[FRIAM] Eternal questions

David Eric Smith desmith at santafe.edu
Tue Aug 24 15:26:18 EDT 2021 

Brings to mind the marriage vow “to have and to hold"

> On Aug 24, 2021, at 9:52 PM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Spanish has two words, "haber" and "tener" that are usually translated into English as "to have".  The former is the auxiliary verb and the latter denotes possession.  
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> On Tue, Aug 24, 2021, 5:48 AM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
> It’s the right kind of answer, Nick, and I don’t find it compelling.
> 
> Put aside for a moment the use of “have” as an auxiliary verb.  I can come up with wonderful reasons why that is both informative and primordial, but I also believe they are complete nonsense and only illustrate that there are no good rules for reliable argument in this domain.
> 
> Also, I don’t adopt the frame of using the past tense as a device to skew the argument toward the conclusion you started with.  (Now _there_ is a category error: to start with a conclusion.  Lawyer!)  
> 
> I think probably throughout Indo-European derived languages, “have” is used to refer to inherent attributes.  I have brown eyes.  I have eyes at all.  It takes a surprisingly convoluted construction to assert that someone looking at my face will find two brown eyes there, that doesn’t use “have” as the verb of attribution.  So that’s old, and it is something the language has really committed to.  I think you have to commit unnatural acts to argue that that is a verb of action.
> 
> Possession isn’t even a lot more action-y.  I have two turntables and a microphone.  If nobody is trying to take them from me, it is not clear that I am “doing” anything to “have” them.
> 
> (btw, I am not a metaphor monist.  I practice polysemy, like the Mormons.  So it seems completely natural that there can be multiple meanings, if there are any meanings at all, and that distinct ones can use the same word because they are somehow similar despite not being the self-same.) 
> 
> It seems to me as if the truest action usage of “have” is one that is not nearly as baked into the language.  If I have lunch, I eat lunch.  If I have a fit, I throw a tantrum.  Many circumlocutions available to me.  That also could be quite idiosyncratic to small language branches.  I think you would never, in normal speech, say you “had” lunch in German.  You would just say you ate lunch.  (Or in Italian or French either, for that matter.)  These kinds of usages do not seem to me to carry strong cognitive weight.
> 
> So it seems to me that the semantic core of “have” is probably attribution.  The legal sense of ownership is probably metaphorical.  It would not _at all_ surprise me if the use both in the auxiliary (widespread in IE) and in the deictic (French il y a, there is) are deep metaphors describing either the ambient, or the ineluctable structure of time, with attributes.
> 
> But, back to whether attribution is natural for emotions (or, as good as anything else, and better than most):
> 
> If I “have” a sunny disposition, that seems not far from having brown eyes.  Italian: Il ha un buon aspetto. 
> 
> If I am having a bad day, that is a little different from having brown eyes, and perhaps closer to having a black eye.  Not an essence that defines my nature, but a condition I can be in, or “take on". To say, indeed, that I parse that as a pattern I carry around (as an aspect of constitution or condition) does not seem category-erroneous to me.
> 
> Sure, there are patterns in my behavior: if I take a hot shower and the water lands on my black eye, I will wince.  If you say good morning and I am having a bad day, I will growl at you.  A Skinnerian can say that my wincing is all there is to my black eye.  But a physician would tell me to put ice on it, and would use the color of the bruise to indicate which eye I should put the ice on.
> 
> These uses of having seem tied up, more closely than with anything else, with uses of being, as SteveS mentioned.  So the be/do dichotomy seems to determine largely where the verb usages split.
> 
> Of course, living is a process, played out on organized structures.  Brains probably look different in eeg and electrode arrays in one emotional condition than in another, and they probably also have different neurotransmitter profiles, and maybe other things.  Even You probably don’t want to refer to a neurotransmitter concentration as a “doing”; It is a variable of state, like a black eye is a state of an eye.  You might want to refer to the brain action pattern as “doing”, but maybe only in the sense that you refer to the existence of non-dead metabolism as “doing” — they are both processes.  To me, the common language seems to split the be and the do on brevity, transience, isolation, or suddenness of an activity.  I _am_ surly, and I _do_ growl at you.  
> 
> If non-black English still preserved the habitual tense, as John McWhorter claims black American English still does, we might be able to make a different kind of a distinction, between the pattern or habit as a state, and the event within it as an act.  That might give an even better account of the split in the common language.
> 
> I also want to acknowledge Glen’s points about working through many frames in a dynamical way.  I can’t add anything, but I do agree.
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
>> On Aug 24, 2021, at 12:30 PM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Now wait a minute!  This is the sort of question I am supposed to ask of you?  A question to which the answer is so obvious to the recipient that he is in danger of not being able to locate it.   
>>  
>> Ok, so, their meanings obviously overlap.   If you tell me you “had” a steak last night, I wont assume that it’s available  for us to eat tonight: “had” is serving as a verb of action.  The situation is further confused  by the fact that both words are used as helper words, i.e, words that indicate the tense of another verb.  To say that I “have” gone and that I “done” gone mean the same thing in different dialects 
>>  
>> In general the grammar of the two words is different.  If you say I had something, I am sent looking for a property, possession or attribute.  If you say I did something, I am sent looking for an action I performed.   So, there is a vast inclination to make emotion words as a reference to something we carry inside, rather than a pattern in what we do.  This seems to me like misdirection, a category error in Ryle’s terms.   
>>  
>> Does that help?    
>>  
>> Mumble, mumble, as steve would say. 
>>  
>> Nick 
>> 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,JZI_rTsnO4PMxifIK-1Pc4gAtSO08UfA4WqKjx73T4Ek3tY5Xl71BUdt3A807uKgEplYNDHINHuRjmL2qnv7SkO_J10fWv5jebCjhCravg,,&typo=1>
>>  
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
>> Sent: Monday, August 23, 2021 4:23 PM
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Eternal questions
>>  
>> 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 <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto: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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