<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">What meaning do you give to the word "boundary"? Time, location, etc.?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Feb 18, 2023 at 10:09 AM Steve Smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com" target="_blank">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<blockquote type="cite">Great
find. Thanks. I will read that.
<br>
</blockquote>
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.<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
"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?<br>
<blockquote type="cite">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.
<br>
</blockquote>
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? <br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<br>
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.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p>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, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_X" target="_blank">IceN</a> (e.g.
Vonnegut's Ice9), water dimers, or more far-afield water-memory
(ala homeopathy) and hexagonal water, polywater (another
pseudo-pseudoscience?).</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>What is the boundary between complex organism, adaptive
organization, metabolism, and thought?<br>
</p>
<p>mumble,</p>
<p> - Steve<br>
</p>
</div>
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</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.<br>Center for Emergent Diplomacy<br><a href="http://emergentdiplomacy.org" target="_blank">emergentdiplomacy.org</a></div><div>Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA</div><div></div><div><br>mobile: (303) 859-5609<br></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>