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

[Eric Charles]

Hmmmmm..... while I don't disagree with Nick, I also don't think he
answered the question. It might well be that when we ask what a thinking
man is doing in any particular instance, we are missing the point. And yet,
as the man sits for longer and longer in his thoughts, that argument seems
itself to have become more remote with regards to our concerns. Further, it
seems empirically true that the man who gets up from thinking is sometimes
different than the man who sat down to begin his pondering. What is THAT
about?

There is not a good answer to this question. I wrote a chapter with British
experimental psychologists Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka about the
problem recently, in a collected volume on American Philosophy and the
Brain. We lamented the lack of a good language with which to talk about
what the brain does, arguing that cognitive-psychology speak is inadequate
and was holding back the field. (Nothing too novel in that.) We also made
some solid suggestions about what the new language would need to look like
- drawing from ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, and the like
- even though we couldn't commit on its final form. Much of the text can be
found here, and I'll get the full text if anyone is interested:
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=TvgqAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA127&dq=charles+andrew+sabrina+neuropragmatism&ots=F-EM6R_Zq1&sig=xa9EbE82QAxAXQVrtad64a-w6Ds#v=onepage&q=charles%20andrew%20sabrina%20neuropragmatism&f=false


The answer has to be something of the form: He is reconfiguring himself.

To the extent that he is "consciously thinking": He is responding to the
fact that he is reconfiguring himself. He is like a man "psyching" himself
up to lift a heavy weight, in that he has a "sense" of whether his body
(brain included) is ready for the task ahead or not.

To elaborate: Humans show a remarkable capacity to rapidly reconfigure into
different types of "task-specific devices" (TSDs). That is, we are well
tuned to (relatively) skillfully do one thing at one moment, and a
different thing at a different moment. After contemplation, our thinking
man is a different dynamic system than he was before, and he now connects
to the larger dynamic system of himself-in-his-environment differently than
he did before - he is sensitive to different variables, and responds to
variables differently than before. While physiological psychology covers a
wide range of systems, including hormonal systems, gut physiology, and
lymphatic response, such processes are generally slow, operating on the
scope of minutes to days. More rapid reconfiguration suggests
that alteration of neuronal mechanisms is the best explanation for the
changes observed during a typical bout of "thinking."

These changes in neuronal mechanisms are a key component in a change in the
habits (relatively predictable responses) one is prepared to display based
on surrounding events.

The question of self-awareness, then, is a question of how one re-cognizes
what one is predisposed to do. This relates to the issue of apparent
"higher-order" self-regulation by which one keeps one's self reconfiguring
until one is ready to act, or until some additional factor pressures
action. The principles that apply on that "higher" level, ought to be
expressible in the same terms as those which operate on the "lower" levels.
The skill of knowing when one is ready to answer a math problem, or give
the public speech, or drive to work, etc., should be viewed as equivalent
to the skill of knowing when one is ready to lift a given weight. Some
weights are light enough that one is essentially always ready, some are
close enough to the limits of one's ability that being (as much as is
possible) the right type of task-specific device is crucial, and still
other weights are so heavy that no amount of effort towards
rapid reconfiguration will suffice. So it is with solving math problems,
nailing a speech, or navigating dangerous roads in a vehicle.  I fully
acknowledge that lifting the near-limit weight will also rely on several of
those minute-scaled bodily changes (blood oxygen, adrenaline, etc.).
However, the key point is that whatever language we come to agree upon most
allow us to highlight the similarities between that situation and the more
typical examples of "thinking", rather than making it seem as if there is a
an uncrossable gulf between the two activities.







-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps
<echarles at american.edu>

On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 5:19 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> 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/
>
>
>
> *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> 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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