[FRIAM] Nick's Categories
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Wed Feb 22 17:05:22 EST 2023
Tom -
> Maybe you’re overthinking this topic.
I think that's a given!
- Steve
> To quote Bucky Fuller:
>
> “Today the world is my backyard. ‘Where do you live?’ and ‘What are
> you?’ are progressively less sensible questions. I live on earth at
> present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category.
> I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary
> process—an integral function of the universe.”
> TJ
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 11:23 AM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> 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> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <mailto: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> <mailto: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> <mailto: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> <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Today is Wednesday, isn't it?
>>>>
>>>> ---
>>>> Frank C. Wimberly
>>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 <https://www.google.com/maps/search/140+Calle+Ojo+Feliz,+%0D%0ASanta+Fe,+NM+87505?entry=gmail&source=g>
>>>>
>>>> 505 670-9918
>>>> Santa Fe, NM
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 10:19 AM Eric Charles<eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> <mailto: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.
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> --
> ============================================
> Tom Johnson - tom at jtjohnson.com
> Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> 505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
> *Visit Global Santa Fe <https://globalsantafe.org/>*
> ============================================
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