[FRIAM] better simulating actual FriAM

Fri Jul 17 18:56:42 EDT 2020

Glen, 

I am all for SteveS doing that.  

My lament is not particular to zFRIAM.  I get restless when the conversation isn't "real".  Now, to understand what I mean by real, one has to make a distinction that Eric Berne made between pastimes and real communication.  Pastimes are ways of interacting, often highly repetitive, which are vaguely dedicated to purposes like making nice, and enhancing reputations, distracting one from problems, etc., where the matters being talked about are not really central and nobody is trying to figure out anything or change anybody's mind about anything.  In a real conversation, there is something explicitly that we care about, some ball that we are trying to move forward.   I know lots of people like pastimes.  Dozens of parties are held every year (or used to be) to which all the participants would come, hoping to engage in their favorite pastimes.  Unfortunately, along with the one math gene I got from my brother, I also got one of his Asperger's genes.  Such parties drive me right raving nuts.  I think the best way to distinguish a pastime from a real conversation is to ask oneself, is anything at issue here, and are we actually talking about it, rather than skirting it.   The only difference that zFRIAM makes is that  it's impossible to split the group up, so we have to differentiate by time, say, rather than by space, if we want to have the two kinds of conversations in the same meeting.  

Nick 

Anyway, I am very grateful to you all for the help I got thinking about control systems.  Accepting for the moment the distinction between the set point that the system seeks and the function that the system serves, I think we came to the conclusion that while there is no LOGICAL reason that the two could not be the same, it is usually the case that they will be found to be different.   So I was half right.  

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 u?l? ???
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2020 3:42 PM
To: Friam at redfish. com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] better simulating actual FriAM

So, Nick has lamented that the Zoom meetings don't well-simulate actual FriAM meetings, where people can self-isolate into cliques based on some tangent or other. I'd mentioned my first experience with (well-done) virtual meetings in Oz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OZ_Virtual

Well, during the ALife meeting, I learned of NeosVR https://neosvr.com/, wherein a fellow dork (named Guillermo Valle) had set up a Neos VR session with some simulations and several ALify objects with which to interact. We had a great conversation about his PhD thesis and how it might relate to ALife, etc. It was very close to what it's like to actually be in another's presence, except, of course, he was some kind of lizard creature and I was a default box since I hadn't set my avatar. But, you turn to look at the VR whiteboard or the simulation GUI and his audio would shift from one ear to the other. You fly away and his voice recedes. Etc.

The trouble, as always, is how difficult it is to get up and running with such a tool. Installation is easy, as it's on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/740250/Neos_VR/. But I was using it on the desktop (a VR setup is one dork epsilon too far for me -- though Renee' said she'd be fine if I dropped $500 for one) and it took some work to get comfortable.

In any case, the stay-at-home orders and our "new reality" absolutely SCREAM for someone like SteveS to set us up a more concrete virtual world, with chairs our avatars can hook to, tattooed baristas (human-shaped or not) sporting PhDs, a little Chopin or maybe Tracy Chapman in the background, along with generic containers to house things like Pietro's COVID-19 model ... or maybe a little AgentScript or P5JS <https://github.com/processing/p5.js/>.

While we were visiting the ISS world in NeosVR, Guillermo summoned up a virtual webcam and hooked us into the ALife "pub crawl" (wherein attendees logged into WhereBy and "shared" whatever alcoholic drink they preferred while yapping about whatever dorky stuff sprung to mind). Back in his world, we watched some of the archived lectures (via a youtube widget), listened to the ALife music playist), etc. all while watching his simulation play out in 3D in the middle of the room.

In any case Solaria is already here! We simply haven't admitted it yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun

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