[FRIAM] Selective cultural processes generate adaptive heuristics

[Steve Smith]

Glen -
> Your use of "regret" is a dead giveaway to your narrativity. A regret 
> operator (even in formal settings) is only useful in contexts that 
> assume both free-will and narrativity. 
I don't know that *I* experience a lot of regret, mostly because I 
recognize that anything I might "regret" in my own life fits squarely in 
the realm of "it seemed like a good idea at the time", even if my 
imagination/memory might be prone to frame it as something I might have 
decided/felt/acted otherwise on.   I *do*, however, recognize that the 
use of the "regret operator"  is pretty pervasive in common discourse 
(codes) and therefore likely in world-view (modes).  Your (constructive) 
criticism of these modes and codes continues to be helpful (if I have 
any free will which seeks or accepts help in it's actions).
> Marcus' link citing our oft-discussed use of psychedelics to raise the 
> "heat" in our "annealing" minds also targets that narrativity and 
> regret operators. There's no reason to have a regret operator *unless* 
> you can change your ephemeris with interventions like, say, a massive 
> dose of LSD or a 3 day stay in an isolation tank.

I believe the (imagined?) utility of a regret operator fits squarely in 
the camp of "free will".  And in it's application in the present-future 
decisions one might make.  I certainly consider it in the present all 
the time, even if I don't so much in the past?  I find myself thinking 
"I seem to have a spectrum of alternative choices to make right now and 
some of them seem like they would lead to regrets" so will likely avoid 
them out of hand, even if I never get around to experiencing regret as 
such. Various interventions (alcohol, meditation, discussion with an 
adversary etc) might reduce the set of "avoid out of hand" 
contemplations, some through your "heat of annealing" analogy and some 
more through more deliberate hill-climbing.  Again, free-will.  Maybe 
what I percieve as deliberate hill-climbing is just the natural 
consequence of "heat" in an obscured dimension? The language of Physics 
and Chemistry lie entirely there if the language of Biology and 
Sociology seem to admit/assume will and free-will.

    one of my more favorite tautologies:  "Life is that which wills to
    live amongst that which wills to live" (my misquote of Albert
    Schweitzer).

> But Nick, EricC, Jon, and I have discussed (ad nauseum) the difference 
> between pragmati[ci]sm, where Peirce (vs the other American 
> Pragmatists) still carries some sort of 
> anti-nominalist/foundationalist idealism. I think the existence of a 
> regret operator in your reflective thought may depend on that deeper 
> structure more than it depends on conceptions of free-will and 
> narrativity.
I could probably use more help unpacking this...  Or maybe I just 
haven't read these conversations astutely enough (no regrets though!).
> In a *very* open context, where not only the machinery changes as it 
> chunks along, but the objective[s] change[s] through the iteration, 
> regret can become locally scoped ... e.g. rather than an octogenarian 
> regretting what they did when they were 20, one might only regret what 
> one did 10 minutes ago but not regret the events of years ago. With 
> such a tightly scoped regret, we can approach self-identified episodic 
> personalities without being anti-nominalist/foundationalist. The 
> foundation of that locally coherent self is simply "smaller" ... more 
> particular, less general, more context dependent than full narrativity.

I think this is a good (temporal) expose of the local/global nature of 
emergence?    Global order from local interactions? References SteveG's 
reflections about "believe in the collective" as I understand it.

As a sexegenarian, I find it hard to remember/understand the context of 
my dodecagenarian self well enough to have any proper regrets about 
actions/decisions made then.  I agree that it is more coherent for me to 
go back through these missives I offer up here before (or after) I send 
them and have regrets (changes if I do it before I hit send) due to the 
temporal (and therefore hamming/network distance in the adjacent 
possible?) proximity than the former example.  Maybe this is just 
another example of being stuck in the "illusion of free-will and 
narrativity"?

- Steve


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