DaveW -Well said (IMO)... I'm a pretty well practiced (but lame) meditator myself, which might be why "go to hell" gets through my satorial facade. If I am approaching enlightenment, it is asymptotically and more aptly perhaps "Satori and I are approaching one another" to use David Bohm's "rheomode" idiom? When we meet out there on the horizon of max-entropy others will probably call it (brain? soul?) death. This is the only thing on MY bucket list. Or more aptly it is the bucket which I seek to kick and be kicked by?
I believe (with confidence but little conviction) that there is something important in the holonomic "stack" of evolution in this "flaw" you point out.
It is the ability to be self-contained, focused, un-manipulable which makes us what we are, makes us capable as independent strongly self-actualized agents. But it is contrarily, our ability to be manipulated, or entrainability, etc. which then makes us capable of participating in higher order self-organized complex adaptive systems... it is what makes us tribal, social, cultural, civilizational, eusocial. For the narrow optimization of an individual agent's "goals" it is a bug, not a feature, but for the collective emergent system it is a feature not a bug.
Naturally the experiments of Soviet and then echoing, Chinese Communism/Socialism and the many satellite eddies that spun off from them turned out to have some acute limits which lead them to ultimately precess their way to a phase-change boundary, a bifurcation point, a saddle point.
We, the democratic free-market sub-species (Post monarchal W Europe, Post-Empire British Commnwealth, the American States) have also precessed away from the ideals we formed around and cling to today (Make 'Murrica Great Some More Forever Goddamit, even if we have to kill everyone else and it kills us too!) and onto the cusp (IMO) of a saddle in the iterated map that is sociopoliticaleconomicreligiotechno humanity.
Modern self-reinforcing technology (has come in spurts from neolithics to ML running on global, distributed, connected, ubiquitous "computronium".
/Computronium being the stuff Data Centers are condensing into that currently looks like buildings of rooms of racks of trays of slots filled with boards of chips of LSIs of transistors of molecules sucking in electrical power and pouring out heat-entropy for the purpose of "organizing and re-organizing the hell out of the corpus of extant (digitized) human knowledge, and making cryptoGarchs richer". /Who/what do we "become" next? I think *we* are already a collective superorganism (glen has voted for "no more than a slime mold") and it is that collective super-organism's evolution that is in play and it is our subvenience which facilitates that but no longer drives it? As a "single cell" in the emergent super-organism in question, I feel blessed to be here to "observe" (and minimally co-evolve) with it in our mutual sub/super-venience?
I should probably rewrite this as a poem. It is definitely a Yarn both in the sense of EricS' recent invokation and in that of Tyson Yunkaporta <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyson_Yunkaporta> methinks?
- SteveS On 6/18/25 6:46 AM, Prof David West wrote:
Nick, A partial reclamation is possible.In software I deal with a closed-deterministic system and I define a specific protocol for an object: the set of messages to which it can and is willing to respond, along with the defined response. In the world of software I forbid one object managing/controlling another despite the fact that the default assumption behind every program is some kind of hierarchical control (even in parallel programming). I can provide all kinds of arguments as to why this is bad and non-control is good, in programming, but you are not really interested in that realm.As to a person. We have a wide ranging 'protocol' of messages we will, often without consideration or consent, respond to. Most of those we picked up non-consciously from parents and culture. This wide range protocol does make humans subject to manipulation.It is possible to expand the protocol and thereby increase the potential for manipulation and control. The "you're going to Hell if you don't stop X" message would be an example. We do this with domesticated animals such that a dog, for example, will respond to 'beg', 'shake', and 'roll over'. (If Pavlov rang his bell in front of a wolf, the "here's lunch" message would likely manipulate the wolf to more than salivation.)But it also possible to self-alter your protocol. I simply will not respond to the "go to hell" message, for example.If we substitute "messages" for "cues" we are pretty much in agreement.We can even get to Zen together:/"cues to an environment that isn't" /is just Maya, the world of illusion. A little meditation and you too can become "immune" to all those cues/messages and achieve Satori (enlightenment).davew On Tue, Jun 17, 2025, at 11:32 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:Dave, Thanks for responding. I hoped that my ".... objects and environments [ahem]..." might catch your attention. This post was my attempt to respond to the intense pressure I feel from EricS and Glen to be more forthright and self-conscious about my metaphysics — by which I mean the things I think before I start thinking..*/Two big differences: I do not distinguish between objects and "environments" and no object is allowed to "manage," "control," "manipulate," or "violate the encapsulation" of any other object/*.Every time I have heard you talk about "object-oriented programming" I have felt that there has probably been some illicit traffic between behaviorism and programming languages that would reward examination. But first I want to try and rescue "management" from the zone of things about which we disagree and put it firmly in the zone of things about which we agree. When I manage you, I don't violate your encapsulation. I don't change the set of if I then O rules that constitute your "insides". On the contrary, I provide you with inputs that, given your design, will produce outputs designed by MY needs, rather than yours. This is the sense in which much management proceeds by deception. We all respond to our environment on the basis of cues. If I can provide you with the cues to an environment that isn't, then I can get you to respond in ways you wouldn't otherwise. That principle is deeply embedded in ethology and also in control system theory. Before we carry this discussion further, I wonder if we do in fact agree on that.Thanks for your charity and close reading. Nick ------------------------------------------------------------------------*From:* Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Prof David West <[email protected]>*Sent:* Tuesday, June 17, 2025 9:53 AM *To:* [email protected] <[email protected]> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box Nick,I have never heard you state your behaviorism in quite this way:/"I think that behaviorism is a way carving the world into objects and environments (ahem) and that rocks behave. Then the distinction beween rocks and organisms would emerge as a distinction between objeccts that manage their environments and objects that dont." /It has some seeming parallels to definitions/descriptions I frequently borrow from Ludwig von Bertalannfy./*A system (any/every) is a set of elements and the relations among them.*/*/An element is differentiated and defined based on its behavior—its "contribution" to the system./*I use 'Object' as a synonym for 'Element', and establish a single way to describe objects, be they abstract (an account), an inanimate (copier machine), human (in a role), or a software/hardware Artifact. The apparent dualism (element — relation) in the definition is, in software, is eliminated by embodying 'relations' in behavioral objects.Two big differences: I do not distinguish between objects and "environments" and no object is allowed to "manage," "control," "manipulate," or "violate the encapsulation" of any other object.There must be some essential differences in our concepts of "Behavior," else we have been talking past each other all these many years.davew On Mon, Jun 16, 2025, at 10:05 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:Eric,It's a dead pigeon that we throw out the window. I wouldnt waste a perfectly good dead duck on such an experiment.I cant decide if the dead pigeon is the limit of behavior or if is behavior. I think it is behavior. I think that behaviorism is a way carving the world into objects and environments (ahem) and that rocks behave. Then the distinction beween rocks and organisms would emerge as a distinction between objeccts that manage their environments and objects that dont.nOn Tue, May 12, 2020 at 7:07 PM Eric Charles <[email protected]> wrote:Jon, This is a great expansion of the issue, and it might take me a bit to build up to an adequate response. You are definitely right that "scale" is one of many dimensions we might look at when evaluating whether or not something is a behavior. The evaluation of whether or not something is behaving involves comparisons, and those comparisons have to be "fair" in some sense that suggests a "domain". For example, if we drop a dead duck out a window, and then agree that falling in that fashion does not evidence behavior, we wouldn't want to then move to a coin-drop in water (where the coin spins and slides erratically, moving down at various speeds) and assert the coin was alive because it's movement didn't look like the dead-duck's movement. Does that get us anywhere? ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist American University - Adjunct Instructor On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 12:58 PM Jon Zingale <[email protected]> wrote: Glen, Eric, I am enjoying how the conversation is developing. The celery example strikes me as being important, but where Glen refers to /scale/ I would speak of /domain of definition/. That a shift in domain happens to be size, rather than some other contextual specification, may not be what we want. If this isn't the case Glen, please let me know. With respect to Eric's points it seems fair to me to say that a paddle wheel is behaving, but perhaps not in the /larger/ context of the river. The celery is behaving, but not not in the /smaller/ context of capillary action. Here I am using the language of /large/ and /small/, but perhaps other modalities have a place as well. One can say Nick's behavior appears spontaneously, but in fact was necessitated by something /prior/. Here an /earlier/ Nick could play the role of the river. Frank, Would you say that the mind is as public as RSA encryption? .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ... FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam <http://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/ .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ... FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam <http://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/ -- Nicholas S. 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Description: OpenPGP digital signature
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