[FRIAM] Guided Apophenia

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The weak vs strong versions of constitutive seems useful. Thanks! It targets my sense of mechanism nicely in the vaguely stated soft requirement for effective procedures: "In principle, it can be done by a human without any aids except writing materials." <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_method> Generalizing that is difficult. I forget where I read it, but the analogy between doing math in your head versus on paper is useful for pointing it out. For me, the steps I use in my head are different from the ones I use on paper. But that makes them constitutive_w, I guess. By contrast, I'm completely incapable of, say, installing a kitchen faucet "in my head". I have to make a billion trips out to the garage to grab a tool I didn't realize I needed. Etc. Having the faucet (or an exploded diagram) in front of me is necessary, constitutive_s.

I'm wondering if it also impacts my assertion that the fundamental grievance the Trumpers hold is a reactionary stance against our progressive loss of individuality. In response to John's idea that a coming Civil War doesn't make sense unless there is a grievance on at least one side. My (tentative) answer is that we're becoming a biofilm (not really collective intelligence, but similar). The so far non-violent but still revolutionary overthrowing of the mostly white, mostly male, elite [⛧] is getting more intense. In a vacuum, it would NOT have to escalate to Frantz Fannon style requirement for blood flowing in the streets. But the elites' reaction to that figurative overthrowing (e.g. cancel culture, PC, diversity training, etc.) is intensifying, which positively reinforces the intensity of the overthrowing. It seems totally reasonable that this could escalate out of control and into widespread violence, if not Civil War.

The reaction of the Trumpers is constitutive_s of the overthrowing. And the left overthrowing is constitutive_s of the Trumpers' reactionary stance. Renee' and I discussed the idea that maybe it's a Good Thing Gorsuch and ACB are now on the court, to dampen any progress made if both the Executive and Legislative branches went D. Dampers on either side of the grievance-tuple might prevent the speculative Civil War (even though we may all die in the fires of climate change). And, of course, caveat the whole setup by remembering how incompetent I am at any of this, history, economics, social interaction, etc.


[⛧] Yes, I'm aware how wrong it sounds to refer to lower middle class Trumpers as "elites". It's a statement of these times.


On 11/12/20 9:48 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Continuing on the arc, I stumbled over this paper ( a more scholarly, less PopSci) on meta-issues of the "Extended Mind Hypothesis"
> 
>     https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-015-0799-9
> 
> This is relevant for multiple reasons but the most obvious to me in the moment is the ideas SteveG has promoted around Collective Intelligence and in some ways the "Extended Phenotype" (in Dawkin's sense), the built environment, and direly the latest application of Kauffman's Adjacent Possible to the exponentially growing (in complexity if not material resource) technosphere (on top of/adjacent to the noosphere on top of the biosphere on top of the hydro-cryo-atmo-geosphere).   It is a "technicolor goo" parallel to the "grey goo" scenario.
> 
> My application domain(s) include the realm of distributed collaboration (nominally scientific) and of "becoming collectively intelligent" in the sense of the distributed camera systems (and beyond) in-process at SimTable.
> 
> Your response below is well received and nicely arcs/ties back to the other threads we are all weaving here in our collective co-evolution of ideas.  This is my response to Nick's desire to capture all of this and reshape (back-propogate/re-project?) it into scholarly papers.   I sense that such a goal is an OldSkool impulse which I do not mean as dismissive, but possibly mutually exclusive to the process we are collectively engaged in here (what I think of as the Buddhist (westernized version) concept of dependent co-arising).   FriAM, for better and worse, is a "Living Batch", a symbiotic colony of organisms....

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