Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Hi Nick, Thank you for this. There have been many things crossing my mind in reading the exchanges on the thread, but I have been run ragged on a trip and am behind on things due, so I gave up intenting to engage. There was one thing in one of the very earliest posts that seemed relevant to t

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

I think you have the "materialist but not mechanist" gist right. But it's worth a warning that Rosen's definition of mechanism isn't what most people mean by that word. And it's his hijacking of the word into jargon that caused so many, for so long, to accuse him of vitalism. Most people incl

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Glen writes: And FWIW, your "scaffolding" sounds a lot like "bootstrapping" to me. It sounds to me like the modularity and re-use of neural nets that Roger directed us to. Marcus ===

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Hm. I'm probably a victim of my own skimming. Allowing metaphor to run rampant ... The scaffolding Nick linked to is definitely *supervised* in what seems a fairly biased (maybe in a good way) constraint system. Granted, the DGI stuff seems very constrained, too. But within the constraints,

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

It seems like teleology has been introduced by the word scaffolding. I'm not sure how that is useful unless it is just an observation that there are components that tend to be introduced earlier in the development of an organism. 

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Well, to be fair, Nick launched the thread with the meaning of "function" that includes teleology. And Rosen's whole shtick is an attempt to address what it means to leave purpose out of science. But Rosen's formulation of anticipation does identify the temporal part of construction. And he do

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Call me old-fashioned. I don't think it means anything to claim understanding of a system unless one can take it apart and put it back together; it is what design requires. There are a lot of systems one can’t understand at that level, either because they don’t yield to reduction or because o

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

I agree. Purpose imputation is fideistic. >8^D On October 26, 2018 12:24:39 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels wrote: >Call me old-fashioned. I don't think it means anything to claim >understanding of a system unless one can take it apart and put it back >together; it is what design requires. There are a

[FRIAM] Shipping Forecast

Today's conversation with Nick about weather circulation in the North Atlantic inevitably got me thinking about that great British tradition, the Shipping Forecast . I must admit, just hearing the opening notes of its theme gets me all misty eyed… ===

Re: [FRIAM] Shipping Forecast

Robert, Luffly. Can you still get them? I never knew what the references were. Thanks. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/

Re: [FRIAM] Shipping Forecast

Yup, four times a day since WW2. The wikipedia page has a list of the areas and the broadcast format if you want to follow along. —Robert On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 9:08 PM Nick Thompson wrote: > Robert, > > > > Luffly. Can you still get them? I