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

[Eric Charles]

Jon,
"Decide" is a weird way to put it.

Whenever a given range of phenomenon start to get scienced, we rapidly find
out that we need to nail down the vocabulary beyond the flexibility usually
allowed in lay conversations about a topic. We can, for example, allow
"He's got momentum" to mean all sorts of things in a lay conversation. We
might talk about broad social phenomenon such as how "Bernie has momentum
in the polls" or "M. Night Shyamalan's career lost momentum after a string
of flops, but he seems to be getting some of that momentum back now",  or
about general laziness such as "I'm not going to do the gardening my wife
keeps asking about, because momentum", *and *we also could mean that there
is a movement that will not alter without the application of force such as
"He's not going to stop before he hits that wall, too much momentum." But
in a physics conversation we would take out the casual usages and limit
ourselves to the latter; momentum would be a property of mass at
velocity, which stays constant unless acted upon by a force. Hell,
Merrium-Webster even offers "momentum" a definition of "force or speed of
movement", where in that physics conversation "force" and "speed" are
clearly distinguished concepts, that are definitely *not *momentum.

Similarly, if we want to talk seriously about psychology, we need to nail
down some vocabulary that will allow us to talk/think rigorously about the
phenomenon in question. We need some terminology by which to refer to the
distinction between the movements of the dead duck (or rock) thrown out the
window and the movements of the live duck thrown out a window. And, as we
already covered, that distinction isn't *just *a matter of falling, because
we want to put Nick's post-defenestration flailing in the same broad
category as the more elegant movements of the live duck.

Note that, if you aren't interested in *that *distinction that is a
different issue. Lot's of people aren't interested in any particular
specialized science, and that is entirely unrelated to whether the science
needs a specialized vocabulary to operate effectively. And while science
frequently go through phases of emphasizing vocabulary that refers to
processes that are not easy to observe, those can't be the terms that
define the domain of the science. What are the observable phenomenon that
lead us to ask questions about psychology? What are the methods by which
those observations are made? Until we answer those types of questions, it
is dramatically premature to start speculating about what
hidden-unobservables might be at play. And, there is every reason to
believe that our interest starts with behavior. "Why did he do that?" "Why
am I acting this way?" When we wonder "Why is he angry at me?", the start
of that question is a witnessed (or reported) action.

Could other phenomenon end up in our bucket at some point? Sure, just like
in any other science. But you can't even figure out where those other
things start, until you know the limits of where the base concepts take
you. Though I think some followers of James J. Gibson's Ecological
Psychology, for example, take his contributions to the field farther than
is warranted, he absolutely showed that basic principles of perceptual
systems can get us much, much farther than previously thought, including
providing solutions to how people act successfully in situations where most
believe that advanced computational thinking is required. We need to nail
down the basic concepts, and then do the same type of push Gibson did to
determine their limits.

In that context, it seems fair to begin using "behavior" in a more
technical sense. Once that is done, we could actually answer your question
about the tree and the falling seeds, but before that, it would just seem
like spinning our wheels.


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:07 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:

> Eric,
> I have some concern that once we *decide* the dead duck was not behaving,
> that we would avoid the dropped coin. I get that we wouldn't want to
> apply the verb *flailing* to the coin except perhaps in a moment of
> poetry.
> This is the season to witness cottonwood drifts, though. Better might
> be the helicopter like motions of maple seedpods. These adaptations,
> which carry the future of the species, are shaped so that they behave
> meaningfully when coupled with their environment. Would you hesitate
> to call the motions of the cottonwood seedpod, in its environment,
> behavior?
> Is it too early in this conversation, or even inappropriate to ask whose
> behavior it would be?
>
> Frank,
> Thank you for mentioning covariant tensors, I enjoyed walking
> around my neighborhood thinking of them and of a response to you.
> While it seems to me that a coffee cup is less abstract than a covariant
> tensor, the latter isn't free of material or phenomenal foundation. If I
> witness a grade schooler attempting to *pushforward* what I know to be
> a covariant tensor, then I know that they are not likely thinking about a
> covariant tensor, even if they wished that they were. If on the other hand,
> they were clear on *pullingback* whatever it is they believed acted like a
> covariant tensor, then I would likely believe they had a covariant tensor
> in mind. Where the coffee cup, arguably is *just* a thing. A covariant
> tensor is a thing which obeys strict rules of behavior. For example, while
> I could use a coffee cup as a hammer, I am not convinced that I could
> use a covariant tensor as a hammer. It may be the case that to resolve a
> covariant tensor with an fMRI, we would need to witness one thinking of
> a covariant tensor through time.
>
> Glen,
> Maybe we could also use the term *bracketed* for those things which
> we wish to keep outside of the Bekenstein bound. Like yourself, I am
> not really a stickler for what terms we use. I would and have claimed
> that *this is how the inductor behaves in this circuit* while explaining
> to family or friends how one of my synthesizers works. What I would
> like to glean in the context of this conversation is whether or not this
> attribution to the inductor is a metaphor. If it is a metaphor here, then
> I would like to understand why.
>
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