[FRIAM] Fwd: excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sat Mar 9 16:21:48 EST 2019
I think this pre-cedent to Frank's reply didn't make the list.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we
behave?)
Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2019 11:02:14 -0700
From: Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
To: Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
Frank -
Where do you get your understanding of a right triangle (originally)?
Do you NOT first experience a large number of examples of imperfect
ones, and only then seek out or adopt from others a mathematical
formalism to describe a right triangle in it's ideal/abstract?
I had split a lot of firewood and cut a lot of pie and contemplated the
similarities and differences among the resulting bits of them before I
saw my first geometry book. I didn't have any trouble recognizing
acute, oblique, right triangles in the (also not perfect, but closer to)
geometry book and having some embodied understanding of them *long*
before I began learning an axiomatic encoding/manipulation of the
geometry of points, lines, planes, angles, conic sections, etc.
This may be (partly) my intuitive nature dominating, but Lakoff/Nunez
make a pretty strong case in "Where Mathematics Comes From" for all
understanding grounding in our embodied minds/sensoria. Have you read
them? I think they were "the rage" around 2000ish.
I believe that the realization that "If you measure close enough, they
are not right triangles" and similar awarenesses of the discrepancy
between an idealized (mathematical) description and the everyday
examples that they offer an archetype for, is entirely /post hoc/. Is
this where Plato and Aristotle begin to tussle?
If whales are as sentient as many believe, I would bet that even if they
have a geometry that is isomorphic to ours, it would superficially be
somewhat different than our own, probably grounded in more complex
manifolds (to reference another thread here) than our own preference for
the euclidean plane and the occasional idealized sphere (thus our love
of spherical cows). Sure, they may have an abstract notion of the
euclidean plane (the boundary between ocean and atmosphere or ocean and
seafloor) but probably are hugely more aware/interested in the 3D
distributions of density, pressure, salinity, etc. of their watery
embedding than we ever were. Pilots and meteorologists and scuba divers
might have a glimmer of how sea creatures perceive the basic fundament
they live in, and our formalized geometries might well eventually line
up if we've both elaborated them enough.
My speculation is that cetaceans (and other sentient ocean-going
creatures) probably register their experiences more in elliptical spaces
and perhaps more minkowskian as well since the scale of the speed of
sound (to the extent that is their dominant sense of distant objects) is
close enough to their physical scale and their mobility. I'm not sure
what type of physical environment would be perceived
Lobachevskiian/Hyperbolic.. It seems like the kind of fiction Physicist
Robert Forward might coin.
- Steve
> I personally don't relate tangible, physical objects to mathematical
> ones because you get into Hywel(RIP) territory. "If you measure it
> carefully enough it's not a right triangle. There are no right
> triangles".
>
> -----------------------------------
> 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 Sat, Mar 9, 2019, 12:07 AM Nick Thompson
> <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
> So a shroud is a manifold but not all manifolds are shrouds?
>
>
>
> N
>
>
>
> 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 8:54 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?)
>
>
>
> It's something you can move around on in a continuous way?
>
> -----------------------------------
> 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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