[FRIAM] Formalizing the concept of design

[Stephen Guerin]

Eric,

Thanks for forwarding Bob Shaw's work to the list. I had the honor of
sharing a few pints with Bob at "Sweet Williams" Pub, in Michael Turvey's
and Claudio Carello's basement :-)

Nick, check out the video Eric linked to and then maybe this paper:
"Hints of Intelligence From First Principles" with his son Jeff.
   http://commons.trincoll.edu/robertshaw/files/2016/02/first_principles.pdf

As we've discussed over the last few years, The Action Principle (energy *
time) and least (stationary) action may provide a more fundamental
selection principle in biology than natural selection and could be a
mathematical formulation you're asking for. Many applied problems in
complexity like ant algorithms using dual pheromone fields, level-set
methods, and route search on a road network using simultaneous floodflill
from both origins and destinations might be considered least action path
selection. I make the claim on intuition - I expect Eric Smith would reject
or accept this based on more formal understanding.





On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 12:32 PM Eric Charles <
eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bob Shaw has spend a good chunk of his career trying to do this at what I
> would call a "lower level of analysis" even though that might not be the
> right term. His "intentional dynamics" are about trying to use
> dynamic-systems math to try to say what "intentionality" looks like in the
> topology of an action. Thus, when I say "lower level" I mean that he is
> interested in how one moves through the room to accomplish a goal, rather
> than *that *one is doing a move-through-the-room option, which is what
> Nick tends to focus on. That said, both approaches connect strongly, I
> believe, with E.B. Holt's assertion that a central task of psychology is to
> determine what aspects of the world our behavior is a function of, i.e.,
> the assertion that one is "*trying* to leave the room" is a *description*
> about how one is acting, contextualized by an array of actions that would
> result in an array of various outcomes.
>
> https://commons.trincoll.edu/robertshaw/
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om0HV5TQkXw
>
> Bob's work might really appeal to some on the list, which is why I have
> linked both to his webpage and a talk from a few years ago. Differential
> geometry, Feynman path integral, system dynamics, etc. If you want to skip
> the less contextualized technical stuff and get to the big picture of his
> effort, regarding the relation between the math he is using and psychology,
> you could start at minute 50 and watch for about 10 minutes.
>
> For a touch more context: Bob was a crucial player in the second
> generation of "ecological psychologists", those who kept James J. Gibson's
> work alive after his death. Gibson's work is now extremely influential in
> the emerging fields of "embodied cognition" (often called "enactivisim" in
> European contexts). That said, most researchers in the field aren't
> mathematically sophisticated enough to connect with Bob's work, and it is
> technically challenging to implement in experiments, as such, few are
> working on the project besides Bob, which is unfortunate.
>
>
> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Supervisory Survey Statistician
> U.S. Marine Corps
> <echarles at american.edu>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 6:53 AM ∄ uǝʃƃ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This description suffers from the same criticism I made before: you're
>> assuming a *strict* hierarchy, where the higher order can only operate over
>> whole components from the lower order.  I.e. the gun's algorithm 1st
>> chooses the type/medium of target (ballistic, air, water), then uses that
>> type to select the specific tracking sub-algorithm.
>>
>> And while this is mostly how it's done in artificial systems, I suspect
>> biology does NOT use strict hierarchies.  A higher order function can
>> operate over a mixture of operands, some complex wholes in that higher
>> order and some from the lower orders.  E.g. if the gun's higher order
>> selection is based not only on the 3 types (ballistic, air, water), but
>> also on a lower order measure like *speed*, then it may well use he same
>> sub-algorithm for both air and water.  So, it takes both high order
>> constructs and low order constructs as its operands.
>>
>> You see your assumption of a strict hierarchy peeking through when you
>> say sex is the only motive that is ESSENTIALLY social.  What do you mean by
>> "essentially"?  Couldn't we say that *all* the behavior of all the social
>> animals is, in part, social?  ... including following others to the water
>> hole?  So, these functions would be mixed ... do not obey a strict
>> hierarchy.
>>
>> On 10/27/18 11:32 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> > But the function that connects the two arrays will be different in the
>> two kinds of gun because a surface target is capable of different sorts of
>> motion from an aerial target.
>> > [...]
>> > So, the gun would display two levels of design, the lower level that
>> relates trajectory to firing and the higher level that relates the lower
>> level design to target type.
>> > [...]
>> > This conception of multiple hierarchical layers of design is a useful
>> way to describe many of the phenomena that ethologists and socio-biologists
>> are required to explain. …
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ∄ uǝʃƃ
>>
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