[FRIAM] Could this possibly be true?
David Eric Smith
desmith at santafe.edu
Fri Sep 17 16:58:31 EDT 2021
Hi Steve,
No, not a Borges reference in that case.
“Garden path sentence” is a technical term used in linguistics, specifically by syntacticians, to express nonlocalities in the parsing of sentences that are left ambiguous by subsets of the exact word sequences, but which normally take conventional forms, and in the garden-path sentence are resolved at the end in an unconventional way. The experience of reading them is that the mind is setting up an understanding, letting drop the details of sentence structure early as they get replaced by semantic representations, and then at the end realizing that those expectations have no resolution with the actual words, so one has to go back and re-load all the specifics to try to re-parse the sentence. It essentially halts the process of sense-making that is normal in reading, as one “reads through the text”, and returns one to the pre-K level when one isn’t really reading, but looking at the literal text and wondering what one is supposed to do in response to it.
I heard a nice one in a talk years ago, which I could not remember exactly and could not find on the internet yesterday. But if you look at Wikipedia, you will find that canonical examples are things like:
The horse raced past the barn fell.
The old man the boats.
To say that reading something in the evolution literature has an alien feel to me that reminds me of reading garden-path sentences is an attempt to point to the non-local nature of meaning carriage and to express an aspect of an experience; I did not make a claim that some particular sentence in some particular post “is” a garden-path sentence by some criterion of alternative parse-trees that I can deliver upon demand. It’s more like saying Gosh, being hit in the head with a piece of a cinder block feels somewhat like falling off a bike and hitting my head on the ground (just to be sure I use two events I have really experienced, so I do not have to speak metaphorically).
Thanks,
Eric
> On Sep 18, 2021, at 12:56 AM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> 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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