[FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

Mon Jul 9 21:37:05 EDT 2018

Wow, Frank!  What you said is much clearer than what I probably said.  

(}:-().  

There’s a reason I do not speak this clearly.  (};-)).

Seriously, the pragmat[ic]ist warrant for induction is if there is anything constant in an essentially random world, organisms (and knowledge systems in general) should be designed to track it. So, for instance, as we keep flipping heads, the probability that the flips are coming from a biased coin steadily increases.   Of course, if the coin we are flipping is not, in any sense, the SAME coin, then all  bets are off.  Literally.   Peirce’s notion of reality is thus statistical.  And it is based on the assumption that only generals (eg, the coin) can be real; specifics (eg, the coin today, the coin tomorrow) cannot be real because there is no way to sample them.  

In short, it is no longer clear to me that Peirce’s account of induction answers the grue/green quandary.   Green is the property of being the color of grass.  Grue is the property of being the color of grass until one samples  it N times and the color of the sky thereafter.  We never know for sure which kind of entity we are dealing with, a green-like entity or a grue-like entity.   We can imagine a situation in which we are sample a chemical to see it is the d-form or the l-form.  Let’s imagine also that each time we sample it, the “spoon” we use introduces a contaminant that, when it reaches a critical concentration, flips the solution from one isomer to the other.   Peirce would say, well, I never said the world was uniform;  I only said, if there are uniformities in the world, statistical inferential systems would be the only way to discover them.  But I don’t still think this really solves the problem of induction.  Alas.   

Thus, if you tell me that the probability of the coin turning up heads on the next flip is 50 percent, the relative frequency of the flips has been fifty percent up till now AND you have no reason to believe that the coin has changed in the meantime because that, in fact, is the basis for your expectations about the coin.  (Well, I suppose you could, being a mathematician, simply say you have lots of reasons to believe that the coin is the sort of thing that fits the binomial model, and let it go at that.)  

I am still studying glen’s interesting comments on the relation between confidence and belief.  As you can imagine, given that he has given me one more chance, I shall be cautious in my response.  

All the best, 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2018 2:54 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

p.s.  I also said that the probability of heads for a fair coin is 0.5.  Of course, that's a definition but since he was denying the reality of probability I think that cut some ice.

----
Frank Wimberly

www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly <http://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly> 

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Mon, Jul 9, 2018, 12:50 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Actually Nick is competitive with you for skepticism.  We were discussing probabilities and he said you can't know the probability of an event based on past observations.  He basically said just because the probability of an event has always been P, how do you know it still is?  Is that a fair characterization of what you said, Nick?

----
Frank Wimberly

www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly <http://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly> 

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Mon, Jul 9, 2018, 12:05 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

Sorry for the extra post.  But it occurred to me you might be asking whether *my* autonomous nervous system believes in the utility of these measurements.  If so, I can give a full-throated "No."  My doubt comes from listening to my S.O. (Renee') talk about things like blood pressure and how they're used in clinical settings as well as my own experience as a patient.  "Assessing the patient" by an intuitive, signal fusing, machine (nurse, doctor, anesthetist) seems to have much more utility than any given particular (linearized) measurement of a subsystem.  The utility of, say, the heart rate, is waaaaayyy below my threshold for belief.

On 07/09/2018 10:53 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Interesting insertion of "utility", a kind of meta-variable to be considered.  To be clear, I'd say the organism believes in heartbeats, lung pumping, etc.  But to ask whether the organism believes in the usability/utility of (subjective) measurements of such things smacks of a hidden assumption.
> 
> But to answer as authentically as I can in spite of that hidden assumption, I'd answer that *after* the yogi did such a full cycle manipulation successfully at least *once*, then that yogi might believe that meta-variable. (By "full cycle manipulation", I mean taking conscious control and reinstalling the new behavior into the autonomous part.)  After such success, the yogi organism has some experience with whether, how, and what impact any particular part may have had.  For example, perhaps heartbeat plays no role in her ability to take conscious control and reinstall the new program.  Hence, she might doubt the utility of heartbeats but believe the utility of lung pumping regulation.
> 
> Again, though, whether the yogi organism believes in this meta-layer "utility of X" would depend on where they draw the threshold.  I can imagine very process-based yogis who, like me, put little stock in belief and more in the process of doing, staying "hands on".  And I can imagine yogis who idealize the process (perhaps similar to chi?) and may even write books about it.  I have no experience with how yogis actually are, of course.
> 
> 
> On 07/09/2018 10:21 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>> I think the answer may be in what you just wrote, but a bit of assistance please. If we were to anthropomorphize your autonomous nervous system would you say it 'believed' or 'doubted' the utility of heartbeats, lungs pumping, etc.?
>>
>> My interest arises from studies of Yoga adepts who "take conscious control of breathing" and upon achieving total conscious control, delegate the control back to the autonomous system which maintains the regularized, 'managed' breathing instead of the 'normal', somewhat chaotic/strange attracter-ish breathing regimen prior to the application of Yoga technique.
> 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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