[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Fri May 1 11:41:20 EDT 2020

Hi, Glen, 

I have swum (swam? Swimmed?) way out beyond my depth, but I have long wanted to explore this "experience" thing, so thank you.  First, remember, a proper monist shouldn't talk about his "stuff",whatever it is, as if it is distinguishable from other "stuff",  because that is dualism, full stop.  So I really shouldn’t be doing this at all.  But see larding below.  On to FRIAM

N

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, May 1, 2020 7:47 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

I described experience as a comprehension.

[NST===>I am happy with this so long as comprehension (= conception, a la Peirce) is taken as a relation not as an instantaneous event.  By the way, there is a nasty typo in my original statement.  I should have written, “A “unique experience” is like acceleration AT an instant.” i.e., a contradiction.  I have always been fascinated by the fact that calculus is based on just such contradictions.  <===nst] 

 Then you say it's not that sort of thing. Then you go on to describe experience as a comprehension. 8^) I guess the problem is that I'm relying too much on that jargon? You describe 2 types of comprehension: O∞) the object versus On) the observers of the object.

[NST===>I don't think we are struggling with jargon.  I think we are struggling with the limits of language.  Wittgenstein thought that such struggles were perhaps not worth the effort.  "That of which we cannot speak should be passed over in silence" or something like that. But putting aside w’s warning for a moment, let me just say that I don’t think we have different kinds of comprehension here, but comprehensions of different types of objects.  <===nst] 

I know this is pedestrian, but to see that these are both comprehensions, the wikipedia disambiguation page might help:  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehension> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehension 

[NST===>I want to join friam so I will look at this later.  Dopeslap me if I forget. <===nst] 

To me, these 6 different things reduce to 2 different categories: {logical, the axiom, lists} versus {language, ideas}. The two things you identify O∞ and On fall into the 1st category. An experience is the act of slicing up and bundling together a new thing from what we find laying around in

the ambient muck. O∞ -- the unified, total object, the elephant -- slices/rebundles in one way and On -- the super-set comprised of the subsets sliced/rebundled by each observer -- does it in another way. 

[NST===>Yes.  I like this.  Holt would like it.  We are constantly doing Catscan's <===nst] 

O∞ is stunted/approximated, as von Neumann tried to point out when claiming that the description of an object is an order higher than the object itself. Or, as Robert Rosen tried to point out by claiming "there is no largest model of a complex thing". The On comprehension isn't stunted like O∞. But it's a collective thing, which can't be sliced/rebundled by any one of us. And that means no _one_ of us can really grok it.

[NST===>Ok.  ASAP, let's dig into this "stunted" thing.  It is the case, taking the point of view metaphor seriously, that "our" view on you is perhaps more different from your view on you, than each of our views is on the elephant.  But that would be true if we were talking about haircuts.  It doesn't need to be about souls. I need to know why you think the appropriate word is “stunted”, rather than just “different”.  Could you “work” the stunted metaphor a bit?  

<===nst] 

On 4/30/20 2:05 PM,  <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:

> I just don’t think “experience” is that sort of thing.  Experience is 

> always a step from one thing to another.  A “unique experience” is like acceleration an instant.  A fiction that is useful for some purposes.  We know how to study the elephant; and we know how to study the uniqueness of the observers of the elephant.  But those are distinct objects of study.

--

☣ uǝlƃ

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam unsubscribe  <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

archives:  <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC  <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200501/9b5d8307/attachment.html>