[FRIAM] tangent on dirt unto soil , pile unto patch, nematode unto jellyfish

[Steve Smith]

> Great find. Thanks. I will read that.
It was pretty damned dense for me, no more probably than OOO itself, and 
being something of a critique the complexity is compounded for me a 
little.   I definitely was drawn in by the poetic title: "Extruding 
Intentionality from the Metaphysical Flux"... which may explain some of 
the topic of my other tangent to the Nick's Categories thread.
>
> I'm a bit worried how you went from "trampled dirt" to a "pile of 
> trampled dirt". This is the target of DaveW's first question of 
> composition and structure. "Dirt" is a mass noun, whereas a "pile of 
> dirt" is not. Mass nouns like "data" are interesting, I think, for the 
> very reason you're targeting. They seem to me to be qualities, not 
> objects. When EricC mentioned "dirt at your feet", I implicitly 
> *registered* a locality to the quality "dirt". There's some intuitive, 
> natural to those of us with feet, boundary around "beneath your feet" 
> versus "way the hell over there". So, you might hedge on "pile" with 
> "local". But as fuzzy as the boundary of a pile is, the boundary 
> around "local" is even fuzzier.
>
"Body Stuff" amongst unequivocal *life stuff* also follows this 
formulation which is why I don't disagree with your (Glen's) ideation 
(probably mischaracterized as I often do) that "mental stuff" is "the 
stuff of body stuff".   Whether a pile (or a "patch"?) of dirt "does 
mental stuff" is one question and (your) Glen's interesting alternative 
which suggests that "a patch of soil" would be a 
different/more-interesting question begs the question of "life 
itself?".   My proverbial sand-pile cum dog+earth-hump began "life as a 
sandpile" when I shoveled a "sandpile" from the back of my flatbed 
trailer onto the spot of earth/soil.  Said sand was (by some measure) 
much more sand than soil (surely there was microbial life on the 
surfaces of the sandgrain, if not quite a flourishing ecosystem of 
microbiota?)   Once it fell upon the adobe-earth of my side-yard it 
began to become more-soil-like the very type of particles (silt, clay, 
organic-bits) that had been screened/washed from it at the sand-gravel 
yard  were re-introduced (in kind, not in particular) by the wind and by 
my dog (and other creatures) who liked to perch atop this tiny 
"mountain" where she liked to play "king" (or whatever the heck she 
thought she was doing).    Within a year or so a nice patch of grass was 
growing up through the "patch of sand" (formerly known as "pile of 
sand") due mostly perhaps to the water-holding or aeration "mulching" of 
the sand?   Today there sits a nice 3-6' diameter patch of rough grass  
to mark where the "pile" once was and amongst it's roots is 
unequivocally "soil" which at the beginning of it's formation (first 
shovel of sand dropped there) it was hardly or even 
patently-not-quite-really soil?    A bit of the vitality of the dog who 
once perched there continues on even though *her body* lies under 
another pile of earth/rocks nearby becoming *soil itself*... with the 
amount of "mental stuff" that went on when she threw herself down on top 
of the pile-o-sand and looked around attentively seems to have 
diminished (or become obscured to the sensibilities of *this* 
warm-blooded-vertebrate-whose-primary-sense-is-focused-attention-in-the-optical-spectrum?
> I hate the word "affordances". But it's as good as any, I guess, as a 
> sign for that boundary-installing transition from quality to object. 
> If I were born without legs and spent my life in a wheelchair, I 
> suspect that boundary-installing registration of "dirt" to "dirt 
> beneath your feet" would be VERY different than it is now, to me with 
> my legs.
I'm glad you noted that you hate the word... I hate it too and perhaps 
that is why I threw it in here (and in a few previous 
thread-fragments)...   I'm trying to process "boundary-installing 
transition from quality to object" here...  I do in fact trust that this 
means something very specific to you and possibly to a whole community 
of folks I don't know (of).   I also hate "boundary" in it's several 
uses, but following your style I acknowledge it might be "as good as 
any".    What I was trying to tease out when I introduced "affordance" 
is that we use the the term as if it is a quality of the Subject when in 
fact it seems to be a projection of some (perceived?) utility to the 
Object observing the Subject.    We say that the class of objects (or a 
particular instance of that class) we call "chair" has a suite of 
affordances as if they are properties of the chair when in fact they are 
aspirational utilities for the object-considered-as-Subject 
(chair/chairs-in-general) which we consider on it's behalf.   We might 
situpon or standupon or placeobjectsupon or blockdoorwayswith or 
throwthroughwindows this thing(ish thing) we call "chair" but it seems 
specious/duplicitous to suggest that the chair itself has those 
qualities/properties?
>
> All this to emphasize, even more, that things like registration are 
> *body* stuff, not whatever is meant by "mental stuff", much the same 
> way as, say, self-organized criticality is body stuff, directly 
> dependent on the shapes and sizes of the particles. I'd expect that 
> what it is like to be a tiny chunk of quartz is different from what it 
> is like to be a tiny chunk of hematite. And compositionally, I'd 
> expect a carbon molecule sitting inside a diamond to *be* different 
> from one sitting inside a lump of coal.

More good "food for thought".    H and O atoms, when bound into H2O 
molecules and even more interesting when variously arranged in Ice 
Crystals or Water Vapor or Liquid Water or at the interface-boundary 
between liquid water, either as part of the miniscus-boundary or 
en-exchange between solid/liquid-phase are all the same yet different in 
fascinating ways.   And this doesn't even begin to address heavy-water, 
titrated water, snow-flakes, IceN <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_X> 
(e.g. Vonnegut's Ice9), water dimers,  or more far-afield water-memory 
(ala homeopathy) and hexagonal water, polywater (another 
pseudo-pseudoscience?).

While "life itself" seems like a likely "floor" for projecting 
mental-stuff onto body-stuff, we get confused (perhaps) somewhere down 
the complexity numeration around virus particles (or at least the 
simplest virii? or a fragment of mRNA?)...   or maybe a nematode with 
302 neurons or a jellyfish with many more but much more distributed?

What is the boundary between complex organism, adaptive organization, 
metabolism, and thought?

mumble,

  - Steve
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