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

Thu May 14 14:39:15 EDT 2020

Jon and cottonwood seeds,

See, that’s why I want to talk about tornadoes.  We need to know the point of view from which you are viewing the seed before we say that it is behaving.  So if we limit our view to the motions of the seed, we might want to say that it is behaving.  We might later account, through intricate micro dopplar radar that it’s motions are entirely accountable to eddies in the wind.  This discovery, on my account, would be an explanation of its behavior, not a demonstration that it is not behaving.  

Why does nobody want to talk about tornadoes? 

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 Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2020 10:57 AM
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

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

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