Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[thompnickson2]

Hi, everybody, 

 

This has been one heluva discussion, and, given the brush-back I got from Glen 
a couple of days ago, I thought I had  better stay out of it unless I could 
really throw myself into it, and I have been tied up with other things.  It's 
the kind of conversation that makes me thing we really ought to be writing a 
book.  The perspectives I get out of reading what you write I get nowhere else 
in the world.  

 

At the risk of getting my ears boxed again, I would like to highlight the 
passage below.  It is for me the crux of one of the matters we are discussing 
here.  What a colleague of mine used to call "interiority". 

 

But I reject the concept of "in principle visible". We either have a 
seeing-device or we don't. And if we don't have the device with which to 
measure it, then it's not directly [†] measurable. (Now, as I've implied 
before, we can *indirectly* measure something that's hidden. That's what I'd 
like to eventually talk about.

 

Visible, here, is, I take it, a metaphor.  I reject, I think, the fundamental 
notion of “hidden” and perhaps of the entire black box idea.  The trouble with 
the black box model is that it implies that we experience the outside of the 
box directly but have to infer what we learn about the insides of the box.  But 
all experience is the product of inference, including everything we know about 
the outside of the box as well as everything we know about the inside of the 
box.  To say that some inferences are to inner things and some to outer things 
is to say SOMETHING, but I have never understood exactly what.  What is this 
dimension of “interiority”?  Does it refer to anything except our difficulty at 
getting at whatever we take ourselves to be talking about?  And is talk about 
the mind as inner (and the hard problem, and all that) just the foolish 
abduction that just because the brain is hidden by the skull, and the mind is 
hidden by it’s conceptual obscurity,  the latter must be the “seat” of the 
former?  

 

I still don’t have the ability to dig into the 50 excellent posts that we have 
made on this subject to try and articulate the positions and to understand 
particularly those posts that appeal at length to computation talk.  I suspect 
that Glen is saying something quite similar but more precise than what I have 
said above.  But, if it’s not the same, I would recommend that before we talk 
about how we are to “indirectly” measure the “inner”, that we come to some sort 
of understanding of what it is to say that something is inner.  What are the 
rules by which we deploy this metaphor.  What implications of it are essential, 
of which confirmation is required for us even to use the metaphor.  And what 
heuristic value does the metaphor offer. 

 

I hope I have not blotted my copybook again.  In any case, keep heating this 
iron and hammering away at it, until you get into shape.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

thompnicks...@gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2020 6:10 PM
To: FriAM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

 

I think Jon's contribution (and my response) argue that the entire space can be 
spanned by such domain specifiers. So, I don't think we're dealing with 
borderline examples, only examples that demonstrate the spanning.

 

I don't think agree with Holt's criteria for distinguishing behavior from 
movement. The example of the antenna (or *any* passive and maybe even purely 
*reactive*)  demonstrates that such things behave. The passive and reactive 
sense of behaving is necessary for me in order to get at the hidden states, 
memory-laden, hysterical (hysteretical?), processes I think we need in order to 
approach human thought. If, e.g. an inductor, can be considered "behaving" 
according to Holt's criteria, then it might be OK. But if an inductor's or 
capacitor's behavior is classified as "mere movement", then no, I disagree.

 

It's good to hear that you're willing to allow behavior *composition* (e.g. 
cellular behavior composes into tissue behavior composes into object behavior). 
But I reject the concept of "in principle visible". We either have a 
seeing-device or we don't. And if we don't have the device with which to 
measure it, then it's not directly [†] measurable. (Now, as I've implied 
before, we can *indirectly* measure something that's hidden. That's what I'd 
like to eventually talk about. We can indirectly measure celery cell behavior 
by watching the color. We can indirectly measure someone's thoughts by EEG ... 
or asking them questions. But those things are still hidden, not directly 
measurable.) Your holographic principle asserts that there is a *bound* (or 
limit) to the spanning parameter such that any hypothetical thing beyond it, 
hidden, is "invalid". (The analogy is to the

Re: [FRIAM] sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

[David Eric Smith]

Frank, 

> On May 13, 2020, at 7:31 AM, Frank Wimberly  wrote:
> 
> When I worked at the PIttsburgh Supercomputing Center, a division of CMU, we 
> had a user who produced a visualization of the first few milliseconds after 
> the big bang.  How can they do that?
> 
> Didn't Penzias and Wilson win the Nobel Prize for showing that the background 
> radiation caused by that event is what radio telescopes hear/see that they 
> can't otherwise account for?

Yes, this is correct.  There is a big time difference, though.  The microwave 
radiation we see as the CMB is the last image of a matter-radiation equilibrium 
just before a plasma of free electrons and nuclei (which couples actively and 
continuously to the radiation field in which it is embedded, and is thus 
“opaque") condensed into the first neutral atoms, which are mostly transparent 
to that radiation.  The event is called “recombination”, even though there had 
been no combination before that, and it is reconstructed to have happened at 
about 370k years after the Big Bang.  The non-uniformity of the CMB reflects 
fluctuations in the density of matter and radiation, which probably were mainly 
maintained through the inertia of matter, since just electromagnetic radiation 
would have smoothed faster.  (Although, exactly how much of this was imposed at 
distances larger than the causal horizon at that time, by inflationary initial 
conditions, is not something I know off the top of my head.).  All that to say, 
the CMB as we see it today is the image of what was even, at the time, a 
relatively low-energy transition, on the order of ten thousand degrees.

A 1ms simulation requires going through several much earlier transitions, but 
they are all still within physics that we can characterize in accelerators.  
The number I find on google is 10^12K, which is around 10^8eV, so less than 
1GeV, which is the characteristic energy scale for condensation of nucleons 
from strong interactions, and a factor of nearly 10^5 lower than the highest 
energies now characterized at the Large Hadron Collider.  That simulation could 
have been done within Enrico Fermi’s very earliest-generation representation 
for the interaction of pi mesons with nucleons, before even tackling the hard 
problems of predicting nucleon masses correctly from QCD, which dragged on for 
a few more decades.

A thing that is so strange is that, although these were very indirect to 
discover and technically difficult to reach, and hard to simulate well, they 
are still “simple” phenomena, in the sense of having few new organizational 
motifs required to be understood.  So a simulation of them is less of a problem 
in principle than a simulation of how the changes in a regulatory law should be 
expected to change the long-range possibilities for the trajectory of an 
economy.  

It’s all very strange, how these things fit together.

Eric




> 
> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 3:59 PM Roger Critchlow  > wrote:
> Jon --
> 
> It's a mystery to me.  I believe they are simply counting the number of 
> spectral lines at each wave number and plotting the histogram.  And the link 
> is between the now and the very long ago.  And I believe there's no reason to 
> expect this histogram to have any particular distribution at all?  It's just 
> a weird result.
> 
> -- rec --
> 
> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:10 PM Jon Zingale  > wrote:
> Roger,
> 
> I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
> and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
> Could you say more about this result?
> 
> Jon
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> 
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Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[Eric Charles]

Ok so how do we distinguish behavior from non-behavior movements within
the system you are proposing? In what way do we distinguish the dead duck
from the living duck? Or, to stick with the example you prefer, the
changing color of the celery from the changing color of a paper towel
placed part-way into the same solution?

I'm also not sure what you mean to refer to with "holographic principle."
My assertion is that psychologists are not, in their basic activity, trying
to infer about internal processes. That claim is similar to the claim that
chemists are not, in their basic activity, trying to infer about the inside
of atoms. Or that Newton, in formulating his physics, was not trying to
infer about the inside of planets. The phenomenon in question can be taken
apart if you want, but that is a fundamentally different path of inquiry. A
rabbit trying to escape a fox is made up of cells, but the cracking open
its skulls and looking inside won't tell you that it is *trying to escape
the fox*. The *trying-to-escape* is not inside it's head, it is in the
rabbit's behavior relative to the fox, and can be observed. When someone
says "Hey, come quick! Look, that rabbit is trying to get away from that
fox!", they are not making some mysterious inference about a hidden state
within the rabbit, they are describing what they are observing.


---
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor



On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 8:10 PM uǝlƃ ☣  wrote:

> I think Jon's contribution (and my response) argue that the entire space
> can be spanned by such domain specifiers. So, I don't think we're dealing
> with borderline examples, only examples that demonstrate the spanning.
>
> I don't think agree with Holt's criteria for distinguishing behavior from
> movement. The example of the antenna (or *any* passive and maybe even
> purely *reactive*)  demonstrates that such things behave. The passive and
> reactive sense of behaving is necessary for me in order to get at the
> hidden states, memory-laden, hysterical (hysteretical?), processes I think
> we need in order to approach human thought. If, e.g. an inductor, can be
> considered "behaving" according to Holt's criteria, then it might be OK.
> But if an inductor's or capacitor's behavior is classified as "mere
> movement", then no, I disagree.
>
> It's good to hear that you're willing to allow behavior *composition*
> (e.g. cellular behavior composes into tissue behavior composes into object
> behavior). But I reject the concept of "in principle visible". We either
> have a seeing-device or we don't. And if we don't have the device with
> which to measure it, then it's not directly [†] measurable. (Now, as I've
> implied before, we can *indirectly* measure something that's hidden. That's
> what I'd like to eventually talk about. We can indirectly measure celery
> cell behavior by watching the color. We can indirectly measure someone's
> thoughts by EEG ... or asking them questions. But those things are still
> hidden, not directly measurable.) Your holographic principle asserts that
> there is a *bound* (or limit) to the spanning parameter such that any
> hypothetical thing beyond it, hidden, is "invalid". (The analogy is to the
> Bekenstein bound, if I understand that correctly.) In your language, you
> might say that talking about anything inside the bound is "invalid",
> whereas talking about things outside the bound is "understood as empirical
> questions about behavior". My contribution is simply to formulate this so
> that it can apply across the board, everywhere, to antennas and humans. And
> if I'm lucky, we might be able to start arguing about *where* that
> bound/limit lies.
>
> And, again Jon's contribution demonstrates that at least the celery
> (organism-eye, tissue-scope, cell-scope) example *is* about scale. But not
> all hiding need be about scale.
>
>
> [†] I imagine there's an argument waiting for me out there that I'm
> kicking the can down the road with "direct" and "indirect". But we can
> define a graph/network of transformations and a hop number across those
> transformations. By that, we can define a "distance" between the measuring
> device (e.g. eyeball) and the thing measured (e.g. cells). The greater that
> distance, the more indirect it is, the more hidden the target is. Another
> way to demonstrate this point would be to say something like some
> microscopes are more powerful than others, or some telescopes allow you to
> see further than others. The hiddenness, directness, hop distance is
> described by these words "power" and "further".
>
> [‡] Of course, Jon's generalization to domains also allows
> discrete/disjoint domains that can't be spanned by a continuous thing like
> a scalar. It opens us up to, say, changing types or even changing the
> entire algebra. And that might be required to capture the historicity,
> stigmergy, developmental trajectory of an individual human

Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Steven A Smith]

Dave -

> The COVID-19 pandemic will end, at least in the US, by mid-June, 2020.
Ignoring the "bait" that I (and others) took earlier, I'll try to
respond to the singular prediction above:

What means "end"?   What is a specific statistic that you believe to
indicate that the pandemic has ended?

From Wikipedia:

A *pandemic* (from Greek
 πᾶν, /pan/, "all"
and δῆμος, /demos/, "people") is an epidemic
 of disease
 that has spread across a
large region, for instance multiple continents
 or worldwide, affecting a
substantial number of people. A widespread endemic
 disease with
a stable number of infected people is not a pandemic. Widespread
endemic diseases with a stable number of infected people such as
recurrences of seasonal influenza
 are generally
excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe
rather than being spread worldwide.

The WHO published THIS description of phases of a pandemic:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143061/

/In the //*post-pandemic*// period, influenza disease activity will
have returned to levels normally seen for seasonal influenza. It is
expected that the pandemic virus will behave as a seasonal influenza
A virus. At this stage, it is important to maintain surveillance and
update pandemic preparedness and response plans accordingly. An
intensive phase of recovery and evaluation may be required./


Or maybe some other (measurable) definition?

- Steve


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Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I think Jon's contribution (and my response) argue that the entire space can be 
spanned by such domain specifiers. So, I don't think we're dealing with 
borderline examples, only examples that demonstrate the spanning.

I don't think agree with Holt's criteria for distinguishing behavior from 
movement. The example of the antenna (or *any* passive and maybe even purely 
*reactive*)  demonstrates that such things behave. The passive and reactive 
sense of behaving is necessary for me in order to get at the hidden states, 
memory-laden, hysterical (hysteretical?), processes I think we need in order to 
approach human thought. If, e.g. an inductor, can be considered "behaving" 
according to Holt's criteria, then it might be OK. But if an inductor's or 
capacitor's behavior is classified as "mere movement", then no, I disagree.

It's good to hear that you're willing to allow behavior *composition* (e.g. 
cellular behavior composes into tissue behavior composes into object behavior). 
But I reject the concept of "in principle visible". We either have a 
seeing-device or we don't. And if we don't have the device with which to 
measure it, then it's not directly [†] measurable. (Now, as I've implied 
before, we can *indirectly* measure something that's hidden. That's what I'd 
like to eventually talk about. We can indirectly measure celery cell behavior 
by watching the color. We can indirectly measure someone's thoughts by EEG ... 
or asking them questions. But those things are still hidden, not directly 
measurable.) Your holographic principle asserts that there is a *bound* (or 
limit) to the spanning parameter such that any hypothetical thing beyond it, 
hidden, is "invalid". (The analogy is to the Bekenstein bound, if I understand 
that correctly.) In your language, you might say that talking about anything 
inside the bound is "invalid", whereas talking about things outside the bound 
is "understood as empirical questions about behavior". My contribution is 
simply to formulate this so that it can apply across the board, everywhere, to 
antennas and humans. And if I'm lucky, we might be able to start arguing about 
*where* that bound/limit lies.

And, again Jon's contribution demonstrates that at least the celery 
(organism-eye, tissue-scope, cell-scope) example *is* about scale. But not all 
hiding need be about scale.


[†] I imagine there's an argument waiting for me out there that I'm kicking the 
can down the road with "direct" and "indirect". But we can define a 
graph/network of transformations and a hop number across those transformations. 
By that, we can define a "distance" between the measuring device (e.g. eyeball) 
and the thing measured (e.g. cells). The greater that distance, the more 
indirect it is, the more hidden the target is. Another way to demonstrate this 
point would be to say something like some microscopes are more powerful than 
others, or some telescopes allow you to see further than others. The 
hiddenness, directness, hop distance is described by these words "power" and 
"further". 

[‡] Of course, Jon's generalization to domains also allows discrete/disjoint 
domains that can't be spanned by a continuous thing like a scalar. It opens us 
up to, say, changing types or even changing the entire algebra. And that might 
be required to capture the historicity, stigmergy, developmental trajectory of 
an individual human. E.g. Nick can't continuously turn some knob like scale to 
get to Frank's perspective. He'd have to change the whole universe of discourse 
(domain) in order to do that. But if I can't even get others to understand 
hiddenness of scale, there's no way in Hell I'll be able to get someone to 
understand the hiddenness of more radical domain changes.

On 5/12/20 3:51 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> That is excellent! However, I think it brings us back to the problem of 
> starting with borderline examples. 
> 
> I /might /be willing to talk about pond scum behaving, but certainly not 
> without further analysis. Did we agree to use Holt's criteria for 
> distinguishing behavior from mere movement? If so, we can evaluate whether 
> the cells in the celery or the tissues are "behaving." I think both are 
> unlikely to make the cut, but, as with the pond scum, I'm willing to be 
> convinced. The issue isn't size/scale, the issue is how to properly describe 
> the movements in question. What is the goal of the celery cell? How does the 
> celery cell vary its movements to accomplish that goal? Please feel free to 
> speculate for now, if necessary... so long as everything you speculate can, 
> in principle, be confirmed or refuted by experiment. 
> 
> Remember, in a casual conversation, you could talk about the "behavior" of a 
> rock rolling down a hill, the "behavior" of the planets in the sky, the 
> "behavior" of a stream, etc., etc. But once we start trying to be rigorous 
> with our terms, that stops working pretty quickly. The same restriction 
> happens with the central

Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[Eric Charles]

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  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?
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Frank Wimberly]

Sorry.  The wife says, "It turns out that it wasn't the meteor that killed
the dinosaurs; it was stress about the meteor".

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 5:02 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> Stress or virus
>
>
> https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipNtFVkBUo9UR7UFiqk8Pe9Jvo-2WubK07UEUGhr
>
> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 2:33 PM Marcus Daniels 
> wrote:
>
>> Dave writes:
>>
>>
>>
>> “Unfortunately, culture is, at minimum, NP-Hard and almost certainly NP
>> complete.”
>>
>>
>>
>> Noisy wetware is going to get anywhere without exponential resources?
>>
>> Like Sars-COV2, the humans are sometimes prone to that rate of
>> reproduction.
>>
>>
>>
>> Marcus
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>>
>
>
> --
> Frank Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 505 670-9918
>


-- 
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Frank Wimberly]

Stress or virus

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipNtFVkBUo9UR7UFiqk8Pe9Jvo-2WubK07UEUGhr

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 2:33 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> Dave writes:
>
>
>
> “Unfortunately, culture is, at minimum, NP-Hard and almost certainly NP
> complete.”
>
>
>
> Noisy wetware is going to get anywhere without exponential resources?
>
> Like Sars-COV2, the humans are sometimes prone to that rate of
> reproduction.
>
>
>
> Marcus
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>


-- 
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[Eric Charles]

Frank,
Well I think conclusions drawn from fMRI results are dramatically
overblown, but the results themselves are mostly decent but if we
side-step that discussion to focus on your broader question as I understand
it:

If *you*, personally, did the type of experiment that got that result, but
use thought of a covariant tensors instead of cups at every appropriate
point, then yes, you would probably end up with a highly-constrained
multi-variate regression equation that could do a pretty good job
predicting whether or not you were thinking of a covariant tensor during a
given trial.

Of course, you couldn't use a typical college freshman for that experiment,
which makes it a lot harder to do the work, and the result wouldn't get as
much press afterwards, which makes it harder to find a researcher willing
to put in the effort. ;- )

---
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor



On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:45 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> Less public.  Last I heard with fMRI they might be able to detect that
> you're thinking of a coffee cup.  I rarely think of cups.  Could the detect
> that I was thinking of a covariant tensor?
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:58 AM Jon Zingale  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?
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Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[Eric Charles]

Glen,
That is excellent! However, I think it brings us back to the problem of
starting with borderline examples.

I *might *be willing to talk about pond scum behaving, but certainly not
without further analysis. Did we agree to use Holt's criteria for
distinguishing behavior from mere movement? If so, we can evaluate whether
the cells in the celery or the tissues are "behaving." I think both are
unlikely to make the cut, but, as with the pond scum, I'm willing to be
convinced. The issue isn't size/scale, the issue is how to properly
describe the movements in question. What is the goal of the celery cell?
How does the celery cell vary its movements to accomplish that goal? Please
feel free to speculate for now, if necessary... so long as everything you
speculate can, in principle, be confirmed or refuted by experiment.

Remember, in a casual conversation, you could talk about the "behavior" of
a rock rolling down a hill, the "behavior" of the planets in the sky, the
"behavior" of a stream, etc., etc. But once we start trying to be rigorous
with our terms, that stops working pretty quickly. The same restriction
happens with the central terms of all sciences.

The issue of what is or is not "hidden" is a different issue from "scale",
so I'm not sure where to go in regards to that part of your comment. In the
way of thinking Nick and I are talking advancing, small behaviors
definitely still count as behaviors, including ones you would need a
microscope to detect. Those are still in-principle visible. You could
construct Holt's base example of behavior with well under 100 cells for the
whole organism.


---
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor



On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 10:24 AM uǝlƃ ☣  wrote:

> OK. Thanks. I'll try again.
>
> It's not the movement of the water that concerns me as much of the
> movement of the *cells* that cause the movement of the water. If we can
> credibly talk about pond scum behaving, then we can talk about a)
> individual cellular behavior and b) tissue behavior. This is why I insist
> on talking about scale.
>
> When you look at the stick of clipped celery sitting in the colored water,
> a coarse scale of the behavior is the change in color. A finer-grained
> scale is the tissue behavior. An even finer-grained scale is the cellular
> behavior. When you look at it with your naked eye, you cannot see the
> latter two, but you can see the 1st one. So, the latter two are *hidden*.
> (I don't want to play word games around "state"... so if you like "process"
> or "whateverwordyouwant", then fine.) But the point is that there is
> something *inside* the celery that you cannot see with your naked eye.
> Change the measuring instrument, and you change what's hidden. E.g. with a
> magnifying glass, you can see the color change and may be able to see the
> water moving and *maybe* even the tissue behavior, depending, but you still
> won't see the cellular behavior. With a high-power microscope, you'll be
> able to see the cellular behavior and, depending, maybe the color and the
> tissue.
>
> It is that sort of conversation that has to happen when we talk about
> "thinking", "feeling", and "consciousness".
>
> The assertion you made was: "there are no valid questions about psychology
> that are not properly understood as empirical questions about behavior." --
> On 5/4/20 5:20 PM
>
> I agree completely. But what you ignored or assumed in your statement was
> SCALE. The question in the context of the celery is: Are there valid
> questions about the tissue or cellular behavior that can be properly
> understood in terms of the naked eye visible behavior? I'd argue *yes*.
> Just because the tissue and cellular behavior are hidden does not mean you
> can't formulate (proper) questions about that finer-grained scale behavior.
> In fact, that's a huge component of science. Similarly, just because there
> are hidden parts of the human (e.g. thinking) that may be hidden given our
> current measuring devices, does not mean we can't (properly) formulate
> hypotheses about that hidden behavior.
>
> Further, we don't necessarily *need* high-power measuring devices in order
> to accumulate evidence for a given hypothesis about those hidden behaviors.
> We can falsify and accumulate evidence for *hidden* behavior that we can't
> *directly* measure with a device. And *that's* where my proposal to look at
> compression, state-space reconstruction, entropy, (apparent) randomness,
> etc. enter the rhetoric.
>
> On 5/11/20 2:46 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> > Off the top of my head, I would say the movement of the water in the
> celery probably will not count as behavior, but that the leaf-turning
> probably is. Do you think something different?
> >
> > Also, is there a "hidden state" of the celery we should be looking for?
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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Re: [FRIAM] sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

[Frank Wimberly]

When I worked at the PIttsburgh Supercomputing Center, a division of CMU,
we had a user who produced a visualization of the first few milliseconds
after the big bang.  How can they do that?

Didn't Penzias and Wilson win the Nobel Prize for showing that the
background radiation caused by that event is what radio telescopes hear/see
that they can't otherwise account for?

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 3:59 PM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> Jon --
>
> It's a mystery to me.  I believe they are simply counting the number of
> spectral lines at each wave number and plotting the histogram.  And the
> link is between the now and the very long ago.  And I believe there's no
> reason to expect this histogram to have any particular distribution at
> all?  It's just a weird result.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:10 PM Jon Zingale  wrote:
>
>> Roger,
>>
>> I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
>> and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
>> Could you say more about this result?
>>
>> Jon
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-- 
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
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Re: [FRIAM] sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

[Roger Critchlow]

Jon --

It's a mystery to me.  I believe they are simply counting the number of
spectral lines at each wave number and plotting the histogram.  And the
link is between the now and the very long ago.  And I believe there's no
reason to expect this histogram to have any particular distribution at
all?  It's just a weird result.

-- rec --

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:10 PM Jon Zingale  wrote:

> Roger,
>
> I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
> and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
> Could you say more about this result?
>
> Jon
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Marcus Daniels]

Dave writes:

“Unfortunately, culture is, at minimum, NP-Hard and almost certainly NP 
complete.”

Noisy wetware is going to get anywhere without exponential resources?
Like Sars-COV2, the humans are sometimes prone to that rate of reproduction.

Marcus
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I understand. But remember that I care very little about the person wearing (or 
not) a helmet. I care *much* more about the other drivers, the ambulance, 
healthcare costs (of both dead and not-dead), etc. What that implies is that I 
don't care very much about the stories from MEs or EMTs, etc. What I care about 
is the cost to society.

To clarify, all that's required to get an endorsement in Oregon is to pass a 
relatively trivial test. But there is ample, scientific, evidence that taking a 
training course (even if only 2 weekends) prior to the test, reduces every bad 
consequence. I'd argue that a law in a *huge* territory like a state, covering 
a huge demographic, is not intended (and won't) help any given individual. They 
do, however, help populations of individuals. Helmet laws are no different.

So I'd welcome any statistics you have over, for example, costs to the state, 
county, city, hospital systems, charities, etc. But statistics showing things 
like Snell vs ODOT impact ratings and spine damage are less interesting to me. 
For data like that to be interesting, we'd have to look not at *laws* but best 
practices and, maybe, household rules (like ATGATT).

My prediction: Helmet laws *reduce* the cost of motorcycling to society.

On 5/12/20 1:14 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> another time, another place, if an only if someone is interested — I can 
> prove my assertions about helmets and show exactly and precisely how all the 
> studies you may have found using Google Scholar, err. Show how other factors 
> (notably age and hours of experience) are far more important that presence or 
> absence of a helmet, and statistics from autopsy reports that belie the 
> simplistic police report based (dead-helmet, dead-no helmet) statistics.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Prof David West]

Marcus,

Unfortunately, culture is, at minimum, NP-Hard and almost certainly NP complete.

davew


On Tue, May 12, 2020, at 2:18 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Dave writes:

> 

> < Similar things happen all the time when we insist on focusing on "the 
> science" and ignore the "art" and the insights of "non-scientific" 
> disciplines and fields of inquiry. >

> * *

> It is possible to state models of cultural interactions and simulate them on 
> a computer. When one does this, they will have said something precise enough 
> to be wrong. 

> 

> Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Marcus Daniels]

Dave writes:

< Similar things happen all the time when we insist on focusing on "the 
science" and ignore the "art" and the insights of "non-scientific" disciplines 
and fields of inquiry. >

It is possible to state models of cultural interactions and simulate them on a 
computer.   When one does this, they will have said something precise enough to 
be wrong.

Marcus
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Prof David West]

glen,

another time, another place, if an only if someone is interested — I can prove 
my assertions about helmets and show exactly and precisely how all the studies 
you may have found using Google Scholar, err. Show how other factors (notably 
age and hours of experience) are far more important that presence or absence of 
a helmet, and statistics from autopsy reports that belie the simplistic police 
report based (dead-helmet, dead-no helmet) statistics.

davew


On Tue, May 12, 2020, at 10:10 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Ha! Well, these analogies do break down. So "precisely the same way" 
> doesn't really work. For example, I think you'd be hard pressed to say 
> that the costs associated with obesity are "precisely the same" as the 
> costs associated with cleaning your smashed body off the road.
> 
> I continue to argue for context and it's importance in these issues. 
> The RoI for seat belts is quite clear. I *think* it's quite clear for 
> mandated helmets, too. A quick Google scholar search shows the actual 
> science behind them (contrary to Dave's conclusion). Regardless, each 
> issue, from the decibels of one's leaf blower to underage ATV riders, 
> from binary rules (prison) to modest inhibitory policies (taxation) 
> requires context. To ignore the context and make blanket generalities 
> like you're doing or blanket laws for/against them is technically 
> ignorant, in the sense that we're ignoring the details.
> 
> But the main point remains: It's not about the individual. It's about 
> the collection of individuals, including the plants and bacteria.
> 
> 
> On 5/12/20 8:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> > In precisely the same way I am harming others when I ride a motorcycle
> > with or without a helmet (THOSE accidents are almost always more gory
> > than the ones with cars buffering/hiding/containing the mess) or a
> > bicycle on the roadways with cars, or fail to optimally care for my body
> > (and mind and spirit ... just google "people of walmart youtube").   The
> > messes we all present one another by being human are just so
> > *intolerable*...  we should set a very high bar for how much any
> > individual can impose on the psyche/sensitivities of any other
> > individual by their mere existence and exercise of personal
> > preferences.  Oh yeh... no more convertibles, no vehicles with a power 
> > to weight ratio above X, certainly no ATVs... and no parkour... that
> > shit can just go SO wrong, and *somebody* has to clean it up... splint
> > the bones... gauze over the gaping eye-socket...  >8^D
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Prof David West]

Steve,

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I continue to fail in my attempts to 
parameterize discussions because all of you are so dammed smart. But I try 
again.

I wanted to make a simple prediction (the end of the pandemic) that contrasted 
significantly with the prevailing prediction (yours included) that there will 
be a round-two and a second lock down. Wait five weeks and see which one 
appears to be closer to observations and then explore the underpinnings of each.

I conceded the "facts" that, I think, the prevailing prediction relies upon: 
there will be spikes, the death toll will continue to increase, people will be 
careless with regard masks and social distancing, new mysteries will arise, etc.

But, I claim, those facts are irrelevant to the outcome.

What I hoped to achieve with this prediction — if it comes to pass — is a 
conversation about what variables, what data, what forces, what relationships, 
what principles where overlooked / willfully ignored by those making the 
prevailing predictions.

I hoped for Glen's reaction — pin this sucker and sharpen the knives while we 
wait. (thereby assuming the not inconsiderable risk of being carved like a 
Thanksgiving turkey come mid-June.)

Of course, I must believe I have an alternative perspective, think I have 
alternative facts, possess alternative theories; all of which underlay the 
prediction. Clearly, I have a not so hidden agenda. You called me on all of 
this and I made the mistake of replying and therefore muddied the water.

In particular, my admission of a subtext was hopelessly unclear. I should have 
spoke of alternative ways of "thinking," not "knowing." At the moment the whole 
"acid epistemology" theme I have raised before is deferred and not particularly 
useful. So to, the "cult" of science issue.

COVID presents a _*unique*_ problem. The government's, the media's, much of the 
populace's response to that problem is to do "what the science tells us." FRIAM 
is seemingly obsessed with determining what the science is and what it is 
telling us to do. 

But COVID, at least is most challenging aspects, does not present a scientific 
problem. The problem is human and cultural. Focusing on "the science" blinds us 
and causes us to ignore significant amounts of relevant information and 
knowledge. Moreover, much of that information and knowledge is not reducible to 
quantities and formal relationships.

And science is not the essential problem — the insanity of believing that 
unless and until a discipline becomes "scientific" (mathematical, quantifiable, 
etc.) it has little or no value. E.g. anthropology is ignored in favor of 
sociology because the latter is far more formal, more scientific.

Malinowski had the insight and provided a thorough description of "satisficing" 
along with all kinds of case studies of its application in Polynesian cultures 
decades before Simon won his Nobel prize in economics for making the exact same 
concept mathematical.

Similar things happen all the time when we insist on focusing on "the science" 
and ignore the "art" and the insights of "non-scientific" disciplines and 
fields of inquiry.

davew


On Mon, May 11, 2020, at 11:05 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> Dave -

>> You noted,* "I simply can't read this as a "simple observation / 
>> prediction"... I believe it is laced with judgements and assumptions... some 
>> I agree with and some which I find either questionable in substance or in 
>> intent, but all worth inspecting."*
>> 
>> Nevertheless, that is exactly what I intend — a prediction that will or will 
>> not be borne out. If not, everyone gets a chance to jeer at the wannabee 
>> Nostradamus. If it does, then maybe a discussion of why; the reasons behind 
>> the prediction.
> I understand that was how you wanted it to be interpreted, and I agree that 
> it can be interpreted strictly that way. If I didn't know you at all, I might 
> accept that the "subtext" as you acknowledge it could/should go unspoken to. 
> I found (at least) two subtexts.
> 
>> I will cede, immediately, that there is a very strong subtext. For the last 
>> month or more I have seen this list, and a few virtual FRIAMS, almost 
>> exclusively devoted to "scientific," statistical, epidemiological, models 
>> and projections of the virus and what the future holds based on those 
>> models, that math, that science.
>> 
>> As if there was no other data set, no other way of thinking about the 
>> problem, no other way of making projections and predictions, no other way of 
>> making sense of the data. No other foundation upon which to make decisions.
>> 
>> My prediction is a challenge to a gentleperson's duel with regard that "as 
>> if ..." And, it is a continuation of a theme I have harped on before - there 
>> are other ways of knowing and other things to know about that are important 
>> but neglected because of the dominance of Scientism.
> I wasn't thinking that much about THAT subtext, though I recognize that it

Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -


> Aha! Excellent point! That viruses are parasites might be a critical issue, 
> though. What do viruses really do for us? It's less a matter of whether they 
> feel pain and more about parasitism. I hesitate to google "ethics of 
> parasitism".

.. and now we tangent to mutualistic, commensal, and parasitic
symbiosis.  Viruses may or may not be strictly parasitic (if such an
absolute is even possible)...  it doesn't seem to be a far stretch to
suggest that humans have adapted to hosting viruses in many ways, some
as beneficial as compensatory.   Following the other lines of thought
here, it has been said that "pneumonia is the old man's friend" (not a
virus, but the same role).  Is not herd-culling of value to a species?  

I nominally borrow my ethics in this context from Albert Schweitzer's
"Reverence for Life" and his oft-quoted (by me mostly) line:

/The most immediate fact of man’s consciousness is the assertion "I
am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live"/

/— /Albert Schweitzer

This question took me nicely back to the Alife II conference in SFe in
1990 when these kinds of questions were still fairly fresh and young.  
I found a great "trip report" by another one of the attendee which
preserved a number of great anecdotes from some of the familiar names. 

http://shinyverse.org/larryy/ALife2.html

I think the most interesting to me (in that moment?) was a panel on the
Ontology of ALife...  probably good preparation for FriAM discussions...

*Ontology of Artificial Life Panel with Peter Cariani, Steen
Rasmussen, Norm Packard, Tom Toffoli, Robert Rosen and Elliot Sober*

The trip-report didn't trigger my memories beyond remembering that the
panel was a lot more lively and interesting than it's title would suggest.

Symbiotically yours,

 - Steve

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Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[Frank Wimberly]

Less public.  Last I heard with fMRI they might be able to detect that
you're thinking of a coffee cup.  I rarely think of cups.  Could the detect
that I was thinking of a covariant tensor?

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, May 12, 2020, 10:58 AM Jon Zingale  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?
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Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Yes, you're right. Scale is merely one parameter by which the domain can be 
shifted. The only problem is that "domain" is a pretty abstract concept. So 
choosing a concrete example (like scale) helps move the discussion along 
without getting too caught up in the generalization. This bears directly on the 
hedging Nick shows with "internal states" and I suspect lingers with the word 
"hidden". Why some thing/process/state/behavior is hidden shouldn't get in the 
way of recognizing that it's hidden. It can be hidden by the perspective (I 
can't see that far) or by definition ("There are many like it, but this one is 
mine.") or standard control theory unreachability or the complexity of the 
gen-phen map or whatever. And too much talk of the abstraction (domain) allows 
the conversation to blossom in too many ambiguous directions. But once the 
particular examples are well-handled, the abstraction is necessary in order to 
make the full point (a kind of holographic principle).

On 5/12/20 9:58 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> 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.


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Re: [FRIAM] sum of atomic spectra == 9000K black body?

[Jon Zingale]

Roger,

I get the sense that this is a link between the very small
and the very large, but I am far from being a physicist.
Could you say more about this result?

Jon
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Aha! Excellent point! That viruses are parasites might be a critical issue, 
though. What do viruses really do for us? It's less a matter of whether they 
feel pain and more about parasitism. I hesitate to google "ethics of 
parasitism".

On 5/12/20 9:53 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> and Virii?  Don't forget the viruses... THEY are just trying to live a
> normal, robust, virus life...  and they DO hole an important role in our
> larger ecology.  With that I might endorse the development and
> distribution of a vaccine, but antivirals are somewhat questionable
> morally.   And that Ice9 stuff?  It has a right to reproduce too...
> which of course seems to lead us back around to "what means behaviour?"
> is crystalization as a self-reproduction mode above the threshold?  


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Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[Jon Zingale]

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?
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Steven A Smith]

On 5/12/20 10:10 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Ha! Well, these analogies do break down. So "precisely the same way" doesn't 
> really work. For example, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that the costs 
> associated with obesity are "precisely the same" as the costs associated with 
> cleaning your smashed body off the road.
  of course it is not "precisely" the same (hyperbole)..  no thing
is precisely the same as any other thing (unless of course there really
is only one electron in the universe and it is everywhere at once).  
Scraping the pixels of the image of my obese body out of people's
wedding and vacation photos might seem nearly as distasteful to the
happy tourists/wedding attendees as watching someone else scrape my
viscera from the pavement (or bridge abutment, or light post)... and to
complete the not-precisely-the-same-as analogy, the happy couple trying
to remove my photo-bombing self are likely not doing the scraping
themselves, but rather paying their photographer or digital lab to do
the same while they look away fastidiously (or gaze on morbidly)
(rubbernekking?).
> I continue to argue for context and it's importance in these issues. The RoI 
> for seat belts is quite clear. I *think* it's quite clear for mandated 
> helmets, too. A quick Google scholar search shows the actual science behind 
> them (contrary to Dave's conclusion).

I don't know the detailed data/science behind helmets.  I happen to be
on the end of the spectrum that says "I'd rather have a quick and
concise death than a long and lingering one" whether it is vehicle
accidents or pandemic health threats.  I haven't owned a motorcycle in
over a decade and have only taken one for a spin a few times in the last
few years, always with a helmet (and boots, and long pants, and
long-sleeves).  If I'm going to have a minor motorcycle accident, I'd
rather stumble away from it with all my skin and hopefully my joints and
bones and cranium intact.  If I were riding hard and fast all the time,
maybe modern body-armour/helmetage is good enough (you may own some, or
at least be aware of the state of the art)  to allow me to dump the bike
on a bad turn or to avoid a bad driver and slide, tumble, thump  my way
down the roadway and not suffer (much) more than a bunch of bruises and
a lot of disorientation and maybe some PTSD dreams.  If that is the
case, I recommend such... there might even be a self-inflating Michelin
man suit that emulates the effects of airbags.   If there are such
things then we should mandate them, maybe even for bicycles and scooters
and skate boards, electric-powered or otherwise.

But that doesn't mean I want to outlaw others who might want to ride
motorcycles, with or without helmets, with or without body armour, with
or without the Michelin Man suit.   I am much more sympathetic with
expecting (demanding of?) people hurtling down the highway at a relative
velocity (to my own) of 120MPH or more to wear eye protection so that
they are MUCH less likely to catch a bug in  the eye and swerve into my
lane and do a face-dive through my windshield (with or without a
helmet).    I'm not sure what the right threshold for these things is,
but I do believe they are and should be negotiable within  various
(sub)cultures... so I (mostly) wear my seatbelt and I don't ride a
motorcycle much anymore (because I'm probably more of risk of being a
burden to society as a motorcycle accident victim with or without  a
helmet than ever before).   But that doesn't make me feel that I should
disallow you from riding yours (with or without a helmet or body armour
or yadda yadda). 

>  Regardless, each issue, from the decibels of one's leaf blower to underage 
> ATV riders, from binary rules (prison) to modest inhibitory policies 
> (taxation) requires context. To ignore the context and make blanket 
> generalities like you're doing or blanket laws for/against them is 
> technically ignorant, in the sense that we're ignoring the details.
Yes, we are prone to ignore details and the paradoxes of stacking rules
about how other people should behave when the consequences (to others)
of such are somewhat  secondary or tertiary...   and we all have our pet
examples of things we think *shouldn't* be (en)forced onto us or we
think *should* be (en)forced onto others.  
> But the main point remains: It's not about the individual. It's about the 
> collection of individuals, including the plants and bacteria.
and Virii?  Don't forget the viruses... THEY are just trying to live a
normal, robust, virus life...  and they DO hole an important role in our
larger ecology.  With that I might endorse the development and
distribution of a vaccine, but antivirals are somewhat questionable
morally.   And that Ice9 stuff?  It has a right to reproduce too...
which of course seems to lead us back around to "what means behaviour?"
is crystalization as a self-reproduction mode above the threshold?  


- Steve



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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Ha! Well, these analogies do break down. So "precisely the same way" doesn't 
really work. For example, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that the costs 
associated with obesity are "precisely the same" as the costs associated with 
cleaning your smashed body off the road.

I continue to argue for context and it's importance in these issues. The RoI 
for seat belts is quite clear. I *think* it's quite clear for mandated helmets, 
too. A quick Google scholar search shows the actual science behind them 
(contrary to Dave's conclusion). Regardless, each issue, from the decibels of 
one's leaf blower to underage ATV riders, from binary rules (prison) to modest 
inhibitory policies (taxation) requires context. To ignore the context and make 
blanket generalities like you're doing or blanket laws for/against them is 
technically ignorant, in the sense that we're ignoring the details.

But the main point remains: It's not about the individual. It's about the 
collection of individuals, including the plants and bacteria.


On 5/12/20 8:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> In precisely the same way I am harming others when I ride a motorcycle
> with or without a helmet (THOSE accidents are almost always more gory
> than the ones with cars buffering/hiding/containing the mess) or a
> bicycle on the roadways with cars, or fail to optimally care for my body
> (and mind and spirit ... just google "people of walmart youtube").   The
> messes we all present one another by being human are just so
> *intolerable*...  we should set a very high bar for how much any
> individual can impose on the psyche/sensitivities of any other
> individual by their mere existence and exercise of personal
> preferences.  Oh yeh... no more convertibles, no vehicles with a power 
> to weight ratio above X, certainly no ATVs... and no parkour... that
> shit can just go SO wrong, and *somebody* has to clean it up... splint
> the bones... gauze over the gaping eye-socket...  >8^D

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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Steven A Smith]

On 5/12/20 7:56 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> The contrary argument was made to me by my dad, who called himself a 
> "Goldwater Conservative", was that when you end up as a blood smear all over 
> the highway or all smashed up against a tree, *someone* has to clean that 
> sh¡t up. Factor in, further, rubbernecking, the possibility of children 
> seeing your dismembered body laying in parts on the road as they drive by, 
> trauma to the poor truck driver who you smashed into who'll have to live with 
> having killed you for the rest of her life, etc. You MIGHT save us *all* a 
> lot of money and psychological trauma if you'd simply wear the seat belt. [†]
>
> So, you *are* harming others by not wearing a seat belt.
In precisely the same way I am harming others when I ride a motorcycle
with or without a helmet (THOSE accidents are almost always more gory
than the ones with cars buffering/hiding/containing the mess) or a
bicycle on the roadways with cars, or fail to optimally care for my body
(and mind and spirit ... just google "people of walmart youtube").   The
messes we all present one another by being human are just so
*intolerable*...  we should set a very high bar for how much any
individual can impose on the psyche/sensitivities of any other
individual by their mere existence and exercise of personal
preferences.  Oh yeh... no more convertibles, no vehicles with a power 
to weight ratio above X, certainly no ATVs... and no parkour... that
shit can just go SO wrong, and *somebody* has to clean it up... splint
the bones... gauze over the gaping eye-socket...  >8^D
>
> In the immortal words of teenagers everywhere, it's not about you. >8^D
>
> [†] Add to that the consideration that human life is *infrastructure*. Sure 
> if you're a do-nothing wastoid, your death costs us only the above and may 
> save us money in the long-term. 
I think the answer to this is to be a functional/useful part of a
community, and in fact participate in and generate a shared sense of
propriety and value with that community.  I believe that is easier to do
in the small (nuclear family, extended family, neighborhood, work group)
at least in principle, and in fact I feel that I try to do that in the
large as well.  
> But if you're competent at something, anything, then WE are all better off if 
> you wear your seat belt. To assert that you're *not* harming us by not 
> wearing your seat belt seems extraordinarily self-indulgent.
I do, by the way, generally wear my seat-belt, and not because I might
get a "ticket if you don't click-it".  My father was a USFS employee
from the late 50s who were one of (as he tells it) first government
agencies to have seat-belts installed in their trucks and required
employees to use them.   We did not have seat-belts in the 1959 VW
pickup truck they bought but in the 1964 ford station wagon, they had
seatbelts installed all around, and we were (usually) expected to wear
them.  I discovered as a young driver (with a car with a bench seat)
that I could take those corners a LOT faster and brake HARDER and still
maintain control if my lap-belt was strapped tight across my hips.  I
even coveted one of those "racing harnesses" for the same reason.   In
some ways, you might say seat-belts made me a *less safe* driver.   But
then I learned most of my road awareness and driving skills on a
motorcycle which made me *hyper-aware* of my vulnerability while
other parents were buying their kids giant land-yachts do drive around
(because they were safer) I was buying my own (mildly underpowered)
motorcycle and possibly becomeing a much more aware/safe driver in the
process and definitely NOT risking other's lives nearly as acutely as
the first-year drivers on testosterone driving a buick with the
muffler's cut out.  
>
> On 5/11/20 10:05 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> To be told I was harming others by not wearing a seatbelt feels patently 
>> incorrect.

>


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Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[uǝlƃ ☣]

OK. Thanks. I'll try again.

It's not the movement of the water that concerns me as much of the movement of 
the *cells* that cause the movement of the water. If we can credibly talk about 
pond scum behaving, then we can talk about a) individual cellular behavior and 
b) tissue behavior. This is why I insist on talking about scale.

When you look at the stick of clipped celery sitting in the colored water, a 
coarse scale of the behavior is the change in color. A finer-grained scale is 
the tissue behavior. An even finer-grained scale is the cellular behavior. When 
you look at it with your naked eye, you cannot see the latter two, but you can 
see the 1st one. So, the latter two are *hidden*. (I don't want to play word 
games around "state"... so if you like "process" or "whateverwordyouwant", then 
fine.) But the point is that there is something *inside* the celery that you 
cannot see with your naked eye. Change the measuring instrument, and you change 
what's hidden. E.g. with a magnifying glass, you can see the color change and 
may be able to see the water moving and *maybe* even the tissue behavior, 
depending, but you still won't see the cellular behavior. With a high-power 
microscope, you'll be able to see the cellular behavior and, depending, maybe 
the color and the tissue.

It is that sort of conversation that has to happen when we talk about 
"thinking", "feeling", and "consciousness".

The assertion you made was: "there are no valid questions about psychology that 
are not properly understood as empirical questions about behavior." -- On 
5/4/20 5:20 PM

I agree completely. But what you ignored or assumed in your statement was 
SCALE. The question in the context of the celery is: Are there valid questions 
about the tissue or cellular behavior that can be properly understood in terms 
of the naked eye visible behavior? I'd argue *yes*. Just because the tissue and 
cellular behavior are hidden does not mean you can't formulate (proper) 
questions about that finer-grained scale behavior. In fact, that's a huge 
component of science. Similarly, just because there are hidden parts of the 
human (e.g. thinking) that may be hidden given our current measuring devices, 
does not mean we can't (properly) formulate hypotheses about that hidden 
behavior.

Further, we don't necessarily *need* high-power measuring devices in order to 
accumulate evidence for a given hypothesis about those hidden behaviors. We can 
falsify and accumulate evidence for *hidden* behavior that we can't *directly* 
measure with a device. And *that's* where my proposal to look at compression, 
state-space reconstruction, entropy, (apparent) randomness, etc. enter the 
rhetoric.

On 5/11/20 2:46 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Off the top of my head, I would say the movement of the water in the celery 
> probably will not count as behavior, but that the leaf-turning probably is. 
> Do you think something different? 
> 
> Also, is there a "hidden state" of the celery we should be looking for? 

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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[Frank Wimberly]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year

My memory/impression is that widespread seatbelt use began in the mid
sixties.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:57 AM uǝlƃ ☣  wrote:

> The contrary argument was made to me by my dad, who called himself a
> "Goldwater Conservative", was that when you end up as a blood smear all
> over the highway or all smashed up against a tree, *someone* has to clean
> that sh¡t up. Factor in, further, rubbernecking, the possibility of
> children seeing your dismembered body laying in parts on the road as they
> drive by, trauma to the poor truck driver who you smashed into who'll have
> to live with having killed you for the rest of her life, etc. You MIGHT
> save us *all* a lot of money and psychological trauma if you'd simply wear
> the seat belt. [†]
>
> So, you *are* harming others by not wearing a seat belt.
>
> In the immortal words of teenagers everywhere, it's not about you. >8^D
>
> [†] Add to that the consideration that human life is *infrastructure*.
> Sure if you're a do-nothing wastoid, your death costs us only the above and
> may save us money in the long-term. But if you're competent at something,
> anything, then WE are all better off if you wear your seat belt. To assert
> that you're *not* harming us by not wearing your seat belt seems
> extraordinarily self-indulgent.
>
> On 5/11/20 10:05 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> > To be told I was harming others by not wearing a seatbelt feels patently
> incorrect.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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Re: [FRIAM] the end of the pandemic

[uǝlƃ ☣]

The contrary argument was made to me by my dad, who called himself a "Goldwater 
Conservative", was that when you end up as a blood smear all over the highway 
or all smashed up against a tree, *someone* has to clean that sh¡t up. Factor 
in, further, rubbernecking, the possibility of children seeing your dismembered 
body laying in parts on the road as they drive by, trauma to the poor truck 
driver who you smashed into who'll have to live with having killed you for the 
rest of her life, etc. You MIGHT save us *all* a lot of money and psychological 
trauma if you'd simply wear the seat belt. [†]

So, you *are* harming others by not wearing a seat belt.

In the immortal words of teenagers everywhere, it's not about you. >8^D

[†] Add to that the consideration that human life is *infrastructure*. Sure if 
you're a do-nothing wastoid, your death costs us only the above and may save us 
money in the long-term. But if you're competent at something, anything, then WE 
are all better off if you wear your seat belt. To assert that you're *not* 
harming us by not wearing your seat belt seems extraordinarily self-indulgent.

On 5/11/20 10:05 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> To be told I was harming others by not wearing a seatbelt feels patently 
> incorrect.


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