[FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Thu Feb 16 12:22:37 EST 2023

Might I offer some terminology reframing, or at least ask for some 
additional explication?

 1. I think "behaviours" would be all Nick's Martians *could* observe? 
    They would be inferring "experiences" from observed behaviours?
 2. When we talk about "categories" here, are we talking about
    "categories of being"?  Ontologies, as it were?

Regarding ErisS' reflections...   I *do* think that animals behave *as 
if* they "have categories", though I don't know what it even means to 
say that they "have categories" in the way Aristotle and his 
legacy-followers (e.g. us) do...   I would suggest/suspect that dogs and 
squirrels are in no way aware of these "categories" and that to say that 
they do is a  projection by (us) humans who have fabricated the (useful 
in myriad contexts) of a category/Category/ontology.   So in that sense 
they do NOT *have* categories...   I think in this 
conception/thought-experiment we assume that Martians *would* and would 
be looking to map their own ontologies onto the behaviour (and inferred  
experiences and judgements?) of Terran animals?

If I were to invert the subject/object relation, I would suggest that it 
is "affordances" not "experiences" (or animals' behaviours) we want to 
categorize into ontologies?  It is what things are "good for" that make 
them interesting/similar/different to living beings.   And "good for" is 
conditionally contextualized.   My dog and cat both find squirrels "good 
for" chasing, but so too for baby rabbits and skunks (once).

Or am I barking up the wrong set of reserved lexicons?

To segue (as I am wont to do), it feels like this discussion parallels 
the one about LLMs where we train the hell out of variations on learning 
classifier systems until they are as good as (or better than) we 
(humans) are at predicting the next token in a string of human-generated 
tokens (or synthesizing a string of tokens which humans cannot 
distinguish from a string generated by another human, in particular one 
with the proverbial 10,000 hours of specialized training).   The fact 
that or "ologies" tend to be recorded and organized as knowledge 
structures and in fact usually *propogated* (taught/learnt) by the same 
makes us want to believe (some of us) that hidden inside these LLMs are 
precisely the same "ologies" we encode in our myriad textbooks and 
professional journal articles?

I think one of the questions that remains present within this group's 
continued 'gurgitations is whether the organizations we have conjured 
are particularly special, or just one of an infinitude of superposed 
alternative formulations?   And whether some of those formulations are 
acutely occult and/or abstract and whether the existing (accepted) 
formulations (e.g. Western Philosophy and Science, etc) are uniquely 
(and exclusively or at least optimally) capable of capturing/describing 
what is "really real" (nod to George Berkeley).

Some here (self included) may often suggest that such formulation is at 
best a coincidence of history and as well as it "covers" a description 
of "reality", it is by circumstance and probably by abstract conception 
("all models are wrong...") incomplete and in error.  But nevertheless 
still useful...

Maybe another way of reframing Nick's question (on a tangent) is to ask 
whether the Barsoomians had their own Aristotle to conceive of 
Categories?   Or did they train their telescopes on ancient Greece and 
learn Latin Lip Reading and adopt one or more the Greek's philosophical 
traditions?  And then, did the gas-balloon creatures floating in the 
atmosphere-substance of Jupiter observe the Martians' who had observed 
the Greeks and thereby come up with their own Categories.   Maybe it was 
those creatures who beamed these abstractions straight into the neural 
tissue of the Aristotelians and Platonists?   Do gas-balloon creatures 
even have solids to be conceived of as Platonic?  And are they missing 
out if they don't?  Do they have their own Edwin Abbot Abbot?   And what 
would the Cheela <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg> say?

My dog and the rock squirrels he chases want to know... so do the cholla 
cactus fruits/segments they hoard in their nests!

Mumble,

  - Steve

On 2/16/23 5:37 AM, Santafe wrote:
> It’s the tiniest and most idiosyncratic take on this question, but FWIW, here:
> https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1520752113
>
> I actually think that all of what Nick says below is a perfectly good draft of a POV.
>
> As to whether animals “have” categories: Spend time with a dog.  Doesn’t take very much time.  Their interest in conspecifics is (ahem) categorically different from their interest in people, different than to squirrels, different than to cats, different than to snakes.
>
> For me to even say that seems like cueing a narcissism of small differences, when overwhelmingly, their behavior is structured around categories, as is everyone else’s.  Squirrels don’t mistake acorns for birds of prey.  Or for the tree limbs and house roofs one can jump onto.  Or for other squirrels.  It’s all categories.  Behavior is an operation on categories.
>
> I found it interesting that you invoked “nouns” as a framework that is helpful but sometimes obstructive.  One might just have said “words”.  This is interesting to me already, because my syntactician friends will tell you that a noun is not, as we were taught as children, a “word for a person, place, or thing”, but rather a “word in a language that transforms as nouns transform in that language”, which is a bit of an obfuscation, since they do have in common that they are in some way “object-words”.  But from the polysemy and synonymy perspective, we see that “meanings” cross the noun-verb syntactic distinction quite frequently for some categories.  Eye/see, ear/hear, moon/shine, and stuff like that.  My typologist friends tell me that is common but particular to some meanings much more than others.
>
> Another fun thing I was told by Ted Chiang a few months ago, which I was amazed I had not heard from linguists, and still want to hold in reserve until I can check it further.  He says that languages without written forms do not have a word for “word”.  If true, that seems very interesting and important.  If Chiang believes it to be true, it is probably already a strong enough regularity to be more-or-less true, and thus still interesting and important.
>
> Eric
>
>> On Feb 15, 2023, at 1:19 PM,<thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> FWiW, I willmake every effort to arrive fed to Thuam by 10.30 Mountain.  I want to hear the experts among you hold forth on WTF a cateogory actually IS.  I am thinking (duh) that a category is a more or less diffuse node in a network of associations (signs, if you must).  Hence they constitute a vast table of what goes with what, what is predictable from what, etc.  This accommodates “family resemblance”  quite nicely.  Do I think animals have categories, in this sense, ABSOLUTELY EFFING YES. Does this make me a (shudder) nominalist?  I hope not.
>> Words…nouns in particular… confuse this category business.  Words place constraints on how vague these nodes can be.   They impose on the network constraints to which it is ill suited.  True, the more my associations with “horse” line up with your associations with “horse”, the more true the horse seems.  Following Peirce, I would say that where our nodes increasingly correspond with increasing shared experience, we have evidence ot the (ultimate) truth of the nodes, their “reality” in Peirce’s terms.  Here is where I am striving to hang on to Peirce’s realism.
>> The reason I want the geeks to participate tomorrow is that I keep thinking of a semantic webby thing that Steve devised for the Institute about a decade ago.   Now a semantic web would be a kind of metaphor for an associative web; don’t associate with other words in exactly the same manner in which experiences associate with other experiences.  Still, I think the metaphor is interesting.  Also, I am kind of re-interested in my “authorial voice”, how much it operates like cbt.
>>
>> Rushing,
>>
>> Nick
>>
>> From: Friam<friam-bounces at redfish.com>  On Behalf Of Eric Charles
>> Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2023 10:29 AM
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group<friam at redfish.com>
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Thuram still happening?
>>
>> Well shoot..... that would do it.... Thank you!
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 12:28 PM Frank Wimberly<wimberly3 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Today is Wednesday, isn't it?
>>>
>>> ---
>>> Frank C. Wimberly
>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>>
>>> 505 670-9918
>>> Santa Fe, NM
>>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 10:19 AM Eric Charles<eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>> Are the Thursday online meetings still happening? I missed a few weeks due to work piling up meetings on, but I'm trying to log in now, and it looks like the meeting hasn't started.
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