Sorry for the late reply! Do you mind sharing a ref for Critch's new work? I have tried to find something about boundaries but was unsuccessful.
As for the historical accident, I would situate it more around the 17th century, when the theory of mechanics was roughly as advanced as that of agency. I don't feel that goals and values require much more advanced math, only math as new as differential calculus was at the time.
Though we now have many pieces that seem to aim in the right direction (variational calculus in general, John Baez and colleagues' investigations of blackboxing via category theory...), it seems more by chance than by concerted, literature-wide effort. But I do hope to build on these pieces.
The problem I have with all these candidates is that they treat all social information as quantitative, a single number like "status"; they do not have semantic content. Praise/shame and reward/punishment do not specify what they are inculcating, so they are just as likely to push people to invent tactical means to avoid said shaming and ostracism.
As for the quote, sorry there was an ambiguity - I meant that rituals as a phenomenon are as present and important in every culture. But it is my contention that I, a completely atheistic professional scien...
I have the hardest time imagining a conceptual link between p-zombies and predictive processing, but if you don't like it, you don't like it, I guess!
Personally, the ambiguity between belief and action in this framework is the only half-reasonable explanation I have encountered so far for why the study of values and rituals is so hopelessly confused at a basic conceptual level (far more than even your typical social science question)
You homed in exactly on the point where I have theoretical doubts (I need to better think through predictive theories and what they really imply) but I can tell you where I stand as of now.
My current idea to resolve this (and I will amend the main text, either to commit to this or to at least avoid contradictory phrasing) is to invoke multiagent models of the mind:
Thanks a lot for the suggestion! I do not know anything about this tradition and I would be very happy to learn about it, especially from a perspective that could generate analyses such as the one you paraphrase here.
Your paraphrase from Schmemann resonates a lot with my understanding of Sperber's argument in Rethinking Symbolism, so you may enjoy that book. He devotes the first fraction of the book deconstructing this assumption that symbolism signifies like a language, i.e. as you put it, that "symbolic action must relate in some obviously analogical or didactic way to the thing being represented". And then he tries to offer an alternative theory which I find elegant.
I take it as a good sign that this generated a response, even if that response is "what the heck" (at the very least, rest assured this is a non-smoking endeavor)
I'll rewrite the post a bit within a few days to address your comments and kithpendragon's -- that was a big part of why I wanted to put it on lesswrong, to have some incentive to rectify loose language and loose thinking.
Some clarifications already:
...Here is a person doing something. What would you need to observe, to decide whether you are or are not looking at an example of the category you
Thanks for your thoughts and for the link! I definitely agree that we are very far from practical category-inspired improvements at this stage; I simply wonder whether there isn't something fundamentally as simple and novel as differential equations waiting around the corner and that we are taking a very circuitous route toward through very deep metamathematics! (Baez's rosetta stone paper and work by Abramsky and Coeck on quantum logic have convinced me that we need something like "not being in a Cartesian category" to account for notions like conte... (read more)