[FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen, 

Most streams of experience don't converge.  Random streams predict nothing.  They are of no use to the organism.  Only streams that converge, "are".  I.e, only they exist.  Random streams, aren't.  Most co-occurrences in stream are random, they reveal no existents.  Since you can never know for sure whether you are in a random or a non random stream, you can never know whether the parts of the stream you are responding to exist or not.  But you can sure make educated (i.e., probabilistic)  guesses, and that's what organisms' learning mechanisms do.  So, I don’t have a ==>faith<== in convergence.  I, like all learning creatures, have a lack of interest in non-convergence.  Non being interested in convergence in experience would be like going to a poker game in which some cards are marked and not being interested in the relation between the cards and the marks.  

Nick 

Nick Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2019 9:40 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

Excellent! So, your *scalar* is confidence in your estimates of any given distribution. I try to describe it in [†] below. But that's a tangent.

What I can't yet reconstruct, credibly, in my own words, is the faith in *convergence*. What if sequential calculations of an average do NOT converge?

Does this mean there are 2 stuffs, some that converge and some that don't? ... some distributions are stationary and some are not? Or would you assert that reality (and/or truth, given Peirce's distinction) is always and everywhere stationary and all (competent/accurate/precise) estimates will always converge?




[†] You can be a little confident (0.01%) or a lot confident (99.9%). I don't much care if you close the set and allow 0 and 1, confidence ∈ [0,1]. I think I have ways to close the set. But it doesn't matter. If we keep it open and agree that 100% confidence is illusory, then your scalar is confidence ∈ (0,1). Now that we have a scale of some kind, we can *construct* a typology of experiences. E.g. we can categorize things like deja vu or a bear in the woods as accumulations of confidence with different organizations. E.g. a composite experience with ((e1⨂e2⨂e3)⨂e4)⨂e5, where each of ei experiences has some confidence associated with it. Obviously, ⨂ is not multiplication or addition, but some other composer function. The whole composite experience would then have some aggregate confidence.

On December 6, 2019 8:22:29 PM PST, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>Elegant, Glen, and you caused me truly to wonder:  Is the population 
>mean, mu,  of statistics fame, of a different substance than the 
>individual measurements, the bar x's that are stabs at it?  But I think 
>the answer is no.  It is just one among the others, a citizen king 
>amongst those bar-x's, the one on which the others will converge in a 
>normally distributed world.  I guess that makes me a frequentist, 
>right?
>
>And it's not strictly true that Mu is beyond my reach.  I may have 
>already reached it with the sample I now hold in my hand.  I just will 
>never be sure that I have reached it.
>
>Could you, Dave, and I perhaps all agree that all ==>certainty<== is 
>illusory?
>
>I don't think that's going to assuage you.  
>
>I am going to have to think more. 
>
>Ugh!  I hate when that happens. 


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