[FRIAM] OK. That's funny.

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Jon, 

I was the youngest in my family by many years and have the psychology of a tag-along.  When you leap ahead like this, I feel like a little kid left behind in my bulky snowsuit in the deep snow, while my siblings, and the dog, bound off into the distance.  "Hey, WAIT FOR ME!"

One little scrap I can grasp at here, and perhaps make a contribution.  There is a subtle point, perhaps a weakness in Peirce, to which the term "believable" points.  Note the mode.  "believable--that which is readily believed."  But Peirce is pointing not to that but to "that which SHALL be believed" or "that which is fated to be believed" in the very long run.  Not "credibles" but "credibilenda" .  

Now to the extent that the human cognitive system has been designed in the course of evolution to scope out the world humans live in, the two will be the same.  But just because of the lesson hidden in the Sober machine (and the Law of Short Sighted Striving), it is easy to walk humans out of their zone of tolerance (known in the literature as the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness") and find propositions that are "believable", yet not "to be believed".  That, for all its other faults, is one of the insights of evolutionary psychology.   Thus, to the extent that our belief systems are embodied, that which we believe may not be that which we ought to believe. 

I don't think it makes any difference to your Haskell model, but the actual object that Sober used is not quite as complicated as you envision.  The colored objects that are sorted differ only in size, as do the holes in the three levels of the "machine".  Thus if you shake the toy long enough, the small (yellow) balls will find their way all the way to the bottom, the medium-sized (blue balls) to the middle, and fat red balls will be stuck at the top (or something like that). Size is the thing selected for, color the spandrel.    If shape were the thing that was being selected, the toy would work only in infinite time, although, of course, the logic is the same, and therefore, this paragraph probably nugatory.  

How does a "citizen" such as myself appreciate your Haskell model.  Is it possible to make  visual out of it.  Large red, medium sized brown, and tiny black ants all striving toward food through screens and only the black ants make it?  Or is that just "eye-candy".  

What is the relation between the SoberSort and the concept of intention in your world.  In my world, the INtension of the sort is that for which the balls are
sorted; the EXtension is any characteristic that the sorted balls share.  

Thanks for all the thought you put into this.  Please send the dog back to get me. 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2020 9:08 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] OK. That's funny.

Thought of another way, I can interpret Peirce-truthiness in terms of alethic operators. Let's say that an apt-belief is Peirce-true if it belongs to the collection of everyone's potential apt-beliefs, in other words, they will be found to be necessarily apt-believable (□). This leaves the collection of apt-beliefs that at least one other person will never find believable, those that are possibly apt-believable (◇), and doomed to never be Peirce-true.



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