[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Fri May 1 11:52:35 EDT 2020

Yeh.  At some point, Eric, you and I are going to have to come to terms with this “formalism” thang that the others keep trotting out.  Is it just the reductio of something that is familiar to you and me, or is it something completely different.  But I am late for FRIAM. 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Friday, May 1, 2020 9:27 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Glen said: " I've disagreed with this point before... I think we can and do model things we don't understand with other things we don't understand... E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system..."

I think this might be some sort of linguistic slippage here. Do you agree with the following?

* When a child tells you that her conglomeration of styrofoam ball, paint, and metal wire is "a model" of the solar system, the child is claiming that the styrofoam-balls-model has shares some properties with the solar system. 

* For example, the child might understands that the balls are "round", and intends that aspect to be shared with the planets, i.e., the model leads to understanding the planets as round objects, rather than points of light in the sky. 

If you agree with that, I think you agree with all that Nick or David/Quine is getting at. Nick isn't asserting than anyone understands anything better than people actually understand things in practice: People TRY to use things they THINK they understand, to gain insights into things the THINK they understand less. And that attempt works only and exactly as well as it works, with no pretending otherwise. 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 9:22 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

I've disagreed with this point before. So, I won't lay the whole thing out again. But I think we can and do model things we don't understand with other things we don't understand. We do this all the time. There are 2 main things that allow us to do this: 1) we understand, or imagine we understand, every thing just a little bit and 2) what little we understand about any one thing differs slightly from what little we understand about any other thing.

E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system. We can't claim she fully understands styrofoam or the solar system. But what she knows about the model is slightly different from what she knows about the solar system and planets. And it's that difference in what she does (and does not) know about each that makes it an interesting model.

I can do this even with formalism. Mathematicians are called "Platonic" precisely because they don't (fully) understand the formalisms they define and use.

On 4/30/20 12:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> We cannot use another (perhaps our internal awareness of being conscious) instance of consciousness because we do not know/understand it either.
> 
> If we had a computer that was incontrovertibly conscious, then maybe.
> 
> We certainly have no formalism we can use to think about and come to understand consciousness.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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