[FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

Fri Sep 22 09:51:37 EDT 2017

Simulation, hmm.  As I read a cover article in Nature several years ago, a
study of tennis players established that their nervous systems implemented
a Bayesian model of where the tennis ball was going in order to prepare for
the possible return actions that might be necessary.  This reminds me of
the mythical martial artist who is quietly waiting for the adversary to
commit to one branch of the ensemble of possible attacks.  So when the
actor believes in a probabilistic network of possible futures, updates
those expectations according to each iota of evidence as it is received,
and acts accordingly, is that belief or skepticism?

-- rec --

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 9:32 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:

> Eric writes:
>
>
> "But at least one of the reasons to have a mind is to simulate many more
> actions than one can take.  I guess I would say that concepts like belief
> refer to very materially instantiated patterns in those contexts of
> simulation.  But again, that is a topic that has been raised and jousted
> over in hundreds of FRIAM pages by now, so I am not adding anything new to
> it here."
>
>
> More than fifteen years ago, one of my colleagues roped me into teaching a
> complexity summer school where we were tasked to teach agent based
> modelling.   Absolutely dreading this task, I instead wrote a quick
> simulation of such jousting -- the projection of personality down to a
> lower dimensional space.   At that time, the tradition was a 2-d
> representation with time iteration, not a 1-d with time iteration.    I
> think a model of this forum should at least have two dimensions, as the
> jousters will often be on oblique angles and miss one another,
> intentionally or not.   In any case, this was _my_ idea and don't steal it!
>   I will dig up the Java code to prove it!
>
>
> Marcus
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Eric Smith <
> desmith at santafe.edu>
> *Sent:* Friday, September 22, 2017 4:14:01 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia
>
> Thanks Nick,
>
> Yes, I understand the distinctions below.  I am glad I opened with “Some
> how I imagine that…”, giving me enough wiggle room to have been wrong in
> the imagination to almost any degree.  Small larding below, because I too
> have been under the gun to do something I don’t want to do, but there will
> be hell to pay for my stalling now.
>
> > As a behaviorist, I have to concede that it is possible to act
> tentatively.  When I am meeting a dog for the first time, I extend the back
> of my hand into the danger zone near its muzzle, rather than putting out my
> hand confidently and stroking its neck, head, or flank.  This allows the
> dog a chance to smell my hand and me a chance to gauge its intentions.  Am
> I acting in doubt.  I guess it depends on what the proposition is.  If the
> proposition is that I am safe to reach out and pet the dog, I definitely
> doubt that.  If the proposition is that no dog is safe to touch on the
> first meeting, then my tentative behavior affirms that belief.
> >
> > Peirce defined belief as that upon which we act and doubt as the absence
> of belief.  It follows logically that anything we act on affirms some
> belief and, therefore, at the moment of action, extinguishes all contrary
> beliefs.  If you follow me here, I may appear to win the argument, but only
> on sophistic points.
>
> I think I understand the alliance between the position you represent as
> Peirce’s, and behaviorism.  With a lot of effort to stay in the discipline,
> and not slip back into reflecting my own intuitions, I could perhaps even
> mimic the kinds of arguments that this alliance makes.
>
> As you probably already know, I am comfortable enough working with even
> sometimes vaguely-understood terms that this position bothers me as
> bleaching language.  If there were never a value-difference between what
> one was (or could have been) seen to do, and what was afterwards
> characterized as one’s beliefs at the time, then it is questionable whether
> there is any reason to have two words in the language.  I imagine (again)
> that the adamant behaviorists would like to see the word “belief” expunged,
> though perhaps there is room in their lexicon to have to words that always
> take (as a matter of logic, or of construction) the same values, but which
> are allowed to carry different names because they are interfaces of those
> selfsame values to contexts or environments of different kinds.  To me it
> seems more plausible that mental-state terms such as “belief” exist in the
> informal lexicon, as distinct from taken-action, not only because whatever
> our inner life is makes it appealing for us to use such terms, but also
> because there is an empirical, inter-subjectively available structure in
> tentativeness that the notion of beliefs as something with an independent
> existence from realized actions does a good job capturing.  So not only are
> we inclined to use the word, but nature and discourse reinforce us to some
> extent in doing so.  But at the same time as you probably know this is my
> preferred assumption, I read you as having energetically argued that it is
> invalid, against any number of opponents, so we let that stand.
>
> > Allow me to go for a KO.
>
> but that requires so little….
>
> > When you are interacting with humans, how exactly DO you decide what
> they believe?
>
> If this were the only frame for such a question, would it not say that
> there is no referent for Ontology apart from a mirror of Epistemology?  The
> important thing here being the extreme corner into which it tries to push
> the argument: we are not talking about all angles from which there might be
> grounds to use such a word, but that the question of the _existence_ of a
> referent for it is to be nothing more than a reflection of the
> epistemological means to assign _values_ to particular instances.  I can
> think of cases where this was the right thing to do (getting rid of
> Newtonian time), but also cases where it amounts to insisting that the most
> restricted forms of evidence are the only ones to be admitted, and that
> much larger bodies of pattern that are not thoroughly analyzed are to be
> dismissed out of hand (historical linguistics in the old Germanic practice
> from before the age of probabilistic reasoning), which I think I can show
> were wrong.
>
> Perhaps because there is so much that I not only don’t know, but am poorly
> suited to being able to “get”, it is congenial to me to think that deciding
> what values something has, or even what something “is” as the referent for
> a word, can be very hard even if the value and the referent exist.  More
> things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, etc.
>
> > What are the practices you would engage in to test the belief of
> somebody.  Can you imagine a test of some belief that would allow you to
> infer that I believe something even though my actions are inconsistent with
> that belief?  Would that be rational on your part, or just evidence of your
> Christian good nature?  Or your belief in a non-material mind?
>
> Not non-material.  But at least one of the reasons to have a mind is to
> simulate many more actions than one can take.  I guess I would say that
> concepts like belief refer to very materially instantiated patterns in
> those contexts of simulation.  But again, that is a topic that has been
> raised and jousted over in hundreds of FRIAM pages by now, so I am not
> adding anything new to it here.
>
> Moriturus te saluto,
>
> Eric
>
>
> >
> > All the best,
> >
> > Nick
> >
> > Nicholas S. Thompson
> > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> > Clark University
> > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <friam-bounces at redfish.com>] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> > Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2017 4:44 PM
> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia
> >
> > Somehow I imagine that Nick means to say there are costly signals in
> this game — that motor action is thicker than conversation or reflection.
> >
> > If I am walking across a snowfield that I know to be filled with
> crevasses, and I know I can’t tell which snow holds weight and which
> doesn’t, my movement is really different than it is putting my feet on the
> floor beside the bed in the morning.
> >
> > To take a different example that is counterfactual but easier to use in
> invoking the real physiological paralysis, if Thank God Ledge on halfdome
> were not actually a solid ledge, but a fragile bridge, or if there had been
> a rockfall that left part of it missing and I were blindfolded, or if I
> were a prisoner of pirates blindfolded and made to walk the plank, my steps
> would land differently than they do when I get out of bed in the morning.
> >
> > There I didn’t say what anyone else would do in any circumstance, but
> did claim that my own motions have different regimes that are viscerally
> _very_ distinct.  I’m not sure I can think about whether I would fight for
> air when being drowned.  It might be atavistic and beyond anything I
> normally refer to as “thought”.  I certainly have had people claim to me
> that that is the case.
> >
> > Those distinctions may occupy a different plane than the distinction
> between reasonableness and dogmatism all in the world of conversation and
> the social exchange.
> >
> > But I should not speak for others.  Only for myself as a spectator.
> >
> > Eric
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Sep 21, 2017, at 4:32 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> No regrets or apology are needed.  And even if we are about to "argue
> about words" ... I forget what famous dead white guy said that ... it's
> still useful to me.
> >>
> >> You say: "if one acts in the assurance that some fact is the case, one
> cannot be said to really doubt it"  The answer is clarified by reading
> Marcus' post.  If you act with assurance, then you're not open to changing
> your mind.  So, you've simply moved the goal posts or passed the buck.
> >>
> >> I *never* act with assurance, as far as I can tell.  Every thing I do
> seems plagued with doubt.  I can force myself out of this state with some
> activities.  Running more than 3 miles does it.  Math sometimes does it.
> Beer does it.  Etc.  But for almost every other action, I do doubt it.  So,
> I don't think we're having the discussion James and Peirce might have.  I
> think we're talking about two different types of people, those with a
> tendency to believe their own beliefs and those who tend to disbelieve
> their own beliefs.
> >>
> >> Maybe it's because people who act with assurance are just smarter than
> people like me?  I don't know.  It's important in this modern world, what
> with our affirmation bubbles, fake news, and whatnot.  What is it that
> makes people prefer to associate with people whose beliefs they share?
> What makes some people prefer the company of people different from them?
> Etc.
> >>
> >>
> >> On 09/21/2017 01:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> >>> I am afraid this discussion is about to dissolve into a quibble about
> the meaning of the words "doubt" and "belief", but let's take it one more
> round.    In my use of the words ... and I think Peirce's ... one can
> entertain a doubt without "really" having one.  Knowledge of perception
> tells us that every perceived "fact" is an inference subject to doubt and
> yet, if one acts in the assurance that some fact is the case, one cannot be
> said to really doubt it, can one?   It follows, then, that to the extent
> that we act on our perceptions, we act without doubt on expectations that
> are doubtable.
> >>>
> >>> Eric Charles may be able to help me with this:  there is some debate
> between William  James and Peirce about whether the man, being chased by
> the bear who pauses at the edge of the chasm, and then leaps across it,
> doubted at the moment of leaping that he could make the jump.  I think
> James says Yes and Peirce says No.  If that is the argument we are having,
> then I am satisfied we have wrung everything we can out of it.
> >>>
> >>> Anyway.  I regret being cranky, but I can't seem to stop.  Is that
> another example of what we are talking about here?
> >>
> >> --
> >> ☣ gⅼеɳ
> >>
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