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

[Eric Charles]

"Does this mean there are 2 stuffs, some that converge and some that don't?
... some distributions are stationary and some are not?"

If we are actually done with the first question (which I don't think we
are), this is a perfect next question! I would say that there are not two
*kinds* of stuff, because of the baggage that seems to add to the
discussion. Yes, there is stuff we are right about and stuff we are wrong
about, but that observation is more something about us than something about
the stuff. We are talking about concepts, and sometimes those concepts try
to cleave the world in ways where the world pushes back. It was not long
ago that the Western World classified animals based on where they lived,
which is why Beaver and Hippo are fair game during Lent (the animals of the
sea having been created in one fell swoop). That way of cleaving didn't
hold up under further scrutiny.

Also, YES, Nick does have faith here. Nick has faith that at least some of
the distributions are stable in the long run.

Though we talk about it as stability in the end-times, he doesn't really
needs faith that anything converges in the infinitely long run... because
amongst a bunch of physicists that can become a messy conversation... but
he has faith that some things converge over a reasonably long period of
time. For example, long enough to confirm that bears and woods are things
that exist, that sometimes woods have bears in them, and that the one Joe
thinks is there is there (or is not there).

Does iron rust via an oxidation process? We are all pretty confident that
will not be upturned by the next scientific break through. The concept of
"oxygen" itself represents a concept that has been remarkably stable, and
does not seem in danger of being overturned, at least since it replaced the
competing concept of " dephlogisticated air." Etc. Someone interjects,
"Does that hold at absurdly high temperatures inside exploding stars, and
will Oxygen even exist when the universe experiences heat death or
re-big-bangs?" I don't know, but that's really a different conversation,
and that's not really what I mean when I say "infinite long run", I mean
when the scientific investigation have proven out what can be proven out:
Will the concept stay stable under scrutiny, or will we need to replace it
with a new concept so we can better match the data; that's what I want to
know. The history of science is a history of searching for just such
stabilities, and some have lasted thousands of years, while others come and
go rapidly.

Most of the concepts we have are not stable in anything like that sense,
and one of the problems we are having as a society is an inability to
broadly discriminate between concepts that are likely to be stable and
concepts that clearly are not going to be. "Water is made of hydrogen and
oxygen in a roughly 2:1 ratio" is not like "Do not wear white after Labor
Day" nor like "Immigrants are job stealers". One is "real" in a sense that
the other two are not. There are some places in which there are some
consequences for wearing white after Labor Day, but there is nothing
universal about that belief, and we can all agree that isn't likely to be a
rule anywhere in another 10,000 years. We can agree that because, while
anyone alive then will likely have a concept nigh identical to our current
concept of "white", it is highly unlikely that "Labor Day" will still exist
as it does now, and even if both exist, fashion is fickle. As for the
immigrants, the statement is too broad and the categories too course.
Likely SOME immigrants steal jobs under SOME conditions. If you want to get
to something more long-term stable, you need to try to divide up immigrants
into types, jobs into types, and wrangle in the conditions dramatically. At
that point, either you would find converge, and science can continue, or
you would not be able to find convergence, and the whole thing conceptual
cluster would disintegrate into nothingness. Or, at least, that is what
would happen if you approached the claim scientifically.

And, it is likely that as things progress, even many of the claims we could
never imagine being overturned will, in fact, be overturned. The science of
"Airs" was going gangbusters before atomic theory upended it. Newtonian
physics and Euclidean Geometry were shown to be a special cases, and might
yet be upended more than that. Most concepts that most people have are
garbage. Yours and mine and Nicks are no exceptions. And yet, the quest to
find stability continues, backed only by the faith that there is *some*
stability to be found.


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 3:25 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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