Clark vs Varela

Ok: Eileen beat me to using this quote as a post, but I am interested in how Clark views the Embodied Mind:

Varela et al. use their reflections as evidence against realist and objectivist views of the world. I deliberately avoid this extension, which runs the risk of obscuring the scientific value of an embodied, embedded approach by linking it to the problematic idea that objects are not independent of the mind. My claim, in contrast, is simply that the aspects of real-world structure which biological brains represent will often be tightly geared to specific needs and sensorimotor capacities. (p. 173)

Clark’s “deliberate” avoidance of, presumably, the Buddhist aspect of The Embodied Mind is puzzling to me. I am not sure how Varela et. al run the risk of obscuring scientific value; as far as I am concerned, they are placing the scientific value in the wider context of other forms of human knowledge. Moreover, Clark’s claim that “the aspects of real-world structure which biological brains represent will often be tightly geared to specific needs and sensorimotor capacities” is not a “contrast” to Varela et al, unless I am misreading the text.

I am also interested in the footnote that Eileen picked up. why bring up the fact that the three authors disagreed on certain points of their thesis? It seems to me that, though a fantastic read, Clark has some real problems with the incorporation of other thought systems into The Embodied Mind. I really would like to know why; the book is so nuanced, thoughtful and clear that it is puzzling to me why he is making these distinctions. Unless, of course, I am missing some crucial part of the text (which is entirely possible).

It all comes back to Fleck

I really enjoyed Clark’s chapter on language. For me, that was where the ideas in the book came together. I also liked the way he seemed to connect his ideas to the ideas from the other books we have read. On page 212, where he describes how language works with our minds, he says that “it may . . . exhibit types of phonetic or grammatical structure that exploit particular natural biases of the human brain and perceptual system. If that were the case, it would look for all the world as if our brains were especially adapted to acquire natural language, but in fact it would be natural language that was especially adapted so as to be acquired by us.” Here he presents the question of language development in a chicken-or-egg scenario, arguing that instead of our being “especially adapted” for language use, language was “adapted so as to be acquired by us.” Though he does not mention it, it seems like the first scenario, which he seems to indicate is the one that is most readily accepted, could be the result of the kind of linear smoothing that Fleck describes, where messy processes end up seeming inevitable because the steps and missteps that led to their fruition are covered up by history.

Clark’s description of the ways in which language can be used as a tool by the mind are also interesting. The three ways he mentions are 1) to “offload memory onto the world,” 2) to use labels to simplify the environment, and 3) to use “linguistic labels” to simplify learning (201). The concept that stood out for me here is his claim that the “most obvious benefit of the linguistic encoding of thoughts and ideas, is . . . that such encoding formats our ideas into compact and easily transmitted signals that enable other human beings to refine them, to critique them, and to exploit them (204). I wonder how close this idea is to that of using language as symbols for thought to the dreaded idea of thought being symbolic. It seems like he is treading a fine line between the two. I’m not sure he is worried about that because one of his goals is bringing the two back together, but I wondered what the application of this conclusion would be.

Self-Awareness

On page 202, discussing flowers and bees, Varela, Thompson and Rosch say “These two broad and reciprocal constraints appear to have shaped a history of coupling in which plant features and the sensorimotor capacities of bees coevolved. It is this coupling, then, that is responsible for both the ultraviolet vision of bees and the ultraviolet reflectance patterns of flowers.” Further down on the page they add “organism and environment are mutually enfolded in multiple ways, and so what constitutes the world of a given organism is enacted by that organism's history of structural coupling.” Here it seems that the authors are dealing with the perception of an organism’s “world” being “enacted” through the process of mutual interaction between the organism and its environment. What they mean by world seems a little murky, but I think they are making the point that cognition is in effect thermodynamic, that it is made up solely of action and reaction. This seems a fine definition, but I wonder if it leaves certain parts of human cognition mysterious.

Take the bee-flower example. In this instance, VT&R’s argument would state that the mutual dependence of bee on flower, flower on bee, was cognitive. The same goes for the Bittorio on pages 151-7. Any system that develops the characteristics of coupling, that “becomes part of an ongoing existing world . . . or shapes a new one” (207) would be considered as a cognitive system.

My question is, does this description of cognition account for human self-awareness? Is self-awareness (even the awareness of no-self) a different order of cognition—more complex, perhaps—than that exhibited by bees and Brittorios, or is it something else entirely? Also, is cognition the same as intelligence? I’m curious to see if anyone else thought about this point, or if was just me. One complication, I suppose, is the question of whether or not bees and Brittorios are self-aware, which doesn’t seem answerable. However, I doubt Varela, et al. would argue that either are able to conduct the kind of self examination that is necessary for mindfulness.

Games and Fonts

Re the discussion of patterns in rule-based systems referred to in Embodied Mind: LifeLab is a game that illustrates this principle. It is pretty interesting to mess around with. (This link is to a Mac version of the game, but I'm sure you could find a similar app for Windows.)

Also, I found two companies that create handwriting fonts. Fontifier only costs $9 and you can have the font almost instantly (if you have a scanner). FontGod costs more and takes longer to acquire, but it looks like it might have a little higher quality.

Enjoy.

turning negatives into positives

One of the more interesting phenomena I have observed since I began graduate school it the push to think negatively: when we examine a particular work, one of our first tendencies is to argue how it is wrong. Only this week, we were given before class a written assignment to criticize the book under discussion. This resulted in 15 people tearing the book apart for the guts of three hours. The instructor had to ask late in the day – “was there anything in this book that you liked?”

The move to jump on the negative appears to be institutional. How we progress and differentiate ourselves partly involves thrusting spears into the shoulders of the giants on which we stand. One of the most startling aspects of The Embodied Mind – and there is much starting news in this text – is its inclusiveness. Open practically any page and you will find synthesis rather than division. An example: “the most interesting relation between subsymbolic emergence and symbolic computation is one of inclusion, in which we see symbols as higher-level description of properties that are ultimately embedded in an underlying distributed system” (101). By looking at different, and sometimes opposing, ways of looking at the world, this book shows how it is possible to generate creative thinking that builds on the past rather than divides it.

The most radical claim in this book – that there is no self – is not new, although it is the first time we have seen it on this course. How it is presented here is certainly new to me, however. There are two reasons for this: first, the book is written from three perspectives: a psychologist, a philosopher, and an immunoligist-turned-neuro-scientist; second, it incorporates a world faith, Buddhism, and situates it in an emergent-cognitive context. I find the combination of these two elements – the interdisciplinary approach, and the inclusion of a faith-based system of knowledge – terrifically exciting. What it all means, I am not sure. The fusion of such disparate fields means that practically anyone who reads this book is going to be at a loss in some areas.

As a template for building new knowledge, however, it is an exciting step; I am looking forward to seeing what we make of it on Thursday.

Self and Noself

I think my main question about the reading is where Varela, Thompson and Rosch come down on the issue of the “self.” There seems to be a tension in the book between “the ongoing sense of self in ordinary experience” (61) and their assertion that the self cannot be identified through investigation. In other words, we all feel that we have a self, but we cannot say if it resides in our bodies in general, in our brain in particular or in any other place. This inability to locate a “self” is called by the authors “noself.” The reason I call this discontinuity a tension, rather than noting that it is merely a discontinuity, is that the authors use the lack of continuity between cognitivism with experience as a way to criticize it, but they seem to ignore this discontinuity when the posit their theory of noself. I’m not trying to say that this theory is wrong; on the contrary, I find their description of it very convincing. I do wonder, though, how we are to deal with the feeling that we do have a self. It is certainly correct to question the validity of this feeling (and, as the authors do, to note the manifold problems that result when selfhood is asserted), but I would guess that cognitive science would be deeply concerned with the source of the feeling of selfhood.

I half expect the authors to answer this question by the end of the book (I’ve only read part-way through the section on emergence), though I wonder if it is answerable. Did anyone else have similar questions (or do you have an answer for my question)?

Shore and techno-totemism

This is an extremely interesting and well-written treatise on psychic unity vs psychic diversity. Shore marshals so many diverse sources into a compelling and clear argument. One of the core tensions of the book - the processing of information and the creation of meaning is extremely compelling; however, I want to flag one particular aspect of his argument that does not seem to make sense. The technology chapter focuses primarily on the development of technologies that process information. Shore argues that the worlds generated by what he calls "techno-totemism" results in "the loss of integrating contexts for experience" (159). He also describes word-processing as transforming our experience of language to the degree that "it is the loss of the poiesis of creation, a loss upon which this new technology of the word is founded" (144).

Granted, the chapter is way out of date with regard to technology, but what he is arguing seems to go against the grain of the rest of the book. If meaning is created analogically by processing information in the context of elements such as environment and memory, then surely technology and the representations of the world that it produces function in a similar way? Simply, rather than a purely information-crunching apparatus that creates a false simulacra of the world, doesn't technology blend into our meaning-making processes in a more organic fashion?

Shore's rather contradictory view of technology stands out among the other more convincingly argued ethnographic chapters. Maybe he just did not really have a good handle on the topic at the time of writing. In any case, it brings up an issue that I think is pertinent to the class: How do we figure technology into cultural modeling and schemas? If anyone has ideas about this, I would love to hear them!

Shore and Technology

I feel that Shore’s book adds a lot to the our general discussion of the topic of the mind and learning in one particular way: he seems to be the first writer we have read who gives a clear model for how new ideas (schemas) replace old ones. On page 49 he says that “it is reasonable to suppose that dominant cultural models are often accompanied by widely shared but not highly cognized or publicly symbolized alternative models,” meaning that the culture contains many models, some of which are dominant while others are less visible (especially to outsiders). His conception is kind of like a town with a red-light district. The folks who are respectable live their lives as if the red-light district does not exist; they may not acknowledge it or openly condemn it, but, though seem to ignore it, they are all aware of it, and that it offers an alternative—though psychically dangerous—mode of living. This particular conception helps explain why cultures, though they demonstrate widely similar traits, are not completely homogenous.

Shore’s distinction between social and cognitive models explains how cultures can adopt radically new social models. Shore explains the phenomenon this way:

It is conceivable . . . that under certain conditions, members of a community will fail to fully internalize a cultural model because their personal experiences are incompatible with the conventional model. For these people, the cultural models have become “dead models.” These individuals may well have alternative mental models, models that may be highly idiosyncratic or socially manifested as marginal cultural representations or as cultural innovations (52)

Take the example of T. S. Eliot. Did Eliot’s widely popular poetry—expressing a fractured sense of modern life and the despair that accompanied it—really indicate a new feeling on the part of the post-WWI, Western European, English-speaking population, or did he merely find a way to articulate a feeling that was latent in people, an alternative model, that had not been given a popular, representative voice? Or to put it another way, did life stink before the dawn of the 20th century, or was that a modern phenomenon?

I wasn’t as pleased with Shore’s chapter on technology (chapter vi), however. His description of modular living that is the result of digital technology seemed to be spot on, but his analysis of this shift—from analog to digital—is about as clear as a record junkie defending his or her refusal to switch to CDs. He sums up the chapter with Heidegger, noting that the author’s “technologically inspired crisis may be understood as the loss of analogically grounded and organically mediated cultural models that can serve as sources for meaning construction” and that “[t]he loss of such models amounts to what Heidegger called ‘the darkening of the world’” (160-61). First, I’m not sure that Shore proves that “meaning construction” is impossible in a digital world or with what he calls the “postmodern mind” (161). Second, I have no idea what he (or Heidegger) means by “the darkening of the world” and why we should fear such a thing. Perhaps someone else can explain that to me.

If one can put aside his fears of word processing, however, Shore’s point about the effect of technology on thought (or schema making) is fascinating. I think the effect of technology on though has been established (Ong, Havelock, and others) but Shore’s emphasis on how it can create culture-wide schemas that dominate our living is relatively new, I think.