<div dir="auto">Steve</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Was there a better way in Gmail? I think the use of caps was conventional in academia before Trump. It certainly does not Suggestshouting.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I apologize for my Many typos and Dictos. I simply seem to be unable to read them until too late</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">N<br clear="all"><br clear="all"><div dir="auto"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Nicholas S. Thompson</div><div>Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology</div><div>Clark University</div><div><a href="mailto:nthompson@clarku.edu" target="_blank">nthompson@clarku.edu</a></div><a href="https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson" target="_blank">https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson</a></div></div></div></div><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 1:36 PM steve smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com">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;padding-left:1ex;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204)"><u></u>
<div>
<p>Nick -</p>
<p>I'm surprised you gave over to ALL-CAPS to distinguish your words
from others... it was shockingly difficult or me to read through
carefully... some call this "shouting" which is part of the
effect to me also, but more key is the typography and readability
of it... <br>
</p>
<p>That said, I did what I had to to make it "parseable" with my own
sensoria/sensibilities and found it to be quite rich
epistemically.<br>
</p>
<p>I share your apprehension/feeling/sensibilities on the topic —
that entropy (or motive, or any number of these second-order
constructs) gets misrepresented when we try to pin it to an
instant, as if we could find it <em>in</em> the moment instead of across the
differential. </p>
<p>Your “Newliebzian category error” notion made me smile - there’s
something compelling about how we keep building our most useful
tools from fictions we then forget are fictions. Even that might
be too conventient? It might be a kind of necessary fold in how
cognition works - using what’s locally graspable to navigate
what’s only ever apparent in change or flow. There is a larger
insight I think about metaphor in general, but in this case
time/causally grounded metaphorical target domains?</p>
<p>I also appreciate your
connection to how motives are misread — interiorized and
moment-bound when really they emerge from comparative arcs of
behaviour. That strikes me as roughly what the nervous system
does: extract regularities from dynamics, then offer up something
<em>like</em> a motive as a
usable handle. Induction is fallible, but it’s also our only
working interface. Not because it guarantees truth, but because it
lets us stay involved.</p>
<p>In that light, entropy - or
motive - might be less about what <em>is</em>, and more about what is <em>minimally sufficient to expect</em>?
From a free energy perspective, the nervous system isn't trying to
uncover objective causes but to <strong>minimize surprise</strong> through actionable
pattern recognition - constructing motives, like entropy, as
provisional summaries of systemic change. It isn’t so much that
they’re true, but that they <strong>reduce the expected divergence</strong> between
model and world just enough to stay viable? </p>
<p>Fascinating that this
iterative/parallel <i>satisficing</i> seems to converge on
something yet more absolute (objective truth)? Is this what
Transformers (for the ML wonks in the crowd) do?<br>
</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<p></p>
<div>On 6/16/25 10:38 AM, Nicholas Thompson
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">HERE
IS A THE PARADOX AS I NOW UNDERSTAND IT. IS ENTROPY A STATE
VARIABLE/ WELL, YES AND NO. IT IS NOT IN THE SENSE THAT YOU
CANNOT CALCULATE IT FROM INSTANTANEOUS STATE VARIABLES, IN PERHAPS
THE WAY THAT YOU CANNOT CALCULATE ACCELERATION FROM AN
INSTANTANEOUS MEASUREMENT OF LOCATION AND VELOCITY. ACCELERATION
AT INSTANT IS A CATEGORY ERROR, A MATHEMATICAL FICTION. BUT,
STRANGE TO DISCOVER, THAT ALL PROGRESS IN MATHEMATICS, BEGINNING
WITH THE MATHEMATICAL LINE, PERHAPS, IS THE RESULT OF THE
EXPLOITATION OF SUCH FICTIONS. fOR THE MOMENT LETS CALL THEM
NEWLIEBZIAN CATEGORY ERRORS. iF MY CURRENT INTUITION IS CORRECT
AND ENTROPY IS NEWLIEBZIAN CATEGORY ERROR, THEN IT FOLLOWS THAT
THE REASON i AM CONFUSED BY IT IS BECAUSE PEOPLE KEEP ATTRIBUTING
IT TO INSTANTS AND PLACES WHEN IT KNOWN THROUGH THE COMPARISON OF
DYNAMICS AND ARRAYS. BEWARE BECAUSE THIS IS A VERY FAMILIAR
CONFUSION TO ME, BETWEEN MOTIVES, WHICH ARE THOUGHT OF INTERIOR
INSTANTS, WHEN THEY ARE ACTUALLY KNOWN THROUGH THE COMPARISON OF
DYNAMICS AND ARRAYS OF BEHAVIOR. THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF OUR
NERVOUS SYSTEM (THE STUFF IN SIDE) IS TO MAKE COMPUTATIONS BASED
ON THE DYNAMICS AND ARRAYS OF BEHAVIOR AND APPLY THEM TO THE NEXT
APPLICABLE INSTANT. PHILOSOPHERS CAN SAY ALL THE WANT ABOUT THE
FALLIBILITY OF INDUCTION, BUT IT IS ALL WE GOT. </blockquote>
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