[FRIAM] Dope slaps, anyone? Text displaying correctly?

[glen]

Aha! Yes, I had not noticed that new point. My reduction ended up on a fairly commonplace sentiment that we're reflexive animals ... that our perspectives and [non]literals feed back upon each other. Although I disagree with you about whether a restatement of something common place is worth [re]stating. Restatements are a kind of parallax. So even if your idea isn't new, it may well benefit others (or yourself in the future).

As to what you think might be new. It sounds like the basic idea is that premature registration of unattainable, hypothetical things is *necessary* to us. (I've mistakenly written "premature" in place of "preemptive" in the past. Here I'm using "premature" on purpose.) The idea is that all we really have is some vague *hole* in our language/experience. But we register an object and place it in the hole even though we have no (or few) facts justifying the object. And it's not only that we happen to do that, but we must do it, in some sense. Is this tracking?

If so, then I'll probably call out the old saw of cross-species mind-reading and ask: To what extent are such horizon point placeholder tokens part of other animals' ways of parsing the world? What is such a tendency necessary for? The only place I've seen such things attacked head-on is in Rosen's Anticipatory Systems. It struck me as an attempt to abstract anticipation (modeling with future inputs) such that it could be translated across animals, complex to simple. But I also think your idea relates somehow to predictive processing (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787), and perhaps even Bad Faith (doing a job when your heart's just not in it).

We build a calculus for the world, intended to minimize surprise when encountering new facts. In order to do that, we treat the prematurely registered object or "in the limit type" *as if* it's a fact ... a bound variable ... a quantity assigned to a quality.

So if I'm right and this is tracking with your proposition, then animals that anticipate (predictively encode) need those unattainable tokens in order to minimize surprise. Those that don't anticipate work entirely in the world of now-facts and lose some interesting expressive power ... reduce to a "reactive system", the best of which would be a high-order Markov process, I guess.

How am I doing? Am I still off base? I find it hard to believe you're unaware of Rosen's and Friston's arguments. So I suspect I'm still missing the point.

On 1/16/23 12:55, David Eric Smith wrote:
> Nick, Glen, hi; thank you both,
> 
> Sorry for dropout — life — I want to acknowledge Glen’s earlier list-form digest of the various assertions, which is in parts rendered in terms I don’t know, so I am impaired in following.  Maybe more when the smoke clears, on that branch, unless I draw all blanks.
> 
> All of what Glen has below here I fully endorse, and a few formulations are as clean versions of the thing I think I want to mean as I can imagine.  Particularly:
> 
>> not only do the particulars vary within the schema, but the schema also vary. The schema are ways to "parse" the world, the Play-Doh extruder(s) we use to form the Play-Doh into something.
> 
>> Worded another way: Our perspective on the world emerges from the world. And our perspective on the world shapes how and what we see of the world.
> 
> My liking of the analogy of sample estimators and underlying values is that, if one felt that were a valid analogy to a specific aspects of Peirce’s truth-relative-to-states-of-knowledge concept, it would completely clear the fog of philosophical profundity from Peirce, and say that this idea, for a modern quantitative reader, is an everyday commonplace, and one that we can easily examine at all levels from our habits to our formalism, and study the structure of in cognition.
> 
> But Glen’s other point is exactly what makes the sample-estimators and underlying-values analogy completely empty on what makes part of truth-concepts most important and interesting.  Unlike sample estimators and underlying values, where the qualities (Glen’s term “types” is the right language to pursue this) are fixed, and only the quantities vary or are discovered or imagined.  But in our effort to faithfully render some aspects of “what is the case”, everything qualitative is also within the variable part.  What type is being used — what types and type systems are possible — are all open to being overturned or replaced.  This extends not only to the lexicon and grammar of the languages a behaviorist can record, but to the habits, states of mind that get triggered in the use of that language, shared behaviors (scientific experiments and measurements), etc.  Worse yet, the rendering _about_ the types is conducted partly _in_ the type-expressions (and partly accessible from other behavior, giving due to the Skinnerians), so we have problems of reflexivity in notions of form and meaning for expressions.  Those are the aspects in which analogies that we understand for ordinary life are (as far as I know) _all_ very inadequate to the task of a good system for talking about truth as it relates to thought, knowledge, behavior, etc.  An adequate system would be a really new construction, a thing added to science that science does not yet have.  (And agreeing with DaveW, one could as well say “added to an apprehension to the nature of culture” as “added to science”).  All of these frameworks for understanding come into play.
> 
> 
> I was trying, however, to say one thing that I didn’t intend to just be part of the exegesis-of-Peirce, or affirmation and reinforcement of long-proclaimed takes in the exegesis of Peirce; it was meant to be offered as its own idea, to be judged.  To the extent that there is nothing in it that can’t get dragged back into the form “Yes! And as I have said all along….” or “Indeed!  As Peirce has said all along….l” then it isn’t actually anything new, and I may as well not have posted it, because it is all already done.
> 
> That was, that these various limit points are not only of one narrow kind.  They are not _only_ Peirce’s “truth”, or the “reality” of this or that philosopher, or the “underlying value” of the statistician doing inference.  The proposal was that a certain family resemblance in the way we use these tokens might cast light on _how we think_, or if you like “the structure of thought” (or, being SteveS, thought/cognition/awareness).  So I am aiming at using a comparative analysis of locutions and behavior to try to make some reductive approximations to a model of people’s coming to terms with the world that they are comfortable putting into constant use.
> 
> To wit: the common pattern is conceiving of things as constructively unattainable (infinite, true, real), and then manipulating them with syntactic systems that presume only things attained.  Managing to keep straight (or fail to do so) the distinction between those that really are attainable (states of knowledge) and those that are not (placeholders for “truth” tokens).  Note that, while states of knowledge are assigned literals (since we actually know them — 4 heads out of 10 flips), “truth tokens” seem to need to be treated as syntactic tokens; when they are spoken of as “having values”, the values we insert are always digests of the literals from our states of knowledge (a h/t flip probability of 0.455372 as digested by an algorithm from 100000 values of a sample estimator).  So we treat the truth token as “having” values, yet ultimately we weasel, and the only “values” we put forth for them are ultimately values of states of knowledge, that we at-some-level appreciate are not the same things as truths.
> 
> Maybe in a way Nick did address this, when he said that (his own?  And not just Peirce's reflected?) position was that what I am referring to as “states of knowledge” with their assigned literal values are “all we have”.  All the weight in such a sentence turns on the word “have”.  Clearly (aka seems to me), if you take away the placeholder tokens, English and every other human language disintegrates into a kind of dust with very little expressive power.  I suspect that there are placeholder tokens in behavior too, and if one were to take them away, behavior would disintegrate to a kind of fibrillation.  (I am recalling dozens of frustrating posts on the list that come at this from various starting points.)  So there is a sense of “have” which might unpack operationally to “Don’t fool yourself that your truth value-assignments are ever independent; they are always functions of knowledge-value assignments that are not the same kind of thing, self-deceptively assigned.”  With that notion of “have”, I would agree.  But until I hear any human (that would even include Nick, who is all too human, pace Nietzsche) use a language that retains expressive power without these infinity-tokens, I will think our expressions depend on them in some kind of inherent way, and in that sense we all “have” them.  The exercise would then be to understand the nature of this sense of “having” and of the thing “had”.
> 
> Anyway, it’s just a thought,
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 16, 2023, at 7:32 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Well, not "languageless", but "language-independent". Now that you've forced me to think harder, that phrase "language-independent" isn't quite right. It's more like "meta-language" ... a family of languages such that the family might be "language-like" ... a language of languages ... a higher order language, maybe.
>>
>> Feferman introduced me to the concept of "schematic axiomatic systems", which seems (correct me if I'm wrong) to talk about formal systems where one reasons over sentences with substitutable elements. I.e. the *particulars* of any given situation may vary, but the "scheme" into which those particulars fit is stable/invariant. [⛧]
>>
>> EricS seemed to be proposing that not only do the particulars vary within the schema, but the schema also vary. The schema are ways to "parse" the world, the Play-Doh extruder(s) we use to form the Play-Doh into something.
>>
>> Your "random yet not random" rendering of Peirce sounds to me similar to the duality between the particulars and the schema they populate.
>>
>> Worded one way: Schema are the stable patterns that emerge from the particulars. And the variation of the particulars is circumscribed (bounded, defined) by the schema.
>>
>> Worded another way: Our perspective on the world emerges from the world. And our perspective on the world shapes how and what we see of the world.
>>
>> And, finally, paraphrasing: The apparition of schema we experience is due to the fact that such schema are useful to organisms. Events in the world that don't fit the schema are beyond experience.
>>
>>
>> [⛧] I'm doing my best to avoid talking about jargonal things like type theory, things that should have come very natural to Peirce, but would be difficult to express in natural language.
>>
>> On 1/15/23 19:49, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>>> EricS and Glen,
>>> Sorry, again.  Here is the short version.  I apologize, again, for appending that great wadge of gunk.
>>> I found the second Feferman even harder to understand than the first. Glen, can you give me a little help on what you meant by a languageless language.
>>>   Thanks, all
>>> On Sun, Jan 15, 2023 at 4:09 PM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>     Aw crap!  The shortish  answer that I meant to send had all sorts of junk appended!  Sorry. Will resend soon. [blush]
>>>     Sent from my Dumb Phone
>>>     On Jan 12, 2023, at 8:54 PM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>     
>>>     Dear EricS, Glen, and anybody else who is following.
>>>     Thank you so much for pitching in.   As I have often said, I am incapable of thinking alone, so your comments are wonderfully welcome.  And thank you also for confirming that what I wrote was readable.  I am having to work in gmail at the moment, which is , to me, an unfamiliar medium.
>>>     First, Eric:  I am trying to talk math-talk in this passage, so poetry is not an excuse if I fail to be understood by you.
>>>     /*FWIW: as I have heard these discussions over the years, to the extent that there is a productive analogy, I would say (unapologetically using my words, and not trying to quote his) that Peirce’s claimed relation between states of knowledge and truth (meaning, some fully-faithful representation of “what is the case”) is analogous to the relation of sample estimators in statistics to the quantity they are constructed to estimate. We don’t have any ontological problems understanding sample estimators and the quantities estimated, as both have status in the ordinary world of empirical things.  In our ontology, they are peers in some sense, but they clearly play different roles and stand for different concepts.*/
>>>     /*
>>>     */
>>>     I like very muchwhat you have written here and think it states, perhaps more precisely than I managed, exactly what I was trying to say.  I do want to further  stress the fact that if a measurement system is tracking a variate that is going to stabilize in the very long run, then it will on average approximate that value with greater precision the more measures are taken.  Thus, not only does the vector of the convergence constitute evidence for the location of the truth, the fact that there is convergence is evidence that there is a truth to be located.   Thus I agree with you that the idea behind Peirce's notion of truth is the central limit theorem.
>>>     Where  we might disagree is whether there is any meaning to truth beyond that central limit.  This is where I found you use of "ontology" so helpful. When talking about statistics, we are always talking about mathematical structures in experience and nothing beyond that.  We are assuredly talking about only one kind of thing.  However, I see you wondering, are there things to talk about beyond the statistical structures of experience?   I hear you wanting to say "yes" and I see me wanting to say "no".
>>>     God knows ... and I use the term advisedly ... my hankering would seem  to be arrogant to the point of absurdity.  Given all the forms of discourse in which the words "truth" and "real" are used, all the myriad language games in which these words appear as tokens, how, on earth, could I (or Peirce)  claim that there exists one and only one standard by which the truth of any proposition or the reality of any abject can be demonstrated?  I think I have to claim (and I think Peirce claims it) that whatever people may say about how they evaluate truth or reality claims, their evaluation always boils down to an appeal to the long run of experience.
>>>     Our difference of opinion, if we have one, is perhaps  related to the difference of opinion between James and Peirce concerning the relation between truth as a believed thing and truth as a thing beyond the belief of any finite group of people.  James was a physician, and presumably knew a lot about the power of placebos.  He also was a ditherer, who famously took years to decide whom to marry  and agonized about it piteously to his siblings.  James was fascinated by the power of belief to make things true and the power of doubt to make them impossible.  Who could jump a chasm who did not believe that he could jump a chasm!   For Peirce, this sort of thinking was just empty psychologizing.  Truth was indeed a kind of opinion, but it was the final opinion, that opinion upon which the operation of scientific practices and logical inquiry would inevitably converge.
>>>     EricC, the Jamesian, will no doubt have a lot to say about this, including that it is total garbage.
>>>     As for Fefferman,  my brief attempt to learn enough about Fefferman to appear intelligent led me to the website, https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fwww.vipfaq.com%2fCharles%20Fefferman.html&c=E,1,HhEk_O6mbSLBHGy9dmbo1sODd7N7sZnbRh7A7VbHHMwNL9shi4rs9BkbvT3xkYfq1D49uWGwu7U0WTsH2Q86g5JxtKGa7IaAH8dHmznp-MGohV31lxfdCw,,&typo=1 <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fwww.vipfaq.com%2fCharles%20Fefferman.html&c=E,1,WtOimJB9xo-dS08crWCQh_7Hboxsw-Pa2Z58jhmpY71mjhQJ5jlCDstmrzeMQJlDjC18uZty_yFxcB49NlWPq0gS2_RPXWWGKRmiznQMz6ZLqQ,,&typo=1>, which might be the weirdest website I have ever gone to.   I don't THINK that a language-free language is my unicorn, but Glen NEVER says something for nothing, so I am withholding judgement until he boxes my ears again.  I think my unicorn may be that all truth is statistical and, therefore, provisional.  Literally:  a seeing into the future.
>>>     Thanks again for helping out, you guys!
>>>     Nick
>>>     Consider, for a moment, the role of placebos in medicine.
>>>     Consider the ritual of transubstantiation.  At the moment that you sip it, is the contents of the chalice Really "blood."
>>>     /*Peirce writes, "Consider what effects, which may have practical bearing, the object of your conception to have.  Then our **conception of those effects is our whole of our conception of the object.*/
>>>     "The Whole"?!  Really?  Now somebody of  Peircean Pursuasion would point out that, if a parishionner were to burst a blood vessel, and a doctor with a transfusion kit were present, NObody would conceive that the patient should b transfused with communion wine.  Since causing instant death upon tranfusion is not one of the conceivable consequences of the chalice containing blood (leave aside immunity issues ), and is a conceivable consequence of transfusing communion wine, we are warranted to say that, despite what the  practice of communion implies, the stuff in the challice is wine not blood.
>>>     But it's entirely conceivable that some parissioners, at theinstant of communion, do conceive of the wine as blood, and experience changes of themselves and teh world around them as a consequence of receiving communion.
>>>     Fork 1 here "The Whole"?!  Really? Consider the phenomenon of a   _________________ effects.
>>>     /*
>>>     */
>>>     The juice here is what we think we are estimating.  Are we estimating the true state of affairs in some world we cannot more directly access or are we estimating the final resting place of the statistic we are measuring.  My point, here, is that the latter is  all we have.  To the extent that anything in experience is non-random (ie, some events are predictive of other events), any mechanism that homes on these contingencies will be selected if the consequences are of importance to reproduction of the organism. we live in a mostly random world  and to the extent that our methods of inquiry are useful, further inquiry will probably narrow our estimate of some property within finer and finer limits.  This is a process I would call inductive.
>>>     Now I think, in your latter comments, you are getting at the fact that this is only one kind of convergence,and is dependent on a prior convergence concerning what identifies a substance as lithium.  Before we can determine the boiling point of lithium we have first to agree upon which substances are lithium and which operations constitute "boiling".   These are decisions that are abductive in nature, and, to that extent are less straight-forward.    Lets say we are interested in determining the boiling point of Li and we are sent looking for some li to biol.   We come accross a lump of grey metal witha dark finish in our lab drawer and we want ot know if this is lithium.   The logic here (light grey substance with dark finish =? lithiumisthe logic ofabduction.  That this first test is positive will lead you toperform yet another abductive lest: is it noticeably light when youbalance it in yourhadn, can you cut it withthe plasticknife you brought home with your take-out
>>>     lunch , etc.  These tests are similarly abductive (Li is light, theis substance is light, this sjumbstance isli;Li is soft, this substance is soft, this substanve is Li. When enough of these tests have come up positive you will declare the substance to be Li an procede to measure its boiling point.  (A similar series of abductions willbe require to agree upon what constitutes "boiling".
>>>     *Lithium* (from Greek <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language>: λίθος, romanized <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Greek>: /lithos/, lit. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_translation> 'stone') is a chemical element <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element> with the symbol <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_(chemistry)> *Li* and atomic number <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_number> 3. It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkali_metal>. Under standard conditions <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_temperature_and_pressure>, it is the least dense metal and the least dense solid element. Like all alkali metals, lithium is highly reactive <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactivity_(chemistry)> and flammable, and must be stored in vacuum, inert atmosphere, or inert liquid such as purified kerosene or mineral oil. When cut, it exhibits a metallic luster
>>>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luster_(mineralogy)>, but moist air corrodes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosion> it quickly to a dull silvery gray, then black tarnish. It never occurs freely in nature, but only in (usually ionic) compounds <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_compound>, such as pegmatitic <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegmatite> minerals, which were once the main source of lithium. Due to its solubility as an ion, it is present in ocean water and is commonly obtained from brines <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine>. Lithium metal is isolated electrolytically <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis> from a mixture of lithium chloride <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_chloride> and potassium chloride <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_chloride>.
>>>     On Sun, Jan 8, 2023 at 3:21 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>         This smacks of Feferman's claim that "implicit in the acceptance of given schemata is the acceptance of any meaningful substitution instances that one may come to meet, but which those instances are is not determined by restriction to a specific language fixed in advance." ... or in the language of my youth, you reap what you sow.
>>>         To Nick's credit (without any presumption that I know anything about Peirce), he seems to be hunting the same unicorn Feferman's hunting, something like a language-independent language. Or maybe something analogous to a moment (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_(mathematics) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_(mathematics)>)?
>>>         While we're on the subject, Martin Davis died recently: https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2flogicprogramming.org%2f2023%2f01%2fin-memoriam-martin-davis%2f&c=E,1,VZmWR2PAPTVpvqTDeiAuu2Pz2HbpBa1UotvEWyEkAACxfwHwNMWQ1BRLlkoFvgvBJaMeSVUlPG5QvzJL0ky83PRIzeCvDW6q_yz0HbCdSQ8E1gGFIuA0gEnA-t8,&typo=1 <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2flogicprogramming.org%2f2023%2f01%2fin-memoriam-martin-davis%2f&c=E,1,-s981QTORa8B5t9HflatV0Klgtu2GrSY5W1FZ8kj9-CBJ_6cYLme0MndhKSl05xlHcT8rO7cA2yTIhonIrs7aLInB6ezrQYM7cnQCVTkGVKvfWR5f016LvkgwWk,&typo=1> As terse as he was with me when I complained about him leaving Tarski out of "Engines of Logic", his loss will be felt, especially to us randos on the internet.
>>>         On 1/7/23 15:20, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>>          > Nick, the text renders.
>>>          >
>>>          > You use words in ways that I cannot parse.  Some of them seem very poetic, suggesting that your intended meaning is different in its whole cast from one I could try for.
>>>          >
>>>          > FWIW: as I have heard these discussions over the years, to the extent that there is a productive analogy, I would say (unapologetically using my words, and not trying to quote his) that Peirce’s claimed relation between states of knowledge and truth (meaning, some fully-faithful representation of “what is the case”) is analogous to the relation of sample estimators in statistics to the quantity they are constructed to estimate.
>>>          >
>>>          > We don’t have any ontological problems understanding sample estimators and the quantities estimated, as both have status in the ordinary world of empirical things.  In our ontology, they are peers in some sense, but they clearly play different roles and stand for different concepts.
>>>          >
>>>          > When we come, however, to “states of knowledge” and “truth” as “what will bear out in the long run”, in addition to the fact that we must study the roles of these tokens in our thought and discourse, if we want to get at the concepts expressive of their nature, we also have a hideously more complicated structure to categorize, than mere sample estimators and the corresponding “actual” values they are constructed to estimate.  For sample estimation, in some sense, we know that the representation for the estimator and the estimated is the same, and that they are both numbers in some number system.  If we wish to discuss states of knowledge and truth, everything is up for grabs: every convention for a word’s denotation and all the rules for its use in a language that confer parts of its meaning.  All the conventions for procedures of observation and guided experience.  All the formal or informal modes of discourse in which we organize our intersubjective experience
>>>         pools and
>>>          > build something from them.  All of that is allowed to “fluctuate”, as we would say in statistics of sample estimators.  The representation scheme itself, and our capacities to perceive through it, are all things we seek to bring into some convergence toward a “faithful representation” of “what is the case”.
>>>          >
>>>          > Speaking or thinking in an orderly way about that seems to have many technical as well as modal aspects.
>>>          >
>>>          > Best,
>>>          >
>>>          > Eric
>>>          >
>>>          >
>>>          >> On Jan 7, 2023, at 5:05 PM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>>> wrote:
>>>          >>
>>>          >> */The relation between the believed in and the True is the relation between a limited function and its limit. {a vector, and the thing toward which the vector points?]   Ultimately  the observations that the function models determine/**/the limit, but the limit is not determined by any particular  observation or group of observations.  Peirce believes that The World -- if, in fact, it makes any sense to speak of a World independent of the human experience -- is essentially random and, therefore,  that contingencies among experiences that lead to valid expectations are rare.  The apparition of order that we experience is due to the fact that such predictive contingencies--rare as they may be-- are extraordinarily useful to organisms and so organisms are conditioned to attend  to them.  Random events are beyond experience.  Order is what can be experienced. /*


-- 
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