Well, Russ, now, I think you might be ready to see (be the only one to see?) the force of my making an analogy between the first derivative of a function and the motivation of a behavior.
One can see and touch increasingly accurate approximations to it, but one can never see and touch the square root of two itself -- at least not as a concrete number. Funny I wonder what the mathematicians on this list will say about this statement. It seems to be that the problem of the square root of two is the reverse of how you have it. You can touch it any time. Just lay out a unit isosceles right triangle and touch the hypotenuse. The problem is that you cannot measure it using a unit ruler. The square root of two is concrete; it’s just the ruler that measures it is abstract. But I don’t think Eric and I are committed to the proposition that imaginary numbers aren’t real. They are signs that stand in a rigorous, systematic, and extensively confirmed way for a vast collection of mathematical relationships. If you could show me that the idea of subjective mind is embedded in a structure of experimental experience as rigorous as that which embraces the square root of two, I would concede the argument. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2016 10:09 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and square roots Since Glen missed the square root analogy, I'd like to repeat it. Nick and Eric seem to be saying that there is no such thing as subjective experience since only things that can be seen and touched are real. I said that such a position seems to deny the existence of the square root of two. One can see and touch increasingly accurate approximations to it, but one can never see and touch the square root of two itself -- at least not as a concrete number. One can also see and touch Newton's algorithm for computing the square root of two. But again, not the number itself. So does that mean from Eric' and Nick's perspective there is no such thing as the square root of 2?
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