[FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

No, Frank.  I would never dismiss a Cartesian.  I am not sure I would hire one, either, but that’s another story. 

 

Nick 

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2020 8:47 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

 

As I said to Nick approximately a dozen years ago, people who deny thought must not have it.  I don't mean that as an insult.  It's that for me thought is the one thing I can't deny because it's the first *experience*

At that point Nick dismisses me as a Cartesian.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Sun, May 10, 2020, 8:34 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

Ha! Well, by ignoring the poignant example, you've ignored my entire point. And it's that point by which I can't agree with the unmoored distinction you're making. The celery example isn't about being alive. Sorry for injecting that into it. The celery example is about *scale*. Celery's movement *is* movement. An antenna's behavior *is* its movement. I introduced antennas' behavior in order to help demonstrate that behavior is orthogonal to life.

Now, the distinction you're making by saying that behavior is a proper subset of movement, would be fine *if* you identify some movement that is *not* behavior. I didn't see that in the Old Dead Guy text you quoted ... maybe I missed it?  Anyway, that's the important category and celery and antennas fit right in. 

But the behavior/movement discussion (including observer-ascribed intention) is a bit of a distraction. What we're actually talking about is *hidden* states (a.k.a. "thinking", maybe extrapolated to "consciousness"). So, the examples of light-following or higher order objective targeting is like trying to run before you can walk. Why do that? Why not talk about, say, the hidden states of an antenna? If we could characterize purely *passive* behavior/movement, we might be able to characterize *reactive* movement. And if we do that, then we can talk about the complicatedness (or complexity) of more general *transformations* from input to output. And then we might be able to talk about I⇔O maps whose internal state can (or can't) be estimated solely from their I&O.

We don't need all this philosophical rigmarole to talk about the complexity of I⇔O maps. 

On 5/9/20 6:17 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Ok, so it sounds like we agree there is a distinction can be made between behavior and "mere movement". So what is that difference? I would argue, following E. B. Holt, that it is the presence of intentionality. Note crucially that the directedness of the behavior described below is descriptive, /not /explanatory. The intention is not a force behind the behavior, it is a property of the behavior-to-circumstance mapping that can be demonstrated by varying conditions appropriately. 
> [...]
> P.S. I'm going to try to ignore the celery challenge, because while we recognize plants as living, we do not typically talk about them as behaving. And I think the broad issue of living vs. not-living is a different issue. We probably should talk about plants behaving a bit more than we normally do, but I think it is worth getting a handle on what we mean in the more normal seeming cases before we try to look for implications like those. 


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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