I don't grok the context well enough to equivocate on concepts like "have"
and "category of being". But in response to Nick's question: "What is there
that animals do that demands us to invent categories to explain their
behavior?", my answer is "animals discretize the ambient muck". So if
categorization is somehow fundamentally related to discretization, then
animals clearly categorize in that sense.
I mean, all you have to do is consider the frequencies of light the
animals' eyeballs do or don't see. That's two categories right there, the
light they do see and the light they don't. Unless there's some sophistry
hidden behind the question, the answer seems clear. Reflection on what one
does and does not categorize isn't necessary. I could even claim my truck
discretizes fluids ... those that make it seize up versus lubricate it,
those that it burns vs those that stop it cold. Etc. Maybe the question is
better formulated as "What makes one impute categories on another?" Clearly
my truck doesn't impute categories on squirrels.
But Nick does follow that question with this "experience" nonsense. So my
guess is there *is* some sophistry behind the question, similar to EricC's
incredulous response to DaveW's question about phenomenological composition
of experience(s). What I find missing in Nick's (and EricC's) distillation
of experience monism is an account of the seemingly analogous position of
panpsychism. Were I a scholar, I might take such work on myself. But I'm
not and, hence, very much appreciate these distillations of dead white
men's metaphysics and will take what I can get. 8^D
On 2/16/23 09:22, Steve Smith wrote:
Might I offer some terminology reframing, or at least ask for some
additional explication?
1. I think "behaviours" would be all Nick's Martians *could* observe?
They would be inferring "experiences" from observed behaviours?
2. When we talk about "categories" here, are we talking about
"categories of being"? Ontologies, as it were?
Regarding ErisS' reflections... I *do* think that animals behave *as
if* they "have categories", though I don't know what it even means to say
that they "have categories" in the way Aristotle and his legacy-followers
(e.g. us) do... I would suggest/suspect that dogs and squirrels are in no
way aware of these "categories" and that to say that they do is a
projection by (us) humans who have fabricated the (useful in myriad
contexts) of a category/Category/ontology. So in that sense they do NOT
*have* categories... I think in this conception/thought-experiment we
assume that Martians *would* and would be looking to map their own
ontologies onto the behaviour (and inferred experiences and judgements?)
of Terran animals?
If I were to invert the subject/object relation, I would suggest that it
is "affordances" not "experiences" (or animals' behaviours) we want to
categorize into ontologies? It is what things are "good for" that make
them interesting/similar/different to living beings. And "good for" is
conditionally contextualized. My dog and cat both find squirrels "good
for" chasing, but so too for baby rabbits and skunks (once).
Or am I barking up the wrong set of reserved lexicons?
To segue (as I am wont to do), it feels like this discussion parallels
the one about LLMs where we train the hell out of variations on learning
classifier systems until they are as good as (or better than) we (humans)
are at predicting the next token in a string of human-generated tokens (or
synthesizing a string of tokens which humans cannot distinguish from a
string generated by another human, in particular one with the proverbial
10,000 hours of specialized training). The fact that or "ologies" tend to
be recorded and organized as knowledge structures and in fact usually
*propogated* (taught/learnt) by the same makes us want to believe (some of
us) that hidden inside these LLMs are precisely the same "ologies" we
encode in our myriad textbooks and professional journal articles?
I think one of the questions that remains present within this group's
continued 'gurgitations is whether the organizations we have conjured are
particularly special, or just one of an infinitude of superposed
alternative formulations? And whether some of those formulations are
acutely occult and/or abstract and whether the existing (accepted)
formulations (e.g. Western Philosophy and Science, etc) are uniquely (and
exclusively or at least optimally) capable of capturing/describing what is
"really real" (nod to George Berkeley).
Some here (self included) may often suggest that such formulation is at
best a coincidence of history and as well as it "covers" a description of
"reality", it is by circumstance and probably by abstract conception ("all
models are wrong...") incomplete and in error. But nevertheless still
useful...
Maybe another way of reframing Nick's question (on a tangent) is to ask
whether the Barsoomians had their own Aristotle to conceive of
Categories? Or did they train their telescopes on ancient Greece and
learn Latin Lip Reading and adopt one or more the Greek's philosophical
traditions? And then, did the gas-balloon creatures floating in the
atmosphere-substance of Jupiter observe the Martians' who had observed the
Greeks and thereby come up with their own Categories. Maybe it was those
creatures who beamed these abstractions straight into the neural tissue of
the Aristotelians and Platonists? Do gas-balloon creatures even have
solids to be conceived of as Platonic? And are they missing out if they
don't? Do they have their own Edwin Abbot Abbot? And what would the
Cheela<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg> say?
My dog and the rock squirrels he chases want to know... so do the cholla
cactus fruits/segments they hoard in their nests!
Mumble,
- Steve
On 2/16/23 5:37 AM, Santafe wrote:
It’s the tiniest and most idiosyncratic take on this question, but
FWIW, here:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1520752113
I actually think that all of what Nick says below is a perfectly good
draft of a POV.
As to whether animals “have” categories: Spend time with a dog.
Doesn’t take very much time. Their interest in conspecifics is (ahem)
categorically different from their interest in people, different than to
squirrels, different than to cats, different than to snakes.
For me to even say that seems like cueing a narcissism of small
differences, when overwhelmingly, their behavior is structured around
categories, as is everyone else’s. Squirrels don’t mistake acorns for
birds of prey. Or for the tree limbs and house roofs one can jump onto.
Or for other squirrels. It’s all categories. Behavior is an operation on
categories.
I found it interesting that you invoked “nouns” as a framework that is
helpful but sometimes obstructive. One might just have said “words”. This
is interesting to me already, because my syntactician friends will tell you
that a noun is not, as we were taught as children, a “word for a person,
place, or thing”, but rather a “word in a language that transforms as nouns
transform in that language”, which is a bit of an obfuscation, since they
do have in common that they are in some way “object-words”. But from the
polysemy and synonymy perspective, we see that “meanings” cross the
noun-verb syntactic distinction quite frequently for some categories.
Eye/see, ear/hear, moon/shine, and stuff like that. My typologist friends
tell me that is common but particular to some meanings much more than
others.
Another fun thing I was told by Ted Chiang a few months ago, which I
was amazed I had not heard from linguists, and still want to hold in
reserve until I can check it further. He says that languages without
written forms do not have a word for “word”. If true, that seems very
interesting and important. If Chiang believes it to be true, it is
probably already a strong enough regularity to be more-or-less true, and
thus still interesting and important.
Eric
On Feb 15, 2023, at 1:19 PM,<thompnicks...@gmail.com> <
thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:
FWiW, I willmake every effort to arrive fed to Thuam by 10.30
Mountain. I want to hear the experts among you hold forth on WTF a
cateogory actually IS. I am thinking (duh) that a category is a more or
less diffuse node in a network of associations (signs, if you must). Hence
they constitute a vast table of what goes with what, what is predictable
from what, etc. This accommodates “family resemblance” quite nicely. Do
I think animals have categories, in this sense, ABSOLUTELY EFFING YES. Does
this make me a (shudder) nominalist? I hope not.
Words…nouns in particular… confuse this category business. Words
place constraints on how vague these nodes can be. They impose on the
network constraints to which it is ill suited. True, the more my
associations with “horse” line up with your associations with “horse”, the
more true the horse seems. Following Peirce, I would say that where our
nodes increasingly correspond with increasing shared experience, we have
evidence ot the (ultimate) truth of the nodes, their “reality” in Peirce’s
terms. Here is where I am striving to hang on to Peirce’s realism.
The reason I want the geeks to participate tomorrow is that I keep
thinking of a semantic webby thing that Steve devised for the Institute
about a decade ago. Now a semantic web would be a kind of metaphor for an
associative web; don’t associate with other words in exactly the same
manner in which experiences associate with other experiences. Still, I
think the metaphor is interesting. Also, I am kind of re-interested in my
“authorial voice”, how much it operates like cbt.
