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

Sun May 10 17:11:56 EDT 2020

>  No one but me knows the content of this message until i click "send" and they read it.

I think you can argue that even this has two layers.  There is a narrative “you” that knows the content of the message _after_ it has been typed out but before it has been sent.  By then it is an artifact in the world, with which the narrative you interacts as it does with other artifacts.  If you are on an irritating neo-microsoft Mac that constantly tries to replace the words you type, you could say that the Mac knows about the message in a similar way to the narrative you.

But there is also the event stream of converting an intended idea (whatever _that_ palr of words should mean!)  into the composition of the particular message sequence.  My experience of that is that the composition keeps unfolding into the view of the narrative you, from someplace that the narrative you doesn’t see, like a spring of which I see the surface pool but which is fed by a subterranean source.  Presumably that language-production phenomenon is also associated with a concept of “you”, and I would not presume at all that it is coextensive with, or even of the same kind as, the narrative you that can proofread the sentence.  Even the process of proofreading, to see whether the extant string really renders the intended idea or needs to have parts replaced by newly-conceived strings of words, almost seems like a collaborative exchange between two quasi-autonomous faculties.  

Artists I talk to, and particularly writers for whom the unfolding of narrative is a high concern, very often emphasize this sense that there are two actors at work.  Whether those two seem like one person, or like two in a dialogue, is a necker cube.  

Eric

> Frank
> 
> On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 2:35 PM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Frank,
> So far as I can tell, no one is denying thought. I'm certainly not. There are phenomenon at play, and one of the things that happens when you science a phenomenon is that you end up with descriptions of the phenomenon (and explanations for the phenomenon) that don't match mundane intuitions about things,. We should expect that the science of psychology defines its subject matter different from mundane intuitions in the same way that the science of physics and the science of biology did for their respective subject matters: Sometimes those definitions end up pretty close to the mundane intuitions of a given era, other times you end up with definitions that are radically different. 
> 
> In these contexts, I like to remind people how mindbogglingly unintuitive Newtonian momentum is. When was the last time you moved an object and it didn't come to rest? Aristotle's system is much more intuitive. 
> 
> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
> American University - Adjunct Instructor
>  <mailto:echarles at american.edu>
> 
> On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 10:46 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 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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