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

[Eric Charles]

Ok.... so how do we distinguish behavior from non-behavior movements within
the system you are proposing? In what way do we distinguish the dead duck
from the living duck? Or, to stick with the example you prefer, the
changing color of the celery from the changing color of a paper towel
placed part-way into the same solution?

I'm also not sure what you mean to refer to with "holographic principle."
My assertion is that psychologists are not, in their basic activity, trying
to infer about internal processes. That claim is similar to the claim that
chemists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about the inside
of atoms. Or that Newton, in formulating his physics, was not trying to
infer about the inside of planets. The phenomenon in question can be taken
apart if you want, but that is a fundamentally different path of inquiry. A
rabbit trying to escape a fox is made up of cells, but the cracking open
its skulls and looking inside won't tell you that it is *trying to escape
the fox*. The *trying-to-escape* is not inside it's head, it is in the
rabbit's behavior relative to the fox, and can be observed. When someone
says "Hey, come quick! Look, that rabbit is trying to get away from that
fox!", they are not making some mysterious inference about a hidden state
within the rabbit, they are describing what they are observing.


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


On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 8:10 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think Jon's contribution (and my response) argue that the entire space
> can be spanned by such domain specifiers. So, I don't think we're dealing
> with borderline examples, only examples that demonstrate the spanning.
>
> I don't think agree with Holt's criteria for distinguishing behavior from
> movement. The example of the antenna (or *any* passive and maybe even
> purely *reactive*)  demonstrates that such things behave. The passive and
> reactive sense of behaving is necessary for me in order to get at the
> hidden states, memory-laden, hysterical (hysteretical?), processes I think
> we need in order to approach human thought. If, e.g. an inductor, can be
> considered "behaving" according to Holt's criteria, then it might be OK.
> But if an inductor's or capacitor's behavior is classified as "mere
> movement", then no, I disagree.
>
> It's good to hear that you're willing to allow behavior *composition*
> (e.g. cellular behavior composes into tissue behavior composes into object
> behavior). But I reject the concept of "in principle visible". We either
> have a seeing-device or we don't. And if we don't have the device with
> which to measure it, then it's not directly [†] measurable. (Now, as I've
> implied before, we can *indirectly* measure something that's hidden. That's
> what I'd like to eventually talk about. We can indirectly measure celery
> cell behavior by watching the color. We can indirectly measure someone's
> thoughts by EEG ... or asking them questions. But those things are still
> hidden, not directly measurable.) Your holographic principle asserts that
> there is a *bound* (or limit) to the spanning parameter such that any
> hypothetical thing beyond it, hidden, is "invalid". (The analogy is to the
> Bekenstein bound, if I understand that correctly.) In your language, you
> might say that talking about anything inside the bound is "invalid",
> whereas talking about things outside the bound is "understood as empirical
> questions about behavior". My contribution is simply to formulate this so
> that it can apply across the board, everywhere, to antennas and humans. And
> if I'm lucky, we might be able to start arguing about *where* that
> bound/limit lies.
>
> And, again Jon's contribution demonstrates that at least the celery
> (organism-eye, tissue-scope, cell-scope) example *is* about scale. But not
> all hiding need be about scale.
>
>
> [†] I imagine there's an argument waiting for me out there that I'm
> kicking the can down the road with "direct" and "indirect". But we can
> define a graph/network of transformations and a hop number across those
> transformations. By that, we can define a "distance" between the measuring
> device (e.g. eyeball) and the thing measured (e.g. cells). The greater that
> distance, the more indirect it is, the more hidden the target is. Another
> way to demonstrate this point would be to say something like some
> microscopes are more powerful than others, or some telescopes allow you to
> see further than others. The hiddenness, directness, hop distance is
> described by these words "power" and "further".
>
> [‡] Of course, Jon's generalization to domains also allows
> discrete/disjoint domains that can't be spanned by a continuous thing like
> a scalar. It opens us up to, say, changing types or even changing the
> entire algebra. And that might be required to capture the historicity,
> stigmergy, developmental trajectory of an individual human. E.g. Nick can't
> continuously turn some knob like scale to get to Frank's perspective. He'd
> have to change the whole universe of discourse (domain) in order to do
> that. But if I can't even get others to understand hiddenness of scale,
> there's no way in Hell I'll be able to get someone to understand the
> hiddenness of more radical domain changes.
>
> On 5/12/20 3:51 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> > 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.
>
> --
> ☣ 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/c396c975/attachment-0001.html>