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

[Eric Charles]

Glen,
That is excellent! However, I think it brings us back to the problem of
starting with borderline examples.

I *might *be willing to talk about pond scum behaving, but certainly not
without further analysis. Did we agree to use Holt's criteria for
distinguishing behavior from mere movement? If so, we can evaluate whether
the cells in the celery or the tissues are "behaving." I think both are
unlikely to make the cut, but, as with the pond scum, I'm willing to be
convinced. The issue isn't size/scale, the issue is how to properly
describe the movements in question. What is the goal of the celery cell?
How does the celery cell vary its movements to accomplish that goal? Please
feel free to speculate for now, if necessary... so long as everything you
speculate can, in principle, be confirmed or refuted by experiment.

Remember, in a casual conversation, you could talk about the "behavior" of
a rock rolling down a hill, the "behavior" of the planets in the sky, the
"behavior" of a stream, etc., etc. But once we start trying to be rigorous
with our terms, that stops working pretty quickly. The same restriction
happens with the central terms of all sciences.

The issue of what is or is not "hidden" is a different issue from "scale",
so I'm not sure where to go in regards to that part of your comment. In the
way of thinking Nick and I are talking advancing, small behaviors
definitely still count as behaviors, including ones you would need a
microscope to detect. Those are still in-principle visible. You could
construct Holt's base example of behavior with well under 100 cells for the
whole organism.


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 10:24 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
> .... . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC>
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200512/f4a522be/attachment.html>