the memories I have in the present and at various times in the past and the wondering about whatever became of her (and others).

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 8:48 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

There are many things that you have experienced that I have not, and vv, but no value is added by calling these “inner.”  I can sort of go along with Glen’s gloss on “inside”, but when you metamorphose it to “inner”, I get antsy.  

 

But I think we have tilled this ground for all it is worth, for the moment.  

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 8:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Forget covariant tensors (again).  There was a beautiful, talented girl in my sixth grade class.  She could dance ballet, draw striking pictures, etc.  I thought of her occasionally over the decades.  When Google search became available I discovered that she was married to a celebrity.

 

When you say that my inner life isn't private, Nick, do you mean you could figure out her name given what I've just written?  As I think of her face, can you "see" it well enough to recognize her photo?

 

I just don't understand what you mean when you question that I have a private inner life.

 

Frank

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Glen, Nick,

 

Glen writes:

`... in last week's Zoom, I mentioned to Jon (in response

to his query to Frank about RSA-encryption::mind) that I

think homomorphic encryption is a better analogy (to mind).`

 

Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally

had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus

on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen

for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to

differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that

Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for

why his mind may be private.

 

Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of

transformations which will allow us to know his mind, it may

be the case that those transformations are not accessible to

us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the

case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize

the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are

able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank,

his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't

entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable.

As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve

a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek

antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory

before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind.

 

Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should

actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine

once said that rememberings were morphisms between

forgettings. We are often ok with the idea that memory is

lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least

with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time

Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting

something fundamentally different. The remembering is

always between different forgettings.

 

Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts.

Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our

conversation. It seemed a good idea to try.

 

On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the

book Steganographia. I had originally read about it in some

part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has since

found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in

1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography.

What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of

itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is

on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to

find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography.

I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library

at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was

doubly hidden from me as I neither had the deciphering

key nor can I read Latin ;)

 

Jon

 

†: If any members of the group would like to form a reading

group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE, I would gladly

participate.

†† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about

the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect,

work beginning with Margherita Beloch (and culminating

with the Huzita-Hatori axioms) show that origami would

have been a more powerful choice!

-- --- .-. . .-.. --- -.-. -.- ... -..-. .- .-. . -..-. - .... . -..-. . ... ... . -. - .. .- .-.. -..-. .-- --- .-. -.- . .-. ...
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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Dreams:  A *lot* of clinical (idiographic) reading would be obligatory to do it right.  I am skeptical that a nomothetic approach would be possible or useful.

On Tue, May 19, 2020, 1:41 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, all,

 

Before it gets buried and institutionalized in the thread, the term is “idiographic”, not “ideographic”.  It doesn’t have to do with ideas but with  the study of events that are thought of as inherently individual, one-off, non-repeatable.  Case histories are idiographs.  The contrast class is nomothetic, having to do with the discovery of laws that relate classes of objects or events.  A full on double blind controlled experiment is an example of nomothetic research.  Psychology Departments can tear themselves apart arguing about which is the most worthy.  I think the distinction is worth bearing in mind, although common sense dictates that an experience that cannot be assigned to a class and does not imply some lawful relation is impossible. 

 

So what about the FRIAM study of dreams?

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 1:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

 > I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an in

 

Psychoanalysts have been working on this for over a century but scientists reject their methodology and many of their conclusions.  They reject them qua scientists but many embrace them personally if they live in a place where psychodynamic therapy is available.  Nothing could be more ideographic than an extremely deep investigation of an individual's "inner life" including her dreams, fantasies, and memories of childhood pains and joys.  

 

Based on living in Pittsburgh where there are two major universities I can say, tentatively, that there are high energy physicists and even behaviorists who have benefitted from this approach.

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Tue, May 19, 2020, 12:49 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS, Glen, David, Frank, Steve, EricC Old Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all,

 

Let me again thank you all for allowing me to sharpen my thinking against your whetstone. 

 

I am perhaps at my most uneasy arguing against EricS, but here goes.

 

Speaking of whetstones, let’s start with Glen’s most recent post, because it set’s a limit to how far I am willing to push the argument I have been making:

 

With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words.

My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible.  I.e., a scientific understanding.  But I am an imagination-pluralist.  For instance, one of my favorite sayings is, “No person should be denied the pleasures of imagining heaven because s/he happens to be an atheist.”  I routinely suggested to graduate students that they should stop trying to cram their ideas into a scientific format and go write a novel, since the idea they were trying to expose was more suitable to that format.  So, if we are arguing about the right of humans to take sustenance from any form of thinking that pleases them, then let the argument cease.   But whenever informal thinking shapes formal thinking (which it always does, to some extent), then I think we need to talk about it in a formal way.)  Thus, if you change Glen’s “practical” above to “Practicial” (= of, or related to, scientific practice), I agree with him entirely. 

 

That said, if you’re not exhausted, you might have a look at the larding of EricS’s note, below:

 

Thanks again, all,

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 10:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

As I read this,I am reminded of the 20th century (seems to long ago), in which the high-energy physicists dug a social pit for themselves, from which the ones they offended do not want ever to let them escape.

 

Keyword is Reductionism.  The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science)

[NST===>I am a reductionist, but let me be precise about what that means to me.    To me, a concept has been reduced when anybody asserts that there is only one key into it (to use the Metaphor Glen and I have been exploring.)  The traditional forms of reduction are reductions in scale, as when somebody asserts that the mind is just brain activity or behavior is just muscle twitches.  I abhor this kind of reductionism, and think it is the worst kind of misdirection and obscurantism.  I am an “up-reductionist”.  My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in.   Our minds are something about us, not something within us.   <===nst]

 

HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks.

ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do.

HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly.

ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.)

HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that.

ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting.

HEP: In Principle we understand all that.

ROS: You are a robot.

 

And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks.  Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives.

[NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst]

 

 

The behaviorists sound _so_ much like the reductionists sounded, and it is not for me to say whether they want to sound that way or not.

[NST===>Well, sure.  I guess some behaviorists have sounded that way.  But not Tolman, and certainly not Peirce, for instance.  <===nst]

  They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO)

[NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF?  In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.”    <===nst]

 that they sound like they are claiming a scope of knowledge including all the things about which they don’t have anything particularly satisfying to say.  They are sure, in the end, They Know what science will consist of, at least In Principle.  They may actually be right on parts of that, but to assert that your system of understanding will, you are confident, subsume all the future problems about which, for the present, you are unable to say anything actually elucidating, is of questionable utility.

[NST===>There’s a huge difference between agreeing to try to build such a system (knowing you will almost certainly fail), and asserting that one already has one.  <===nst]

 It’s fine to believe that, but if it does no work for you, it is not easily distinguishable from a not-even-wrong claim.  At the most benign, it substitutes putting a lot of energy into defending the turf (of what? of “materialism”? or is that now such an overused term that we would like something fresh to characterize the non-spiritualist, non-vitalist position?), instead of engaging with where the other person wants the discussion to be, which is to say “Hey, there is some distinct cognitive or experiential primitive here, which I don’t know how to characterize in a satisfying way; would you like to help me think about it?” 

[NST===>Great!  Let’s do that work! * Is this the same as saying “hey, we seem to share some productive patterns of thought, here, which we have not articulated, let alone integrated into our larger system.  How can we do that? But to the extent that spiritual means not amenable to integration into the practices of science, we are blocked from having any systematic conversation about spirit.  <===nst]

 

My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity.  And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work.  In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations.  Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure.  Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search.  The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is its own kind of thing that occupies science in addition to the system that characterizes the building blocks and the local rules for their combination.  All the systems that characterize all the irreducible patterns are compatible with the building blocks, but precisely because each of them captures something different, the system for the building blocks doesn’t extract any of them _in its particularity_, and it is getting at that particularity that the whole rest of science is occupied with.

[NST===> Is a cake irreduceable?  I think it is.  If you agree on that point, then I really don’t have to say anything other than that I agree with all of the above.  To the extent that I see you-all exploring a mathematical or algorithmic reduction of the irreducible, I wait outside your conference room for news of your success.  <===nst]

 

(Btw, the rabid Darwinists do the same thing.  That is what enables Richard Dawkins to take what would otherwise be completely reasonable positions, and turn them into an overall offensive posture.

[NST===>Dawkins does not have a consistent or comprehensive view of evolution, let along anything else.  He flagrantly abuses the Darwinian metaphor.  So please don’t hang that particular dead chicken around my neck.  Any Darwinist who did not get on the evo-devo train, was left at the station a generation ago. <===nst]

 And the character of the deflection is the same.  If Darwinism contains everything, then it isn’t doing the work for you of extracting some further, particular thing.)[NST===>I agree that anything that claims to be everything is probably nothing.  That does not keep me from – as a matter of method – attempting to “push” a line of thought as far as it takes me. I see that this is contradictory.   [sigh].<===nst]  

 

 

Sorry for the meta-commentary on conversation analysis (or opinionizing).  I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an interesting investigation.

[NST===>Well, only if it’s not understood as “that which we cannot investigate.”  <===nst]

 

[NST===>* I have decided to adopt Glen’s footnote practice.  OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams.  How would we go about it?  I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did.  <===nst]

Eric

 

 

On May 19, 2020, at 12:15 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

You have a life for which, at the moment, only you hold the key.   That’s the furthest I am prepared to go. 

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 9:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Then quit saying I don't have an  inner life.  The inner expeeiences are the memories I have in the present and at various times in the past and the wondering about whatever became of her (and others).

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 8:48 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

There are many things that you have experienced that I have not, and vv, but no value is added by calling these “inner.”  I can sort of go along with Glen’s gloss on “inside”, but when you metamorphose it to “inner”, I get antsy.  

 

But I think we have tilled this ground for all it is worth, for the moment.  

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 8:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Forget covariant tensors (again).  There was a beautiful, talented girl in my sixth grade class.  She could dance ballet, draw striking pictures, etc.  I thought of her occasionally over the decades.  When Google search became available I discovered that she was married to a celebrity.

 

When you say that my inner life isn't private, Nick, do you mean you could figure out her name given what I've just written?  As I think of her face, can you "see" it well enough to recognize her photo?

 

I just don't understand what you mean when you question that I have a private inner life.

 

Frank

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Glen, Nick,

 

Glen writes:

`... in last week's Zoom, I mentioned to Jon (in response

to his query to Frank about RSA-encryption::mind) that I

think homomorphic encryption is a better analogy (to mind).`

 

Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally

had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus

on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen

for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to

differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that

Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for

why his mind may be private.

 

Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of

transformations which will allow us to know his mind, it may

be the case that those transformations are not accessible to

us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the

case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize

the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are

able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank,

his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't

entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable.

As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve

a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek

antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory

before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind.

 

Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should

actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine

once said that rememberings were morphisms between

forgettings. We are often ok with the idea that memory is

lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least

with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time

Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting

something fundamentally different. The remembering is

always between different forgettings.

 

Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts.

Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our

conversation. It seemed a good idea to try.

 

On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the

book Steganographia. I had originally read about it in some

part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has since

found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in

1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography.

What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of

itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is

on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to

find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography.

I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library

at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was

doubly hidden from me as I neither had the deciphering

key nor can I read Latin ;)

 

Jon

 

†: If any members of the group would like to form a reading

group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE, I would gladly

participate.

†† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about

the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect,

work beginning with Margherita Beloch (and culminating

with the Huzita-Hatori axioms) show that origami would

have been a more powerful choice!

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[Prof David West]

Would Jung's alchemical approach to dreams be nomothetic?

davew

On Tue, May 19, 2020, at 2:02 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Dreams:  A *lot* of clinical (idiographic) reading would be obligatory to do it right.  I am skeptical that a nomothetic approach would be possible or useful.

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, May 19, 2020, 1:41 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, all,

 

Before it gets buried and institutionalized in the thread, the term is “idiographic”, not “ideographic”.  It doesn’t have to do with ideas but with  the study of events that are thought of as inherently individual, one-off, non-repeatable.  Case histories are idiographs.  The contrast class is nomothetic, having to do with the discovery of laws that relate classes of objects or events.  A full on double blind controlled experiment is an example of nomothetic research.  Psychology Departments can tear themselves apart arguing about which is the most worthy.  I think the distinction is worth bearing in mind, although common sense dictates that an experience that cannot be assigned to a class and does not imply some lawful relation is impossible. 

 

So what about the FRIAM study of dreams?

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly

Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 1:28 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

 > I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an in

 

Psychoanalysts have been working on this for over a century but scientists reject their methodology and many of their conclusions.  They reject them qua scientists but many embrace them personally if they live in a place where psychodynamic therapy is available.  Nothing could be more ideographic than an extremely deep investigation of an individual's "inner life" including her dreams, fantasies, and memories of childhood pains and joys.  

 

Based on living in Pittsburgh where there are two major universities I can say, tentatively, that there are high energy physicists and even behaviorists who have benefitted from this approach.

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Tue, May 19, 2020, 12:49 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS, Glen, David, Frank, Steve, EricC Old Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all,

 

Let me again thank you all for allowing me to sharpen my thinking against your whetstone. 

 

I am perhaps at my most uneasy arguing against EricS, but here goes.

 

Speaking of whetstones, let’s start with Glen’s most recent post, because it set’s a limit to how far I am willing to push the argument I have been making:

 

With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words.

My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible.  I.e., a scientific understanding.  But I am an imagination-pluralist.  For instance, one of my favorite sayings is, “No person should be denied the pleasures of imagining heaven because s/he happens to be an atheist.”  I routinely suggested to graduate students that they should stop trying to cram their ideas into a scientific format and go write a novel, since the idea they were trying to expose was more suitable to that format.  So, if we are arguing about the right of humans to take sustenance from any form of thinking that pleases them, then let the argument cease.   But whenever informal thinking shapes formal thinking (which it always does, to some extent), then I think we need to talk about it in a formal way.)  Thus, if you change Glen’s “practical” above to “Practicial” (= of, or related to, scientific practice), I agree with him entirely. 

 

That said, if you’re not exhausted, you might have a look at the larding of EricS’s note, below:

 

Thanks again, all,

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith

Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 10:26 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

As I read this,I am reminded of the 20th century (seems to long ago), in which the high-energy physicists dug a social pit for themselves, from which the ones they offended do not want ever to let them escape.

 

Keyword is Reductionism.  The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science)

[NST===>I am a reductionist, but let me be precise about what that means to me.    To me, a concept has been reduced when anybody asserts that there is only one key into it (to use the Metaphor Glen and I have been exploring.)  The traditional forms of reduction are reductions in scale, as when somebody asserts that the mind is just brain activity or behavior is just muscle twitches.  I abhor this kind of reductionism, and think it is the worst kind of misdirection and obscurantism.  I am an “up-reductionist”.  My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in.   Our minds are something about us, not something within us.   <===nst]

 

HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks.

ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do.

HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly.

ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.)

HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that.

ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting.

HEP: In Principle we understand all that.

ROS: You are a robot.

 

And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks.  Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives.

[NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst]

 

 

The behaviorists sound _so_ much like the reductionists sounded, and it is not for me to say whether they want to sound that way or not.

[NST===>Well, sure.  I guess some behaviorists have sounded that way.  But not Tolman, and certainly not Peirce, for instance.  <===nst]

  They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO)

[NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF?  In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.”    <===nst]

 that they sound like they are claiming a scope of knowledge including all the things about which they don’t have anything particularly satisfying to say.  They are sure, in the end, They Know what science will consist of, at least In Principle.  They may actually be right on parts of that, but to assert that your system of understanding will, you are confident, subsume all the future problems about which, for the present, you are unable to say anything actually elucidating, is of questionable utility.

[NST===>There’s a huge difference between agreeing to try to build such a system (knowing you will almost certainly fail), and asserting that one already has one.  <===nst]

 It’s fine to believe that, but if it does no work for you, it is not easily distinguishable from a not-even-wrong claim.  At the most benign, it substitutes putting a lot of energy into defending the turf (of what? of “materialism”? or is that now such an overused term that we would like something fresh to characterize the non-spiritualist, non-vitalist position?), instead of engaging with where the other person wants the discussion to be, which is to say “Hey, there is some distinct cognitive or experiential primitive here, which I don’t know how to characterize in a satisfying way; would you like to help me think about it?” 

[NST===>Great!  Let’s do that work! * Is this the same as saying “hey, we seem to share some productive patterns of thought, here, which we have not articulated, let alone integrated into our larger system.  How can we do that? But to the extent that spiritual means not amenable to integration into the practices of science, we are blocked from having any systematic conversation about spirit.  <===nst]

 

My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity.  And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work.  In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations.  Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure.  Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search.  The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is its own kind of thing that occupies science in addition to the system that characterizes the building blocks and the local rules for their combination.  All the systems that characterize all the irreducible patterns are compatible with the building blocks, but precisely because each of them captures something different, the system for the building blocks doesn’t extract any of them _in its particularity_, and it is getting at that particularity that the whole rest of science is occupied with.

[NST===> Is a cake irreduceable?  I think it is.  If you agree on that point, then I really don’t have to say anything other than that I agree with all of the above.  To the extent that I see you-all exploring a mathematical or algorithmic reduction of the irreducible, I wait outside your conference room for news of your success.  <===nst]

 

(Btw, the rabid Darwinists do the same thing.  That is what enables Richard Dawkins to take what would otherwise be completely reasonable positions, and turn them into an overall offensive posture.

[NST===>Dawkins does not have a consistent or comprehensive view of evolution, let along anything else.  He flagrantly abuses the Darwinian metaphor.  So please don’t hang that particular dead chicken around my neck.  Any Darwinist who did not get on the evo-devo train, was left at the station a generation ago. <===nst]

 And the character of the deflection is the same.  If Darwinism contains everything, then it isn’t doing the work for you of extracting some further, particular thing.)[NST===>I agree that anything that claims to be everything is probably nothing.  That does not keep me from – as a matter of method – attempting to “push” a line of thought as far as it takes me. I see that this is contradictory.   [sigh].<===nst]  

 

 

Sorry for the meta-commentary on conversation analysis (or opinionizing).  I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an interesting investigation.

[NST===>Well, only if it’s not understood as “that which we cannot investigate.”  <===nst]

 

[NST===>* I have decided to adopt Glen’s footnote practice.  OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams.  How would we go about it?  I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did.  <===nst]

Eric

 

 

On May 19, 2020, at 12:15 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

You have a life for which, at the moment, only you hold the key.   That’s the furthest I am prepared to go. 

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly

Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 9:13 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Then quit saying I don't have an  inner life.  The inner expeeiences are the memories I have in the present and at various times in the past and the wondering about whatever became of her (and others).

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 8:48 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

There are many things that you have experienced that I have not, and vv, but no value is added by calling these “inner.”  I can sort of go along with Glen’s gloss on “inside”, but when you metamorphose it to “inner”, I get antsy.  

 

But I think we have tilled this ground for all it is worth, for the moment.  

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly

Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 8:02 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Forget covariant tensors (again).  There was a beautiful, talented girl in my sixth grade class.  She could dance ballet, draw striking pictures, etc.  I thought of her occasionally over the decades.  When Google search became available I discovered that she was married to a celebrity.

 

When you say that my inner life isn't private, Nick, do you mean you could figure out her name given what I've just written?  As I think of her face, can you "see" it well enough to recognize her photo?

 

I just don't understand what you mean when you question that I have a private inner life.

 

Frank

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Glen, Nick,

 

Glen writes:

`... in last week's Zoom, I mentioned to Jon (in response

to his query to Frank about RSA-encryption::mind) that I

think homomorphic encryption is a better analogy (to mind).`

 

Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally

had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus

on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen

for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to

differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that

Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for

why his mind may be private.

 

Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of

transformations which will allow us to know his mind, it may

be the case that those transformations are not accessible to

us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the

case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize

the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are

able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank,

his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't

entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable.

As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve

a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek

antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory

before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind.

 

Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should

actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine

once said that rememberings were morphisms between

forgettings. We are often ok with the idea that memory is

lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least

with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time

Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting

something fundamentally different. The remembering is

always between different forgettings.

 

Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts.

Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our

conversation. It seemed a good idea to try.

 

On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the

book Steganographia. I had originally read about it in some

part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has since

found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in

1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography.

What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of

itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is

on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to

find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography.

I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library

at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was

doubly hidden from me as I neither had the deciphering

key nor can I read Latin ;)

 

Jon

 

†: If any members of the group would like to form a reading

group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE, I would gladly

participate.

†† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about

the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect,

work beginning with Margherita Beloch (and culminating

with the Huzita-Hatori axioms) show that origami would

have been a more powerful choice!

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[thompnickson2]

Dave,

 

You have every reason to expect me to know about this, but I don’t.  Whazzat?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 2:09 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Would Jung's alchemical approach to dreams be nomothetic?

 

davew

 

 

On Tue, May 19, 2020, at 2:02 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Dreams:  A *lot* of clinical (idiographic) reading would be obligatory to do it right.  I am skeptical that a nomothetic approach would be possible or useful.

 

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Tue, May 19, 2020, 1:41 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, all,

 

Before it gets buried and institutionalized in the thread, the term is “idiographic”, not “ideographic”.  It doesn’t have to do with ideas but with  the study of events that are thought of as inherently individual, one-off, non-repeatable.  Case histories are idiographs.  The contrast class is nomothetic, having to do with the discovery of laws that relate classes of objects or events.  A full on double blind controlled experiment is an example of nomothetic research.  Psychology Departments can tear themselves apart arguing about which is the most worthy.  I think the distinction is worth bearing in mind, although common sense dictates that an experience that cannot be assigned to a class and does not imply some lawful relation is impossible. 

 

So what about the FRIAM study of dreams?

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly

Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 1:28 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

 > I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an in

 

Psychoanalysts have been working on this for over a century but scientists reject their methodology and many of their conclusions.  They reject them qua scientists but many embrace them personally if they live in a place where psychodynamic therapy is available.  Nothing could be more ideographic than an extremely deep investigation of an individual's "inner life" including her dreams, fantasies, and memories of childhood pains and joys.  

 

Based on living in Pittsburgh where there are two major universities I can say, tentatively, that there are high energy physicists and even behaviorists who have benefitted from this approach.

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz,

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Tue, May 19, 2020, 12:49 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS, Glen, David, Frank, Steve, EricC Old Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all,

 

Let me again thank you all for allowing me to sharpen my thinking against your whetstone. 

 

I am perhaps at my most uneasy arguing against EricS, but here goes.

 

Speaking of whetstones, let’s start with Glen’s most recent post, because it set’s a limit to how far I am willing to push the argument I have been making:

 

With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words.

My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible.  I.e., a scientific understanding.  But I am an imagination-pluralist.  For instance, one of my favorite sayings is, “No person should be denied the pleasures of imagining heaven because s/he happens to be an atheist.”  I routinely suggested to graduate students that they should stop trying to cram their ideas into a scientific format and go write a novel, since the idea they were trying to expose was more suitable to that format.  So, if we are arguing about the right of humans to take sustenance from any form of thinking that pleases them, then let the argument cease.   But whenever informal thinking shapes formal thinking (which it always does, to some extent), then I think we need to talk about it in a formal way.)  Thus, if you change Glen’s “practical” above to “Practicial” (= of, or related to, scientific practice), I agree with him entirely. 

 

That said, if you’re not exhausted, you might have a look at the larding of EricS’s note, below:

 

Thanks again, all,

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith

Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 10:26 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

As I read this,I am reminded of the 20th century (seems to long ago), in which the high-energy physicists dug a social pit for themselves, from which the ones they offended do not want ever to let them escape.

 

Keyword is Reductionism.  The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science)

[NST===>I am a reductionist, but let me be precise about what that means to me.    To me, a concept has been reduced when anybody asserts that there is only one key into it (to use the Metaphor Glen and I have been exploring.)  The traditional forms of reduction are reductions in scale, as when somebody asserts that the mind is just brain activity or behavior is just muscle twitches.  I abhor this kind of reductionism, and think it is the worst kind of misdirection and obscurantism.  I am an “up-reductionist”.  My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in.   Our minds are something about us, not something within us.   <===nst]

 

HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks.

ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do.

HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly.

ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.)

HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that.

ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting.

HEP: In Principle we understand all that.

ROS: You are a robot.

 

And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks.  Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives.

[NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst]

 

 

The behaviorists sound _so_ much like the reductionists sounded, and it is not for me to say whether they want to sound that way or not.

[NST===>Well, sure.  I guess some behaviorists have sounded that way.  But not Tolman, and certainly not Peirce, for instance.  <===nst]

  They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO)

[NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF?  In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.”    <===nst]

 that they sound like they are claiming a scope of knowledge including all the things about which they don’t have anything particularly satisfying to say.  They are sure, in the end, They Know what science will consist of, at least In Principle.  They may actually be right on parts of that, but to assert that your system of understanding will, you are confident, subsume all the future problems about which, for the present, you are unable to say anything actually elucidating, is of questionable utility.

[NST===>There’s a huge difference between agreeing to try to build such a system (knowing you will almost certainly fail), and asserting that one already has one.  <===nst]

 It’s fine to believe that, but if it does no work for you, it is not easily distinguishable from a not-even-wrong claim.  At the most benign, it substitutes putting a lot of energy into defending the turf (of what? of “materialism”? or is that now such an overused term that we would like something fresh to characterize the non-spiritualist, non-vitalist position?), instead of engaging with where the other person wants the discussion to be, which is to say “Hey, there is some distinct cognitive or experiential primitive here, which I don’t know how to characterize in a satisfying way; would you like to help me think about it?” 

[NST===>Great!  Let’s do that work! * Is this the same as saying “hey, we seem to share some productive patterns of thought, here, which we have not articulated, let alone integrated into our larger system.  How can we do that? But to the extent that spiritual means not amenable to integration into the practices of science, we are blocked from having any systematic conversation about spirit.  <===nst]

 

My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity.  And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work.  In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations.  Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure.  Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search.  The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is its own kind of thing that occupies science in addition to the system that characterizes the building blocks and the local rules for their combination.  All the systems that characterize all the irreducible patterns are compatible with the building blocks, but precisely because each of them captures something different, the system for the building blocks doesn’t extract any of them _in its particularity_, and it is getting at that particularity that the whole rest of science is occupied with.

[NST===> Is a cake irreduceable?  I think it is.  If you agree on that point, then I really don’t have to say anything other than that I agree with all of the above.  To the extent that I see you-all exploring a mathematical or algorithmic reduction of the irreducible, I wait outside your conference room for news of your success.  <===nst]

 

(Btw, the rabid Darwinists do the same thing.  That is what enables Richard Dawkins to take what would otherwise be completely reasonable positions, and turn them into an overall offensive posture.

[NST===>Dawkins does not have a consistent or comprehensive view of evolution, let along anything else.  He flagrantly abuses the Darwinian metaphor.  So please don’t hang that particular dead chicken around my neck.  Any Darwinist who did not get on the evo-devo train, was left at the station a generation ago. <===nst]

 And the character of the deflection is the same.  If Darwinism contains everything, then it isn’t doing the work for you of extracting some further, particular thing.)[NST===>I agree that anything that claims to be everything is probably nothing.  That does not keep me from – as a matter of method – attempting to “push” a line of thought as far as it takes me. I see that this is contradictory.   [sigh].<===nst]  

 

 

Sorry for the meta-commentary on conversation analysis (or opinionizing).  I don’t have anything useful or clarifying to say about inner experience either, except to vote that it seems a fine term from which to begin an interesting investigation.

[NST===>Well, only if it’s not understood as “that which we cannot investigate.”  <===nst]

 

[NST===>* I have decided to adopt Glen’s footnote practice.  OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams.  How would we go about it?  I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did.  <===nst]

Eric

 

 

On May 19, 2020, at 12:15 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

You have a life for which, at the moment, only you hold the key.   That’s the furthest I am prepared to go. 

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly

Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 9:13 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Then quit saying I don't have an  inner life.  The inner expeeiences are the memories I have in the present and at various times in the past and the wondering about whatever became of her (and others).

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 8:48 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

There are many things that you have experienced that I have not, and vv, but no value is added by calling these “inner.”  I can sort of go along with Glen’s gloss on “inside”, but when you metamorphose it to “inner”, I get antsy.  

 

But I think we have tilled this ground for all it is worth, for the moment.  

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly

Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 8:02 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

 

Forget covariant tensors (again).  There was a beautiful, talented girl in my sixth grade class.  She could dance ballet, draw striking pictures, etc.  I thought of her occasionally over the decades.  When Google search became available I discovered that she was married to a celebrity.

 

When you say that my inner life isn't private, Nick, do you mean you could figure out her name given what I've just written?  As I think of her face, can you "see" it well enough to recognize her photo?

 

I just don't understand what you mean when you question that I have a private inner life.

 

Frank

---

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

505 670-9918

Santa Fe, NM

 

On Mon, May 18, 2020, 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Glen, Nick,

 

Glen writes:

`... in last week's Zoom, I mentioned to Jon (in response

to his query to Frank about RSA-encryption::mind) that I

think homomorphic encryption is a better analogy (to mind).`

 

Fully homomorphic encryption† was also the metaphor I originally

had in mind. In an effort to not complicate matters, I decided to focus

on the idea of public key encryption more generally. Thank you, Glen

for taking it the rest of the way. Because Glen, Nick and I appear to

differ on Frank's mind only in that we disagree about the way that

Frank's mind is public, I will attempt to switch sides and argue for

why his mind may be private.

 

Firstly, while we may only need to know some combination of

transformations which will allow us to know his mind, it may

be the case that those transformations are not accessible to

us. As an example and in analogy to computation, it may be the

case that we are not the kind of machines which can recognize

the language produced by a mind. While we as observers are

able to finite automata our way along observations of Frank,

his mind is producing context-free sentences, say. I don't

entirely buy this argument, but it also may be defendable.

As another example/analogy, we may be attempting to solve

a problem analogous to those geometric problems of Greek

antiquity††. It may take a psychological analog to Galois theory

before we understand exactly why we can't know Frank's mind.

 

Secondly, it may be that the encryption metaphor should

actually be something closer to hashing. A friend of mine

once said that rememberings were morphisms between

forgettings. We are often ok with the idea that memory is

lossy, but why not thoughts themselves? Perhaps, at least

with regard to what we can observer of Frank, every time

Frank thinks of a covariant tensor he is reconstituting

something fundamentally different. The remembering is

always between different forgettings.

 

Ok, I am not sure I could necessarily defend these thoughts.

Further, I am not sure they are necessarily helpful to our

conversation. It seemed a good idea to try.

 

On the topic of steganography, I wanted to mention the

book Steganographia. I had originally read about it in some

part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has since

found a place in my heart. The book, originally written in

1499, is perhaps the oldest text on the subject of cryptography.

What is amazing about the book is that it is an example of

itself (nod to Nick). The plaintext content of the book is

on the subject of magic, but for a reader clever enough to

find the deciphering key the book is about cryptography.

I had found a copy from the 1700's in the rare books library

at the University of Texas some years ago. The content was

doubly hidden from me as I neither had the deciphering

key nor can I read Latin ;)

 

Jon

 

†: If any members of the group would like to form a reading

group around Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE, I would gladly

participate.

†† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about

the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect,

work beginning with Margherita Beloch (and culminating

with the Huzita-Hatori axioms) show that origami would

have been a more powerful choice!

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[Steve Smith]

glen -
> I'd like to avoid your (more accurate) use of holography in talking about this "holographic principle". While the technical details of actual holography are interesting, it adds noise to the idea I'm offering. (Again, I don't believe this idea, myself. I'm offering it as a rewording of what I heard EricC say.) So, I'm offering an analogy to the Bekenstein bound or the holographic principle in physics. I probably should never have used that word "holographic". I'm regretting it, now.

sorry if I wet-noodled you here, not exactly my intention...

I understand/accept that, but am looking into the parts of the
metaphor/analogy/model that *are* apt.  I also admit that I forgot that
you don't subscribe to the idea yourself, but are rather trying to
acknowledge it for the sake of improved discussion.   The part I *think*
you want to preserve is perhaps is that of lossless dimension reduction,
and a part-whole relation (where any small part/sampling of the
whole-ogram yields *some* information about the whole target)?
> On 5/19/20 11:16 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> These are all examples of selecting or valuating transformations
>> (letter-scrambles and elisions) based on the relative entropy yielded in
>> a secondary lexicon?
> I haven't, yet, invoked entropy in my attempt to reconstruct privacy from the bare concept of hidden with which I started this thread. I did invoke it earlier, in other threads, because I *do* think it will apply with higher order forms of privacy. But for "privacy through obscurity" all we need is the combinatorial explosion.
And I think the corner of this I was trying to pry up was that
"obscurity" is relative.   If you don't know that I encoded my message
using a specific edition of the 1933 Berlin Phone Book which was
*hashed* by a specific mode of cutting away the binding and shuffling it
(precisely according to a particular algorithm (which for example, might
include first removing the fibonacci-numbered pages), then the apparent
entropy of my encrypted message is HUUUGE! but if YOU DO know those
"keys" then bam!  you have zero relative entropy.... you know
*precisely* what the *text* of my message contains, even if I may have
obscured it further by including idiomatic and anecdotal coding that is
shared (presumably only by the sender and the receiver).   While I don't
know this to be the case, the Native American code-talkers (in
particular the well known Navajo) could have added another layer of
obscurity to their communications by using idioms from their culture and
religion and maybe even personal relations.
>> thus something like entropy relative to the target domain of some model
>> or another?
> Not yet, no. You *could* argue that a particular target, like Frank, could be identified and attacked via the class inferred from that particularity. In principle, I think this is what therapy does. It's definitely what industrial espionage is about. Some cute girl moves into the apartment next to the young engineer with a newly minted yellow badge and she proceeds to *decrypt* the engineer. She would definitely use some conception of entropy relative to the "young engineer" domain.
>
> But we don't need that for privacy through obscurity.
Not to beg this issue much further, but I guess in your example, I was
thinking that the young engineers working at the quantum-time-tunneling
laboratory might well keep their secrets obscure from the cute girl
simply through the use of shared idioms (amongst the engineers) which
she is not privy to by virtue of not being a young man nor an
engineer.   Another type of obscurity?
>> And there IS an art to plausible ambiguity, [...]
> Yes. In an adversarial co-evolution, it's relatively easy to exploit privacy for some gain. And a skilled hacker will be able to eliminate implausible decoders based on implausible results they generate. But, like with the above, adversarial systems imply targets. And this lowest order privacy doesn't need that for its justification.
yes, a bridge beyond, if not too far, built of the pales that we went
beyond (to coin or abuse a sillygasm).   I do believe that
encryption/decryption (even as a sport?) is intrinsically adversarial
co-evolution.  However, I think it the context this discussion arose
from, perhaps what you are seeking/suggesting is the opposite (or a
complement to) of this.   I think we are perhaps discussing the
qualitative scatter-gather that happens as we have experiences,
differentiating and specializing language to the point of mutual
obscurity (tower of Babel allegory?).  I know that some of my
good-intentions to fill in blanks and stitch between disparate bits ends
up being effectively distracting and divisive (disruptive?).   I do
believe in coherence which leads me to want to tangent on the metaphor
of LASEing which of course would just muddy the aethers more.
>> And you aren't even invoking quantum computing, which throws a whole
>> other wrench into, no?
> Well, I did by implication. QC simply exploits time/space tradeoffs, at least for my purposes, here. And by "With enough time/resources, ..." and the "etc.",
I suppose I haven't yet accepted that QC is qualitatively the same as a
universal computer (archetypical von Neuman machine)...   or the
equivalence (by construction) of nDmState CA by n'Dm'State (where n'<n
and m'>m).  TANSTAAFL suggests that in space-time trades they
might/must/should-oughta be the same, but I don't think that's a done
deal yet?
>  I tried to imply QC along with all the other issues surrounding computational power limitations. We don't really need QC to puncture privacy through obscurity. Targeting will suffice. Frank can't be obscure if we can surveil him in particular ... like some psychodynamic stalker.

I apologize for being the tangenter that I apparently am... or apologize
for the effect of it on the conversation... BUT...  I think when it
comes to the adversarial co-evolution you were not (yet) talking about,
I think Alan Kay's "best way to predict the future is to invent it" is
part of the strategy of various flavors of con-men which is to plant a
tiny seed in the mark's head and then fertilize it and water it until it
becomes the mark's own idea about the future (hopes and fears).   One
way to come to a "common understanding" is to bully or manipulate others
into sharing your own (or some variant of it).

- Steve




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[gepr]

On 5/19/20 1:47 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> The part I *think*
> you want to preserve is perhaps is that of lossless dimension reduction,
> and a part-whole relation (where any small part/sampling of the
> whole-ogram yields *some* information about the whole target)?

Yes. I take the position to be: all valid questions about psychology can be properly asked as questions about behavior. This implies, to me, that all valid questions about anything can be properly asked as questions about the distinguishability limit between that thing (being studied, the object) and another thing (e.g. the question asker). I would NOT go so far as to say the transformation from object to distinguishability limit is *lossless*. (In analogy with black holes, what goes in comes out randomized ... again, if understand what I'm talking about ... which is unlikely.) And, also yes, there is a part-whole relationship in talking about the object, the transformations from object to question asker, and question asker.

> And I think the corner of this I was trying to pry up was that
> "obscurity" is relative.

Well, maybe. Let's say you're someone like Nick trying to decide whether or not your computer has been compromised. Then compare that to someone like you doing the same thing. While it's true that the space of things Nick considers might be observables is different from the space of things you might consider are observables, that you are both fully large dimensional creatures *might* suggest that the relative entropies are the same, for all intents and purposes. Sure, you know a few more heuristics to winnow out the plausible decoders than Nick. But the sheer number of ways your computer can be compromised might *swamp* any difference between the two of you.

My argument is that no matter what thing (object) we're considering decoding ... a basketball, a human, an ant colony, etc. the number of ways we *could* decode what's written right there on the surface swamps any difference between 2 particular question askers. This is why I cite Rosen and von Neumann and, hell, even Feynman, e.g. the description of an object is of a higher order than the object itself. All successful cracks are banal tricks. It's easier to be a script kiddy than it is to be an intrusion detection specialist. The obscurity lies in the number of possible decoders, not the thing that needs to be decoded.

> Not to beg this issue much further, but I guess in your example, I was
> thinking that the young engineers working at the quantum-time-tunneling
> laboratory might well keep their secrets obscure from the cute girl
> simply through the use of shared idioms (amongst the engineers) which
> she is not privy to by virtue of not being a young man nor an
> engineer.   Another type of obscurity?

Heh, not to beg it further, but ... [begs it further]. No. The cute girl spy is probably *more* well-versed in the young engineer domain than the young engineer is. (And, to be clear, I never suggested the young engineer was a man.)

> I suppose I haven't yet accepted that QC is qualitatively the same as a
> universal computer (archetypical von Neuman machine)...   or the
> equivalence (by construction) of nDmState CA by n'Dm'State (where n'<n
> and m'>m).  TANSTAAFL suggests that in space-time trades they
> might/must/should-oughta be the same, but I don't think that's a done
> deal yet?

Not that I know of. But it doesn't matter for this conversation. I'll allow that if QC turns out to be something fantastic like hyper-computation, then woohoo (!) privacy by obscurity is gone forever. But until then, I'm skeptical.

> I apologize for being the tangenter that I apparently am... or apologize
> for the effect of it on the conversation... BUT...  I think when it
> comes to the adversarial co-evolution you were not (yet) talking about,
> I think Alan Kay's "best way to predict the future is to invent it" is
> part of the strategy of various flavors of con-men which is to plant a
> tiny seed in the mark's head and then fertilize it and water it until it
> becomes the mark's own idea about the future (hopes and fears).   One
> way to come to a "common understanding" is to bully or manipulate others
> into sharing your own (or some variant of it).

I'm not sure if you grokked my attitude towards psychodynamics and that's why you said "bully". Regardless, it's spot on. The only way you'll get me on the couch is if you physically force and restrain me. It seems to me what they do is build a pseudo-relationship with you in order to manipulate you into speech and thought patterns that, then, *reprogram* you. For those of us with debilitating habits who (eventually) "accept a higher power", I'm sure it's fine. But I suspect there's a whole host of people whose consent in such a process is *implied* at best. And if you made it clear that they were undergoing "benevolent brainwashing", they might object.

If someone actually suggested interpreting my dreams, I'd literally laugh out loud [†]. As someone who sporadically reads the Tarot and runs some Numerological "analyses", I've bumped up against how tender and manipulable people can be. It's beyond disgusting that people do this for a living, much less call themselves "therapists" or "doctors". A better term would be "reeducators".


[†] Last night, I dreamt my cat Scooter killed my friend Brock because he was trying to put Scooter in the cat carrier (and I was trying to put his cat in his cat carrier). I told Scooter about the dream this morning while I was lifting weights. Scooter didn't respond at all ... because interpreting dreams is a silly thing to waste time on.

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[David Eric Smith]

I like this Glen, particularly the following:

> On May 20, 2020, at 2:10 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I really wish more people would/could permanently install a "methodological" qualifier in front of every -ism they advocate. So, if you call yourself a monist, are you a methodological monist? And if not, if you're ideal-monist but methodological-pluralist, then I don't particularly care about your idealism. I care about your methods more than your thoughts. At least then, when someone foists a reduction on us, we can, in practice, find if/where they've ignored or assumed away some particulars.

I have wondered — maybe just because I am a spectator to this debate on another channel so it is on my mind — whether it is productive to compare the distinction you draw to that between the Formalists and the Intuitionists in mathematics (came up in Jon’s post a few days ago too).  

To me the formalist wants to trust that whatever satisfies certain rules of syntax should be considered true.  (Here I put aside the role of model theory, as what formalists would call a semantics associated with the formalism, because to me axioms like the excluded middle are syntactic in their nature.)

It probably matters that the Intuitionists are not merely constructivists (the univalent-foundations people, Voyevodsky et al., seem to be more purely constructivists), but I’m not sure how much more there is to the philosophical position of the intuitionists that mathematical truth is a property of “mental events”, than just their methodological commitment that proofs must be constructive and definitions demonstrative, ruling out things like terms for infinite sets.

The behaviorists seem to have something like a law of the excluded middle in their style of thought, of not perhaps articulated as a commitment of method.  They can simply declare that they have The scientific point of view, and as long as you can’t demonstrate a contradiction within it, if you object that they are asserting things they can’t back up with construction, you must be advocating a spiritualist position.  There is a lot I REALLY DONT LIKE in my use of that metaphor, because it ascribes to the behaviorists a more dogmatic and domineering position than I think the actual people have, though I think their language pushes them toward sounding more that way than they are.  But there is some axis of distinction between the syntactic notion of truth that the formalists are after, and the constructive semantics (+ some notion of “embodiment”, I guess) in the intuitionists, which seems similar to me to your contrast of methodological versus idealistic commitments to monism or pluralism, and that I agree has been the focus of the impasse in this dialogue so far.

I bring up this debate in mathematics because it seems significant to me how long and how intensely it has been going on, with both sides wanting a notion of “truth”, and neither being able to claim to have achieved it in terms satisfied by the other.  If the intuitionists had never been able to build a real system around their position, the formalists could just declare victory and go home.  But the debate seems still live, even within math and not only in philosophy, with clear trade-offs that there are proofs that each side will accept that the other rejects (certain proofs of manifold continuity that the intuitionists accept that formalists reject, and finitistic proofs for infinite sets, as well as the excluded-middle arguments, that the formalists accept and the intuitionists reject).  I was surprised, when I first saw the axiom of choice, that it was just presented as a part of mathematical reasoning, as to me it seemed wildly unreliable, as most efforts to interpret syntactic rules in terms of truth values seem unreliable.  On the other hand, like the irrationality of sqrt(2) in the proof Frank recounted, I would be surprised at any constructive math in which such a result would be false.  Uncommitted is the most I would expect.

I held off writing this initially, because I am unsure whether I think it is useful even in the broad quality of the distinction, and certainly there is not a fine-grained mapping from one of these cases to the others.  But I write it now in case it will help a different response I have to write to Nick’s post.

I agree with you we are after trying to express the same or similar kind of distinction.

Eric



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[thompnickson2]

Q: Why are not dreams, like any other experience, proper objects o study?  
A:  Because, unlike other experiences, we report them after we have them.
Q: No, that can't be right.  There is no situation in which we actually report the experience precisely as we have it.  So, the difference between a dream and any other reportable experience is a matter of degree.
A: Oh, all right.  We can't study dreams because there is no way to observe you having the experience.
Q: Well, what if we take REM sleep as a proxy for dreaming.  Now we can observe you having the experience.
A:  Well, I suppose.  But you  can't observe the experience that I am having.  
... to be continued.
 



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: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 3:33 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

On 5/19/20 1:47 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> The part I *think*
> you want to preserve is perhaps is that of lossless dimension
> reduction, and a part-whole relation (where any small part/sampling of
> the whole-ogram yields *some* information about the whole target)?

Yes. I take the position to be: all valid questions about psychology can be properly asked as questions about behavior. This implies, to me, that all valid questions about anything can be properly asked as questions about the distinguishability limit between that thing (being studied, the object) and another thing (e.g. the question asker). I would NOT go so far as to say the transformation from object to distinguishability limit is *lossless*. (In analogy with black holes, what goes in comes out randomized ... again, if understand what I'm talking about ... which is unlikely.) And, also yes, there is a part-whole relationship in talking about the object, the transformations from object to question asker, and question asker.

> And I think the corner of this I was trying to pry up was that
> "obscurity" is relative.

Well, maybe. Let's say you're someone like Nick trying to decide whether or not your computer has been compromised. Then compare that to someone like you doing the same thing. While it's true that the space of things Nick considers might be observables is different from the space of things you might consider are observables, that you are both fully large dimensional creatures *might* suggest that the relative entropies are the same, for all intents and purposes. Sure, you know a few more heuristics to winnow out the plausible decoders than Nick. But the sheer number of ways your computer can be compromised might *swamp* any difference between the two of you.

My argument is that no matter what thing (object) we're considering decoding ... a basketball, a human, an ant colony, etc. the number of ways we *could* decode what's written right there on the surface swamps any difference between 2 particular question askers. This is why I cite Rosen and von Neumann and, hell, even Feynman, e.g. the description of an object is of a higher order than the object itself. All successful cracks are banal tricks. It's easier to be a script kiddy than it is to be an intrusion detection specialist. The obscurity lies in the number of possible decoders, not the thing that needs to be decoded.

> Not to beg this issue much further, but I guess in your example, I was
> thinking that the young engineers working at the
> quantum-time-tunneling laboratory might well keep their secrets
> obscure from the cute girl simply through the use of shared idioms
> (amongst the engineers) which she is not privy to by virtue of not
> being a young man nor an engineer.   Another type of obscurity?

Heh, not to beg it further, but ... [begs it further]. No. The cute girl spy is probably *more* well-versed in the young engineer domain than the young engineer is. (And, to be clear, I never suggested the young engineer was a man.)

> I suppose I haven't yet accepted that QC is qualitatively the same as
> a universal computer (archetypical von Neuman machine)...   or the
> equivalence (by construction) of nDmState CA by n'Dm'State (where n'<n
> and m'>m).  TANSTAAFL suggests that in space-time trades they
> might/must/should-oughta be the same, but I don't think that's a done
> deal yet?

Not that I know of. But it doesn't matter for this conversation. I'll allow that if QC turns out to be something fantastic like hyper-computation, then woohoo (!) privacy by obscurity is gone forever. But until then, I'm skeptical.

> I apologize for being the tangenter that I apparently am... or
> apologize for the effect of it on the conversation... BUT...  I think
> when it comes to the adversarial co-evolution you were not (yet)
> talking about, I think Alan Kay's "best way to predict the future is
> to invent it" is part of the strategy of various flavors of con-men
> which is to plant a tiny seed in the mark's head and then fertilize it
> and water it until it becomes the mark's own idea about the future
> (hopes and fears).   One way to come to a "common understanding" is to
> bully or manipulate others into sharing your own (or some variant of it).

I'm not sure if you grokked my attitude towards psychodynamics and that's why you said "bully". Regardless, it's spot on. The only way you'll get me on the couch is if you physically force and restrain me. It seems to me what they do is build a pseudo-relationship with you in order to manipulate you into speech and thought patterns that, then, *reprogram* you. For those of us with debilitating habits who (eventually) "accept a higher power", I'm sure it's fine. But I suspect there's a whole host of people whose consent in such a process is *implied* at best. And if you made it clear that they were undergoing "benevolent brainwashing", they might object.

If someone actually suggested interpreting my dreams, I'd literally laugh out loud [†]. As someone who sporadically reads the Tarot and runs some Numerological "analyses", I've bumped up against how tender and manipulable people can be. It's beyond disgusting that people do this for a living, much less call themselves "therapists" or "doctors". A better term would be "reeducators".


[†] Last night, I dreamt my cat Scooter killed my friend Brock because he was trying to put Scooter in the cat carrier (and I was trying to put his cat in his cat carrier). I told Scooter about the dream this morning while I was lifting weights. Scooter didn't respond at all ... because interpreting dreams is a silly thing to waste time on.

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[jon zingale]

EricS,

Philosophically, I most closely identify with what I perhaps could call
phenomenological-materialism. For me all ideas we have, we have exactly
because they are afforded by the world. There may not be unicorns, but
horses and animals with horns do exist. Unicorns then are afforded. The role of
the trump card in a game of bridge† is nowhere to be found in the atomic
structure of the card, but the role is afforded by our world. Straight lines
and symmetry groups may be nowhere measured, but are exactly accessible

to us because we exist in a world which affords them. For me, this is how I

thinly justify not needing a spiritual or platonic meta-physics. Also on a personal
level, I do believe that mind is public. I am interested in following this line, in part,

because I wish to understand exactly how wrong I am.

While Tononi (in the development of his IIT) aims to be very clear about
the reducibility floor of consciousness, he also puts forth positive assertions
about what consciousness is/isn't. For example, Tononi claims that The internet
is not conscious exactly because it isn't fully integrated. The technical details of

his concept of fully integrated can be summarized as the observation that when I

go to a wikipedia page there aren't bits of my email and other webpages mixed in.

He, like I believe we are attempting here, is working to develop a formal model of

consciousness. It may be that we are committing the sin of naming things and

abstracting, and that we will ultimately have in our hands nothing but a silly-horribly-

wrong tool. I feel that doing this kind of work is a wonderful break from binge

watching another season of 'Eureka'.

Frank,

You and Nick have been arguing for and against (respectively) the private nature
of mind as long as I have known you both. I apologize if placing you in these
examples was in bad taste. I certainly believe you have a rich and beautiful
mind, and I will be careful in the future to not trivialize it by using your
mind in examples. For the record, anything I had said in regards to your mind,
I meant to say about my mind as well.

Glen, Steve,

If I understand Glen's comprehension of strings example, there are many arbitrary
functions which can act as a choice of representative for a given extensional
transformation. To some limited extent, the claim that the mind is not opaque may

be the claim that there are more structured categories than Sets with arbitrary
functions which are applicable to the mind/behavior problem. If we had such a
category, I might go so far as to define a fiber over each point on the holographic

surface and consider liftings to a bundle or sheaf. Now while simultaneously *ducking*

fistfuls of hay from various strawman arguments posed, I suggest that it may be

reasonable to define a connection (damn, are we back to covariance) on the bundle.

Doing so could be one meaningful way to interpret tracing a thought.

With regards to the discussion about our holographic surface, I could use more
clarification on the lossy/lossless property. I assume we agree that sorting is
not dual to shuffling. For instance, defining the type of a shuffling algorithm
does not require Ord to be a class constraint, where it is required for sorting.
If we are claiming that the information found on our holographic surface is
complete, I would like to think we are claiming it to be lossless‡. At the end
of the day, it may be the case that we will never know the ontological status of
information reversibility through a black hole. Am I wrong about this? If our

holographic surface isn't reversible, is hashing perhaps a better analogy?

If in the limit of behavioral investigation we find no more semantic ambiguity than
the semantic ambiguities we experience when attempting to understand an others

language, I may wish to consider the question closed in favor of the mind being

public. I do suspect we would run into many many more (perhaps unresolvable)

problems along the way, but this exercise is exactly an exercise to me. Learning

the nature of these problems is reward enough.

Jon

†) This example coming from Rota's lectures on 'The end of objectivity'.

‡) Bzip is a great example of a seemingly lossy algorithm that amazingly enough
is not. The fact that the Burrows-Wheeler transform is invertible and is statistically useful
more-often-than-it-is-not provides a high bar for what can be accomplished with data
compression.

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

My mind doesn't feel trivialized, Jon.  I like being an example--of most things that I am.

Frank

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 5:56 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS,

Philosophically, I most closely identify with what I perhaps could call
phenomenological-materialism. For me all ideas we have, we have exactly
because they are afforded by the world. There may not be unicorns, but
horses and animals with horns do exist. Unicorns then are afforded. The role of
the trump card in a game of bridge† is nowhere to be found in the atomic
structure of the card, but the role is afforded by our world. Straight lines
and symmetry groups may be nowhere measured, but are exactly accessible

to us because we exist in a world which affords them. For me, this is how I

thinly justify not needing a spiritual or platonic meta-physics. Also on a personal
level, I do believe that mind is public. I am interested in following this line, in part,

because I wish to understand exactly how wrong I am.

While Tononi (in the development of his IIT) aims to be very clear about
the reducibility floor of consciousness, he also puts forth positive assertions
about what consciousness is/isn't. For example, Tononi claims that The internet
is not conscious exactly because it isn't fully integrated. The technical details of

his concept of fully integrated can be summarized as the observation that when I

go to a wikipedia page there aren't bits of my email and other webpages mixed in.

He, like I believe we are attempting here, is working to develop a formal model of

consciousness. It may be that we are committing the sin of naming things and

abstracting, and that we will ultimately have in our hands nothing but a silly-horribly-

wrong tool. I feel that doing this kind of work is a wonderful break from binge

watching another season of 'Eureka'.

Frank,

You and Nick have been arguing for and against (respectively) the private nature
of mind as long as I have known you both. I apologize if placing you in these
examples was in bad taste. I certainly believe you have a rich and beautiful
mind, and I will be careful in the future to not trivialize it by using your
mind in examples. For the record, anything I had said in regards to your mind,
I meant to say about my mind as well.

Glen, Steve,

If I understand Glen's comprehension of strings example, there are many arbitrary
functions which can act as a choice of representative for a given extensional
transformation. To some limited extent, the claim that the mind is not opaque may

be the claim that there are more structured categories than Sets with arbitrary
functions which are applicable to the mind/behavior problem. If we had such a
category, I might go so far as to define a fiber over each point on the holographic

surface and consider liftings to a bundle or sheaf. Now while simultaneously *ducking*

fistfuls of hay from various strawman arguments posed, I suggest that it may be

reasonable to define a connection (damn, are we back to covariance) on the bundle.

Doing so could be one meaningful way to interpret tracing a thought.

With regards to the discussion about our holographic surface, I could use more
clarification on the lossy/lossless property. I assume we agree that sorting is
not dual to shuffling. For instance, defining the type of a shuffling algorithm
does not require Ord to be a class constraint, where it is required for sorting.
If we are claiming that the information found on our holographic surface is
complete, I would like to think we are claiming it to be lossless‡. At the end
of the day, it may be the case that we will never know the ontological status of
information reversibility through a black hole. Am I wrong about this? If our

holographic surface isn't reversible, is hashing perhaps a better analogy?

If in the limit of behavioral investigation we find no more semantic ambiguity than
the semantic ambiguities we experience when attempting to understand an others

language, I may wish to consider the question closed in favor of the mind being

public. I do suspect we would run into many many more (perhaps unresolvable)

problems along the way, but this exercise is exactly an exercise to me. Learning

the nature of these problems is reward enough.

Jon

†) This example coming from Rota's lectures on 'The end of objectivity'.

‡) Bzip is a great example of a seemingly lossy algorithm that amazingly enough
is not. The fact that the Burrows-Wheeler transform is invertible and is statistically useful
more-often-than-it-is-not provides a high bar for what can be accomplished with data
compression.

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--

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

You may consider the question closed as soon as you tell me the name of my 6th grade classmate. :-)

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 6:28 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

My mind doesn't feel trivialized, Jon.  I like being an example--of most things that I am.

Frank

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 5:56 PM Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS,

Philosophically, I most closely identify with what I perhaps could call
phenomenological-materialism. For me all ideas we have, we have exactly
because they are afforded by the world. There may not be unicorns, but
horses and animals with horns do exist. Unicorns then are afforded. The role of
the trump card in a game of bridge† is nowhere to be found in the atomic
structure of the card, but the role is afforded by our world. Straight lines
and symmetry groups may be nowhere measured, but are exactly accessible

to us because we exist in a world which affords them. For me, this is how I

thinly justify not needing a spiritual or platonic meta-physics. Also on a personal
level, I do believe that mind is public. I am interested in following this line, in part,

because I wish to understand exactly how wrong I am.

While Tononi (in the development of his IIT) aims to be very clear about
the reducibility floor of consciousness, he also puts forth positive assertions
about what consciousness is/isn't. For example, Tononi claims that The internet
is not conscious exactly because it isn't fully integrated. The technical details of

his concept of fully integrated can be summarized as the observation that when I

go to a wikipedia page there aren't bits of my email and other webpages mixed in.

He, like I believe we are attempting here, is working to develop a formal model of

consciousness. It may be that we are committing the sin of naming things and

abstracting, and that we will ultimately have in our hands nothing but a silly-horribly-

wrong tool. I feel that doing this kind of work is a wonderful break from binge

watching another season of 'Eureka'.

Frank,

You and Nick have been arguing for and against (respectively) the private nature
of mind as long as I have known you both. I apologize if placing you in these
examples was in bad taste. I certainly believe you have a rich and beautiful
mind, and I will be careful in the future to not trivialize it by using your
mind in examples. For the record, anything I had said in regards to your mind,
I meant to say about my mind as well.

Glen, Steve,

If I understand Glen's comprehension of strings example, there are many arbitrary
functions which can act as a choice of representative for a given extensional
transformation. To some limited extent, the claim that the mind is not opaque may

be the claim that there are more structured categories than Sets with arbitrary
functions which are applicable to the mind/behavior problem. If we had such a
category, I might go so far as to define a fiber over each point on the holographic

surface and consider liftings to a bundle or sheaf. Now while simultaneously *ducking*

fistfuls of hay from various strawman arguments posed, I suggest that it may be

reasonable to define a connection (damn, are we back to covariance) on the bundle.

Doing so could be one meaningful way to interpret tracing a thought.

With regards to the discussion about our holographic surface, I could use more
clarification on the lossy/lossless property. I assume we agree that sorting is
not dual to shuffling. For instance, defining the type of a shuffling algorithm
does not require Ord to be a class constraint, where it is required for sorting.
If we are claiming that the information found on our holographic surface is
complete, I would like to think we are claiming it to be lossless‡. At the end
of the day, it may be the case that we will never know the ontological status of
information reversibility through a black hole. Am I wrong about this? If our

holographic surface isn't reversible, is hashing perhaps a better analogy?

If in the limit of behavioral investigation we find no more semantic ambiguity than
the semantic ambiguities we experience when attempting to understand an others

language, I may wish to consider the question closed in favor of the mind being

public. I do suspect we would run into many many more (perhaps unresolvable)

problems along the way, but this exercise is exactly an exercise to me. Learning

the nature of these problems is reward enough.

Jon

†) This example coming from Rota's lectures on 'The end of objectivity'.

‡) Bzip is a great example of a seemingly lossy algorithm that amazingly enough
is not. The fact that the Burrows-Wheeler transform is invertible and is statistically useful
more-often-than-it-is-not provides a high bar for what can be accomplished with data
compression.

-- --- .-. . .-.. --- -.-. -.- ... -..-. .- .-. . -..-. - .... . -..-. . ... ... . -. - .. .- .-.. -..-. .-- --- .-. -.- . .-. ...
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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--

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
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[jon zingale]

EricS,

You write:
I bring up this debate in mathematics because it seems significant to me
how long and how intensely it has been going on, with both sides wanting a
notion of “truth”, and neither being able to claim to have achieved it in terms
satisfied by the other.  If the intuitionists had never been able to build a
real system around their position, the formalists could just declare victory
and go home.  But the debate seems still live, even within math and not only in
philosophy, with clear trade-offs that there are proofs that each side will
accept that the other rejects.

It would surprise me to meet a mathematician who feels intensely one way
or an other about a particular choice of topos. For mathematical-logicians,
what seems more interesting are the geometric morphisms between toposes.
I would argue that the formalists to some extent did just declare victory
many times over and that their are still pockets of scientific/mathematical
culture that believe everything can be reduced to bits. Still, and not just as
with the intuitionists, richer toposes are there to be found and explored.

My two favorite examples come from algebraic geometry and from

quantum cosmology. In the former case, Grothendieck arrives at the

idea of a non-boolean topos while writing the foundations of algebraic

geometry. In the latter, Fontini Markopoulou-Kalamara develops her

non-boolean topos in the context of quantum gravity†.

Jon

†) Tangentially related to other parts of the overall discussion, Fotini
is also a design engineer working on embodied cognition technologies.

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[David Eric Smith]

This is why lists are a death trap, a kind of cognitive-affective pitcher plant.  Always there is the impulse to say “Oh no no no! You have misunderstood me!”.  But of course there is no sentence compassable that can’t be misunderstood.  Whoever is most tenacious will simply outlive the others, and I can promise you it won’t be me.  I can’t even imagine what social media must be like for the generation born into it.

So I can’t do even 1/10 of the line-by-line reply toward which I twitch, or this would turn into the through-the-night conversations between Moriarty and Ginsburg that Kerouac relates in On the Road, and I will accept defeat at the outset rather than go that way.

Only a couple of things, then.  I need to re-arrange:

On May 20, 2020, at 3:48 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

  They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO)

[NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)

I do remember it, always since finding out about it.  Miserably it is part of the aggression in which such terms are used.  The people who would use it against the physicists do not intend to be kind.

… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF?  In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.”    <===nst] 

My original sentence can be read two ways, one of which is a good-natured, humorous supportive one toward what I read as your motive.  Being hell-bent on denying the spiritualists an inch is a worthy position IMO.   That was the intended meaning, both the good humor and the supportiveness, to say that my objections are bounded, and there is much in which I am on your side.   Should I say more about why you read it the other way?  No, clearly not.  Interestingly, because I _cannot_, and there is some fundamental element of courtesy in realizing there are limits to what one can know about another.  Something about being hidden….  (Sorry; that is trolling.)

And then:

HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks.

ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do.

HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly.

ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.)

HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that.

ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting.

HEP: In Principle we understand all that.

ROS: You are a robot.

 

And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks.  Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives.

[NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst] 

Followed by 

[NST===>

[yes I have clipped content here, which does affect context, to highlight a part still intending good faith]

 I am an “up-reductionist”.  My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in.   Our minds are something about us, not something within us.   <===nst]

“The one key to the mind”. “Our minds are … about … not … within”

This is why I answered Glen about Brouwer (Intuitionism, constructivism) versus the formalists.

If you make your above assertions as answers to a conversation in which you are not constructing something to address what the conversation is about (this question of inner/outer or hidden or whatever), what is the content of the formal assertions?  

Someone is asking you to search in the void for the surprise of a new thought.  You are answering by declaring a certain kind of sufficiency of thoughts you have long held fixed.  You are not claiming to be in possession of all constructions — I understand that and always have — but your “about … not … within” is a certain kind of changing the subject as a pre-emption.

In my cartoon of the reductionism of the physicists above, I wasn’t asking you to make a mapping from the domain-content of that discussion to the domain-content of this one — there is a crass older-school behaviorism, as you say, for which that kind of mapping would have worked, and I know that is not what is at work here, and you are not from that kind of mind — I was asking you to consider the style of thought that substitutes a formalist-style declaration of scope in answer to a constructivist-style search for something surprising because it is hard to find.

You did address this, in a style I recognize:

My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible.  I.e., a scientific understanding. 

I understood a few days ago that this was the source of your (also good-natured) dig at me asking “must one be doing science all the time?  Isn’t it okay to sometimes have a bit of fun?” as a read of my position.

I believe I am as on-board with you as a person can be, in liking consistency, believing that science as an aspiration is somehow in that direction, etc.  If there is a difference in the way we are fencing over this position — and there may not be in substance so much as in style — it could be that I expect my belief in my ability to recognize that consistency to be much more thoroughly upended by new thoughts of kinds I could not anticipate.  So I don’t think I could define what “science” is, except from a very unimaginative appeal to things I currently happen to know about from our shared past,   I would include in that all the Piercing positions I have learned from you on this list, and more things I want to do with them.  But that’s just what is already in the library.  I hope to be floored by what is opened up by new ideas, the way I am floored by the curved spacetime geometry of black holes as a thinkable thing, which comes from outside my whole experiential history as an animal living in the nearly-flat spacetime of Earth.  

I just got off a long Skype call with a student, which is why this awful post got delayed.  At several points in the conversation, he started laughing, because suddenly he saw things, and understood that they had been just at his elbow seeable all the time, but not seen.  That laughter is the evidence.  He is a wonderful student because he would never think of suppressing the admission of it to maintain an image.  That surprise is what makes the miserable rest of it worth getting through.

But in the end, all was well anyway:

[NST===>

[a clip, not related to what is kept]

OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams.  How would we go about it?  I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did.  <===nst] 

Here you have yourself summarized everything I wanted to say. 

All best,

Eric

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[David Eric Smith]

This s lovely stuff, Jon, above my understanding and beyond my reach to learn in my current circumstances.  Thank you for both.

I know Fotini distantly, from brief overlap at SFI; I didn’t understand that this was the particular thing she had done, though I knew this was the general area of her work.  I have also been able to talk to her about why she left professional math to do design.  It is not the saddest disappointment in what our culture should offer people and sometimes fails to, but it is a contender.

I am currently watching a debate or learning session, between a dutch philosopher and mathematical logician who specializes in intuitionism, and a younger mathematician (maybe from MIT?, currently working in documentary film!) who knows category theory well, and some philosophy of math, and is trying to learn in the conversation how intuitionism fits into the landscape.  I don’t use names because I don’t know whether the existence of the exchange should be left as a private correspondence protected from traffic analysis.

But the positions are interesting.  The younger cat-theorist, who is reading philosophy of math, presents a picture much like the one you describe, with pluralism of several dimensions and no strong attachments.  The dutchman asserts that there are ongoing interests in what we want from notions of truth, and holds that the formalist/intuitionist polarity is one of the more important ones on that question.  The idea that there is no “winning strategy”, in a Jaako Hintikka-sense, is what interests me, as something illuminating about our aspiration for a truth-notion, and how perhaps inadequately we have been able to pin one down after millennia of quite sophisticated efforts.  That is why I expect the formalist-constructivist dialogue on the psychology topics to be persistent.

Both discussants in the math conversation seem to agree that, in some sense, the formalists didn’t declare a full victory, but at most a severely qualified one.  The incompleteness theorem ended the Hilbertian hope for a self-contained formalist program, and they both seem to agree (I have no knowledge or background to say myself) that even the formalists came to some degree to admit that there were sectors of their reasoning that did appeal to a kind of demonstrative semantics of the kind that intuitionists pin a lot on for number theory of finite numbers.  

My witness of this exchange lies behind my earlier remarks.  I wish I had the mind to understand the issues for myself.

Eric

On May 20, 2020, at 10:39 AM, Jon Zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

EricS,

You write:
I bring up this debate in mathematics because it seems significant to me
how long and how intensely it has been going on, with both sides wanting a
notion of “truth”, and neither being able to claim to have achieved it in terms
satisfied by the other.  If the intuitionists had never been able to build a
real system around their position, the formalists could just declare victory
and go home.  But the debate seems still live, even within math and not only in
philosophy, with clear trade-offs that there are proofs that each side will
accept that the other rejects.

It would surprise me to meet a mathematician who feels intensely one way
or an other about a particular choice of topos. For mathematical-logicians,
what seems more interesting are the geometric morphisms between toposes.
I would argue that the formalists to some extent did just declare victory
many times over and that their are still pockets of scientific/mathematical
culture that believe everything can be reduced to bits. Still, and not just as
with the intuitionists, richer toposes are there to be found and explored.

My two favorite examples come from algebraic geometry and from

quantum cosmology. In the former case, Grothendieck arrives at the

idea of a non-boolean topos while writing the foundations of algebraic

geometry. In the latter, Fontini Markopoulou-Kalamara develops her

non-boolean topos in the context of quantum gravity†.

Jon

†) Tangentially related to other parts of the overall discussion, Fotini
is also a design engineer working on embodied cognition technologies.

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