[FRIAM] chicken-egg::gumflap-talk

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Without trying to convince you of anything, but trying to practice
(learn) empathic listening, and surely coming up far short of a steelman
of your position:

You seem to be saying that (in my example) what I have applied the terms
"songline" to are (might be?) (only/mostly?) someone's reification of
some thoughts they had?  I *do* understand that the (dead white guy/gal
- Boas, Benedict, Mead, et alia) field of Western Anthropology might
well impose onto the Cosmology of a population such as the "first
peoples" who lived on the continent we call "Australia", our *own*
projection of what they are about with what we have com eot "reify"?
under the title of  "songline" or "dream track".   In fact, I am given
to understand that within that cosmology, these "lines" are the tracks
of creator-beings within the Dreamtime, all of which is perhaps too
foreign for me to do more than recite these terms about.

But that leaves the question of whether what *they* (if there is even a
they-there?) use their version of these terms for something that is
"simply a mish-mash of junk from which no sense can be inferred?".   I
realize you were using that phrase to describe an extrema of a spectrum,
and perhaps were not even thinking of the specific example I put
forward.  (trying to take any idea that I'm throwing up a strawman here).

I don't know if it helps to try to address (so we can factor it out?)
this Western/Anthropological *interpretation/projection* from the
*aggregation/abstaction* of trying to treat a people as presumably
diverse as the entire (pre-colonial?) population of the continenet we
call Australia, as a single culture.   We have acknowledged something
*like* 250 distinct languages (pre-colonization) but also
imagine/pretend that their collective spirituality/mythology/culture was
significantly more homogenous than that encountered, for example, in the
Americas with a vaguely-parallel timeline (first "discovered" just over
100 years later).

You acknowledge Stigmergy and (thereby?) allude to spontaneous order and
further afield perhaps spandrels and exaptation.    Just to be clear,
I'm not *trying* to "throw dookey in the fan" here (aka "generate
thread-splatter"), but looking for an arc/trajectory/envelope in it that
makes sense to me.  

What you say about "Scientific Practice" sounds to me like you are
saying the "object" we point at is more like an ephemeral cloud (from
another thread) whose boundaries are not what we think they are.  That
is "porous", possibly "fractalish", and not so much objectish, or easily
pointed at except as a distribution, or maybe an envelope (bounding
volume?) in higher dimensional space?

Maybe this is another example of how "communication is an illusion"...
but Frank's recent cartoon of communication that I took to be a stylized
form of projection -> serialization -> transition -> deserializatoin ->
reprojection, seems relevant.

chicken-egg::gumflap::threadsplatter ?

- Steve

On 6/8/20 1:00 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> No, I reject both your and Dave's concepts (for the sake of argument). In both the story-conception and the songline-recitation, there's a sense that there's something underlying the actual stuff ... some idea(s) that drive, guide, cause, modify, the things ... some *coherence* that can be well-inferred. In Dave's conception, the collapse integrates/coheres into an ephemeral story. In the classroom, there's a sense of "training", "indoctrination", "learning", etc. This is what I mean when I say people *reify* their thoughts.
>
> I *imagine* there are pathological, accidentally accreted "trajectories" that are not even identifiable as trajectories (or meshes, or lineage trees, etc.). They're simply an accidental mish-mash of junk from which no sense can be inferred.
>
> Now, it would be a spectrum, of course. Stigmergy is a word we use to describe the mostly accidental coming together of some accreted thing into perceivable patterns like a cityscape. Jon's idea of the Equisite Corpse is another. But if we allow a spectrum, then we should allow both extremes, which would include collections of speech acts that don't ever cohere.
>
> Your example of scientific training does evoke, however, scientific *practice*, which I think lands more toward the incoherent side of the spectrum. That it's less coherent than philosophers of science try to make it seem is a frequent topic.
>
> On 6/8/20 9:26 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> Scientific training has a strong parallel?   Classroom study being  a
>> bit like learning to recite a songline, and lab work a bit like "walking
>> the talk" and new discoveries ranging from correcting a misphrase or
>> accomodating a nuanced change in the environment or adding a side-jaunt
>> up a different canyon to a never-before (or not in this songline)
>> explicated bit of territory?
> On 6/8/20 8:36 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>> To me this suggests that the speech act is, in itself, nothing more than 'gum-flapping' but when a collection of 'flaps' are inter-connected / integrated into a conversation, or, more accurately, a story; the story  has an emergent property of "meaning." 
>>
>> 'Flaps' have no "meaning." Stories do.
>