[FRIAM] anthropological observations

[Stephen Guerin]

Eric,

Was it Barrier to Objects?
https://scholar.harvard.edu/walterfontana/publications/barrier-objects-dynamical-systems-bounded-organizations

That was the constructivist lambda calculus paper. Bill Mckelvey extended
to pi calculus



On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:36 AM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Very good Nick.
>
> You see, unfortunately it appears that the reason I was put on Earth was
> to be the evangelist of distributional thinking.
>
> In one of Walter Fontana’s early papers, which I probably saw in 1998, he
> opened with a quote “Ever focused on objects, we something something
> something…(some expression of loss)”.  This was in his Lambda-calculus
> papers about the concreteness of realized patterns that are not objects,
> and their fundamental role for biology.  For as much as I like it, you
> would think I had remembered either the text or the source.  Cannot find it
> now.
>
> But, to your point:
>
> I think where the discussion happens is not about knowledge, or even
> regularity, but rather how wide and how flexible a scope you are willing to
> cast for what counts as an “object of knowledge”.  Or even “objects in
> knowledge”.
>
> Yes, the values taken at events can be very good things to have found out
> about.  They inhabit the past, and our sense of knowing them is heavily
> wrapped up in both the senses of “the past” and of “knowledge".  It is a
> very small set of cases that are so constrained that the future may as well
> be in the past.  Nonetheless, the longing for it seems to be an eternal
> wellspring for delusions.  The Popol Vu has something about, for the
> adepts, ’The future and the past are laid out before them [like symmetric
> spatial dimensions]’ or something to that effect.  Lakoff probably can cite
> no end of metaphors by which people have mapped between the two, conceiving
> of time as having the same symmetric availability as space.  I expect it is
> a human cognitive and cultural universal.
>
> But what happens when the future really is different from the past?  Do we
> insist that every “real” object of knowledge about the future must have a
> model in only the most singular of things archived from the past?  I would
> say no.  There are lots of cases in which the outcome delivered by an event
> not yet performed is not available for knowing.  How you plan to sample,
> though, and features of the distribution from which you will sample, may be
> very good things to know.  Back in Ancient Greece, we could have argued
> interminably about whether a distribution is less privileged as an “object”
> of knowledge than the particular value yielded by a sample from the
> distribution.
>
> But a lot has happened since Ancient Greece, and today we have many many
> reasons to see them as deserving peers, and even to be cautious that we may
> not be able to tell them apart.
>
> Entropy in thermodynamics is a distributional concept, yet it does very
> very much of the work in the world that we used to ascribe to Newtonian
> objects.
>
> In high-energy physics, post Gell-Mann/Wilson (so 1954 Gell-Mann and Lowe,
> Wilson 1974), we have learned that everything we used to think _were_
> objects, turned out to be distributions.  In hindsight this was of crucial
> conceptual importance.  If objects had been primary, and distributions had
> been mere step-children when we could not pin things down, and that had
> been _all_ there was to our science, we would have suffered an infinite
> regress.  Until we had a Theory of Everything, or a bottoming out of the
> well of smallness, we could never know if the science was predictively
> closed.  But now with some understanding of phase transitions, we know that
> the world could as well be distributions all the way down forever (or it
> might not be; it might have a bottom), and the foundation of _any_ of the
> predictive science we currently use would not be any worse in one case than
> in another.  They are not currently “exactly” closed, but we can put bounds
> on how closed they must be.  Everything is Probably Approximately Correct
> (Leslie Valiant), and that was all we had ever had.  It was more valuable
> to learn that there are ceilings and floors in the scope of influence of
> variations within distributions, than whether there is any smallest level
> of objects, or even any need for a concept of “object” distinct from what
> we can do with distributions.  A short incantation that I use to ward off
> the vampires who mis-use the word “reductionism” is that “Only with a
> theory of emergence did reductionist science become well-founded."
>
> Biology has been conceptually impaired by too literalist a view of
> objects, whether organisms for Darwin, genes for Williams and Dawkins, or
> whatever other “unit of selection” you want to use as a shibboleth.  People
> fret over whether “viruses are alive”, having already committed that
> “alive” must a predicate defined over objects, and they worry whether there
> “really are” any individuals, since material is always coming and going and
> there are more bacterial cells in my gut than human cells in the rest of
> me.  Habits of understanding that determinism can dwell in the distribution
> opens a treasure chest of methods but also styles of thought, with which
> all these “not-even-wrong” frets simply dissipate the same way we no longer
> agonize over Zeno paradoxes.
>
> I have no gripe with object-oriented thinking, or event-outcome-oriented
> thinking; we can do much with those, and they account for a lot of our
> animal habit and our “folk physics”.  But to put it up as a gold standard
> is very limiting.  We know lots of things that cannot be done within that
> frame, but that can be done, and some things where we thought it was the
> right frame and we were wrong.
>
> There was a source I thought of putting on the list early in this thread,
> here:
> https://philpapers.org/rec/ROTLOB
> I have seen a copy of this, but I don’t know where to get a legally
> distributable copy and this is either paywalled or not even electronic.
> Some of you may have it already.
>
> It was when Dave gave the assertion that the rural people are actually the
> careful balanced thinkers, and Frank put up an article as “another
> perspective, or perhaps David will see it as confirming evidence”.
>
> I know probably most of you have read Heidegger, and Husserl, and Fink,
> and lots of others.  I had not.  So I found Rota’s notes, structured by
> Heidegger but drawing in many of their good parts on Husserl, helpful to
> sort-of recognize what the phenomenologists are on about.
>
> In one of the late lectures, Rota explains the phenomenologists strong
> emphasis that no mere events in our existence have any particular meaning.
> There can be the sequence of lines in a proof, or a recipe for doing an
> experiment.  By themselves, they are just artifacts, inscribed in a library
> somewhere.  Even read through, or performed, they may just be motions in
> nature.  They become “a proof” or “evidence”, when they are experienced as
> evidence-for a truth or a bit of knowledge.  This concept of
> “perceiving-as” or “evidence-for”, the phenomenologists claim, is simply
> different in kind from any of the procedures in which it occurs.  If I
> understand them, they assert that the moment of experiencing something “as”
> in fact defines an experiential notion of the temporal present that is
> different entirely in kind from the notations of either the past or the
> future.
>
> It is a bit of a digression from this post, but I will remark, that this
> position makes the world look pretty hopeless to me, since anyone can
> experience anything “as” evidence for anything.  And there is a part of
> reality-building in those moments for them, that nobody else outside them
> has any grip on.
>
> But in a more positive note, and on the point of this post, I feel like it
> is a Husserlian/Heideggerian shift in the occupancy of the temporal
> present, to find it as normal to experience distributionally-defined
> patterns as objects, as event-outcome-defined patterns.  They just do
> different things.
>
> Anyway, sorry.  Big long TLDR to state the obvious.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 18, 2020, at 12:36 PM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <
> thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Cranky Eric,
>
> When Peirce writes, countering determinism, that “everything is just about
> as random as it could be” he is referring to contingencies amongst events,
> I think.  At the risk of quoting myself:
>
> Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the
> ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of
> the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old
> upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as
> the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of
> the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of
> mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the
> fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps
> the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that
> is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever
> relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an
> infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related
> to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody
> could care them to be.
>
> But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related,
> these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to
> predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict
> that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things,
> that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms
> are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on
> them.  This, and only this, is the reason that the world appears regular.
> So, I stipulate the ubiquity of randomness.
>
> What I am less certain about is whether randomness should – note the use
> of modal language – should ever be offered as the reason for anything.  If
> we regard science as an extension of this animal propensity for ferreting
> out regularities, then to declare that anything occurred because it was
> random is a kind of copping out.  It is like ferrets giving up on the idea
> that borrows contain prairie dogs.  That’s just NOT what we ferrets DO!
> It’s certainly not what we do if we ever expect to catch any prairie dogs.
>
>
> Oh, and:  The problem is not that I need a religion; the problem is I
> already HAVE one and I don’t know what it is.
>
> Oh, and #2.  “Enjoy these conversations” is, for me, vastly understate the
> case.  They are literally keeping me alive, particularly these days, when,
> it appears, for the first time in 50 years, I won’t have a garden in the
> Mosquito Infested Swamp.
>
> CrankyNick
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *David Eric Smith
> *Sent:* Friday, April 17, 2020 6:08 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations
>
> Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.
>
>
> Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton
> was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such
> predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens
> falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made
> it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer
> him to say, "Actually we were wrong, *but I would make the same
> prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  *In other words,
> the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.
>
>
> The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know
> full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are
> the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you,
> and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.
>
> What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution
> (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative
> construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the
> “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as
> Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability
> distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all
> we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s
> estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling,
> are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like
> systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying
> correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link
> Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The
> acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.
>
> So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases
> described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged,
> is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied —
> which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.
>
> If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the
> afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know
> what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list
> putting that out as a philosophical problem.
>
>
> I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know
> you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to
> make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is
> not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but
> when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to
> taking on new frames of mind.
>
> The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and
> definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite
> deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is
> where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language
> in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are
> disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism
> as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining”
> metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.
> Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular
> sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only
> signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic
> fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do
> it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that
> don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”,
> thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states,
> the narrowest of special cases.
>
> And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at
> the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull
> and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum
> physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the
> old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind
> of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.
> States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be
> associated with any definite values for observables, because observables,
> when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are
> different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think
> of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers
> that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to
> claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as
> coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple
> definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So
> Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means
> “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right,
> but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists
> that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for
> conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for
> sense-making.
>
> Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts
> of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was
> reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and
> source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get
> Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
>
> That’s all,
>
> 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 17, 2020 4:45 PM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations
>
> Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you.
> When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do
> NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick
> apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.
>
> Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then
> you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the
> vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the
> doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your
> 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from
> jargon to vernacular.
>
> I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow
> troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical
> thinker", whatever that means.
>
> FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to
> find that she tweeted this, as well:
>
> Embracing the Uncertainties
> While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can
> handle the truth.’
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share
>
> The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and
> numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract
>
> If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together
> with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they
> might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving
> their politics. Pfft.
>
>
> On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> > If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then,
> > when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect
> that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after
> that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether
> the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that
> the shaded area is part of that second conversation.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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