[Inquiry] Re: Relatives of Second Intention -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

ROSI.  Discussion Note 4

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

BB = Bill Bailey

Re: ROSI-DIS 3.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/002528.html
In: ROSI-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/thread.html#2504

BB: I've been a fan of Patino's coaching for years, all the more 
    so since he left Boston.  You had the right team right up to 
    the next to last bracket.

BB: I must have been unclear.  I don't think there is any such thing
    as "unmediated" when it comes to information -- or perhaps anything
    else.  I meant the correlation of the "whiteness" experience with the
    pain expectation was absolute, "unrelativized" by other possibilities,
    and not that color was a perception by the child.  It would be very
    difficult, in my view, to speak of perception, per se, for some of
    the infants -- and even older children -- whose experiences of the
    world were still a "sensory hash," as it were.  Peirce's comments
    about the inferential nature of color reminded me of a study by
    von Senden, called Space and Sight (as I recall).  It was a
    report on the experiences of persons blind from congenital
    cataracts when cataract surgery first became available, and
    spanned ages from childhood to adulthood and their struggles
    to learn how to see.  Sight was at first just so much noise
    in their auditory/kinesic/tactile universe.  They would close
    their eyes to turn off the noise while they handled an object
    to recognize it.  Initially, vision was experiences as formless
    blobs on the surface of the eye.  Some resisted learning to see.
    A very few never learned.  As I recall, Senden argued against the
    idea of space as an innate construct and came into lots of criticism
    for the study.

Bob,

Well, I thought I saw something there for a moment, but maybe I was
trying to force a link between your story and the run of the mill
examples that come up in talking about the logic of relatives,
"child of __", "parent of __", "spouse of __", and so on.

What I was thinking, if I can remember, may have been like this:
Think of the 2-adic relation between stimulus and meaning as
something that has to be prescinded from a 3-adic context,
mediated by actual states or experienced occasions where
the linkage occurs, say, <whiteness, pain, event j>.
The full relationship approaches a 2-adic relation
only if it remains constant over a certain number
of experienced associations.  A certain number
might be 1 if you believe in 1-shot learning,
which I have explored in software fashion,
by the way.

Something like that ...

Jon Awbrey

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o