Maybe you’re overthinking this topic. To quote Bucky Fuller:
“Today the world is my backyard. ‘Where do you live?’ and ‘What are you?’
are progressively less sensible questions. I live on earth at present, and
I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a
noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of
the universe.”
TJ
On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 11:23 AM Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> 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> <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> <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>
> <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>
> <wimber...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Today is Wednesday, isn't it?
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/140+Calle+Ojo+Feliz,+%0D%0ASanta+Fe,+NM+87505?entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 10:19 AM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com>
> <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.
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--
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Tom Johnson - t...@jtjohnson.com
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
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