Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 474.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "McCullers, Jeff" <JeffM@lee.k12.fl.us> (220)
Subject: RE: 15.467 minds and bodies
[2] From: Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com> (22)
Subject: artificial minds and bodies
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 09:17:42 +0000
From: "McCullers, Jeff" <JeffM@lee.k12.fl.us>
Subject: RE: 15.467 minds and bodies
Dear Willard,
I thank you so very much for including me in your list and then posting this
fine conversation as my initiation into this topic. It is with trepidation
that post at all, being that I am both a newcomer to your community and
quite the dilettante in such matters (after all, I'm more a bureaucrat than
a scholar). However, I have been delightfully provoked, and so I blithely
risk humiliation in the interest of bettering my knowledge.
I enthusiastically agree with Charles Ess' comment that "these technologies
indeed help us expand (sometimes dramatically) our sense of connection with
a larger world" especially when they are thoughtfully and purposefully
developed to reduce the awareness of the interface between the machine and
the user.
Although I certainly lack a full appreciation for the details of mind-body
"problem" which appears to be a fundamental issue, I can certainly say that
my own experience with well-developed tools includes some
evolutionary/behavioristic aspects. What I am trying to say is that when I
use a tool that has a particularly intimate and transparent interface (such
as a computer keyboard), there is an amplification of ability (of power?) to
which my mind and body respond. The keyboard allows me to transcribe my
thoughts almost as nearly as I can think them, which means that the act of
constructing any sentence is completely recursive in the way that has so
fascinated Hofstadter--in fact, I began writing this very sentence without
any notion that by the time I got halfway through it, it would include this
self-referential clause. When writing in my own hand with a pen or pencil,
the laboriousness of that interface inhibits recursiveness and discovery and
my sentences tend to be shorter, more predictable, and with diminished
import. This means that the keyboard, while being manipulated by my body
with such intimacy that it feels like it IS part of my body, has actually
become a primary factor in the construction of abstract thought. In this
sense, the keyboard (a physical tool) works to no small extent in the same
way that language works as a innate tool to focus (and limit) the
construction of abstract thought.
All of this is no doubt elementary to subscribers of this list, so I beg
your indulgence as I finally get around to making my point: When Charles Ess
notes that these tools expand our connection with a larger world, I concur
in the sense that because these tools become so much a part of us that there
is an evolutionary/behavioristic effect. We receive positive and powerful
reinforcement from the use of this tool in a biological sense. To me, that
is a fundamental "connection with a larger world" although I may be twisting
his intended meaning somewhat for my own purposes.
A secondary thought: a lot of the computing I do is text-based, so the
QWERTY keyboard comes to mind as my first example, but it is not my only
one. Other non-text, non-language-related tools achieve this same intimacy,
and thus the same evolutionary reinforcement. If you'll pardon a low-tech
example, my grandfather's ancient woodworking tools are astonishingly light,
quick, and pleasing in my hand, to such a degree that I might use them
simply for the pleasant sensation of doing so. This raises an interesting
question: what do we make of a tool that has such a successful interface
that we desire to use it purposelessly? Is that tool now better seen as a
recreational drug, an evolutionary dead-end, a toy, or what?
My thanks again for letting me watch you good people think out loud.
Kind regards,
Jeff
_________________________________________
J. F. "JEFF" MCCULLERS
Program Administrator
Department of Grants and Program Development
School District of Lee County
2055 Central Avenue
Fort Myers, Florida USA 33901-3988
-----Original Message-----
From: Humanist Discussion Group
<w.mccarty@btinternet.com>) [mailto:willard@LISTS.VILLAGE.VIRGINIA.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 3:52 AM
To: humanist@Princeton.EDU
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 467.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 08:50:50 +0000
From: Charles Ess <cmess@lib.drury.edu>
Subject: minds and bodies
[The following exchange between Charles Ess and me I thought should be
circulated to members of Humanist, and happily Charles agrees. More on this
subject would be most welcome. --WM]
> From: Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com>
> Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 09:53:46 +0000
> To: Charles Ess <cmess@lib.drury.edu>
> >
> Charles,
>
> My first thought is to put your note out on Humanist, where this
discussion
> should really be taking place. That is, I'd like our conversation to be
> overheard, and I would hope thereby to provoke others. Let me know what
you
> think about this.
>
> I am grateful to be pointed to the Englebartian sense of mind-and-body
in
> the GUI. Where I think the mind/body problem comes up is in the
prevaling
> "impression of information" (as Geoffrey Nunberg brilliantly calls it)
> which seems all over the abstract discussions of the technology. The
> builders of systems (to extend a point made by Jerry McGann) are
conducting
> a much more interesting and intelligent metatheoretical discourse in
their
> acts of construction. Philosophy in the building of things. Or, as Ian
> Hacking says, in intervening in the world.
>
....
> Yours,
> W
>
> At 02:20 22/01/2002, you wrote:
>> Dear Willard:
I'm not sure I'd say that the mind/problem is central to _everything_ we do
- or if it is, it would be so in an equivocal way.
That is: what is wonderful about the Bardini text on Engelbart is that it
makes clear that the devices and general interface that you and I and most
computer users take for granted - i.e., the mouse, the GUI, even the
keyboard - emerge from Engelbart's commitment to a kind of symbiosis and
co-evolution between human and machine. Specifically: his interest in the
kinesthetic aspects of human knowing - that began, in some measure, with his
work as a radar technician in WWII - represented a _non-Cartesian_
epistemology, i.e., the "mind-and-body" notion that Barbara Becker so nicely
labels with the German neologism "BodySubject" (_LeibSubjekt_).
This approach was clearly and consciously in conflict with the then
prevailing approach, especially in AI, that basically took off from the
Cartesian view - i.e., a mind as divorced from body. Hence all the
attention to mind as a mechanism that could be - ostensibly, though now we
are considerably more modest on this point - reproduced in a computational
machine whose interface with the larger world ran from nonexistent (no
sensory inputs) to user-hostile: minimal read-outs and user inputs. The
thought was apparently that once an AI was so constituted, it would take off
down its own, putatively superior evolutionary road, leaving us puny humans
deservedly in the dust.
FWIW: while I enjoy tinkering with operating systems such as DOS, UNIX,
Linux, etc., that bypass the less demanding GUI-based elements to let the
user "speak" somewhat more directly to the machine - Engelbart's more
democratic notion of making computing machines accessible to the many is
admittedly closer to my own sense of the better possible uses of these
devices. That is: somewhat as Pirsig wrote convincingly in his famous _Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_, _contra_ the romantics who believe
we are more genuine and more genuinely in touch with "nature" when we strip
away our technologies - at least up to a point, it seems to me that these
technologies indeed help us expand (sometimes dramatically) our sense of
connection with a larger world. At least insofar as they are designed along
"Engelbartian" lines - i.e., precisely so as to minimize the sense of
"interface" between user and machine by devoting as much computational
resources as possible to help the machine "fit" the natural/cultural human
ways of knowing and acting in the world as embodied beings and kinesthetic
knowers. The more "user-friendly" the interface, the more of us will be
able to enjoy and take advantage of this symbiotic evolution. In this latter
direction, then, rather than assume a mind-body split/problem
- we seem to assume the identity of human beings as "mind-and-body" - one
capable of closely interacting with at least well-designed machines, and in
ways that might mutually enhance the development of each.
(Addendum: this raises an interesting counterpoint to Albert Borgmann's
important analysis of "focal activities" in his 1984 volume on _Technology
and the Character of Contemporary Life_. Such focal activities (gardening,
cooking and eating together, etc.) are offered as something of an antidote
to the ways in which technological devices offer increasing convenience -
but at the cost of greater internal complexity that quickly defeats the
ability of users to understand, much less manipulate or repair the device,
thus making us ever more dependent on technologies and their supporting
infrastructures. What Pirsig suggests - and Borgmann later exemplifies with
his discussion of the Altair 8800 computer as device so basic that the
user's required understanding of binary, logic switches, and programming
allowed for an experience he characterizes in terms of coherence, intimacy,
transparency, and comprehensibility [_Holding on to Reality_, 165) - is that
we can also experience something of the sense of skill mastery and
engagement with others and our environment _through_ technologies, not
always _against_ technologies. Similarly, our engagement as
"minds-and-bodies" with well-designed machines in what Engelbart
characterizes as symbiotic co-evolution would perhaps stand as an example of
a "technologically-mediated" focal activity?)
In light of this, I guess I would say that the mind-body problem perhaps
lurks behinds all we do with the delightful little beasties - but as we
pursue this second direction, it seems to presume that there _is_ no
(significant) mind-body problem: rather, we seek to address both
mind-and-body by taking up considerable amounts of computing resources to
help the machine interface with an embodied knower - ultimately, through all
of our senses. (Hence the excitement with multi-media?)
Thanks for providing me the occasion to tap out something I've mulling over
but haven't really worked up yet. Your thoughts and comments would be most
welcome!
>> Charles Ess
>> Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center
>> Drury University
>> 900 N. Benton Ave. Voice: 417-873-7230
>> Springfield, MO 65802 USA FAX: 417-873-7435
>> Home page: http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html
>> Co-chair, CATaC 2002: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/~sudweeks/catac02/
>> "...to be non-violent, we must not wish for anything on this earth
which the
>> meanest and lowest of human beings cannot have." -- Gandhi
>>
>>> From: Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com>
>>> Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 06:46:08 +0000
>>> To: Charles Ess <cmess@lib.drury.edu>
>>> Subject: minds and bodies
>>>
>>> Charles,
>>>
>>> I hope you were knowingly cooperating with my editorial persona, whom
I
>>> almost always allow to speak on a rather thin diet of knowledge but
copious
>>> amounts of boldness :-). Just the sort of thing I was hoping that such
a
>>> message would provoke -- a reading list for the incompletely trained.
>>> Thanks very much indeed. Would you mind sending me an offprint when
your
>>> article sees the light of day & the darkness of night?
>>>
>>> BTW, do you think (as I can only suspect) that the mind/body problem
is
>>> central to everything we do with our beloved machines?
>>>
>>> Yours,
>>> W
>>>
>>>
>>> Dr Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer,
>>> Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London,
>>> Strand, London WC2R 2LS, U.K.,
>>> +44 (0)20 7848-2784, ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/,
>>> willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk, w.mccarty@btinternet.com
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 09:18:06 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com>
Subject: artificial minds and bodies
The latest issue of the Times Literary Supplement (25 January, no. 5156),
contains an interesting review of Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of
Puppets (Harvard), on the artificial bodies of human simulacra, including
robots, androids and cyborgs. If anyone here has read this book, I for one
would appreciate comments on it. The reviewer, Edward Sidelsky argues that,
"Idolatry -- and indeed all forms of spiritualism -- mistakes spirit for a
kind of thing, an object that can be grasped and manipulated. The spirit is
seen as something existing alongside the body, as a 'subtle' or 'astral'
body. This leads to the superstition that it can somehow be separated from
the body, or transferred without loss to another body (an idol, mannikin,
robot or computer).... The ban on idolatry in Judaism, Christianity and
Islam springs from a fundamental religious insight: the spirit is not
static and thing-like, and so cannot be housed in any thing." He goes on to
comment that the apparent revival of religious interest in recent sci-fi
films -- where artificial bodies, thanks to computer technology, become
instruments of redemption -- is really a revival of idolatrous paganism.
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer,
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London,
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, U.K.,
+44 (0)20 7848-2784, ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/,
willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk, w.mccarty@btinternet.com
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