[FRIAM] natalism

[glen]

As usual, there's too much in your post for me to follow a thread. But I can cherry-pick this one: affect - or what it is to be about/for something. An option is to think in terms of soft types such that the lower order objects over which the higher order operators ... uh, operate, have some "flex and slop", allowing the higher order operators to become schema and the lower order objects to constitute (nearly? ... quasi?) equivalence classes.

The ontological status "engrams" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology)> came up recently in another context. I'm told they're quite *specific*. But I'm not convinced. I think they can be specific (e.g. the efficacy of things like a Memory Palace). But I also think they can be accidentally invoked in non-specific or specific, but various ways. The non-specificity might provide for variation in stimulus (memory triggered by something different, different part of the body, smell vs taste, etc.) or components (memory of a visual scene versus that of a somatic context).

All my speculation is subject to falsifying or validating data, of which I have none. But whatever. My point, here, is that overly simple hypotheses for the spread of (largely) cultural or psychological behaviors are so impoverished that they feel like just-so stories to me. E.g. Dawkin's memes ... or Hanson's "innovation" ... or the nihilistic mode-switching facility of cult-members.

Deutsch's "hard to vary" constraint for good scientific theories comes to mind, I guess. Call me contrarian if you want. But in order for a "theory" to convolve into all the other "theories" wallowing out there in the ambience, it has to percolate into the unoccupied interstitial spaces left blank by the others. And that requires them to have a little flex and slop, allowing them to "be about" or "be for" things other than what you might think they're about or for.

Abuse seems to be the norm, not the exception.

On 10/6/23 09:28, Steve Smith wrote:
> Another fancy word I've come to like is /"Ententional"/ which combines the ideas of what something is "about" with what it is "for".
> 
> This leads me around to Deacon's "Teleodynamics" which might be obliquely related to your invocation recently of a physics "Lagrangian vs Eulerian" rather than the Anthropological "Emic vs Etic" axis of understanding first-third person, reductionist-holistic, nominal-real perspectives?   This also leads me back around to the (nearly) ineffable discussion of Stationary Action revisited from time to time here?
> 
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle#Disputes_about_possible_teleological_aspects
> 

-- 
glen