[FRIAM] Tangents and the Hamiltonian of News/Cultural Narratives
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sat Feb 18 12:11:15 EST 2023
<on a tangent from a tangent among tangents>
Thanks to EricC for introducing the very idea of a /tangent/ to this
discussion. I would propose that "mental stuff" might be characterized
*by* tangents? The mathematical/geometric definition of *tangent*
tends to suggest a *reduction* of the curve or arc or path at a specific
point along it *to* the direction components of that point/vector in
phase space.
When we colloquially say something is a tangent (a geometric metaphor
for thought and discussion) we mean that at some point along the path of
logic/conversation/discussion/description *another* path diverges but in
fact follows the instantaneous or point-localized vector and is one of
an uncountable member of a family of curves with that direction
component. This implies that it is relevant to the original (implied)
path but somehow is unexpected or a divergence from what *somebody*
regards as the original arc of the conversation?
In the spirit of an extravagant application of metaphor I realized as I
was trying to formulate *this tangent* that my underlying model of human
thought (individual and collective) is registered on a high dimensional
calculus of variations conceit. And in deference to Glen's regular
reminder to of us of the risk of excess meaning (also Reese and Overton
1970) and premature binding/registration, I do believe that there are
elements of a romantic/nostalgic force-fit in this game I play here.
It feels to me as if at "every point in a conversation" that there are a
plethora (uncountable but not infiinite?) of possible divergences and to
be healthy (whatever that means) there needs to be a tension between
predictable and interesting (if those are actual opposites?)...
Perhaps I am alone in this intuition/conception but the collective
conversation that I apprehend *here* and in the larger world (exempli
gratia: the news-stream/social-media milieu), narrative arcs of "truth"
feel to me be not unlike least action paths or even Feynman path
integrals. The superposition of possible arcs/paths and something like
probability/possibility/plausability fields (family of curves weighted
by ???) within our (intersubjective ala Harari) realities.
Listening to the "fake news media's" discussion of the "Faux
(Fox/Murdoch) News Media"'s troubles with the courts over the Dominion
Voting Machine ?Libel? suits gave me the distinct feeling that the
former is (at the very least) attempting to enforce some sort of
cause-effect rules on the news-sphere whilst the latter (Murdoch++) is
trying to carve a shape in rhetoric space which fits a pre-determined
grand narrative that fits some higher-order agenda/model. Some of the
circular logic exposed (where, for example, the Trump-team would make a
claim which Faux folks would pick up and echo as "it has been suggested"
and then Trump-echo would call-respond with "the media has reported" and
thus the resonance in the echo chamber is triggered/tuned, feels like a
deliberate challenge to the prohibition of causal loops in mechanics.
Of course, they would (and not without some merit) claim the same of
"everyone else" in media? Meanwhile the binary distribution within our
political spectrum suggests a tension between two equal but disparate
cosmologies which attract ideation and opinion to those two "poles".
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haroun_and_the_Sea_of_Stories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
On 2/18/23 6:29 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.
>
> Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of
> panpsychism entails.
>
> Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on
> everything you do being "body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the
> empirical question of what types of bodies do "psyche", and where
> those types of bodies can be found.
>
> You say further that: No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff".
>
> Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West,
> unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche
> in at least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you
> (Glen) do mental stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in
> panpsychism /does/ affect how he lives in the world. Exactly to
> the extent that his way of living in the world is made different by
> the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more than just something he says.
>
> Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt
> trampled beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially
> interesting in its own right. His discussion of when he, personally,
> starts to attribute identity - and potentially psyche - to clumps of
> inanimate stuff seems directly on topic, especially as he too has
> listed some ways his behaviors change when he becomes engaged in those
> habits.
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 2:36 AM ⛧ glen <gepropella at gmail.com> 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.
> >> >>>
> >> >>>
> --
> glen ⛧
>
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