[FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sat Mar 9 00:32:51 EST 2019
Frank/Nick -
> It's something you can move around on in a continuous way?
elaborating slightly at the risk of obscuring or confounding:
"a closed (hyper)surface you can move around on in a continuous way"
I don't know if /closed/ and /continuous/ are redundant in this case,
but for Nick's edification, the point to "closed" is that as one
"wanders about" on the surface, one needn't worry about "falling through
a hole".
(didn't I just promise to be more careful with my orthography? Why DO
I feel the need to quote these phrases? In the first two cases, I'm
quoting Franks words, but what is the nature of my added phrase
"falling through a hole"? It is not /Falling Through a Hole/, I don't
think? Perhaps the /Target Domain/ then is from the metaphor of a
physical surface a human might actually wander about upon and then fall
through a hole if he missteps?)
Examples of 2D manifolds embedded in 3D spaces include spheres, donuts,
and double rubber-ring-toys your dogs tug at with one another. A Klein
bottle is also a 2D manifold, but it must be embedded in R4 (3D
depictions include self-intersecting surfaces which is misleading if
illustrative).
The point (of course) of adding "hyper" is to remind Nick that a
manifold needn't be restricted to 2 or even 3 dimensions, even though
visualizing those is fruitless. For more intuition on the topic, I
refer Nick to E.A. Abbot's _Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions_
(1884). A. Square (the protagonist) struggles with similar questions,
but only in 2D, giving us some sympathy (and sense of mostly undeserved
superiority?)
<ugly description of internal combustion engine (imperfect and
misleading) manifolds deleted>
-Steve
> -----------------------------------
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
> On Fri, Mar 8, 2019, 8:52 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net
> <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
> I am sure it helps a lot of people; just not me.
>
>
>
> I need a metaphor.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>] *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Friday, March 08, 2019 8:43 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how
> we behave?)
>
>
>
> Succinctly, and I may leave something out, a manifold is a
> topological space for which there is a homeomorphism between every
> open set and an open set in Rn for some n. More concretely, lines
> and surfaces are manifolds but things get complicated in higher
> dimensions. That probably doesn't help.
>
> -----------------------------------
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 8, 2019, 8:27 PM Nick Thompson
> <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>>
> wrote:
>
> Lee,
>
> Just to bend the thread a bit further, is "excess meaning" a
> term of art for
> you? It seems very close to the term "surplus meaning" which
> was used in a
> famous article assigned to all Psychology graduate students in
> the sixties
> on the distinction between hypothetical constructs and intervening
> variables. Wondering if your term has the same meaning and
> if it has a
> life somewhere.
>
> As to the convex hull I went from there to the overturned boat
> in NCIS and
> thence to "manifold" which, when the term is deployed by
> mathematicians I
> always think of a shroud, like a blanket dropped over some
> lumpy thing to
> contain it, roughly. Which, now that I mention it, makes me
> want to explain
> wtf you mathematicians mean when you use the word manifold.
>
> If that's not a thoroughly bent thread I don't know what is.
>
> 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
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>] On Behalf Of
> lrudolph at meganet.net <mailto:lrudolph at meganet.net>
> Sent: Friday, March 08, 2019 7:04 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> Subject: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we
> behave?)
>
> Steve writes in relevant part:
>
> > My position is that I favor each and every one of us taking
> whatever
> > responsibility for understanding our own "convex hull" of
> > capability/knowledge/intuition as we are capable of and
> "managing" it
> > to the best of our ability.
>
> The quotation marks around the phrase 'convex hull' and the
> word 'managing'
> presumably signal that they are being used non-literally, and
> (I guess)
> metaphorically. I would particularly like Steve, if he is
> willing, to delve
> into the intended metaphor in the first case. On the one
> hand, lots of my
> work uses more or less geometry; on the other, in lots of my
> other work I
> use metaphor; and I even think and write about metaphor. So
> it's likely
> that I'm taking the metaphor more seriously than intended.
>
> With that disclaimer: in the technical contexts I'm familiar
> with, to pass
> from something X to the convex hull of X has the effect of (1)
> 'filling in
> holes in X', in a well-defined manner that is (2) as
> economical as possible
> and (3) (therefore) unique. Which (if any) of those properties are
> reflected, and how, in the case that X is our
> "capability/knowledge/intuition"? ... I could ramble on a lot
> more but will
> start with that.
>
>
>
>
>
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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