My answer to Roger's question is "both", FWIW. But my concern seems slightly different from both Marcus' and Nick's answers. I'm more concerned with the granularity of the updates/iota. Nick's 70/30-clean/scramble is pretty fscking coarse. As I said early on, my beliefs/skepticism is *never* that coarse. Marcus' set of equivalent solutions gets closer to what I care about... a kind of measure of how many options one has at any given *instant* in the action process. And I also care about the boundary of that set. Which course corrections can I make that still lead to a satisficing objective (like crashing my bike without brain damage), which lead to failure (brain damage), which lead to optimal outcome (dodging the left-turning old lady completely), etc.
I maintain that some of this complicated problem solving is conscious and some is subconscious (muscle memory as well as the lizard brain). And I tend to believe that the spectrum between the two is fine-grained. I.e. there is no disjoint, binary, distinction between "things I do with full belief" versus "things I (don't) do with full skepticism." On 09/22/2017 08:26 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > So I leap across the chasm believing that I have a 70 percent chance of > making the jump but knowing that I have a 30 percent chance of not making it. > I think James would argue that to the extent that one paid attention to the > 30 percent, it is actually increased. I.E., if you jump ambivalently, you > are less likely to make the jump. And that would be because an ambivalent > jump is functionally different from a confident one. For instance, to the > extent that you prepare yourself to grab at the cliff as you miss, you > ill-prepare yourself to make the jump cleanly. On 09/22/2017 08:31 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Underlying such a network is some generating process, and the belief is about > that ongoing process, as tabulated by joint and conditional probabilities. > Some of the imagined degrees of freedom may not be relevant in an applied > setting (e.g. pilot waves or a multiverse) and are acceptable reasons for > having probabilities, but others can and should be explained by hidden or > external variables. The more these variables are made explicit, the more > precise and falsifiable the predictions can be. Ideally, one would have a > network of logical predicates that deterministically lead to one or a > degenerate set of equivalent solutions. -- ☣ gⅼеɳ ============================================================ 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
