[FRIAM] Eternal questions

Tue Aug 24 08:52:54 EDT 2021

Spanish has two words, "haber" and "tener" that are usually translated into
English as "to have".  The former is the auxiliary verb and the latter
denotes possession.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Aug 24, 2021, 5:48 AM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> It’s the right kind of answer, Nick, and I don’t find it compelling.
>
> Put aside for a moment the use of “have” as an auxiliary verb.  I can come
> up with wonderful reasons why that is both informative and primordial, but
> I also believe they are complete nonsense and only illustrate that there
> are no good rules for reliable argument in this domain.
>
> Also, I don’t adopt the frame of using the past tense as a device to skew
> the argument toward the conclusion you started with.  (Now _there_ is a
> category error: to start with a conclusion.  Lawyer!)
>
> I think probably throughout Indo-European derived languages, “have” is
> used to refer to inherent attributes.  I have brown eyes.  I have eyes at
> all.  It takes a surprisingly convoluted construction to assert that
> someone looking at my face will find two brown eyes there, that doesn’t use
> “have” as the verb of attribution.  So that’s old, and it is something the
> language has really committed to.  I think you have to commit unnatural
> acts to argue that that is a verb of action.
>
> Possession isn’t even a lot more action-y.  I have two turntables and a
> microphone.  If nobody is trying to take them from me, it is not clear that
> I am “doing” anything to “have” them.
>
> (btw, I am not a metaphor monist.  I practice polysemy, like the Mormons.
> So it seems completely natural that there can be multiple meanings, if
> there are any meanings at all, and that distinct ones can use the same word
> because they are somehow similar despite not being the self-same.)
>
> It seems to me as if the truest action usage of “have” is one that is not
> nearly as baked into the language.  If I have lunch, I eat lunch.  If I
> have a fit, I throw a tantrum.  Many circumlocutions available to me.  That
> also could be quite idiosyncratic to small language branches.  I think you
> would never, in normal speech, say you “had” lunch in German.  You would
> just say you ate lunch.  (Or in Italian or French either, for that matter.)
>  These kinds of usages do not seem to me to carry strong cognitive weight.
>
> So it seems to me that the semantic core of “have” is probably
> attribution.  The legal sense of ownership is probably metaphorical.  It
> would not _at all_ surprise me if the use both in the auxiliary (widespread
> in IE) and in the deictic (French il y a, there is) are deep metaphors
> describing either the ambient, or the ineluctable structure of time, with
> attributes.
>
> But, back to whether attribution is natural for emotions (or, as good as
> anything else, and better than most):
>
> If I “have” a sunny disposition, that seems not far from having brown
> eyes.  Italian: Il ha un buon aspetto.
>
> If I am having a bad day, that is a little different from having brown
> eyes, and perhaps closer to having a black eye.  Not an essence that
> defines my nature, but a condition I can be in, or “take on". To say,
> indeed, that I parse that as a pattern I carry around (as an aspect of
> constitution or condition) does not seem category-erroneous to me.
>
> Sure, there are patterns in my behavior: if I take a hot shower and the
> water lands on my black eye, I will wince.  If you say good morning and I
> am having a bad day, I will growl at you.  A Skinnerian can say that my
> wincing is all there is to my black eye.  But a physician would tell me to
> put ice on it, and would use the color of the bruise to indicate which eye
> I should put the ice on.
>
> These uses of having seem tied up, more closely than with anything else,
> with uses of being, as SteveS mentioned.  So the be/do dichotomy seems to
> determine largely where the verb usages split.
>
> Of course, living is a process, played out on organized structures.
> Brains probably look different in eeg and electrode arrays in one emotional
> condition than in another, and they probably also have different
> neurotransmitter profiles, and maybe other things.  Even You probably don’t
> want to refer to a neurotransmitter concentration as a “doing”; It is a
> variable of state, like a black eye is a state of an eye.  You might want
> to refer to the brain action pattern as “doing”, but maybe only in the
> sense that you refer to the existence of non-dead metabolism as “doing” —
> they are both processes.  To me, the common language seems to split the be
> and the do on brevity, transience, isolation, or suddenness of an
> activity.  I _am_ surly, and I _do_ growl at you.
>
> If non-black English still preserved the habitual tense, as John McWhorter
> claims black American English still does, we might be able to make a
> different kind of a distinction, between the pattern or habit as a state,
> and the event within it as an act.  That might give an even better account
> of the split in the common language.
>
> I also want to acknowledge Glen’s points about working through many frames
> in a dynamical way.  I can’t add anything, but I do agree.
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Aug 24, 2021, at 12:30 PM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <
> thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,JZI_rTsnO4PMxifIK-1Pc4gAtSO08UfA4WqKjx73T4Ek3tY5Xl71BUdt3A807uKgEplYNDHINHuRjmL2qnv7SkO_J10fWv5jebCjhCravg,,&typo=1>
>
> *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> <
> 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
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,7HSjAiYZs0TskSYM3z8t3I3vm7JNBV7OyZgHYp-6EjYczSSRW9xIT6typjL4CJpU_atJnKNr9galrl_vRQGGlXHYIX3WqoquVu8Bpe1ntqUc&typo=1>
>
> *From:* Friam <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>
> *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> 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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