Eric, 

 

I do hope you relent on your new year’s resolution to avoid FRIAM.  Yours is 
one of the voices that makes it thrive.  

 

I do regret the … um .. strength of my last post, it’s … um …er….arrogance?  I 
did rather want to resist you adding your considerable authority to any notion 
that there is any truth outside enduring patterns of human experience.  But I 
should do that with the strength of my logic, not the force of my opprobrium.  

 

Do stay in touch as much as you can, where ever you are.  

 

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 Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2019 3:11 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Nick, hi,

 

I am about to drop permanently off this thread, because the inanity (that could 
be a typo for insanity) of my year is about to begin, and all time will be 
lost.  But let me try to clarify one thing before leaving.  I mean this as an 
acknowledgment of the respect due to people who are willing to do work I am not 
doing.  (Larding below, only at one place.)





On Jan 1, 2019, at 5:46 AM, Nick Thompson <nickthomp...@earthlink.net 
<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> > wrote:

 

Dear Erics, C. and S., 

 

I got lost for a moment, here, but now am caught up.  I hope. 

 

Eric Charles is correct.

 

Eric Smith’s first sentence is about as unvarnished statement of pragmatism as 
one can imagine.  

 

The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted 
shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in 
certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing 
that action. 

 

But then there is again, that plaintive lament, that hapless dream of a 
warrantee for a permanent, unshakeable belief in a reality not only undoubted 
but forever beyond the reach of doubt:

 

.  I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that could carry 
philosophical weight."

But this is nonsense!  In the first place, because you misrepresent yourself.  
As a scientist put your philosophical weight on the scientific method every 
day.  In the second place, because you, as a human being, have no where else to 
put it! Unless, of course, you put it in God.  

I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I think it gives credit for two 
things, when only one is actually true.

 

I’m a decoherent-histories kind of guy:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.0767

https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9407040

Like the rest of the classical variables in the universe, every time I pass 
from one moment to the next, I am in some state, or I undergo some particular 
transformation event.  In doing so, I forever cut off infinitely many whole 
trees of possible futures, and open up some particular tree of possible 
futures.  In a very empiricist sense, I would say this is the lowest sense of 
“making a choice”, though the term admits many higher-level senses that this 
lowest sense does not try to capture.

 

The trajectory of my existence is thus dense with choices in this low-level, 
kinematic sense.  I don’t consider that observation itself to entail the 
existence of a philosophy (or should I say a Philosophy).  It is just a 
consequence of the rules of existing.  I would have a philosophy if I had 
_reasons_ to make particular choices that were known to be consistent in some 
interesting way, and if my choices were really intentionally guided by those 
reasons.  

 

Two things I know I do have are inertia (lowest level) and habit (a bit more 
dynamical; kind of like the counterpart to inertia for events as opposed to 
just states, raising Zeno’s mathematics of positions to Hamilton’s mathematics 
of positions and momenta).  To the extent that either my state that inertially 
persists, or my habits that show pattern, are outcomes of my past, it could be 
said that they are particular responses to the problem of induction over 
futures.  There is, we believe, no unique solution to the problem of induction, 
but by existing I am forced instant by instant to act as if I were choosing 
some such solution.  In some very low-level empiricist kind of way, one could 
call that a “folk philosophy”.  However, I suspect that philosophers would like 
to think they try for something a little higher in the Chomsky hierarchy of 
computational power.

 

Yes, of course I have broad patterns of behavior that mimic some aspects of 
scientific work, both in my work and in the rest of life.  So maybe my folk 
philosophy is a little richer than accidental.  But compared to the density of 
events of choosing, I think it is still pretty thin (my habit is to say 
“measure zero” relative to the events of decoherence blink by blink), but I 
would want to be cautious before calling it a deeply-considered philosophy.

 

Maybe, as in economics there are “positive” and “normative” theories — where 
the “positive” aim for a description of pattern and function in whatever has 
been happening, while “normative” is willing to give some confidence to 
counterfactuals and make claims about what “should” happen — there are positive 
and normative senses of philosophical weight in the pattern of one’s choices 
(?).  If you like that distinction, then yes, I will grant that I have a 
positive philosophy of some small subset of my choices, and a slightly-reasoned 
normative one (about the depth that can be communicated in email missives), but 
much less than a fully normative Philosophy.

 

All best for better luck in 2019 than we seem to have had in ending 2018.

 

Eric

 

 

 

 





Now, No-one will ever deny me the pleasures of talking to God, or imagining 
heaven, on the slim premise that I happen to be a lifelong atheist.  If I want 
to get up each morning and thank God for the day, I will do so because it makes 
me feel good, and makes me a better person.  And I might even abduce from that 
fact, that God exists.  But I would do so wrongly because I have much better 
explanations for that experience.  (It’s a plain psychological fact that 
expressing gratitude makes people feel good; expressing bitterness makes them 
feel lousy.  Darwinian Group selection explanation to follow, if needed.)  

As I listen to people talk at Friam, I sense that most of us have a hankering 
after God.  It expresses itself in many ways, some subtle.  One of the subtle 
ways is in the idea of a truth beyond experience.  But whenever people start to 
import that thought back into their science, they begin to talk non-sense.  
Literally:  NON  SENSE, right?  Outside the senses and their elaborations in 
thought.  

Once long ago, I had the daughter of a Famous Person as a freshman in a 
Writing-Across-The-Curriculum class.  The students got to write on any subject 
they chose, and my role was as facilitator, not as an expert.  She announced in 
class one day that she wanted to write about her voices.  Now, even though I 
have always been an experimental psychologist, I did go to school with a lot of 
clinicians, and I did think I knew that Hearing Voices Is A Bad Sign.   So, 
first I tried to gently steer her away from that topic, and when she resisted 
firmly, I went to see one of the clinicians in my department, a man named Mort, 
to get advice on what to do.  He looked at me in that way shrinks look at a 
client on the first visit and asked, “And what do you WANT to do, Nicholas.”  

After resisting the impulse to crush his head with the snow globe on his desk, 
I only said, “Mort.  Cut that crap out!  You know as well as I do that hearing 
voices is a sign of serious mental illness and that I have an obligation to do 
something, and certainly not to encourage it.”

He replied: “No.  I don’t know that!  I do know that people whose voices tell 
them to do bad things often end up in trouble.  We don’t hear from the people 
whose voices tell them to do good things.  Do her voices tell her to do bad 
things. “

“No.  On the contrary!  They say things like, “Atta Girl!  Keep up the good 
work!”  Or, “Take it easy!  You have time.”

“Sounds like good advice to me.  Leave the poor girl alone.”  

So I left her alone.  In the end she wrote a paper about something else, got a 
good grade, and went on to graduate in 4 years. 

So.  In conclusion, Brethren and Sisteren: Cultivate your illusions, but no 
matter how functional they may prove to be, never, never confuse them with 
reality. 

Thus Spake Father Thompson

Happy New Year

 

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> 
mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2018 9:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group < 
<mailto:friam@redfish.com> friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

"The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted 
shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in 
certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing 
that action.  I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that 
could carry philosophical weight."

Wait! Slow down! Why not see what happens when we ask that to carry 
philosophical weight?

 

What would get you to change your habits? Presumably a failure of the "act 
without too much doubt" plan to work out as desired would eventually get you to 
change how you act,  right?

 

What if you saw others acting without doubt in the same way,  and they got 
screwed as a result? Would that cause some doubt?

 

If we follow this train if thought long enough,  do we eventually end up 
realizing it isn't just about what works for me-in-this-moment. Rather we end 
up with something like: "Real" is how we awkwardly try to refer to the those 
things we think will hold up over the long run of lots off people acting 
without doubting it. 

 

Now THAT sounds like it might be able carry some weight AND be true to your 
intuition.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018, 7:43 PM Nick Thompson < 
<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote:

Hi, Everybody, 

 

I have been writing this email for most of the last week.

 

While I am loath to argue with Frank on matters of logic and mathematics, I 
think his solution violates Peirce’s project by making our understanding of 
truth dependent on our understanding of Real, rather than, as Peirce would have 
it, the other way around.   So Frank is surely correct on his own terms, but 
not Peircean, if you see what I mean.  

 

So, let me take a step back.  Here is Thompson’s History of Modern Philosophy.  
Once upon a time there was God.  All-seeing, all-knowing God.  What God  saw 
was Real and the Real was real whether or not anything, anybody, other than God 
could see it.  Then God died.  “Sad”, as Trump would say.  But still there was 
Descartes’s (pronounced “day cart sez”) brain in a vat.  Everything that we 
experience could be like phantom limb experiences.  Phantom legs, phantom 
hands, phantom, sounds, phantom sights, phantom me, phantom you, phantom 
thoughts, phantom WORLD.  So, here we sit, you and I, two brains in two vats, 
side by side.  The devil tickles your nerves and you see something you call, 
“horse”.  So your motor nerves are excited and you stimulate my auditory nerves 
with “horse”.   Now unless the Devil happens to simulate my nerves with exactly 
the same pattern as he stimulated yours before you said “horse”, there is no 
possible way we could know if we are talking about the same thing.  And 
remember, that’s the thing about The Devil (as we have recently learned), he 
has no commitment to the Truth.  (Notice how in this story God dies, yet the 
devil lives on; interesting; very sad) .  

 

Ok.  What to do?  Well, we could admit that we are screwed and define truth as 
that which is beyond all experience.  But this is nonsense, right?  If truth is 
beyond all experience, how do we come to be talking about it.  If Truth is that 
which we cannot talk about, then and any statement that we make about it is 
necessarily untrue.  What to do?  Well, we could sneak a little God back in.  
We could talk about true intuitions that come from the spirit world, etc.  Many 
people talk like that.  Sometimes,  I think of some of you talk like that, tho 
I won’t name names.  For me, that’s not a starter.  

 

So, Truth must be defined in terms of experience.  Some kinds of experiences 
are more enduring than others.  They are the sorts of experiences that repeat 
themselves day after day.  They are the sorts of experiences that when you tell 
them to other person, that person says, “Oh yeah, that happened to me.”  More 
formally, they are the sort of experiences that survive experiments, both 
formal experiments and the little day to day experiments we try on the world 
around us.  Does the computer run on battery even when it is plugged in? Run 
the battery down to zero, plug it in, and the computer won’t start right away. 
Hmmm. Seems like.  Does my love still love me?  Oh, I will come home from a 
business trip a day early and see if her eyes light up.  Or perhaps if a 
foreign car is parked in the driveway and the lights are out.  Love, power 
supplies, it’s all the same.  It’s T.O.T.E, all the way down.  The most 
enduring experiences are those generated by communities of inquiry, working at 
the same questions through rigorous experimentation and debate and concerning 
themselves with abstract realities, force, momentum, lithium, etc.  After all, 
look at how the 19th Century produced the periodic table!  Let’s define Truth 
as the asymptote of that convergence.  Truth is where the community of inquiry 
will converge in the very long run.  And real objects can be something like, 
anything that is taken for granted by a true proposition.   The existence of 
unicorns is definitely NOT taken for granted by the proposition, “No Unicorn 
Exists”, so that let’s us out of that box.  

 

Now nothing about this implies that there is a truth concerning all matters.  
Peirce’s notion of truth is ultimately statistical and based on the central 
limit theorem.  He cheerfully admits that the world we live in is essentially 
random.  However, if some things are not random, if there is systematic pattern 
in our experience with regard to some things (such as, say, saber-toothed 
tigers) then it would be extraordinarily useful to know it, and the cognitive 
systems around today would tend to be those that had not been eaten by tigers, 
right?  

 

Ach! You protest!  What kind of a lilly-livered reality is this?! We can never 
know for sure whether some particular string of experiences is real or not, 
whether it will endure to the endtimes, or whatever!  Yup.  That’s right.  The 
day you decide the stock is a good bet is the day it may fall 20 percent.  
That’s pragmatism for you.  We start in the middle, there are no firm 
foundations, and everything is fallible.  But what pragmatism tells you is what 
Darwinian experience tells you:  you bet your life everyday, and sometimes you 
win and sometimes you lose.  Those that bet right tend to be the ones who are 
here to tell the story.  And science is privileged because, on the whole, over 
the long run, it has proved itself to be the best at making those sorts of 
bets. 

 

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: <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> 
friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 6:29 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group < 
<mailto:friam@redfish.com> friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true 
propositions of the form "x is real".

 

I suspect that either begs the question or becomes a tautology.  Compare: 
Wouldn't it make more sense to say green things are subjects of true 
propositions of the form "x is green".

 

Though it seems convoluted,  I think "Unicorns are not real" is best understood 
as the assertion "Beliefs about unicorns are not true", which unpacks to 
something like: "Beliefs about the category 'unicorns' will not converge," 
which itself means,  "if a community was to investigate claims about unicorns,  
they would not evidence support of those claims over the long haul." 

 

For that to work,  we can't allow "nonexist" to be "a property." That is,  we 
have to distinguish ideas about unicorns from ideas about not-unicorns. 

 

 

 

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 11:06 PM Nick Thompson < 
<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote:

Thanks, Frank.  I thought at first that was a cheat, but it seems to work, 
actually.  It makes The Real dependent on The True, which is how Peirce thinks 
it should be.  

 

I guess that’s why they paid you the big bucis. 

 

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: <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> 
friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group < 
<mailto:friam@redfish.com> friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true 
propositions of the form "x is real".

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

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

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

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 4:57 PM Nick Thompson < 
<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote:

Thanks, Eric, 

 

I think you have everything right here, and it is very well laid out.  Thank 
you. 

 

One point that nobody seems to quite want to help me get a grip on is the 
grammar of the two terms.  True seems to apply only to propositions, while real 
only to nouns.  Now the way we get around that is by saying that the real 
things are the objects of true proposition.  But that leads to what I call the 
unicorn problem.  “Unicorns don’t exist” is a true proposition that does not, 
however, make “unicorns” real.  

 

This seems like the kind of problem a sophomore might go crazy ab0ut in an 
introductory philosophy course, so I am a bit embarrassed to be raising it.  
For my philosophical mentors, it is beneath their contempt.  

 

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: <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> 
friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group < 
<mailto:friam@redfish.com> friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good 
behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a 
Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will 
continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means 
all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, 
whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way 
of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement 
about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything 
contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real. 

 

When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work 
that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or 
not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 
1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and 
figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to 
perform the necessary studies?

 

However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into 
his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved 
early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating 
oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and 
such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might 
be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing 
of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists 
actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of 
thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described 
procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the 
described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract 
circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce 
some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists 
aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact 
way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to 
know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled 
fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of 
gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it 
found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists 
would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something 
about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of 
such-and-such type.   

 

I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written 
above. 

 

Now, however, we must work our way backwards: 

*  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are 
abstractions, 

*  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them 
out, 

*  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object 
of an idea is real. 

*  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are 
abstractions. 

 

In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable 
are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the 
abstractions themselves, must be "real." 

 

(I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.) 

 


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

 

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West < <mailto:profw...@fastmail.fm> 
profw...@fastmail.fm> wrote:

Nick,

 

Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do 
some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.

 

Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' 
consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that 
which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the 
common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to 
the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and 
or the recipient of same.

 

We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off 
signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a 
source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we 
rename as a sensor.

 

First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each 
stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) 
are "Real?"

 

Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right. 

 

Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 
'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is 
"Real."

 

If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle 
contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:

 

   -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of 
muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of 
a circuit. Or,

   -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at 
least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of 
what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond 
conscious control.)

 

Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?

 

Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: 
Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might 
still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really 
do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.

 

But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things 
"Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.

 

The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the 
signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call 
it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]

 

It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind 
that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — 
interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive 
response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  
Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or 
complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, 
application of induction, deduction, and abduction.

 

Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"

 

At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are 
there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to 
define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading 
you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that 
set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.

 

Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.

 

dave west

 

 

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again 
until the 3rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we 
do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all 
of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the 
issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself 
making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that 
all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the 
opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and 
the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with 
your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  
This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it. 
 Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is 
precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so 
deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” 
that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the 
river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume 
it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the 
measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted 
to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

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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
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
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
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
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
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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