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

[Frank Wimberly]

I was just outside sawing up dead branches.  I noticed a large ant
struggling to carry a piece of vegetation larger than it was over obstacles
in a general direction which did not change notwithstanding the obstacles.
It was very hard not to feel the ant's intentionality and determination.  I
was experiencing the ant as the ant.  Extreme empathy.

Frank

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:58 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5/13/20 11:17 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> > I'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of
> > words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that
> > tone?).   Maybe I'm missing something.  HAD you (or Eric) used
> > IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation
> > sideways?  Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the
> > day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd?
>
> Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way. I literally
> couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer
> implications (connotations?). Behavior is a very laden word. Since we're
> talking in the midst of a conversation about psychology, it's a seriously
> BAD word to use. And since EricC and Nick have *explicitly* challenged the
> concept of "inside", that makes "inside" a bad word, too. It would be very
> cool if we could use neutral terms like X and Y. But then we'll devolve
> into mathematics, which some people think they don't like. (I'd argue
> everyone likes math; they just don't know they like math.)
>
> I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and
> "hidden" is absurd. But I AM asking EricC and Nick to treat words as
> ambiguous, with multiple meanings, wiggle room, and to make some effort to
> read what I *mean*, not whatever immediate constructs pop into their heads
> when they first read the words. I've talked about this as "steelmanning"
> and "listening with empathy" a lot. I know it's difficult. I fail all the
> time. The conversation will be permanently *dead* (to me) when/if we lock
> down a jargonal definition of any word. If you force someone to read 800
> page scribbles by old dead guys in order to understand what a single word
> means, then you've lost the game.
>
> > Just to continue my niggling.  Interiority would seem to make perfect
> > sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober  and the
> > object (seen/measured/probed)?   To the subject, there is a boundary
> > between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever
> > mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly
> > perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector
> > photons/phonons/nerf-balls).   Visible light mostly bounces off the
> > surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through...  thus yielding a
> > different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?)
> > interiority/exteriority...
>
> No. I've purposefully stopped implying that the boundary closes a space
> because I thought that was interfering with my steelmanning EricC's
> position. The position involves a kind of "projection" from the object's
> actions (flapping wings or whatever) out to a (possibly imaginary)
> objective. And that projection is important to the categorization of the
> *types* of behavior they want to talk about (motivated, intentional, etc.).
> That projection to the objective is what founds the claim that all (valid)
> questions about the object's actions can be empirically studied, because
> the behavior is, ultimately, embedded in the object-objective relationship
> ... the agent lives in an environment and the environment is a kind of
> reflection of everything that agent may do.
>
> So, I attempted to remove the "interiority" from my language by stopping
> my talk about inside and sticking with boundaries. That boundary can be
> closed (like a sphere with an inside and outside) or it could be a plane or
> a wavy manifold or like a slice of Swiss cheese or whatever. So,
> "interiority" is *not* what I'm going for. In fact it's a distraction from
> what I am going for, which is the *distance* (think network hop-distance)
> between the subject and object and the *medium* (think intermediate
> transforms as nodes/edges) through which signals go from subject to object
> and vice versa.
>
> The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible
> cut-points. E.g. a telescope has parts like mirrors and lenses, twists and
> turns. Any one of those could be THE important cut-point, the boundary. The
> boundary is the cut-point beyond which our ability to infer or distinguish
> stops. So, for a telescope, THE important cut-point is whatever distance 2
> pin-pricks of light blur together, such that we need a more powerful
> telescope to distinguish the 2 pin-prick lights.
>
> > This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and
> > objectness?  I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand
> > here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up?
>
> Yes, this conversation is a DIRECT descendant from the conversation that
> cited Fontana, BC Smith, Chalmers, path integrals, Necker cubes, verbs as
> duals of nouns, etc. Luckily, Marcus assures us that e-ink is cheap. 8^D
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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-- 
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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