[FRIAM] Entropy RE-redux

[Nicholas Thompson]

Steve

Was there a better way in Gmail? I think the use of caps was conventional
in academia before Trump. It certainly does not Suggestshouting.

I apologize for my Many typos and Dictos. I simply seem to be unable to
read them until too late

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
nthompson at clarku.edu
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson


On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 1:36 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> Nick -
>
> I'm surprised you gave over to ALL-CAPS to distinguish your words from
> others... it was shockingly difficult or me to read through carefully...
> some call this "shouting" which is part of the effect to me also, but more
> key is the typography and readability of it...
>
> That said, I did what I had to to make it "parseable" with my own
> sensoria/sensibilities and found it to be quite rich epistemically.
>
> I share your apprehension/feeling/sensibilities on the topic — that
> entropy (or motive, or any number of these second-order constructs) gets
> misrepresented when we try to pin it to an instant, as if we could find it
> *in* the moment instead of across the differential.
>
> Your “Newliebzian category error” notion made me smile - there’s something
> compelling about how we keep building our most useful tools from fictions
> we then forget are fictions. Even that might be too conventient? It might
> be a kind of necessary fold in how cognition works - using what’s locally
> graspable to navigate what’s only ever apparent in change or flow. There is
> a larger insight I think about metaphor in general, but in this case
> time/causally grounded metaphorical target domains?
>
> I also appreciate your connection to how motives are misread —
> interiorized and moment-bound when really they emerge from comparative arcs
> of behaviour. That strikes me as roughly what the nervous system does:
> extract regularities from dynamics, then offer up something *like* a
> motive as a usable handle. Induction is fallible, but it’s also our only
> working interface. Not because it guarantees truth, but because it lets us
> stay involved.
>
> In that light, entropy - or motive - might be less about what *is*, and
> more about what is *minimally sufficient to expect*? From a free energy
> perspective, the nervous system isn't trying to uncover objective causes
> but to *minimize surprise* through actionable pattern recognition -
> constructing motives, like entropy, as provisional summaries of systemic
> change. It isn’t so much that they’re true, but that they *reduce the
> expected divergence* between model and world just enough to stay
> viable?
>
> Fascinating that this iterative/parallel *satisficing* seems to converge
> on something yet more absolute (objective truth)?  Is this what
> Transformers (for the ML wonks in the crowd) do?
>
> - Steve
>
> On 6/16/25 10:38 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>
> HERE IS A THE PARADOX AS I NOW UNDERSTAND IT.  IS ENTROPY A STATE
> VARIABLE/  WELL, YES AND NO.  IT IS NOT IN THE SENSE THAT YOU CANNOT
> CALCULATE IT FROM INSTANTANEOUS STATE VARIABLES, IN PERHAPS THE WAY THAT
> YOU CANNOT CALCULATE ACCELERATION FROM AN INSTANTANEOUS MEASUREMENT OF
> LOCATION AND VELOCITY.  ACCELERATION AT INSTANT IS A CATEGORY ERROR, A
> MATHEMATICAL FICTION.  BUT, STRANGE TO DISCOVER, THAT ALL PROGRESS IN
> MATHEMATICS, BEGINNING WITH THE MATHEMATICAL LINE, PERHAPS, IS THE RESULT
> OF THE EXPLOITATION OF SUCH FICTIONS.   fOR THE MOMENT LETS CALL THEM
> NEWLIEBZIAN CATEGORY ERRORS.  iF MY CURRENT INTUITION IS CORRECT AND
> ENTROPY IS NEWLIEBZIAN CATEGORY ERROR, THEN IT FOLLOWS THAT THE REASON i AM
> CONFUSED BY IT IS BECAUSE PEOPLE KEEP ATTRIBUTING IT TO INSTANTS AND PLACES
> WHEN IT KNOWN THROUGH THE COMPARISON OF DYNAMICS AND ARRAYS.  BEWARE
> BECAUSE THIS IS A VERY FAMILIAR CONFUSION TO ME, BETWEEN MOTIVES, WHICH ARE
> THOUGHT OF INTERIOR INSTANTS, WHEN THEY ARE ACTUALLY KNOWN THROUGH THE
> COMPARISON OF DYNAMICS AND ARRAYS OF BEHAVIOR.   THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF OUR
> NERVOUS SYSTEM (THE STUFF IN SIDE)  IS TO MAKE COMPUTATIONS BASED ON THE
> DYNAMICS AND ARRAYS OF BEHAVIOR AND APPLY THEM TO THE NEXT APPLICABLE
> INSTANT.  PHILOSOPHERS CAN SAY ALL THE WANT ABOUT THE FALLIBILITY OF
> INDUCTION, BUT IT IS ALL WE GOT.
>
> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. /
> ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru present
> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20250616/891eaa24/attachment.html>