[FRIAM] Friday Fodder

[jon zingale]

The idea isn't all that clear to me. I am still trying to understand the
various concepts and perspectives in play. What follows is a first-order
attempt. I can sympathize with the need for Gibsonians to disambiguate
experience. There is a need to state direct experience because the
discussion is happening in a room with others that argue for mediated
experience. EricC, et al. write in "The Most Important Thing
Neuropragmatism Can Do":

"""
An essential and vastly underappreciated aspect of the world is the flux
of energy in the ‘empty space’ around us, the light and pressure waves
crisscrossing, chemical gradients, magnetic fields, etc. Gibson labeled
the structural elements of this ambient energy that can support behavior
‘information.’

This information flow is surprisingly stable, as is our access to it
(following the requisite learning). We are not adrift in a ‘blooming,
buzzing confusion’ (to use the oft-misunderstood William James quote).
As with other stable aspects of our ecological niche, we can (and
evidence shows that we do) rely on this information to do a lot of work
for us. We exist in and move through a flow of information and our
behavior emerges as we interact with that flow. There is no need to
construct a model of our environment; as Rodney Brooks famously claims,
we can let the world be its own model.
"""

For Gibsonians, the world exists in an aether of relatively stable and
structured energy, and what we come to do in the world is ultimately
afforded to us via embodiment. That this aether is structured suggests
that there is a difference to exploit, as agents, our aimless wanderings
are channeled, we are coaxed and seduced. That this aether is stable
suggests that we can rely on the value of our habits to a fairly fine-
scale, differences in niche-exploiting paths amplify in time. From what
little I understand, Gibsonians are attempting an explanatory theory of
behavior, why we do and are able to do what we do, via an unmediated
experiencial account. One seemingly crucial detail for such a theory is
that it does not presuppose objects, but rather, when they arise at all,
are a name we can give to sufficiently differentiated experience, that
is, the theory does not (as a mathematical theory might) begin with a
notion of equivalence.

Meanwhile the Noetherians, historically, are interested in a descriptive
and objectifying account of nature. They too, begin with a theory of
differences, namely the differential calculus or the calculus of
variations. Unlike the Gibsonians, however, the Noetherians take as
primitive the notion of equivalence. While this choice confers great
benefits with regards a tremendous conceptual economy, symmetry most
saliently, it seems to have little (predictive nor anticipatory) to say
about the production of new kinds. In other words, accepting equivalence
as a primitive comes at a price. Proving that there exists stable
manifolds, limit cycles, or strange attractors takes work, and much of
the recent history of modern dynamics has found itself in the study of
classifying and modeling the production of bifurcations and other
catastrophes that arise from changing the structural variables of a
given phase space. What such a theory gains from a strong condition like
equivalence it loses in its ability to predict what different ought to
be near.

I should probably say more about connecting the two perspectives, but
again, I am still very much feeling around in the dark. Thinking about
SteveG's ants, it is worth mentioning that given a space of sufficiently
high genus, there is no reason to assume that a given solution is
anywhere near-optimal, nor that once a solution is found that there
would be an impetus to find a better one. The Noetherian solution will
likely be a family of solutions given by the underlying cohomology of
the space. In some, hand-wavy way, this seems to me to correspond to an
aspect of the Gibsonian structured aether. I fantasize that, and in
analogy with the work being done by embodied cognitive scientists to
build a bridge with ecological psychology[1], that the Noetherians and
the Gibsonians will build such a bridge. The former building descriptions
for the latters' explanations.

[1] Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, pg 28, 30



--
Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/