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

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -
> Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way.   
I was asking because it seemed to have that tone, but I also know you to
be pretty literal, so appreciate this clarity (as below as well).
>  I literally couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer implications (connotations?).
I think that is meritable
>  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 will try to concede here to you what *I* believe to be one of the
major perils of the broad and free use of metaphor and that is that we
end up applying what I think you call "excess meaning".   And I am
sympathetic with wanting to couch it in entirely arbitrary symbols (even
X and Y often connote a Euclidean Grid and Orientation).
> I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and "hidden" is absurd. 
Excellent... and I in return am sorry for letting that tack distract
me... I *am* trying to align more better with the conversation and this
helps.
> 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.
Yes, much discussion (especially on e-mail) seems to be at risk to
devolving into a cascade of triggers (in a broad sense, not just the
PTSD sense).   I also agree (if I'm understanding what you *mean*) that
meaning is carried in the white space, between the words, in the total
context/construct of the words and their arrangement and their embedding
in a larger conversation.
>  I've talked about this as "steelmanning" and "listening with empathy" a lot. 
I appreciate your making the connection between these two explicit.   It
enhances my empathy (I think) for what you are trying to do when you
"steelman".   We can discuss that entire idiom separately if I continue
to mis(sub?) understand it.   I think your use of "straw" and "steel" in
the sense of "antipathy" and "empathy" (perhaps) is very helpful to me
at least, as I begin to catch up (more) on how you mean/use those terms.
> 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.

And I *think* this is part of the larger discussion alluded to with your
invocation of "holographic".   A LOT can be inferred in a hologram from
a small subset of the arrangements of silver-halide (or the varying
thickness of a light-propogating substance), but no single atom or even
crystal really tells you much at all, and the MORE of the original
holographic recording that is maintained/referred to, the MORE fidelity
is obtained.    I don't know if this is an acutely useful observation in
this exchange, but I hope so.

>>  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.
Thanks... again I apologize for asking dumb questions to "come up to speed".
>  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.
I DO usually try to read (listen) empathetically but your reference
above was a good reminder and I *think* helps in engaging in these types
of discussoins.   Another tangent you might be able to prune for me
trivially is the question of teleology.   We normally allow things with
agency to have objectives whilst we do not those without.   Drop a
human-scale (weight and dimension) mannequin with loose clothing from an
airplane and it may well "flap it's arms and legs" all the way to impact
which may look like hysterical panic if exhibited by a conscious human
*with agency*.  
> 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.
Yes, I think this is both helpful and registers well on what I have been
trying to understand using Judea Pearl's "Causal Diagrams". 
> The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible cut-points.
Agreed.  And similarly many possible levels of aggregation of the graph
of object-object relations?
>> 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

Yeh... but is "cheap" a proxy for "nearly worthless"? 8^D

- Steve

BTW, your adoption (if only temporarily or self-consciously) of my use
of "quotes" and CAPS and *asterisked-bold* and occasionally
_italics-underscore_  had pretty good fidelity to my own as I read it. 
It *did* add some cadence and emphasis that (I think) helped *me* (if
nobody else) read a little more empathetically.  I think it was
effective for reasons beyond the mere NLP "mirroring" that can evoke
something similar as I understand it.  I suspect you did NOT adopt my
layered (parenthetical) stylization because it maybe doesn't add
anything *for you* when you read me, or it *is not* the way your thought
processes work.  My typographic conventions are primarily about emphasis
while my parenthetical stylizing is more of a reflection of the way I
have a hard time pruning the branching narratives in my head when
reading/thinking/responding and wanting to *share* some of those
branches at least as remaining stubs.   Any observation you have on how
well that works (or how badly it distracts) would be of interest to me. 
I tend to trust most people to skip/skim my parentheticals as they are
there more for disambiguation (rather than elaboration) than anything.