[FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

[uǝlƃ ☣]

These are wonderful questions. In the past, we've even questioned whether it's right/True to disallow causal loops. 

My tendency, I think, lies in the foundational distinction between "fields" vs. objects. I feel coerced into my broken record repetition of "artificial discretization" (which is one reason why Owen's post of Wolpert et al's work was so cool -- the 2nd reason comes into play for temporal vs. spatial layering).  I've mentioned BC Smith's Origin of Objects stuff several times, I think.  His concept of permature registration must have evoked something deep in my history because it stuck like glue.

For example, when you talk about the GO or Classical Ontology and such, my reaction is simply that such _things_ (objects, artificially imputed units) are an artifact of the lens/attention/focus with which the fluid-millieu is viewed. They are not, ontologically, units/objects/things at all.

Granted, a LOT of us are triggered/snapped into/catalized to perceive the thingness (and the subsequent linking of those things). So, for someone like me who doesn't seem to snap into that right away, the onus is on me to come up with an alternative. And the one I trot out most is along the lines of cross-species mind-reading. A good example is how, say, cats distinguish objects versus the way humans distinguish objects. I could easily be wrong. But my ignorance allows me to think that cats rely more on motion-based object discrimination and humans rely more on color-based discrimination. I often see my cats engaged in a kind of triangulation, where if they're looking out the window and seem to think they see something, they'll bob their head this way and that, seemingly trying to thingify whatever juicy milieu they see. In my limited experience, I've never seen a human do that. Of course, we have more intellectually justified things we do (e.g. guidance laws, etc.) that rely on the same principle. But it can't be as *literal* as how my cats are thinking when they do it.

So, to answer as closely as I can, we start with infinitely extensible *fluid* and only register objects when doing so gives us a more powerful model. But even if/when we arrive at a more powerful model (like the Standard Model), it should still be challengable by alternative thingified models. To be clear, by "fluid", I can also doubt continuous valued orthogonal bases/dimensions of high dimensional spaces.  I think we have plenty of evidence that the universe doesn't (necessarily) adhere to our artificially dimensionalized constructs like Euclidean space, either.

I hope that's not too much nonsensical gibberish. I'm trying to be less self-indulgent in my posts. 8^)


On 4/25/19 9:43 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> You have weighed in before on ideas like this, that "hierarchical
structure may be an illusion" (my paraphrase) and I'm at least
half-sympathetic with the point.   The heritage of Classical Ontology,
Aristotle's "Categories", and the general idea of "Abstraction" all seem
to reflect or support (or both) our tendency toward hierarchical
structuring with a bias toward *strict hierarchies*.
> 
> [...]
> 
> In either case, our Western conception of causality admits no more than
> a DAG (to deny causal loops) and privileges strict branching
> narratives.   Similarly, Linnean Taxonomies as well as Cladistics are
> inherently strict hierarchies, the former based primarily on
> observational distinctions (birds with seed-cracking beaks vs birds with
> (insect catching vs carrion eating) beaks, etc.) or inferred
> evolutionary (multi?)bifurcations.
> 
> By debunking or deflating or de-emphasizing (strict?) hierarchies, what
> types of structure remain for us to recognize?   Is this problem
> anything more than model (over?) fitting?    By starting with a
> generalized graph or network, we leave room to recognize other
> interesting structures (than strict hierarchies),  does introducing
> ideas like temporal aggregation or other weak sisters to "causality"
> bring back (at least) *directed acyclic* graphs as candidate models? 
> Are POsets (partially ordered sets) uniquely valuable?  
> 
> I'm both rusty and under-informed in this depth of analysis of knowledge
> structures.  I'm hoping (you and?) others here have more up to date
> knowledge or understanding.


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ