[FRIAM] is this true?

Thu Mar 14 00:24:23 EDT 2019

Hi, David, 

I keep giving these off-the-cuff responses because of my situation.  I am not sure I am quite doing the argument justice.    I am trying to fight off a certain kind of talk that The Press wants to engage in, without committing myself to any particular talk, but that’s not very productive.  So, let me just say that people want to turn these relations into two-value relations.  X is a y.  I think I want to make all relations into three-valued relations.  X is a Y from point-of-view P.  Does that mean all truth is relative?  No, because as a result of systematic inquiry, some points-of-view converge in the long run.  When the converge, the thing toward which they converge is, by definition, a Truth concerning some matter.  

The wonderful feature of the [point of view] metaphor is that it honors our separate points of view without giving up on finding a point of view that integrates them. Two blind New Realists groping an elephant: “OK, I’ll follow the snake toward the sound of your voice and you follow the tree toward the sound of my voice, and we’ll see what we feel along the way.” Pause. Together, “My God, it’s  an  elephant!”

Of course, having rebuked Glen for having excised a living liver from a living creature I should expect to rebuked for imaging two investigators who survived the groping of a living elephant.  “Oh my God, it’s an elephant! Fred?  FRED????”  Spherical cow indeed.  

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] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2019 8:45 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] is this true?

A point of view:

We are accustomed to talking about complex adaptive systems. I propose that the brain is a "complex reactive system," in that it reacts in a complex fashion (patterns, strange attractors,never exactly the same in any two instances) to a complex, and constantly changing, set of signals.

Nick would, (I am putting words in his mouth, kind of) insist that the "brain" is co-extensive with the skin.(for whatever reason, this statement immediately reminded me of the fact that an octopus has more neurons in its skin that it does in its three brains combined.) Whenever stimulus is detected the brainBody reacts, and the reaction takes the form of neruons firing, connections established, parts of the brain body emitting energy (e.g. warm skin radiating the heat from redirected blood flow), etc.

if, apparently, widely different stimuli seem to evoke fairly similar reaction patters (same area of the brain, overlapping synapse firing, alpha or beta wave emissions of energy, etc.) we might say the they have the same effect. But that is really saying that they seem to evoke sufficiently similar reactions that an observer sees a "pattern" or "similarity."

So, meditation, a specific kind of psychedelic drug, at least one "pharmaceutical" drug, and extreme early childhood evoke behavior 9oral utterances are a form of behavior) that an observer would characterize as "lack of awareness of the Self-Universe distinction and simultaneously a decrease (or total lack, in the ase of the extreme early child) in neural firings and activated circuits in a specific region of specific regions of brain tissue along with changes in heart and respiration rhythm, and other factors within the skin, but outside the 'brain'.

BTW — Nick did not want to start a discussion about the embodied brain, but if he eventually does, I will cheer him onward and insist that the embodied brain extends to culture and argue that it extends to and is coextensive with the Universe.

dave west

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019, at 12:35 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

And this gives me an opening to report the conference presentation title I am the proudest of. It was on experimental elicitation of emotional vocalizations In crows:

CAWS AND AFFECT IN THE COMMUNICATION OF THE COMMON CROW.   

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2019 12:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] is this true?

In my mind "affect" as a noun means behavior determined by a mood or feeling complex.  For example, "He has flat affect".

-----------------------------------

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 Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 11:49 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

And, just to be as clear as I can, it's not lost on me that there's a common confusion between "affect" and "effect".  However, I tend to think linguistic confusion is often an indicator for an underlying conceptual ambiguity.  When I say "effect on the brain", I do NOT mean "affect on the brain".  I mean something more linear, cause-effect.  So, it seems reasonable to hear "the affects of talk therapy on the brain" as a behavioral measure.  But it seems more analytic/synthetic to say "the effects of talk therapy on the brain".  That is a more constructive (constructionist? constructivist?) measure.  The former is more consequentialist, the latter is more axiomatic.

And the reason I believe the original author meant the latter is because the actual words were "changes the brain in similar ways".  "Way" being more of a constructive concept than, say, "destination".

Technical writing has (painfully) verbose ways to handle this ambiguity.  But since we're discussing snarkiness, we shouldn't need to point out that people *always* prefer pithy snark to technical verbosity.  This is why bullsh¡t is more efficient than the truth.

On 3/13/19 10:23 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> The idea that the path of least resistance *names* the end result is interesting.  But it's definitely NOT what *I* mean when I hear "similar effects on the brain".  What I mean is along the same lines of the 3 links I posted:

> 

> https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/27/health/behavior-like-drugs-talk-therapy-can-change-brain-chemistry.html

> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-018-0128-4

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5957509/

> 

> Patterns in PET scans (glucose uptake?) and the like are "effects on the brain" (and other parts of the body, it should go without saying).  The "effect" is what we observe on the sliced out part of the object, not the whole organism. Maybe it would help to talk about the liver?  When I talk about alcohol's "effect on the liver", I'm not talking about alcoholics over-sharing in church basements.  Similarly, if I say, "slamming my hand on the table had an effect", the "effect" I'm talking about is that my hand start to hurt, not how the other people in the room react.  And I believe that's how the author was using the word "effect" when they made their unjustified claim that talk therapy has similar effects to drug therapy.  But I could easily be wrong about that, too.

> 

> 

> On 3/13/19 10:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

>> Ok.  I should stop being snarky and try to answer my own damned question.  I think we parse things into "brain" effects and "therapy" effects depending on the lability of behavior with respect to the manipulation we are contemplating.  Let's say the symptom is Thompson's Snarkiness.  Let's say it could be cured either by a 25 cent pill or ten thousand hours of therapy.  We would call this a brain effect.  On the other hand, let's say it could be cured by a ten thousand dollar course of pills or one hour of therapy. We would call this a therapy effect.  These attributions would apply even if it could be demonstated that they all acted on precisely the same part of the brain.  

>> 

>>  Am I wrong about that?  

> 

-- 

☣ uǝlƃ

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