Steve Smith wrote at 05/07/2013 04:01 PM: >> Q. Can Science be done without language? >> A(smith). Some, almost for sure. >> A(gepr): No, probably not. Language is an denser/compressed replacement >> for other behaviors (e.g. grooming) and serves to bring about behavioral >> coherence in a group. Behavioral coherence is necessary for science. >> (Thought coherence is irrelevant to science except when/where it >> facilitates behavioral coherence.) > So you are saying that it is *practically* not possible because of lack > of group coherence, though in principle (which I think was Kennison's > original question?) language is not possible *for* doing science, it is > merely neccessary (valuable/efficient) for gaining coherence? Is it > not possible then that a tribe of primates who obtain behavioral > coherence through lots of nit-picking (like we are doing here?) could > then have enough behavioral coherence to start doing science? >>> Q. Can Science be done more easily/effectively with language? >>> A(smith). It seems as if this is the case. >> A(gepr): Yes, which seems like a natural consequence of my answer to the >> first question. > Ok... so I think your answer to the first question was really an answer > to the second.
In don't think so. My answer to the first is that all science requires language. Can science be done without language? No. Not in principle, nor in practice. This is because language is a denser replacement for more drawn out behaviors. E.g. I could draw a solar system in the sand with a stick and "explain" heliocentrism with dynamic diagramming. But it's much FASTER to do that with words. Science requires this _acceleration_, this compacting. Note that I'm NOT claiming science requires symbolism/semiotics. I'm claiming that it requires compression, dense concepts that can or must be unpacked. > But what is a "conjecture" without language? And if there is such a > thing, it is already reified (or more to the point needs no > reification/cannot-be-reified)? Perhaps if we use the sand diagrams of the solar system? One mute draws the solar system in the sand and points at it. Another mute rubs out the sun and replaces it with a flower-shaped thingamabob ... or a unicorn, or whatever. This amounts to the conjecture that the planets revolve around thingamabob instead of the sun. Note that this isn't pure syntax, symbol manipulation. The parts of the diagram decompress into the actual objects to which they refer. > And back to (my corollary to) Kennison's original question... can > (any/all?) conjectures be created/encoded without language? Perhaps. But some of those conjectures would take just as long as the real thing to reify. I.e. a simulation that runs just as fast, no slower, no faster than the thing it simulates _and_ takes just as much physical material to construct as the thing it simulates is _not_ a simulation at all. The model cannot be the territory. Language is required because it is a compression for material and process. I can tell you what I would do, if I wanted to do it, without actually doing it. > still nit picking... I'm not clear on what a conjecture based in > anatomical/physiological structure is? It is a rearrangement of biochemical, neuroelectrical patterns. For example, if one mute redraws the solar system diagram with a unicorn in the center, then your brain mixes the firing patterns for solar system and unicorn. The point being that it's not some logical or ideological abstraction you're mixing. It's biochemical processes you're mixing. > I still hold onto the thought that thoughts are > real and may also be required to be coherent). If by "thoughts", you mean biochemical processes, then I agree. But it's deceptive to talk of "thoughts" without also talking about what you ate for breakfast, how much exercise you get, or whether or not you have syphilis. The answers to questions like that _matter_ to every thought in your mind. > I'm stuck on (the other side) on this myself. What you describe, I > would call "Identification" and/or "empathy". It only becomes > "Anthropomorphism" (for me) when we add the abstractions of "this is > human-like" and "human-like is me-like". But I accept that you you > don't grant "thinking" it's own reality, so I I'm not sure you accept > these abstractions? I accept that you (and I) are often deluded into thinking they are abstractions, abstracted from the detail in the original source material. But when I'm lucid, i.e. living in the moment ... in the Tao, they are not abstractions at all. I really do _feel_ the frustration of the robot, or the satisfaction when a cron job completes, etc. > I think you are making the argument of the materialists that mind does > not exist, only brain, and that mind (even to the extent that it is an > illusion) could not exist independently of brain. Maybe. I accept that mind exists. But "mind" is another way of thinking about brain. They are the same thing, mind = brain. But brain is outside looking in. Mind is inside looking out. It's not so much an illusion as it is myopic or partly false ... biased. > I don't expect to demonstrate a > mind outside of a brain anytime soon, but I'm also not ready to say it > is impossible That's fine. You're agnostic. I'm not trying to change your mind. I'm just trying to lay out some (alternative) positions in the quest for whether or not science makes sense without language. > And yet, when I write down a complex thought (or better yet, someone > more capable than I) and someone else reads it (maybe you, maybe someone > more capable than you ;) ) then a "thought" or at least an "idea" has > been serialized, disembodied, and reembodied? Yes! However, the output may be totally different than the input. I.e. your source material may look nothing like the reembodiment I make after hearing your words. That's why the thoughts/ideas are irrelevant and what matters are the two embodiments. > So the correlation is that people who are good at things, got good by > doing it, don't *need* to discuss it, and in fact recognize that > discussing is futile in the face of doing? Well, that wasn't my point. My point was that getting good at something seems to correlate with _less_ symbolism, not more. > Hmmm... they are discovering the reality of certain relations between > symbolic statements? No. They're discovering reality, itself, perhaps even in its _purest_ form. That's what (I think) Platonic means. Mathematical constructs aren't symbols, they are real. The point being that good mathematicians think this way ... this Platonic literalism, whereas [in]adequate mathematicians like myself treat the constructs as symbols that can be applied wherever I choose. > I am beginning to understand the level of your commitment to this > position but am not necessarily becoming more committed to it myself. > I'm seeking a toehold in this realm, or maybe more to the point, trying > to find obtain an intuitive understanding of what it would mean to > dispense with "language", "abstraction", "figuration", "metaphor", > "analogy", etc. Well, we don't have to dispense with them, just unpack them differently, strip them of their ontological status. What goes on in our mind is dirty, messy, and correlates with how much seratonin's floating around. I.e. the way I think about circles or unicorns or the Copenhagen interpretation depends, in a fundamental way, on what I ate for breakfast. > I think you are in territory that I have encountered elsewhere and been > stymied (well, temporarily stuck actually). I do think they can be > regarded as compressions, but I think even *as* compressions, they also > serve as abstractions? I'm left assuming that you might believe in > abstractions at all? That they do not exist, that they are meaningless? They do exist, but they are erroneous, fatally flawed compressions. They are too lossy to be useful. How about this? A good abstraction can be decompressed and give a relatively accurate reembodiment of the source material. A bad abstraction, when decompressed, gives an inaccurate reembodiment of the source material. Is that better? If so, sure abstractions exist. But they're useless without some caveat saying how good or bad they are, according to some concretization/decompression process. The difference between the word "abstraction" (meaning "without detail") and "compression" is the former says nothing about the detail that was sluffed off. The latter, at least _implies_ that there's more to the story and you can't just symbol manipulate around willy nilly. Compression implies baggage. Compression is bound in some way to the details that were filtered out. Abstraction is free to be total useless nonsense. > We "compress" as you say. We fit data to models. Then we manipulate > these instances of the models (informed by the data) until we find a > supposedly useful or interesting instanced-model-state (some might say > output-from) which we then "decompress" (in this case I think I mean > re-apply semantics to...). Grrr. I agreed with you completely until you said "re-apply semantics to". ;-) My point in using "compress" is to preserve at least some shred of the semantics... to be _less_ syntactic ... to be _more_ like the good mathematician who, while doing math, thinks they're discovering reality. I do NOT think we humans, with brains/minds, strip our symbols of all meaning then push them around like a typical computer, then re-apply meaning when we're done computing. Rather, some shadow of the meaning haunts _every_ biochemical process in our heads as we churn and mix and match them. If/when a decompression results in nonsense, like when we dream we're flying and swimming at the same time or somesuch, then it shows that the semantics stayed with the mix and matched processes, until we wake up and our ties to the outside world sync up more tightly. > We measure the position of something which > we percieve to be "a thing". We impute thingness (rigid bodyness+???) > to this imagined "thing" and we use some model which we received or > discovered (by conjecture, testing,etc.) in the form perhaps of a set of > differential equations. With values attached to the differential > equations, we manipulate said equations according to the rules of > calculus and algebra (independent of the compressed out qualities of the > "thing") until we, for example, derive a simpler form, such as the > "thing"'s position and velocity at some time (t). When we decompress, > we apply the semantics of the "thing" (red billiard ball bouncing and > rolling down an inclined plane?) . We definitely "filtered" when we > decided that the "compression" (if I'm using your term correctly) of the > features of the "thing" we measured was useful... We took it's > position, mass, velocity, etc. at time t0, fit it to a model of "rigid > bodies in motion in a gravitational field" and *ignored* it's redness, > it's human-ascribed utility as a "billiard ball" etc. >> Preserving the applicability or embeddability of what's in your head is >> the most important part, no matter how you manipulate thing in your head. > Ok... I think that is what I just said above? Making sure that the > lossiness is really just separability... holding onto the "redness" and > the "billiardballness" to re-apply at decompression? No, it sounds to me like you totally slice off the semantics, store it in a separate place, then re-apply it after your pure syntax computation is finished. I'm NOT saying that. I'm claiming that this slicing off of the semantics does not happen, ever. We simply do not slice off the semantics, at all, ever. The compression preserves some vestige of every detail, _as_ we're mixing and matching things in our heads. The constructs are never really _symbols_. They are, in some strong sense, the same thing we experienced before, the same patterns that were activated when we experienced the source material. Those patterns persist _through_ the thinking, through the evolution of the brain. Some vestige of the "redness" and "billiardballness" stay with the the thought the whole time. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. -- Frank Zappa ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
