[FRIAM] The Self Case

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen, 

 

Good to see you again in the Zoom meeting.  Talking to people “in person” really does enhance understanding.  Duh!

 

You wrote:

 

I reject both your and Nick's distinctions as artificial. 8^)

 

But then you wrote: 

 

The objection I have to catastrophizing or intolerance to ambiguity is, essentially, calling attention to our sticky-modes ... our inability to switch modes when it would be very useful to switch. I'm not trying to suggest that "nomothetic" knowledge is better than "idiographic" knowledge, only that we avoid getting stuck in either one.

 

Am I allowed to agree with the second without agreeing to the second?  Am I allowed, in fact to use the success of your second argument as evidence AGAINST the aritificiality of the distinction? 

 

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2020 10:09 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Self Case

 

Nick's prior introduction of the two terms (here:  <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/Good-climate-change-skeptics-td7586673i20.html#a7586710> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/Good-climate-change-skeptics-td7586673i20.html#a7586710) is still relevant. I reject both your and Nick's distinctions as artificial. 8^)

 

The deeper issue is the domain of applicability. As chaotic, fractal, scalable, stigmergic, markov, etc. systems seem to imply, regularity and historicity aren't really distinct things. What matters is whether we are *modal* in the formulation of our predicates. Inducing a rule when studying the narrative trajectory of Nick need not be any different than inducing a rule when studying the longitudinal trajectory of an idealized demographic. There's a bit of trickery when switching from temporal induction to spatial induction (narrative vs. population). But as the parallelism theorem argues, any process achievable by a bunch of independent processes can be simulated by a serial process. So, there *are* ways to switch modes, perhaps even perfectly. We see the same duality in objects vs. processes.

 

The objection I have to catastrophizing or intolerance to ambiguity is, essentially, calling attention to our sticky-modes ... our inability to switch modes when it would be very useful to switch. I'm not trying to suggest that "nomothetic" knowledge is better than "idiographic" knowledge, only that we avoid getting stuck in either one.

 

In fact, I've argued in some publications that qualitative observations naturally precede quantitative observations. And as the domain changes (in our simulation work, *expands*, but it applies equally to *moves*, in particular for parallax), what was previously quantitative can be fuzzified to be more qualitative and then steadily walked back to quantitative with the new domain. I.e. regularity derives from irregularity, nomothetic derives from idiographic.

 

On 4/10/20 4:47 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:

> I don't know the difference between "nomothetic" and "idiographic", but I am interested in the area between idiosyncratic, irregular descriptions and symmetric, regular theories. History is often the former, an idiosyncratic description of events and names specific for a certain time and country. Mathematics is usually the latter, because it is based on symmetries and precise rules to describe regularities. In the area between we can find phenomena like path-dependent evolution and adaptation.

> 

> For example as Edwin Holt ("The concept of consciousness") noticed the concept of an environmental cross section helps to explain subjective consciousness which is in a sense both specific to an individual but also predictable if we know the exact cross section of the environment. George H. Mead ("Mind, Self & Society") also argues that all individual selves are reflections of the social process. I believe we discussed it a few years ago.

> 

> In the case of Donald Trump we can also observe how subjective objects and objective theories overlap. There is certainly no one like Donald, and yet there are many people especially among managers who have a Narcissistic Personality Disorder as mental health professionals have warned us ("The dangerous case of Donald Trump"). In addition to this psychological interpretation Sarah Kendzior describes in her new book ("Hiding in plain sight") that his behavior is not uncommon for authoritarian systems.

 

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☣ uǝlƃ

 

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