Posted by
David Eric Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/hidden-tp7596148p7596180.html
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)
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.
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. They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO) 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. 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?”
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.
(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. 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.)
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.
Eric
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
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
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
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
`... 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
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 ;)
†: If any members of the group would like to form a reading
†† While it turned out that the Greek's assumptions about
the power of a compass and straightedge were incorrect,
have been a more powerful choice!
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