[FRIAM] hidden

Wed May 20 00:02:38 EDT 2020

Hi, Eric S, 

Thanks again for your thoughtful commentary.  As I read it, I came in and out of understanding it just as I came in and out of understanding Glen’s gloss on “inside”, just before I FINALLY got it.  So there is hope for me. 

This is why lists are a death trap, a kind of cognitive-affective pitcher plant.  Always there is the impulse to say “Oh no no no! You have misunderstood me!”.  But of course there is no sentence compassable that can’t be misunderstood.  Whoever is most tenacious will simply outlive the others, and I can promise you it won’t be me.  I can’t even imagine what social media must be like for the generation born into it.

At 82, I am not going to outlive any of you, so I would rather not think of the discussion in this way.  I have this insane, naïve view that out of such a discussion we could pull an article, a book, a compendium, and academic thingy of SOME sort that would give some permanence, something that we could be proud of.  I would love to see a book, written in  a language we-citizens could understand, that would convey the algorithmists’ understandings of the topics we have been discussing, e.g., whether they think they are building a machine with a ghost in it  or one that merely demonstrates that ghosts are unnecessary.  

I would love to participate in such a book  In point of fact, over the 15 years I have been coming to FRIAM, I have published four articles, each arising to some degree from our discussions, so it IS possible.  I am not sure anybody else thinks it’s a worthy enterprise, or, more particularly, one that they have time to pursue.  I am simply helpless to not try to do it.   And nothing sharpens a writer more keenly than learning all the myriad ways in which he can be misunderstood.  

Sorry for hastily reading your comment on spiritualism.  In the meetings of the Mother Church, there are two or three people of a more or less spiritualist inclination whom I have been trying to understand and draw out their threads.  So my comment about the Pragmatic implications of spiritualistic position was honest and I hope not haughty. 

Thanks once again for your many contributions to my thinking.  I need to reread  your posts, particularly your back and forth with Jon, to see if I can understand better the mathematical/computational point of view that you are developing there. 

All the best, 

Nick

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 David Eric Smith
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 8:20 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] hidden

This is why lists are a death trap, a kind of cognitive-affective pitcher plant.  Always there is the impulse to say “Oh no no no! You have misunderstood me!”.  But of course there is no sentence compassable that can’t be misunderstood.  Whoever is most tenacious will simply outlive the others, and I can promise you it won’t be me.  I can’t even imagine what social media must be like for the generation born into it.

So I can’t do even 1/10 of the line-by-line reply toward which I twitch, or this would turn into the through-the-night conversations between Moriarty and Ginsburg that Kerouac relates in On the Road, and I will accept defeat at the outset rather than go that way.

Only a couple of things, then.  I need to re-arrange:

On May 20, 2020, at 3:48 AM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

  They are so hell-bent on not giving an inch to the spiritualists (a worthy position IMO)

[NST===>OK, so here I am about to confirm my philistinity… (By the way, when is the world going to wake up and remember that Philistine is a racist term.)

I do remember it, always since finding out about it.  Miserably it is part of the aggression in which such terms are used.  The people who would use it against the physicists do not intend to be kind.

… by asking you what you think spiritualism is and what it is worthy OF?  In other words, I don’t think you get your “by the way.” It may be “in the way.”    <===nst] 

My original sentence can be read two ways, one of which is a good-natured, humorous supportive one toward what I read as your motive.  Being hell-bent on denying the spiritualists an inch is a worthy position IMO.   That was the intended meaning, both the good humor and the supportiveness, to say that my objections are bounded, and there is much in which I am on your side.   Should I say more about why you read it the other way?  No, clearly not.  Interestingly, because I _cannot_, and there is some fundamental element of courtesy in realizing there are limits to what one can know about another.  Something about being hidden….  (Sorry; that is trolling.)

And then:

HEP: In principle, whatever you care about is a result of interaction of our building blocks.

ROS: Well, okay, but your saying that hasn’t addressed basically anything in what we wanted to understand from what we do.

HEP: Whatever you wanted to understand was just a problem of assembly.

ROS: “Just assembly” has its own rules which are not already expressed in the rules by which you characterize your building blocks (Of course, the objection was never made with such circumspection, but usually in less clear terms.)

HEP: Well, in principle we understand all that.

ROS: Then In Practice, say something we find useful or interesting.

HEP: In Principle we understand all that.

ROS: You are a robot.

And in that way, “reductionist” got entrenched as a synonym for “philistine” who thinks there isn’t anything left to explain beyond a few descriptions of building blocks.  Not only did it lead to a lot of unproductive fighting, it also made it much harder for those who had useful points of view on what reductionism is, or isn’t, to relate its contributions to all the other work that involves understanding of new explanatory primitives.

[NST===>If anybody on this list thinks I hold the above position, I have been a very poor expositor, indeed. <===nst] 

Followed by 

[NST===>

[yes I have clipped content here, which does affect context, to highlight a part still intending good faith]

 I am an “up-reductionist”.  My crime is that I assert that the one key to the mind is to look up and out, rather than down and in.   Our minds are something about us, not something within us.   <===nst]

“The one key to the mind”. “Our minds are … about … not … within”

This is why I answered Glen about Brouwer (Intuitionism, constructivism) versus the formalists.

If you make your above assertions as answers to a conversation in which you are not constructing something to address what the conversation is about (this question of inner/outer or hidden or whatever), what is the content of the formal assertions?  

Someone is asking you to search in the void for the surprise of a new thought.  You are answering by declaring a certain kind of sufficiency of thoughts you have long held fixed.  You are not claiming to be in possession of all constructions — I understand that and always have — but your “about … not … within” is a certain kind of changing the subject as a pre-emption.

In my cartoon of the reductionism of the physicists above, I wasn’t asking you to make a mapping from the domain-content of that discussion to the domain-content of this one — there is a crass older-school behaviorism, as you say, for which that kind of mapping would have worked, and I know that is not what is at work here, and you are not from that kind of mind — I was asking you to consider the style of thought that substitutes a formalist-style declaration of scope in answer to a constructivist-style search for something surprising because it is hard to find.

You did address this, in a style I recognize:

My monism is limited to formal thought, to the project of building an approach to understanding that is as comprehensive and consistent as possible.  I.e., a scientific understanding. 

I understood a few days ago that this was the source of your (also good-natured) dig at me asking “must one be doing science all the time?  Isn’t it okay to sometimes have a bit of fun?” as a read of my position.

I believe I am as on-board with you as a person can be, in liking consistency, believing that science as an aspiration is somehow in that direction, etc.  If there is a difference in the way we are fencing over this position — and there may not be in substance so much as in style — it could be that I expect my belief in my ability to recognize that consistency to be much more thoroughly upended by new thoughts of kinds I could not anticipate.  So I don’t think I could define what “science” is, except from a very unimaginative appeal to things I currently happen to know about from our shared past,   I would include in that all the Piercing positions I have learned from you on this list, and more things I want to do with them.  But that’s just what is already in the library.  I hope to be floored by what is opened up by new ideas, the way I am floored by the curved spacetime geometry of black holes as a thinkable thing, which comes from outside my whole experiential history as an animal living in the nearly-flat spacetime of Earth.  

I just got off a long Skype call with a student, which is why this awful post got delayed.  At several points in the conversation, he started laughing, because suddenly he saw things, and understood that they had been just at his elbow seeable all the time, but not seen.  That laughter is the evidence.  He is a wonderful student because he would never think of suppressing the admission of it to maintain an image.  That surprise is what makes the miserable rest of it worth getting through.

But in the end, all was well anyway:

[NST===>

[a clip, not related to what is kept]

OK, so how about we commit ourselves right now to the design and execution of a research project on dreams.  How would we go about it?  I think it might turn out to be the hardest thing we ever did.  <===nst] 

Here you have yourself summarized everything I wanted to say. 

All best,

Eric

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