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

[uǝlƃ ☣]

OK. Thanks. I'll try again.

It's not the movement of the water that concerns me as much of the movement of the *cells* that cause the movement of the water. If we can credibly talk about pond scum behaving, then we can talk about a) individual cellular behavior and b) tissue behavior. This is why I insist on talking about scale.

When you look at the stick of clipped celery sitting in the colored water, a coarse scale of the behavior is the change in color. A finer-grained scale is the tissue behavior. An even finer-grained scale is the cellular behavior. When you look at it with your naked eye, you cannot see the latter two, but you can see the 1st one. So, the latter two are *hidden*. (I don't want to play word games around "state"... so if you like "process" or "whateverwordyouwant", then fine.) But the point is that there is something *inside* the celery that you cannot see with your naked eye. Change the measuring instrument, and you change what's hidden. E.g. with a magnifying glass, you can see the color change and may be able to see the water moving and *maybe* even the tissue behavior, depending, but you still won't see the cellular behavior. With a high-power microscope, you'll be able to see the cellular behavior and, depending, maybe the color and the tissue.

It is that sort of conversation that has to happen when we talk about "thinking", "feeling", and "consciousness".

The assertion you made was: "there are no valid questions about psychology that are not properly understood as empirical questions about behavior." -- On 5/4/20 5:20 PM

I agree completely. But what you ignored or assumed in your statement was SCALE. The question in the context of the celery is: Are there valid questions about the tissue or cellular behavior that can be properly understood in terms of the naked eye visible behavior? I'd argue *yes*. Just because the tissue and cellular behavior are hidden does not mean you can't formulate (proper) questions about that finer-grained scale behavior. In fact, that's a huge component of science. Similarly, just because there are hidden parts of the human (e.g. thinking) that may be hidden given our current measuring devices, does not mean we can't (properly) formulate hypotheses about that hidden behavior.

Further, we don't necessarily *need* high-power measuring devices in order to accumulate evidence for a given hypothesis about those hidden behaviors. We can falsify and accumulate evidence for *hidden* behavior that we can't *directly* measure with a device. And *that's* where my proposal to look at compression, state-space reconstruction, entropy, (apparent) randomness, etc. enter the rhetoric.

On 5/11/20 2:46 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Off the top of my head, I would say the movement of the water in the celery probably will not count as behavior, but that the leaf-turning probably is. Do you think something different? 
> 
> Also, is there a "hidden state" of the celery we should be looking for? 

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