This exposition would be much clearer if you reduced / expanded the concepts of “create correspondences between formal and real objects” and “ground a formal system in the territory”. Those look like they’re hiding important mental algorithms which the original post was trying to get at (Not the dot combining one. Maybe the one which attributes a common cause, a latent mathematical truth variable to explain the similar results of rocks and sheep gathering?). Do those phrases, “make correspondences” and “ground a system”, mean that we can stop talking about formal objects and instead talk about the behavior of physical circuits which compute all those formal things, like which strings are well formed, what the result of a grammatical transformation will be, and which truth values get mapped to formulas?
As it stands, I don’t see your point. You talk about a model which is true but doesn’t “say something” about reality. You don’t address whether things in reality “say something” about each other prior to humans showing up with their beliefs that reflect reality, i.e. whether there are things in the world that look like computations, things which have mutually informative behavior that isn’t a result of intermediary causal chains of physics-stuff jiggling each other.
Or maybe you did a little bit when you called sheep a map-level distinction? Physics clearly doesn’t act directly on sheep, but that doesn’t mean sheep can’t be a substrate for computing. Sheep are still there. It is a fact of reality that some fields contain hooved clumps of meat, even if we have to phrase that fact in terms of the response of visual-field segmenting and object-permanence-establishing neurons in the brain a person looking out upon the field.
This exposition would be much clearer if you reduced / expanded the concepts of “create correspondences between formal and real objects” and “ground a formal system in the territory”. Those look like they’re hiding important mental algorithms which the original post was trying to get at (Not the dot combining one. Maybe the one which attributes a common cause, a latent mathematical truth variable to explain the similar results of rocks and sheep gathering?). Do those phrases, “make correspondences” and “ground a system”, mean that we can stop talking about formal objects and instead talk about the behavior of physical circuits which compute all those formal things, like which strings are well formed, what the result of a grammatical transformation will be, and which truth values get mapped to formulas?
As it stands, I don’t see your point. You talk about a model which is true but doesn’t “say something” about reality. You don’t address whether things in reality “say something” about each other prior to humans showing up with their beliefs that reflect reality, i.e. whether there are things in the world that look like computations, things which have mutually informative behavior that isn’t a result of intermediary causal chains of physics-stuff jiggling each other.
Or maybe you did a little bit when you called sheep a map-level distinction? Physics clearly doesn’t act directly on sheep, but that doesn’t mean sheep can’t be a substrate for computing. Sheep are still there. It is a fact of reality that some fields contain hooved clumps of meat, even if we have to phrase that fact in terms of the response of visual-field segmenting and object-permanence-establishing neurons in the brain a person looking out upon the field.
I just wish I knew what you were getting at.