I was just outside sawing up dead branches. I noticed a large ant struggling to carry a piece of vegetation larger than it was over obstacles in a general direction which did not change notwithstanding the obstacles. It was very hard not to feel the ant's intentionality and determination. I was experiencing the ant as the ant. Extreme empathy.
Frank On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:58 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 5/13/20 11:17 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > > I'm not sure why you need to suggest (sarcastically?) that the choice of > > words don't matter (if that is what you are suggesting and in that > > tone?). Maybe I'm missing something. HAD you (or Eric) used > > IggityBiggity, I think it would have really thrown the conversation > > sideways? Perhaps you are implying that niggling (my new word for the > > day) over "visible" and "hidden" is so arbitrary as to be absurd? > > Sorry if my tone seems sarcastic. It's not meant that way. I literally > couldn't care what word is used. And I'd prefer we use a word with fewer > implications (connotations?). Behavior is a very laden word. Since we're > talking in the midst of a conversation about psychology, it's a seriously > BAD word to use. And since EricC and Nick have *explicitly* challenged the > concept of "inside", that makes "inside" a bad word, too. It would be very > cool if we could use neutral terms like X and Y. But then we'll devolve > into mathematics, which some people think they don't like. (I'd argue > everyone likes math; they just don't know they like math.) > > I'm not trying to imply that dickering over words like "visible" and > "hidden" is absurd. But I AM asking EricC and Nick to treat words as > ambiguous, with multiple meanings, wiggle room, and to make some effort to > read what I *mean*, not whatever immediate constructs pop into their heads > when they first read the words. I've talked about this as "steelmanning" > and "listening with empathy" a lot. I know it's difficult. I fail all the > time. The conversation will be permanently *dead* (to me) when/if we lock > down a jargonal definition of any word. If you force someone to read 800 > page scribbles by old dead guys in order to understand what a single word > means, then you've lost the game. > > > Just to continue my niggling. Interiority would seem to make perfect > > sense in the context of your (subject) seer/measurer/prober and the > > object (seen/measured/probed)? To the subject, there is a boundary > > between it and the object when it comes to perceiving (by whatever > > mechanism) beyond which nothing (or vanishingly little) can be directly > > perceived (with the caveat of a mechanism of intermediate vector > > photons/phonons/nerf-balls). Visible light mostly bounces off the > > surface of the skin but XRays penetrate through... thus yielding a > > different idea of surface or boundary and therefore (I think?) > > interiority/exteriority... > > No. I've purposefully stopped implying that the boundary closes a space > because I thought that was interfering with my steelmanning EricC's > position. The position involves a kind of "projection" from the object's > actions (flapping wings or whatever) out to a (possibly imaginary) > objective. And that projection is important to the categorization of the > *types* of behavior they want to talk about (motivated, intentional, etc.). > That projection to the objective is what founds the claim that all (valid) > questions about the object's actions can be empirically studied, because > the behavior is, ultimately, embedded in the object-objective relationship > ... the agent lives in an environment and the environment is a kind of > reflection of everything that agent may do. > > So, I attempted to remove the "interiority" from my language by stopping > my talk about inside and sticking with boundaries. That boundary can be > closed (like a sphere with an inside and outside) or it could be a plane or > a wavy manifold or like a slice of Swiss cheese or whatever. So, > "interiority" is *not* what I'm going for. In fact it's a distraction from > what I am going for, which is the *distance* (think network hop-distance) > between the subject and object and the *medium* (think intermediate > transforms as nodes/edges) through which signals go from subject to object > and vice versa. > > The boundary is a cut-point in that medium. There might be many possible > cut-points. E.g. a telescope has parts like mirrors and lenses, twists and > turns. Any one of those could be THE important cut-point, the boundary. The > boundary is the cut-point beyond which our ability to infer or distinguish > stops. So, for a telescope, THE important cut-point is whatever distance 2 > pin-pricks of light blur together, such that we need a more powerful > telescope to distinguish the 2 pin-prick lights. > > > This seems to beg the questions (from other threads) about identity and > > objectness? I hope I'm not just stirring the conversation at hand > > here... I'm just trying to catch/keep up? > > Yes, this conversation is a DIRECT descendant from the conversation that > cited Fontana, BC Smith, Chalmers, path integrals, Necker cubes, verbs as > duals of nouns, etc. Luckily, Marcus assures us that e-ink is cheap. 8^D > > -- > ☣ 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.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC> > http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > -- Frank Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918
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