[FRIAM] Why depth/thickness matters

Wed Feb 8 23:26:12 EST 2017

All, 

I am throwing this in so Eric C. will chew on it when he chews on S.G.’s point.  

For a proper PRAGMATIST, the question is not whether an understanding corresponds to some ephemeral external reality; the question is whether it proves out in future experience.  When state engineers approve a garage construction (see this week’s New Mexican), they in effect make a bet that future experience will show it to have been sound.  When the garage starts to sink into the ground in four years, we say they were wrong to make that bet.  “Reality” in the sense of something outside experience has nothing to do with it.  

The problem perhaps with Holt and Gibson is that they took Peirce’s monism in the opposite direction.  Instead of being experience monists, they became “outside world” monists.  Their Consciousness is just the outside world as described from a position in the outside world.  Truth, for them is just a correspondence of the outside world as seen from all different angles.  The world as seen from 4 years ago turned out to be not the world as seen from today.  Mind has nothing to do with it.  The truest statement is one that doesn’t change when one changes one’s position in the world. Cf, vonUexkull?  I call this the “extentionless dot” theory of consciousness. 

Note that neither Holt, nor his mentor’s mentor, Peirce, would endorse the idea that truth is a correspondence between a mental representation and a world outside human experience that it represents, Peirce because human experience is all we got, and Holt because the outside world is all we got.  

Eric knows a lot about this stuff, having edited a book about Holt, and read a lot more James than I have.  But I wanted to give him a chance to contradict me.  

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 Stephen Guerin
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2017 8:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why depth/thickness matters

The opening of this article would be a complete counter position for an Ecological Psychologist:

  "Students of perception often claim that perception, in general, estimates the truth. They argue that creatures whose perceptions are more true are also, thereby, more fit. Therefore, due to natural selection, the accuracy of perception grows over generations, so that today our perceptions, in most cases, approximate the truth."

As an alternative to the Evolutionary Psychology perspective bias of this paper, Eric Charles may chime in on how Ecological Psychology and the Neo-Gibsonians (Michael Turvey et al) would be aligned with your stance as they also seek to minimizing the reliance on internal representations of "the truth"/reality when explaining perception and action.

I'd further be interested to think about how Eric's example of the Aikido perspective (which Critchlow would appreciate) in his paper could be applied to responding to alt-right attacks in contrast to direct confrontation:

  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44571452_Ecological_Psychology_and_Social_Psychology_It_is_Holt_or_Nothing

Not sure what Holt would say about Rosen's modeling relation.

-S

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On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 1:05 PM, glen ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

  Natural selection and veridical perceptions
  Justin T. Mark, Brian B. Marion, Donald D. Hoffman
  http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/PerceptualEvolution.pdf

> For the weak type, X ⊄ W in general, and g is a homomorphism. Perception need not faithfully mirror any subset of reality, but relationships among perceptions reflect relationships among aspects of reality. Thus, weak critical realists can bias their perceptions based on utility, so long as this homomorphism is maintained.

To me, this evoked RRosen's "modeling relation", wherein he assumes the structure of inferential entailment must be similar to that of causal entailment (otherwise "there can be no science" -- Life Itself, pg. 58).

> For the interface (or desktop) strategy, in general X ⊄ W and g need not be a homomorphism.

This more closely resembles what I (contingently) believe to be true.  Hoffman goes on to define and play some games, the results of which (he thinks) show that the interface strategy, under evolution, can demonstrate how fake news might dominate.  But my interest lies more in the idea that one's internal structure does matter with respect to whether or not one's likely to _believe_ false statements.  And I'm arguing that flattening that internal structure in a kind of holographic principle simply doesn't work with this sort of machine.

An interesting potential contradiction in my own thought lies in:

1) I reject Rosen's assumption of the modeling relation (i.e. inference ≉ cause), and
2) I still think intra-individual circularity is necessary for biomimicry.

--
☣ glen

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