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

[Steven A Smith]

glen -

I try to resist sticking my fat foot (face, keyboard?) into these
discussions.   A few weeks back at the beginning of this (or perhaps a
precursor to this) thread, I felt as if you and Nick (and maybe Eric?)
were having an exchange almost indistinguishable (in form, not detail)
from the one between Vizzini and Dread Pirate Roberts now infamously
known as "the Iocane Powder Battle of  Wits".    I will leave it to the
reader to judge who I imaged as Vizzini and who Roberts, but let me
clarify that I was relieved when both parties emerged from the exchange
alive (or so I impute from your continued textual engagement via this
mail list, which given some of this discussion might actually be worth
questioning as sufficient for that imputation?).

I will niggle at your statement that "there is no behavioral difference
between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color" though I
accept that the (more) interesting distinction is between the mechanisms
in each.   Replace your celery stalk with a giant sequoia and make your
paper towel roll equally tall, and maybe you sense my issue.   By
observing the (behavioural) difference between the sequoia's leaves
taking up fuscia dye at it's crown and the paper towel roll only taking
it up a few meters high (postulate a waterproof and very strong
core-roll to keep it from sagging/breaking with the added weight), we
might *then* impute that their dyed-water uptake is based on differing
mechanisms.   At this scale/context of observation, I think the
*mechanism* (or it's behaviour) is hidden whilst the
macro-(quantitatively and qualitatively?) behaviour is exposed (visible).

As for Nick's use of "black box" and your own niggling with that, I will
*try* to follow your lead on thread hygiene and respond inline to that
response/post (next).

- Steve

> There is no need to distinguish between behavior and non-behavior movement. It's a distraction. That's part of my position in this discussion. To play fair, though, I'll take your example of the live vs. dead duck. I don't care whether the duck is alive or dead. I don't distinguish between dead duck behavior and live duck behavior. There is no such thing as "trying to escape the fox" behavior. There is only "darting this way", "sprinting that way", etc.
>
> *You*, the observer impute the "trying to escape the fox" intention onto the behavior much the same way a mystic might impute a "returning to mother earth" intention onto a dead duck falling from the sky.
>
> There is no behavioral difference between celery changing color and a paper towel changing color. There *is* behavioral difference between the *mechanisms* inside the paper towel and the mechanisms inside the celery. Rocks don't have intention when they fall from a cliff and humans don't have intention when they wink sarcastically. Intention is an illusory imputation. All I care about is the action and the boundary between the measuring device and the thing measured (which Nick targets nicely in the next post, to which I'll reply).
>
> But please remember that I'm trying to steelman what I infer is *your* (and you claim is Nick's) position. It's a testament to my incompetence that I've failed so spectacularly to repeat what I inferred to be your own position back to you.
>
> On 5/12/20 7:55 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> 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.