subject:"\[FRIAM\] A question for tomorrow"

> On May 2, 2019, at 8:21 AM, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
> 
> Eric writes:
>  
> < 4. The values of those microscopic observables can evolve jointly with 
> values of more complicated large-actor observables that we describe as 
> apparatus measuring spins etc., and the branches of the large-actor state 
> vector can evolve to have no coherence; but that evolution is still all under 
> the same local Hamiltonian.  >
>  
> < There is no instantaneous dynamics that “creates” these correlations at the 
> time of the measurement, the presence or absence of correlations was 
> generated as a feature of the state vector, locally, when the EPR pair was 
> produced, and they evolved locally with consequences for the possible 
> correlations among macro-actors since.  I guess whether this bothers you 
> depends on whether you view the phases over which one averages to compute the 
> coherence or decoherence as “properties” somehow of degrees of freedom at 
> distinct locations.  >
>  
> Being a gearhead, I look at from the perspective of a distributed computing 
> problem.   Classical supercomputers are limited in their effective size by 
> the speed of light.   If it takes longer to share a computation result than 
> to do it locally, then there’s no point in scaling out.   Here we have new 
> rules where the local Hamiltonian can be copied elsewhere without a cost.  
> It’s like having an infinite dimensional communication fabric.   (Assuming it 
> was possible to engineer a system where one could isolate or outrun 
> entanglement with the environment and assuming that measurement could be 
> deferred until the desired evolution had completed.)

Yes, this seems exactly right.  I feel like we have all become accustomed to 
thinking only in relatively small numbers.  Quantum computers are going to 
require that we start learning to think in terms of really really large numbers 
(your ‘infinite dimensional communication fabric”).  I have a somewhat pleasant 
anticipation of what it will feel like to start developing an intuition for 
that space, though sadly I am old enough, and far enough behind, that most of 
that experience will forever be out of my reach.

Eric

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Eric writes:

< 4. The values of those microscopic observables can evolve jointly with values 
of more complicated large-actor observables that we describe as apparatus 
measuring spins etc., and the branches of the large-actor state vector can 
evolve to have no coherence; but that evolution is still all under the same 
local Hamiltonian.  >

< There is no instantaneous dynamics that “creates” these correlations at the 
time of the measurement, the presence or absence of correlations was generated 
as a feature of the state vector, locally, when the EPR pair was produced, and 
they evolved locally with consequences for the possible correlations among 
macro-actors since.  I guess whether this bothers you depends on whether you 
view the phases over which one averages to compute the coherence or decoherence 
as “properties” somehow of degrees of freedom at distinct locations.  >

Being a gearhead, I look at from the perspective of a distributed computing 
problem.   Classical supercomputers are limited in their effective size by the 
speed of light.   If it takes longer to share a computation result than to do 
it locally, then there’s no point in scaling out.   Here we have new rules 
where the local Hamiltonian can be copied elsewhere without a cost.  It’s like 
having an infinite dimensional communication fabric.   (Assuming it was 
possible to engineer a system where one could isolate or outrun entanglement 
with the environment and assuming that measurement could be deferred until the 
desired evolution had completed.)

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Okay, one last, and then I die, having created as much chaos in the world as it 
was my place to create.

> On May 1, 2019, at 8:09 AM, Nick Thompson  wrote:
> 
> The Schrodinger's cat can be both dead and un-dead, but I cannot know a thing 
> and not know it, except by equivocating on the meaning of "know”.  

Careful here.  You used the word “be” — are you sure you know what that was 
supposed to stand for?

You used the word “I” when you spoke of knowing a thing and not knowing it — 
are you sure you know what that “I” stands for?  Meaning, are you sure you know 
what kinds of “I” are capable of existing in this physical universe?  This was 
the Wigner’s Friend conversation for which Aaronson’s blog is good to clear the 
fog: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975 
<https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975>

I am not recommending _equivocation_ on the meaning of “know”.  I understand 
that any sentence can be unraveled, and the whole edifice of conversation 
destroyed, by constantly objecting “what is ‘is’?”, “what is ‘what’?” etc.  
People who want to be annoying do that, and I can’t (or won’t) deal with them.  
What I am proposing is that, in some cases, we suddenly realize we can put some 
definite better thing in place of the usage habit we had heretofore.  Then the 
project of realizing that we didn’t know the constraints on good usage of a 
term is not meant to unravel conversation, but to incrementally raise it.  We 
continue to use all the rest provisionally, understanding that it is all 
fragile, but moving on until we find the next place we an make a concrete 
change for the better.

> I don't think quantum theory applies to logic in the familiar world.  Or does 
> it?  Am I wrong to be bloody minded about people who bring "lessons from 
> quantum theory" into day-to-day macro-world scientific arguments?  

Presumably all these languages are coarse-grained.  Whether one or another rule 
applies (even if it was shown to apply somewhere) will depend on whether the 
tokens that require it are retained under the coarse-graining, or are replaced 
by other aggregate tokens to which the same rules do not apply.  Case by case.

Moriturus te saluto

Eric 

> 
> Nick 
> 
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> 
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 10:10 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
> 
> Nick -
> 
>> That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron. 
> 
> Did you just exclude the law of the excluded middle?  How very human of you!
>> 
>> "How do we explain consciousness?" in any way that is not inane.  
>> (Geez, was that a quadruple negative?)
> And a 4 dimensional version of same?  
> 
> 
> - Steve
> 
> 
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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> 
> 
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-05-01 Thread Frank Wimberly

r which a superposition with respect to one observable happens
> to coincide with a specific value of a different one.  The name is
> unfortunate.  An infinitely extended radio wave can have an arbitrarily
> well-defined wavelength, and correspondingly can have exactly no specific
> location associated with it.  It is not that we can’t “know” the position
> that the “wave really has”, it is that the syntactically acceptable
> construct “position of the wave” doesn’t actually refer to anything in the
> real world.  Such is the hazard of trying to get from syntax to
> meaning; colorless green dreams sleep furiously.  I assume this is why the
> project of Montague Grammar was never tenable, though the exercise and its
> failure were useful and informative.
>
> But this is also why, when you say “I was trying to make a logical point”,
> I see the difference of philosophers from physicists. Logic seems to me
> like a syntactic exercise.  (But I am not a logician, so what I said could
> have been offensively ignorant.). We build logics for semantic motivations,
> and try to use them to systematize thinking.  But the hold they have on the
> world is mediated by the semantics of the referents for their tokens.
> Physicists, I would say, should share the trait that they generally expect
> those referents to turn over routinely.
>
> I hear a lot of talk among social scientists to the effect that now that
> we have quantum theory, we can’t do psychology, which talk I take to be
> obscurantist blather.
>
>
> I agree.  See the earlier post about Smolin versus Aaronson.  Some people
> use common language to show you how smart they are; others use it to give
> you a tool to become smarter yourself.  We do the best we can to identify
> who is who, in areas we can’t referee on our own.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> Do I need to be pistol-whipped on that point, too?
>
> Nick
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com ]
> On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
> > I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were
> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience
> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.
>
> I think this requires care.  Never wanting to defend the positions of
> people I don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to
> know what topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants
> applied to it.
>
>
> Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since
> Newton?), it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.
>
> Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable
> properties” (shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the
> system’s states.
>
> In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a
> collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of
> observables, and which observables made up the set could be chosen without
> regard to which particular state they were characterizing.
>
> aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was
> just the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who
> bothered to measure it.
>
>
> In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.
>
> Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of
> values assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables,
> which one could declare in advance without regard to which state is being
> characterized.
>
> To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the
> state may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the
> case.  (To many others, this is its most important consequence.  But the
> reason I shake that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)
>
> The important consequence of this understanding is that we have
> mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and
> they are two different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be
> defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and
> that the definitions are different, that expands our understanding of
> concepts of state and observable.  A state still does the main things
> states have always done in quantitative physical theories, and in the sense
> that they characterize our “attainabl

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

ercise.  (But I am not a logician, so what I said could have been 
offensively ignorant.). We build logics for semantic motivations, and try to 
use them to systematize thinking.  But the hold they have on the world is 
mediated by the semantics of the referents for their tokens.  Physicists, I 
would say, should share the trait that they generally expect those referents to 
turn over routinely.

> I hear a lot of talk among social scientists to the effect that now that we 
> have quantum theory, we can’t do psychology, which talk I take to be 
> obscurantist blather. 

I agree.  See the earlier post about Smolin versus Aaronson.  Some people use 
common language to show you how smart they are; others use it to give you a 
tool to become smarter yourself.  We do the best we can to identify who is who, 
in areas we can’t referee on our own.

Eric



> Do I need to be pistol-whipped on that point, too?
>  
> Nick
>  
>  
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>  
>  
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>  
> > I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were 
> > wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience 
> > that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron. 
>  
> I think this requires care.  Never wanting to defend the positions of people 
> I don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to know what 
> topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants applied to it.
>  
>  
> Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since 
> Newton?), it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.
>  
> Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable properties” 
> (shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the system’s states.
>  
> In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a 
> collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of 
> observables, and which observables made up the set could be chosen without 
> regard to which particular state they were characterizing.
>  
> aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was just 
> the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who 
> bothered to measure it.
>  
>  
> In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.
>  
> Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of values 
> assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables, which one 
> could declare in advance without regard to which state is being characterized.
>  
> To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the state 
> may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the case.  (To 
> many others, this is its most important consequence.  But the reason I shake 
> that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)
>  
> The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical 
> formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two 
> different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be defined, that 
> the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and that the 
> definitions are different, that expands our understanding of concepts of 
> state and observable.  A state still does the main things states have always 
> done in quantitative physical theories, and in the sense that they 
> characterize our “attainable knowledge”, observables do what they have always 
> done.  Before, the two jobs had been coextensive; now they are not.
>  
>  
> I assume Shakespeare wrote the “There are more things in heaven and earth, 
> Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” line about the same 
> phenomenon as the thing that makes the Copernical revolution a revolution: 
> people fight to give up importance they believed they had, or control they 
> believed they had.  Once the fight is in the culture, there may not be that 
> emotional motive in all the combatants; they may believe they have a logical 
> problem with the revolution.  But how can there be a logical problem with the 
> Copernican revolution?  It is a statement about the alignments of beliefs and 
> facts.  Likewise the concepts of state and observable in quantum mechanics.
>  
> It feels like a Copernican revolution to me, every time physics shows that 
> new operational understandings are required,

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

> On May 1, 2019, at 2:33 AM, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
> 
> I was just throwing out two, the wormhole idea of Maldacena & Susskind and 
> super-determinism described by Hooft.They seem very different to me, and 
> could imply two very different universes.   That QM works for either doesn't 
> help explain how one or the other or neither is the true explanation.

Alright, so I surrender.  I can’t keep up with this.  Susskind is 
God-the-Father, and Maldacena is God-the-Son and God-the-Holy-Spirit (and 
probably several other incarnations of God), of a field I got kicked out of 
because I couldn’t follow what the hell was going on in it.  Although to watch 
Joe Polchinski or Eva Silverstein rein Lenny in is reassuring — he knows he is 
both smarter and bolder than most, and can use it to get away with things.  
There are only limited superheroes who can call him on it.  Maldacena, however, 
I don’t think plays those games so much.

The appeal to authority has a place.  One can be a guest in another’s house, as 
long as one knows one’s limitations and how to behave.

Eric

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

On May 1, 2019, at 12:58 AM, Marcus Daniels  wrote:

Marcus wrote: 

> < Why do people seek this (as Eric puts it) emotional comfort with their ways 
> of knowing? >
> 
> Either spacetime works in a surprising way and commonsense intuition is just 
> wrong -- to cling to a familiar way of knowing amounts to taking the blue 
> pill -- settling for crude satisficing heuristics to muddle through as a 
> bag-of-water in what appears to be a 3D space.   Or we are totally driven and 
> our experiments are fate.  In one case humans can't engage their 
> special-purpose DSPs (so to speak) and fast thinking is useless -- we aren't 
> equipped to function efficiently in that alien world.  In the latter case, it 
> just doesn't matter what we calculate.I think the potential for cognitive 
> dissonance here is pretty clear.

I would love to take this question into a developmental timescale, but it will 
he hopeless to ever get it past IRBs.  The only way we will learn is when 
companies that already view children’s attention as a natural resource to be 
consumed do it anyway, and afterward we run a post-mortem on the consequences.

I can do a great job visualizing 2-spheres when I need to reason or prove 
something expressed in terms of them.  I can do it with eyes closed, without 
going to fetch a material 2-sphere.  But probably the only reason I developed a 
brain that can do this, is that I spent all those developmental years with my 
eyes open in a world that had material 2-spheres to experience.

I can’t similarly visualize 3-spheres, or other higher n-spheres.

Is that frontier a reflection of inherent limits in what my brain an do, which 
evolved together with the limits of vertebrate eyes to provide its training 
sets?  Or would a child, immersed in a visual world with real renderings of 
n-spheres, learn to visualize them as I an do for n=2.  After all, I can’t 
“see” the 2-sphere.  I use time together with my flat visual field to do an 
active construction.  Are there ways to render higher-dimensional spheres that 
employ time, perspective, scale, shear distortion, or whatever other aspects of 
flow, to encode dimensions of space that are not literal in the 2-d projection? 
 And could my brain then learn to process them as equivalent dimensions?  (Of 
course not MY brain; some other brain that worked in the first place, and then 
did so through its infancy and childhood.). What would be the limits?  
Eventually, overloading other sensory modalities to carry dimensional 
information must lead to confounds from their carrying information about what 
they literally are.  (There’s a material application for Nick’s worry about 
metaphor, a kind of data-compression and confound problem.). 

I like the visualization version of this question, because we can do a lot with 
it already and it is familiar, so not hard to imagine extrapolating.  But 
having said that about visualization, why not say it about quantum 
superposition dynamics or decoherent histories?  

Eric

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Hi Marcus et al.

> On Apr 30, 2019, at 10:41 PM, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
> 
> Eric writes:
> 
> < The important consequence of this understanding is that we have 
> mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and 
> they are two different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be 
> defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and 
> that the definitions are different, that expands our understanding of 
> concepts of state and observable. >
> 
> It seems to me that it is kicking the can down the road.   It enables 
> communication but it is not clear it drives toward a resolution of what is 
> going on.   I have heard other (computational) physicists claim that "all 
> physics is local", which may or may not be true depending on what the 
> calculator chooses to believe.   It seems to keep the two concepts clear one 
> cannot make that commitment. 

I am not sure this is right, or that we can know whether locality is a problem 
until the quantum gravity situation is sorted out.  

Here I have to be careful, because I don’t work in this area professionally.  
Let me try a little, and stop when I know I can’t keep up with the topic.  What 
I mean is this:

1. For now, classical gravity is all we have, which means that in our physics 
locations exist as definite indices, and on top of those we can write down a 
quantum theory in which states are defined in terms of those indices.  Short of 
black hole unitarity problems, there isn’t any specific failure of that quantum 
theory that tells us what if anything would need to be changed.  

2. In such a quantum theory, state vectors evolve under some Hamiltonian, and 
the Hamiltonian is written only in terms of local interactions in the spatial 
index.  When I say something like “physics evolves locally”, that is all and 
everything I mean.  We haven’t had to give any of that up, as far as I know.

3. There certainly can be superposition state vectors, with spin correlations 
that it has become popular to refer to as “entangled” since the quantum 
computing parlance took over the field.  (I have nursed some vague discomfort 
that it is a double entendre with illegitimate romantic liaisons that is 
responsible for the popularity of that terminology; nobody would have got so 
excited over “correlated-spin superpositions”, which was the older language for 
the same thing). In those state vectors (say for an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen 
pair allowed to evolve so the carriers of the spin are separated by a large 
distance), there can be zero values for some observables, such as 
“up-New-York-and-down-Los-Angeles”, or “left-New-York-and-right-Los-Angeles”, 
even though there are marginals 
“(up-New-York)-or-without-respect-to-(down-Los-Angeles)” etc.  

4. The values of those microscopic observables can evolve jointly with values 
of more complicated large-actor observables that we describe as apparatus 
measuring spins etc., and the branches of the large-actor state vector can 
evolve to have no coherence; but that evolution is still all under the same 
local Hamiltonian.  

5. A decoherent-histories formulation (Hartle, Gell-Mann for current versions, 
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04126  is an 
index) seems to be fine with giving a descriptive language for, and to some 
extent tools to compute, which kinds of joint large-actor states exist as 
alternative histories.  There will, in general, not be a unique basis in which 
such decoherent-histories can be shown to exist.  Weinberg objects to this as a 
problem with DH renderings of quantum mechanics in the last section of Ch.3 of 
his textbook Lectures on Quantum Mechanics 
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/lectures-on-quantum-mechanics/F739B9577D2473995024FA5E9ABA9B6C

.
  I don’t see from what direction, however, other than comfort, one can argue 
that that objection has any weight..  Decoherent histories are defined; there 
may be more than one basis in which such histories split into branches (an 
up-down comparison branch or a left-right comparison branch for measurers set 
up in New York and LA), and that description is incompatible with referring to 
“a measurer” in NY or LA who is a projection of macro-variables in branches of 
two different and incompatible DH bases.  There is no instantaneous dynamics 
that “creates” these correlations at the time of the measurement, the presence 
or absence of correlations was generated as a feature of the state vector, 
locally, when the EPR pair was produced, and they evolved locally with 
consequences for the possible correlations among macro-actors since.  I guess 
whether this bothers you depends on whether you view the phases over which one 
averages to compute the coherence or decoherence as “properties” somehow of 
degrees of freedom at distinct locations.  It is not clear to

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen writes:

< To make that point concrete, I'll talk about the local VFW, which is 
populated with racist, self-righteous jerks. Renee' and I tend to like aged 
drinkers ... partly because we are aged drinkers in the making. So there's a 
natural affinity with the regulars at the local VFW. I can be a member because 
my dad "fought" in Korea.  (In reality, he was a flight engineer and helped 
bomb people from the abstracted heights.) But the only reason they (barely) 
accept me is because I speak respectfully (in their presence) about what it 
means to kill people, mostly with other skin colors, because our leadership 
told us to kill them. Anyone who bears the slightest resemblance of 
skepticism/disrespect for "those who served" is quickly shown the door. They 
are much more interested in their *identity* than they are in any facts 
surrounding the issues. >

Yep, I know those engineers & designers.  Didn't see it directly until after 
the election, but sheesh, there it was.
Mercenary, I can deal with that.   Heisenberg (science comes first no matter 
what), I can deal with that.But sitting at a table with a proud moron 
eventually makes me run for the exit (or worse).   I could live in Antarctica 
or Mars by myself for the rest of my life and I would never have the slightest 
urge to seek that company.
 
Marcus 


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

On 5/1/19 2:23 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Historically, women have not found us much fun.  

Induction is the Devil.

On 5/1/19 2:22 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There are "leadership positions" on this mailing list?!Wow, there are two 
> words that make me leave a party.

Ha! Unfortunately, leadership is that way. What's the saying "nature abhors a 
vacuum"? Leave it open and whatever corrupt moron *wants* the seat will have 
the seat. I find it interesting how seldom our leaders (talking about 
government, here, not this list) seem to sacrifice their selves for their 
"service". Even in the cases where it's debatable, the leaders seem to be less 
interested in sacrificing their selves to serve the collective.

To make that point concrete, I'll talk about the local VFW, which is populated 
with racist, self-righteous jerks. Renee' and I tend to like aged drinkers ... 
partly because we are aged drinkers in the making. So there's a natural 
affinity with the regulars at the local VFW. I can be a member because my dad 
"fought" in Korea.  (In reality, he was a flight engineer and helped bomb 
people from the abstracted heights.) But the only reason they (barely) accept 
me is because I speak respectfully (in their presence) about what it means to 
kill people, mostly with other skin colors, because our leadership told us to 
kill them. Anyone who bears the slightest resemblance of skepticism/disrespect 
for "those who served" is quickly shown the door. They are much more interested 
in their *identity* than they are in any facts surrounding the issues.

Renee' still wants to join. Her dad did not "serve". So I get the veto power. 
I'm not hangin' with those ... [ahem] people.

> I don't think the sexism is just from men, but the overt stuff is mostly from 
> men.   

That's a safe position to take. But I think it's ultimately wrong. If, however, 
we lived in a matriarchy, I would likely object to the parallel idea that 
sexism was not just from women. I tend to think that the sexism is systemic and 
programmed in by the reigning -archy. This is enlightened, I think, by 
reactionary ideas like "reverse racism" and "all lives matter" ... or even the 
victim blaming rampant in sexual abuse media stories. It's fine to rationally 
assert a non-zero participation on the part of the victim. But such rhetoric 
will always be overblown. In our society, I think men are the overwhelming 
majority cause of sexism, both overt and covert.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

G
Historically, women have not found us much fun.  
n

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2019 2:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Yep. It is sexist. But lest we get confused, the sexists are men, not women.
I'm pummeled on a daily basis for my ... [ahem] "sensitivity". On Twitch
recently, some jerk gamer accused me of being a CASUAL just for saying I
liked playing co-op games with Renee' ... the Texas analog for being called
all sorts of names line "Nancy boy". 

I regularly come back to the idea that if women were the majority in
leadership positions, our world would be a better place. I don't know if
it's true. But we should give it a shot, including on this mailing list.

On May 1, 2019 1:35:09 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
>A brief survey leads me to believe there are no non-satire Real 
>Husbands of X programs on cable.
>This is completely sexist.   There ought to be a way for a middle-aged
>man to get a stylist, a trainer, a wardrobe, a television program *and* 
>to have their partners (male or female) celebrate the investment.
>This should be the new mid-life crisis.   
--
glen

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

There are "leadership positions" on this mailing list?!Wow, there are two 
words that make me leave a party.

I became aware of some these cable shows staying with my uncle for a few days.  
 There are also the ones about plastic surgery.
It's incredible to imagine going under the knife to be attractive.   Being 
open-minded it makes sense as some protection from ageism.   I work out more 
for my mental health at this point, but I can see doing it for other practical 
reasons.   I bet many women are more practically-minded than vain when it comes 
to fitness -- it is just expected, even though it is isn't fair.

I don't think the sexism is just from men, but the overt stuff is mostly from 
men.   

On 5/1/19, 2:55 PM, "Friam on behalf of glen"  wrote:

Yep. It is sexist. But lest we get confused, the sexists are men, not 
women. I'm pummeled on a daily basis for my ... [ahem] "sensitivity". On Twitch 
recently, some jerk gamer accused me of being a CASUAL just for saying I liked 
playing co-op games with Renee' ... the Texas analog for being called all sorts 
of names line "Nancy boy". 

I regularly come back to the idea that if women were the majority in 
leadership positions, our world would be a better place. I don't know if it's 
true. But we should give it a shot, including on this mailing list.

On May 1, 2019 1:35:09 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
>A brief survey leads me to believe there are no non-satire Real
>Husbands of X programs on cable.
>This is completely sexist.   There ought to be a way for a middle-aged
>man to get a stylist, a trainer, a wardrobe, a television program *and*
>to have their partners (male or female) celebrate the investment.  
>This should be the new mid-life crisis.   
-- 
glen

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-05-01 Thread glen

Yep. It is sexist. But lest we get confused, the sexists are men, not women. 
I'm pummeled on a daily basis for my ... [ahem] "sensitivity". On Twitch 
recently, some jerk gamer accused me of being a CASUAL just for saying I liked 
playing co-op games with Renee' ... the Texas analog for being called all sorts 
of names line "Nancy boy". 

I regularly come back to the idea that if women were the majority in leadership 
positions, our world would be a better place. I don't know if it's true. But we 
should give it a shot, including on this mailing list.

On May 1, 2019 1:35:09 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
>A brief survey leads me to believe there are no non-satire Real
>Husbands of X programs on cable.
>This is completely sexist.   There ought to be a way for a middle-aged
>man to get a stylist, a trainer, a wardrobe, a television program *and*
>to have their partners (male or female) celebrate the investment.  
>This should be the new mid-life crisis.   
-- 
glen

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

A brief survey leads me to believe there are no non-satire Real Husbands of X 
programs on cable.
This is completely sexist.   There ought to be a way for a middle-aged man to 
get a stylist, a trainer, a wardrobe, a television program *and* to have their 
partners (male or female) celebrate the investment.   This should be the new 
mid-life crisis.   

On 5/1/19, 2:22 PM, "Friam on behalf of glen"  wrote:

Agreed! But I've put on about 5 lbs of fat during this last winter season. 
Add that to my bald head and it's obvious my dreams of being a trophy husband 
are delusional. The best I could hope for is to rub my beard a lot and speak 
only rarely in cryptic, pseudo-profound jargon ... maybe wearing tweed. But I'm 
allergic to smoke. So I can't even smoke a pipe. [sigh]

On May 1, 2019 1:10:48 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
>I have a colleague whose husband is a F16 pilot. (Wow!)   As he moves
>up through the ranks, she is the main source of income.  
>She says things to him like "You're so pretty."   I could live with
>that (minus the pilot part - not gonna happen).   Get me a shirt with
>ruffles.   No problem.
-- 
glen

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-05-01 Thread glen

Agreed! But I've put on about 5 lbs of fat during this last winter season. Add 
that to my bald head and it's obvious my dreams of being a trophy husband are 
delusional. The best I could hope for is to rub my beard a lot and speak only 
rarely in cryptic, pseudo-profound jargon ... maybe wearing tweed. But I'm 
allergic to smoke. So I can't even smoke a pipe. [sigh]

On May 1, 2019 1:10:48 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
>I have a colleague whose husband is a F16 pilot. (Wow!)   As he moves
>up through the ranks, she is the main source of income.  
>She says things to him like "You're so pretty."   I could live with
>that (minus the pilot part - not gonna happen).   Get me a shirt with
>ruffles.   No problem.
-- 
glen

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Oh, gosh!  "Humiliate?!!!" 

I hope not. 

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2019 11:57 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen writes:

< In fact, culturally, I wonder why so many of you *direct* your posts
at all > 

>From a career of trying to redirect or humiliate students in a classroom
setting?  :-)

Marcus
 


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen writes:

"Now I suppose I have to read yours as well. I should just quit my job and read 
full time. Renee' makes enough money to support us, I think."

I have a colleague whose husband is a F16 pilot. (Wow!)   As he moves up 
through the ranks, she is the main source of income.  
She says things to him like "You're so pretty."   I could live with that (minus 
the pilot part - not gonna happen).   Get me a shirt with ruffles.   No problem.

Marcus


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick writes:

"My basic New Thought (new to me, I mean) was, why talk about biology when we 
can talk about computer programming, given the wonders that simple algorithms 
(eg, cellular automata) can generate."

It's true it is all much more coherent.   But the algorithms are simple and the 
machines that execute them can't (yet) reproduce or repair themselves.   They 
are at most shallow 3D fixed-purpose devices, not complex evolving nanomachines 
like cells.   Most computer programs are built around the so-called von Neumann 
architecture that separates programs from the machine that executes programs, 
and this architecture has favored serial step-by-step programs instead of 
highly-distributed and scalable signaling.   Papers like the one Roger shared 
are interesting to me is because the latent `discovered' structure might 
suggest new (synthetic biology) programming models, which could either be used 
directly to perform different tasks (eat up CO2, clean up toxic waste, novel 
medications, perform large distributed calculations) or inspire new designs for 
more conventional (e.g. silicon) systems.   It's a fishing expedition to find 
fixed-function machines that already exist in nature and can be adapted to do 
what we want.

Marcus
 


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Very nice! Had you prefaced the link to the paper with that, I would have 
better understand *why* it might be a good idea to read it. I also failed to 
infer the challenge to ... non-materialist? ... interpretations of phenomena 
generated by CAs. Your text was too obtuse for me. I can defend at least one 
non-materialist interpretation of emergence for that context. But I suspect my 
defense would simply lead you to another objection that hasn't yet been 
delineated clearly enough, because it relies on the immaterial nature of what 
we've come to call "digital" computing. This has professional as well as 
personal consequences. I've recently had to grapple with using the word 
"virtual" as a descriptor for the simulations I build. When we talk about 
"virtual reality", are we being materialist? I honestly don't know.

A better example to work with than CAs implemented on a general purpose [†] 
computer would be something implemented by an analog computer. (Hillis' 
tinkertoy computer, maybe? ... or Turing's patterns on a seashell? ... I don't 
know.) Maybe your alphabet soup is such a thing?

Although I (obviously?) agree on the value of this list and the people who post 
to it, I do find myself unsatisfied with how often we let things fade away 
without developing them further [‡], something similar to what you've expressed 
in your posts about other formats, assembling chains of posts, etc. Thanks for 
explaining why you direct the posts at particular people. I think it has 
unforeseen (negative) consequences that outweigh your intended consequences. 
But at least I can understand the motivation, now.

[†] Both the general purpose and the digital qualifiers are important, here. 
Jon's comments re: "Magic The Gathering" and "Mine Craft" and sensing the world 
are relevant.

[‡] I openly blame my own laziness, of course. I still intend to read both the 
Bokov paper Eric posted, the Bernian paper Marcus posted, and the Rives paper 
Roger posted. Now I suppose I have to read yours as well. I should just quit my 
job and read full time. Renee' makes enough money to support us, I think. 8^)

On 5/1/19 11:39 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> I direct my posts at who ever made me think about something.  I think I am 
> following up on a question you asked, roughly, why are we talking about 
> consciousness when basic facts of biology pose all the interesting problems 
> and we know a lot more about them?  My basic New Thought (new to me, I mean) 
> was, why talk about biology when we can talk about computer programming, 
> given the wonders that simple algorithms (eg, cellular automata) can 
> generate.  I wondered how any computer programmer could have doubts about 
> materialism: i.e., doubts about how emergent properties (such as 
> consciousness) could be generated from higher and higher levels of material 
> relations.  The Alphabet Soup Letter I sent you shows how the complexities of 
> the genome could readily arise from material relations.  
> 
> You basic point is however correct.  I think many of us who write here are 
> trying to work out some ideas and we use the posts of others as the occasions 
> for those developments.  Threading might not be as ... um ... tight as should 
> be.  But I find that looseness actually exciting  -- people here are trying 
> to figure stuff out.  FRIAM has been a tremendous help to me in that regard. 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I left when the pit bull had lost interest in the other dog, which it couldn't 
reach .  The pit bull, kind of playfully, went back to its master who was 
upright by then, as if nothing had happened.   To be honest, I felt sorry for 
that guy but I didn't want to engage with him because his options were obvious 
and all bad.   The pit bull hadn't violated the don't-hurt-the-pack taboo, but 
was unaware of other modern taboos.   I think we can look forward to more of 
this sort of thing from the tribalism of human animals.

On 5/1/19, 12:46 PM, "Nick Thompson"  wrote:

What a great story, Marcus.  Do you know how it came out?  I know that's 
irrelevant, but still I want to know. 

More to the point, I take it you have no trouble calling that behavior 
"single-mindedness."  Does anybody else?  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2019 12:25 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
    Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

On 5/1/19, 12:06 PM, "uǝlƃ ☣"  wrote:

 <   All that text is merely to provide context that my guess is your 
depth-firsty commitment to a reasonably trustworthy reductionism isn't as 
depth-firsty as you think it is. It's more like those massive muscles in your 
back or leg that attract all the attention, but that are useless without the 
thousands of little control tissues providing the context that allows the big 
guys to do their work.  >

That's probably so.  One would hope that one gets better over time at 
choosing when to sink one's teeth in to something.   

Oh, this is kind of an unpleasant story but it speaks to the emotional side 
of this.   I may have mentioned it before in some other context.   I'm driving 
home after some errands on a Saturday and I see this woman kicking a dog in the 
middle of Canyon road.   It's a pit bull and it is mauling her smaller, 
defenseless dog.   Several people are trying to figure out how to stop this, 
and we drag the mess off to the side of the road and try to start to pry open 
the pit bull's jaws.   This wasn't some mix of pit bull, this was the real 
thing.   It didn't think it was strong, it was strong.  It was not an easy task 
to slow the pit bull down, even with several men with gloves.  An older man 
that had probably rescued the dog had been knocked over and was struggling to 
collect himself.  He could see his dog was going to be put down and was 
distraught.The woman was also of course distraught seeing her pet being 
killed.   

But the fascinating part of this was watching the pit bull work.   It would 
slow down for a moment just to see what the humans were doing and go from one 
target to the next when the time was right.   It was _totally_ committed.We 
did eventually free the smaller dog and isolated it in a safe place until it 
could be taken to the vet.The pit bull did not show any indication of 
hostility toward a human, it just wouldn't budge on what it was doing.   In 
spite of the awfulness of it all, I couldn't help admire that 
single-mindedness.   

Marcus 


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

What a great story, Marcus.  Do you know how it came out?  I know that's 
irrelevant, but still I want to know. 

More to the point, I take it you have no trouble calling that behavior 
"single-mindedness."  Does anybody else?  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2019 12:25 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

On 5/1/19, 12:06 PM, "uǝlƃ ☣"  wrote:

 <   All that text is merely to provide context that my guess is your 
depth-firsty commitment to a reasonably trustworthy reductionism isn't as 
depth-firsty as you think it is. It's more like those massive muscles in your 
back or leg that attract all the attention, but that are useless without the 
thousands of little control tissues providing the context that allows the big 
guys to do their work.  >

That's probably so.  One would hope that one gets better over time at choosing 
when to sink one's teeth in to something.   

Oh, this is kind of an unpleasant story but it speaks to the emotional side of 
this.   I may have mentioned it before in some other context.   I'm driving 
home after some errands on a Saturday and I see this woman kicking a dog in the 
middle of Canyon road.   It's a pit bull and it is mauling her smaller, 
defenseless dog.   Several people are trying to figure out how to stop this, 
and we drag the mess off to the side of the road and try to start to pry open 
the pit bull's jaws.   This wasn't some mix of pit bull, this was the real 
thing.   It didn't think it was strong, it was strong.  It was not an easy task 
to slow the pit bull down, even with several men with gloves.  An older man 
that had probably rescued the dog had been knocked over and was struggling to 
collect himself.  He could see his dog was going to be put down and was 
distraught.The woman was also of course distraught seeing her pet being 
killed.   

But the fascinating part of this was watching the pit bull work.   It would 
slow down for a moment just to see what the humans were doing and go from one 
target to the next when the time was right.   It was _totally_ committed.We 
did eventually free the smaller dog and isolated it in a safe place until it 
could be taken to the vet.The pit bull did not show any indication of 
hostility toward a human, it just wouldn't budge on what it was doing.   In 
spite of the awfulness of it all, I couldn't help admire that 
single-mindedness.   

Marcus 


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen, 

I direct my posts at who ever made me think about something.  I think I am 
following up on a question you asked, roughly, why are we talking about 
consciousness when basic facts of biology pose all the interesting problems and 
we know a lot more about them?  My basic New Thought (new to me, I mean) was, 
why talk about biology when we can talk about computer programming, given the 
wonders that simple algorithms (eg, cellular automata) can generate.  I 
wondered how any computer programmer could have doubts about materialism: i.e., 
doubts about how emergent properties (such as consciousness) could be generated 
from higher and higher levels of material relations.  The Alphabet Soup Letter 
I sent you shows how the complexities of the genome could readily arise from 
material relations.  

You basic point is however correct.  I think many of us who write here are 
trying to work out some ideas and we use the posts of others as the occasions 
for those developments.  Threading might not be as ... um ... tight as should 
be.  But I find that looseness actually exciting  -- people here are trying to 
figure stuff out.  FRIAM has been a tremendous help to me in that regard. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2019 11:49 AM
To: FriAM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Heh, you mistake me for someone who thinks clearly and understands social 
interaction. I have no idea why you forwarded that or why you direct it at me. 
In fact, culturally, I wonder why so many of you *direct* your posts at all. So 
many of you start your posts with "Bob, ..." or "Tim, ...". It's weird and 
confusing to me. I tend to think quoted preambles like "On 2/12/2050 5:56 PM, 
Frank Zappa wrote:" as the person most likely to *respond* to my post. But it's 
a post to a lot of people and not really directed *at* Mr. Zappa. If anyone 
would like to throw some words out that may clear up my confusion, I'd be 
grateful.  Seriously.

But back to the topic, I think the majority of the people on this list are, and 
have been for most of their lives, committed materialists. Affiliations can be 
tricky, of course. E.g. I've been agnostic my entire life (as far as I can 
tell), but I was affiliated with St. Martha's Parish from age 4-16 or so, until 
my affinity for Satanic metal stressed that affiliation. 8^) I didn't 
"identify" with the Satanists until the Satanic Temple emerged. The Church of 
Satan, though I appreciated their libertarian and entheogenic overtones, had 
too much "social darwinism" to it. I didn't learn the term "social darwinism" 
until I started arguing about neo-Darwinism back at Lockheed Martin, where a 
fellow engineer asserted, very confidently, that black people were bred to be 
extraordinary athletes. I struggled to find ways to communicate with someone I 
had thought to be a fairly thoughtful person until he put that forth at our 
weekly salon over Guiness and darts. He single-handedly coerced me to identify 
as a politically correct snowflake.

Anyhoo ... what were we talking about? 8^D

On 5/1/19 12:13 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> This Article 
> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312489651_Alphabet_Soup>, published 
> in the 70's, will show that my materialist affiliations go way back. Please 
> let me know if the link doesn’t work.
> 
> My children, who are now pushing sixty, admit that I have become a 
> somewhat better cook.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

On 5/1/19, 12:06 PM, "uǝlƃ ☣"  wrote:

 <   All that text is merely to provide context that my guess is your 
depth-firsty commitment to a reasonably trustworthy reductionism isn't as 
depth-firsty as you think it is. It's more like those massive muscles in your 
back or leg that attract all the attention, but that are useless without the 
thousands of little control tissues providing the context that allows the big 
guys to do their work.  >

That's probably so.  One would hope that one gets better over time at choosing 
when to sink one's teeth in to something.   

Oh, this is kind of an unpleasant story but it speaks to the emotional side of 
this.   I may have mentioned it before in some other context.   I'm driving 
home after some errands on a Saturday and I see this woman kicking a dog in the 
middle of Canyon road.   It's a pit bull and it is mauling her smaller, 
defenseless dog.   Several people are trying to figure out how to stop this, 
and we drag the mess off to the side of the road and try to start to pry open 
the pit bull's jaws.   This wasn't some mix of pit bull, this was the real 
thing.   It didn't think it was strong, it was strong.  It was not an easy task 
to slow the pit bull down, even with several men with gloves.  An older man 
that had probably rescued the dog had been knocked over and was struggling to 
collect himself.  He could see his dog was going to be put down and was 
distraught.The woman was also of course distraught seeing her pet being 
killed.   

But the fascinating part of this was watching the pit bull work.   It would 
slow down for a moment just to see what the humans were doing and go from one 
target to the next when the time was right.   It was _totally_ committed.We 
did eventually free the smaller dog and isolated it in a safe place until it 
could be taken to the vet.The pit bull did not show any indication of 
hostility toward a human, it just wouldn't budge on what it was doing.   In 
spite of the awfulness of it all, I couldn't help admire that 
single-mindedness.   

Marcus 


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Very interesting.  In the last post, I deleted a paragraph where I analogized 
the human population to a swarm intelligence optimization problem, each human 
being an ant pursuing her own little solution, but the whole circumscribing (up 
to a convex hull) the solution space. I deleted it because I was being too glib 
with the analogy. Humans are very complicated organisms, not zero-intelligence 
agents.

But we do have *modes* where we behave very depth-firsty. My depth-firsty 
methods don't kick in in very many contexts. Others tend to use them in more 
places. E.g. I have a friend who really dug deep into ferementation food and 
drink. I limit myself to beer. But he launched into everything that involved 
any type of fermentation to get a deeper (hands-on) understanding of our 
symbiotic relationship with those little bugs. I struggled to stay interested 
in any context but that of beer ... though the bread phase was interesting. In 
any case, even *that* relatively narrow aspect of "food and drink" is pretty 
diverse, almost fractal. We can find a connected path from any part of 
fermented food and drink to pretty much any other aspect of humanity that I've 
ever encountered, from domesticated animals to humans visiting the far side of 
the moon.

All that text is merely to provide context that my guess is your depth-firsty 
commitment to a reasonably trustworthy reductionism isn't as depth-firsty as 
you think it is. It's more like those massive muscles in your back or leg that 
attract all the attention, but that are useless without the thousands of little 
control tissues providing the context that allows the big guys to do their 
work. The real weight is being pulled by the infrastructure, not the rock 
stars. Anyone whose suffered from Tennis Elbow will attest. 8^)

On 5/1/19 10:29 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> One recollection from many years ago was debugging a generational garbage 
> collector (GGC).  The program with the GGC would crash after hours due to a 
> memory corruption that manifest itself via multiple layers of indirection.
> C programs often have memory overruns that create similarly baffling 
> outcomes, but this was worse due the complexity of the algorithm.   The 
> advice I got from one expert was to ratchet it down on degree of freedom at a 
> time.  It was incredibly tedious, days of work, and required systematic 
> bookkeeping.   I eventually found the problem.   That reductionist approach 
> from experiences like that, is burned into my psyche and has paid-off many 
> times.The alternative is suspect to me at a primal level.Pulling up 
> stakes and trying something else only slightly different is wasted motion.   
> There has to be some clear stopping evidence to show an approach is flawed 
> before one pulls up stakes.   Otherwise it is just a game of musical chairs.  
>  So to me jumping between different modeling approaches or "views" speaks not 
> to plasticity but a lack of commitment; it is an act of desperation.
> 
> Obviously this is not a justification.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen writes:

< In fact, culturally, I wonder why so many of you *direct* your posts at 
all > 

>From a career of trying to redirect or humiliate students in a classroom 
>setting?  :-)

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Heh, you mistake me for someone who thinks clearly and understands social 
interaction. I have no idea why you forwarded that or why you direct it at me. 
In fact, culturally, I wonder why so many of you *direct* your posts at all. So 
many of you start your posts with "Bob, ..." or "Tim, ...". It's weird and 
confusing to me. I tend to think quoted preambles like "On 2/12/2050 5:56 PM, 
Frank Zappa wrote:" as the person most likely to *respond* to my post. But it's 
a post to a lot of people and not really directed *at* Mr. Zappa. If anyone 
would like to throw some words out that may clear up my confusion, I'd be 
grateful.  Seriously.

But back to the topic, I think the majority of the people on this list are, and 
have been for most of their lives, committed materialists. Affiliations can be 
tricky, of course. E.g. I've been agnostic my entire life (as far as I can 
tell), but I was affiliated with St. Martha's Parish from age 4-16 or so, until 
my affinity for Satanic metal stressed that affiliation. 8^) I didn't 
"identify" with the Satanists until the Satanic Temple emerged. The Church of 
Satan, though I appreciated their libertarian and entheogenic overtones, had 
too much "social darwinism" to it. I didn't learn the term "social darwinism" 
until I started arguing about neo-Darwinism back at Lockheed Martin, where a 
fellow engineer asserted, very confidently, that black people were bred to be 
extraordinary athletes. I struggled to find ways to communicate with someone I 
had thought to be a fairly thoughtful person until he put that forth at our 
weekly salon over Guiness and darts. He single-handedly coerced me to identify 
as a politically correct snowflake.

Anyhoo ... what were we talking about? 8^D

On 5/1/19 12:13 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> This Article 
> , published 
> in the 70's, will show that my materialist affiliations go way back. Please 
> let me know if the link doesn’t work.
> 
> My children, who are now pushing sixty, admit that I have become a somewhat 
> better cook. 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen writes:

< But, in my ignorant understanding of the process, neither physics nor 
mathematical paradox resolution rely on that. It's always some munging of old 
things to arrive at the new things, including munging the logic by which the 
implications are inferred. Why is "shut up and calculate" so unnatural? >

One recollection from many years ago was debugging a generational garbage 
collector (GGC).  The program with the GGC would crash after hours due to a 
memory corruption that manifest itself via multiple layers of indirection.C 
programs often have memory overruns that create similarly baffling outcomes, 
but this was worse due the complexity of the algorithm.   The advice I got from 
one expert was to ratchet it down on degree of freedom at a time.  It was 
incredibly tedious, days of work, and required systematic bookkeeping.   I 
eventually found the problem.   That reductionist approach from experiences 
like that, is burned into my psyche and has paid-off many times.The 
alternative is suspect to me at a primal level.Pulling up stakes and trying 
something else only slightly different is wasted motion.   There has to be some 
clear stopping evidence to show an approach is flawed before one pulls up 
stakes.   Otherwise it is just a game of musical chairs.   So to me jumping 
between different modeling approaches or "views" speaks not to plasticity but a 
lack of commitment; it is an act of desperation.

Obviously this is not a justification.

Marcus


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-05-01 Thread glen∈ℂ


But that's what's confusing to me. Why do we need the metaphysical extrapolation from the 
model to "the true explanation"? I'm not saying I don't suffer from a similar 
need. I'm asking for myself as much as anyone else.

By "seem very different", you're asserting classical logic, a fragility to inconsistency, 
a reliance on proof by contradiction. If the implications of this contradict the implications of 
that, then one of them must be false. But, in my ignorant understanding of the process, neither 
physics nor mathematical paradox resolution rely on that. It's always some munging of old things to 
arrive at the new things, including munging the logic by which the implications are inferred. Why 
is "shut up and calculate" so unnatural?

On 4/30/19 5:33 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

I was just throwing out two, the wormhole idea of Maldacena & Susskind and 
super-determinism described by Hooft.They seem very different to me, and could 
imply two very different universes.   That QM works for either doesn't help explain 
how one or the other or neither is the true explanation.




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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Frank writes:

“The question is, how does it accomplish "action-at-a-distance"?  There are 
explanations of other such phenomena.  Particles sent back and forth, etc.”

Particles travelling at 10,000 times the speed of light?  
https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0614

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-05-01 Thread Frank Wimberly

I did find notes from Hywel but they are too long to send to Friam.
Perhaps they could be put on a server.  I will see if they say enough about
gravity to make that worthwhile.

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Wed, May 1, 2019, 6:27 AM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> We already know what it causes.  The question is, how does it accomplish
> "action-at-a-distance"?  There are explanations of other such phenomena.
> Particles sent back and forth, etc.  Ask Hywel for details.  Perhaps he
> left some notes.  Or has an equivalent Oracle on the list.
>
> Frank
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 11:46 PM Nick Thompson 
> wrote:
>
>> Frank,
>>
>>
>>
>> But when we do find out what gravity is, it will be from the study of the
>> things it causes; and if it caused nothing, we would find out nothing,
>> right?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
>> Wimberly
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:25 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam@redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick,
>>
>>
>>
>> If Hywel is correct we know a great deal about how gravity "behaves" but
>> not what causes it.  No one has ever observed a graviton, he said.
>>
>>
>>
>> Frank
>>
>>
>>
>> The quote marks are because we know how objects behave in a gravitational
>> field.
>>
>> ---
>> Frank Wimberly
>>
>> My memoir:
>> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>>
>> My scientific publications:
>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>>
>> Phone (505) 670-9918
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 9:15 PM Nick Thompson 
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Eric, and interlocutors,
>>
>>
>>
>> I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:
>>
>>
>>
>> *I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were
>> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience
>> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  *
>>
>>
>>
>> Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now
>> confess that I was making a small logical point.   In the first place,
>> “things beyond experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.
>> So, that expression is merely to say that there are things we may never
>> know.  Ok.  That’s fine.  But when you go on to say that nature is
>> determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that
>> anything is caused, by whatever means,  it reveals its causes in its
>> behavior.  To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and
>> no cause exists.
>>
>>
>>
>> Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head,
>> that I wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following:  To what
>> extent do you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly
>> generalized to the  macro level?  I hear a lot of talk among social
>> scientists to the effect that now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do
>> psychology, which talk I take to be obscurantist blather.  Do I need to be
>> pistol-whipped on that point, too?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > >
>> Subject: Re: [FR

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-05-01 Thread Frank Wimberly

We already know what it causes.  The question is, how does it accomplish
"action-at-a-distance"?  There are explanations of other such phenomena.
Particles sent back and forth, etc.  Ask Hywel for details.  Perhaps he
left some notes.  Or has an equivalent Oracle on the list.

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 11:46 PM Nick Thompson 
wrote:

> Frank,
>
>
>
> But when we do find out what gravity is, it will be from the study of the
> things it causes; and if it caused nothing, we would find out nothing,
> right?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:25 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> Nick,
>
>
>
> If Hywel is correct we know a great deal about how gravity "behaves" but
> not what causes it.  No one has ever observed a graviton, he said.
>
>
>
> Frank
>
>
>
> The quote marks are because we know how objects behave in a gravitational
> field.
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 9:15 PM Nick Thompson 
> wrote:
>
> Hi, Eric, and interlocutors,
>
>
>
> I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:
>
>
>
> *I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were
> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience
> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  *
>
>
>
> Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now
> confess that I was making a small logical point.   In the first place,
> “things beyond experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.
> So, that expression is merely to say that there are things we may never
> know.  Ok.  That’s fine.  But when you go on to say that nature is
> determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that
> anything is caused, by whatever means,  it reveals its causes in its
> behavior.  To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and
> no cause exists.
>
>
>
> Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head, that
> I wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following:  To what
> extent do you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly
> generalized to the  macro level?  I hear a lot of talk among social
> scientists to the effect that now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do
> psychology, which talk I take to be obscurantist blather.  Do I need to be
> pistol-whipped on that point, too?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> > I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were
> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience
> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.
>
>
>
> I think this requires care.  Never wanting to defend the positions of
> people I don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to
> know what topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants
> applied to it.
>
>
>
>
>
> Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since
> Newton?), it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.
>
>
>
> Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable
> properties” (shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the
> system’s states.
>
>
>
> In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a
> collection of values assigned to some sufficient

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Hi, again, Glen, 

This Article <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312489651_Alphabet_Soup> 
, published in the 70's, will show that my materialist affiliations go way 
back. Please let me know if the link doesn’t work.

My children, who are now pushing sixty, admit that I have become a somewhat 
better cook.  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:54 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I struggled to find the proper branch of the thread-tree to place this post.  
But I decided to do it, here, because your invocation of "organism" confirms my 
bias.  The inclusion of "consciousness" is a red herring, I think. And the 
expansion to "relations between entities", including "triads" is nice-to-have 
icing, but unnecessary[†].

The important part is, as Marcus pointed out with self-driving cars, and I 
tried to affirm, the glove *knows* hands just like a pattern recognizing AI 
knows the patterns it's been programmed to recognize. We've demonstrated that 
knowledge can be instantiated into objects/machines/animals/people. The term we 
use for that is "specific intelligence" these days, in order to distinguish 
those tasks/jobs that are straightforward to automate. Those difficult to 
automate jobs require general intelligence (GI).

The attribute of our current examples of GIs (animals and maybe even plants) 
that we long settled on is "alive" and the common term for the machines that 
exhibit GI is "organism". So I struggle to find a unique question in this 
thread that does NOT boil down to "what is life?"

What am I missing? Why are we talking about all these abstract things like 
"monism", "mind", "knowledge", "experience", "consciousness", and all that 
malarkey instead of the more biologically established things? How is this 
thread NOT about biology?

[†] The common term "ecology" and the pairwise, triadic, ..., N-ary, relations 
it implies seems sufficient without diving into semiotic hermeneutics.

On 4/27/19 11:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> As we talk, here, I am beginning to wonder if the minimal conditions for a 
> ‘knowing” require co=ordination between two organisms.

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Uncertainty means that every scenario must be considered.   Surely you've had 
to run experiments where there was missing data (like a superposition state) 
and surely you've had to use p-values?  Or are you saying there is a property 
of quantum systems beyond probability that seems irrelevant to you?

On 5/1/19, 12:09 AM, "Friam on behalf of Nick Thompson" 
 wrote:

The Schrodinger's cat can be both dead and un-dead, but I cannot know a 
thing and not know it, except by equivocating on the meaning of "know".  I 
don't think quantum theory applies to logic in the familiar world.  Or does it? 
 Am I wrong to be bloody minded about people who bring "lessons from quantum 
theory" into day-to-day macro-world scientific arguments?  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 10:10 PM
    To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick -

> That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron. 

Did you just exclude the law of the excluded middle?  How very human of you!
>  
>  "How do we explain consciousness?" in any way that is not inane.  
> (Geez, was that a quadruple negative?)
And a 4 dimensional version of same?  

- Steve

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe 
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archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

The Schrodinger's cat can be both dead and un-dead, but I cannot know a thing 
and not know it, except by equivocating on the meaning of "know".  I don't 
think quantum theory applies to logic in the familiar world.  Or does it?  Am I 
wrong to be bloody minded about people who bring "lessons from quantum theory" 
into day-to-day macro-world scientific arguments?  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 10:10 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick -

> That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron. 

Did you just exclude the law of the excluded middle?  How very human of you!
>  
>  "How do we explain consciousness?" in any way that is not inane.  
> (Geez, was that a quadruple negative?)
And a 4 dimensional version of same?  


- Steve



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe 
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Marcus, 

 

Is this the butterfly-flap argument in another form?  

 

Ok, I am improvising here: 

 

Let us say that a group of tourists goes to camp under Standing Rock, a 
geological formation known for its apparent precariousness.  Unbeknownst to the 
campers and the park rangers, erosion due to a rainstorm the previous night had 
undermined the foundation of the rock, leaving as precarious as it looked.  
During the night, a mouse walked out on the rock, and leaning over to peer at 
the sleeping campers below, tipped over the rock, crushing the tourists.  (We 
Santa Feans are given to ghoulish tourist stories.) 

 

Brought to trial, the mouse’s lawyer claimed that the mouse’s responsible, 
while not zero, was so small with respect to the other causal forces involved 
as to be negligible.  The mouse was acquitted. 

 

Moral: Some causes are so small as to not be worth talking about. 

 

I think this is a crappy argument, but I had fun writing it. 

 

Nick 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Nick writes:

 

“But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable causes 
that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever means,  
it reveals its causes in its behavior.  To the extent that events are random, 
no cause is revealed and no cause exists.”

 

The apparently random cause could have been mixed-in long ago, far out of scope 
from a contemporary experiment.   So to understand the behavior, you’d have to 
go back in time and follow everything (sub-atomically) that followed.   It 
doesn’t mean there is no cause, just that it is meaningless in practice to talk 
about it – it is too far away.

 

Marcus


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Frank, 

But when we do find out what gravity is, it will be from the study of the 
things it causes; and if it caused nothing, we would find out nothing, right?  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:25 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick,

If Hywel is correct we know a great deal about how gravity "behaves" but not 
what causes it.  No one has ever observed a graviton, he said.

Frank

The quote marks are because we know how objects behave in a gravitational field.

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 9:15 PM Nick Thompson mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> > wrote:

Hi, Eric, and interlocutors, 

I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:

I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded 
to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we 
would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  

Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now confess 
that I was making a small logical point.   In the first place, “things beyond 
experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.  So, that 
expression is merely to say that there are things we may never know.  Ok.  
That’s fine.  But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable 
causes that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever 
means,  it reveals its causes in its behavior.  To the extent that events are 
random, no cause is revealed and no cause exists.  

Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head, that I 
wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following:  To what extent do 
you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly generalized to the 
 macro level?  I hear a lot of talk among social scientists to the effect that 
now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do psychology, which talk I take to 
be obscurantist blather.  Do I need to be pistol-whipped on that point, too? 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com 
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

> I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were 
> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience 
> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  

I think this requires care.  Never wanting to defend the positions of people I 
don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to know what 
topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants applied to it.

Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since Newton?), 
it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.

Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable properties” 
(shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the system’s states.

In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a 
collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of observables, 
and which observables made up the set could be chosen without regard to which 
particular state they were characterizing.

aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was just 
the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who bothered 
to measure it.

In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.

Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of values 
assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables, which one 
could declare in advance without regard to which state is being characterized.

To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the state 
may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the case.  (To 
many others, this is its most important consequence.  But the reason I shake 
that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)

The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical 
formalization

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-30 Thread Steven A Smith

Nick -

> That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron. 

Did you just exclude the law of the excluded middle?  How very human of you!
>  
>  "How do we explain consciousness?" in any way that is not inane.  (Geez, was 
> that a quadruple negative?)
And a 4 dimensional version of same?  


- Steve



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick writes:

“But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable causes 
that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever means,  
it reveals its causes in its behavior.  To the extent that events are random, 
no cause is revealed and no cause exists.”

The apparently random cause could have been mixed-in long ago, far out of scope 
from a contemporary experiment.   So to understand the behavior, you’d have to 
go back in time and follow everything (sub-atomically) that followed.   It 
doesn’t mean there is no cause, just that it is meaningless in practice to talk 
about it – it is too far away.

Marcus

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-30 Thread Frank Wimberly

Nick,

If Hywel is correct we know a great deal about how gravity "behaves" but
not what causes it.  No one has ever observed a graviton, he said.

Frank

The quote marks are because we know how objects behave in a gravitational
field.

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 9:15 PM Nick Thompson 
wrote:

> Hi, Eric, and interlocutors,
>
>
>
> I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:
>
>
>
> *I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were
> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience
> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  *
>
>
>
> Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now
> confess that I was making a small logical point.   In the first place,
> “things beyond experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.
> So, that expression is merely to say that there are things we may never
> know.  Ok.  That’s fine.  But when you go on to say that nature is
> determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that
> anything is caused, by whatever means,  it reveals its causes in its
> behavior.  To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and
> no cause exists.
>
>
>
> Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head, that
> I wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following:  To what
> extent do you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly
> generalized to the  macro level?  I hear a lot of talk among social
> scientists to the effect that now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do
> psychology, which talk I take to be obscurantist blather.  Do I need to be
> pistol-whipped on that point, too?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> > I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were
> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience
> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.
>
>
>
> I think this requires care.  Never wanting to defend the positions of
> people I don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to
> know what topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants
> applied to it.
>
>
>
>
>
> Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since
> Newton?), it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.
>
>
>
> Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable
> properties” (shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the
> system’s states.
>
>
>
> In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a
> collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of
> observables, and which observables made up the set could be chosen without
> regard to which particular state they were characterizing.
>
>
>
> aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was
> just the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who
> bothered to measure it.
>
>
>
>
>
> In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.
>
>
>
> Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of
> values assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables,
> which one could declare in advance without regard to which state is being
> characterized.
>
>
>
> To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the
> state may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the
> case.  (To many others, this is its most important consequence.  But the
> reason I shake that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)
>
>
>
> The important consequence of this understanding is that we have
> mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and
> they are two different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be
> defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and
> that the definitions are different, that expan

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Hi, Eric, and interlocutors, 

 

I knew I would get my ears boxed for this:

 

I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded 
to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we 
would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  

 

Others have met you at the high level of your response, so I will now confess 
that I was making a small logical point.   In the first place, “things beyond 
experience that we could never know” IS a tautology, right.  So, that 
expression is merely to say that there are things we may never know.  Ok.  
That’s fine.  But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable 
causes that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever 
means,  it reveals its causes in its behavior.  To the extent that events are 
random, no cause is revealed and no cause exists.  

 

Now the discussion which followed your post was so far above my head, that I 
wasn’t sure the extent to which it addressed the following:  To what extent do 
you-all think the vagaries of quantum phenomena are properly generalized to the 
 macro level?  I hear a lot of talk among social scientists to the effect that 
now that we have quantum theory, we can’t do psychology, which talk I take to 
be obscurantist blather.  Do I need to be pistol-whipped on that point, too? 

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 2:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

> I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were 
> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience 
> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  

 

I think this requires care.  Never wanting to defend the positions of people I 
don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to know what 
topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants applied to it.

 

 

Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since Newton?), 
it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.

 

Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable properties” 
(shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the system’s states.

 

In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a 
collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of observables, 
and which observables made up the set could be chosen without regard to which 
particular state they were characterizing.

 

aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was just 
the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who bothered 
to measure it.

 

 

In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.

 

Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of values 
assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables, which one 
could declare in advance without regard to which state is being characterized.

 

To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the state 
may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the case.  (To 
many others, this is its most important consequence.  But the reason I shake 
that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)

 

The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical 
formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two 
different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be defined, that the 
theory needs both to function in its complete form, and that the definitions 
are different, that expands our understanding of concepts of state and 
observable.  A state still does the main things states have always done in 
quantitative physical theories, and in the sense that they characterize our 
“attainable knowledge”, observables do what they have always done.  Before, the 
two jobs had been coextensive; now they are not.

 

 

I assume Shakespeare wrote the “There are more things in heaven and earth, 
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” line about the same phenomenon 
as the thing that makes the Copernical revolution a revolution: people fight to 
give up importance they believed they had, or control they believed they had.  
Once the fight is in the culture, there may not be that emotional motive in all 
the combatants; they may believe they have a logical problem with the 
revolution.  But how can there be a logical problem with the Copernican 
revolution?  It is a statement about the alignments of beliefs and facts.  
Likewise the concepts of state and observable i

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

An invocation of superdeterminism would be in a double slit experiment that the 
particles are imagined to be synchronized in a deterministic fashion with the 
measurements (whether human or machine) who had to measure exactly when they 
did.  An inevitable consequence 13 billion years later.   The randomness of a 
radioactive decay or a pseudo-number random number generator is all the same 
sort of thing.   Want a different universe?   Change your random seed and 
replay..

From: Friam  on behalf of Frank Wimberly 

Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 at 6:40 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Tell me if I am wrong.  When we read Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity by John 
Baez I had the impression that wormholes were mathematical fictions.  Is 
hyperdeterminism some form of the idea that if you knew the position and 
momentum of every particle in the universe you could calculate the trajectory 
thereof for all time.

Frank
---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:33 PM Marcus Daniels 
mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
I was just throwing out two, the wormhole idea of Maldacena & Susskind and 
super-determinism described by Hooft.They seem very different to me, and 
could imply two very different universes.   That QM works for either doesn't 
help explain how one or the other or neither is the true explanation.

On 4/30/19, 6:02 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" 
mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of 
geprope...@gmail.com<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Yes, I understand your skepticism. I even share it. But nothing you've said 
validates the dichotomy you laid out before. The wizard's spell sense you get 
from entanglement across 3 meters of space is a reflection of how you (yes, and 
most of us) model the world. Even if it's only like 5/7e9 people that have any 
intuition of how the other model(s) work(s), it's still not zero. And I suspect 
it's more than 5.

A pedestrian example is in how/why/what the kids love about Instagram and 
hate about Facebook ... or can listen to that gawdawful music they listen to. 
They're developing intuitions us old farts will never have. What's to say it 
won't also happen with QM effects? E.g. we're already (fairly) comfortable with 
the way transistors work, even if most of the modeling language in which 
they're used is classical. The distinction between the circuits-level language 
of use versus the underlying quantum properties of materials level language of 
transistor construction (again riffing off Eric's point) isn't near as crisp as 
it once was.

That optimism does rely on a progressive society, though ... which looks 
unlikely at this point.

On 4/30/19 4:34 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of 
physical information.   I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will 
change that.   Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a 
reconfigurable species, a large part of the population will spend their days 
experiencing and manipulating physical phenomenon as first class thing using an 
extended nervous system.  But as it is, the inputs are from a narrow range of 
temperatures & pressures and a tiny window of electromagnetic radiation.   And 
cognitively, the short term workspace of a human is small and slow compared to 
even a simple computer.

--
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-30 Thread Frank Wimberly

Tell me if I am wrong.  When we read Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity by
John Baez I had the impression that wormholes were mathematical fictions.
Is hyperdeterminism some form of the idea that if you knew the position and
momentum of every particle in the universe you could calculate the
trajectory thereof for all time.

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:33 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> I was just throwing out two, the wormhole idea of Maldacena & Susskind and
> super-determinism described by Hooft.They seem very different to me,
> and could imply two very different universes.   That QM works for either
> doesn't help explain how one or the other or neither is the true
> explanation.
>
> On 4/30/19, 6:02 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <
> friam-boun...@redfish.com on behalf of geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, I understand your skepticism. I even share it. But nothing you've
> said validates the dichotomy you laid out before. The wizard's spell sense
> you get from entanglement across 3 meters of space is a reflection of how
> you (yes, and most of us) model the world. Even if it's only like 5/7e9
> people that have any intuition of how the other model(s) work(s), it's
> still not zero. And I suspect it's more than 5.
>
> A pedestrian example is in how/why/what the kids love about Instagram
> and hate about Facebook ... or can listen to that gawdawful music they
> listen to. They're developing intuitions us old farts will never have.
> What's to say it won't also happen with QM effects? E.g. we're already
> (fairly) comfortable with the way transistors work, even if most of the
> modeling language in which they're used is classical. The distinction
> between the circuits-level language of use versus the underlying quantum
> properties of materials level language of transistor construction (again
> riffing off Eric's point) isn't near as crisp as it once was.
>
> That optimism does rely on a progressive society, though ... which
> looks unlikely at this point.
>
> On 4/30/19 4:34 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of
> physical information.   I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will
> change that.   Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a
> reconfigurable species, a large part of the population will spend their
> days experiencing and manipulating physical phenomenon as first class thing
> using an extended nervous system.  But as it is, the inputs are from a
> narrow range of temperatures & pressures and a tiny window of
> electromagnetic radiation.   And cognitively, the short term workspace of a
> human is small and slow compared to even a simple computer.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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>

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I was just throwing out two, the wormhole idea of Maldacena & Susskind and 
super-determinism described by Hooft.They seem very different to me, and 
could imply two very different universes.   That QM works for either doesn't 
help explain how one or the other or neither is the true explanation.

On 4/30/19, 6:02 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣"  wrote:

Yes, I understand your skepticism. I even share it. But nothing you've said 
validates the dichotomy you laid out before. The wizard's spell sense you get 
from entanglement across 3 meters of space is a reflection of how you (yes, and 
most of us) model the world. Even if it's only like 5/7e9 people that have any 
intuition of how the other model(s) work(s), it's still not zero. And I suspect 
it's more than 5.

A pedestrian example is in how/why/what the kids love about Instagram and 
hate about Facebook ... or can listen to that gawdawful music they listen to. 
They're developing intuitions us old farts will never have. What's to say it 
won't also happen with QM effects? E.g. we're already (fairly) comfortable with 
the way transistors work, even if most of the modeling language in which 
they're used is classical. The distinction between the circuits-level language 
of use versus the underlying quantum properties of materials level language of 
transistor construction (again riffing off Eric's point) isn't near as crisp as 
it once was.

That optimism does rely on a progressive society, though ... which looks 
unlikely at this point.

On 4/30/19 4:34 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of 
physical information.   I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will 
change that.   Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a 
reconfigurable species, a large part of the population will spend their days 
experiencing and manipulating physical phenomenon as first class thing using an 
extended nervous system.  But as it is, the inputs are from a narrow range of 
temperatures & pressures and a tiny window of electromagnetic radiation.   And 
cognitively, the short term workspace of a human is small and slow compared to 
even a simple computer.   

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Yes, I understand your skepticism. I even share it. But nothing you've said 
validates the dichotomy you laid out before. The wizard's spell sense you get 
from entanglement across 3 meters of space is a reflection of how you (yes, and 
most of us) model the world. Even if it's only like 5/7e9 people that have any 
intuition of how the other model(s) work(s), it's still not zero. And I suspect 
it's more than 5.

A pedestrian example is in how/why/what the kids love about Instagram and hate 
about Facebook ... or can listen to that gawdawful music they listen to. 
They're developing intuitions us old farts will never have. What's to say it 
won't also happen with QM effects? E.g. we're already (fairly) comfortable with 
the way transistors work, even if most of the modeling language in which 
they're used is classical. The distinction between the circuits-level language 
of use versus the underlying quantum properties of materials level language of 
transistor construction (again riffing off Eric's point) isn't near as crisp as 
it once was.

That optimism does rely on a progressive society, though ... which looks 
unlikely at this point.

On 4/30/19 4:34 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of physical 
> information.   I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will change 
> that.   Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a reconfigurable 
> species, a large part of the population will spend their days experiencing 
> and manipulating physical phenomenon as first class thing using an extended 
> nervous system.  But as it is, the inputs are from a narrow range of 
> temperatures & pressures and a tiny window of electromagnetic radiation.   
> And cognitively, the short term workspace of a human is small and slow 
> compared to even a simple computer.   

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

There are more people that catch fly balls than develop theories of physical 
information.   I don't believe a well-funded liberal culture will change that.  
 Maybe in a hundred or a thousand years if we are a reconfigurable species, a 
large part of the population will spend their days experiencing and 
manipulating physical phenomenon as first class thing using an extended nervous 
system.  But as it is, the inputs are from a narrow range of temperatures & 
pressures and a tiny window of electromagnetic radiation.   And cognitively, 
the short term workspace of a human is small and slow compared to even a simple 
computer.   

On 4/30/19, 5:08 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣"  wrote:

You're trolling me, aren't you? 8^) I can't help myself, though.

It's not an exclusive or you've laid out. Some of us will have fast memory 
that works well in common sense space and time.  Some of us will have DSPs that 
work well in other conceptions (I'm thinking of Hawking, here). Etc. And while 
it's plausible that we stumble on innovative models (ways to think) that no 
human or animal could ever have had the means for programming their DSP, 
*eventually* [†] some clique of the population will develop DSPs for that way 
of thinking.

I'm blind to the stumbling block you see, I guess.

[†] Assuming we don't kill ourselves, of course.

On 4/30/19 3:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Either spacetime works in a surprising way and commonsense intuition is 
just wrong -- to cling to a familiar way of knowing amounts to taking the blue 
pill -- settling for crude satisficing heuristics to muddle through as a 
bag-of-water in what appears to be a 3D space.   Or we are totally driven and 
our experiments are fate.  In one case humans can't engage their 
special-purpose DSPs (so to speak) and fast thinking is useless -- we aren't 
equipped to function efficiently in that alien world.  In the latter case, it 
just doesn't matter what we calculate.I think the potential for cognitive 
dissonance here is pretty clear.


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

You're trolling me, aren't you? 8^) I can't help myself, though.

It's not an exclusive or you've laid out. Some of us will have fast memory that 
works well in common sense space and time.  Some of us will have DSPs that work 
well in other conceptions (I'm thinking of Hawking, here). Etc. And while it's 
plausible that we stumble on innovative models (ways to think) that no human or 
animal could ever have had the means for programming their DSP, *eventually* 
[†] some clique of the population will develop DSPs for that way of thinking.

I'm blind to the stumbling block you see, I guess.

[†] Assuming we don't kill ourselves, of course.

On 4/30/19 3:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Either spacetime works in a surprising way and commonsense intuition is just 
> wrong -- to cling to a familiar way of knowing amounts to taking the blue 
> pill -- settling for crude satisficing heuristics to muddle through as a 
> bag-of-water in what appears to be a 3D space.   Or we are totally driven and 
> our experiments are fate.  In one case humans can't engage their 
> special-purpose DSPs (so to speak) and fast thinking is useless -- we aren't 
> equipped to function efficiently in that alien world.  In the latter case, it 
> just doesn't matter what we calculate.I think the potential for cognitive 
> dissonance here is pretty clear.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

< Why do people seek this (as Eric puts it) emotional comfort with their ways 
of knowing? >

Either spacetime works in a surprising way and commonsense intuition is just 
wrong -- to cling to a familiar way of knowing amounts to taking the blue pill 
-- settling for crude satisficing heuristics to muddle through as a 
bag-of-water in what appears to be a 3D space.   Or we are totally driven and 
our experiments are fate.  In one case humans can't engage their 
special-purpose DSPs (so to speak) and fast thinking is useless -- we aren't 
equipped to function efficiently in that alien world.  In the latter case, it 
just doesn't matter what we calculate.I think the potential for cognitive 
dissonance here is pretty clear.

Marcus


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I agree that the concepts of intuition or muscle memory apply to however 
mysterious one finds any given phenomenon. But we don't need deep mysteries 
like nonlocal entanglement for that. We can merely compare someone who knows 
how to write an equation for ballistic trajectories versus someone who can 
catch a high fly. Knowing the spells is not the same as having a hands-on 
understanding. There's no surprise there.

But what's odd, to me, is that people think that either (or both, or the many) 
ways of knowing are somehow *more real* (or more basic, or closer, or whatever) 
than other ways of knowing. Why do people seek this (as Eric puts it) emotional 
comfort with their ways of knowing?

On 4/30/19 2:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Experiment seems to address but not resolve experience to me.   How can this 
>  be more than an wizard’s elaborate spell?   
> Don’t basic questions like whether there is randomness in the universe 
> matter?   If not, what _/does/_ matter?   Just knowing the spells?
> 
> A not insignificant, but minor issue to me is the difference between fast and 
> slow thinking.  There’s a difference between a taxi driver taking me across 
> London through dozens of small and large streets and me following GPS to do 
> the same.  The taxi driver can holistically see the route from hundreds of 
> other possible routes. 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen writes:



< I don't know. Eric's pointing out (I think) both the bootstrapping concept 
(writing a compiler in the language it compiles) *and* the ontological status 
of levels in, eg, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Things like state space 
reconstruction and the holographic principle seem to flow directly from Nick's 
objection to nature's phenomena being generated by a language/mechanism that's 
beyond experience. >



Experiment seems to address but not resolve experience to me.   How can 
this be more than an wizard’s elaborate spell? 
  Don’t basic questions like whether there is randomness in the universe 
matter?   If not, what _does_ matter?   Just knowing the spells?



A not insignificant, but minor issue to me is the difference between fast and 
slow thinking.  There’s a difference between a taxi driver taking me across 
London through dozens of small and large streets and me following GPS to do the 
same.  The taxi driver can holistically see the route from hundreds of other 
possible routes.



Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I don't know. Eric's pointing out (I think) both the bootstrapping concept 
(writing a compiler in the language it compiles) *and* the ontological status 
of levels in, eg, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Things like state space 
reconstruction and the holographic principle seem to flow directly from Nick's 
objection to nature's phenomena being generated by a language/mechanism that's 
beyond experience.

Maybe the state/observable distinction targets those issues well, even if it 
only implies them.

On 4/30/19 1:41 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Eric writes:
> 
> < The important consequence of this understanding is that we have 
> mathematical formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and 
> they are two different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be 
> defined, that the theory needs both to function in its complete form, and 
> that the definitions are different, that expands our understanding of 
> concepts of state and observable. >
> 
> It seems to me that it is kicking the can down the road.   It enables 
> communication but it is not clear it drives toward a resolution of what is 
> going on.   I have heard other (computational) physicists claim that "all 
> physics is local", which may or may not be true depending on what the 
> calculator chooses to believe.   It seems to keep the two concepts clear one 
> cannot make that commitment. 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Eric writes:

< The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical 
formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two 
different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be defined, that the 
theory needs both to function in its complete form, and that the definitions 
are different, that expands our understanding of concepts of state and 
observable. >

It seems to me that it is kicking the can down the road.   It enables 
communication but it is not clear it drives toward a resolution of what is 
going on.   I have heard other (computational) physicists claim that "all 
physics is local", which may or may not be true depending on what the 
calculator chooses to believe.   It seems to keep the two concepts clear one 
cannot make that commitment. 

Marcus


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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-30 Thread Eric Smith

> I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were 
> wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience 
> that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  

I think this requires care.  Never wanting to defend the positions of people I 
don’t know in a conversation I wasn’t in, it would be helpful to know what 
topic the conversation was about, in the terms the participants applied to it.


Since physics has existed as a mathematical science (let’s say, since Newton?), 
it has employed a notation of “state” of a system.

Also since that time, it has employed a notion of the “observable properties” 
(shortened to just “observables”) somehow associated with the system’s states.

In classical physics, the concept of state was identical to that of a 
collection of values assigned to some sufficiently complete set of observables, 
and which observables made up the set could be chosen without regard to which 
particular state they were characterizing.

aka in common language, anything inherent in the concept of a state was just 
the value of an observable, meaning something knowable by somebody who bothered 
to measure it.


In quantum mechanics, physics still has notions of states and observables.

Now, however, the notion of state is _not_ coextensive with a set of values 
assigned to a complete (but not over-complete) set of observables, which one 
could declare in advance without regard to which state is being characterized.

To my view, the least important consequence of this change is that the state 
may not be knowable by us, even in principle, though that is the case.  (To 
many others, this is its most important consequence.  But the reason I shake 
that red cape before a herd of bulls is so that I can say…)

The important consequence of this understanding is that we have mathematical 
formalizations of the concept of state and of observable, and they are two 
different kinds of concept.  It is precisely that both can be defined, that the 
theory needs both to function in its complete form, and that the definitions 
are different, that expands our understanding of concepts of state and 
observable.  A state still does the main things states have always done in 
quantitative physical theories, and in the sense that they characterize our 
“attainable knowledge”, observables do what they have always done.  Before, the 
two jobs had been coextensive; now they are not.


I assume Shakespeare wrote the “There are more things in heaven and earth, 
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” line about the same phenomenon 
as the thing that makes the Copernical revolution a revolution: people fight to 
give up importance they believed they had, or control they believed they had.  
Once the fight is in the culture, there may not be that emotional motive in all 
the combatants; they may believe they have a logical problem with the 
revolution.  But how can there be a logical problem with the Copernican 
revolution?  It is a statement about the alignments of beliefs and facts.  
Likewise the concepts of state and observable in quantum mechanics.

It feels like a Copernican revolution to me, every time physics shows that new 
operational understandings are required, and tries to give us new language 
habits in which to coordinate our minds (singly or jointly) around them, to 
pose the question how this was known all along in our folk language and thus 
can be logically analyzed with its categories.  There is only very limited 
reason for our folk language to furnish “a description” of the nature of the 
world.  It is a collection of symbols that are part of “the system of us”, 
which when exchanged or imagined mediate coordination of our states of mind 
(and yes, I know this term can be objected to from some behaviorist points of 
view, but it seems to require much less flexibility to use provisionally than 
the state of a quantum system, even though it is also much less well-understood 
at present).  If a collection of robot vacuum cleaners exchange little pulse 
sequences of infrared light to coordinate, so they don’t re-vacuum the same 
spot, we might anticipate that there is a limited implicit representation of 
the furniture of the room and its occupants in the pulse sequences, but we 
would not expect them to furnish a description of the robots’ engineering, or 
the physical world, or much else.  Human language is somewhat richer than that, 
but it seems to me the default assumption should be that its interpretation 
suffers the same fundamental hazard.  Signals exchanged as part of a system 
should not be expected to furnish a valid empirical description _of_ the system.

Common language is fraught with that hazard in unknown degrees and dimensions; 
technical language can also be fraught, but we try to build in debuggers to be 
better at finding the errors or gaps and doing a better-than-random job of 
fixing them.

The fluidity and f

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Glen, 

You are right, here.  We could conduct this conversation just as well if not 
better over the question of how the organism develops from the zygote.  

Still, I think it's useful to have the conversation about the "-Isms" every 
once in a while, because we are committed to them in ways we do not know.  I 
was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to 
the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would 
never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  

After my exchange with Lee, I wasn't sure the conversation couldn't be had 
around the manner in which cellular automata generate entirely unexpected 
outcomes ... "seething dog vomit" as Carl used to so charmingly say ... never 
mind psychology or biology.   Clearly, the fact that we understand how 
something came about (in the way that we "understand", down to the finest 
detail, how cellular automata phenomena are generated) cannot be the criterion 
for non-conscious, if we are ever to ask the question, "How do we explain 
consciousness?" in any way that is not inane.  (Geez, was that a quadruple 
negative?)

But I am clearly in over my head, here.   I am still trying to get for Russ a 
definition of the material relation that is consciousness, something that I 
used to do confidently only a few years ago.  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:54 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I struggled to find the proper branch of the thread-tree to place this post.  
But I decided to do it, here, because your invocation of "organism" confirms my 
bias.  The inclusion of "consciousness" is a red herring, I think. And the 
expansion to "relations between entities", including "triads" is nice-to-have 
icing, but unnecessary[†].

The important part is, as Marcus pointed out with self-driving cars, and I 
tried to affirm, the glove *knows* hands just like a pattern recognizing AI 
knows the patterns it's been programmed to recognize. We've demonstrated that 
knowledge can be instantiated into objects/machines/animals/people. The term we 
use for that is "specific intelligence" these days, in order to distinguish 
those tasks/jobs that are straightforward to automate. Those difficult to 
automate jobs require general intelligence (GI).

The attribute of our current examples of GIs (animals and maybe even plants) 
that we long settled on is "alive" and the common term for the machines that 
exhibit GI is "organism". So I struggle to find a unique question in this 
thread that does NOT boil down to "what is life?"

What am I missing? Why are we talking about all these abstract things like 
"monism", "mind", "knowledge", "experience", "consciousness", and all that 
malarkey instead of the more biologically established things? How is this 
thread NOT about biology?

[†] The common term "ecology" and the pairwise, triadic, ..., N-ary, relations 
it implies seems sufficient without diving into semiotic hermeneutics.

On 4/27/19 11:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> As we talk, here, I am beginning to wonder if the minimal conditions for a 
> ‘knowing” require co=ordination between two organisms.

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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-30 Thread glen∈ℂ

I struggled to find the proper branch of the thread-tree to place this post. But I decided to do it, here, because
your invocation of "organism" confirms my bias. The inclusion of "consciousness" is a red herring,
I think. And the expansion to "relations between entities", including "triads" is nice-to-have
icing, but unnecessary[†].

The important part is, as Marcus pointed out with self-driving cars, and I tried to
affirm, the glove *knows* hands just like a pattern recognizing AI knows the patterns
it's been programmed to recognize. We've demonstrated that knowledge can be instantiated
into objects/machines/animals/people. The term we use for that is "specific
intelligence" these days, in order to distinguish those tasks/jobs that are
straightforward to automate. Those difficult to automate jobs require general
intelligence (GI).

The attribute of our current examples of GIs (animals and maybe even plants) that we long settled on is
"alive" and the common term for the machines that exhibit GI is "organism". So I struggle
to find a unique question in this thread that does NOT boil down to "what is life?"

What am I missing? Why are we talking about all these abstract things like "monism", "mind",
"knowledge", "experience", "consciousness", and all that malarkey instead of the more biologically
established things? How is this thread NOT about biology?

[†] The common term "ecology" and the pairwise, triadic, ..., N-ary, relations
it implies seems sufficient without diving into semiotic hermeneutics.

On 4/27/19 11:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

As we talk, here, I am beginning to wonder if the minimal conditions for a
‘knowing” require co=ordination between two organisms.

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-29 Thread Nick Thompson

Lee

 

God:creation::fish:water::programmer:emergence?

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of
lrudo...@meganet.net
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2019 11:31 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

> It's as

> if I ran into God on the street and I said, "God, I have always

> wondered:  How did you do this creation thing?  And God answered "What 

> creation thing?"

 

God:creation::fish:water

 

 



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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-29 Thread lrudolph

> It's as
> if I ran into God on the street and I said, "God, I have always
> wondered:  How did you do this creation thing?  And God answered "What
> creation thing?"

God:creation::fish:water



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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-29 Thread Nick Thompson

Glen, 

This is, among many other things, glorious prose.  Thank you. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2019 11:04 AM
To: FriAM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

We can apply your ... pragmatism (not pragmaticism) inherent in "what good is 
gut pain" to your story vs. model question, too. The significance of any thing 
lies in what you can *do* with it. Hence, any "taken as given", self-evident 
propositions will only exist as tools, just like their derived siblings. If the 
oracles like priests or Feynmans are understood as the tools they are, then 
it's relatively easy to see that all models are complete[able] stories because 
they imply the parts you think are missing. This is precisely the same as the 
assertion that a hand implies a glove.

It's not that doubt in *all* matters is impossible and reverence of some 
authority is necessary.  It *is* that you're looking at the fossils without 
inferring the agency that constructed the fossils. Feynman is *used* as an 
oracle when the user can do something with Feynman's authority. God is used 
when the user can use Him. Etc.

FWIW, I use my gut pain all the time. Headaches are more interesting for me, 
because I get these seizure-like headaches that often end in shivers and hours 
of puking. If they don't end that way, they go on for 3-5 days. Such headaches 
are, to me, spiritual experiences. I come out the other side feeling *erased*, 
like the fresh skin underneath a peel from a sunburn ... or how I imagine a 
cicada must feel after it emerges from its molting. I would never induce one of 
these headaches purposely. But they still seem like the serve a purpose, have a 
correlated "Why?" to them, etc.

On 4/28/19 10:53 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Oh, all right.  Threat of damage.  I am truly puzzled by the function of 
> pain.  I mean, pain in my ankle causes me to favor my ankle.  But what good 
> is gut pain?  Or headaches, for instance.  Clearly, from an evolutionary 
> standpoint, the function of pain must be what it leads you to do.  My heart 
> pain was in my elbow.  What’s with that?
> 
> Well, you say; the body can’t get everything right.  But those mistakes seem 
> really bonehead ones.

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe 
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-29 Thread glen∈ℂ

We can apply your ... pragmatism (not pragmaticism) inherent in "what good is 
gut pain" to your story vs. model question, too. The significance of any thing 
lies in what you can *do* with it. Hence, any "taken as given", self-evident 
propositions will only exist as tools, just like their derived siblings. If the 
oracles like priests or Feynmans are understood as the tools they are, then 
it's relatively easy to see that all models are complete[able] stories because 
they imply the parts you think are missing. This is precisely the same as the 
assertion that a hand implies a glove.

It's not that doubt in *all* matters is impossible and reverence of some 
authority is necessary.  It *is* that you're looking at the fossils without 
inferring the agency that constructed the fossils. Feynman is *used* as an 
oracle when the user can do something with Feynman's authority. God is used 
when the user can use Him. Etc.

FWIW, I use my gut pain all the time. Headaches are more interesting for me, 
because I get these seizure-like headaches that often end in shivers and hours 
of puking. If they don't end that way, they go on for 3-5 days. Such headaches 
are, to me, spiritual experiences. I come out the other side feeling *erased*, 
like the fresh skin underneath a peel from a sunburn ... or how I imagine a 
cicada must feel after it emerges from its molting. I would never induce one of 
these headaches purposely. But they still seem like the serve a purpose, have a 
correlated "Why?" to them, etc.

On 4/28/19 10:53 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Oh, all right.  Threat of damage.  I am truly puzzled by the function of 
> pain.  I mean, pain in my ankle causes me to favor my ankle.  But what good 
> is gut pain?  Or headaches, for instance.  Clearly, from an evolutionary 
> standpoint, the function of pain must be what it leads you to do.  My heart 
> pain was in my elbow.  What’s with that?
> 
> Well, you say; the body can’t get everything right.  But those mistakes seem 
> really bonehead ones.

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-29 Thread Nick Thompson

Hi David, 

 

No, on Bennett.  Not yet. 

 

But as I struggle with Russ’s assignment, that I sketch out a material account 
of the consciousness relation (the conscious-of relation?”), can I share this 
thought with you?  

 

Why exactly do FRIAMMERS fascinate me?  It is because you begin with elemental 
worlds of great simplicity and make magic of them.  From a small number of 
assumptions, you make worlds of wonder.  What could be more like the emergence 
of consciousness then the miraculous patterns produced “unpredictably” by 
cellular automata.  And yet, some of you deny the material continuity of 
consciousness.  How could that be?  It’s as if I ran into God on the street 
and I said, “God, I have always wondered:  How did you do this creation thing?  
And God answered, “What creation thing?”

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of David West
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2019 12:16 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

"Pain is instructive."  Read that in a book once, don't remember which one.

But pain really is what you make of it. "Damage sensor" or "threat indicator" 
are such limited possibilities. Pain is "ecstasy," pain is "erotic," pain is 
"illuminating," pain is a means to the transcendental.

Nick — as a fan of Pierce's triads, have you ever explored J.G. Bennet's 
epistemological triads?

also, if the Turing machine, the programmer, and the 'user' form an appropriate 
triad, might it be said that the Turing machine 'knows' what the programmer 
programmed and the user observes? None of the three elements "possess" that 
knowledge in isolation, but 'triadically' they all do.

dave west

 

 

On 4/29/19 7:53 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, 

 

Oh, all right.  Threat of damage.  I am truly puzzled by the function of pain.  
I mean, pain in my ankle causes me to favor my ankle.  But what good is gut 
pain?  Or headaches, for instance.  Clearly, from an evolutionary standpoint, 
the function of pain must be what it leads you to do.  My heart pain was in my 
elbow.  What’s with that?  

 

Well, you say; the body can’t get everything right.  But those mistakes seem 
really bonehead ones.  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2019 10:37 PM
To: friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Nick -

>I think of “pain” as a damage sensor.  

I think of "pain" as a "threat" indicator.  A great deal of the pain I've 
experienced in my life was not really commensurate with the damage that has 
already occurred.   

Touching a hot stove doesn't always lead to significant damage if you react 
quickly to the pain.

In my late teens, I had a dentist tell me that the "pain" I was feeling from 
his drill was really from the *heat* of the drill, not direct damage to any 
nerve.   I had complained that the novacaine was more disturbing than anything 
I felt when he was working on me.  He said "I can do it without novacaine next 
time, if you prefer".  He said that the time he saves not waiting for the 
novacaine to kick in allows him to run the drill at a lower speed and go more 
carefully/slowly and that if I was willing to signal him if I began to feel 
pain by raising a hand and promised not to panic, he would prefer that.  Sure 
enough, It worked and I haven't had novacaine since excepting one root canal.  
Most dentists seem perfectly familiar with this alternative.   The dentist who 
did the root canal *promised* me that no matter how slow she went, the process 
of killing and cleaning out the root would be the most excruciating pain I ever 
felt without novacaine.  I didn't argue.  I felt more than a little during the 
deep file-plunging.  

I don't associate a headache with "damage" though I do acknowledge it as some 
kind of warning... often nothing more than mild dehydration.   I could pop a 
few ibuprofen and ignore the pain or I could drink a glass or two of water and 
take the lesson my body was offering me.A concussion or tumor or aneurism?  
A different matter I suppose.

I *HATE* ice-cream headaches, even though I know they will pass quickly if I 
quite gulping it down.  My partner Mary doesn't get ice-cream headaches, in her 
case the same class of pain settled under one of her shoulder blades.  Once 
again, a glass of water is a good reme

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-29 Thread lrudolph

Dave writes in relevant part:

> also, if the Turing machine, the programmer, and the 'user' form an
> appropriate triad, might it be said that the Turing machine 'knows' what
> the programmer programmed and the user observes? None of the three
> elements "possess" that knowledge in isolation, but 'triadically' they
> all do.

I really like this formulation, except that I would go all the way and say
that it's the triad (rather than any one or two of "Turing machine",
"programmer", "user") that "knows" [something].  At least, with "Turing
machine" replaced by something like "partly formalized proof", it can
happen (and has happened to me more than once, sometimes with me in the
role of "programmer"="formulator of partly formalized proof", and
sometimes with me in the role of "user"="understander of partly formalized
proof"--where the latter has, again more than once, been either
"myself-at-later-time-stage-of-formulator" or
"myself-as-different-person-than-formulator") that the second of these two
triads "knows" something other than what the first knew (specifically,
that the proof actually proved more than what it was claimed to prove; of
course, the other case, where it didn't prove what it claimed, also
happens but then it may not be fair to say "know" for the earlier state of
affairs, depending on whether or not you epistemology insists that only
truths can be known).  Of course a "partly formalized proof" is not a
Turing machine, but some of the programs people have been creating lately
for doing various mathematical tasks (theorem verification, theorem
generation) really are TMs, and I see no reason why similar phenomena
couldn't happen there as well.




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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-28 Thread David West


"Pain is instructive."  Read that in a book once, don't remember which one.

But pain really is what you make of it. "Damage sensor" or "threat 
indicator" are such limited possibilities. Pain is "ecstasy," pain is 
"erotic," pain is "illuminating," pain is a means to the transcendental.


Nick — as a fan of Pierce's triads, have you ever explored J.G. Bennet's 
epistemological triads?


also, if the Turing machine, the programmer, and the 'user' form an 
appropriate triad, might it be said that the Turing machine 'knows' what 
the programmer programmed and the user observes? None of the three 
elements "possess" that knowledge in isolation, but 'triadically' they 
all do.


dave west



On 4/29/19 7:53 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:


Steve,

Oh, all right.  Threat of damage.  I am truly puzzled by the function 
of pain.  I mean, pain in my ankle causes me to favor my ankle.  But 
what good is gut pain?  Or headaches, for instance.  Clearly, from an 
evolutionary standpoint, the function of pain must be what it leads 
you to do.  My heart pain was in my elbow.  What’s with that?


Well, you say; the body can’t get everything right.  But those 
mistakes seem really bonehead ones.


Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

*From:*Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Steven 
A Smith

*Sent:* Sunday, April 28, 2019 10:37 PM
*To:* friam@redfish.com
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Nick -

>I think of “pain” as a damage sensor.

I think of "pain" as a "threat" indicator.  A great deal of the pain 
I've experienced in my life was not really commensurate with the 
damage that has already occurred.


Touching a hot stove doesn't always lead to significant damage if you 
react quickly to the pain.


In my late teens, I had a dentist tell me that the "pain" I was 
feeling from his drill was really from the *heat* of the drill, not 
direct damage to any nerve.   I had complained that the novacaine was 
more disturbing than anything I felt when he was working on me.  He 
said "I can do it without novacaine next time, if you prefer".  He 
said that the time he saves not waiting for the novacaine to kick in 
allows him to run the drill at a lower speed and go more 
carefully/slowly and that if I was willing to signal him if I began to 
feel pain by raising a hand and promised not to panic, he would prefer 
that.  Sure enough, It worked and I haven't had novacaine since 
excepting one root canal.  Most dentists seem perfectly familiar with 
this alternative.   The dentist who did the root canal *promised* me 
that no matter how slow she went, the process of killing and cleaning 
out the root would be the most excruciating pain I ever felt without 
novacaine.  I didn't argue.  I felt more than a little during the deep 
file-plunging.


I don't associate a headache with "damage" though I do acknowledge it 
as some kind of warning... often nothing more than mild dehydration.   
I could pop a few ibuprofen and ignore the pain or I could drink a 
glass or two of water and take the lesson my body was offering me.    
A concussion or tumor or aneurism?  A different matter I suppose.


I *HATE* ice-cream headaches, even though I know they will pass 
quickly if I quite gulping it down.  My partner Mary doesn't get 
ice-cream headaches, in her case the same class of pain settled under 
one of her shoulder blades.  Once again, a glass of water is a good 
remedy for me...


I have never had "phantom pain" but that is another example I think of 
how Pain != Damage?


Glad to Frank's surgery (apparently) went well.   I hope he's back on 
the Tennis Court soon!


 - Steve



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-28 Thread Nick Thompson

Steve, 

 

Oh, all right.  Threat of damage.  I am truly puzzled by the function of pain.  
I mean, pain in my ankle causes me to favor my ankle.  But what good is gut 
pain?  Or headaches, for instance.  Clearly, from an evolutionary standpoint, 
the function of pain must be what it leads you to do.  My heart pain was in my 
elbow.  What’s with that?  

 

Well, you say; the body can’t get everything right.  But those mistakes seem 
really bonehead ones.  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2019 10:37 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Nick -

>I think of “pain” as a damage sensor.  

I think of "pain" as a "threat" indicator.  A great deal of the pain I've 
experienced in my life was not really commensurate with the damage that has 
already occurred.   

Touching a hot stove doesn't always lead to significant damage if you react 
quickly to the pain.

In my late teens, I had a dentist tell me that the "pain" I was feeling from 
his drill was really from the *heat* of the drill, not direct damage to any 
nerve.   I had complained that the novacaine was more disturbing than anything 
I felt when he was working on me.  He said "I can do it without novacaine next 
time, if you prefer".  He said that the time he saves not waiting for the 
novacaine to kick in allows him to run the drill at a lower speed and go more 
carefully/slowly and that if I was willing to signal him if I began to feel 
pain by raising a hand and promised not to panic, he would prefer that.  Sure 
enough, It worked and I haven't had novacaine since excepting one root canal.  
Most dentists seem perfectly familiar with this alternative.   The dentist who 
did the root canal *promised* me that no matter how slow she went, the process 
of killing and cleaning out the root would be the most excruciating pain I ever 
felt without novacaine.  I didn't argue.  I felt more than a little during the 
deep file-plunging.  

I don't associate a headache with "damage" though I do acknowledge it as some 
kind of warning... often nothing more than mild dehydration.   I could pop a 
few ibuprofen and ignore the pain or I could drink a glass or two of water and 
take the lesson my body was offering me.A concussion or tumor or aneurism?  
A different matter I suppose.

I *HATE* ice-cream headaches, even though I know they will pass quickly if I 
quite gulping it down.  My partner Mary doesn't get ice-cream headaches, in her 
case the same class of pain settled under one of her shoulder blades.  Once 
again, a glass of water is a good remedy for me...

I have never had "phantom pain" but that is another example I think of how Pain 
!= Damage?

Glad to Frank's surgery (apparently) went well.   I hope he's back on the 
Tennis Court soon!

 - Steve


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-28 Thread Steven A Smith

Nick -

>I think of “pain” as a damage sensor. 

I think of "pain" as a "threat" indicator.  A great deal of the pain
I've experienced in my life was not really commensurate with the damage
that has already occurred.  

Touching a hot stove doesn't always lead to significant damage if you
react quickly to the pain.

In my late teens, I had a dentist tell me that the "pain" I was feeling
from his drill was really from the *heat* of the drill, not direct
damage to any nerve.   I had complained that the novacaine was more
disturbing than anything I felt when he was working on me.  He said "I
can do it without novacaine next time, if you prefer".  He said that the
time he saves not waiting for the novacaine to kick in allows him to run
the drill at a lower speed and go more carefully/slowly and that if I
was willing to signal him if I began to feel pain by raising a hand and
promised not to panic, he would prefer that.  Sure enough, It worked and
I haven't had novacaine since excepting one root canal.  Most dentists
seem perfectly familiar with this alternative.   The dentist who did the
root canal *promised* me that no matter how slow she went, the process
of killing and cleaning out the root would be the most excruciating pain
I ever felt without novacaine.  I didn't argue.  I felt more than a
little during the deep file-plunging. 

I don't associate a headache with "damage" though I do acknowledge it as
some kind of warning... often nothing more than mild dehydration.   I
could pop a few ibuprofen and ignore the pain or I could drink a glass
or two of water and take the lesson my body was offering me.    A
concussion or tumor or aneurism?  A different matter I suppose.

I *HATE* ice-cream headaches, even though I know they will pass quickly
if I quite gulping it down.  My partner Mary doesn't get ice-cream
headaches, in her case the same class of pain settled under one of her
shoulder blades.  Once again, a glass of water is a good remedy for me...

I have never had "phantom pain" but that is another example I think of
how Pain != Damage?

Glad to Frank's surgery (apparently) went well.   I hope he's back on
the Tennis Court soon!

 - Steve


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-28 Thread Nick Thompson

D

 

I like this example!  I might parse it differently.  I might say, you were 
conscious of the fact of the polypectomy but not of the damage done to your 
colon in the process.  I think of “pain” as a damage sensor.  

 

N

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2019 2:51 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Last colonoscopy I was thoroughly anesthetized but totally conscious. In 
recovery room, doctor explaining he had removed three minor polyps and I 
interrupted to say I thought I counted four. Shocked look on his part then told 
me the fourth was more like a skin tag. The anesthesia did prevent feeling, 
just not consciousness. 

 

Dave west

 

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, at 8:35 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

No.  But people who are under light anesthesia such as during a colonoscopy 
sometimes talk.  I don't think they remember that.

 

---

Frank Wimberly

 

My memoir:

https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

 

My scientific publications:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

 

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:32 PM Nick Thompson mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> > wrote:

Oh, yes.  We agree that I was unconscious.  And if you had been there, you 
would have experienced my unconsciousness.  But did I?  I think a person who 
adopts your position has to say, “No.”

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com 
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 12:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Yes, you were unconscious.  As you know, I had that experience a few days ago.

 

Frank

---

Frank Wimberly

 

My memoir:

https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

 

My scientific publications:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

 

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:13 PM Nick Thompson mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> > wrote:

Hi Frank, 

 

The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class of 
experiencing consciousness?  Experiencing non-consciousness?  I think for your 
line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an oxymoron.  For my 
line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24 hours had passed, I had 
a powerful experience of my non-consciousness.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com 
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Jon,

 

How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.

 

Frsnk

 

---

Frank Wimberly

 

My memoir:

https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

 

My scientific publications:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

 

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale mailto:jonzing...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick,

 

I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.

My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,

though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.

For instance, can something have consciousness? That said, a

conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe

with consciousness language begins with granting consciousness

to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those

that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things

with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).

This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem

of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.

 `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.

 

You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which

summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,

I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider

particular implementations

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-28 Thread Frank Wimberly

I underwent a laminectoforaminotomy
In which piece of a vertebra is removed to permit access to the foramin,
the tunnel through which a nerve passes from the spinal cord to, for
example, an arm.  My seven year-old grandson wanted to know if the surgeon
had done this before.  The doc said that he had done it a few times and
that he was a smart seven year-old.  I suspect it's routine for a
neurosurgeon.

You probably need to be unconscious for this.  They put pins in your skull
to keep you from moving.  But it's considered minimally invasive surgery.

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sun, Apr 28, 2019, 2:51 PM Prof David West  wrote:

> Last colonoscopy I was thoroughly anesthetized but totally conscious. In
> recovery room, doctor explaining he had removed three minor polyps and I
> interrupted to say I thought I counted four. Shocked look on his part then
> told me the fourth was more like a skin tag. The anesthesia did prevent
> feeling, just not consciousness.
>
> Dave west
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, at 8:35 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>
> No.  But people who are under light anesthesia such as during a
> colonoscopy sometimes talk.  I don't think they remember that.
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:32 PM Nick Thompson 
> wrote:
>
> Oh, yes.  We agree that I was unconscious.  And if you had been there, you
> would have experienced my unconsciousness.  But did I?  I think a person
> who adopts your position has to say, “No.”
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 12:16 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> Yes, you were unconscious.  As you know, I had that experience a few days
> ago.
>
>
>
> Frank
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:13 PM Nick Thompson 
> wrote:
>
> Hi Frank,
>
>
>
> The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class
> of experiencing consciousness?  Experiencing non-consciousness?  I think
> for your line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an
> oxymoron.  For my line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24
> hours had passed, I had a powerful experience of my non-consciousness.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> Jon,
>
>
>
> How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.
>
>
>
> Frsnk
>
>
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale  wrote:
>
> Nick,
>
>
>
> I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.
>
> My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,
>
> though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.
>
> For instance, can something *have* consciousness? That said, a
>
> conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe
>
> with *consciousness language* begins with granting consciousness
>
> to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those
>
> that agree thus far, it appears that the only way t

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-28 Thread Prof David West

Last colonoscopy I was thoroughly anesthetized but totally conscious. In 
recovery room, doctor explaining he had removed three minor polyps and I 
interrupted to say I thought I counted four. Shocked look on his part then told 
me the fourth was more like a skin tag. The anesthesia did prevent feeling, 
just not consciousness. 

Dave west

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, at 8:35 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> No. But people who are under light anesthesia such as during a colonoscopy 
> sometimes talk. I don't think they remember that.
> 
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
> 
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
> 
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
> 
> Phone (505) 670-9918
> 
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:32 PM Nick Thompson  
> wrote:
>> Oh, yes. We agree that I was unconscious. And if you had been there, you 
>> would have experienced my unconsciousness. But did I? I think a person who 
>> adopts your position has to say, “No.”

>> __ __

>> Nicholas S. Thompson

>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

>> Clark University

>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

>> __ __

>> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank 
>> Wimberly
>> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 12:16 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

>> __ __

>> Yes, you were unconscious. As you know, I had that experience a few days 
>> ago.

>> __ __

>> Frank


>> ---
>> Frank Wimberly
>> 
>> My memoir:
>> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>> 
>> My scientific publications:
>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>> 
>> Phone (505) 670-9918

>> __ __

>> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:13 PM Nick Thompson  
>> wrote:

>>> Hi Frank, 

>>> 

>>> The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class 
>>> of experiencing consciousness? Experiencing non-consciousness? I think for 
>>> your line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an oxymoron. 
>>> For my line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24 hours had 
>>> passed, I had a powerful experience of my non-consciousness. 

>>> 

>>> Nick 

>>> 

>>> Nicholas S. Thompson

>>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

>>> Clark University

>>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

>>> 

>>> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank 
>>> Wimberly
>>> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
>>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

>>> 

>>> Jon,

>>> 

>>> How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.

>>> 

>>> Frsnk

>>> 


>>> ---
>>> Frank Wimberly
>>> 
>>> My memoir:
>>> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>>> 
>>> My scientific publications:
>>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>>> 
>>> Phone (505) 670-9918

>>> 

>>> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale  wrote:

 Nick,

 

 I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.

 My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,

 though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.

 For instance, can something *have* consciousness? That said, a

 conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe

 with *consciousness language* begins with granting consciousness

 to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for 
 those

 that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new 
 things

 with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).

 This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem

 of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.

  `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.

 

 You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which

 summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,

 I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider

 particular implementations or better particular embodiments.

 

 Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and

 memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.

 The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing

 complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the

 Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge

 for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but

 som

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

> Thanks, Marcus.
>
> How often are proofs with errors published in refereed articles or
> textbooks?

Some years ago, when you guys in Santa Fe were reading Ruben Hersh's "18
Unconventional Essays on the Nature of Mathematics", I took the
opportunity to download a copy for myself.  Assuming you(-all) still have
your copies too, I recommend that you read (or reread) the
philosopher-of-mathematics Jody Azzouni's chapter, "How and why
mathematics is unique as a social practice", where he elaborates an idea
he calls "the benign fixation of mathematical practice".Here's a brief
passage from that chapter (asterisks indicate italicized matter):
===begin===
Lets turn to the second (*unnoticed*) way that mathematics
*shockingly* differs from other group practices. *Mistakes are ubiquitous
in mathematics.* [...] What makes mathematics difficult is (1) that its
*so easy* to blunder in; and (2) that its *so easy* for others (or
oneself) to see
when theyre pointed outthat blunders have been made. (pp. 204 and 205
of Hersh's book)
===end===
If the claims in that passage are true (and they ring true to me), then
even the informal refereeing (from colleagues, friends, or students) to
which a proposed proof is subjected at the blackboard or in pre-print form
is likely to turn up mistakes, and even less-than-diligent formal
refereeing to which a proof submitted for publication is subjected most of
the time, are likely to lead to corrections before eventual publication;
and if errors persist (as they often do), then unless the publication goes
unread (as many do...) they too will likely be corrected, eventually.

None of this quantifies the "how often" question, but it is consistent
with the general consensus "not often (but sometimes), and eventually
corrected (unless no one gives a good goddamn about the result)".

For more on this, read the chapter by me at the following link (I may have
sent the list, or some subset of it, this chapter once before; sorry about
that), which (incidentally relevant to an earlier subthread) has a
footnote mentioning computations with unreliable oracles.

https://clarkuedu-my.sharepoint.com/personal/lrudolph_clarku_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?id=%2Fpersonal%2Flrudolph%5Fclarku%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2Flogics%5Ffor%5Farxiv%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Flrudolph%5Fclarku%5Fedu%2FDocuments&cid=2d17a63c-3b2f-4b08-ada5-7f384570ef5a




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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Another example in different domain is Coq.   

Scientists often aren't very good about reproducibility.   Recently, the 
psychology community has had a pound of flesh taken, but I'd argue it is a 
fundamental problem.   Good enough to publish isn't really that high a bar.  

Marcus

On 4/27/19, 7:26 PM, "Friam on behalf of Russell Standish" 
 wrote:

On Sun, Apr 28, 2019 at 12:52:02AM +, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Russell writes:
> 
> < However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate 
P=NP for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this, though, 
and personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in the area :). >
> 
> Minimally, why is LaTeX the preferred format and not, say, Mathematica?   
At least the latter makes it complete and computable.

Convince Stephen Wolfram to open source Mathematica (or at least the
typesetting bits of it), then there might be some chance of
this. Otherwise, not so much.

LaTeX got its head start by not only being superior to its
competition, but also by being open source from the get go (unusual
for the time). When LaTeX came out, the only thing better (at least
according to some people) were incredibly expensive desktop publishing
packages worth $10K or more (back when $10K was worth more than double
that now).

-- 

Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au

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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

2019-04-27 Thread Russell Standish

On Sun, Apr 28, 2019 at 12:52:02AM +, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Russell writes:
> 
> < However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate P=NP 
> for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this, though, and 
> personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in the area :). >
> 
> Minimally, why is LaTeX the preferred format and not, say, Mathematica?   At 
> least the latter makes it complete and computable.

Convince Stephen Wolfram to open source Mathematica (or at least the
typesetting bits of it), then there might be some chance of
this. Otherwise, not so much.

LaTeX got its head start by not only being superior to its
competition, but also by being open source from the get go (unusual
for the time). When LaTeX came out, the only thing better (at least
according to some people) were incredibly expensive desktop publishing
packages worth $10K or more (back when $10K was worth more than double
that now).

-- 

Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

> Russell writes:
>
> < However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate
> P=NP for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this,
> though, and personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in the
> area :). >
>
> Minimally, why is LaTeX the preferred format and not, say, Mathematica?
> At least the latter makes it complete and computable.

Not everyone can afford Mathematica.  I can, but am not motivated enough
both to pay for it and to learn to use it well, given that very little of
the mathematics I want to do is very amenable to what it seems designed to
be best at.  Clark's mathematics department *couldn't* afford it while I
was there--Matlab was apparently enough cheaper, or perhaps more
appropriate to the research interests of the most likely user.  For the
occasional investigation of some example or other that comes up in my
work, free wxMaxima has mostly been adequate (but I could never persuade
any of the undergraduate math majors who were working with me and one of
our CS faculty on some geometric problems in motion planning that it was
something it was worth *their* trouble to learn in the hopes of 
furthering our research: I  have no evangelical talents to be applied to
those who have not already been touched by the appropriate version of the
Holy Spirit).

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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Thanks, Marcus.

How often are proofs with errors published in refereed articles or
textbooks?

Hywel told me about a case in which Lincoln Wolfenstein got the sign wrong
in the conclusion of a long article about neutrinos.  A result was that his
article was cited much more than a typical one in physics.

Totally non sequitur: my daughter's best friend in highschool was
Wolfenstein's daughter.

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 7:04 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> One reason it could be hard to follow something is because an implication
> is just not there, or notation is used in a contradictory fashion.   These
> are that a computer just won’t tolerate.   At least convince a computer
> that conclusions follow from premises and then I’ll bother to spend hours
> on it.   A proof is just a best effort, so use machines to make it as good
> as it can be.
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 6:55 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow
>
>
>
> I'm not following.  What has LaTex vs Mathematica got to do with the
> proofs in question?
>
>
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 6:52 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:
>
> Russell writes:
>
> < However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate
> P=NP for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this,
> though, and personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in the
> area :). >
>
> Minimally, why is LaTeX the preferred format and not, say, Mathematica?
>  At least the latter makes it complete and computable.
>
> Marcus
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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>

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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

One reason it could be hard to follow something is because an implication is 
just not there, or notation is used in a contradictory fashion.   These are 
that a computer just won’t tolerate.   At least convince a computer that 
conclusions follow from premises and then I’ll bother to spend hours on it.   A 
proof is just a best effort, so use machines to make it as good as it can be.

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 6:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

I'm not following.  What has LaTex vs Mathematica got to do with the proofs in 
question?

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 6:52 PM Marcus Daniels 
mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
Russell writes:

< However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate P=NP 
for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this, though, and 
personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in the area :). >

Minimally, why is LaTeX the preferred format and not, say, Mathematica?   At 
least the latter makes it complete and computable.

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

I'm not following.  What has LaTex vs Mathematica got to do with the proofs
in question?

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 6:52 PM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> Russell writes:
>
> < However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate
> P=NP for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this,
> though, and personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in the
> area :). >
>
> Minimally, why is LaTeX the preferred format and not, say, Mathematica?
>  At least the latter makes it complete and computable.
>
> Marcus
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Russell writes:

< However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate P=NP 
for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this, though, and 
personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in the area :). >

Minimally, why is LaTeX the preferred format and not, say, Mathematica?   At 
least the latter makes it complete and computable.

Marcus

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

2019-04-27 Thread Russell Standish

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 11:28:41AM -0600, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> 
> Lee, Surely someone has developed probabilistic Turing Machines which can, 
> very
> rarely, make errors.  I am ignorant of the field since 1972 when I took a
> course which used Hopcroft and Ullman as a text.
> 
> Nick, I agree that your questions are charming.  Your humanity is clearly
> seen.  By the way, it occurred to me this morning that the motto of
> behaviorists should be, "If it talks like a duck🦆...etc"
> 
> Frank
> 

There is a small amount of literature on probabilistic Turing
machines, which tends to go under the name "Turing machine with random
oracle".

The first result was an early one of Shannon's, who showed that adding
a random oracle did not increase the set of functions that are
computable.

However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate
P=NP for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this,
though, and personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in
the area :).

If true, it meshes in well with the idea that evolutionary algorithms
exploit the obvious random oracles of "Variation" to effectively solve
some very NP hard problems.

-- 

Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

2019-04-27 Thread Russ Abbott

I remember part of mine. The anesthesia was a bit *too* light. At one point
I felt the instrument in me. I opened my eyes and grunted. They gave me a
bit more anesthesia.


On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 11:35 AM Frank Wimberly  wrote:

> No.  But people who are under light anesthesia such as during a
> colonoscopy sometimes talk.  I don't think they remember that.
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:32 PM Nick Thompson 
> wrote:
>
>> Oh, yes.  We agree that I was unconscious.  And if you had been there,
>> you would have experienced my unconsciousness.  But did I?  I think a
>> person who adopts your position has to say, “No.”
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
>> Wimberly
>> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 12:16 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam@redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, you were unconscious.  As you know, I had that experience a few days
>> ago.
>>
>>
>>
>> Frank
>>
>> ---
>> Frank Wimberly
>>
>> My memoir:
>> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>>
>> My scientific publications:
>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>>
>> Phone (505) 670-9918
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:13 PM Nick Thompson 
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Frank,
>>
>>
>>
>> The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast
>> class of experiencing consciousness?  Experiencing non-consciousness?  I
>> think for your line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an
>> oxymoron.  For my line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24
>> hours had passed, I had a powerful experience of my non-consciousness.
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
>> Wimberly
>> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam@redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>>
>>
>>
>> Jon,
>>
>>
>>
>> How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.
>>
>>
>>
>> Frsnk
>>
>>
>>
>> ---
>> Frank Wimberly
>>
>> My memoir:
>> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>>
>> My scientific publications:
>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>>
>> Phone (505) 670-9918
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale  wrote:
>>
>> Nick,
>>
>>
>>
>> I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.
>>
>> My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,
>>
>> though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.
>>
>> For instance, can something *have* consciousness? That said, a
>>
>> conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe
>>
>> with *consciousness language* begins with granting consciousness
>>
>> to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those
>>
>> that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things
>>
>> with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).
>>
>> This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem
>>
>> of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.
>>
>>  `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.
>>
>>
>>
>> You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which
>>
>> summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,
>>

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

2019-04-27 Thread Russ Abbott

Nick: "It’s not that I think that self-conscious (etc.) doesn’t exist; it’s
that I think of it as a material relation."

What do you mean by a material relation?

Nick: "anywhere, anytime, etc., that material relation can be generated,
there consciousness exists."

Is there something to that statement other than its tautological
interpretation: whenever something can be brought into existence, it exists?


-- Russ Abbott
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles


On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 11:02 PM Nick Thompson 
wrote:

> Russ,
>
>
>
> Thanks for stating the issues so precisely.
>
>
>
> You perhaps my side of the argument a tad too strongly.  It’s not that I
> think that self-conscious (etc.) doesn’t exist; it’s that I think of it as
> a material relation.  So anywhere, anytime, etc., that material relation
> can be generated, there consciousness exists.  It’s sort of like what
> Christ said: “wherever any number shall come together in my name, there
> shall I be.” Sorry, I am probably being silly there, but I just love that
> quote.)
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Russ
> Abbott
> *Sent:* Friday, April 26, 2019 10:44 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow
>
>
>
> Good to talk to you again also, Nick.
>
>
>
> You characterized me as saying, *"yours is an in principle argument
> against any claim that machines and humans are ever doing the same thing,
> right?" *
>
> I wouldn't go that far. One might argue that as physical beings, we are
> machines of a sort, so there's not such a clear line between machines and
> humans. One of our current scientific challenges is to figure out how to
> characterize it and how to push entities across it.
>
>
>
> But moving to shallower water, consider this example. Presumably, no one
> would say that a standard washing machine knows how to clean clothes. A
> washing machine is built to control the flow of water in and out of its
> tank, to rotate its agitator for given periods of time, etc. We then
> informally say that the washing machine is cleaning the clothes. But it's
> not. It just performing mechanical actions that result in what we think of
> as clean clothes.
>
>
>
> Suppose we made the washing machine smarter. Suppose it had sensors that
> could sense the chemicals that we consider "dirt," and selected actions
> from its repertoire of actions that reduced the level of those chemicals
> below some minimal threshold. Would one say that it then knows how to clean
> clothes? I would say that it doesn't--except in an informal way of talking.
> The washing machine is built of physical components, sensors, etc. along
> with algorithms that (again) produce what *we *think of as clean clothes.
> But the washing machine doesn't think of them as clean clothes. It doesn't
> think of anything. It just does what it does.
>
>
>
> Is there anything one might add to our washing machine so that we would
> want to say that it knows how to clean clothes. I can't think of any
> incremental steps. For me to attribute the washing machine with knowing how
> to clean clothes I would insist that it have consciousness and subjective
> experience. I know that's a big jump; it's the line between machines and
> humans that I would draw. I'm now recalling, Nick, that you don't believe
> in consciousness and subjective experience. Right? So we are probably at an
> impasse since we no longer have a common vocabulary. But even if the
> position I'm assuming you hold on consciousness and subjective experience
> were not a problem, I'd still be stuck. I have no idea how to build
> consciousness and subjective experience into a washing machine. This is
> probably where we got stuck the last time we talked about this. I guess we
> drifted back out to the deeper water anyway. Oh, well. Perhaps it was worth
> reviewing the issue. Perhaps not.
>
>
>
> -- Russ
>
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 8:55 PM Nick Thompson 
> wrote:
>
> Larding below.
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Friday, April 26,

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

No.  But people who are under light anesthesia such as during a colonoscopy
sometimes talk.  I don't think they remember that.

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:32 PM Nick Thompson 
wrote:

> Oh, yes.  We agree that I was unconscious.  And if you had been there, you
> would have experienced my unconsciousness.  But did I?  I think a person
> who adopts your position has to say, “No.”
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 12:16 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> Yes, you were unconscious.  As you know, I had that experience a few days
> ago.
>
>
>
> Frank
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:13 PM Nick Thompson 
> wrote:
>
> Hi Frank,
>
>
>
> The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class
> of experiencing consciousness?  Experiencing non-consciousness?  I think
> for your line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an
> oxymoron.  For my line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24
> hours had passed, I had a powerful experience of my non-consciousness.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> Jon,
>
>
>
> How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.
>
>
>
> Frsnk
>
>
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale  wrote:
>
> Nick,
>
>
>
> I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.
>
> My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,
>
> though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.
>
> For instance, can something *have* consciousness? That said, a
>
> conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe
>
> with *consciousness language* begins with granting consciousness
>
> to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those
>
> that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things
>
> with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).
>
> This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem
>
> of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.
>
>  `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.
>
>
>
> You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which
>
> summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,
>
> I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider
>
> particular implementations or better particular embodiments.
>
>
>
> Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and
>
> memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.
>
> The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing
>
> complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the
>
> Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge
>
> for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but
>
> sometimes I can speak to my own experience. Oscar Hammerstein
>
> mused about what Old Man River knows.
>
>
>
> Naively, it seems to me that some kind of information processing,
>
> though not sufficient, is necessary for experience and for a foundations

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Oh, yes.  We agree that I was unconscious.  And if you had been there, you 
would have experienced my unconsciousness.  But did I?  I think a person who 
adopts your position has to say, “No.”

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 12:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Yes, you were unconscious.  As you know, I had that experience a few days ago.

 

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:13 PM Nick Thompson mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> > wrote:

Hi Frank, 

 

The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class of 
experiencing consciousness?  Experiencing non-consciousness?  I think for your 
line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an oxymoron.  For my 
line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24 hours had passed, I had 
a powerful experience of my non-consciousness.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com 
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Jon,

 

How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.

 

Frsnk

 

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale mailto:jonzing...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick,

 

I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.

My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,

though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.

For instance, can something have consciousness? That said, a

conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe

with consciousness language begins with granting consciousness

to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those

that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things

with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).

This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem

of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.

 `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.

 

You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which

summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,

I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider

particular implementations or better particular embodiments.

 

Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and

memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.

The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing

complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the

Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge

for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but

sometimes I can speak to my own experience. Oscar Hammerstein

mused about what Old Man River knows.

 

Naively, it seems to me that some kind of information processing,

though not sufficient, is necessary for experience and for a foundations

for consciousness. Whether the information processor needs to be

Turing complete is not immediately obvious to me, perhaps a finite-

state machine will do. Still, I do not think that a complete description of

consciousness (or whatever it means to experience) can exist without

speaking to how it is that a thing comes to sense its world.

 

For instance, in the heyday of analogue synthesizers,  musicians

would slog these machines from city to city, altitude to altitude,

desert to rain-forested coast and these machines would notoriously

respond in kind. Their finicky capacitors would experience the

change and changes in micro-farads would ensue. What does an

analogue synthesizer know?

 

Cheers,

Jonathan Zingale

 


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Yes, you were unconscious.  As you know, I had that experience a few days
ago.

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 12:13 PM Nick Thompson 
wrote:

> Hi Frank,
>
>
>
> The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class
> of experiencing consciousness?  Experiencing non-consciousness?  I think
> for your line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an
> oxymoron.  For my line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24
> hours had passed, I had a powerful experience of my non-consciousness.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow
>
>
>
> Jon,
>
>
>
> How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.
>
>
>
> Frsnk
>
>
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale  wrote:
>
> Nick,
>
>
>
> I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.
>
> My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,
>
> though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.
>
> For instance, can something *have* consciousness? That said, a
>
> conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe
>
> with *consciousness language* begins with granting consciousness
>
> to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those
>
> that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things
>
> with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).
>
> This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem
>
> of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.
>
>  `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.
>
>
>
> You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which
>
> summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,
>
> I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider
>
> particular implementations or better particular embodiments.
>
>
>
> Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and
>
> memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.
>
> The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing
>
> complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the
>
> Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge
>
> for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but
>
> sometimes I can speak to my own experience. Oscar Hammerstein
>
> mused about what Old Man River knows.
>
>
>
> Naively, it seems to me that some kind of information processing,
>
> though not sufficient, is necessary for experience and for a foundations
>
> for consciousness. Whether the information processor needs to be
>
> Turing complete is not immediately obvious to me, perhaps a finite-
>
> state machine will do. Still, I do not think that a complete description of
>
> consciousness (or whatever it means to experience) can exist without
>
> speaking to how it is that a thing comes to sense its world.
>
>
>
> For instance, in the heyday of analogue synthesizers,  musicians
>
> would slog these machines from city to city, altitude to altitude,
>
> desert to rain-forested coast and these machines would notoriously
>
> respond in kind. Their finicky capacitors would experience the
>
> change and changes in micro-farads would ensue. What does an
>
> analogue synthesizer know?
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jonathan Zingale
>
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Hi Frank, 

 

The problem is that one has immediately to ask, what is the contrast class of 
experiencing consciousness?  Experiencing non-consciousness?  I think for your 
line of thinking, where consciousness is direct, that’s an oxymoron.  For my 
line of thinking, when I woke up from my surgery and 24 hours had passed, I had 
a powerful experience of my non-consciousness.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:33 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Jon,

 

How about "experiences consciousness" in place of has consciousness.

 

Frsnk

 

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 11:03 AM Jon Zingale mailto:jonzing...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick,

 

I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.

My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,

though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.

For instance, can something have consciousness? That said, a

conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe

with consciousness language begins with granting consciousness

to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those

that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things

with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).

This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem

of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.

 `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.

 

You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which

summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,

I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider

particular implementations or better particular embodiments.

 

Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and

memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.

The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing

complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the

Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge

for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but

sometimes I can speak to my own experience. Oscar Hammerstein

mused about what Old Man River knows.

 

Naively, it seems to me that some kind of information processing,

though not sufficient, is necessary for experience and for a foundations

for consciousness. Whether the information processor needs to be

Turing complete is not immediately obvious to me, perhaps a finite-

state machine will do. Still, I do not think that a complete description of

consciousness (or whatever it means to experience) can exist without

speaking to how it is that a thing comes to sense its world.

 

For instance, in the heyday of analogue synthesizers,  musicians

would slog these machines from city to city, altitude to altitude,

desert to rain-forested coast and these machines would notoriously

respond in kind. Their finicky capacitors would experience the

change and changes in micro-farads would ensue. What does an

analogue synthesizer know?

 

Cheers,

Jonathan Zingale

 


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Thanks, Jon, for that thoughtful post.  Mostly I hope that others will comment 
on it.  

 

I guess it comes down to two questions:  Grant, for a moment, that knowing is a 
relation between two entities.  Then, we can ask: What is the knowing relation? 
 And, what sorts of competencies are required for an entity to engage in such a 
relation?  And how many entities do you need before you have an instance of 
“knowing?”  

 

Let’s take a dog as an entity and “time to take a walk” as another entity and 
the dog’s owner as a third entity.  I would say that “the time to take a walk” 
is an entity they both know, although I don’t think they know it by the same 
description.  As we talk, here, I am beginning to wonder if the minimal 
conditions for a ‘knowing” require co=ordination between two organisms.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:04 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Nick,

 

I love that the title of this thread is 'A question for tomorrow'.

My position continues to be that the label `conscious` is meaningful,

though along with you, I am not sure what language to use around it.

For instance, can something have consciousness? That said, a

conservative scoping of the phenomena I would wish to describe

with consciousness language begins with granting consciousness

to more than 7 billion things on this planet alone. Presently, for those

that agree thus far, it appears that the only way to synthesize new things

with consciousness is to have sex (up to some crude equivalence).

This constraint seems an unreasonable limitation and so the problem

of synthesizing consciousness strikes me as reasonably near, ie.

 `a question for tomorrow` and not some distant future.

 

You begin by asking about the Turing machine, an abstraction which

summarizes what we can say about processing information. Here,

I am going to extend Lee's comment and ask that we consider

particular implementations or better particular embodiments.

 

Hopefully said without too much hubris, given enough time and

memory, I can compute anything that a Turing machine can compute.

The games `Magic the Gathering` and `Mine Craft` are Turing

complete. I would suspect that under some characterization, the

Mississippi river is Turing complete. It would be a real challenge

for me state what abstractions like `Mine Craft` experience, but

sometimes I can speak to my own experience. Oscar Hammerstein

mused about what Old Man River knows.

 

Naively, it seems to me that some kind of information processing,

though not sufficient, is necessary for experience and for a foundations

for consciousness. Whether the information processor needs to be

Turing complete is not immediately obvious to me, perhaps a finite-

state machine will do. Still, I do not think that a complete description of

consciousness (or whatever it means to experience) can exist without

speaking to how it is that a thing comes to sense its world.

 

For instance, in the heyday of analogue synthesizers,  musicians

would slog these machines from city to city, altitude to altitude,

desert to rain-forested coast and these machines would notoriously

respond in kind. Their finicky capacitors would experience the

change and changes in micro-farads would ensue. What does an

analogue synthesizer know?

 

Cheers,

Jonathan Zingale

 


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Gosh, Russ; thanks. 

Really!  It does help to be ignorant.  

Talking to you guys is like wandering in a field of wonders.  (Or is that 
wondering in a field of wanders?  I can never tell. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 10:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Nick,

One of the most attractive things about your posts is how charming they are. 
They are so well written! Thank you for keeping the discussion at such a 
civilized and enjoyable level -- even when I don't agree with you.

-- Russ Abbott   
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 9:44 AM mailto:lrudo...@meganet.net> > wrote:

Frank writes:
> I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an instance
> of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have multiple
> processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it could be done,
> theoretically.

First a passage from a chapter I contributed to a book edited by a
graduate student Nick knows (Zack Beckstead); I have cut out a bit in the
middle which aims at a different point not under consideration here.
===begin===
If talk of “machines” in the context of the human sciences seems out of
place, note that Turing (1936) actually introduces his “automatic machine”
as a formalization (thoroughly mathematical, though described in
suggestive mechanistic terms like “tape” and “scanning”) of “an idealized
*human* calculating agent” (Soare, 1996, p. 291; italics in the original),
called by Turing a “computer”. [...] As Turing remarks, “It is always
possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and
forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it” (1936, p.
253). It seems to me that then it must also be “always possible for the
computer to break off” and never “come back” (in fact, this often happens
in the lives, and invariably upon the deaths, of non-idealized human
calculating agents).
===end===
Of course Turing's idealization of "an idealized *human* calculating
agent" also idealizes away the fact that human computers sometimes make
errors. A Turing machine doesn't make errors.  But both the processors and
the memory of a modern computer can, and *must* make errors (however
rarely, and however good the error-detection).  To at least that extent,
then, they are not *perfect* instantiations of Turing machines.  On the
other hand, that very fact about them makes them (in some sense) *more*
like (actual) human calculating agents.

So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Or implement a Mersenne Twister with a period of 219937 – 1 and inject some 
conditionals in the machine to make the `mistakes’.   That’s a distinction 
without a difference to a behaviorist.
From: Friam  on behalf of Frank Wimberly 

Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Date: Saturday, April 27, 2019 at 11:29 AM
To: "russ.abb...@gmail.com" , The Friday Morning Applied 
Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Lee, Surely someone has developed probabilistic Turing Machines which can, very 
rarely, make errors.  I am ignorant of the field since 1972 when I took a 
course which used Hopcroft and Ullman as a text.

Nick, I agree that your questions are charming.  Your humanity is clearly seen. 
 By the way, it occurred to me this morning that the motto of behaviorists 
should be, "If it talks like a duck🦆...etc"

Frank
---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 10:59 AM Russ Abbott 
mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Nick,

One of the most attractive things about your posts is how charming they are. 
They are so well written! Thank you for keeping the discussion at such a 
civilized and enjoyable level -- even when I don't agree with you.

-- Russ Abbott
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 9:44 AM 
mailto:lrudo...@meganet.net>> wrote:
Frank writes:
> I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an instance
> of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have multiple
> processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it could be done,
> theoretically.

First a passage from a chapter I contributed to a book edited by a
graduate student Nick knows (Zack Beckstead); I have cut out a bit in the
middle which aims at a different point not under consideration here.
===begin===
If talk of “machines” in the context of the human sciences seems out of
place, note that Turing (1936) actually introduces his “automatic machine”
as a formalization (thoroughly mathematical, though described in
suggestive mechanistic terms like “tape” and “scanning”) of “an idealized
*human* calculating agent” (Soare, 1996, p. 291; italics in the original),
called by Turing a “computer”. [...] As Turing remarks, “It is always
possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and
forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it” (1936, p.
253). It seems to me that then it must also be “always possible for the
computer to break off” and never “come back” (in fact, this often happens
in the lives, and invariably upon the deaths, of non-idealized human
calculating agents).
===end===
Of course Turing's idealization of "an idealized *human* calculating
agent" also idealizes away the fact that human computers sometimes make
errors. A Turing machine doesn't make errors.  But both the processors and
the memory of a modern computer can, and *must* make errors (however
rarely, and however good the error-detection).  To at least that extent,
then, they are not *perfect* instantiations of Turing machines.  On the
other hand, that very fact about them makes them (in some sense) *more*
like (actual) human calculating agents.

So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

So, Lee, you ask: 

So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)

So, I am trying to think like an honest monist.  It seems to me that a
Turing Machine is a monist event processing system.  All you got is marks on
the tape, right? 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of
lrudo...@meganet.net
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 10:45 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Frank writes:

> I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an 

> instance of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have 

> multiple processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it 

> could be done, theoretically.

First a passage from a chapter I contributed to a book edited by a graduate
student Nick knows (Zack Beckstead); I have cut out a bit in the middle
which aims at a different point not under consideration here.

===begin===

If talk of "machines" in the context of the human sciences seems out of
place, note that Turing (1936) actually introduces his "automatic machine"

as a formalization (thoroughly mathematical, though described in suggestive
mechanistic terms like "tape" and "scanning") of "an idealized

*human* calculating agent" (Soare, 1996, p. 291; italics in the original),
called by Turing a "computer". [...] As Turing remarks, "It is always
possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and forget
all about it, and later to come back and go on with it" (1936, p.

253). It seems to me that then it must also be "always possible for the
computer to break off" and never "come back" (in fact, this often happens in
the lives, and invariably upon the deaths, of non-idealized human
calculating agents).

===end===

Of course Turing's idealization of "an idealized *human* calculating agent"
also idealizes away the fact that human computers sometimes make errors. A
Turing machine doesn't make errors.  But both the processors and the memory
of a modern computer can, and *must* make errors (however rarely, and
however good the error-detection).  To at least that extent, then, they are
not *perfect* instantiations of Turing machines.  On the other hand, that
very fact about them makes them (in some sense) *more* like (actual) human
calculating agents.

So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe
<http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

archives back to 2003:  <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC  <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/>
http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

Jon writes:

< For instance, in the heyday of analogue synthesizers,  musicians
would slog these machines from city to city, altitude to altitude,
desert to rain-forested coast and these machines would notoriously
respond in kind. Their finicky capacitors would experience the
change and changes in micro-farads would ensue. What does an
analogue synthesizer know?  >

Knowing must involve a stable representation, e.g. to facilitate reasoning, but 
it also must be informed by a large network of relations.
Digital computers are really good at providing a stable representation.   With 
an extensive sensor network and an ability to engage in an environment, it 
seems reasonable to me to say an autonomous vehicle would know something about 
driving.  It has to pass a Turing test.   But I wonder to what extent humans 
benefit from their physical vulnerabilities to know things?

One example that comes to mind with quantum computing is that a SQUID can be 
used to implement a qubit (a somewhat stable representation), but it can also 
be used as an exquisitely-sensitive sensor (low-field MRI).   The non-digital 
aspects of an analog computer, e.g. entanglement with the environment, could be 
used to both sense and compute at once.

Marcus


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Indeed, Frank.

We behaviorists call that abDUCKtion.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 11:29 AM
To: russ.abb...@gmail.com; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Lee, Surely someone has developed probabilistic Turing Machines which can, very 
rarely, make errors.  I am ignorant of the field since 1972 when I took a 
course which used Hopcroft and Ullman as a text.

Nick, I agree that your questions are charming.  Your humanity is clearly seen. 
 By the way, it occurred to me this morning that the motto of behaviorists 
should be, "If it talks like a duck🦆...etc"

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 10:59 AM Russ Abbott mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Nick,

One of the most attractive things about your posts is how charming they are. 
They are so well written! Thank you for keeping the discussion at such a 
civilized and enjoyable level -- even when I don't agree with you.

-- Russ Abbott   
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 9:44 AM mailto:lrudo...@meganet.net> > wrote:

Frank writes:
> I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an instance
> of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have multiple
> processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it could be done,
> theoretically.

First a passage from a chapter I contributed to a book edited by a
graduate student Nick knows (Zack Beckstead); I have cut out a bit in the
middle which aims at a different point not under consideration here.
===begin===
If talk of “machines” in the context of the human sciences seems out of
place, note that Turing (1936) actually introduces his “automatic machine”
as a formalization (thoroughly mathematical, though described in
suggestive mechanistic terms like “tape” and “scanning”) of “an idealized
*human* calculating agent” (Soare, 1996, p. 291; italics in the original),
called by Turing a “computer”. [...] As Turing remarks, “It is always
possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and
forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it” (1936, p.
253). It seems to me that then it must also be “always possible for the
computer to break off” and never “come back” (in fact, this often happens
in the lives, and invariably upon the deaths, of non-idealized human
calculating agents).
===end===
Of course Turing's idealization of "an idealized *human* calculating
agent" also idealizes away the fact that human computers sometimes make
errors. A Turing machine doesn't make errors.  But both the processors and
the memory of a modern computer can, and *must* make errors (however
rarely, and however good the error-detection).  To at least that extent,
then, they are not *perfect* instantiations of Turing machines.  On the
other hand, that very fact about them makes them (in some sense) *more*
like (actual) human calculating agents.

So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Lee, Surely someone has developed probabilistic Turing Machines which can,
very rarely, make errors.  I am ignorant of the field since 1972 when I
took a course which used Hopcroft and Ullman as a text.

Nick, I agree that your questions are charming.  Your humanity is clearly
seen.  By the way, it occurred to me this morning that the motto of
behaviorists should be, "If it talks like a duck🦆...etc"

Frank

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 10:59 AM Russ Abbott  wrote:

> Nick,
>
> One of the most attractive things about your posts is how charming they
> are. They are so well written! Thank you for keeping the discussion at such
> a civilized and enjoyable level -- even when I don't agree with you.
>
> -- Russ Abbott
> Professor, Computer Science
> California State University, Los Angeles
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 9:44 AM  wrote:
>
>> Frank writes:
>> > I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an
>> instance
>> > of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have multiple
>> > processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it could be
>> done,
>> > theoretically.
>>
>> First a passage from a chapter I contributed to a book edited by a
>> graduate student Nick knows (Zack Beckstead); I have cut out a bit in the
>> middle which aims at a different point not under consideration here.
>> ===begin===
>> If talk of “machines” in the context of the human sciences seems out of
>> place, note that Turing (1936) actually introduces his “automatic machine”
>> as a formalization (thoroughly mathematical, though described in
>> suggestive mechanistic terms like “tape” and “scanning”) of “an idealized
>> *human* calculating agent” (Soare, 1996, p. 291; italics in the original),
>> called by Turing a “computer”. [...] As Turing remarks, “It is always
>> possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and
>> forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it” (1936, p.
>> 253). It seems to me that then it must also be “always possible for the
>> computer to break off” and never “come back” (in fact, this often happens
>> in the lives, and invariably upon the deaths, of non-idealized human
>> calculating agents).
>> ===end===
>> Of course Turing's idealization of "an idealized *human* calculating
>> agent" also idealizes away the fact that human computers sometimes make
>> errors. A Turing machine doesn't make errors.  But both the processors and
>> the memory of a modern computer can, and *must* make errors (however
>> rarely, and however good the error-detection).  To at least that extent,
>> then, they are not *perfect* instantiations of Turing machines.  On the
>> other hand, that very fact about them makes them (in some sense) *more*
>> like (actual) human calculating agents.
>>
>> So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
>> modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)
>>
>>
>> 
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

2019-04-27 Thread Russ Abbott

Nick,

One of the most attractive things about your posts is how charming they
are. They are so well written! Thank you for keeping the discussion at such
a civilized and enjoyable level -- even when I don't agree with you.

-- Russ Abbott
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles


On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 9:44 AM  wrote:

> Frank writes:
> > I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an instance
> > of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have multiple
> > processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it could be
> done,
> > theoretically.
>
> First a passage from a chapter I contributed to a book edited by a
> graduate student Nick knows (Zack Beckstead); I have cut out a bit in the
> middle which aims at a different point not under consideration here.
> ===begin===
> If talk of “machines” in the context of the human sciences seems out of
> place, note that Turing (1936) actually introduces his “automatic machine”
> as a formalization (thoroughly mathematical, though described in
> suggestive mechanistic terms like “tape” and “scanning”) of “an idealized
> *human* calculating agent” (Soare, 1996, p. 291; italics in the original),
> called by Turing a “computer”. [...] As Turing remarks, “It is always
> possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and
> forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it” (1936, p.
> 253). It seems to me that then it must also be “always possible for the
> computer to break off” and never “come back” (in fact, this often happens
> in the lives, and invariably upon the deaths, of non-idealized human
> calculating agents).
> ===end===
> Of course Turing's idealization of "an idealized *human* calculating
> agent" also idealizes away the fact that human computers sometimes make
> errors. A Turing machine doesn't make errors.  But both the processors and
> the memory of a modern computer can, and *must* make errors (however
> rarely, and however good the error-detection).  To at least that extent,
> then, they are not *perfect* instantiations of Turing machines.  On the
> other hand, that very fact about them makes them (in some sense) *more*
> like (actual) human calculating agents.
>
> So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
> modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Frank writes:
> I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an instance
> of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have multiple
> processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it could be done,
> theoretically.

First a passage from a chapter I contributed to a book edited by a
graduate student Nick knows (Zack Beckstead); I have cut out a bit in the
middle which aims at a different point not under consideration here.
===begin===
If talk of machines in the context of the human sciences seems out of
place, note that Turing (1936) actually introduces his automatic machine
as a formalization (thoroughly mathematical, though described in
suggestive mechanistic terms like tape and scanning) of an idealized
*human* calculating agent (Soare, 1996, p. 291; italics in the original),
called by Turing a computer. [...] As Turing remarks, It is always
possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and
forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it (1936, p.
253). It seems to me that then it must also be always possible for the
computer to break off and never come back (in fact, this often happens
in the lives, and invariably upon the deaths, of non-idealized human
calculating agents).
===end===
Of course Turing's idealization of "an idealized *human* calculating
agent" also idealizes away the fact that human computers sometimes make
errors. A Turing machine doesn't make errors.  But both the processors and
the memory of a modern computer can, and *must* make errors (however
rarely, and however good the error-detection).  To at least that extent,
then, they are not *perfect* instantiations of Turing machines.  On the
other hand, that very fact about them makes them (in some sense) *more*
like (actual) human calculating agents.

So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Glen, 

I missed this question the first time.  

Mostly, we didn't discuss the "knowing" relation at all.  There was (to me, 
anyway) a very interesting conversation about the importance of "stories" in 
scientific thought.  It started when I  got quite testy about the over-use of 
"story" or "narrative"  to refer to "models" or "pictures of the world".  Now I 
absolutely agree that "stories" can be models, but I don't think that all 
models are complete stories.  A story has a beginning, a middle and an end, a 
tension that is set up, developed, and released.  (In that regard, a story is a 
little like hunger, or fear, or sex.)  Aesop's fables are examples of stories 
that are models. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference:  It's hard to 
separate Archimedes insight that his own body in the bathtub could be a model 
for the king's crown in a bucket of water (charity of classicists requested 
here) from the story, "Is this crown real or fake gold? If I dunk the crown in 
a bucket of water and measure the displaced water, I will discover the answer 
and find favor with the king."  They are deeply entangled.   And all 
experimental write-ups are, if well written, highly constrained stories.  But 
by itself, "A crown in a bucket is the same thing as me in a bathtub" is just a 
model, with a story yet to be told about it.  

The basic scientific story is to me a story about the resolution of doubt:  "I  
learned some stuff that didn't square with what I knew,  I did some stuff, and 
now that doubt is resolved."   I think the scientific story is  different from 
the religious story which I take to be, "I learned some stuff that didn't 
square with what I knew, I went to a guru, the guru set me straight, and now my 
doubt is resolved."  (I hate it when people tell me stories of having gone to 
pray at the Temple of Feynman and returned with Wisdom.)  Now the Congregation 
was INSTANTLY critical of this distinction, pointing out  that the Guru might 
say, "I had the same doubt yesterday, and so I did some stuff, and my doubt was 
resolved: let me show you how to do it."  Also, somebody pointed out that doubt 
in all matters is just impossible and science cannot be done without a 
reverential attitude with respect to SOME authorities.  I take the point, but I 
don't like it.  It pisses me off. 

I also argued that there was a version of the scientific story that 
particularly captivated all of us around the table.  The Emperor's New Clothes. 
  I can imagine a FRIAM seal, with an image of the little boy, pointing at a 
naked king, before a crowd aghast.  

Others will dispute that any of this happened. 

Wish you had been there to validate my perception. 

Nick 



Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 26, 2019 3:38 PM
To: FriAM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

What was the result of this morning's conversation?

On 4/25/19 10:50 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> What does a Turing Machine know?


--
☣ uǝlƃ


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe 
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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an instance
of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have multiple
processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it could be done,
theoretically.

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 9:43 AM Nick Thompson 
wrote:

> Frank,
>
>
>
> Well, that’s a little blunter than I feel comfortable with because it
> identifies “answering questions” with consciousness.  I like better,
> “Imagine a computer, however complicated you care to make it, however
> skilled in its execution of human behaviors in human contexts, can such a
> computer be conscious?”  I would assume from past conversations with you,
> you would say, “No.”
>
>
>
> By the way:  Am I using the language correctly if I say that a computer is
> an “instantiation” of a Turing Machine?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Frank
> Wimberly
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 27, 2019 7:33 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam@redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow
>
>
>
> I will channel Nick based on our conversation yesterday.  "A computer is a
> Turing machine and it can answer questions."* I apologize, Nick, if that's
> not your position.
>
>
>
> *Alexa, Siri, Hey Google
>
> ---
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 7:22 AM  wrote:
>
> Maybe I've missed it, but has no one pointed out that a "Turing Machine"
> is a mathematical formalism?  I may be a stick in the mud, but I refuse to
> extend the definition of "know" so far as to make "A Turing Machine knows
> [something]" a meaningful statement.  You might as well ask what a Goedel
> Enumeration knows, or what The Classification of Finite Simple Groups
> knows.  Hell, what does the integer 1 know???
>
> Now maybe in you-alls' circles, "Turing Machine" is used to refer to some
> kinds of physical implementations of particular Turing Machines.  But
> that's a pernicious identification that can only lead to tears.
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Frank, 

 

Well, that’s a little blunter than I feel comfortable with because it 
identifies “answering questions” with consciousness.  I like better, “Imagine a 
computer, however complicated you care to make it, however skilled in its 
execution of human behaviors in human contexts, can such a computer be 
conscious?”  I would assume from past conversations with you, you would say, 
“No.”  

 

By the way:  Am I using the language correctly if I say that a computer is an 
“instantiation” of a Turing Machine?  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 7:33 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

 

I will channel Nick based on our conversation yesterday.  "A computer is a 
Turing machine and it can answer questions."* I apologize, Nick, if that's not 
your position.

 

*Alexa, Siri, Hey Google

---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 7:22 AM mailto:lrudo...@meganet.net> > wrote:

Maybe I've missed it, but has no one pointed out that a "Turing Machine"
is a mathematical formalism?  I may be a stick in the mud, but I refuse to
extend the definition of "know" so far as to make "A Turing Machine knows
[something]" a meaningful statement.  You might as well ask what a Goedel
Enumeration knows, or what The Classification of Finite Simple Groups
knows.  Hell, what does the integer 1 know???

Now maybe in you-alls' circles, "Turing Machine" is used to refer to some
kinds of physical implementations of particular Turing Machines.  But
that's a pernicious identification that can only lead to tears.



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Lee, 

Remember, I and only I, am to blame for raising this question.   There ain't
no "circles" here.  

Belelagued as I am, I migh persist and ask you, "Ok, what does an
"instantiation" of a Turing Machine Know?"

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of
lrudo...@meganet.net
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2019 7:22 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Maybe I've missed it, but has no one pointed out that a "Turing Machine"
is a mathematical formalism?  I may be a stick in the mud, but I refuse to
extend the definition of "know" so far as to make "A Turing Machine knows
[something]" a meaningful statement.  You might as well ask what a Goedel
Enumeration knows, or what The Classification of Finite Simple Groups knows.
Hell, what does the integer 1 know???

Now maybe in you-alls' circles, "Turing Machine" is used to refer to some
kinds of physical implementations of particular Turing Machines.  But that's
a pernicious identification that can only lead to tears.



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove



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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

I will channel Nick based on our conversation yesterday.  "A computer is a
Turing machine and it can answer questions."* I apologize, Nick, if that's
not your position.

*Alexa, Siri, Hey Google
---
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 7:22 AM  wrote:

> Maybe I've missed it, but has no one pointed out that a "Turing Machine"
> is a mathematical formalism?  I may be a stick in the mud, but I refuse to
> extend the definition of "know" so far as to make "A Turing Machine knows
> [something]" a meaningful statement.  You might as well ask what a Goedel
> Enumeration knows, or what The Classification of Finite Simple Groups
> knows.  Hell, what does the integer 1 know???
>
> Now maybe in you-alls' circles, "Turing Machine" is used to refer to some
> kinds of physical implementations of particular Turing Machines.  But
> that's a pernicious identification that can only lead to tears.
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

Maybe I've missed it, but has no one pointed out that a "Turing Machine"
is a mathematical formalism?  I may be a stick in the mud, but I refuse to
extend the definition of "know" so far as to make "A Turing Machine knows
[something]" a meaningful statement.  You might as well ask what a Goedel
Enumeration knows, or what The Classification of Finite Simple Groups
knows.  Hell, what does the integer 1 know???

Now maybe in you-alls' circles, "Turing Machine" is used to refer to some
kinds of physical implementations of particular Turing Machines.  But
that's a pernicious identification that can only lead to tears.



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow