I don't grok the context well enough to equivocate on concepts like "have" and "category of being".
But in response to Nick's question: "What is there that animals do that demands us to invent categories to explain
their behavior?", my answer is "animals discretize the ambient muck". So if categorization is somehow
fundamentally related to discretization, then animals clearly categorize in that sense.
I mean, all you have to do is consider the frequencies of light the animals' eyeballs do
or don't see. That's two categories right there, the light they do see and the light they
don't. Unless there's some sophistry hidden behind the question, the answer seems clear.
Reflection on what one does and does not categorize isn't necessary. I could even claim
my truck discretizes fluids ... those that make it seize up versus lubricate it, those
that it burns vs those that stop it cold. Etc. Maybe the question is better formulated as
"What makes one impute categories on another?" Clearly my truck doesn't impute
categories on squirrels.
But Nick does follow that question with this "experience" nonsense. So my guess
is there *is* some sophistry behind the question, similar to EricC's incredulous response
to DaveW's question about phenomenological composition of experience(s). What I find
missing in Nick's (and EricC's) distillation of experience monism is an account of the
seemingly analogous position of panpsychism. Were I a scholar, I might take such work on
myself. But I'm not and, hence, very much appreciate these distillations of dead white
men's metaphysics and will take what I can get. 8^D
On 2/16/23 09:22, Steve Smith wrote:
Might I offer some terminology reframing, or at least ask for some additional
explication?
1. I think "behaviours" would be all Nick's Martians *could* observe? They would be
inferring "experiences" from observed behaviours?
2. When we talk about "categories" here, are we talking about "categories of
being"? Ontologies, as it were?
Regarding ErisS' reflections... I *do* think that animals behave *as if* they "have categories",
though I don't know what it even means to say that they "have categories" in the way Aristotle and
his legacy-followers (e.g. us) do... I would suggest/suspect that dogs and squirrels are in no way aware of
these "categories" and that to say that they do is a projection by (us) humans who have fabricated
the (useful in myriad contexts) of a category/Category/ontology. So in that sense they do NOT *have*
categories... I think in this conception/thought-experiment we assume that Martians *would* and would be
looking to map their own ontologies onto the behaviour (and inferred experiences and judgements?) of Terran
animals?
If I were to invert the subject/object relation, I would suggest that it is "affordances" not "experiences"
(or animals' behaviours) we want to categorize into ontologies? It is what things are "good for" that make them
interesting/similar/different to living beings. And "good for" is conditionally contextualized. My dog and cat both
find squirrels "good for" chasing, but so too for baby rabbits and skunks (once).
Or am I barking up the wrong set of reserved lexicons?
To segue (as I am wont to do), it feels like this discussion parallels the one about LLMs where we
train the hell out of variations on learning classifier systems until they are as good as (or
better than) we (humans) are at predicting the next token in a string of human-generated tokens (or
synthesizing a string of tokens which humans cannot distinguish from a string generated by another
human, in particular one with the proverbial 10,000 hours of specialized training). The fact that
or "ologies" tend to be recorded and organized as knowledge structures and in fact
usually *propogated* (taught/learnt) by the same makes us want to believe (some of us) that hidden
inside these LLMs are precisely the same "ologies" we encode in our myriad textbooks and
professional journal articles?
I think one of the questions that remains present within this group's continued
'gurgitations is whether the organizations we have conjured are particularly special, or
just one of an infinitude of superposed alternative formulations? And whether some of
those formulations are acutely occult and/or abstract and whether the existing (accepted)
formulations (e.g. Western Philosophy and Science, etc) are uniquely (and exclusively or
at least optimally) capable of capturing/describing what is "really real" (nod
to George Berkeley).
Some here (self included) may often suggest that such formulation is at best a coincidence of history and as
well as it "covers" a description of "reality", it is by circumstance and probably by
abstract conception ("all models are wrong...") incomplete and in error. But nevertheless still
useful...
Maybe another way of reframing Nick's question (on a tangent) is to ask whether the
Barsoomians had their own Aristotle to conceive of Categories? Or did they train
their telescopes on ancient Greece and learn Latin Lip Reading and adopt one or more
the Greek's philosophical traditions? And then, did the gas-balloon creatures
floating in the atmosphere-substance of Jupiter observe the Martians' who had
observed the Greeks and thereby come up with their own Categories. Maybe it was
those creatures who beamed these abstractions straight into the neural tissue of the
Aristotelians and Platonists? Do gas-balloon creatures even have solids to be
conceived of as Platonic? And are they missing out if they don't? Do they have
their own Edwin Abbot Abbot? And what would the Cheela
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg> say?
My dog and the rock squirrels he chases want to know... so do the cholla cactus
fruits/segments they hoard in their nests!
Mumble,
- Steve
On 2/16/23 5:37 AM, Santafe wrote:
It’s the tiniest and most idiosyncratic take on this question, but FWIW, here:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1520752113
I actually think that all of what Nick says below is a perfectly good draft of
a POV.
As to whether animals “have” categories: Spend time with a dog. Doesn’t take
very much time. Their interest in conspecifics is (ahem) categorically
different from their interest in people, different than to squirrels, different
than to cats, different than to snakes.
For me to even say that seems like cueing a narcissism of small differences,
when overwhelmingly, their behavior is structured around categories, as is
everyone else’s. Squirrels don’t mistake acorns for birds of prey. Or for the
tree limbs and house roofs one can jump onto. Or for other squirrels. It’s
all categories. Behavior is an operation on categories.
I found it interesting that you invoked “nouns” as a framework that is helpful
but sometimes obstructive. One might just have said “words”. This is
interesting to me already, because my syntactician friends will tell you that a
noun is not, as we were taught as children, a “word for a person, place, or
thing”, but rather a “word in a language that transforms as nouns transform in
that language”, which is a bit of an obfuscation, since they do have in common
that they are in some way “object-words”. But from the polysemy and synonymy
perspective, we see that “meanings” cross the noun-verb syntactic distinction
quite frequently for some categories. Eye/see, ear/hear, moon/shine, and stuff
like that. My typologist friends tell me that is common but particular to some
meanings much more than others.
Another fun thing I was told by Ted Chiang a few months ago, which I was amazed
I had not heard from linguists, and still want to hold in reserve until I can
check it further. He says that languages without written forms do not have a
word for “word”. If true, that seems very interesting and important. If
Chiang believes it to be true, it is probably already a strong enough
regularity to be more-or-less true, and thus still interesting and important.
Eric
On Feb 15, 2023, at 1:19 PM,<thompnicks...@gmail.com>
<thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:
FWiW, I willmake every effort to arrive fed to Thuam by 10.30 Mountain. I want
to hear the experts among you hold forth on WTF a cateogory actually IS. I am
thinking (duh) that a category is a more or less diffuse node in a network of
associations (signs, if you must). Hence they constitute a vast table of what
goes with what, what is predictable from what, etc. This accommodates “family
resemblance” quite nicely. Do I think animals have categories, in this sense,
ABSOLUTELY EFFING YES. Does this make me a (shudder) nominalist? I hope not.
Words…nouns in particular… confuse this category business. Words place
constraints on how vague these nodes can be. They impose on the network
constraints to which it is ill suited. True, the more my associations with
“horse” line up with your associations with “horse”, the more true the horse
seems. Following Peirce, I would say that where our nodes increasingly
correspond with increasing shared experience, we have evidence ot the
(ultimate) truth of the nodes, their “reality” in Peirce’s terms. Here is
where I am striving to hang on to Peirce’s realism.
The reason I want the geeks to participate tomorrow is that I keep thinking of
a semantic webby thing that Steve devised for the Institute about a decade ago.
Now a semantic web would be a kind of metaphor for an associative web; don’t
associate with other words in exactly the same manner in which experiences
associate with other experiences. Still, I think the metaphor is interesting.
Also, I am kind of re-interested in my “authorial voice”, how much it operates
like cbt.
Rushing,
Nick
From: Friam<friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2023 10:29 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group<friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Thuram still happening?
Well shoot..... that would do it.... Thank you!
On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 12:28 PM Frank Wimberly<wimber...@gmail.com> wrote:
Today is Wednesday, isn't it?
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 10:19 AM Eric Charles<eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Are the Thursday online meetings still happening? I missed a few weeks due to
work piling up meetings on, but I'm trying to log in now, and it looks like the
meeting hasn't started.
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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