[FRIAM] Why depth/thickness matters

[glen ☣]

Thanks for pointing that out.  I found this other article of Eric's more helpful:

  The (Old) New Realism: What Holt Has to Offer for Ecological Psychology
  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12124-008-9075-6

But I've only skimmed them too quickly.  It seems to my impoverished understanding that Eric's description of ecological psychology assumes a larger dimensionality to the world out there than Hoffman assumes.  I infer from phrases like "extracting information from ambient energy arrays that specify our surroundings (sometimes referred to as resonating with the structure of the arrays)" that the world is fairly rich.  Hoffman's conception seems to suggest that there can be a very tiny, perhaps even simple, kernel of the world that would exist entirely _without_ the organisms, but that the majority of the medium through which the organisms swim is co-constructed by the organisms.

It's a game of "logic, logic, who's got the logic?"  If you place more logic in the environment, then the actors will be more likely to find paths to a common semantic ground.  But if you place more logic in the actors, then they'll be more likely to find meaning in whatever communities they're in (and have been in, given structured memory).

If I've read that difference right, the key to Hoffman's "results" that fake news will dominate lies in the logic ratio medium:organism.  Perhaps there's even a tipping point below which fake news will dominate and above which truth will dominate.  And this would allow us to consider the role of technology (extended phenotype) like Twitter or even investigative journalism as well as deeper concepts like argument from authority.

I tend to think of things like calculators and Google as parts of my brain. (Was it Einstein that said "never memorize what you can look up"?)  As we delegate our logic out to the medium, perhaps we can preserve the Progressive Agenda?  The election of Trump and such might seem to argue against that.  But perhaps it's a counter-intuitive result that _because_ we're getting closer to the Truth as technology advances, the morons come out of the woodwork in a reactionary backlash against the progression?



On 02/08/2017 07:41 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> 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.

-- 
☣ glen