[FRIAM] Friday Fodder

Wed Mar 24 23:58:44 EDT 2021

JZ wrote or quoted

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.’

Nick responds.

. Let experience be as random as it could possibly be; indeed, Peirce thinks that experience is approximately that random. Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody could care them to be.  But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related, these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things, that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on them.

In short, if perception is direct, it comes only to the prepared mind and there are an infinity of fluxes that must go unnoticed.  

Nick 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2021 9:41 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friday Fodder

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

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