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

Wed May 13 01:40:53 EDT 2020

Hi, everybody, 

This has been one heluva discussion, and, given the brush-back I got from Glen a couple of days ago, I thought I had  better stay out of it unless I could really throw myself into it, and I have been tied up with other things.  It's the kind of conversation that makes me thing we really ought to be writing a book.  The perspectives I get out of reading what you write I get nowhere else in the world.  

At the risk of getting my ears boxed again, I would like to highlight the passage below.  It is for me the crux of one of the matters we are discussing here.  What a colleague of mine used to call "interiority". 

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.

Visible, here, is, I take it, a metaphor.  I reject, I think, the fundamental notion of “hidden” and perhaps of the entire black box idea.  The trouble with the black box model is that it implies that we experience the outside of the box directly but have to infer what we learn about the insides of the box.  But all experience is the product of inference, including everything we know about the outside of the box as well as everything we know about the inside of the box.  To say that some inferences are to inner things and some to outer things is to say SOMETHING, but I have never understood exactly what.  What is this dimension of “interiority”?  Does it refer to anything except our difficulty at getting at whatever we take ourselves to be talking about?  And is talk about the mind as inner (and the hard problem, and all that) just the foolish abduction that just because the brain is hidden by the skull, and the mind is hidden by it’s conceptual obscurity,  the latter must be the “seat” of the former?  

I still don’t have the ability to dig into the 50 excellent posts that we have made on this subject to try and articulate the positions and to understand particularly those posts that appeal at length to computation talk.  I suspect that Glen is saying something quite similar but more precise than what I have said above.  But, if it’s not the same, I would recommend that before we talk about how we are to “indirectly” measure the “inner”, that we come to some sort of understanding of what it is to say that something is inner.  What are the rules by which we deploy this metaphor.  What implications of it are essential, of which confirmation is required for us even to use the metaphor.  And what heuristic value does the metaphor offer. 

I hope I have not blotted my copybook again.  In any case, keep heating this iron and hammering away at it, until you get into shape.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2020 6:10 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

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. 

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