[FRIAM] Wolpert - discussion thread placeholder

[glen]

We haven't broached Wolpert's later questions much. But before I try to do that, I'd like to follow up on these 2 things:

• What errors are involved with my cf to List's "indexicality"?

• My intention with the "percolation ..." was to allude to the limits of our convex hull. From Dave's "concrete" perspective, whatever formalisms we ultimately end up abstracting to will be detail-impoverished. That's the "forward map" from mechanism to (abstract) phenomena. Then, inversely, adding detail to a (the? [⛧]) formalism so that it accurately (qual. and/or quant.) predicts what will happen in fully detailed concrete circumstances.

My bullet was intended to say that *both* directions of flow, forward and inverse, might help us highlight cracks in the hull, things we cannot imagine about what we know. Here's where I think Jon's discussion of "developing the classical world from the Schrödinger equation" is an example of the inverse map: formalism → concrete world. It nicely dovetails with List's use of Lewis' possible worlds as well. (The difference between a full commitment to the existence of all possible worlds is quite different from parallel universes ... but, whatever.)

And Dave's (and to some extent Nick's) insistence that concrete experiences can lead (by introspective study in Dave's case or truth in the long run in Nick's case) universally translatable formalisms is an example of the forward map: concrete to formal.

An interesting tangent on this is that in plectics, we usually assert the mechanism is simple and the phenomenon is complex, a kind of polyphenism. But, if I'm even close, we might be able to formulate some of the objection of arrogance to Scientismists and Reductionists is that the *mechanism* is actually the fully messy actual world and the phenomena are the hopelessly impoverished formalisms we "recognize" or "see".

I hope that clarifies my overly concise re-statement.


[⛧] One of the capitulations Wolpert makes (consciously or not) when he suggests the beauty of category theory *might* be an indicator that it *is* a good impedance match for our predictive processor brains is that there might be a *unitary* formalism to which we will only ever successfully abstract. The GUT, as it were. It's akin to Nick's monism and the pressure to unify the Standard Model with gravity, etc. I, as a pluralist, reject those. And I think Dave and Jon (and others?) might agree to some extent that it's fideistic to assume There Can be Only One GUT. Even if we finally land upon a perfectly accurate GUT, perhaps there are multiple of them, distinguishable by something like elegance or some other aesthetic?

On 9/15/22 12:14, Steve Smith wrote:
> I am also interested in responding to another bit of "chumming" you did I think with Christian List... I will try to avoid these errors when I do that.

On 9/16/22 10:29, Steve Smith wrote:
> On 9/16/22 09:25, glen∉ℂ wrote:
> 
> I haven't been able to parse the following very completely and look forward to more discussion?
> 
>> - percolation from concrete, participative, perceptual intuition and imagination (or perhaps the inverse, a wandering from abstract/formal *toward* embodiment as we see with the rise of GANs, zero-shot, and online learning AI)

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