[FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

Sat Mar 9 12:04:33 EST 2019

Oh do it,  Steve.

Forward me that ugly description of the manifold of an internal combustion engine.

Pleeeeeese!  

Nick 

PS –One of the things I notice that I don’t share with you guys is a history of reading Science Fiction.  I read Etoin Shurdlu when I was about 15, Metamorphosis (Kofka) when I was about 17, and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery when I was in my 20’s and that’s about it.  

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2019 10:33 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

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/> 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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