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

Wed May 13 16:23:14 EDT 2020

George, 

I, too, watched such an ant.  At any one moment, it was struggling ahead in a single direction carrying an elmseed; but over the whole ten minutes that I watched it, it went around in three large circles.   This sort of thing is why I am so reluctant to encumber the notion of behavior with the notion of goal-direction.  I happy to say that from my point of view the ant was behaving, despite having no idea what the ant was trying to achieve by that behavior.  

N

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of George Duncan
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 2:17 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

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 <http://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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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