[FRIAM] anthropological observations

[Steven A Smith]

This list/thread(s) has been so prolific and pithy of late, I can hardly
begin to respond to one thing before another (dozen shiny objects)
catches my eye.

☣ ƃlǝu (reads like "blau"?) thus wroteth:
> Now Marcus is just being sadistic. >8^D
>
> My own guess at a summary of Eric's stance is that where we see qualities, we can, at will, invert the vision and see quantities. Fontana is a great source for distinguishing construction from evolution. But for me, BC Smith [†] is better for maintaining an agnostic flippability (Necker cube) between objects vs fields, nodes vs edges, nouns vs verbs.

Guerin and I spend more than a little time bantering around the head and
shoulders (I can't resist trolling /uǝlƃ ☣//**/with various (in)apt(ept)
and mixed/mangled metaphors at every turn here)  what he refers to as
(his?) dual-field theory.    This duality (if you are willing to call
the things you flip) seems pervasive.   It is in fact the vernacular
foreground/background I think, only moreso?   We tend to struggle with
the agent-field (turtle-patch in his netlogo vernacular) or perhaps
graph/field, projector-camera, or discrete/continuous aspects.   And I
have to ask (@Stephen) <tongue-in-cheek> "is it Turtles or is it Patches
all the way down?"  And why the preference for down... why not up?

>  The conflation Nick began with between expected value (an algorithmic reduction from a distribution to a singular thing/object) and a *quality* ... a qualitative feature of the world, parsed (registered in BC Smith's domain) from the ambience of the world is not inherently a bad thing. That conflation is not inherently bad because they're similar. They're both transformations from a field to a thing. The key is to be able to flip it back again, from a thing to a field.
To crispify the fuzzy and fuzzify the crisp?   Sounds downright quantum
wave-function collapse?  How in the world did something like THAT get
into language?  Did I impute that?
> It is our nature as pattern-recognizers to parse the ambience into things ... at least that *was* our nature before the modern math/physics *field* techniques began to seep into our intuition.
And I wonder at *when* that started.  It seems as if aether and
phlogisten were proto-field-like-things... a struggle of the
post/meta-alchemist to remain in a familar domain of "stuffness" whilst
the abstractions of "fields" were starting to have more traction (what
how can an idea have "traction", what is it a tractor?) ?
>  Some of us who deal with fields/ambience/distributions all the time have begun to relax the harsh and immediate parsing. Engineers tend to simply be a bit lazy about it.
Or self-proclaimedly *pragmatic* about it (engineers)?
>  The parsing happens, but they talk of approximations and epsilon as it goes to ∞ or 0. Mathematicians talk of duals, congruence, bisimulation, isomorphism, comutation, etc.
Nick loves it when you talk dirty. (many of us do).
> But I think it can all be adequately understood in terms of qualities vs quantities. Qualities like "wetness" are precisely the same as things like "frozen pond". Quantities like 32°F are precisely the same as processes like "if I walk on that, I'll slip and fall".
I don't know if they are precisely the same... there is a dualism (in
language?) like your former noun/verb.  We *can* verbize any noun it
seems.   There is the quantification of a quality (how "wet" is the
frozen pond?) and a domain-specific judgement about it ("is it
slippery?"), which I contend is not "precisely the same", as the context
for each is different.   32°F is not "precisely the same as" 0°C, at
least in it's context?  0°C and 100°C were *defined* in the context of
(pure) water's freezing/boiling (under standard atmospheric pressure) 
points.  But °F are only deferential to water in the sense that they
require only 2-3 digits to cover the range of water's phase-changes?  
°K is less deferential to water, and if not not entirely out of the
context of all matter, at least  not registered to any particular
element (what does °K imply for condensed matter or gluons?).
>  The language each of us uses to grok this stuff is a choice. 
A choice (partly) made by our parents, our teachers, our embedded
context.   It has been said (at least in inherited disease) that "it is
important to choose our parents well".   We all got to be the way we are
*somehow*, though I still cling (myself) to the illusion of free-will
(perhaps a precondition to imagining there is a self, a "here here"?)
> Eric provided a nice swath across several domains. Maybe too many. We're faced with the tyranny of choice. I'd treat it like a cafeteria. Pull the thread you understand best.
Or get out your darning egg and needle and try to weave them back into
the stocking, lest your toes or heel or knee pokes through?
> Bah! 316 words ... close enough, I say!
From whence (or wherest?) did you get your 300 word target?  And
mightest-not a syllable-weighted count be better? (preferring short
words?).  Or would that be too antidisestablishmentarian?

- Snarf

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