[FRIAM] anonymity/deniability/ambiguity

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I really *want* to say something about building a machine (to be provocative) that implements a "reliable in the long-run without predicting the contents of reliable sentences" mechanism. I'm purposefully trying to elide your cognizing-social behavers in order to "flatten" the mechanism somewhat ... to root out the unspeakable-innerness-bogeyman, flatten the leaves of the graph, at least. This would still allow for hierarchy (even a very deep one), just without allowing for things that cannot be talked about.

I don't think it's all that useful to painstakingly knead Peirce's writings looking for a proto-structure, even though I often complain about people like Wolfram who consistently fail to cite those whose shoulders on which they stand. It would be more interesting to simply try to build a system that has some hint of the sought features. Here, I'm thinking of Luc Steels' robots playing language games. A simulator [†] of Ackley's work you mention, or even of something like the Debian package dependencies might approach it, too. (Marcus often raises branch prediction methods, which may also apply to some extent.) I can't help but also think of Edelman and Tononi's "neural darwinism" and Hoffman's "interface theory of perception". I mention these because they used mechanistic simulation as persuasive rhetoric, albeit purely justificationist -- i.e. little to no attempt to *falsify* the simulation mechanisms against data taken from an ultimate referent, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Along some similar lines, I've been exposed to (again, mechanistic/constructive) simulation of "innovation", wherein propositions about how/why seemingly unique phenomena like Silicon Valley (as a system) or particular disruptors like the iPhone emerge.

I don't find any of these machines compelling, though. So I can't really say anything useful in response to your post, except to say that it would be *great fun* to try to construct a self-correcting truth machine. It would be even more fun to construct several of them and have them compete and be evaluated against an implicit objective function.


[†] Re: Jon's cite of Baudrillard's dissimulation, I (obviously) have to disagree with the dichotomy between [dis]simulation. To act as if you don't have something you do have requires you to use other things you do have to hide the something you're hiding. I'm struggling to say this concretely, though. In the trustafarian case, the spanging (dissimulation) couples well with the dreadlock wax (simulation). Can there be dissimulation without a complementary simulation? And if not, if they always occur together, then distinguishing them may not buy us much.


On 5/21/20 4:14 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> I use the stripped down form in the hope of building a recursive tree of mutual refereeing, for all elements of scientific practice, now appealing to my mental image of Peter Gacs’s error-correcting 1D cellular automaton, which does this by nesting correcting structure within correcting structure.  Then I can look for every aspect of our practice that is trying to play this role in some way.  A subset include:
> 1. Intersubjectivity to guard against individual delusion, ignorance, oversight, and similar hazards.
> 2. Experimentation to guard against individual and group delusion etc, and to provide an additional active corrective against erroneous abduction from instances to classes.
> 3. Adoption of formal language protocols:
> 3a. Definitions, with both operational (semantic) and syntactic (formalist) criteria for their scope and usage
> 3b. Rigid languages for argument, including logic but also less-formal standards of scientific argument, like insistence on null models and significance measures for statistical claims
> 
> There must be more, but the above are the ones I am mostly aware of in daily work.
> 
> These are, to some extent, hierarchical, in that those further down the list are often taken to have a control-theoretic-like authority to tag those higher-up in the list as “errors”.  However, like any control system, the controller can also be wrong, and then its authority allows it to impose cascades of errors before being caught.  Hence, I guess Kant thought that a Newtonian space x time geometry was so self-evident that it was part of the “a priori” to physical reasoning. It was a kind of more-definite-than-a-definition criterion in arguments.  And it turned out not to describe the universe we live in, if one requires sufficient scope and precision.  Likewise, the amount of a semantics that we can capture in syntactic rules for formal speech is likely to always be less than all the semantics we have, and even the validity of a syntax could be undermined (Godel).  But most common in practice is that the syntax could be used as a kind of parlor entertainment, but the
> interpretation of it becomes either invalid or essentially useless when tokens that appeared in it turn out not to actually stand for anything.  This is what happens when things we thought were operational definitions are shown by construction of their replacements to have been invalid, as with the classical physics notion of “observable”, or the Newtonian convention of “absolute time”.
> 
> I would like to give Pierce’s “truth == reliable in the long run” a modern gloss by regarding the above the way an engineer would in designing an error-correction system.  The instances that are grouped in the above list are not just subroutines in a computer code, but embodied artifacts and events of practice by living-cognizing-social behavers and reasoners.  And then decide from a post-Shannon vantage point what such a system can and cannot do.  What notions of truth are constructible?  How long is the long run, for any particular problem?  What are the sample fluctuations in our state of understanding, as represented in placeholders for terms, rules, or other forms we adopt in the above list in any era, relative to asymptotes that we may or may not yet think we can identify?  How have errors cascaded through that list as we have it now, and can we use those to learn something about the performance of this way of organizing science?  (Dave Ackley of UNM did a lovely
> project on the statistics of library overhauls for Linux utilities some years ago, which is my mental model in framing that last question.)  Formal tools to answer more interesting versions of questions like those.
> 
> I mentioned some stuff about this in a post a month or two ago, and EricC included in a later post by way of reply that Pierce did a lot of statistics, so I understand I can’t take anything here outside the playpen of a listserve until I have first read everything Pierce wrote, and everything others wrote about what Pierce wrote, etc.  I suspect that, since Pierce lived before the publication of at least part of what is now understood about reliable error correction, large deviations, renormalization, automata theory, etc., there should be something new to say from a modern standpoint that Pierce didn’t already know, but that assertion is formalist, and thus valueless.  I have to do the exhaustive search through everything he actually did know, to point out something new that isn’t already in it (constructivist).  


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