Victor,
Why would you ever expect Lacan to report accurately on his on mental state? Or even to know it? What special privilege does Lacan have to know his own mental state? 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 Vladimyr Burachynsky Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2016 11:32 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Please I need help with a technical term to Frank Curious, a trained psychoanalyst had difficulty determining Lacan’s mental state. One only has to attempt reading his work. vib At least Zizek has some funny lines about bathroom seating and the focal centres, English, German ,and American . I think he missed the Italian tiled pit and the Bavarian Watering Hole. From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: November-16-16 8:00 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Please I need help with a technical term Vladimyr, Two of my closest friends in Pittsburgh were senior psychoanalysts. One was a female and a child training analyst (the pinnacle of the profession). The other was a male and was very involved with philosophers from the University of Pittsburgh (one of the best graduate programs in the US). They were discussing Lacan and the female said, "He's crazy, isn't he?". The male said, "What difference does that make?" Irrelevant to your points but an amusing memory. Frank Frank Wimberly Phone (505) 670-9918 On Nov 16, 2016 6:44 PM, "Vladimyr Burachynsky" <vbur...@shaw.ca <mailto:vbur...@shaw.ca> > wrote: Nick, Eco describes a situation where the object is its own sign and the confusion just keeps getting worse when the Thing described as an object , turns out to be a counterfeit. If you wish to elaborate on what is an object you may have a problem since every possible object only exists as a symbol in a viewer’s mind and some minds are rather perverse in what they consider to be real in any sense. Eco hinted at some 19th century erotic literature having a more profound effect than the real. E.O. Wilson described a species of moth where the males attempted to gang rape Tinsel lures cast out into a field. The object gets the distinction of that name only when perceived by a witness. If I recall correctly the males entirely ignored the females. A self guided robotic vacuum cleaner never identifies the obstacle as a chair or sleeping dog, nor is it even a requirement. I once tried to read Jacques Lacan but never finished due to all his baffling jargon. I thought him a charlatan. Then I tried reading Claude-Levy Strauss , Savage Mind, and started seeing the historical line of thinking. Strauss tried to develop a formalism based on some weird type of graphical geometry and all his parameters were given metaphorical names but never any clarity. You would be welcome to these if you lived closer. Slavoj Zizek tried to modernize Hegel and Lacan and actually got some real laughs. He is very prolific and an easier read than Lacan. Umberto Eco is much more methodical and Kant and the Platypus is still a difficult work to plough through. Eco died last year but his body of work should help you and is well referenced. The Lion is an object as well as a symbol. When the symbol of a lion is juxtaposed with a symbol of a royal family it becomes another level of symbology. Place the Lion at the foot of a child and we have another composite symbol. When CS Lewis used the Lion to symbolize the Ultimate Goodness , Aslan , in Narnia the symbol appears reordered and now the child follows this symbol. Perhaps Objects as distinct from Symbols is a first step. Symbols become ever more complex and their level of abstraction becomes difficult to determine. Back to the basement level then a Real Lion can eat me or foul my carpet. No symbol can do so. But someone holding a symbol can still slay me. But a hooligan carrying a swastika symbol does not actually give the symbol agency. If one can see these two as inseparable then we may call it conflation. Conflation of symbols today is very common and widely acceptable, sometimes useful and even revolutionary. I will hazard a guess and suggest you are exclusively dealing with high level symbols such as computer code that can digest other symbols and may or may not ,make a mess as well. Let’s assume that is the case and symbolic code can sort and re-catalogue other code, information. It is highly ordered and intolerant of meddling. These symbols are mechanistic and can not tolerate disorder. So in a sense they may be symbols but also serve as operators. My Fake Hiroshige wood prints only operated on my own vanity, my guests were unaffected. I think your symbols have a wider field of operation. I might suggest that only a thinking entity can tell the difference between an object and a symbol. I used to catch dragonflies by tossing small gravel above my head. The dragons were attracted but once caught they could detect the chicanery and released the bait. However they never learned that this was a ruse. So the dragonfly responds to an image that fits an optical pattern. It is rather timely that someone adds to this topic from a hard science position, bridge the divide so to speak. If you manage to reconcile so much literature it should be seen as a triumph. Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky vib names are symbols and it is in our nature to categorize such symbols. From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Nick Thompson Sent: November-15-16 1:38 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Please I need help with a technical term Hi Eric and Victor, One of the most frustrating features of my attempt to formularize the sign relation, is that with each next example, I always think that applying the formula is going to be easy. And yet, when I try to do it, it always turns out to be VERY hard, or simply impossible. Let me try out my newly-declared formula for the sign relation, … [A sign] re-presents [some object] with respect to [some interpretant]. …on your example: Only to a third party, analyzing the events before them, would "High_contrast_round_things" be a bird-symbol for "Seeds". To the bird it is whatever it is, and is not a symbol of anything. First of all, I assume that “symbol” was a slip of the tongue. In the Peircean world, a symbol is a very special sort of sign, and we are just trying to come up with a general way to attribute sign-dom, so the question of whether this is a “symbol” or not, can be postponed. Before I apply the formula, I need to make a stipulation about how a chick works. I assume that a chick that lacks grit in its gullet but has food is a different chick than a chick that has food in its gullet but lacks grit. Let’s assume that the chick distinguishes between grit and corn, by a trial peck, and that it distinguishes peckable items by how they behave when scratched. With these assumptions in place, let’s try to apply the formula to the chick. Chick scratches [loose Object] re-presents [dirt] with respect to [object vs substrate] [Peckable] re-presents [loose objects] with respect to [size] Chick Pecks, now two possibilities, path a and path b 1a [Hard, dense] re-presents [peckable, loose object] with respect to [density, softness] 1b [Soft, light] re-presents [peckable, loose object ] with respect to [density, softness] 2a [Grit] re-presents [hard, dense, peckable, loose object] with respect to [chick that lacks grit] 2b [Food] re-presents [soft, light, peckable, loose object with respect to [chick that lacks food] Chick pecks and swallows. WHY IS THIS SO HARD!? 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 Eric Charles Sent: Monday, November 14, 2016 8:07 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Please I need help with a technical term Good points! And this draws attention to the "third party" problem I mentioned. Only to a third party, analyzing the events before them, would "High_contrast_round_things" be a bird-symbol for "Seeds". To the bird it is whatever it is, and is not a symbol of anything. Should the third party misidentify the function of the objects in question, for example, by neglecting to take into account that birds gain benefit from eating small hard objects of almost any kind (because the non-food aids digestion by performing a grinding function in the crop), then the third-party is wrong about what is going on. This is complicated by the ability of homo sapiens to adopt a reflective third-party perspective regarding their own behavior. Thus I can speculate about what different things symbolize to me, in the same manner I speculate about what different things symbolize to the bird. However, contra Descartes, and in line with Peirce and Freud, we must remember that our diagnoses of our own symbolic actions can suffer from the same deficiency discussed above. A claim like, "To me, this flag symbolizes strength and resolve," is a hypothesis/assertion regarding our own symbolic interaction with the world, and can be mistaken. A third party can challenge our self-symbol claim in all the same ways they could challenge our bird-symbol claim. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Supervisory Survey Statistician U.S. Marine Corps On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 9:49 PM, VLADIMYR BURACHYNSKY <vbur...@shaw.ca <mailto:vbur...@shaw.ca> > wrote: Peck_Ground_Now is "Seeds" Birds peck for gravel to aid digestion in the crop. They have to replace the grinding stones regularly. So without grit they starve to death even when supplied with more than adequate grain. Your interpretation of this particular symbol requires a modification. I am such a supplier of information and it requires the linkage of two minds connected by a flexible Script . Your Symbol may or may not be amended that is your decision not mine. However your symbol may ultimately contain information that originates from other minds and preserves this in your language without full attribution. I also adjust my symbols in such a casual manner without intentional disrespect. Check out Umberto Eco's writings on Semiotics and Good Luck. I myself am struggling with Object Oriented Programming versus Procedural Programming and the versions of language appear to overlap and smear out some distinctions. Each discipline attempts to inform users in its unique idiom of a language while the student arrives with a third language set never anticipated by the lecturers. At first reading I thought myself unable to contribute but the slight error seems opportune. You, so it appears, are now trying to reconcile more than one language set for the benefit of unknown minds with unknown language preferences. So it forces you to use a common predecessor language structure which I never considered so important before now. That implies that a general language must be a first step to building subsequent precise languages. This e-mail is perhaps an example of something , I thought came from Wittgenstein ; about the way he thought language is a type of negotiation procedure. I have no idea in truth how you think and expect you have no idea how I think but this scrap of agreed upon language may be of some use to an unknown reader. Serendipity that started a course of thought. vib _____ From: "Eric Charles" <eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com> > To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> > Sent: Wednesday, November 9, 2016 8:38:14 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Please I need help with a technical term Case study: We put several (non-toxic) items on the ground around a bird, and find that high-contrast mini-Styrofoam balls, high-contrast glitter, and several similar items result in pecking. From that we learn ---- When Object [Bird] performs Function [Peck_Ground?] with the Cue/Argument [High-contrast_round_things_on_ground], the result is that Bird sets variable "Peck_Ground_Now" = "True" ---- That's all fine and good, I think. But, If you want to get to "signs", I suspect, we need to go up a level of analysis. We need to add into our system a third party capable of taking all of those elements as arguments for something akin to a Function [Evaluate_Evolutionary_Utility]. That is, we must have outside knowledge (perhaps derived from prior study, perhaps from deep study of religious texts), that the "proper" context of Peck_Ground_Now is "Seeds". Building off of several of the messages above, an Object [Human] could run the three-argument-function Evaluate_Evolutionary_Utility(Bird, Peck_Ground, High-Contrast_Round_Things) . As a result, the human would set variable "Evolutionary_Function" = "Seeds". You would then have Human run another Funciton [Is_Sign?], which takes two arguments ---- 1) the third argument in the Evaluate_Evolutionary_Utility function, and 2) the result of the Evaluate_Evolutionary_Utility function ---- to determine if they match. In this case, because they do not match (i.e., "High-contrast_round_things" =/= "Seeds" ), Human sets the variable "Sign" = "True". If you want to make a more sophisticated (Peircian) function, then in this case the Function [Is_Sign?] might lead you to set the variable "Sign" = "Icon" (because it is the type of "sign" that physically resembles what it "stands for"). ---- Note that (and this should appeal to Nick), the "arguments" for the Human include things that were not "arguments" for the bird, demonstrating that one cannot determine whether any particular "thing" is an example of "an argument" without knowing it's role in the program/discussion. At least, that would be my take. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Supervisory Survey Statistician U.S. Marine Corps On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 3:40 PM, Russ Abbott <russ.abb...@gmail.com <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com> > wrote: If you are talking about “S. is a sign to I. of O.” I would call that a ternary relation: isASignOfTo (S, O, I). (Notice I switched the O and the I.) So the triple ("hello", greeting, Nick) is a triple in the isASignOfTo relation. I don't know that there are standard terms for the individual elements. They might be called field values, tuple elements, components, or something similar. I don't like "argument" because I tend to use "argument" when calling a function. But we are talking about relations, not functions. If the fields have names (like sign, meaning, person), you might call the elements use "the sign", "the meaning", and "the person." More generally, if you like to think in terms of roles, you might call the elements in the tuples, role-fillers, where sign, meaning, and person are roles. -- Russ On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 11:53 AM glen ☣ <geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com> > wrote: It seems we're conflating relations with operators. The sense of "argument" is that of operand, which can be just an input to an operator or just an output, or both an input and an output. The operand is a possibly dynamic thing operated on by the operator. I don't think you want that sense. So, for that reason, you may not want to use "argument". Naively, relations are simpler statements of how extant/static things relate. And if you really just want relations, then you're talking about a triad, not a dyad. So, there would be 1 relation term and 3 "parameter" (or "variable") terms. But operators _also_ define context, which is relevant to your "O". So, perhaps S and I are merely related in the context set by the O operator? So, the reason I waited till lunch time to answer is because I think the language you choose to say this depends quite a bit on what it is you're trying to say. On 11/08/2016 11:20 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > In the language I proposed, this expression would be rendered as > [Relation1([Relation2][Argument1][Relation3][Argument2]) or something like > that. In other words, I see you as using “argument” exactly as I meant it. > > While still confused, tho, I like your solution to my problem. However my > FRIAM colleagues my react to my usage, Philosophers are going to HATE it. dave> "Arguments in this sense have nothing to do with the structure of the expression itself. dave> dave> It might sound redundant, but I think you should simply use 'Term', e.g. [Term1][relation][Term2][Relation2]Term3] and replace the word 'term' in the prose with 'part' or 'element', i.e. segment or piece. [...] nick> [Argument1][relation1][Argument2][Relation2]Argument3]; or, for short nick> nick> A1R1A2R2A3 -- ☣ glen ============================================================ 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 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 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 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 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 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 FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
