[FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Tue Feb 21 20:45:25 EST 2017

Thanks for the structure of thought .

So am I an Iconoclast because I am all too aware of the misuse of Icons ( simulations). I taught FEM and CAD and

saw puzzlement on the, soon to be, engineers faces. I have watched engineers sneak out of the lecture hall when I started showing slides of 

summation of stacked matrices flying across the screen.

So this alludes to a possible intrinsic Tautology or Loopiness in our brains. The representation is conflated with the speculative but unknown reality (since it is never completely understood anyway) Switching from one state to the other might be called metaphysical thinking. A wonderful source of confusion.

Being totally immersed in a computer game might be said to be in the groove but when one man fights another and we call that being in the groove then are we conflating two models. If one is slaughtering the enemies on a game platform one can say he is free of ethics or morality. When Bruce Lee does the same on film

many thought it real. but those who actually fought in life knew it was BS on  constrained/elevated ropes.

If the  mirror neurons discussed at length do as described then they must occupy configurations near identical to neurons trained by self discovery (learning)

Then actual differentiation would seem very difficult. 

I have a daughter  formally trained as a M.Sc. BioMedical Artist and we used to argue about symbolic thinking , she pro and I con. But the strangest part is that I am also or was considered a fair artist and illustrator for a time. Indeed I use symbols very well but mistrust others with lesser skill. Yet the most skillful are the most dangerous at least in engineering. She would regularly remark that I sketched in perspective complex machinery that did not yet exist and then built the working prototypes. Nothing elegant but functional. She claimed only to draw what already  really existed dead or alive, I always thought those arguments were small expeditions into some form of knowledge about human thinking. She thought otherwise unfortunately, but I have never had the fortune to meet another with her combination of talents.  Somewhere in this quasi-church may be others lurking in the shadows.

I admit to being a rather visual thinker so data visualization is my hobby now. And understanding Normal People, since they are so many...

Perhaps this is not exactly the correct thread but miss the song of larks on the prairie fields. A few notes brings back so many memories and the smells

of clover and honey.

vib

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Robert Wall
Sent: February-21-17 2:46 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

Hi Glen,

What you describe as flow or being in the zone has been precisely written <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W94FE6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1>  and talked <https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow#t-396713>  about by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as the Optimal Experience.  No one will experience this quite the same way, as the flow experience requires both skill and challenge in an area where flow will occur. By his own statements, Einstein is said to have been in flow when he synthesized the concept of General and Special Relativity. At the time he was arguably very skilled in math and physics and, of course, very challenged.

However, I prefer Alfred North Whitehead's (et al.) concept that we are all always in flow. We just don't alway realize it. In his Process Philosophy, as conveyed  in his Process and Reality, he writes about the two modes of perceptual experience: (1) Presentational Immediacy [the bits of data that get presented to us through our senses--or imagination] and (2) Causal Efficacy [the conditioning of the present by the past]. Curiously, Csikszentmihalyi says that we can only process data from our senses at a rate of 110 bit/sec.  Reading this post likely will chew up 60 bits/sec. of that bandwidth. 😴

Why I bring this up at all is that Whitehead thinks that what integrates these two modes into the whole of what we perceive is Symbolic Reference. Symbolic reference is kind of like how we tag bits of our real-world immersion for building a largely symbolic but sustainable--for us individually--worldview. Most time these symbolic references are provided to us--inculcated--by others like with a religion or by our parents.  Most are satisfied with that. In your friend's case, I believe it is possible that y' all were unsettling--challenging--his worldview ... or, he challenging yours. 

Flow is not likely to be aroused in a social context. It is an inner state ... what the Greeks and Csikszentmihalyi would say is the entering into an alternate reality devoid of our sense of self.  Your existence melts away in such a state. So our symbols get challenged or, perhaps, disappear as well. French social philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze also talk about symbolism, but it was at a social level.  As far as I am concerned, Flow can't be achieved at the level of society ... but, boy I wish that that were not so.  Csikszentmihalyi talks about the opposite of Flow that occurs on a social level that often occurs when society has been thrown into a chaos as with war or Trumpism. 🤔

Is mathematics invented or discovered?  This is a perennial topic that arises within my philosophy group.  It never really gets resolved, but how could it be?   It is the ultimate of symbolic reference systems because of its precision in predicting the way the world manifests itself to our perception. This is not so true of our other symbols or abstractions. So are they any different?  In a way, they are because mathematical symbols form from an axiom-driven language. But, notwithstanding Jerry Fodor's "built-in" syntactic language of thought, languages are human inventions based on metaphors [if you like George Lakoff].  Languages work among cultures because they are more or less conventional (acceptable) to a culture.  The fact that they can be translated into other languages is because we are all immersed in the same reality. In this way, I tend to think of mathematics as invented. If you are a Platonist--a worldview--you will likely disagree. 

As I often do, I  kind of resonate with Vladimyr's thought, which you included in your post. It is very Csikszentmihalyi-est. I do think that simulations can lure us into thinking that they are an exact dynamic facsimile of the reality which they try to abstract into an analytical model.  There are all kinds of things about simulations that can lead us astray. Fidelity is one thing, obviously.  But, I think that the worst thing--and this is often the fate of a simulator because of time and funding--is when they get so complicated that no one understands the process for how the results were computed.  This--like with many neural networks--is when the simulator just become an Oracle.  This is kind of what happened with Henry Markam's Blue Brain Project <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain-project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/> , building a simulation of something for which they didn't know the first principles.  I think also this is what John Horgan wrote about concerning what was going on at the Santa Fe Institute in his SA article From Complexity to Perplexity <http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/hogan.complexperplex.htm> . 

But, as Vladimyr muses, maybe this is the best we can do ... and symbolic reference is what nature served up for us to cope, concerning what we are perceiving.  But, as with all smart systems, a smart entity will always try to challenge and refine those symbols with continuous feedback--FLOW.  However, in the larger scheme of things, it really doesn't matter if mathematics was invented or discovered. I mean, where did the concept of a hammer come from? 🤔

Cheers

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:13 AM, glen ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

There's no doubt that there's some kernel of truth to the concept of "flow" or "in the zone".  I always make the mistake of thinking others have had similar experiences to mine.  But at our journal club a few weeks ago, while discussing whether math is invented or discovered, one guy kept conflating mathematical symbols with their semantic grounding.  A couple of us kept trying to make the point that after you've abstracted all the symbols away from their grounding, so that you're just manipulating the symbols, you get into the state where you start to think of the math, itself, as having an ontological existence.  You're "in the zone", so to speak, where the math becomes real as opposed to a proxy for the real.  That the other guy couldn't grok it could be a sign that he's never entered that zone, hamstrung by his grounding to physical reality.

Or, he could have simply felt defensive because he thought we kept attacking him ... you never know how some people interpret the milieu.

On 02/20/2017 10:44 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
> Some music allows some people to focus longer. Maybe Taser jolts work for others. The simulation lures us into fantasy lands. Which I kinda like sometimes.
> Time links these sims of mine but temporality is a coincidence not a true cause and we don't live long enough to test every contingency, so we make do with delusions. There seems no path out of this box. The box just grows with us.
> vib
>
> So why did evolution place so much emphasis on time...

--
☣ glen

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