[FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate

Sun Oct 3 12:01:33 EDT 2021

Thanks for the example, Frank.  I hope others respond.  

I think of the standard category error to be of the form, “How Tall is the University”

There is an odd kind of resemblance between category mistakes and metaphors.  And Jokes.  “Why do you rob banks, Mr. Sutton?””Cuz that’s where the money is!” involves something like a category error, doesn’t it?  The Wikipedia entry on category mistakes is helpful at the beginning but then makes one’s head spin.  

By the way, here is Zeno’s arrow paradox, also from Wikipedia.

The third is … that the flying arrow is at rest, which result follows from the assumption that time is composed of moments …. he says that if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always in a now, the flying arrow is therefore motionless. (Aristotle Physics, 239b30) 

Zeno abolishes motion, saying “What is in motion moves neither in the place it is nor in one in which it is not”. (Diogenes Laertius Lives of Famous Philosophers, ix.72)

Please, everybody, read EricS’s responses.  They are topped up and overflowing with good stuff.  Way too good to be wasted on me.  

But let me also say that, as a FRIAM member, I reject the notion of a price of admission.  If there is one thing I take to be true of all FRIAMMERS is that we take seriously the fable of The Emperor’s Cloths.  The lesson therein is that there is always the possibility that the naïve observer will see something that the experts are blind to.  I am increasingly fond of the idea of “schools of thought” where screwy ideas are nurtured for a bit before they are let out into the world of the BSD’s. Now, obviously, everybody has to make their own decision about where to spend their time.   I am profoundly grateful to anybody who is willing to spend some of their time in my particular chamber of philosophical horrors. 

Nick 

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

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

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, October 3, 2021 11:10 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate

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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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

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From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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

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From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto: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 <mailto: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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