Now Marcus is just being sadistic. >8^D My own guess at a summary of Eric's stance is that where we see qualities, we can, at will, invert the vision and see quantities. Fontana is a great source for distinguishing construction from evolution. But for me, BC Smith [†] is better for maintaining an agnostic flippability (Necker cube) between objects vs fields, nodes vs edges, nouns vs verbs. The conflation Nick began with between expected value (an algorithmic reduction from a distribution to a singular thing/object) and a *quality* ... a qualitative feature of the world, parsed (registered in BC Smith's domain) from the ambience of the world is not inherently a bad thing. That conflation is not inherently bad because they're similar. They're both transformations from a field to a thing. The key is to be able to flip it back again, from a thing to a field.
It is our nature as pattern-recognizers to parse the ambience into things ... at least that *was* our nature before the modern math/physics *field* techniques began to seep into our intuition. Some of us who deal with fields/ambience/distributions all the time have begun to relax the harsh and immediate parsing. Engineers tend to simply be a bit lazy about it. The parsing happens, but they talk of approximations and epsilon as it goes to ∞ or 0. Mathematicians talk of duals, congruence, bisimulation, isomorphism, comutation, etc. But I think it can all be adequately understood in terms of qualities vs quantities. Qualities like "wetness" are precisely the same as things like "frozen pond". Quantities like 32°F are precisely the same as processes like "if I walk on that, I'll slip and fall". The language each of us uses to grok this stuff is a choice. Eric provided a nice swath across several domains. Maybe too many. We're faced with the tyranny of choice. I'd treat it like a cafeteria. Pull the thread you understand best. Bah! 316 words ... close enough, I say! [†] On the Origin of Objects or, better yet Philosophy of Mental Representation ed Hugh Clapin. On 4/18/20 9:25 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > I think the point is that the relations or contingencies you mention can be > cast as posterior probabilities from observed many-body correlations. > Distributional thinking works fine in that case too, it is just that some of > those conditional probabilities get very close to 1. Others relations are > softer, only giving slightly favorable odds. Still others can be modeled, > having surprising <http://cds.cern.ch/record/154856/files/pre-27827.pdf> > behavior. -- ☣ uǝlƃ .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ... FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
