[FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Frank Wimberly wimberly3 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 16 21:15:26 EST 2023 

"...how do you think your ways of acting in the world would change if you
adopted such a position?"

I would stop shooting piles of dirt with a .30-06.  I haven't done that for
60+ years but it's intended as a* reductio ad absurdum* argument.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 7:05 PM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
wrote:

> "an account of the seemingly analogous position of panpsychism"
>
> What is that more than something people say?
>
> Do *you* experience the dirt at your feet as having a mental life? If so,
> tell me about it: What is the dirt like when it seems to be doing mental
> stuff? What kind of mental stuff is it doing?
>
> If not: Have you seen anyone who earnestly thinks the dirt is doing mental
> stuff? If so, what were *they* like? How was that belief pervasive in their
> adjustments to the world? Based on your experiences with that person, how
> do you think your ways of acting in the world would change if you adopted
> such a position?
>
>
> <echarles at american.edu>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 1:27 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> 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.
>>
>> I mean, all you have to do is consider the frequencies of light the
>> animals' eyeballs do or don't see. That's two categories right there, the
>> light they do see and the light they don't. Unless there's some sophistry
>> hidden behind the question, the answer seems clear. Reflection on what one
>> does and does not categorize isn't necessary. I could even claim my truck
>> discretizes fluids ... those that make it seize up versus lubricate it,
>> those that it burns vs those that stop it cold. Etc. Maybe the question is
>> better formulated as "What makes one impute categories on another?" Clearly
>> my truck doesn't impute categories on squirrels.
>>
>> 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. Were I a scholar, I might take such work on myself. But I'm
>> not and, hence, very much appreciate these distillations of dead white
>> men's metaphysics and will take what I can get. 8^D
>>
>> On 2/16/23 09:22, Steve Smith wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> --
>> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>>
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