3 Things I Learned in Grad School This Week~May 14 2017

This week is basically a vocabulary list. I’ve been reading super heavy theory and philosophy and to try and understand even a touch of it I’ve had to crack the digital dictionary. The three vocab words are: supervenience, veridical, and convolve. 

Supervenience illustrated. This is not mine. Click on it for the link.

Supervenience
“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” I’m fascinated by this concept. When something occurs at a level greater than it should it seems almost magical. Being a non-magical person I’m searching for something material that explains how this occurs. Some of the better answers I’ve found are housed in chaos theory, through biological and philosophical emergence, and network theory. When looking at network theory and emergence in relation to Socio-Ecological Systems Theory I came across this vocabulary word: supervenience. It looks like convenience and reads like superposition in physics and I guess, in a way, it can be thought of as the combination of the two. Maybe not.
 
The way I’m reading it, you can say that something of a higher level supervenes upon the lower level structures that contributed to that higher level thing’s development. For example, American society can supervene upon an American citizen born and raised in the US. But, it cannot be used to say that the concept of money supervenes on the fibers in a dollar bill. Supervenience doesn’t imbue magical powers into the material components that create it, rather it relates through a feedback loop to the things of the lower levels. I read this as similar to concepts of hegemony, ontological valuing, philosophy of mind, and epigenetics on genomes.
 
As a heuristic I’ve used “piercing the veil” to explain how a singular individual (person, gene, etc.) impacts and effects the system or how the system can impact the singular. There does seem to be a veil though. One person cannot instantly impact and shape society by a youtube video on a whim. That person would need skills, characteristics, or the social environment to make their video pertinent. Similarly, the society has a regular background noise impact upon the individual but rarely does it marshal resources to direct the attention on someone (through positive or negative fame, a rescue effort, or whatever). I think I’m still going to use the veil idea but supervene and subvene are going to be added to how I use it. Maybe instead: “supervene the veil.”
 
Veridical
I’m reading a phenomenal book on Framing and the concept of truth is discussed. I will write about another Framing another time – when I understand it enough. But, basically, when a person has to choose between believing a contrary fact or their “frame” of how they see the world, they will choose to keep their frame. The frame means more to their identity than the fact. This develops into what truth means to us or how veridical something is. Veridical is simply defined as truthful, veracious or not illusory. In semantics though it means the environmental context in which something is truthful. Wikipedia Veridical and you can find how formal this concept is. You can veridicality through negation, conditional operators, downward entailment, and many other ways. There are many shades of truth and even more shades of veridicality apparently.
 
Convolve
I was talking to my mathematical impresario and engineering wunderkind brother about some minutiae and he used the word “deconvolve.” I stopped him from speaking further and asked what the hell he just said. His answer: well, I know you can convolve something so I just figured you could deconvolve it. Well, what the hell does convolve mean?
 
Apparently, it’s a math thing and my too-smart brother was using it to describe something in normal life. Convolution is when you intertwine two functions to create a third function that is different than either of the two original functions to create a transformation. Unfortunately, I don’t really understand what this means. I looked up Fourier and Laplace transformations and I got lost in the cosine of harmony. However, I do like the metaphor. Like the supervenience above, Convolve and Convolution deal with what happens when two or more parts come together to create something different