[FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

Sun Apr 23 17:19:55 EDT 2017

Hi, Frank, 

Heluva Question, there! 

Allow me to skip to what seems to be the core question you are asking:

“Nick: What is it that you Peirceian’s think I am doing when I think I am modeling stuff in my head.” 

Gilbert Ryle put this in an even more succinct manner. 

What is Le Penseur doing? 

Now, you of all people, Frank, know how troubling this question is to a behaviorist, particularly one who denies to himself the notion of “unobservable” behavior.  It is the kind of question which has sent me to Peirce, who initially dissappointed me by writing: 

The truth, however, appears to be that all deductive reasoning…involves an element of observation; namely, deduction consists in contructing an icon or diagram the relations of whose parts shall present a complete analogy with those of the parts of the obect of reasoning, of experimenting upon this image in the imagination, and of observing the result so as to discover unnoticed and hidden relations among the parts.  

Now this is dissappointing to me because at first blush, it appears to be a stalwart defense of the notion of “Mental Models”, which so captivated the field of Cognitive Psychology and which, as you know, I deplore.  In fact, so far as I know, it may be the first INVENTION of that notion, in which case, Peirce, not Tolman, would have to be acknowledged as the Father of Cognitive Psychology.  

So, either I have to abandon Peirce, or understand him in another way.  The problem is that I take Peirce to be a neutral monist.  To be a monist is to believe that there is only one kind of stuff in the world.  Now, Idealists and Materialists are both monists of a type, bur I think they are kidding themselves; neither position survives without the implication of the other.  Indeed, for a any monist to name his “stuff” is really inconsistent because in naming it, he implies the possibility of its absense, and that is to step on the slippery slope of dualism.  But to go through the next 100 words using the word stuff, two or three times in a sentence, abhors me, so I am going to give this stuff an name: “experience” stuff.  This experience stuff is not experience of anything else but of other experience.  We begin, thus, by saying that there is a stream of experience in time and that all experience is of other experiences.  In short, we begin in the middle and we regard as silly, a question like, “What was was the FIRST experience of?”  

So we start by assuming that experience is random.  In such a case, no patterns will appear in it, or, at the very list no such patterns will endure.  If patterns do emerge, however,  it would make a lot of sense to mark them and behave in accordance with them.  We note that some things stick with us when we leave a room and they become “self”; others come and go even when we are stationary, and these become “other”. Some are accompanied by immediate suceeding experiences, and these we call objective; others lead to expectations that are not confirmed, and these we call “dreams.”  Etc.  Some objective experiences are immediately confirmed by all of our senses, and these we call “direct”; other experiences are confirmed only by longer chains of experiences, and these we call indirect or abstract.  The blow of a hammer upon a thumb is of the first sort, the collision of two electrons is of the second. 

All behavior, from a monist perspective, consists in experiences of relations between an experience of “seeing” and an experience of “doing”.  When those two experiences are close together in time we experrience a reflex; when they are more distant in time, we experience a response; and when they occur at a still greater distance in time, we experience a deliberate action.  So the difference between your hitting your thumb with a hammer and yelling “Ouch”  and you hitting your thumb for the ninth time and reaching for a pair of pliers to hold the next nail, is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.  

In short, the mystery of the mind, about which we often talk, is really a confusion that arises because we so unreasonably priviledge things that happen half a second apart of being related to one another.  So, looking at Le Penseur and asking, what is he doing?, is like looking at a very highspeed photograph of a moving train and demanding to know how fast it is moving on the basis a single instantaneous image.  The only proper answer is, “We don’t know yet! “

Thanks for the question, 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 11:32 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

So it's easy to substitute the word 'conceptual' for the word 'mental' whenever I talk to you (or Nick).

I'm curious.  My qualifying exam in real analysis consisted of 10 questions (stimuli, inputs?) like "State and prove the Heine-Borel Theorem". The successful response was a written version of a valid proof.  I hadn't memorized the proofs but I had memorized conceptualizations of them. How does that fit?  Would the referents be the proofs in the text or as presented in class?

I passed.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone (505) 670-9918

On Apr 23, 2017 10:00 AM, "┣glen┫" <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

I've made this same point 10s of times and I've clearly failed.  I'll try one last time and then take my failure with me.

When you assert that there's a dividing line between rigorous and whimsical mental models, what are you saying?  It makes no sense to me, whatsoever.  Rigor means something like detailed, accurate, complete, etc.  Even whimsical implies something active, real, behavioral, physical.  In other words, neither word belongs next to "mental".  When you string together mutually contradictory words like "rigorous mental model" or "whimsical mental model", your contradiction prevents a predictable inference.

At least the word "concept" allows one to talk coherently about the abstraction process (abstraction from the environment in which the brain is embedded).  It preserves something about the origins of the things, the concepts.  When you talk of "mental models", then you're left talking about things like "mental constructs" or whatever functional unit of mind you have to carve out, register, as it were.  What in the heck is a "mental construct"?  Where did it come from?  What's the difference between a mental construct and, say, a physical construct?  What _is_ a "mental model"?  How does it differ from any other "mental" thing?  Is there a difference between a "mental foot" and a "mental book"?  What if my "mental books" are peach colored clumps of "mental flesh" with 10 "mental toes"?  It's ridiculous.  Contrast that with the terms "conceptual foot" or "conceptual book".

So, in the end, I simply disagree.  The term "conceptual" does much to illuminate.

On 04/22/2017 08:35 PM, Vladimyr wrote:
> there exists a dividing line between rigorous and whimsical mental models
>
> that the term “conceptual” does little to illuminate.

--
␦glen?

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