[FRIAM] Could this possibly be true?
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Fri Sep 17 11:56:30 EDT 2021
EricS -
>
> 2. Before commenting on resolutions, maybe a comment more to clarify
> the experience of the problem. The use of some of these words in the
> various posts leads to a reading experience for me that is like garden
> path sentences. So it is not so simple as “defining” a term. It is
> that the semantic work the usage of a certain term does in someone’s
> mind percolates down to lots of levels in the forming and the reading
> of text.
I appreciate what I presume might be a Borges reference and my own
apprehension (expressed quite lamely in my last post/response) of these
things as "fields of meaning" which may or may not be
continuous/differentiable if even ultimately defined over metric spaces.
>
> 3, Often, there are cadences in your use of the term function that
> feel familiar to me from evolutionists, whose use of it also is a
> garden-path sentence for me. So for that I know you are at most
> partly idiosyncratic, or that the behaviorist conventions are only
> partly distinctive. Some of this goes back a level in generality and
> community. Since the evolutionists don’t use the word “goal” the way
> you do, the things in that that seem strange to me are more particular
> to this discourse.
This description bumbles me over from Borges "Garden of Forking Paths"
to "the Library of Babel".
Of course, you may only be using "Garden Path" in the more vernacular
sense of being "lead astray" or "wandering amongst constraints imposed
by the garden designer but mostly occult to the wanderer". Or something
else entirely?
> 4a. I happen to feel like this is something I run into in the “beyond
> fitness” exercise. So in being concrete I can allow others to tell me
> how I am misunderstanding everything they say. I experience the
> evolutionists as thinking about things like sporophytes, gametophytes,
> spores, gametes, etc. — the various objects in the lifecycle of ferns
> — as epiphenomena of the fitnesses of units of selection. As for
> Plato, the Unit of Selection, and its Fitness, are the true Forms, and
> all those objects and transitions are just shadows on the cave wall.
> The “no epiphenomena” is for me the pushback that says: No, start
> with the things that are there and do stuff; whether it fits the frame
> you want to put on it (Glen’s pre-emptive registration) can come
> later, or not at all, as appropriate. Of course for the narrow cases
> I treat it is easy, like Godel’s demonstration of the limitations of
> arithmetic was easy because explicit constructions can be made: that
> the Platonic Form of fitness and the unit of selection to which they
> wish to make everything else epiphenomenal can be shown to exclude
> quite concrete and specific things that are included if one starts
> with just what happens and constructs, to find that other
> registrations are consistent while the fitness and the unit of
> selection are not. I know this is not germane to the topic you were
> discussing, but I cannot help have it as part of the experience set
> that parses styles of speaking.
To the extent I *think* (hope?) I parsed this paragraph correctly, it
feels like it gets to the root of our (collectively mutual) confusion
over epi/phenomena and exposes a complement of meta/object distinctions?
The rest of your treatment of the larger weave of this discussion that
follows is equally rich albeit sometimes ambiguous/arcane (to my
unsophisticated ear/eye) but I wanted to thank you for your repeated
attempts at "effing the effable" or perhaps "locuting the locutable"?
Carry on!
- SteveS
>
> 5. I assume the resolution is a sort of AA resolution: to admit the
> conversation has a problem. Probably to expect, too, that the problem
> doesn’t really go away. So one just deals with it one day at a time.
>
> I have to comment that in one other post, you gave three assertions
> that made me sure (and also probably wrong) why DaveW says you are a
> mystic, whether you will admit it or not. They are not entirely out
> of context of the above. You said:
>
> I don't know what world you are talking about if you [think you] are
> talking about a world beyond experience.
> I don't know what existence you are talking about if you [think you]
> are talking about existence apart from experience.
> I don't know what fidelity you are talking about if you [think you]
> are talking about fidelity apart from experience.
>
> I think that hits my neoplatonist triggers too. It’s an interesting
> exercise for me to try to find a locution that captures the right
> concept. The visceral response, which I also have to religious
> people, and which makes the contemplatives angry when I tell them they
> are hitting the same triggers as the religious ones do, is to scream
> at them IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU. The religious ones don’t want to live
> in a world that isn’t all about them. I think the mystics and the
> contemplatives want to say they are not that breed of cat. I will
> take them at their word, but I can’t picture myself doing a good job
> of arguing on their behalf, which is usually the measure for whether I
> understand something.
>
> But what then is the careful version?
>
> Well, my discourse can never happen except within the larger field of
> my experience, and I would do well to always keep that in mind. That
> seems good. But what is there of the language I produce, and that we
> produce together? It is generated within behavior, it is transacted
> in experience, indeed. But what forms is it desirable for me to endow
> it with, or in which to try to use it and develop it? Suppose it is
> capable of having forms that refer to an existence in ways such that
> that referral doesn’t care how my experience is or isn’t involved. A
> biosphere could have sprung up on this planet, with all these insects
> and plants and fish and so forth, and with never people to comment
> about them. They would be no less themselves. A language capable of
> expressing (or aspiring to express) that frame is one I would like to
> use. To conceive of a language that has structures in common with a
> world beyond experience, even though my talking in it is an event
> within behavior or experience, does not seem to me obviously logically
> incoherent. Any more than living in a world that would have been much
> the same if I hadn’t been living in it seems incompatible with the
> inherent coherence — of a thing’s being whatever-all that thing is —
> of existing.
>
> The question of “how would I know whether the language had ever
> achieved such an alignment, since my knowing takes place within
> experience” is of course fine to pursue. But I think I can express a
> preference for trying for a language with that overall form, even if I
> don’t know how to answer the question about validation. There is the
> issue of how I participate in a language, given whatever it is and
> whatever I am. I have a mode of participation in, or engagement with,
> or use or receipt of, a language that refers to a world beyond
> experience, that I imagine I would not have if it didn’t.
>
>
> That didn’t buy you any of what you came for, I know. Hopefully not
> time lost down a well, even so.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>> On Sep 17, 2021, at 6:52 AM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com
>> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com
>> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, EricS
>>
>> You faith in my consistency is touching (};-)].
>>
>> I know that, in response to this, Nick will reply with a sequence of
>> English-language words that I find even more unparseable than the
>> ones above.
>>
>> Frankly, you shouldn’t have any faith that my average psychology
>> colleague will rescue me. 90% of them, directly or indirectly, make
>> their living off The Hard Problem.
>>
>> EricC and JonZ might do so, but they are probably too busy.
>>
>> Given that I find my inability to communicate with you alarming and
>> distressing, and given that you find what I write so exasperating, is
>> there any way forward?
>>
>> Please understand that I am not fooling around, here.
>>
>> Are there any baby steps we could take? If I can’t communicate with
>> you guys, small chance I will be able to communicate with ordinary
>> mortals.
>>
>>
>> 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,1,7DujyKj5BlPA-iLJk3HDHbbYf60pN4x1wLc2-4y8BhU7T98FngpaBqZeRQ7hpECyZN4GzK-mPCBf7x_afUfzbyUr1CYriZXSYMJPqZQk&typo=1>
>>
>> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
>> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *David Eric Smith
>> *Sent:* Thursday, September 16, 2021 5:32 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Could this possibly be true?
>>
>> This is where there is a style of use of language that may be unique
>> to Nick among all humans, or may be a tribal custom among the
>> psychologists, but which the common man needs to be aware exists, so
>> that he knows that the way Nick/psychologists use words will be
>> directly opposed to the way the common man has always used them.
>>
>>> If that question disappears for you under those circumstances, then
>>> I can simply admit that a pleasure is just the behavioral transition
>>> that occurs upon the achievement of set of circumstances, and escape
>>> the tautology by defining a goal as the organization of behavior
>>> that points to a set of circumstances.
>>
>> So, in archery, the way the archer points the bow (organization of
>> behavior) is the “goal”, and the event of an arrow’s hitting a
>> bullseye is somehow not a goal. Nick didn’t happen to use the word
>> “function” in the clip above; I have no idea what he would say a
>> “function” is, but in the earlier posts, it was as bizarrely glossed
>> to me as this glossing of goal, so I can’t even come up with a guess
>> for how to imitate it.
>>
>> The plugging in of an address for the supermarket to the GPS while
>> sitting in the car in the driveway (organization of behavior) is the
>> goal, not the event of my arriving at the supermarket.
>>
>> For me as a mechanic, the bullseye as a position for arrows is the
>> goal (applied to an object), or the event of the arrow’s arriving
>> there is a goal (applied to an outcome of a behavior) that serves as
>> a selection criterion among directions in which a bow might be
>> pointed. My pointing the bow one way versus another is to me a
>> function for attaining that goal. The event of arriving at a
>> supermarket is the goal that serves as a criterion for selection of
>> which GPS location I plug in; the act of plugging in that address is
>> then a function for attaining that goal.
>>
>> I know that, in response to this, Nick will reply with a sequence of
>> English-language words that I find even more unparseable than the
>> ones above.
>>
>> The meditators do this too. If I comment that, as a mechanic, I am
>> interested in what would get people to be more restrained in the use
>> of excesses of power when they find themselves in possession of such,
>> to try to unwind the death spiral that is leading to the dissolution
>> of the society, I know that the meditators will say “Poor child, lost
>> in samsara, he doesn’t realize that all these things he refers to are
>> just illusion.” If I say to them that this is what I expect them to
>> say, the meditators get annoyed at me because they think I am
>> insulting them. They say “when we say, over and over again, in the
>> first pages of every piece of our literature, and again every three
>> pages after that, that `all that is illusion’ “, we don’t mean that
>> all that is illusion. You strawman us. Seriously?
>>
>> I guess that’s how either discipline-specific or idiosyncratic speech
>> habits work. What is unexplainably self-evident to one person is
>> mystifying to somebody else.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
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