the role of metaphor in scientific thought

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis and return to(ward) the point at
hand.  Your comparison of "closure" to Nick's idea of "surplus"
(intentional or not) meaning.   I accept that in programming a computer,
"closure" is a useful tool, to avoid unintended "side effects".   In
natural language, I think a certain amount of ambiguity is
*necessary*.   Perhaps not in the most dry and literal of technical
manuals or even journal papers.  But there are many other modes of
communication where I believe that ambiguity and multiple meanings and
even "side effects" or "un/intentional surplus" is not only a good thing
but perhaps critical to the goal of that communication.

I would say that exploratory brainstorming is a key example.   I would
suggest that the value of this list (to me) is precisely that mode.  
There is nothing expressed literally on this list that I couldn't have
looked up for myself.   It is the collective curatorial value of this
group that makes it useful and interesting to me.   It is the eclectic
*context* of the members of this group which makes it (much) more than
Wikipedia.  After many years of reading others on this list, I
appreciate the wide perspectives offered by the computational/simulants
(e.g. Glen/Marcus), the social scientists (e.g. Nick et al), the
Educators (e.g. Angel, Sherwood, Chabon, now fled?), the non-US-born
(e.g. Vlad, Jochen, Mohammed), the exPatriot (Gary Schulz), the women
(e.g. Jenny, Merle, Dede, Patricia, et. al), the youth (Cody, Gil, ???),
the TechnoMystics (Rich Murray), the Mathematicians (Wimberly, et al),
the Generalists, the Complexitists, the Lightweights, the Heavy Hitters,
etc.

The *many* reserved lexicons and alternative uses of similar words adds
to the rich fecundity of the discussions *when* they blossom here.

I DO find it useful to niggle out of others, where there is
*intentional* vs *unintentional* surplus, and perhaps more to the point
*misintentional* or worse *malintentional* surplus.   Nick jumped me
about using "inform" a dozen threads ago, I think assuming that my
choice of that word was sloppy parroting of a certain "style" of talk
(perhaps a subdialect of PostModernism?).   I defended it as best I
could (and had to think carefully about why I chose "inform" instead of
the alternative(s) he offered which admittedly WERE more "plainspoken".  
I was not offended by Nick's questioning my use of this specific word,
because it forced me to think more carefully about my use and to provide
the context to the rest of you who might actually be reading the
otherwise TL;DR material for the nuanced meaning I was trying to offer.

Ramble,

  - Steve


On 6/23/17 9:13 AM, ┣glen┫ wrote:

> Ha!  I struggled to come up with "single" as an alternative name and you had 4 waiting in the wings.
>
> I'm going to skip ahead a bit and state that my entire line of rhetoric about circularity goes back to the complexity jargon discussion we were having and whether or not, as Nick put it, a system has a say in its own boundary.  It's all about _closure_.  This particular tangent targets closure from the functional programming perspective (or maybe from the procedural one, depending on how you look at it).  When you execute a loop in a "systems" language like C, you have a good chance that whatever you do in there could have side effects.  But when you do something like that in a purely functional language, you're very unlikely (never) going to leave side effects laying around.
>
> If the unmarried person in the just-so story were somehow "closed", then there would be no side effects left lying around as a result of walking _any_ path from the name "unmarried" to/from any other name like "widow".  But people aren't ever "closed" in any vernacular sense (never mind Rosen's or Kauffman's parsing of agency for a while).  That's why I asserted that the existence of _any_ other name (bachelor, single, widow, whatever) opens up an entirely new world of side effects (including what Peirce should call practical) to the unmarried patient.  The fact that the condition even has _names_ opens it up to nomothetic generality.  An entirely unique condition, showing up nowhere else in space or time will not have a name and is not generalizable, by definition.
>
> FWIW, in his introduction, Nick does distinguish 3 types of implication important to analogical reasoning: "basic", "surplus-intentional", and "surplus-unintentional".  And the latter 2 types are, I think, directly related to computational side effects, where type 3 would be a bug, type 2 might be considered sloppy, and type 1 is the ideal.  This is a fantastic way to talk about this sort of thing.  But it would be easier to discuss if we either avoided discussion of circularity _or_ gave it the full analytic context it needs (starting from a relatively complete definition of closure).
>
> You may be asking: If Nick's talking about analogs and implications, how does that relate to a computational procedure?  Well, simulation has several meanings, the 2 main ones being: mimicry vs. implementation.  I'd say 90% of simulation is about implementation.  E.g. an ODE solver numerically implements (simulates) an ideal/platonic mathematical declaration.  So, when you write a program, the computer that executes it (only during the execution) is an analog to whatever other (physical or platonic) construct might also be described by such a mathematical declaration.  Either of these two analogs can leave (surplus) side effects lying about as they reify their analogous (basic) behaviors.
>
> I hope that's not tl;dr. 8^)
>
>
> On 06/23/2017 06:52 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> Has anybody mentioned that there are lot of unmarried men that you usually
>> wouldn't call bachelors?  There are widowers, priests, and nineteen
>> year-olds, for example.  I learned the word because my father's brother was
>> a thirty-five year old Major in the Air Force with no wife. He eventually
>> got married and had children. Late bloomer?

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

< Your comparison of "closure" to Nick's idea of "surplus"
(intentional or not) meaning.  I accept that in programming a computer,
"closure" is a useful tool, to avoid unintended "side effects".>

If one thinks of the mind of two people as two circles in a Venn diagram and the intersection as their communication, meaning is still in reference to each complete circle; it is subjective.  This may often lead to ambiguity and contradiction, but doesn't mean that language itself should be inherently ambiguous.   Specifically, a closure would imply that while each agent was bringing to bear their experience on the interpretation of the communication,  to the extent their mind is in flux from that communication, in a functional programming approach it would be modeled as transactions within each agent.   It's simply a question of being precise about what is going on.

Marcus

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[Stephen Guerin-5]

For catholics, a confirmed unmarried man might be different than a confirmed bachelor .

On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 7:52 AM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Has anybody mentioned that there are lot of unmarried men that you usually wouldn't call bachelors?  There are widowers, priests, and nineteen year-olds, for example.  I learned the word because my father's brother was a thirty-five year old Major in the Air Force with no wife. He eventually got married and had children. Late bloomer?

Frank

On Jun 22, 2017 11:34 PM, "gepr ⛧" <[hidden email]> wrote:

But the difference isn't merely rhetorical. If we take the setup seriously, that the unmarried patient really doesn't know the other names by which his condition is known, then there are all sorts of different side effects that might obtain. E.g. if the doctor tells him he's a bachelor, he might google that and discover bachelor parties. But if the doctor tells him he is "single", he might discover single's night at the local pub.

My point was not only the evocation of various ideas, but also the side effects of various (computational) paths.


On June 22, 2017 7:00:55 PM PDT, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:
>Glen said: "So, the loop of unmarried <=> bachelor has information in
>it,
>even if the only information is (as in your example), the guy learns
>that
>because the condition has another name, perhaps there are other ways of
>thinking about it ... other _circles_ to use."
>
>This reminds me that, in another context, Nick complained to me quite a
>bit
>about Peirce's asserting that that any concept was simply a collection
>of
>conceived "practical" consequences. He felt that the term "practical"
>was
>unnecessary, and lead to confusions. I think this is a good example of
>why
>Peirce used that term, and felt it necessary.
>
>Perice would point out that the practical consequences of being
>"unmarried"
>are identical to the practical consequences of being "a bachelor."
>Thus,
>though the spellings be different, there is only one idea at play there
>(in
>Peirce-land... if we are thinking clearly). This is the tautology that
>Nick
>is pointing at, and he isn't wrong.
>
>And yet, Glen is still clearly correct that using one term or the other
>may
>more readily invoke certain ideas in a listener. Those aren't practical
>differences in Peirce's sense- they are not differences in practice
>that
>would achieve if one tested the unique implications of one label or the
>other (as there are no contrasting unique implications). The value of
>having the multiple terms is rhetorical, not logical.
>
>What to do with such differences..............

--
⛧glen⛧

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[Steve Smith]

Marcus -

This is about the time when I expect Dave West to jump in with his rant about how broken the metaphor of "mind as computer" (or perhaps venn diagram) is.  Though he may not be cross-subscribed here.

Ignoring those arguments for a moment and giving over to the metaphor, let me offer this observation:

To the extent that the only and precise goal is to efficiently, unambiguously, and accurately serialize the contents of one's mind and transmit it to another mind which de-serializes with the goal of syncronizing the internal states of Bob's mind to that of Alice's, perhaps what you say is spot on.   A technical manual, a scientific paper, those might very well call for that level of precision.

From Other Tongues - Mary Strong Jackson

It just so happens, I am reading this poetry collection just now...  

I think this all "begs the question" <grin> that Owen brought up about shared ontologies.    If Bob and Alice have a *precisely* shared ontology (and therefore lexicon?) then this is quite tractable.   If they do NOT share an ontology (much less lexicon) then there is likely (surely?) to be a mis-registration (if I'm using Glen's term correctly) in any such serialization/deserialization.    One might suggest that developing/obtaining a perfectly shared ontology is the primary goal of communication (coming to a common understanding?) and I think that is a significant part of the reason we commun(icat)e...   but I would claim there is also a *creative* aspect of communication which is to explore the differences between our ontolologies and look for interpolations between and extrapolations *beyond* them which *might* yield a larger, richer, more expressive and apprehensive ontology for *understanding the world as it is*.   Science is a very elaborated and formal system for pursuing the more observable phenomena of the world and I don't argue that in the phase of science where we might be buttoning down a well explored concept/phenomena that precision and accuracy and lack of ambiguity are crucial.   Thus the reserved lexicons of every scientific (sub)discipline.   But what explains the Tower of Babel that is Science as it is practiced?  Is it merely sloppy thinking and language that causes each subfield to (mis?)use terms from other (sub)fields?  Or is there something more afoot?

I would contend that this is one of the things that divides Science from Engineering.  Engineering is generally interested in highly reproduceable results, while in a paradoxical sense, Science is often more interested in the anomalous results?

That aside, my good friend and colleague Tom Caudell (UNM) has been working on a book with Mike Healey (UW) for what seems like decades now, building up a theory (and surrounding arguements) for a Neuronal Model of Mind which is ultimately grounded in category theory and informed by neural net theory.   I am likely mis-describing this effort, but I think I've captured the gist.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241246640_Ontologies_and_Worlds_in_Category_Theory_Implications_for_Neural_Systems

In any case, I think that their level of formality is useful, but may miss the true nature of consciousness and importantly creativity.

Just SAyin,

 - Steve

On 6/23/17 10:39 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

< Your comparison of "closure" to Nick's idea of "surplus" 
(intentional or not) meaning.  I accept that in programming a computer, 
"closure" is a useful tool, to avoid unintended "side effects".>

If one thinks of the mind of two people as two circles in a Venn diagram and the intersection as their communication, meaning is still in reference to each complete circle; it is subjective.  This may often lead to ambiguity and contradiction, but doesn't mean that language itself should be inherently ambiguous.   Specifically, a closure would imply that while each agent was bringing to bear their experience on the interpretation of the communication,  to the extent their mind is in flux from that communication, in a functional programming approach it would be modeled as transactions within each agent.   It's simply a question of being precise about what is going on.

Marcus

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[Steve Smith]

Stephen -

For catholics, a confirmed unmarried man might be different than a confirmed bachelor .

being an unmarried man but not a Catholic, Confirmed or otherwise, I am not a bachelor, though my current lifestyle mimics many of the qualities of the canonical (but not Canonized) confirmed bachelor.   I did, however, attend Catholic Mass for over 15 years, and raised two daughters under the Catholic Catechism up to (but not quite including) their Confirmation.   I am still drawn (for reasons unknown) to women raised Catholic... perhaps I was overly influenced by Billy Joel's apprehension of Catholic Girls in "Only the Good Die Young".

<random personal anecdote>

In my specific case, the Catholic Church declared my only legal/religious marriage null and void just about the time my daughters, the issue of that (non)Marriage, were about to accept Confirmation into the Catholic Church.... somehow the Church's retroactive declaration that no Marriage had existed between their parents, now officially Bastards, gave my impressionable daughters the perfect excuse to decline Confirmation.  I do believe neither of them have attended Mass even once in the intervening 25 years.   I myself, despite not being a Confirmed Catholic did attend Mass (and listened thoughtfully) for 15 years and have in fact returned for special occasions (weddings, funerals, baptisms, confirmations).  In the spirit of hair-splitting terminology, I tend to ask those who were raised (and usually Confirmed) Catholic but no longer practicing if they are "Escaped", "Reformed", or "Recovering" Catholics.  I doubt those three terms cover the space fully, but seem to provide some pretty good sampling.   Most have used the term "Recovering" but many are taken aback by the alternatives and the nuances implied.  

</anecdote

This is why I split hairs about terminology... or maybe my hairsplitting of such terms is why I think the way I do? 

A woman once asked me "do you love me because I am beautiful or am I beautiful because you love me?"   I answered the only way possible: "Yes!"  It should also be noted that we have neither married nor divorced, and I still think she is beautiful.

- Sleeve

On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 7:52 AM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Has anybody mentioned that there are lot of unmarried men that you usually wouldn't call bachelors?  There are widowers, priests, and nineteen year-olds, for example.  I learned the word because my father's brother was a thirty-five year old Major in the Air Force with no wife. He eventually got married and had children. Late bloomer?

Frank

On Jun 22, 2017 11:34 PM, "gepr ⛧" <[hidden email]> wrote:

But the difference isn't merely rhetorical. If we take the setup seriously, that the unmarried patient really doesn't know the other names by which his condition is known, then there are all sorts of different side effects that might obtain. E.g. if the doctor tells him he's a bachelor, he might google that and discover bachelor parties. But if the doctor tells him he is "single", he might discover single's night at the local pub.

My point was not only the evocation of various ideas, but also the side effects of various (computational) paths.


On June 22, 2017 7:00:55 PM PDT, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:
>Glen said: "So, the loop of unmarried <=> bachelor has information in
>it,
>even if the only information is (as in your example), the guy learns
>that
>because the condition has another name, perhaps there are other ways of
>thinking about it ... other _circles_ to use."
>
>This reminds me that, in another context, Nick complained to me quite a
>bit
>about Peirce's asserting that that any concept was simply a collection
>of
>conceived "practical" consequences. He felt that the term "practical"
>was
>unnecessary, and lead to confusions. I think this is a good example of
>why
>Peirce used that term, and felt it necessary.
>
>Perice would point out that the practical consequences of being
>"unmarried"
>are identical to the practical consequences of being "a bachelor."
>Thus,
>though the spellings be different, there is only one idea at play there
>(in
>Peirce-land... if we are thinking clearly). This is the tautology that
>Nick
>is pointing at, and he isn't wrong.
>
>And yet, Glen is still clearly correct that using one term or the other
>may
>more readily invoke certain ideas in a listener. Those aren't practical
>differences in Peirce's sense- they are not differences in practice
>that
>would achieve if one tested the unique implications of one label or the
>other (as there are no contrasting unique implications). The value of
>having the multiple terms is rhetorical, not logical.
>
>What to do with such differences..............

--
⛧glen⛧

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[gepr]

What would you call people like me, who were reared Catholic, including confirmation and duties as an "altar boy", but who never believed a single word uttered in Mass, by parents, or in the official books?  In fact, the only concepts I took, believed in, from Catholicism are 1) catholicism (little "c") and 2) mystery, both of which I could have more readily learned from other traditions had my parents been more worldy.  Thank Yog for open-minded priests, who took the time to explore their own mental gymnastics with a child like me, in lieu of the stupidity that is Confession.

I kinda like "aborted acolyte".  8^)

On 06/23/2017 11:39 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>    I tend to ask those who
>    were raised (and usually Confirmed) Catholic but no longer
>    practicing if they are "Escaped", "Reformed", or "Recovering"
>    Catholics.  I doubt those three terms cover the space fully, but
>    seem to provide some pretty good sampling.   Most have used the term
>    "Recovering" but many are taken aback by the alternatives and the
>    nuances implied.

--
☣ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Steve writes:

“To the extent that the only and precise goal is to efficiently, unambiguously, and accurately serialize the contents of one's mind and transmit it to another mind which de-serializes with the goal of syncronizing the internal states of Bob's mind to that of Alice's, perhaps what you say is spot on.”

The _From Other Tongues_ sketch is good.  Both what is heard and what is said could be modeled as a closure over some subjective representation.   Most computer programs have one representation (one or separable module architectures, not many competing points of view), and, closures, if used, are over some (often small) subset of it.  Agent based models, in contrast, usually have many representations, and so there is the possibility of a well-defined types (and closures that use those types) for clauses in the blue and orange captions.  The squiggles suggest that the types are not yet shared amongst the agents.  I’m not sure I agree in the value of the interpolations and extrapolations of ontologies.  It sounds too much like “agree to disagree”.  Progress I think requires aggressively creating and destroying types and constant by negotiation and empirical validation.   Many “interpretations” just put off getting to the bottom of things.   Keep the interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a better interpretation, then press Delete. 

Marcus

 

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[Steve Smith]

Glen -
> What would you call people like me, who were reared Catholic, including confirmation and duties as an "altar boy", but who never believed a single word uttered in Mass, by parents, or in the official books?  In fact, the only concepts I took, believed in, from Catholicism are 1) catholicism (little "c") and 2) mystery, both of which I could have more readily learned from other traditions had my parents been more worldy.  Thank Yog for open-minded priests, who took the time to explore their own mental gymnastics with a child like me, in lieu of the stupidity that is Confession.
>
> I kinda like "aborted acolyte".  8^)
Works for me, I was thinking "crypto athiest"... and while it is not
accurate to the original usage, I like the sound of "Refusenik Catholic".

I was not raised with much overt religion, though my mother attended
(and included her children) a local Presbyterian church now and again...
my father got drug in for occasional Easter or Christmas services where
he insisted on singing louder than anyone else and when the collection
plate was passed, he would just wave it off and say "thanks, but I've
got plenty already".

Interesting that you didn't believe "a word uttered in Mass" while I, as
a young adult came to believe (or at least a appreciate) a great deal of
what was uttered in Mass.   Of course, I had unique priests.. the first
being Father Abiwyckrema, whose first language was probably Hindi...
although Mass was held in English by that time, his singsong accent made
most of what he said entirely unintelligible, but at least as lyrical as
if it had been in Latin. The second being Father Charlie Brown (yup,
that was his given name!) who dropped out of seminary after a year,
realizing that he couldn't minister to a "flock" if he was isolated and
sequestered from the common person.   He studied psychotherapy instead
and practiced well into his 40's before realizing that without a more
spiritual grounding he felt he was less effective in his ministrations
and returned to Seminary.    The bottom line for me was that his
Homilies were actually quite well considered and relevant to the real
world.   I "believed" a great deal of what he offered in those Homilies.

I lost what little "faith" in Christian Dogma I might have had when
during a summer Bible School teaching (9 years old?).  I got really
excited by the many "miracles" (manna from heaven, red sea parting,
burning bushes, virgin birth, rising from the dead, etc.) and when I
expressed my enthusiasm, taking these to be literal and true and
verifiable stories, my Bible School teacher became very stern with me,
but did not attempt to explain allegory or parable to me, leaving me to
believe that SHE didn't believe those stories either. Kinda undermined
the magic of it all!  I got a little back years later when I came to
understand allegory and parable.

And THAT kindof undermined the phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance
referencing "under God"...

Carry on!
  - Steve
>
> On 06/23/2017 11:39 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>>     I tend to ask those who
>>     were raised (and usually Confirmed) Catholic but no longer
>>     practicing if they are "Escaped", "Reformed", or "Recovering"
>>     Catholics.  I doubt those three terms cover the space fully, but
>>     seem to provide some pretty good sampling.   Most have used the term
>>     "Recovering" but many are taken aback by the alternatives and the
>>     nuances implied.


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[gepr]

On 06/23/2017 12:07 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Many "interpretations" just put off getting to the bottom of things.   Keep the interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a better interpretation, then press Delete.

How about, instead of interpretations, we think of applications, e.g. commonalities between domain-specific languages?

--
☣ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Glen writes:

"How about, instead of interpretations, we think of applications, e.g. commonalities between domain-specific languages?"

I'd make a distinction between embedded DSLs (built on general-purpose programming languages) and DSLs which are not.   I don't want to get stuck thinking about only those things where the language is established and works well.   I want to be able to step away from it and change it when it doesn't work.   If language L' does something useful L doesn't, then I want to use its utility to drag the community along to my way of thinking.  DSLs lead to rule by committee and stagnation.

Marcus


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[gepr]

OK.  I mostly agree.  But at some point, there might be an unresolveable ambiguity in the kernel, at which point I would be forced to allow pluralism.  That's why I allow pluaralism from the start... to avoid having to change my mind later. 8^)  I think it's easier to go from many to one than it is from one to many.

On 06/23/2017 12:25 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I'd make a distinction between embedded DSLs (built on general-purpose programming languages) and DSLs which are not.   I don't want to get stuck thinking about only those things where the language is established and works well.   I want to be able to step away from it and change it when it doesn't work.   If language L' does something useful L doesn't, then I want to use its utility to drag the community along to my way of thinking.  DSLs lead to rule by committee and stagnation.


--
☣ glen

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[gepr]

On 06/23/2017 12:08 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> Works for me, I was thinking "crypto athiest"...

Naa.  I don't qualify as any sort of atheist.  I have gods, they're just unique gods.

> Interesting that you didn't believe "a word uttered in Mass" while I, as a young adult came to believe (or at least a appreciate) a great deal of what was uttered in Mass. […] I "believed" a great deal of what he offered in those Homilies.

Hm.  I suppose we could parse "believe".  But I've had way too many arguments about the difference (or lack thereof) between belief and knowledge.  I don't enjoy them much anymore.

> I lost what little "faith" in Christian Dogma I might have had when during a summer Bible School teaching (9 years old?).  I got really excited by the many "miracles" (manna from heaven, red sea parting, burning bushes, virgin birth, rising from the dead, etc.) and when I expressed my enthusiasm, taking these to be literal and true and verifiable stories, my Bible School teacher became very stern with me, but did not attempt to explain allegory or parable to me, leaving me to believe that SHE didn't believe those stories either. Kinda undermined the magic of it all!  I got a little back years later when I came to understand allegory and parable.

Heh, I kinda wish I'd had more "people in positions of power" like that.  Maybe I did and just ignored any power they had.  My CCD teacher taught us to meditate and chant.  I knew Jesus as Buddha before I learned anything about Buddha.

--
☣ glen

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[Steve Smith]

Marcus -

The _From Other Tongues_ sketch is good.  Both what is heard and what is said could be modeled as a closure over some subjective representation.  

...

The squiggles suggest that the types are not yet shared amongst the agents.

I agree with this, but the theme of the "From Other Tongues" collection is that one culture (and in this case associated language) has atomic concepts built into it (as a single common word) which do not have an atomic word in the other language and in fact may not lend themselves to a succinct description.  In fact, I believe entire books, multivolume sets, maybe even libraries have been written on and dedicated to a concept native to one culture but not to another?

My favorite: "Tingo" from Pascucense (Easter Islanders) is succinctly described as "to gradually steal all of one's neighbor's possessions by borrowing them one at a time and not returning them".     The fact of a single word for this suggests that in that culture it is a much more common occurrence than in our own, or that the number of possessions involved is a tiny fraction of what we are familiar with, or the attachment to them by the original owner is so minimal that it is *possible* for Alice to borrow all of Bob's possessions before he might notice "what she did there".   

Sobremesa is Spanish (and Frank and a few others may have their own input) for "the sociable time after a meal when you have food-induced conversations with the people you have had a meal with.   

WedTech has an element of Sobremesa, but also has some of the overtones that Stephen once observed at the Complex:  "When you get together with a group of autistics, they might all appear to be listening intently to your every word, when in fact they are just waiting intently for you to pause so THEY can talk about what THEY are interested in!"

 I’m not sure I agree in the value of the interpolations and extrapolations of ontologies.  It sounds too much like “agree to disagree”.

I think that it does begin as "agree to disagree", my main formal experience with Ontologies is the Gene Ontology and that is perhaps 10 years stale now, but at the time, it was apparently considered to be the most elaborated single technical ontology with a huge amount of work put forth to bring it to it's current state.  I think the number of concepts was roughly 5,000 at the time.  

 Progress I think requires aggressively creating and destroying types and constant by negotiation and empirical validation.

I do believe a great deal of this was done in order to come to the level of "agreement" in place, but it was anecdotally understood that this was more of a "Rosetta Stone" linking the more accurate and apt Ontologies from the many subfields...   it was more useful for translation than for understanding, and that real understanding required learning the language/ontology of the subfields.   I don't think these are "disagreements" but rather an awareness that there is a fuller richness behind the formalisms agreed upon for convenience of discussion.

Many “interpretations” just put off getting to the bottom of things.   Keep the interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a better interpretation, then press Delete. 

I do agree with this in a mild form.   Many of us here are very interested in Etymology because often there is some deeper understanding residing in a word's original use, just as the calling up of deprecated terms can turn out to be useful for many reasons.   

John Zingale referenced something in last Monday's Salon about how idioms frm early string theory investigations was almost deprecated when it found new utility in quantum loop gravity?    I am winging this if John wants to correct me.  

I think that a great deal of the "Ontology" developed by Alchemists before the Age of Enlightenment was still useful long after the Enlightenment brought a new way of thinking about Natural Sciences and in fact remains useful in the form of the Periodic Table.  Similarly Newtonian vs Relativistic Mechanics, not to mention Quantum Theory?   Each has a domain of utility which may last past a formal resolution of the differences and an agreement on a shared view (e.g. GUT)?  

Closer to shared/reserved lexicons, I don't know if Newton's and Leibnitz' differing notations for Calculus also differences in how facile one using one or the other might be with the same concepts?

- Steve

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

“John Zingale referenced something in last Monday's Salon about how idioms frm early string theory investigations was almost deprecated when it found new utility in quantum loop gravity?”

 

I was thinking of the ER=EPR example.  

 

Seems like basic questions of interpretation just get kicked down the road indefinitely because there is math that is serviceable.   One could say its serviceability is what leads to improved interpretations (in the fullness of time), or maybe it just delays asking the hard questions?  

 

“There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity.  I do not believe that there ever was such a time.  On the other hand, I think it is safe to say that no one understand quantum mechanics.   Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, `But how can it be like that?’ because you will get `down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.  Nobody knows how it can be like that.”   [Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law]

 

Marcus

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[Steve Smith]

Glen -

>> Works for me, I was thinking "crypto athiest"...
> Naa.  I don't qualify as any sort of atheist.  I have gods, they're just unique gods.
Understood...  "crypto-animist" perhaps?   I didn't think much of the
term (animist) until I encountered it in Abram's "Spell of the Sensuous"
which I am now recognizing anew in the "Pan Consciousness" movement.  
You may also enjoy, if you haven't read it, Neal Gaiman's "American
Gods"...
>> Interesting that you didn't believe "a word uttered in Mass" while I, as a young adult came to believe (or at least a appreciate) a great deal of what was uttered in Mass. […] I "believed" a great deal of what he offered in those Homilies.
> Hm.  I suppose we could parse "believe".  But I've had way too many arguments about the difference (or lack thereof) between belief and knowledge.  I don't enjoy them much anymore.
I guess more important to me was that I *liked* and *tended to agree
with* a great deal of what he had to say.  His Homilies illuminated my
understanding of the mystery of being human in this world in a new and
larger way than I had before.   None of that was, by the way, couched in
the specific dogma of Catholicism or even Christianity.    His
conception of "Grace" for example, did not require a literal belief in a
Paternalistic God, or a Forgiving Son, though maybe something like a
mysterious "Holy Spirit", nor a literal Garden of Eden or a Snake or an
Apple, or Satan or ....   It might be noted that he had a lot of tussle
with the congregation at-large, partly over his "secular" style.  
Selfishly, it "worked for me"!
>> I lost what little "faith" in Christian Dogma I might have had when during a summer Bible School teaching (9 years old?).  I got really excited by the many "miracles" (manna from heaven, red sea parting, burning bushes, virgin birth, rising from the dead, etc.) and when I expressed my enthusiasm, taking these to be literal and true and verifiable stories, my Bible School teacher became very stern with me, but did not attempt to explain allegory or parable to me, leaving me to believe that SHE didn't believe those stories either. Kinda undermined the magic of it all!  I got a little back years later when I came to understand allegory and parable.
> Heh, I kinda wish I'd had more "people in positions of power" like that.  Maybe I did and just ignored any power they had.  My CCD teacher taught us to meditate and chant.  I knew Jesus as Buddha before I learned anything about Buddha.
I wish I had not been so quick to ignore/dismiss those "people in
positions of power" myself.   It *did* allow/require me to do a lot more
thinking for myself than if I'd swallowed their hooks, lines and
sinkers, but I think there might have been a finer line to have
appreciated than I did.   For example, if I'd recognized those
miraculous stories for what they were, I might have returned for more of
that good 'ole Bible- thumpery-for-children and developed a more astute
understanding/appreciation of Christianity earlier...  I feel quite
lucky to have been immersed in Catholicism as much as I was, and only
wish I had had more opportunity to get the same up-close-and-personal
taste of other "foreign" cultures.

I've a very good friend born/raised Muslim but extremely Westernized who
I wish would take me into her family for a year... she lives in
Australia...  otherwise I think she would.  Her father (now deceased)
was known for his scholarly nature and his affection for "Whiteys" (her
term, not mine) and the class of discourse they offered that was
different from his own peers in Islamic culture... she was raised at his
knee watching John Ford Westerns, many set in our local scenery...  She
is a very powerful hybrid of three cultures.   I have numerous Native
American friends but they are mostly if not all too "Americanized" to
give me yet more cultural/spiritual parallax, not to mention the clutter
we have loaded on them with ideas like "noble Savage".   Even those born
and raised in the relative isolation of a "the Rez"... or more likely,
I'm not listening carefully enough.

- Steve

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[Steve Smith]

Marcus-

I was thinking of the ER=EPR example.  

My intuition is that after we elaborate enough examples like this, as well as Feynman's observation that since all (heretofore observed) electrons appear identical, perhaps they are a *single* electron which is everywhere/everywhen, we might come up with a "dual theory" in the same sense that when you replace the edges of a graph with vertices and vice-versa, you get a *dual* which is sometimes more tractable to operate on (or think about) than the other.  

Seems like basic questions of interpretation just get kicked down the road indefinitely because there is math that is serviceable.   One could say its serviceability is what leads to improved interpretations (in the fullness of time), or maybe it just delays asking the hard questions?  

 

“There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity.  I do not believe that there ever was such a time.  On the other hand, I think it is safe to say that no one understand quantum mechanics.   Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, `But how can it be like that?’ because you will get `down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.  Nobody knows how it can be like that.”   [Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law]

Good stuff...   in Monday's Salon, we invoked the von Neumann quote: "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." and also discussed Lakoff/Nunez' "Where Mathematics Comes From" but did not resolve the implied contradiction (my observation in this moment, not discussed there/then).  

- Steve

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[Nick Thompson]

We have a word for tingo, don’t we?  Its “to ”borrow””.

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2017 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

 

Marcus -

The _From Other Tongues_ sketch is good.  Both what is heard and what is said could be modeled as a closure over some subjective representation.  

...

The squiggles suggest that the types are not yet shared amongst the agents.

I agree with this, but the theme of the "From Other Tongues" collection is that one culture (and in this case associated language) has atomic concepts built into it (as a single common word) which do not have an atomic word in the other language and in fact may not lend themselves to a succinct description.  In fact, I believe entire books, multivolume sets, maybe even libraries have been written on and dedicated to a concept native to one culture but not to another?

My favorite: "Tingo" from Pascucense (Easter Islanders) is succinctly described as "to gradually steal all of one's neighbor's possessions by borrowing them one at a time and not returning them".     The fact of a single word for this suggests that in that culture it is a much more common occurrence than in our own, or that the number of possessions involved is a tiny fraction of what we are familiar with, or the attachment to them by the original owner is so minimal that it is *possible* for Alice to borrow all of Bob's possessions before he might notice "what she did there".   

Sobremesa is Spanish (and Frank and a few others may have their own input) for "the sociable time after a meal when you have food-induced conversations with the people you have had a meal with.   

WedTech has an element of Sobremesa, but also has some of the overtones that Stephen once observed at the Complex:  "When you get together with a group of autistics, they might all appear to be listening intently to your every word, when in fact they are just waiting intently for you to pause so THEY can talk about what THEY are interested in!"

 I’m not sure I agree in the value of the interpolations and extrapolations of ontologies.  It sounds too much like “agree to disagree”.

I think that it does begin as "agree to disagree", my main formal experience with Ontologies is the Gene Ontology and that is perhaps 10 years stale now, but at the time, it was apparently considered to be the most elaborated single technical ontology with a huge amount of work put forth to bring it to it's current state.  I think the number of concepts was roughly 5,000 at the time.  

 Progress I think requires aggressively creating and destroying types and constant by negotiation and empirical validation.

I do believe a great deal of this was done in order to come to the level of "agreement" in place, but it was anecdotally understood that this was more of a "Rosetta Stone" linking the more accurate and apt Ontologies from the many subfields...   it was more useful for translation than for understanding, and that real understanding required learning the language/ontology of the subfields.   I don't think these are "disagreements" but rather an awareness that there is a fuller richness behind the formalisms agreed upon for convenience of discussion.

Many “interpretations” just put off getting to the bottom of things.   Keep the interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a better interpretation, then press Delete. 

I do agree with this in a mild form.   Many of us here are very interested in Etymology because often there is some deeper understanding residing in a word's original use, just as the calling up of deprecated terms can turn out to be useful for many reasons.   

John Zingale referenced something in last Monday's Salon about how idioms frm early string theory investigations was almost deprecated when it found new utility in quantum loop gravity?    I am winging this if John wants to correct me.  

I think that a great deal of the "Ontology" developed by Alchemists before the Age of Enlightenment was still useful long after the Enlightenment brought a new way of thinking about Natural Sciences and in fact remains useful in the form of the Periodic Table.  Similarly Newtonian vs Relativistic Mechanics, not to mention Quantum Theory?   Each has a domain of utility which may last past a formal resolution of the differences and an agreement on a shared view (e.g. GUT)?  

Closer to shared/reserved lexicons, I don't know if Newton's and Leibnitz' differing notations for Calculus also differences in how facile one using one or the other might be with the same concepts?

- Steve

 

 

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[Nick Thompson]

Thank you, Frank.  A really important point.

 

So bachelor implies unmarried, but unmarried does not imply bachelor.  Your message also contained some additional correspondence which, for some reason, I have never seen.  I have no quick answer to any of it.  I still think that there is an important peril in explanations of the form “A is the explanation for A” but I am way less confident of my ability to identify pernicious extensions of that form.  And it still seems significant to me that you complexitists have not identified and agreed upon a target for your explanatory efforts.  (Please remind me, I if I am wrong about that).  So, unless I have gone dozy, we have two outstanding questions:

 

1.       When complexitists speak of complexity, to what phenomenon are they referring?

2.       What are the conditions that predict the occurrence of such phenomena. 

3.       Does anybody on this list believe that it is fair to include parts of your answer to question #1 in your answer to question #2

 

One more thing.  Back in the email midden several days ago, I said something to Glen that was inadvertently tactless and overtly stupid.  Glen responded with kindness, generosity,  and indefatigable focus on the main issues.   This is to announce my gratitude to Glen for being … well … Glen.  I am honored that you-guys let me sit on the edge of your pool and dangle my feet in it.  That’s a metaphor. 

 

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2017 9:52 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

 

Has anybody mentioned that there are lot of unmarried men that you usually wouldn't call bachelors?  There are widowers, priests, and nineteen year-olds, for example.  I learned the word because my father's brother was a thirty-five year old Major in the Air Force with no wife. He eventually got married and had children. Late bloomer?

 

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone [phone]

 

On Jun 22, 2017 11:34 PM, "gepr ⛧" <[hidden email]> wrote:

But the difference isn't merely rhetorical. If we take the setup seriously, that the unmarried patient really doesn't know the other names by which his condition is known, then there are all sorts of different side effects that might obtain. E.g. if the doctor tells him he's a bachelor, he might google that and discover bachelor parties. But if the doctor tells him he is "single", he might discover single's night at the local pub.

My point was not only the evocation of various ideas, but also the side effects of various (computational) paths.


On June 22, 2017 7:00:55 PM PDT, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

>Glen said: "So, the loop of unmarried <=> bachelor has information in
>it,
>even if the only information is (as in your example), the guy learns
>that
>because the condition has another name, perhaps there are other ways of
>thinking about it ... other _circles_ to use."
>
>This reminds me that, in another context, Nick complained to me quite a
>bit
>about Peirce's asserting that that any concept was simply a collection
>of
>conceived "practical" consequences. He felt that the term "practical"
>was
>unnecessary, and lead to confusions. I think this is a good example of
>why
>Peirce used that term, and felt it necessary.
>
>Perice would point out that the practical consequences of being
>"unmarried"
>are identical to the practical consequences of being "a bachelor."
>Thus,
>though the spellings be different, there is only one idea at play there
>(in
>Peirce-land... if we are thinking clearly). This is the tautology that
>Nick
>is pointing at, and he isn't wrong.
>
>And yet, Glen is still clearly correct that using one term or the other
>may
>more readily invoke certain ideas in a listener. Those aren't practical
>differences in Peirce's sense- they are not differences in practice
>that
>would achieve if one tested the unique implications of one label or the
>other (as there are no contrasting unique implications). The value of
>having the multiple terms is rhetorical, not logical.
>
>What to do with such differences..............

--
⛧glen⛧

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[Steve Smith]

Nick sez:

We have a word for tingo, don’t we?  Its “to ”borrow””.

In my experience 'to "borrow" ', in our culture usually means to "take without permission" or more bluntly "to steal".   That extends to "borrowing without returning" and anecdotally we are familiar with those who seem to do this chronically, though I don't know of it ever driving anyone to pauperhood.   I suppose, in the right extended context, one could claim that "tingo" and " 'borrow' " (with quotes) are roughly sememes...  but that is a LOT of context!

 There are other words in Rapanui for "to steal" which seem to all have an implication of "stealing things of little value", "to pilfer".   I'm not sure that "tingo" is a euphamism for simply borrowing without returning, it might very well be a real cultural experience that doesn't occur (often?) in our culture?

I wonder if there is an analog in "borrow words" between languages... can one language "borrow" so many word from another that the target of the borrowing becomes impoverished?   Within small circles I suppose that one could make that claim for Pidgens/Creoles where the resulting language is so much richer than the word-donor language that it might be true in some figurative sense...  or where the borrow words' meaning becomes more closely associated with the borrowing language than the mother tongue?

Curiouser and curiouser,
 - Steve






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[Vladimyr Burachynsky]

Just how many of these Glens are out there...
I guess they just keep sprouting up like dandelions.

The use of any Word requires a little cooperation from a group.
If I were a solipsist why would I ever need the fiction that you understood my
grunts. Why does each Glen seem to stand in different places as I prepare to hurl
an assault... All Glen's come to some end either willingly or not, same is equally true for all
the Vladimyr's however people do choose to spell it out. My name is for me only
a symbolic token, hiding the skills and scars I have accumulated . When I enter a bar and ask for dark rum
I do not have any interest in how bartender's solve problems.

He is just a man made out of many parts even many minds, not so dissimilar all told.
There is no clear consensus of many minds just the tacit agreement that we will wait
for more insight.

So a Complex Creature wishes to snare a complex cosmos with words before it recognizes
that it is a child of the entire landscape.

I still keep my old Suunto sighting compass on my bookshelf. A little floating circle in a cage of aluminium
illuminated with Thorium. It has a red sash to snare my neck, an old friend. Indeed I keep the GPS on a lower shelf
I used to store maps to locate mushroom colonies , a very clever device.
I guess the new circles adorn the earth in silent orbits. I perform actions very long before
the text is ever perfected. We are driven by someone's will not just editors.

Did we evolve to use/construct  perfect circles, since most of us can detect minute eccentricity.
Maybe the perfection is likened to a god and normal people detest those minds that find fault
 in the heavens as did  Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. Perfection as a delusion has acquired many
foolish defenders. Though well guarded,  it,  delusion/metaphor,  still is useful.

You guys are marvellous, i wish we could meet. But reality does not always provide convenient  stage trap doors.

Vladimyr

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ?glen?
Sent: June-23-17 10:13 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

Ha!  I struggled to come up with "single" as an alternative name and you had 4 waiting in the wings.

I'm going to skip ahead a bit and state that my entire line of rhetoric about circularity goes back to the complexity jargon discussion we were having and whether or not, as Nick put it, a system has a say in its own boundary.  It's all about _closure_.  This particular tangent targets closure from the functional programming perspective (or maybe from the procedural one, depending on how you look at it).  When you execute a loop in a "systems" language like C, you have a good chance that whatever you do in there could have side effects.  But when you do something like that in a purely functional language, you're very unlikely (never) going to leave side effects laying around.

If the unmarried person in the just-so story were somehow "closed", then there would be no side effects left lying around as a result of walking _any_ path from the name "unmarried" to/from any other name like "widow".  But people aren't ever "closed" in any vernacular sense (never mind Rosen's or Kauffman's parsing of agency for a while).  That's why I asserted that the existence of _any_ other name (bachelor, single, widow, whatever) opens up an entirely new world of side effects (including what Peirce should call practical) to the unmarried patient.  The fact that the condition even has _names_ opens it up to nomothetic generality.  An entirely unique condition, showing up nowhere else in space or time will not have a name and is not generalizable, by definition.

FWIW, in his introduction, Nick does distinguish 3 types of implication important to analogical reasoning: "basic", "surplus-intentional", and "surplus-unintentional".  And the latter 2 types are, I think, directly related to computational side effects, where type 3 would be a bug, type 2 might be considered sloppy, and type 1 is the ideal.  This is a fantastic way to talk about this sort of thing.  But it would be easier to discuss if we either avoided discussion of circularity _or_ gave it the full analytic context it needs (starting from a relatively complete definition of closure).

You may be asking: If Nick's talking about analogs and implications, how does that relate to a computational procedure?  Well, simulation has several meanings, the 2 main ones being: mimicry vs. implementation.  I'd say 90% of simulation is about implementation.  E.g. an ODE solver numerically implements (simulates) an ideal/platonic mathematical declaration.  So, when you write a program, the computer that executes it (only during the execution) is an analog to whatever other (physical or platonic) construct might also be described by such a mathematical declaration.  Either of these two analogs can leave (surplus) side effects lying about as they reify their analogous (basic) behaviors.

I hope that's not tl;dr. 8^)


On 06/23/2017 06:52 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Has anybody mentioned that there are lot of unmarried men that you
> usually wouldn't call bachelors?  There are widowers, priests, and
> nineteen year-olds, for example.  I learned the word because my
> father's brother was a thirty-five year old Major in the Air Force
> with no wife. He eventually got married and had children. Late bloomer?

--
␦glen?

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