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<p>As absurd as this whole conversation feels in some ways, I find
it fascinating (and possibly useful). At the very least it seems
to be an extreme example of empathy-seeking.<br>
</p>
<p>This is "me" doing "mental stuff". I don't know how to separate
"mental stuff" from "body stuff" except perhaps <i>en extrema</i>,
<i>per exemplia</i>. Imaginating on what it is like to be
trampled-dirt would fit into my category of "doing mental stuff",
whatever that actually means (beyond being able to label extreme
examples of it?)</p>
<p>Glen sez "there is something it is like to be trampled dirt" as
if that actually means something and that any/all of us perhaps
can experience that. Try as I might I can't quite "feel what it
is like to be trampled dirt".... however I do find that I can find
within the things I'm more inclined to call "body stuff" that my
"mental stuff" is willing to label (very loosely) as "being like
trampled dirt". BUT I don't know that in that process I ever
imagine I actually "feel like trampled dirt".<br>
</p>
<p> I could ramble forever (uncountable, not infiinite) on examples
of what it is for *me* to "be like trampled dirt" ( a great deal
of what feeds good poetry actually) and some here *might8
recognize some/many of my examples and end up "feeling like
trampled dirt" more than they did before they read it. This
would be what *I* call communication (which Glen insists does not
actually exist?). I'm possibly talking/thinking (mental stuff)
into "feeling like trampled dirt" (body stuff) here. I don't
know that I can claim (imagine) that dirt is in any way
communicating "what it is like to be trampled dirt" to me except
perhaps simply by *being trampled dirt*. Observing dirt as it is
trampled, or as it's configuration suggests "having been trampled"
seems to be part of *my* strategy in trying to imagine "being
trampled dirt"<br>
</p>
<p>And it occurs to me (mental stuff, this 'occuring to") that the
very description *as* "trampled" dirt is a projection of a living
creature onto something with no obvious agency nor sensation? To
the extent that dirt is something that *most* creatures
walk/run/stomp-about upon (at least dirt on the surface of a
gravitational body), it is *all trampled*? Of course, dirt on
the surface of the moon (is it actually *dirt* if it's origins are
not earthly? Moon-dust, Moon-rock, Moon-gravel) is on the whole
untrampled (with the exception of the small area where Apollo
Astronauts placed their feet?) and maybe by extension where the
landing-pads of the Lunar Lander's touched down and then by
yet-more extension, every place a bit of man-made debris has
struck or landed-on the surface? Which leads us to the
possibility that *all* moon-surface material is "trampled earth",
being "trampled by meteors"? <br>
</p>
<p>As I write this I "feel like moondust, trampled not only by
meteorites/asteroids but also by cosmic rays"...</p>
<p>What is the opposite-of/complement-to <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>
? <i>ridiculum faciens nota </i>or more likely<i> ridiculum
faciens usitata verberando sicut equus mortuus</i><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2/17/23 12:35 AM, ⛧ glen wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:BF4056A3-70CB-4560-8B87-E6C423E1A39C@gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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 <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com"><eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">"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?
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:echarles@american.edu"><echarles@american.edu></a>
On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 1:27 PM glen <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:gepropella@gmail.com"><gepropella@gmail.com></a> wrote:
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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:
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Might I offer some terminology reframing, or at least ask for some
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">additional explication?
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
1. I think "behaviours" would be all Nick's Martians *could* observe?
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">They would be inferring "experiences" from observed behaviours?
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""> 2. When we talk about "categories" here, are we talking about
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">"categories of being"? Ontologies, as it were?
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
Regarding ErisS' reflections... I *do* think that animals behave *as
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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?
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
If I were to invert the subject/object relation, I would suggest that it
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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).
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
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
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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?
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
I think one of the questions that remains present within this group's
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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).
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
Some here (self included) may often suggest that such formulation is at
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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...
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
Maybe another way of reframing Nick's question (on a tangent) is to ask
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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 <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg"><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg></a> say?
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
My dog and the rock squirrels he chases want to know... so do the cholla
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">cactus fruits/segments they hoard in their nests!
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
Mumble,
- Steve
On 2/16/23 5:37 AM, Santafe wrote:
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">It’s the tiniest and most idiosyncratic take on this question, but
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">FWIW, here:
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1520752113">https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1520752113</a>
I actually think that all of what Nick says below is a perfectly good
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">draft of a POV.
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
As to whether animals “have” categories: Spend time with a dog.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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.
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
For me to even say that seems like cueing a narcissism of small
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
I found it interesting that you invoked “nouns” as a framework that is
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
Another fun thing I was told by Ted Chiang a few months ago, which I
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
Eric
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">On Feb 15, 2023, at 1:19 PM,<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com"><thompnickson2@gmail.com></a> <
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
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FWiW, I willmake every effort to arrive fed to Thuam by 10.30
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Words…nouns in particular… confuse this category business. Words
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">The reason I want the geeks to participate tomorrow is that I keep
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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.
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