[FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

[steve smith]

> Your interleaving broke me. I can't tell if you have a coherent thing 
> to say or if you're merely reacting shallowly to the things I've said. 
> Maybe it's because I'm still sick from my last COVID infection and 
> just can't think straight. But I can't coerce your interleaved 
> responses into a coherent whole. Sorry.
I appreciate that you try and that you are direct in acknowledging when 
you fail.  I am not in a good position to judge where the blame or 
remedy to this lies.   I know that my intention is not to "react 
shallowly" and I do know that I believe that what I am saying is at 
least *seeking coherence*.   In particular seeking a "mutual coherence" 
with what I think I hear you saying.  I think that is the point of 
dialogue, or maybe more pointedly "conversation"?  I am not trying to 
"prove a point" by any measure, but rather seeking what point might be 
self-evident from our contrasting perspectives on it?
> But I can respond to the primary point I think I was making, which is 
> that the disambiguation of the 2 conceptions of telicity (1 - agential 
> aspiration vs. 2 - calculation where a final state is an input) 
I think I understand 1) but am struggling with 2).   Are we talking 
about the "forward chaining" where the results of one intentional act 
becomes the input to the next turn of a telic engine-crank? The 
self-other scaffolding of co-evolution evolution?
> relies on asking questions like "How personal is the calculation?" Is 
> it merely about you, the agent? Or is it about something larger, like 
> the system in which you (the agent) operate? If it's the latter, then 
> telicity leans more my way (type 2). If it's the former, then it leans 
> Nick's way (type 1).
At risk of blurring away from the coherence I aspire to in this 
conversation, I'm lost as to why/how these must be distinct and not in 
an obvious way coupled?   Is it not the co-evolution of "the agent" and 
"the agent's context" which drives these systems forward?
> The dissolution of self (however it's brought on - hallucinogens, 
> ecstasy, beauty, etc) is one way to ensure we talk about type 2 
> telicity, rather than type 1. Individualism ("efficient markets", BDI 
> agents, etc.) restricts telicity to type 1, whereas socialism 
> (networks, fabrics, fields vs particles, etc) allows both, conflates 
> the two.
Maybe you are saying what I just tried to say above?   My intuition is 
that we are talking about the same thing in the same sense but with 
confoundingly complementary lexicons or idioms?
> Those of us who are tricked by profundity seem to feel an urgency for 
> self-dissolution. My guess is that's because they don't have a way to 
> induce ecstasy in themselves, at will. Whether you develop a regimen 
> of judicious drug use or can simply dive in and back out of deep 
> bullshit like String Theory doesn't matter that much. All you need is 
> some/any method by which to induce ecstasy in yourself. And if you 
> have such a method, you won't be *desperate* for it. And if you're not 
> thirsty in that way, you won't fall for profundity against your will.

On a good day (hour minute second), everything feels profound to me and 
I needn't focus on/be-drawn-to/generate anything more than what is "just 
there"...   if there is a bottom line for me in this conversation it is 
reinforcing this.

I am *drawn* to this list for the relative profundity (and deep bullshit 
as in string theory or more snarkily our "complexity babble") it offers 
me.  Even while the dragonflies perching on the tips of the reeds 
growing from the pond filled with fish and insects and myriad other bits 
of life dancing together can be plenty if I allow it.  Or the clouds 
scudding in the sky, bumping up against the Sangres, phase-changing into 
rain to wet the rock and vegetation and fill the streams, recharge the 
aquifers and acequias to overflow into the arroyos to irrigate the 
fields and surge my pond to ... ... ...

I am struggling (contentedly?) in this moment to understand your 
conception of telic, of how it relates to the ecstatic experience of 
profundity and the recursive (telic?) drive to generate yet-more 
(pseudo?) profundity.

FWIW, Jon and I sat out by that pond last week with young Tycho who 
contentedly moved a handul of dirtied mah-jong tiles around on a 
handmade table while the 'dolts spoke "of many things: Of shoes—and 
ships—and sealing-wax—Of cabbages—and kings—And why the sea is boiling 
hot—And whether pigs have wings."

I am saddened that mutual coherence is so elusive... supporting your own 
repeated suggestion that "communication is illusory", but nevertheless 
ever-hopeful that "the illusion of communication" is in some fundamental 
sense real and is the magic dust of the coherence I seem to believe in?