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

Wed May 13 16:14:23 EDT 2020

Hi, Uncle Steve, 

For me, the problem with Pirate Roberts was that he seemed to hold the view that nobody who did not know everything should say anything.  (i.e, that there is no value in discourse on any technical matter that is not expert discourse.)  My own view is that there is value in any discourse that is honest and respectful.  Respectful means that you take the other guy's words seriously; honest means you take your own seriously.  Taking the other guy's seriously is hard enough; taking one's own seriously that's -- oh my -- a whole different level.  

Taking one's words seriously amounts to caring intensely about the integrity of one's thought.  One CARES whether the thing one said yesterday about X has the same predicates or implications as the thing one said today about Y.  I don't know about you guys, but this conversation has me right out at my limits of integrity.  Even though I have studied and thought about behavior for 60 years, it has me flailing.  I am trying to find a place to stand so that I will not have to shift my ground every time you, or Glen, or Marcus, or EricS, or EricC, or Frank asks me a question. You have me at one of those boundaries that Steve G. likes to talk about, where creativity sometimes happens.   I hope and pray that I am doing the same for you.   

I think I am sympathetic with the notion that the dead duck is behaving, it's just displaying "dead-behavior."  The alternative I reject when I agree to that formulation is to require all behavior to be telic (i.e., goal-directed). That just seems to heap too much on the language for it to bear.  True, most of what EricC and I talk about is telic behavior, so it's understandable that he would try to exclude the dead duck, but I think that exclusion is just too troublesome for speech.  

So how do we get out of this mess?  Let me lay out a general perspective which is Holtian and Peircean and, I think, ultimately Glenian.  Any assertion of the existence of something requires THREE "arguments?": the thing seen, what it is seen AS, and the point of view from which it is seen that way.  The nice thing about the "point of view" metaphor is that it gives assigns reality both to the observer and to the thing observed.  Every point of view tells you something about what is observed, and yet, what is observed from that point of view is determined by the thing observed.  Knowledge advances as we compared the information gathered from our various points of view to agree upon a point of view that is more nearly universal.  

This convergence toward agreement depends, of course, on our prior agreement that, in any one conversation, we are all looking at the same object.  And THAT agreement requires us to adopt a meta-point of view, one in which the world is divided into objects of observation.   For something to be an object, it has, somehow, to endure and separate itself from its background.  One way  for that sort of separation to occur is parallax, which Glen keeps asking us to talk about.  That is when we see the near mountain as separate from the mountain range behind it because as we move, it moves in relation to the range.  The most common way, however, for objects to designate themselves is by moving, themselves, even tho we, the observers, and the background, remain still.  I think I am happy to call such motion, behavior. So, yes, rocks rolling down mountain sides are behaving.  Dead ducks behave. But remember, all of this requires that we isolate the object of which we are speaking BEFORE we begin to describe it's behavior.  Thus my suspicion about some of the argument going on between EricC and Glen is equivocation concerning what it is that is behaving, not disagreement about whether behavior is going on.  

This is why I find the discussion of tornadoes so fascinating.  Please see again Frank's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gQutQQiuAI&feature=youtu.be .  At the risk of summoning Doug out of the ground to once again dunk my head in a toilet, I want to try to understand if tornadoes behave.  At first blush, they seem to: there is the tornado, it is writhing across the ground and it us acting on its environment.  It is definitely moving, both in parallax and on its own.  But is a proper object?  That, to me, is the much harder question.  

To be an object, irreducibly, what ever we are talking about has to have boundaries and persist in time.  A tornado persists in time, but what is its  boundary?  Is the tornado an object in itself or is it just an appendage of the supercell that generates it?  Indeed, is the supercell an object in itself or is IT just an appendage of the synoptic situation that makes it possible.  Indeed, is that synoptic situation an object in itself or just an appendage the meso-convective complex that embraces it, and is that, in turn just an appendage of the of the energy gradient generated by the sun on the surface of the earth, as Steve G. would  have it?  And so forth. Is there only one "object", the big bang, and are we all--tornadoes, people, celery, and dead ducks--appendages of that object.  

If I agree to the last proposition, I have plainly cornered myself in gagaland.  But point of view can rescue us, I hope.  From the point of view of the farmer on the ground, the tornado is plainly the object that behavior.  It is the exact motions and variations in strength that will determine the future of that farmer's barn.  From the point of view of the tornado-chaser, it is the super cell he needs to pay attention to.  Over- focus on the tornado fading away in front of him may distract him from the on-coming tornado being generated behind him by super cell over him.   From the point of view of the severe storms forecaster, it is the meso-convective complex that are the relevant objects, because those are the likely objects to persist into the next forecast period.  Each point of view isolates different objects and gathers information about those objects that has predictive power for the concerns of the observer.  

Before letting this fly, I want to address a meta, meta, metameta, concern that I sense lurking in the shadows around this discussion.  SHOULD (note the use of modal language!) ==>should<== we be trying to come to an agreement on either facts or terminology and, if we fail, should we be discouraged.  I would say yes on the first, and no on the second.  I think we should constantly try for agreement, because that effort produces the tension that leads to change and growth, no matter how ephemeral that agreement ever proves to be. 

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 Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 9:23 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

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.

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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 Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 9:23 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

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.

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...
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-comic.blogspot.com/ 