[FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate

Sun Oct 3 11:10:02 EDT 2021

Category errors, an opinion.

In computer programming there are type errors.  For example, in a strongly
typed language it is an error to say real A := 2*3.75
This is because the machine code for integer multiplication is entirely
different from that for floating point multiplication.  In a more forgiving
language the compiler will cast 2 as 2.0 and do the obvious thing.  As I
understand it a category error is a type error in natural language.  Most
people ignore them outside of tight, logical discourse I think analogous to
the behavior of forgiving compilers.

It's been 50 years since I studied compiler theory but I'm sure someone
will correct my errors.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, Oct 3, 2021, 4:37 AM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Second note; apologies for two postings, because I forgot to include
> something:
>
> In that last reply I meant to mention that there is no shame (though I
> believe there is error) in committing to Zeno beyond necessity.  One
> travels in illustrious company.
>
> I have wanted to write a semi-opinion piece entitled “In Price of Process;
> In Praise of Hypergraphs”, with a nod to Tanizaki, and may even do it
> someday.
>
> The idea being that, while the Classical Mechanics got past Zeno’s rules
> of argument with Hamiltonian mechanics formulated on phase space, the
> thermodynamicists in a sense never did.  Evidence: Prigogine got a Nobel
> for trying to derive rules of dynamics from properties of an entropy of
> states.  That, of course, is not possible in general just by
> dimension-counting.   The whole aching frustration of a real
> non-equilibrium thermodynamics has been to try to get the GD physicists to
> give up Zeno in the way they think about entropies for questions of
> process.  The same is true for the geneticists and their “units of
> selection” addiction.  There is clearly a big domain in which we have all
> the tools to do at least both of these, and I am sure a good deal more
> beyond (a domain in which the process space can have its important
> parameters captured in hypergraphs), so there is no reason we can’t all
> just start doing it now.  But thermo is committed to its ways of 70 years
> ago, with de Groot and Mazur, or maybe even 90 years ago, stopping at the
> innovations seen by Lars Onsager but then not really built upon much
> further.  And population genetics to what was brought down from the
> mountain on stone tables by Fisher, likewise in 1930.
>
> So the idea that, where we have clear, useful, and trustworthy tools to
> get past Zeno, we really should _just do it_, is still quite fresh, as I
> see it.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> On Oct 3, 2021, at 12:09 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>
> EricS,
>
> Thanks, as always, for your response.  Everything you say here is
> interesting and relevant except perhaps where you represent me as an otiose
> idiot.  That makes me want to defend my post, rather than absorb your
> excellent response.
>
> Before I stifle my stupid defensive impulse, allow me to ask you a few
>  questions.  Is not an inquiry into the relation between levels of
> organization of interest?  Are you entirely comfortable with the way that
> people talk about interlevel causation?  Is it of any interest to you that
> the three inference engines of a syllogism, all bridge different levels of
> organization?  Are not probability theory and calculus both conceptual
> bridges across levels organization?  Granting, ex hypothesi, that those
> bridges are virtuous,  does not their success have some implications for
> other ways in which we bridge levels of organization, as, say,
> brain/behavior reflections, or the relation between behavior acts and
> behavior motivations?  Is metaphor thinking a way of crossing directly from
> one particular to another without crossing any such bridges?   Is metaphor
> how we really think and is, therefore, logical analysis a poor proxy for
> virtuous thought.
>
> Thinking as an experience monist, everything that is is experience and all
> experiences are of other experiences.  So, levels of organization are
> experiences that have to be assembled out of other experiences.  Many MANY
> years ago when I was working on Brown Thrasher song we tried to automate
> the classification of the units of the song.   The birds can sing for hours
> and rarely repeat themselves, but when they do, they do so very precisely.
>  So they aren’t just improvising.  To this day I don’t think anybody has
> figured out what they are doing.   When I quit, it wasn’t even clear we
> were parsing the stream of sound into the right units!
>
> The stream of experience is like that.  The structures of The World that
> Frank talks about are all structures of experience, validatable only by
> subsequent experiences.   We animals are not truth seekers, we are
> consequence anticipators, and if there is any truth or reality, it must be
> in the power those experiences we experience as true or real to anticipate
> future experiences.   How does the stream of experience come to be
> organized?
>
> These are the kinds of questions I am pursuing, here, and, lacking
> graduate students, a laboratory, work study students, courses to teach,
> colleagues to interact with, here is really the only place I can pursue
> them.   If the assumptions I bring to bear that cause me ask these
> questions are too naïve, onerous, or outlandish to entertain, then for
> god’s sake don’t try to shoulder them.   You have done me many kindnesses
> in the past and you can walk away from my confusions any moment without any
> debts whatsoever.   The same is true, of course, of Jon, EricC, Glen or any
> of the kind folk who have helped me think over these years.
>
> Anyway, thanks for your very relevant comments.  I shall study them
> carefully tomorrow when I get up.
>
> All the best,
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nick Thompson
> 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,FlKil6Oo-OcZgl78FjunjqYCa03v-EeN8BN8CwdDyjLHD_jatCwLzinRfqOjRK1t-unkmR727-kN4rAlm7dj8TLyUUpgoZZ9C6yLfABMPDC4&typo=1>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *David Eric Smith
> *Sent:* Saturday, October 2, 2021 9:47 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate
>
> I feel in this, Frank, like your comments will fall on deaf ears, for an
> interesting reason.  The thing you summarize for Nick is precisely the
> thing he wants to object to.
>
> It seems to me that Nick believes that Zeno’s arrow paradox,
> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/
> or something close to it, defines in some Platonic way the “right rules of
> thought”.  Whatever Zeno’s rules of argument make ill-defined, we should
> somehow believe isn’t really properly conceived, and _cannot be_.
>
> If I were to tell Nick (replace “momentum” where he has “acceleration” in
> the sentences below), that in 1833, Hamilton took us beyond all the things
> Zeno can’t do, by writing the states of objects in a 2-coordinate space,
> where one coordinate is position and the other is momentum, and the two
> coordinates are _independent of one another_, and in some important sense
> _symmetric_ and _peer_ attributes of the object, I would not be addressing
> his objection to calculus (which does define these things in limits as you
> say below), but I would be arguing that physics may suggest the
> limit-definition from calculus is not the most fundamental one.  If I were
> then to tell Nick that the duality between being at a place (all position)
> and being in a state of motion (all momentum) became in quantum mechanics
> the duality between standing and traveling waves, and that we understand
> their independence and peer status even more thoroughly in quantum
> mechanics than in Hamilton’s classical mechanics, I would still not be
> addressing the unquiet about calculus, but would perhaps be asserting that
> physical reality is even further from needing its in-the-limit definitions.
>
> But the part of this that is interesting (to me) is: why is this
> Nick-as-I-perceive-him (which the real Nick may or may not be) convinced
> that Zeno’s rules of argument are somehow the defined “right rules of
> thought”?  Why is anyone convinced that he knows ahead of time what rules
> are the right rules of thought for anything?  Why are we not somehow always
> aware that all these words and rules come up together somehow as parts of a
> mutually-interdependent system, really “pulled up by their own bootstraps”
> in a much more perfect way than the way that metaphor is used for the
> startup of an operating system in a computer?  And if we were thus aware of
> the somehow out-of-nowhere character of the bootstrapped systems within
> which all the terms and rules take their meaning, how would it then change
> the way we think about choosing which one to use?  The Platonists in their
> own words b believe that truth somehow comes to them through the divine
> channel of thought from a reality beyond experience.  I think they are more
> fond (in the original sense of “crazy”) of their own preconceived notions
> than they are of the complexity of experience, and mistake their
> preconceived notions for a more ultimate and perfect, but in any case
> preferable “reality”.  If we get out of that habit, how does our style of
> argument for what constitutes right thought change?
>
> Neither here nor there to this thread, I did want to mention some weeks
> ago that I really liked Glen’s formulation of The Will to Simulation.  I
> think Nietzsche would have appreciated its irreverence, though he would
> have been too vain and obstreperous to contribute anything to it.
>
> Eric
>
> p.s.  On the above, I could have stayed with Nick’s original query about
> acceleration, and gone to physics.  I could have spoken of his very
> physical self, standing here on the surface of the Earth, and accelerated
> away from the world-line of an inertial observer in general relativity by
> the fact that the Earth is in the way of his free fall.  The gravity that
> he feels in the seat of his pants is the acceleration that is a property of
> his state.  But it was simpler to refer to momentum and to go back to
> Hamiltonian mechanics, which has an additional century behind it, and which
> really marked the turn away from Zeno and a definition of velocities in
> terms of derivatives by Lagrange, and toward a recognition of momentum as
> an inherent property.  If one can see that clearly and with familiarity, it
> is then a straightforward next step to say that Mach’s principle just said
> “if frame-independence applies to velocity, then why not also to rotational
> velocity, and what then do we do about acceleration”, and you get the case
> from general relativity.
>
>
> On Oct 1, 2021, at 10:00 PM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Nick, i hope this helps.  Given a fair die that hasn't been thrown the
> probability that it will come up 2 (or any of the other particular values)
> on the next throw is 1/6 by definition of fair.  Given that it has been
> thrown and ceterus paribus the a posteriori probability that it shows 2
> given that it does is 1.0.  In that case the probabilities of each of the
> other values is 0.0.
>
> The acceleration of an object with constant velocity is 0.0.  If the
> velocity is changing the acceleration is the instantaneous change in
> velocity the knowledge of which is limited by the ability to measure that.
> The acceleration of an object whose velocity is described by a closed form
> mathematical function is the derivative of that function as we learned in
> calculus.  The derivative is defined by limits.  This is theoretical and
> approximates what happens in the physical world.
>
> Questions and comments are welcome.
>
> Frank
>
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Fri, Oct 1, 2021, 7:21 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I thought the conversation about probability, category errors, and
> crossing boundaries between levels of organization was interesting and I
> was sorry I had to leave it.   I want to say that to speak a die as having
> a probability of 1/6 of coming up 6 on a single throw is a category error
> because it is not a property that can be displayed on a single throw.  It’s
> the same worry that I have often deployed about the calculus.  If we take
> the idea of a category error seriously, then acceleration is just not the
> sort of thing an object can have at an instant.    But just as clearly as
> this argument is too strong – lots of very nice longstanding bridges have
> been built with the calculus – so the argument is also too strong with
> respect to probability – lots of nice atom bombs have been built with
> probability theory … or something.
>
> I care about this because my standard account of such concepts as
> “wanting” is that they are properties of the population of responses to an
> object, not properties of any one of those responses.   We encounter the
> same problem with anecdotes and newspaper photographs designed to
> illustrate some general fact.  If the generally fact is that “very few of
> the immigrants at the southern border are well treated” a single photograph
> looking peaked or hungry is irrelevant.  Equally irrelevant would be a
> picture of a bright eyed kid sitting in the lap of a border patrol officer
> eating a hot-fudge sundae.
>
> This makes me wonder about one of the foundations of psychological
> research, the statistics of inference, which I think Peirce invented.   Let
> a coin be thrown 10 times and each time come up heads.  What I think Peirce
> would  have me conclude is that that coin is unlikely to be drawn from a
> population of fair throws of a fair coin.   But, of coure, what we are
> likely to conclude is that “this coin is not fair.”    But that could be as
> misguided, couldn’t it, as concluding that the kid in the lap of the border
> patrol officers is being mistreated.
>
> I apologize, once more, for sharing my comfusions with you.
>
> n
>
> Nick Thompson
> 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,QU0qVpqNOoJiPM24Dv11INL-P7InBOIA4z4LOnpttneeWXYwPuFzZKWaVU3KPxC8ObCG7JECy2fbQeuL-V9-2OsvQN3I7mXpu9mzsoPaIE0,&typo=1>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Friday, October 1, 2021 6:46 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate
>
>
> https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/61/1/119
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fpediatrics.aappublications.org%2fcontent%2f61%2f1%2f119&c=E,1,uD1tIhc7c-0wZqgMnI5_Ki1-cJ9QDa1EyaSQIuM5xQO8giKGtKM8z1rtfEnJ33KUkPyECbG92OSX1Pt-uIL6rgVLiylCxIbiMASMUnV7SEjwSw,,&typo=1>
>
> This is for those who attended this morning's vFriam meeting.  I was
> Schachter's colleague, among a couple of others.
>
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
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