[FRIAM] Nick's Categories
Eric Charles
eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com
Thu Feb 16 21:28:51 EST 2023
Would you though?!? You certainly wouldn't stop stepping on it.
<echarles at american.edu>
On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 9:16 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "...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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