[FRIAM] What is an object?

Thu Jul 19 21:45:50 EDT 2018

Thanks Nick,

> Life, here, is very complicated, right at the moment, but I wanted to answer one of your comments, strait-away.  
>  
> Not only can this happen in *sequence* as you assume.  But it can also happen in parallel.  My hand can feel the elephant's trunk at the exact same time my eyes can see the elephant.  It's not clear to me what you gain through such (over-)simplification

This was actually Glen’s comment, which gave me the courage to pick up the topic in the paragraph I added.  But all good to pick up this thread wherever is productive.

All best,

Eric

> What I gain from the over simplification is humbleness, the same humbleness that is so eloquently expressed in you extended passage.  At the risk of irritating Glen (which I truly strive not to do; I have supped too often at his table),  the Real can only consist of the validation of some expectation of experience arising from an earlier experience.  I once tried to rescue a litter of wild kittens.  I kept stepping on them because they never learned to watch my EYES.   They were too focused on my feet to figure out what was going to happen next.  I might respond to your critique by conceding that the sequence of experiences is more like a braid than a thread, but I think it is a sequence.  But past, present, and future are of course themselves experiences, and it is an accomplishment, not God given, to distinguish between or our present experiences, our memories and our expectations for the future. 
>  
> I hope to get another crack at your email before I go to bed tonight. 
>  
>  
> Nick 
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>  
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2018 5:39 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What is an object?
>  
>  
> > On Jul 19, 2018, at 5:26 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > 
> > "the validator of our senses can only be our senses" waaay oversimplifies the set of experiences.  If there were only 1 type of experience, then you'd be right.  But there are (at least) many types of experience.  And 1 experience of one type can "validate" a different experience of an entirely different type.
> > 
> > Not only can this happen in *sequence* as you assume.  But it can also happen in parallel.  My hand can feel the elephant's trunk at the exact same time my eyes can see the elephant.  It's not clear to me what you gain through such (over-)simplification.
>  
> Yes, I was going to say something similar, and couldn’t figure out how to say it so that it would be constructive rather than sounding like I was trying to pick a fight (which I assure you, I never am; enough fights pick me already which I wish to get out of).
>  
> So many of these statements read, to me, as if they are asserting that the structures of sense-data are some kind of self-evident bottleneck, or conversely, that they are privileged in some correspondingly self-evident way.  I get this impression from reading Russell’s emphasis on the role of sense data, in either Problems of Philosophy or History of Western Philosophy (I forget which now).
>  
> My sense data deliver essentially nothing direct about colliding black holes, or colliding neutron stars, or rotating black hole accretion disks' emitting gamma rays and ultra-high-energy neutrinos.  (More specifically, they deliver essentially nothing direct about whatever makes these phenomena their particular selves, different from all the other phenomena that they are not.)  Anything I or anyone else knows about those subjects and phenomena is distilled from unbelievably elaborate prosthetic systems, which appeal, not so much to any particular sensory event, as to the ability to coreograph such events in ways that are selective of certain kinds of patterns.  And then there is the whole edifice of logic, math, and language to organize it all and make it navigable.  What comes out of all that, however, is a formal model of an external universe that is as worthy of trust as anything my mind is capable of holding.  
>  
> That to say, I guess, that from a few bricks, the number of different kinds of houses that can be built combinatorially is far greater than the count of the types of bricks.  So the limits on what patterns can be apprehended seems to be very obscurely related to the limits of senses.
>  
> At least to me.
>  
> Eric
>  
>  
>  
> > 
> > 
> > On 07/19/2018 02:17 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> >> I was just making the banal philosophical point that the validator of our senses can only be our senses.  So a hunch “about the world” is nothing more than a hunch about future experiences of the world.  As Harmon would say, we can never touch the noumenal.
> > 
> > --
> > ☣ uǝlƃ
> > 
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