[FRIAM] Nick's Categories

[Steve Smith]

As absurd as this whole conversation feels in some ways, I find it 
fascinating (and possibly useful).  At the very least it seems to be an 
extreme example of empathy-seeking.

This is "me" doing "mental stuff".   I don't know how to separate 
"mental stuff" from "body stuff" except perhaps /en extrema/, /per 
exemplia/.   Imaginating on what it is like to be trampled-dirt would 
fit into my category of "doing mental stuff", whatever that actually 
means (beyond being able to label extreme examples of it?)

Glen sez "there is something it is like to be trampled dirt" as if that 
actually means something and that any/all of us perhaps can experience 
that.   Try as I might I can't quite "feel what it is like to be 
trampled dirt".... however I do find that I can find within the things 
I'm more inclined to call "body stuff"  that my "mental stuff" is 
willing to label (very loosely) as "being like trampled dirt".  BUT I 
don't know that in that process I ever imagine I actually "feel like 
trampled dirt".

  I could ramble forever (uncountable, not infiinite) on examples of 
what it is for *me* to "be like trampled dirt" ( a great deal of what 
feeds good poetry actually) and some here *might8 recognize some/many of 
my examples and end up "feeling like trampled dirt" more than they did 
before they read it.   This would be what *I* call communication (which 
Glen insists does not actually exist?).   I'm possibly talking/thinking 
(mental stuff) into "feeling like trampled dirt" (body stuff) here.   I 
don't know that I can claim (imagine) that dirt is in any way 
communicating "what it is like to be trampled dirt" to me except perhaps 
simply by *being trampled dirt*.   Observing dirt as it is trampled, or 
as it's configuration suggests "having been trampled" seems to be part 
of *my* strategy in trying to imagine "being trampled dirt"

And it occurs to me (mental stuff, this 'occuring to") that the very 
description *as* "trampled" dirt is a projection of a living creature 
onto something with no obvious agency nor sensation?   To the extent 
that dirt is something that *most* creatures walk/run/stomp-about upon 
(at least dirt on the surface of a gravitational body), it is *all 
trampled*?   Of course, dirt on the surface of the moon (is it actually 
*dirt* if it's origins are not earthly?   Moon-dust, Moon-rock, 
Moon-gravel) is on the whole untrampled (with the exception of the small 
area where Apollo Astronauts placed their feet?) and maybe by extension 
where the landing-pads of the Lunar Lander's touched down and then by 
yet-more extension, every place a bit of man-made debris has struck or 
landed-on the surface?  Which leads us to the possibility that *all* 
moon-surface material is "trampled earth", being "trampled by meteors"?

As I write this I "feel like moondust, trampled not only by 
meteorites/asteroids but also by cosmic rays"...

What is the opposite-of/complement-to /reductio ad absurdum/ ? 
/ridiculum faciens nota /or more likely/ridiculum faciens usitata 
verberando sicut equus mortuus/


On 2/17/23 12:35 AM, ⛧ glen wrote:
> Doubling down on the incredulity fallacy? OK. Yes. There is something it is like to be trampled dirt. I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course. I don't do any mental stuff as far as I know. Everything I do is inherently "body stuff". Maybe that's because I've experienced chronic pain my whole life. Maybe some of you consistently live in a body free experience? I've only experienced that a few times, e.g. running in a fasted state. And I later suffered for that indulgent delusion.
>
> No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff". So you need a more concrete question.
>
> On February 16, 2023 6:04:17 PM PST, 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.
>>>>>>
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