Glen -
Hm. I don't think science _aspires_ to be anything. And I'm not just
making a cheap rhetorical jab, either. ;-) Science isn't really a
thing, at all, much less an entity that can aspire.
I understood that when I wrote it of course... but...
It's an amalgam of
behaviors that we cherry-pick and call "science". In order to impute
science with the ability to aspire, we'd have to go back to our
discussion of Rosen's "anticipatory systems" or perhaps Kauffman's
attempt to place Final Cause in our lexicon. Until we do that, science
is a collection of behaviors we identify through the rearview mirror.
E.g. Jim Carter ("circlons") is not a scientist, whereas Lord Kelvin
was. Etc.
I still think it makes sense (though it is highly figurative) to say
that "science aspires". What I am saying when I say that is that there
is some "collective" who *want* science to mean what I am suggesting,
even if they may fail to do their part consistently in making it that
way. I think there is a collective (but not fully consensual)
aspiration among people who identify *as* science (scientists) and/or
proper science groupies (people who do not *practice* science as such
but who *do* consume it (consciously and introspectively).
But my point was more the contrast between a collectively defined thing
versus a consensus thing. And that distinction leads us back to the
discussion John Kennison started about whether there can be science
without language. Behaviors (like using a stick to catch ants, or
learning to be afraid of snakes) can be learned without the super
structure of what we call language. (I maintain that it still requires
the substructure for language, namely empathy and the ability to point.)
Perhaps there exist collectively defined things (like science) that
don't really depend on consensus so much as a shared physiological or
anatomical structure?
I wonder if there is an important distinction between "co-munication"
and "language"? I think that *language* can be used *for*
communication but they are not identical. Language is useful for
manipulating ideas (thinking) independent of sharing with others. This
symbolic abstraction might have been *created* as an extension of
"pointing with empathy" but I believe that it is more than that.
I'm not sure what it would mean to "co-municate" the details of any
significantly complicated bit of science without language. I'd be more
comfortable claiming that this "proto-language" (pointing with empathy)
at best supports a "proto-science". At this level of the game, one
individual can observe another individual doing something and through
emulation reproduce the "experiment". One crow watching another crow
use a twig to dislodge a grub from a crevice in some bark might,
through the benefit of empathic awareness try the same thing and find
that she likes the results very much. Such a behaviour might spread by
example. Is this communication? Is this language? What if the
observing crow abstracts this to demonstrating the action of prizing a
grub out, but without the grub? Is this language? Coining a "term" in
the proto language of "to prize a morsel"? Perhaps if there is already
a posture or vocalization to be associated with "a tasty morsel" or "I
seek/desire a tasty morsel"?
Nick (if he is not on the road to MA) in his corvid/bird studies might
have an opinion, as might Doug-of-the-Parrots if he were not taking
separate vacations. This is, of course, not about birds... I used
birds (corvids in particular) as an example because they are
simultaneously familiar yet distant from us.
Of course, one might argue that consensus doesn't _have_ to come about
through language. Perhaps consensus isn't necessarily about "thought
agreement" so much as it is "behavior agreement". If that's the case,
then one could argue that consensus and collective are synonymous. But
I think that would seem strange to most people, at least until you
co-learned enough, interactively behaved together enough to agree that
they were the same. ;-)
I continue to be interested in (both puzzled and intrigued) by your
distinction between behavior and thought and language. While I believe
our consciousness is rooted in direct experience, I also think our
language generates a qualitatively different nature in our
consciousness. The simplest level of language (pointing at/naming
things) has it's charms and uses, but I think something else happens
when we actually start to use predicates. I am wondering if you feel
that empathy provides access to a "proto-predicate" in the same way that
"pointing at" might provide proto-subject/objects?
The key to the way I think of "language" and the way you discuss it
seems to be that I'm assuming that sentient beings (or at least humans,
or at least me) build simulations *in* language and execute them *in*
logic.
Of course, we have the stories of folks like UberGeek Nikolai Tesla who
claimed to build models of devices in his mind and then "execute" them
in his sleep, waking later knowing the performance/flaws of his
simulated devices.
- Steve
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