[FRIAM] Narrating Complexity

[Frank Wimberly]

👍

----
Frank Wimberly
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
Phone (505) 670-9918

On Dec 19, 2017 5:45 PM, "Prof David West" <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> In my opinion, Glen is right to be worried, and more than a little worried
> about the idea that "narrative" is fundamental to cognition.
>
> Simultaneously, I am a huge fan of "story" and do believe that "story" is
> fundamental to cognition.
>
> My antipathy towards narrative theory, and the resolution of the partial
> contradiction above, is that I see narrative theorists as a group of
> academics that are trying to "formalize" something that is fundamentally
> aformal.
>
> That vast majority of what we know, individually and collectively was
> acquired via story (70-75%); while 20-25% was acquired via direct
> experience (but shared with others via story); and only 2-5% of what we
> know was acquired formally as 'book learning'.
>
> Ever since we started talking to each other, and telling stories around
> the fire pit, we have had no difficulty telling intelligible, meaningful,
> and useful stories about complex systems - after all we have lived in one
> and interacted with one, pretty successfully, for tens of thousands of
> years.
>
> If narrative theory, as presently formalized, cannot deal with complexity,
> then the issue is with the formalism - it is fatally flawed.
>
> In my opinion, this is the same issue with AI, both classical and the
> current resurgence of "AI in everything" fad - intelligence is defined as
> what the machine can do, what the formalisms that drive the machine can
> handle, and not what goes on in the embodied minds of human beings. When
> the singularity occurs and the machines take over, it is not because they
> are 'are cognitively superior and think better than us" it is because we
> allowed them to define away, as "not cognition," that which is unique to
> human minds.
>
> Narrative theorists, again only in my opinion, do the same thing with
> story: anything not congruent with the theory is excluded as not cognition.
>
> davew
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 18, 2017, at 3:51 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> >
> > This was helpful:
> >
> > https://www.academia.edu/4163381/
> > Narrating_Complexity_The_Antipathy_of_Stories_and_Systems
> >
> > Ultimately, I'm a little worried about the idea that narrative is
> > somehow fundamental to thought/understanding. I'm completely ignorant of
> > any official domain called "Narrative".  But I tend to associate it with
> > stories, most importantly *including* stories that include concrete
> > detail.  And concreteness is antithetic to the type of "conceptual
> > model" I'm inferring from both Stepney's and Walsh's (from the above
> > presentation) sense/use of the term.  This is my core concern.
> >
> > But first, I'd like to broach a more peripheral concern.  Walsh's defn:
> > "The semiotic articulation of linear temporal sequence" very clearly
> > lays out the sequentiality.  But, at least with computation, isn't it
> > relatively accepted that any parallel process can be simulated by a
> > sequential process?  And if so, couldn't we claim that this
> > sequentiality isn't that much of a limiting factor?  I mean, sure, it
> > may be merely approximate, or inaccurate, or whatever.  But, basically,
> > this would mean their research program would become showing which, in
> > particular, types of complex adaptive systems cannot be approximated by
> > narrative and the naive claim that *no* CAS can ever be adequately
> > approximated would be unjustified or too extreme.
> >
> > The more important concern goes back to the accusation of idealism I
> > often lob.  I don't believe narrative is core to *my* cognition.  Yes,
> > when interacting mostly in symbols (like books, email, etc.), narrative
> > seems dominant.  But I would claim that's an artifact, a side effect, of
> > the underlying process(es). A quick way to my point is the accusation of
> > "book learning" vs. doing.  It's notoriously difficult to *tell* someone
> > how to, ride a bike or hit a baseball with a bat.  Such telling does
> > tend to be narrative, a kind of recipe, I suppose.  But is the narrative
> > necessary for *understanding* how to hit a baseball?  Or for
> > understanding what it *means* to ride a bicycle?  I would say "no."
> >
> > Understanding is a concrete thing, done with the *body*, not with some
> > abstraction in the *mind*. To go a step further, the objects pointed to
> > by the signs in a narrative, are fully complex processes. The narratives
> > really are just lossy models of the complex experiences. So, one person
> > compresses her experience(s) into a word salad.  Another person reads
> > that word salad and the signs are interpreted to map to concretely
> > *different* complex processes in the receiver.  I like the quote from
> > Herman below.  But even that doesn't go far enough.  Rather than say it
> > the way Herman does, I'd prefer to say narrative is a justificationist
> > technique for formulating hypotheses (whether testable or not).  Then
> > the concrete experiences of executed *tests* of those hypotheses are
> > understanding (like when a child actually slides a block down an incline
> > as opposed to hearing descriptions of blocks sliding down inclines). The
> > experiment is the understanding.  The narratives are only related to
> > reality to the extent they cause repeatable experiences (through both
> > inter- and intra-agent repetition).
> >
> > Anyway, none of what I say is probably new to Walsh or Stepney and they
> > probably have answers.  But it's curious.  I'm intrigued by one of the
> > text boxes in the "Cognition" box of slide 60: "Narrative cognition
> > (relation to other modes of cognition)".  It'll be interesting to see if
> > the upcoming book talks about that.
> >
> >
> > On 12/17/2017 09:03 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> > >
> > >       Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >     David Herman, ed.
> > >     /Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences/.
> > >     CSLI. 2003
> > > [...]
> > > Herman
> > >
> > >     /Narrative can have many cognitive functions. It is a system for
> structuring patterns of events progressing through time: for structuring
> processes. It can be used to “chunk” experiences into “frames” of
> stereotypical experiences, then used to compare this typical against the
> actual. This helps us to understand the world more, and therefore have to
> memorise less. It allows us to generate and evaluate what-if scenarios. It
> allows us to draw coherent system boundaries: to extract and bound a
> relevant collection of participants, events, and structures from the
> overall stream of events we experience. /
> >
> >
> > --
> > ☣ uǝlƃ
> > ============================================================
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>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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