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

Sat Feb 18 12:38:27 EST 2023

What meaning do you give to the word "boundary"?  Time, location, etc.?

On Sat, Feb 18, 2023 at 10:09 AM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
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