musings on a central brain...

It is difficult for me to talk about a central brain at this stage of the semester because I seem to have no brain at all (or maybe I have reached a higher state of emptiness? Er, I doubt it somehow...)

Anyway, I'd like to congratulate myself for learning enough this semester to understand what our esteemed professor was writing about; I'd like to congratulate our esteemed professor for writing so clearly on a topic that poses some central questions that I have to negotiate for probably the rest of my professional life. Now that I am finishing my paper, I'd like to pick up on one of the "challenges to an ecological theory of composing" (200):

"If complex systems are not controlled by a central "brain" or processor, how do some agents - particular readers, writers or texts, for instance - come to have a greater influence on such systems and why?" (200)

Now here's a thorny question. My own paper (were there time to rewrite it) would focus on this very topic. My particular area is historical in nature, so the recovery of an ecological environment is almost impossible (before tomorrow at 5pm, at any rate). Shore would argue that we focus on culture and the symbolic realm because of the legacy of Victorian ideas of evolution. I would amend this argument to say this: cultural historians focus on the level of symbol because that's all they have, in many cases. To develop an ecological network can ever only be incomplete when it comes to historical texts. Yet, if a cultural historian is to be honest, he or she must look for some "central brain" that pushes through the culture, particularly in charged atmospheres (colonial Ireland being my particular hotbed of intrigue). If you introduce power structures into the equation, it is REALLY difficult for me to say that a particular cultural form is ecological in nature when a central brain like the English colonial system is coming down on the historical situation like a ton of bricks.

Of course, in my paper I have said that my topic is ecological in nature. And I believe it. But to argue that I have literally had to leave 700 years of colonial history out of my 15 pages. If I got into that quagmire, you probably wouldn't see me for the next decade, and I would probably be waving to you from the bottom of a whisky bottle.

I suppose that I see a chasm between the theory and putting it into practice when there is an absolutely overwhelming psychic trauma going on in a culture and there is very little chance of creating a genuine ecological situation because the information is simply not available. Even if you look at something ecologically in such a charged atmosphere, then the charged atmosphere will inevitably win, and somehow the symbolic argument and the ecological will end up looking the same, ie colonialism was bad, bad, bad, and you can see that everywhere in the culture.

I know that this totally simplistic. But as I said, I have no brain at this stage of the semester. Now, where IS that whisky bottle...?

Explanations

I, too, enjoyed the way Dr. Syverson’s book tied together the works we have been reading It gives the course a pleasant sense of completion. What I found most helpful about the book was the way in which it modeled a method of applying the material we’ve been reading to a different field. I found the “ecological matrix” on page 23 especially useful, for I think it provides a good way of organizing other writing in English using this material.

I don’t know about other fields, but I think that for any kind of study of writers, be it in composition studies, literature/cultural studies, or rhetoric, I think the complex systems model provides a good theoretical tool for examining what (I believe) has long been a folk understanding of writers and writing that lacked any sort of theoretical credibility. Very few people would admit that in all cases writing was a simple matter of someone sitting down and tossing off perfect prose or balanced and lyrical verse. The inability of theorists to understand why writing was so hard, why it was difficult to teach, why it seemed like so few people were good at it, gave rise to theories that turned writers into solitary geniuses, who were somehow more capable, more intelligent, or more blessed than the rest of us. The known complexity of writing situations (and the complex results we get when we attempt to write) has privileged these interpretations because there was no other theory that could explain why some writers were successful and others were not.

Rhetorical studies are a good example of this phenomena. Since its inception, the primary function of rhetoric has been training speakers (now writers) how to create effective texts. To this end many manuals in rhetoric providing copious examples of “good” writing have been given to students in order to scaffold their understanding of composition. But, still some writers were much “better” than others, and Aristotle’s lists of topoi or psychological analysis of audiences could not explain why different writers could follow the same rules and produce texts that were successful and unsuccessful.

In these situations, failure was seen to be faulty application of the rules, a deficiency of the speaker, or a lack of skill on his or her part that led to imperfection. Rarely was the question of why a “good” text produced poor results asked. Complexity theory, as in Dr. Syverson’s matrix, provides a method to explain the success and failure of “good” or “correct” writing through its focus on emergence and embodiment, as well as the social and physical settings of the writing situation.

Diversification

The Santa Fe Instituted is interested in more than just Economics and Physics.

The Backstory: Last night, since I was slightly ahead on my coursework, I decided to spend some time relaxing with a little pleasure reading. In actuality, I was under a little pressure to do some pleasure reading, because the book I had intended to read leisurely over the break, Cormac McCarthy's new novel No Country for Old Men, had been recalled by some kind soul, and I had to have it read by next Tuesday. A cynical person might wonder how the library and this person (no doubt someone who has a serious paper due on 20th Century Southern Authors in the New Millennium) had conspired to turn my pleasure reading into an assignment with a due date, but I am not cynical, so I dutifully grabbed the book on the way to bed, determined to knock off a few chapters before sleep.

This particular assignment wasn’t that horrible, really, because I like McCarthy, and I have been wanting to check out his new book for a while. Even though I’m not studying literature, it seemed wise to get away from the Waldrop’s of this world and indulge a few whims and personal interests every now and then.

And lo and behold, what should I see on the dedication page but this:

“The author would like to express his appreciation to the Santa Fe Institute for his long association and his four-year residence.”

They’re everywhere.

Complex Rhetoric

As I was reading the section of the book where Arthur and Kauffman are discussing bootstrapping and self-replicating systems (‘round page 126 or so), I began to wonder what the implications of these systems were for the study of rhetoric. Kauffman’s genetic networks and the book’s discussion of emergent properties had put me in mind of the connectionist diagrams Hutchins had in chapter 7 (?) and their implication that too much information was a bad thing—it tended to bias all the agents to a particular outcome. This interpretation seemed to dovetail nicely with Arthur’s ideas about the ways in which technology gets a foothold and tends to root out other technologies: VHS tape killed Beta, cars relegated horses to the care of enthusiasts, gasoline engines beat out steam-power. It seemed to me that similar sorts of phenomena occur in persuasive situations. Consider the Al Qaeda link to Iraq. Near as I can tell, this particular link was always a little fuzzy, but it was insinuated so often that it was accepted as true by a majority of Americans long after it had been shown to be ill-founded. Why—when the information that would counter that claim was so widely available between TV news and the Internet—why did it persist? Perhaps Arthur’s theory of “early adoption” or “self replication” indicates how it was initially privileged so that it was almost impossible to eradicate quickly.

Does this seem like a plausible reading of that event? Can you guys think of similar sorts of events that would support or contradict a self-replicating kind of rhetoric?

Tufte Course

I thought some of you might be interested in this course. Tufte developed the small multiples that Dr. Syverson uses for grading. He'll be in Austin Feb. 2, 3, 2006. The cost for the course is only $160 for full-time students, and you get his three books for free.

Hutchins on Learning

For some reason, I’ve spent some time thinking about Hutchins’s definition of learning, that it is “adaptive reorganization in a complex system.” I think what really got me was his explanation of how it works; he states that this definition “works well for learning situated in the socio-material world, and it works equally well for private discoveries made in moments of reflective thought” (289). It is interesting that he should make that statement because it brings together the reading we’ve been doing up until now. Whereas we began working with the learning that occurs in “the socio-material world” we’ve moved on to discussing how learning occurs in the “mind” (whatever that is). And now, with Hutchins, we are back to group learning, and he suggests that his theory can account for both.

Coincidentally, while I am writing this a work crew is in my apartment replacing my smoke detectors. As I type, two men are boring holes in my asbestos-filled ceiling. The first man is short, so he is using small step ladder. He is also doing most of the work: measuring, cutting the holes, hanging the smoke detector. (I’m told the new detector is better than my previous model, and that it will not go off every time I cook frozen pizzas or make coffee. This will a huge time saver for me, since I won’t have to spend a few minutes wildly fanning the smoke detector with my phonebook every time I eat. Perhaps my shoulders won’t be as strong, but I will be more serene.) The second man is taller and can easily reach the short ceiling of my hallway. He helps the first man by giving instructions, but does little of the actual “work.” Here is a portion of their conversation I overheard while the first man was measuring and then preparing the area where my new smoke detector will go:

2nd man: “You can’t cut your hole too deep because the screw has to go in there.”

[The 1st man apparently incorrectly measured the spots where he was going to cut.]

2nd man: “Take a look at this.”

1st man: “Oh.”

2nd man: “Right, you see how you aren’t lined up there.”

2nd man: “Did you use a marker or a pencil?”

1st man: “Marker.”

2nd man: “Next time you need to use a pencil.”

Listening to them, I began to be annoyed by the 2nd man’s constant interruptions of the 1st man’s work. However, it soon became apparent that the 2nd man was training the 1st, and that as I observed the process, it was fascinating to see how quickly the 1st man caught on. The constant interruptions were made to prevent the 1st man from making mistakes that would have lasting consequences. Suppose he mis-measured his holes and cut one that was too wide. The hole would have to be re-cut, and there would be an extra hole in the ceiling. That would mean that every time I had to fan the smoke detector with my phonebook, I would be freeing tiny bits of asbestos to float around my apartment, where they could eventually work their way into my lungs. Though this would be a spectacular bonanza for my lawyers, it would be bad for me and my health. The 2nd man was aware of both of these factors and was working to make sure that the holes were cut correctly. In retrospect, his instructions, though perhaps annoying in another situation, were appropriate for the job at hand. The 1st man learned quickly and for the last 30 minutes that they worked, the two said very little to each other. It would seem in their case that both “socio-cultural” and individual learning had occurred. The 1st man reorganized his activities by following the instructions of the 2nd man until he eventually “knew” how to do the job without constant feedback.

Basic Info page

There is some information that might be useful for grad students on my basic info page, including "What is a Prospectus?" and "Diagnostics for Dissertations and Chapters:"

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/basicinfo/index.html

Hutchins Lab

Here's the URL for Ed's DCog Lab:
http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab/

Hutchins, ultimate theories, and homemade bread

Sorry this is late...

I haven't fully read the next chapters yet for various reasons (like I don't have the book!), but I have already "bought" the whole theory lock, stock and barrel. I want to chime in with Jim, who (unfortunately) beat me to the question: how do we critique Hutchins? The mail from Hutchins that Peg read out last week was exhilarating but also kinda troubling: this is the theory to end all theory, the ultimate scaffolding. The totalitarian reach of it all could make things so clear, but at the same time, dangerous. To look at ways that we can at least walk around the theory and see possible points of critique or ways to adapt/modify it, I think would be extremely valuable. I'm going to check out some reviews to see what the great intellectual unwashed have to say about it...

In the meantime, I have an idea: let's rent a boat and sail to Ireland. That way we can test all the navigation stuff and I don't have to buy a ticket home for Christmas. You can all stay at my place and taste my mother's great homemade bread. And we could theorize, drink and be merry. In the process we will come up with a theory to trump Hutchins, become famous and live happily ever after as distributed tax exiles. Then End.

Any takers?

Gibbous Waning

I was especially intrigued by two points Hutchins makes in this chapter. They are not exactly connected to each other, so that may make this post seem a little scattered.

First, on page 221 he points out how external objects act as a “memory” for their users, in this case referring to a blank cell in a log book maintained on the ship. Though Hutchins doesn’t mention this point, I was reminded of our discussion earlier in the semester about how technology like databases obscures information that is left out of their architecture. Similarly, as in the case Hutchins mentions, technology like the cell in the logbook makes certain information incredibly important (or conspicuous in its absence). In the book’s example, the blank in the log book reminded the log recorder that the plotter had missed a fix and needed to complete it. As Hutchins points out, this is not the job of the recorder, but the blank in his book allowed him to assist the plotter in this way.

Though this example is non-trivial—if enough fixes were missed, the boat could run aground—it made me think of ways in which similar processes work on more trivial cases. Currently, I’m writing—à la Fleck—on the ways in which thought communities restrict the type of information available to literary theorists and how this restriction plays a role in determining the theories that theorist will produce. It seems that the ideas of other writers important to the theorist would work just like the log book, creating “blanks” in a thought style that, because of their presence, demand to be filled.

Secondly, I was fascinated by the comment of Roy D’Andrade which states that employees at an auto manufacturer might in reality be engaged in making social relationships with the production of cars being merely a side-effect of this process (225). This is a fascinating inversion of the intentions of the actor in this situation, implying that the best way to make cars is to try to make social relationships. (This point could be related to one made in class that the best way to play a piece of music is to not think about playing it.) To relate this idea back to my paper, it seems—at least in the case of the text I’m looking at, T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood—that the theory did not come about as the result of an attempt to make theory, but as a byproduct of the activity of critiquing the theories of others.

In both these cases, it seems to me that these theories can add to our understanding of the writing process, by making us more aware of the situated nature of the writer in a social/historical context. (I guess the ideas are related after all; I pointed at two disconnected parts of Hutchins’s book, and the lines intersected at me and my paper.)

The Ethics of Computation

I actually cheated and read chapter nine of Cognition in the Wild a few weeks ago (or two weeks ago; it's all becoming a blur for me at this point). He makes an interesting comment in that chapter about what computation is, and I thought it would be valid to bring the point up because he alludes to it in the three chapters we were assigned for this week. (Speaking of which, though it is wonderfully written, it is terribly slow to read; Hutchins embeds his theory in the narrative of his sailing stories, which makes it almost impossible to skim the text to find the “important” parts.)

Hutchins makes a point of describing how computation is distributed across many devices (note the way he refers to navigation tools as analog or digital computers). He seems to use the model of computation to refer to processes that were called cognition in our other textbooks (I don’t think this is a problem, or that he is making a necessarily different argument than, say, Shore or Clark; I just thought it was interesting to note). By the final chapter he expands this idea to include groups of individuals operating as computing (cogitating?) “machines.” When computation tasks are being handled by actual human actors, the question of what types of computation tasks are legitimate to ask those actors to participate in arises. For example, Kenneth Burke uses the example of scientists working on weapons technology to complicate the idea that there is such a thing as “pure science” that can be divorced from real-world effects.

My thinking has reached a dead end here. Does anyone else think this is a legitimate issue to discuss in terms of cognition/computation?

off the charts

What an absolutely thrilling read! The first section of Hutchins reads like a novel…and has inspired me to write completely off-topic. Hutchins’ experience on the Palau forcefully brought home to me how when systems work, you don’t really notice them, but when something goes wrong, the scaffolding that holds the system together becomes so overwhelmingly apparent that it can be extremely disconcerting.

Two years ago I was wandering around Western China (as you do) when the SARS virus broke. Within two short weeks, this sprawling country was transformed. An invisible killer was at once everywhere and nowhere; the media was being secretive and contradictory about the extent of the epidemic; tourists – because we were extremely mobile and painstakingly obvious – were being hauled off buses, questioned by armed police, and subject to mandatory temperature checks. Every country in the world suddenly required people traveling from China to be quarantined for up to two weeks. Since hospitals were the environments where the disease was most commonly spread, this was not an attractive option.

I was stranded somewhere up on the Tibetan Plateau and had been refused entry into Tibet proper because an outbreak of SARS in such a poor region would be devastating. Since the concentration of casualties was principally in the East, and Tibet was closed to the West, I headed North, skirting the Taklamakan Desert and eventually hitting the Silk Road. Every few hours, I was hauled off buses to have my temperature checked by inefficient stick thermometers. It was freezing, and by the time the official could read the mercury bar on the thermometer, the reading suggested that I should be clinically dead. This usually prompted laughter from all concerned (mine tinged with a slightly nervous hysteria). Within days, everyone was wearing nasty surgical masks, and I was suspiciously eyed by all locals. Foreign equaled disease, and though I could not speak Mandarin, I gleaned that many media reports were blaming tourists for the spread.

Within weeks, this chaotic situation was transformed. Instead of being taken off buses, officials in gleaming white body suits, rubber boots and very complicated masks would come onto the train or bus and point guns at everyone’s forehead with state-of-the-art temperature-taking guns! Everyone was zapped, and those with a high reading were unceremoniously hauled off the bus. The media was awash with anti-SARS propoganda. People were encouraged not to spit (a national pastime); saccharine anti- SARS anthems blasted out from TVs and radios everywhere (think “We are the World” through a helium fog). Even the glorious Chinese fake rag trade cashed in on the delirium: walking down any metropolitan street you could spot fake Fendi, Gucci or Prada anti-SARS apparel. (In the face of an international epidemic, one simply must accessorize.)

By the time the spread had been brought under control, I was hiding out in a yurt somewhere close to the Pakistani border, freezing my ass off and surviving on nasty yak-butter tea. When I finally emerged, SARS protection mechanisms had been completely sublimated into the culture. Temperatures were screened as you walked in the door of a public transport building, the masks had disappeared, eerily empty trains were once again teeming with people. In the space of a few short weeks I had changed from a human being to a potential disease-carrier and back to a human being, and no one batted an eye. The whole experience was an incredible lesson in how environmentally tangled we all are, how systems adapt ferociously quickly to change or threat, how radically contingent are entire sense of reality really is. Reading Hutchins, I felt this urgent sense of how networks of communication, technology and human cognition really function – and I am sure that we all have experiences in our lives when who we think we are and how we relate to our environment is radically called into question. And maybe my ultimate point in this digressive narrative is this: while we may sometimes get lost in the theories under discussion, maybe our navigation charts lie not only between the covers of a book, but among the synapses and electrical pulses that connect our lived experience to the world.

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).