[FRIAM] Eternal questions

Mon Aug 23 16:23:07 EDT 2021

Nick, what’s the difference between having and doing?

I once heard Ray Jackendoff give quite a nice talk on word categories.  Of all of it, the one part I remember the most about is what he said about prepositions.  Even after you are getting right most of the rest of word usage in a new language (or handling it well with a dumb, rule-based translator), you are still at sea in the prepositions.  Their scopes are not completely arbitrary, but arbitrary in such large part that speakers essentially learn them nearly as a list of ad hoc applications.

But when we are in a specialist domain, such as reference to the unpacking of the convention-term “emotion”, which we all know is a different specialist domain from car ownership or the consumption of lunch, we know that verbs are not on any a priori firmer ground than prepositions.  Or it seems to me, we should expect that to be so.

I am struck by how widespread it is in languages to use the same particle or other construction for possession and attribution.  Both in concretes and in the abstractions that seemingly derive from them.  SteveG will like this one from Chinese if I haven’t messed it up or misunderstood it: youde you, youde meiyou.  Some have it, some don’t.

Performance of an act, being configured in a state or condition, if we use passphrases rather than passwords, we can discriminate many categories.

So when we use metaphors to expand the scope of reference and discourse (to eventually shed their metaphor status and become true polysemes once our familiarity in the new domain is such that, as novelists say, it “stands up and casts a shadow”), are some of the metaphors more obligatory than others?  Are the psychologists sure they are right about which ones?  Are they right?

Eric

> On Aug 24, 2021, at 3:06 AM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh!
>  
> How we seal ourselves in caves of nonsense!
>  
> And emotion is not something we “have”; it’s something we do.  Or, if you prefer a dualist sensory metaphor, it’s a particular mode of feeling the world.  
>  
> n
>  
> Nick Thompson
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,7HSjAiYZs0TskSYM3z8t3I3vm7JNBV7OyZgHYp-6EjYczSSRW9xIT6typjL4CJpU_atJnKNr9galrl_vRQGGlXHYIX3WqoquVu8Bpe1ntqUc&typo=1>
>  
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
> Sent: Monday, August 23, 2021 6:04 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Eternal questions
>  
> The creators of the Aibo robot dog say it has ‘real emotions and instinct’. This is obviously not true, it's just an illusion.
> 
> But then, according to Daniel Dennett, human consciousness is just an illusion.
> https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fase.tufts.edu%2fcogstud%2fdennett%2fpapers%2fillusionism.pdf&c=E,1,wZyzI4xcowqEH1XfK9Q39EPbwHxfV11-EVaCCROdnuFD-hDpoJBA6vqVkaGgbd-yOuYwvTupjP_Soz_obIbOZjgWkLMocfZEa2BpUqNsBKBy&typo=1>
>  
> On Mon, 23 Aug 2021 at 09:18, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net <mailto:jofr at cas-group.net>> wrote:
>> "In today’s AI universe, all the eternal questions (about intentionality, consciousness, free will, mind-body problem...) have become engineering problems", argues this Guardian article. 
>> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/10/dogs-inner-life-what-robot-pet-taught-me-about-consciousness-artificial-intelligence <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.com%2fscience%2f2021%2faug%2f10%2fdogs-inner-life-what-robot-pet-taught-me-about-consciousness-artificial-intelligence&c=E,1,0zM4mCzKmbes0weZLeJCmVy6dAfDvfYxSyHKpvl-aa8-hwd84lMymcY9HHVsp4jXbWOCjmb3kQDLfcwUGjHCouKd8sNTTfFuQtv62vY-RfAsXg,,&typo=1>
>>  
>> -J.
>>  
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