[FRIAM] Eternal questions

Mon Aug 23 23:30:52 EDT 2021

Now wait a minute!  This is the sort of question I am supposed to ask of you?  A question to which the answer is so obvious to the recipient that he is in danger of not being able to locate it.   

Ok, so, their meanings obviously overlap.   If you tell me you “had” a steak last night, I wont assume that it’s available  for us to eat tonight: “had” is serving as a verb of action.  The situation is further confused  by the fact that both words are used as helper words, i.e, words that indicate the tense of another verb.  To say that I “have” gone and that I “done” gone mean the same thing in different dialects 

In general the grammar of the two words is different.  If you say I had something, I am sent looking for a property, possession or attribute.  If you say I did something, I am sent looking for an action I performed.   So, there is a vast inclination to make emotion words as a reference to something we carry inside, rather than a pattern in what we do.  This seems to me like misdirection, a category error in Ryle’s terms.   

Does that help?    

Mumble, mumble, as steve would say. 

Nick 

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

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

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, August 23, 2021 4:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Eternal questions

Nick, what’s the difference between having and doing?

I once heard Ray Jackendoff give quite a nice talk on word categories.  Of all of it, the one part I remember the most about is what he said about prepositions.  Even after you are getting right most of the rest of word usage in a new language (or handling it well with a dumb, rule-based translator), you are still at sea in the prepositions.  Their scopes are not completely arbitrary, but arbitrary in such large part that speakers essentially learn them nearly as a list of ad hoc applications.

But when we are in a specialist domain, such as reference to the unpacking of the convention-term “emotion”, which we all know is a different specialist domain from car ownership or the consumption of lunch, we know that verbs are not on any a priori firmer ground than prepositions.  Or it seems to me, we should expect that to be so.

I am struck by how widespread it is in languages to use the same particle or other construction for possession and attribution.  Both in concretes and in the abstractions that seemingly derive from them.  SteveG will like this one from Chinese if I haven’t messed it up or misunderstood it: youde you, youde meiyou.  Some have it, some don’t.

Performance of an act, being configured in a state or condition, if we use passphrases rather than passwords, we can discriminate many categories.

So when we use metaphors to expand the scope of reference and discourse (to eventually shed their metaphor status and become true polysemes once our familiarity in the new domain is such that, as novelists say, it “stands up and casts a shadow”), are some of the metaphors more obligatory than others?  Are the psychologists sure they are right about which ones?  Are they right?

Eric

On Aug 24, 2021, at 3:06 AM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh!

How we seal ourselves in caves of nonsense!

And emotion is not something we “have”; it’s something we do.  Or, if you prefer a dualist sensory metaphor, it’s a particular mode of feeling the world.  

n

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,7HSjAiYZs0TskSYM3z8t3I3vm7JNBV7OyZgHYp-6EjYczSSRW9xIT6typjL4CJpU_atJnKNr9galrl_vRQGGlXHYIX3WqoquVu8Bpe1ntqUc&typo=1> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
Sent: Monday, August 23, 2021 6:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Eternal questions

The creators of the Aibo robot dog say it has ‘real emotions and instinct’. This is obviously not true, it's just an illusion.

But then, according to Daniel Dennett, human consciousness is just an illusion.
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fase.tufts.edu%2fcogstud%2fdennett%2fpapers%2fillusionism.pdf&c=E,1,wZyzI4xcowqEH1XfK9Q39EPbwHxfV11-EVaCCROdnuFD-hDpoJBA6vqVkaGgbd-yOuYwvTupjP_Soz_obIbOZjgWkLMocfZEa2BpUqNsBKBy&typo=1> 

On Mon, 23 Aug 2021 at 09:18, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net <mailto:jofr at cas-group.net> > wrote:

"In today’s AI universe, all the eternal questions (about intentionality, consciousness, free will, mind-body problem...) have become engineering problems", argues this Guardian article. 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/10/dogs-inner-life-what-robot-pet-taught-me-about-consciousness-artificial-intelligence <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.com%2fscience%2f2021%2faug%2f10%2fdogs-inner-life-what-robot-pet-taught-me-about-consciousness-artificial-intelligence&c=E,1,0zM4mCzKmbes0weZLeJCmVy6dAfDvfYxSyHKpvl-aa8-hwd84lMymcY9HHVsp4jXbWOCjmb3kQDLfcwUGjHCouKd8sNTTfFuQtv62vY-RfAsXg,,&typo=1> 

-J.

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