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

Wed May 13 17:29:13 EDT 2020

Glen, 

I like your Deus Ex Meshina.  More later. 

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 u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 3:04 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

On 5/13/20 1:14 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> 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.

Maybe. But for my part, I'm arguing that the question "Who is behaving?" is unnecessary (or maybe simply prejudicial, pre-emptive registration). I'll try something completely different, playing off Steve's generalization of the subject-object chain into an object-object mesh.

If you imagine the universe as an irregular mesh of little nodes where filament intersects, then you can imagine that mesh being more tightly bunched up in some places and more loosely gauzy in others. Given such a mesh, you can also imagine some super-creature who floats along grabbing bunches of the mesh in its fist (or claws, or mouth, or whatever), thereby *forcing* its idea of what constitutes a distinguishable *glob* of the mesh from other parts of the mesh. That super-creature is not part of the mesh, it's a kind of deus ex machina (or maybe demiurge ex machina), if I'm using that phrase correctly.

What you guys seem (to me) to be doing is acting as those super-creatures ... trying to force your clumping of the mesh on everyone else.

What I'm trying to do is *stop* such ex machina clumping. If we assume the nodes (connections between filaments) are real things, then we can move along a filament from one intersection to another and keep doing that for as long as we want ... walking the graph. Now, if the mesh were regular, certain properties of the graph would be true. E.g. Given any 2 intersections, we could walk from one to the other. As an irregular mesh, maybe that's not true. Maybe there are some pairs of intersections where you simply cannot get from one to the other. Or, maybe not every intersection has 2 (or whatever N) filaments crossing at that point? Maybe as we're walking the graph, at one intersection we have 2 directions we could go, but at other intersections we have 50 directions we could go.

What I'd like this conversation to be about is to discuss the conditions by which, when at an intersection, there is no way to choose a direction. I.e. that intersection has to be the *last* one visited ... the end of the graph ... the end of the transforms we can make to "see further down the mesh".

It's not a matter of "who behaves". It's a matter of "what conditions obtain that *prevent* us from inferring anything more". (This is why I keep talking about entropy, apparent randomness, etc.) The position EricC has taken might be rephrased as: the mesh is *regular enough* and any question about infinite-valence intersections or no-valent intersections is nonsense. Alternatively, he might be saying that there exist infinite-valence (or no-valent) intersections and when we get to that point, we recognize we have to stop talking because nothing we say will make any sense.

But *both* of those statements would be fine with me. The middle ground might be something like "the mesh has an inherently interesting structure (not totally ordered, not totally random) where, if you find yourself at an infinite-valence or no-valent intersection, XYZ is what you do to *continue* walking the graph."

> But is [it] a proper object?  That, to me, is the much harder question.  

I would argue there is no such thing as a "proper object".

> Each point of view isolates different objects and gathers information about those objects that has predictive power for the concerns of the observer.

If I reword this, you and I could agree completely. I'd say: Each point of view registers a different ontology, works with that ontology until they get tired of it, then registers another ontology and works with that until they tire of that.

> 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. 

I'd argue the answers are "a little bit" to the first one and "a little bit" to the second one. If agreement is admittedly *temporary*, then I'm all for it. But if one party wants to chisel that agreement in stone and suffer it for the rest of their lives and for every situation, then I reject it entirely. In fact, I think people ought to juggle, keep up in the air, as MANY different "agreements" as they can possibly stand and strive to mate and evolve them till their dying breath. Similarly, if you find yourself in a discussion with contract-written-in-stone people, you should try to shatter their ontology and help them build more dynamic, co-evolving ones. When you meet another person with a dynamic ecology of inter-coopetitive boilerplate contract-lets and you *fail* to find a (temporary) match, you should be a bit embarrassed that your ecology doesn't have that species in it and do your best to remedy that.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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