[FRIAM] Why depth/thickness matters

Fri Feb 10 09:31:52 EST 2017

Eric, 

Much to chew on here.  Medical stuff this morning, then friam, so later!

N

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 Eric Charles
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2017 6:06 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why depth/thickness matters

Alright.... some more sensible responses, hopefully hitting all the prior comments:

1) Mark, Marrion, & Hoffman, like almost all biologists interested in perception, conflate two types of question. The first, is whether there is sufficient structured energy (for lack of a better term) that reaches the organism, in order to specify the interesting states of the world. The traditional answer to this in "no", Gibson's answer is "yes", and that changes all sorts of things about how the problems of perception must be approached. The second, is how well organisms can attune (for lack of a better term) with the available information (via evolutionary and developmental processes). The authors also port in the suspect assumption that seeing correctly takes more time and energy. This is because they have no theory of ambient energy or perceptual systems, which flows from their having answered "no" to that first question. (As a rough metaphor: A well-kept radio doesn't take more time or energy to get a clear resonance with a station than a poorly-kept radio takes to get a crappy resonance with the same station.)  The simulation they ran is interesting for what it is, another demonstration of the potential benefits of heuristic decision making (see "Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart") but it doesn't have the implications for perception that they think it does. And.... as a final parting shot.... why they thought "choice of a territory" based on difficult-to-detect-food-and-water-resources was a good modeling context for basic questions about "perception", is pretty dumbfounding. 

2) Regarding responses to alt-right attacks, I think the fundamental problem is thinking that the truth of the matter is what is at issue. We need to be looking to Orwell regarding the destruction of language and the need to stick up for the basic meaning of terms. We need to stop thinking that the most clever answer is the winning one, or that acts of "rebellion" like reading a statement in a hallway after the cool kids kicked you out of the senate "sure showed them." The retreat isn't to high-ground, it is to salt-of-the-earth folksiness, which in the U.S. has always carried a bite. Holt's ethics (from "The Freudian Wish and its Place in Ethics") would be quite helpful. The fundamental question there is whether you are acting with respect to the actual world. To act ethically is to act with respect to what is really happening, and to act unethically is to act without respect to what is really happening. For that to work, you need to believe that there are things that are really happening, and you need to call it like you see it in bare ways. 

3)  The philosophical argument about "relations" is hard to appreciate outside of the obvious context at the time (though that context continues to influence today, it is now much more subtle and nefarious). The context was that many old fashioned empiricists, and even some idealists, admitted that certain things could be known, while claiming that the relations between things were entirely "mental". The most well known attack along these lines was the assertion that causation was entirely inferred from observed correlation, i.e., that all perceived causation was ipso facto imaginary. However, it can get much more dramatic, i.e., if you believe that people can only know sense impressions, then even the clumping of those sense impressions into an "object" --- which entails relating some sense impressions to, say, the desk I am typing on, and other sense impressions to the surrounding room --- would be seen as entirely an additive mental act (i.e., you "mind" added more to what was available to it).  Given the recently (at the time) discovered projective geometry, even a judgment regarding whether one thing is above the another (a seemingly external relation), could be viewed as completely, dualistically, mental in nature. The assertion that external relations were real, and detectable, was thus a very big deal. 

4) Gibson did some very interesting writing during and shortly after the WWII period about social psychology and perception which, unfortunately, he never really followed up on later in his career. It is a small number of publications regarding race relations and other such things. It would seem that his view was that social processes shaped what we did or did not pay attention to in the world. Also, following Holt, he believed that the truth was out there, ready to be detected (cue X-files music). For example, if were told that certain races were less than human, all you would have to do was observe to see the error of such a claim. However, depending on the circumstances of the claim (who made it, etc.), the claim itself might lead you to ignore the evidence, even when it was right in front of you. He seemed very much to view this with the exact same logic he would use in more straightforward perception-action situations, i.e., in the same way the instructions "don't look down" could, if followed, get you to ignore the perceivable danger or safety inherent in a situation. This work has been almost entirely ignored by ecological psychologists, even those interested in social stuff. The only recent paper I know about that covers the topic is by Harry Heft, and will be published shortly (I'll get a copy to the list after it is out).  

Holy cow that's a wide variety of stuff..... How did this all start again? Where are we going? Did I miss anything crucial?

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 8:14 PM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> > wrote:

Late to the party, but still lots to chew on! 

It is unfortunate that everyone wants to throw the simulation/representation/modeling wrench into the middle of what might otherwise be a very sensible story about about dynamic systems. (And if you like the dynamic systems side of things, Tony Chemero's "Radical Embodied Cognitive Science" does an excellent job explaining why "representation" talk ads nothing to serious models of perception-action.)  

While I digest, the posts above, and try to make a more focused response, I can offer a contrasting view of how I think evolutionary theories of perception should look (attached, forthcoming, pending miner revision). 

Best,

Eric

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 2:26 PM, glen ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

The way you worded this confuses me.  Did you mean "truth is a correspondence between"?  Or did you mean something like "truth can be corresponded with"?  I typically use the word "truth" to mean the outside, alone, not a map between the outside and inside.  The map between them would be the grounding.  Granted, Hoffman et al's use of the label "truth" to mean a particular strategy was more like the map.

But if you did mean to talk specifically about the inside ⇔ outside map, then you're saying that neither Holt nor Peirce would accept Rosen's assumption of his modeling relation (that inference ≈ causality).  That's interesting.  Another thread from Eric's paper follows from his #2 highlight from New Realism: "Relations are real, and hence detectable".  This also evoked Rosen's evocation of Nicolas Rashevsky and relational biology (cf: https://ahlouie.com/relational-biology/ "Relational biology, on the other hand, keeps the organization and throws away the matter; function dictates structure, whence material aspects are entailed.").

It's entirely reasonable to think of edges vs vertices in a graph as perfect duals, to study one is to study the other.  But what Eric seemed to be saying was that relations were elevated to the same status as the organisms, not a flip-flop like we think of as duals.  So studying just the organisms or just the relations would be inadequate.

On 02/08/2017 08:26 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> 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.

--
☣ glen

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