[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[Nick Thompson]

Once again, I am lost in my own thread.  

 

I will say this:  often it seems, with both Marcus, and Glen, and even Owen and Steve, and to a lesser extent Dave West, that their (your) thinking is rooted in models from coding and because I have never been a coder those models are utterly unavailable to me.   I have always ... since childhood ...believed that if I worked hard enough at something I could understand it.  And so, almost 14 years ago, when I was cast loose in Santa Fe, and Steve and Owen and Carl and Frank took me into that jammed freezing cold office on Agua Fria.  They fed me when I was intellectually hungry and comforted me when I was intellectually lonely, and in gratitude, I was determined to understand their mindset.  But despite all that I have learned since that time, I have come to admit that there are probably chasms of thought too deep for people to reach across … or, at least, people like me, at this age.   I simply lack the models, the commonplace toys of thought, with which you guys so effortlessly play.  

 

I will keep trying, of course,  But I thought, perhaps, being the New Year and all, now was a moment to stop and thank FRIAM members for your patience, your indulgence, and your profound commitment to teaching that has kept me alert and engaged and alive these last 14 years. 

 

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] On Behalf Of ? u???
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2019 8:48 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

 

Excellent!  I like everything you've said below.  In fact, were we able to clearly talk about heterarchies as explicitly externalizing controls, where hierarchies leave the source(s) of control ambiguous, then we'd map nicely back to Marcus' example of "serializing" a recursive function into a tree walkable by a single control pointer.  And we'd also be able to discuss Rosen's conception of separating a closure of agency from (an openness to) the other types of cause (material, formal, and final).

 

The concept of a heterarchy facilitates the discussion of systemic behaviors like motive as separable into sets of distinct causes and structures in a way the concept of hierarchy does not.

 

On 1/7/19 6:12 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

> Thanks for the clarification. I intentionally said  Nick was invoking 

> *something like "levels of analysis" talk, *because I thought I 

> recalled Nick telling me at some point that he didn't like that way of 

> thinking, and I'm surprised he hasn't disavowed me more completely on 

> it. All metaphors are imperfect, and, acknowledging that, I still like 

> that way of talking a lot.

> While you are quite right that tissue isn't literally JUST an 

> arrangement of cells, it *is *pretty fair to say tissue is an bunch of 

> cells arranged-in-a-structured-fashion and interconnected by various 

> inter-cellular structures.... organs are a bunch of tissues 

> arranged-in-a-structured-fashion and interconnected by various 

> inter-tissue structures, etc.

> 

> At any rate... trying to follow your lead, and translate your 

> preferred sentence structure to be more like what (I assert) Nick is thinking:

> 

> Motives ARE a particular type of pattern in a behavior-by-environment 

> matrix.

> 

> As a "point of view" based Realism, which Nick has been trying to 

> emphasize, it is true that there are many ways the 

> behavior-by-environment matrix can be constructed and arranged. Some 

> of those ways will reveal the relevant pattern in some instances, 

> others will not. The particular pattern is one in which the behavior 

> vary across circumstances so as to stay directed towards the 

> production of a particular outcome. This sounds very similar to "One 

> of the definitions of "heterarchy" is that the components can be 

> organized in multiple ways" but if I understood the prior discussion 

> of "heterarchy", I take it that concept is about a flexibility in 

> control/leadership, whereas no control is implied here (control being 

> a different pattern in a different matrix). The cause of the pattern 

> is a different matter entirely from the existence of the pattern - 

> which is expressly part of the point of Nick's way of approaching it, i.e.,that a "motive" must be identifiable independent of a particular cause.

 

--

∄ uǝʃƃ

 

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