I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.
Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of
panpsychism entails.
Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on
everything you do being "body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the
empirical question of what types of bodies do "psyche", and where
those types of bodies can be found.
You say further that: No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff".
Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West,
unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche
in at least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you
(Glen) do mental stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in
panpsychism /does/ affect how he lives in the world. Exactly to
the extent that his way of living in the world is made different by
the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more than just something he says.
Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt
trampled beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially
interesting in its own right. His discussion of when he, personally,
starts to attribute identity - and potentially psyche - to clumps of
inanimate stuff seems directly on topic, especially as he too has
listed some ways his behaviors change when he becomes engaged in those
habits.
On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 2:36 AM ⛧ glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
Doubling down on the incredulity fallacy? OK. Yes. There is
something it is like to be trampled dirt. I don't know what you
mean by "mental stuff", of course. I don't do any mental stuff as
far as I know. Everything I do is inherently "body stuff". Maybe
that's because I've experienced chronic pain my whole life. Maybe
some of you consistently live in a body free experience? I've only
experienced that a few times, e.g. running in a fasted state. And
I later suffered for that indulgent delusion.
No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff". So you need a more
concrete question.
On February 16, 2023 6:04:17 PM PST, Eric Charles
<eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com> wrote:
>"an account of the seemingly analogous position of panpsychism"
>
>What is that more than something people say?
>
>Do *you* experience the dirt at your feet as having a mental
life? If so,
>tell me about it: What is the dirt like when it seems to be doing
mental
>stuff? What kind of mental stuff is it doing?
>
>If not: Have you seen anyone who earnestly thinks the dirt is
doing mental
>stuff? If so, what were *they* like? How was that belief
pervasive in their
>adjustments to the world? Based on your experiences with that
person, how
>do you think your ways of acting in the world would change if you
adopted
>such a position?
>
>
><echar...@american.edu>
>
>
>On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 1:27 PM glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>> >>>
>> >>>
--
glen ⛧
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