Redefining the explanatory gap

So much blood and ink has been spilt trying to bridge the gap between something called mind and something called world. The gap I seek to bridge is instead between something called experience and something called language. This we can do. And with that the game is won.

 

For everything there must be a price . . .

This is understood in economics.  It validates the discipline.

But that entails the need to agree on what constitutes a measurement.  Without measurement, no price.  Measurement, in turn, always depends implicitly upon a model of the agent.  Cognitivist models come in many flavors.  But each of these has economic consequences; various models of rationality; various accounts of the Perception-Cognition-Action arc.  The assumptions of each of these accounts are used to validate a host of measurements.

 

Of Transparency

In this article, the consequences of transparency in public life are considered. It appears that money revels the collective nature of the system. Lawfulness appears in behavior, but that lawfulness requires us to posit a limited sort of an individual. Essentially selfish, but with a limited notion of self. Revealing our collective side, once again. Brains drive those smaller units, as they generate P-worlds. Consensus will be of our common nature, and not of that which is first person.

 

What is oscillating?

I have been re-engaging with a bit of theory.

When we find any unmistakably periodic behavior from an organism, one sensible theory is that something is oscillating to control that behavior. (Bob Port)

I need to consider why this is important. What is it that is oscillating? The undamped oscillator of task dynamics is a hack. That’s not a good enough description. But the maths gets hairy when you get more complex.

First, since the theory specifies attractors in terms of phase angle,
we expect that at least for moderate changes in rate (that is, changes
in the duration of the repetition cycle), the attractors should be
unaffected in terms of phase but vary in direct proportion with cycle
duration.

My stance here would be to shun the notion of control, and recognize that periodic system behavior is simply a  common form of viable, stable self-organized behavior.  It needs no controller, and indeed, it makes no sense if there is a controller.  It only makes sense because this is how simple systems, each with some autonomy, will couple.

 

On Markets

Watching an interesting documentary on economics, which pits Keyensian interventionism against von Hyeck and free markets, it strikes me that this tension, which stretched throughout the 20th century, derives from two views of markets: to the free marketeers, markets are forces of nature, not to be controlled, but to be accepted. To the Keyensians, they are a big machine, to be tuned and fiddled with. From where I stand, they are neither. They both miss the fact that markets are us! The issue of how we control them, how we constrain them, these are questions of self-definition. We therefore need to resolve this collectively, and ideology (either) simply will not do!

 

To be socially constituted….

… is not to be less real, in any sense.  Once we “thingify” the P-world–treat it as a discernable object with properties, and temporarily stop trying to describe it from the inside–then phenomena defined over multiple P-worlds are just as real.  When we see the battles of nations, are those not real battles between real nations?  We insist that they are all the act of individuals, but they have a reality of their own, and the participants are less free than they think.  So we are not the participants in these patterns.  We are also constituted by the patterns among the P-worlds.  Nations are emergent phenomena in a very real sense.  The problem with cashing this insight out is that an emergent phenomenon, to be justly so called, is a structural pattern defined over a substratum.  Prior to the emergence, there are lots of individual bits.  Thereafter, there are coordinations, such as bubbles, cells, columns, and nations.  Dynamics is the language in which we are written.

 

Ideology and money

A disinterested observer might opine that the US tends to support just those causes that exhibit a great faith in the value of money.  Many communities are split in this regard, and the debate is normally framed as a clash between religion (which often doesn’t care about money) and political ideology, but that really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  So what is this belief in commerce, and why the fuss?

 

Madeline

There will be more books written about the media coverage of the Madeline Mc Cann case than will be written about the case itself.

 

Farming humans

Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress: they farm humans!  Provide the nutrients, the boundary conditions, and trust in the stock to do what it does naturally: communicating and showing off and yapping. That’s the immediate effect of the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

 

Codecs

Looking at videos breaking up in their structured, pixellated way, I could see the ingenuity of the codec: focussing on the regions that change the most, trying to mimic human attention.  At a slight remove, it is clear that the engineers are chasing the grail of sending the experience down the line.  Thats a massive urge to communicate from P-world to P-world.   (Can’t grab an example, sorry.)