[FRIAM] Nick's Categories

[Steve Smith]

On 2/16/23 11:26 AM, glen wrote:
> I don't grok the context well enough to equivocate on concepts like 
> "have" and "category of being". But in response to Nick's question: 
> "What is there that animals do that demands us to invent categories to 
> explain their behavior?", my answer is "animals discretize the ambient 
> muck". So if categorization is somehow fundamentally related to 
> discretization, then animals clearly categorize in that sense.

.. or more elaborately?  "life *transduces* gradients and spectra 
(light, sound, chemistry) and then *thresholds* the results into what we 
would nominally call "discrete categories".  The actual definition of 
those categories, the stimulus-response patterns are actually built upon 
(created under the shaping of) some kind of utility function (variations 
on survival in some sense).   One step removed from this is to begin to 
"name" these categories and modulate and relate (adjectives and verbs) 
them to one another and from that build elaborate models of cause/effect 
that can be used to leverage our sensory inputs in pursuit of optimizing 
said utility functions?   Semiotic theory probably already has a suite 
of terminology for this?

> But Nick does follow that question with this "experience" nonsense. So 
> my guess is there *is* some sophistry behind the question, similar to 
> EricC's incredulous response to DaveW's question about 
> phenomenological composition of experience(s). What I find missing in 
> Nick's (and EricC's) distillation of experience monism is an account 
> of the seemingly analogous position of panpsychism. 
I don't know if I am fully untangling this construction:   I personally 
am drawn (intuitively) to panpsychism but more in abstract theory than 
in practice.   I rarely treat a brick or stone as if it has any level of 
sentience, yet I do grant (impute) *something* like sentience onto more 
complex units.  That would be especially life itself, and especially 
life at my personal scale such as a tree or a horse, while it might be 
easier to ignore whatever complex adaptivity a protozoa or an entire 
forest or coral reef or the biosphere as a whole might have (because it 
is out of my physical/time scale).   But many artifacts in my world 
which I have an intimate relationship with, I tend to impute *some* 
sentience (or at least agency/identity) onto?  House, Vehicles, Garden, 
some toolsets?