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

Sun May 10 18:07:28 EDT 2020

No, frank.  Idon’t think that’s my position.  If you want to make it as extreme as the position you lay out, it should be that I can think your thoughts as well as you can, not that you don’t have thoughts.  

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 2:45 PM
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

Eric,

Nick has said to me that "thought" is mentalist language and that I only think I think.  Note the paradox.  Surely you've heard him deny the existence of mental life and the private access that I (you) have to mine (yours).  I think it happened here recently.  No one but me knows the content of this message until i click "send" and they read it.

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

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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-- 

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

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