6 ms·

This is a sort of pattern. (1) We create categories and concepts that rely on categories: molecules, organisms, species, galaxies; water, rebecca, potatoes, mul

by netcan 11y ago

This is a sort of pattern. (1) We create categories and concepts that rely on categories: molecules, organisms, species, galaxies; water, rebecca, potatoes, multiple personality disorder. (2) We use those categories to describe and understand things, engineer and theorize using them. We have evolution and chemistry and potato salad recipes. (3) Then we discover that these categories aren't really real. They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean. Tasmanian devils are being decimated by a contagious cancer. A mutated cell in some devil reproduced until it was lumps, then the devils bit another delve in the face (they're not nice animals) and some of that cancer jumped into another one and spread. Now, that cancer has outlived his maker and is going around spreading in the world with complete disregard for the concepts of organism or species and behaving like a bacteria, virus or somesuch. Instead of spreading normally like the rest of the devil by sexy with other devils it jumps into the other devil's face (sometimes during sex, they are not nice animals). Maybe one day it will evolve into our replacement. Maybe it will find symbioses with sheep and become a beneficial gut fauna (it is a taste devil after all). We make up these categories for convenience. They are not obligated to comply.

jacquesm 11y ago
The posterchild for categorization failure is 'species'. The closer you look at what a species is the more nebulous it becomes.
- samuel 11y ago
  Most of the models that we use everyday are "leaky abstractions". They are useful in most contexts, but they get fuzzy at their boundaries. My favourite example is the "chicken and egg" problem. The difficulty of it is to define what a chicken is, everything is trivial afterwards. The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".
  - dTal 11y ago
    It seems to me that difficulty is not so much defining what a chicken is, but what a chicken egg is - is it an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg a chicken hatches from?
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      Just pick one. That's easier than picking the bird that is a chicken whose parent is not a chicken.
  - bottled_poe 11y ago
    Sorry to be pedantic - but every model is, by definition, an approximation of reality. Everything we experience is a blurry rendition of the inconceivable volume of information dancing around us.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      To look at models as 'blurry' is misleading. Models are imperfect, but the imperfect model can be more crisp than the underlying reality. Newtonian physics are very useful and less blurry than reality. More relevant, categories are useful and less blurry than reality. There doesn't need to be a sudden major difference between a chicken and a not-chicken. They only need to have a clear distinction in the model. For comparison, let's look at integers. 11 is very similar to 12, and 13 is at least as similar, but 11 and 12 are not-teen and 13 is teen. There's no ambiguity, there is only the definition of the category/model "teen". The distinction is arbitrary, but there's still a distinction. You can easily "draw a line" as the sibling comment says.
      - swamp40 11y ago
        Re: Blurry, I think that and Dancing are Thru the glass darkly type references.
  - jernfrost 11y ago
    I really like Richard Dawkins explanation of this, where he has you imagine taking a photo of yourself from your are born to you reach adulthood with 1 minute intervals. If you stack these pictures, there is no single picture you can pull out and say: "Here I transitioned from child to adult" e.g. Likewise with animals and evolution. Changes are so minute that you can speak of a transition from one species to another happening at the point of birth. Only when you look at pictures of yourself far away from each other in the pile can you start differentiating them. Likewise with animals.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      Exactly, they are minute because they are constant. We are in constant flux so to speak.
    - sageikosa 11y ago
      Also Dawkins posits a relatively good empirical definition of species boundaries (although I'm not quoting him verbatim, and I may be extending/synthesizing some of the ideas somewhat), but...a species is basically the pool of organisms available at a period of time that can generate progeny that themselves can generate progeny. That is, they have replicator compatibility... Under that definition, humans make a species. Horses make a species, donkeys make a species, but mules do not. Apparently in the world of Star Trek, Klingons and humans make a species: Worf (Klingon) had a child with a half-human/half-Klingon woman, and Tom Paris (human) had a child with a half-human/half-Klingon woman. Not sure about Vulcans and Romulans...obviously they can mate, but I'm not sure Spock himself can have children, perhaps we'll find out in a future movie. In Futurama, Kiff reproduced with Leela. As to the concept of a human as a "super-organism", the problem with bacteria being part of the equation is that they do not transmit their replicator payload through the germ-line transmission vector. They are not integrated into the next generation in whole or in part. Via the concept of the extended phenotype they may alter and extend their environment to improve their chance of success (and often mothers and children have the same bacteria flora), but it's better to think of it as symbiosis (or in the worst case, parasitism) than true "super-organism" reproduction. (Me thinks!)
      - 11y ago
  - eveningcoffee 11y ago
    The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken". And the thing is, you could not determine when exactly the non-chicken became the chicken i.e. when it is chicken enough. You could not draw a line.
- jcromartie 11y ago
  Richard Dawkins gives a fantastic and compact illustration of this problem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz8KEF8oid0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz8KEF8oid0
  - anon4 11y ago
    Nonsense, you just use git bisect to find the oldest ancestor that can still mate with a modern chicken and produce fertile offspring and there's your first chicken.
smanuel 11y ago
> They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean. You mean.. the real reality? The reality that can't be easily explained through observation and empirical evidence? The reality that can't be perceived through our basic physical senses? The reality where causation and correlation don't mean a thing? If you mean that reality... there's no such thing, and even if there is, there's no point in talking about it, it's way beyond our reach. If you mean the reality in which we've done most of the division and classification work very poorly due to lack of data... I know what you mean.
- darkerside 11y ago
  > there's no point in talking about it, it's way beyond our reach All of humanity's scientific progress has been a step-by-step widening of the circle of our knowledge into that vast universe of the unknown. There is certainly a point in acknowledging it, acknowledging its vastness in comparison to what we actually know, and looking for the next tiny pebble we can chip out of that wall of ignorance.
  - smanuel 11y ago
    All of humanity's scientific progress has been built gradually upon principles, that have been the same for ages. Start experimenting with the fundamentals and you start wandering in a sea of abstractness - holographic universe, multiverse, one-electron universe... you name it. Theories that you can either prove or disprove and theories that bring no progress. That's just my opinion of course.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > Theories that you can either prove or disprove and theories that bring no progress. Of course you can "prove"/"disprove" them, otherwise they wouldn't be discussed by scientists but by philosophers or theologians. For theories to be different, there must be an experiment that in principle could be done, for which each of them predicts different result. If we get around doing that expriment, we'll learn which theory is the right model. This is an universal principle of science and applies at every level - both fundamentals and macro/practical.
breakbot 11y ago
I think you'd enjoy this philosophical dive into why we have categories and how to properly use them. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...
danharaj 11y ago
The way that can be followed isn't the real way. The name that can be named isn't the real name. etc.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
This, and a lot of related observations are discussed at length in articles in [0]. Highly recommended! Personally, I like to imagine concepts as boundaries in the abstract multidimmensional "thingspace" - you can cast and recast them as you like, but some are more useful than others. Some things naturally group together along one axis but spread out when you look along another one. The most important point is, concepts are tools of understanding and communication that we invent, not parts of reality itself. They're multiple ways of drawing a map, each with different focus, but each representing the same territory. [0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words
radicalbyte 11y ago
Algebraists were way ahead of the curve: look at the properties of an object with respect to an operation. i.e. integers are commutive under addition and multiplication but not under subtraction or division.
ThomPete 11y ago
Exactly! Language is a reduction of reality. A way for finite pattern recognizing feedback loops like ourself to deal with the patterns we experience around us. And to make some provincial sense of them. In reality it's all patterns overlapping other patterns with no clear divide other than the one language forces upon it.
- netcan 11y ago
  I kind of wonder if there's something else going on as well. I mean, on one hand these categories are uncomfortably loose. Not just obviously made up ones like race or species. Things like molecules and galaxies are uncomfortably loose categories rather than actual things. Thingness seems to be a matter of degrees everywhere. On the other hand, reality seems to make use of these close enough categories just like we do. It's building stuff out of molecules, stars and galaxies. It's evolving new species and problem solving using organisms and species despite the leaks in the abstractions. I don't think its just a matter of crutches for our puny human perception. Something fishy is ging on.
iamsohungry 11y ago
This topic is, I think, most succinctly explained in Isaac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong[1]. These concepts which rely on categories that you describe are wrong, but they're far less wrong than many other ideas. Don't forget that often science is used for prediction, and for prediction a good approximation is very useful. Yes, Tasmanian devils are a counterexample to the idea that cancers are never communicable, but it's an extremely rare counterexample. One can achieve great results in the study of cancers based on the assumption that cancers are never communicable. [1] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
gerbilly 11y ago
>Then we discover that these categories aren't really real. They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

by netcan 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago

The posterchild for categorization failure is 'species'. The closer you look at what a species is the more nebulous it becomes.

samuel 11y ago
Most of the models that we use everyday are "leaky abstractions". They are useful in most contexts, but they get fuzzy at their boundaries. My favourite example is the "chicken and egg" problem. The difficulty of it is to define what a chicken is, everything is trivial afterwards. The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".
- dTal 11y ago
  It seems to me that difficulty is not so much defining what a chicken is, but what a chicken egg is - is it an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg a chicken hatches from?
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    Just pick one. That's easier than picking the bird that is a chicken whose parent is not a chicken.
- bottled_poe 11y ago
  Sorry to be pedantic - but every model is, by definition, an approximation of reality. Everything we experience is a blurry rendition of the inconceivable volume of information dancing around us.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    To look at models as 'blurry' is misleading. Models are imperfect, but the imperfect model can be more crisp than the underlying reality. Newtonian physics are very useful and less blurry than reality. More relevant, categories are useful and less blurry than reality. There doesn't need to be a sudden major difference between a chicken and a not-chicken. They only need to have a clear distinction in the model. For comparison, let's look at integers. 11 is very similar to 12, and 13 is at least as similar, but 11 and 12 are not-teen and 13 is teen. There's no ambiguity, there is only the definition of the category/model "teen". The distinction is arbitrary, but there's still a distinction. You can easily "draw a line" as the sibling comment says.
    - swamp40 11y ago
      Re: Blurry, I think that and Dancing are Thru the glass darkly type references.
- jernfrost 11y ago
  I really like Richard Dawkins explanation of this, where he has you imagine taking a photo of yourself from your are born to you reach adulthood with 1 minute intervals. If you stack these pictures, there is no single picture you can pull out and say: "Here I transitioned from child to adult" e.g. Likewise with animals and evolution. Changes are so minute that you can speak of a transition from one species to another happening at the point of birth. Only when you look at pictures of yourself far away from each other in the pile can you start differentiating them. Likewise with animals.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    Exactly, they are minute because they are constant. We are in constant flux so to speak.
  - sageikosa 11y ago
    Also Dawkins posits a relatively good empirical definition of species boundaries (although I'm not quoting him verbatim, and I may be extending/synthesizing some of the ideas somewhat), but...a species is basically the pool of organisms available at a period of time that can generate progeny that themselves can generate progeny. That is, they have replicator compatibility... Under that definition, humans make a species. Horses make a species, donkeys make a species, but mules do not. Apparently in the world of Star Trek, Klingons and humans make a species: Worf (Klingon) had a child with a half-human/half-Klingon woman, and Tom Paris (human) had a child with a half-human/half-Klingon woman. Not sure about Vulcans and Romulans...obviously they can mate, but I'm not sure Spock himself can have children, perhaps we'll find out in a future movie. In Futurama, Kiff reproduced with Leela. As to the concept of a human as a "super-organism", the problem with bacteria being part of the equation is that they do not transmit their replicator payload through the germ-line transmission vector. They are not integrated into the next generation in whole or in part. Via the concept of the extended phenotype they may alter and extend their environment to improve their chance of success (and often mothers and children have the same bacteria flora), but it's better to think of it as symbiosis (or in the worst case, parasitism) than true "super-organism" reproduction. (Me thinks!)
    - 11y ago
- eveningcoffee 11y ago
  The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken". And the thing is, you could not determine when exactly the non-chicken became the chicken i.e. when it is chicken enough. You could not draw a line.
jcromartie 11y ago
Richard Dawkins gives a fantastic and compact illustration of this problem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz8KEF8oid0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz8KEF8oid0
- anon4 11y ago
  Nonsense, you just use git bisect to find the oldest ancestor that can still mate with a modern chicken and produce fertile offspring and there's your first chicken.

smanuel 11y ago

> They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean. You mean.. the real reality? The reality that can't be easily explained through observation and empirical evidence? The reality that can't be perceived through our basic physical senses? The reality where causation and correlation don't mean a thing? If you mean that reality... there's no such thing, and even if there is, there's no point in talking about it, it's way beyond our reach. If you mean the reality in which we've done most of the division and classification work very poorly due to lack of data... I know what you mean.

darkerside 11y ago
> there's no point in talking about it, it's way beyond our reach All of humanity's scientific progress has been a step-by-step widening of the circle of our knowledge into that vast universe of the unknown. There is certainly a point in acknowledging it, acknowledging its vastness in comparison to what we actually know, and looking for the next tiny pebble we can chip out of that wall of ignorance.
- smanuel 11y ago
  All of humanity's scientific progress has been built gradually upon principles, that have been the same for ages. Start experimenting with the fundamentals and you start wandering in a sea of abstractness - holographic universe, multiverse, one-electron universe... you name it. Theories that you can either prove or disprove and theories that bring no progress. That's just my opinion of course.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > Theories that you can either prove or disprove and theories that bring no progress. Of course you can "prove"/"disprove" them, otherwise they wouldn't be discussed by scientists but by philosophers or theologians. For theories to be different, there must be an experiment that in principle could be done, for which each of them predicts different result. If we get around doing that expriment, we'll learn which theory is the right model. This is an universal principle of science and applies at every level - both fundamentals and macro/practical.

breakbot 11y ago

I think you'd enjoy this philosophical dive into why we have categories and how to properly use them. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...

danharaj 11y ago

The way that can be followed isn't the real way. The name that can be named isn't the real name. etc.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

This, and a lot of related observations are discussed at length in articles in [0]. Highly recommended! Personally, I like to imagine concepts as boundaries in the abstract multidimmensional "thingspace" - you can cast and recast them as you like, but some are more useful than others. Some things naturally group together along one axis but spread out when you look along another one. The most important point is, concepts are tools of understanding and communication that we invent, not parts of reality itself. They're multiple ways of drawing a map, each with different focus, but each representing the same territory. [0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words

radicalbyte 11y ago

Algebraists were way ahead of the curve: look at the properties of an object with respect to an operation. i.e. integers are commutive under addition and multiplication but not under subtraction or division.

ThomPete 11y ago

Exactly! Language is a reduction of reality. A way for finite pattern recognizing feedback loops like ourself to deal with the patterns we experience around us. And to make some provincial sense of them. In reality it's all patterns overlapping other patterns with no clear divide other than the one language forces upon it.

netcan 11y ago
I kind of wonder if there's something else going on as well. I mean, on one hand these categories are uncomfortably loose. Not just obviously made up ones like race or species. Things like molecules and galaxies are uncomfortably loose categories rather than actual things. Thingness seems to be a matter of degrees everywhere. On the other hand, reality seems to make use of these close enough categories just like we do. It's building stuff out of molecules, stars and galaxies. It's evolving new species and problem solving using organisms and species despite the leaks in the abstractions. I don't think its just a matter of crutches for our puny human perception. Something fishy is ging on.

iamsohungry 11y ago

This topic is, I think, most succinctly explained in Isaac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong[1]. These concepts which rely on categories that you describe are wrong, but they're far less wrong than many other ideas. Don't forget that often science is used for prediction, and for prediction a good approximation is very useful. Yes, Tasmanian devils are a counterexample to the idea that cancers are never communicable, but it's an extremely rare counterexample. One can achieve great results in the study of cancers based on the assumption that cancers are never communicable. [1] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

gerbilly 11y ago

>Then we discover that these categories aren't really real. They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)