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

Wed May 13 16:16:57 EDT 2020

Monday, I did a video of such an ant carrying a leaf multiples of his size.
I wonder if this is a season for such activity.

George Duncan
Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
georgeduncanart.com
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My art theme: Dynamic exposition of the tension between matrix order and
luminous chaos.

"Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may
then be a valuable delusion."
>From "Notes to myself on beginning a painting" by Richard Diebenkorn.

"It's that knife-edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our truest
power." Joanna Macy.

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:44 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
>
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> Frank Wimberly
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