[FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

Mon Jun 16 20:58:23 EDT 2025

For what it's worth here's a very famous statement by Bertrand Russell:

   - Pure mathematics consists entirely of such asseverations as that, if
   such and such is a proposition is true of anything, then such and such
   another propositions is true of that thing.  It's essential not to discuss
   whether the proposition is really true, and not to mention what the
   anything is of which it is supposed to be true... If our hypothesis is
   about anything and not about some one or more particular things, then our
   deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the
   subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what
   we are saying is true.

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 8:06 AM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Eric,
>
> It's a dead pigeon that we throw out the window.  I wouldnt waste a
> perfectly good dead duck on such an experiment.
>
> I cant decide if the dead pigeon is the limit of behavior or if is
> behavior.  I think it is behavior.  I think that behaviorism is a way
> carving the world into objects and environments (ahem) and that rocks
> behave.  Then the distinction beween rocks and organisms would emerge as a
> distinction between objeccts that manage their environments and objects
> that dont.
>
> n
>
> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 7:07 PM Eric Charles <
> eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Jon,
>> This is a great expansion of the issue, and it might take me a bit to
>> build up to an adequate response.
>>
>> You are definitely right that "scale" is one of many dimensions we might
>> look at when evaluating whether or not something is a behavior. The
>> evaluation of whether or not something is behaving involves comparisons,
>> and those comparisons have to be "fair" in some sense that suggests a
>> "domain". For example, if we drop a dead duck out a window, and then agree
>> that falling in that fashion does not evidence behavior, we wouldn't want
>> to then move to a coin-drop in water (where the coin spins and slides
>> erratically, moving down at various speeds) and assert the coin was alive
>> because it's movement didn't look like the dead-duck's movement.
>>
>> Does that get us anywhere?
>>
>>
>> -----------
>> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
>> Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
>> American University - Adjunct Instructor
>> <echarles at american.edu>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 12:58 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Glen, Eric,
>>>
>>> I am enjoying how the conversation is developing. The celery
>>> example strikes me as being important, but where Glen refers
>>> to *scale* I would speak of *domain of definition*. That a shift in
>>> domain happens to be size, rather than some other contextual
>>> specification, may not be what we want. If this isn't the case
>>> Glen, please let me know. With respect to Eric's points it seems
>>> fair to me to say that a paddle wheel is behaving, but perhaps not
>>> in the *larger* context of the river. The celery is behaving, but not
>>> not in the *smaller* context of capillary action. Here I am using
>>> the language of *large* and *small*, but perhaps other modalities
>>> have a place as well. One can say Nick's behavior appears
>>> spontaneously, but in fact was necessitated by something *prior*.
>>> Here an *earlier* Nick could play the role of the river.
>>>
>>> Frank,
>>> Would you say that the mind is as public as RSA encryption?
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>
>
> --
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> nthompson at clarku.edu
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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