Btw, one can ask Claude, after use of Deep Research mode, to build a bibtex 
bibliography and include URLs in the notes.   Once that is assembled, ask 
Claude to check the URLs and their titles one at a time -- it will fetch each 
paper and do the check, and show you it is doing it.  I have not seen Claude 
trip over itself this way, but I have caught ChatGPT be too motivated.   I find 
it very interesting that it ChatGPT will craft plausible, but entirely 
fictional, papers that sound ideal.   Reasonable sounding page number ranges, 
reasonable sounding journals, author names, even abstract info that is right on 
the mark.   Something amazing is going on inside these LLMs.  Just put aside 
for the moment it is terrifying.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Santafe
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2025 1:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "analogies we live by"

Thanks for this, Glen, and also the list from Claude a little later.  The 
latter feels like designing a symposium: who would you bring, and around what 
narrative would you explain why you have them in the same place at the same 
time.  Really quite an enjoyable activity in its early stages, before the slog 
hits of getting an actual meeting to work.  Alison Gopnik is the only other 
name in that list I know besides Andy Clark, so at least one other isn’t 
hallucinated.  

> On Jul 22, 2025, at 0:23, glen <[email protected]> wrote:

I wanted to reply to this days ago, in one tiny point, 

> • the brain as a sensory organ: current activity = streaming in 
> through the senses • a resonance from current activity to a 
> counterfactual active role

I would not have equated current activity with reception and response to 
sensory input streams.  Doing so would be a reversion to the very old “passive” 
conception of perception, which I think has now long been corrected with the 
notion that perception is active, interrogative, and constructive.  

The latter, mainly, argues for something that both to me and in common-language 
usage seems obvious, but that I suspect strict behaviorists would want to deny 
(if only to see if they could, lawyer-like, defend such a position): that 
mental activity has its own autonomous streams, whether ongoing synthesis and 
following of “inner narrative” (the thing the meditators want to shut off 
somehow), or just maintaining whatever internal sense of integration and 
identity-centeredness a current state of mind has.  That state is one of the 
other inputs, to the active engagement with sensory inputs that constitutes a 
lot of perception (e.g. building the visual field, or selecting voices to 
attend to in a conversation).  

Somebody, some years ago, gave me some explanatory book on Vedic categories of 
things related to cognition and consciousness, I think because he was annoyed 
at my constant complaining and hoped that this would quiet me down.  So I 
dutifully read it.  I was struck that it was sent to me, to show me that there 
was substance to this “truth that dispenses with all philosophy and concepts”, 
and I read it as a very elaborate philosophical system and conceptual typology.

Anyway, the reason I mention it (and I can’t remember the title of the book 
now, to link here), is that they say that system considers the internal 
mind-state or sequence to be just-another of the senses, peer to and parallel 
to the standard-five input streams (sight, sound, touch, taste/smell, 
proprioception).  Since, for each of the standard senses, they want to go on 
with an object/subject/interaction decomposition into terms, they try to build 
out a comparable decomposition when arguing that internal thought-states are 
just a version of senses.  (Matrices seem to be very important to 
system-building philosophers, across times and cultures.)

Don’t want to endorse or reject somebody’s particular description of some other 
group’s large philosophical system, for which I cannot speak from any knowledge 
of my own, but I did find that an interesting bit of evidence, that a system 
that had had to organically evolve and become accepted, had chosen this way to 
handle the autonomy of inner life from immediate-passive reaction to 
sense-delivered events.

Eric




.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... 
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom 
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
  1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... 
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom 
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
  1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

Reply via email to