March 2008
30 posts
1 tag
"Infrastructure studies" and collective action: a...
In “Experience and abstraction: the arts and the logic of machines,” Simon Penny highlights a tension between critical arts practice and the logics and rhetorics underlying and embedded within the technologies that are sometimes (indeed explicitly, in the case of digital arts) used to give voice to the critiques offered by arts practice. He writes:
Much of my writing has grappled...
24 tags
Summary: intelligence is not separable from the...
If we are to understand mind as the locus of intelligence, we cannot follow Descartes in regarding it as separable in principle from the body and the world. I have argued that such separability would haveto coincide with narrow-bandwidth interfaces, among the interactions that are relevant to intelligence. In recent decades, a commitment to understanding intelligence as rational problem...
The intelligence of institutions
the structure of an institution is implemented in the high-bandwidth intelligent interactions among individuals, as well as between individuals and their paraphernalia. Furthermore, the expertise of those individuals could not be what it is apart from their participation in that structure. Consequently, the intelligence of each is itself intelligible only in terms of their higher unity.
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Not all of structure of intelligence is external,...
…the point: it’s not that all of the structure of intelligence is “external”, but only that some of it is, in a way that is integral to the rest.
—Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded, p. 29. Chapter 9 in Haugeland, J., 2000: Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Harvard University Press.
author:haugeland-john book:haugeland-having-thought...
Embodied/embedded intelligence: getting to...
Consider the ability to get to San Jose. That’s a capacity to deal with something out of view—a distant city—and so just what is characteristic of intelligence. Moreover, a cognitive scientist will instinctively attribute it to some sort of representation, either an internal or external map or set of instructions, which an intelligent system either consists in or can consult and follow. But that’s...
Things meaningful in themselves
When cognitive scientists and philosophers speak of meaningful inner entities, they always mean representations (nothing other than representations has ever been proposed as inner and meaningful). Descartes, in effect, invented the “inner realm” as a repository for cognitive representations—above all, representations of what’s outside of it—and cognitive science hasn’t really changed that at...
The world itself as meaningful
When we are at home in the world, the meaningful objects embedded in their context of references among which we live are not a model of the world stored in our mind or brain: they are the world itself. (Dreyfus, 265–266)
There are really several (closely related) points being made in this dense and powerful sentence. First, there is, so to speak, the locus of the meaningful; second its...
Intelligence in the meaningful
Intelligence abides in the meaningful. This is not to say that it is surrounded by or directed toward the meaningful, as if they were two separate phenomena, somehow related to one another. Rather, intelligence has its very existence in the meaningful as such—in something like the way a nation’s wealth lies in its productive capacity, or a corporation’s strength may consist in its market position....
Specific complexity
the complexity of the nervous system is task specific, and in two different ways. In the first place, at any moment, the pulse patterns needed for typing an ‘A’ differ from those needed for typing a ‘B’, not to mention from those needed for writing a ‘B’. The skills in question just are the abilities to get these things done right. And getting them right—this letter as opposed to that one—depends...
Cryptography analogy for explaining non-separation...
Perhaps an analogy would help—even if it’s fairly far fetched. Imagine an encryption algorithm with the following three features: it uses very large encryption keys (tens of millions of bits, just for instance); cryptograms, even for quite brief messages, are comparable in size to the keys themselves; and it is tremendously redundant, in the sense that (for each key) countless distinct cryptograms...
Output patterns that aren't instructions
There are tens of millions (or whatever) of neural pathways leading out of my brain (or neocortex, or whatever) into various muscle fibers in my fingers, hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, and so on, and also from various tactile and proprioceptive cells back again. Each time I type a letter, a substantial fraction of these fire at various frequencies, and in various temporal relations to one...
Flexibility, smoothness, and the "muscular...
Generally, in acquiring a skill—in learning to drive, dance, or pronounce a foreign language, for example—at first we must slowly, awkwardly, and consciously follow the rules. But then there comes a moment when we finally can perform automatically. At this point we do not seem to be simply dropping these same rigid rules into unconsciousness; rather we seem to have picked up the muscular gestalt...
Visual response to affordances
Central to Gibson’s “ecological approach” is his account of what it is that an animal perceives and how. Visual perception cannot be understood, he maintains, if one starts from the perspective of physical optics. A system that sees—a sighted animal—is not responsive, in the first instance, to physically simple properties of light, like color and brightness, but rather to visible features of the...
"Animal" and "environment"
the words animal and environment make an inseparable pair. Each term implies the other. No animal could exist without an environment surrounding it. Equally, although not so obvious, an environment implies an animal (or at least an organism) to be surrounded. This means that the surface of the earth, millions of years before life developed on it, was not an environment, properly speaking....
"Interaction," not "perception" and "action"
…notice that the very distinction between perception and action is itself artificially emphasized and sharpened by the image of a central processor or mind working between them, receiving “input” from the one and then (later) sending “output” to the other. The primary instance is rather interaction, which is simultaneously perceptive and active, richly integrated in real time.
Thus, what’s...
Perceiving instead of representing: "The world is...
The world is its own best model. (Brooks 1990, 5) This is precisely to repudiate designs like the alternatives I mentioned earlier for Simon’s ant: that is, the ant should not contain any inner model or representation of the beach, nor an inner list of step and turn instructions. These alternatives would substitute complexity within the organism for intensity of interaction between the organism...
Brooks' "subsumption architecture"
[This] alternative decomposition makes no distinction between peripheral systems, such as vision, and central systems. Rather the fundamental slicing up of an intelligent system is in the orthogonal direction dividing it into activity producing subsystems. Each activity or behavior producing system individually connects sensing to action. We refer to an activity producing system as a layer. An...
Simon's ant as archetype of intimacy
If what we’re interested in is the path, and if the ant relies mostly on its own internal structure to guide its steps, counting on the ground just for friction and support, then the ant and beach are two relatively independent components or systems, with a well-defined simple interface at the soles of its feet. If, on the other hand, there is constant close coupling between the ant and the...
You must understand what you want to understand
…which close interactions matter, when considering the scope and structure of systems, depends fundamentally on what we’re interested in—that is, what we’re trying to understand.
—Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded, pp. 10-11. Chapter 9 in Haugeland, J., 2000: Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Harvard University Press.
author:haugeland-john...
Intelligibility as the principle of decomposition
‘Nearly decomposable systems’ is his term for systems of relatively independent interacting components with simple interfaces between them. So the point about comprehensibility can be paraphrased as follows: finding, in something complicated and hard to understand, a set of simple reliable interfaces, dividing it into relatively independent components, is a way of rendering it intelligible.
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Intensity of interaction as the defining factor in...
Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms. We detect the organelles in a cell in the way we detect the raisins in a cake—they are “visibly” differentiated substructures localized spatially in the larger structure. On the other hand, we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom. These two...
Interfaces need not be corporeal discontinuities
That systematic interfaces need not coincide with corporeal surfaces can be shown by example. Large organizations, like governments, corporations, and universities, are almost always subdivided into various divisions, departments, and units. But the correspondence between these demarcations and corporeal boundaries is at best haphazard, and never essential. Indeed, as more and more business is...
Relational definitions of "components, systems,...
In careful usage, the notions of component, system, and interface should all be understood together and in terms of one another. A component is a relatively independent and self-contained portion of a system in the sense that it relevantly interacts with other components only through interfaces between them (and contains no internal interfaces at the same level). An interface is a point of...
Television example for exploring relationship...
Consider a television set in comparison to a block of marble. The former, we are inclined to say, is highly systematic, composed of many nested interacting subsystems, whereas the latter is hardly systematic at all. Why? One suggestion might be that the tv is composed of many different kinds of material, arranged in complicated shapes and patterns, whereas the marble contains relatively few...
Frame for understanding "intelligence" should be...
If the significant complexity of intelligent behavior depends intimately on the concrete details of the agent’s embodiment and worldly situation, then perhaps intelligence as such should be understood as characteristic, in the first instance, of some more comprehensive structure than an internal, disembodied “mind”, whether artificial or natural.
—Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded,...
(Properties of) intelligent systems as (properties...
The essential point of systems based on semantic nets, frames, internal models, prototypes, and “common sense” is that, except in very special circumstances, the intelligent performance of a system depends more directly on the particular interconnectedness and organization of its knowledge, than on any reason- ing or processing power. Note that the issue is not the quantity of information, but its...
Simon's ant: complexity reflects environment, not...
We watch an ant make his [sic] laborious way across a wind- and wave-molded beach. He moves ahead, angles to the right to ease his climb up a steep dunelet, detours around a pebble, stops for a moment to exchange information with a compatriot. Thus he makes his weaving, halting way back to his home. … Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant’s path is irregular, complex, hard to describe. But...
Haugeland: Interrelationist critiques do not go...
While undeniably important and compelling, [interrelationist] considerations like these seem to me seriously incomplete and potentially distorting. They remain theoretical or intellectual in a way that not only does not undermine but actually reinforces an aspect of the Cartesian separation that is still so pervasive as to be almost invisible. In particular, interrelationist accounts retain a...
"Interrelationist" critiques of the Cartesian...
…most of the challenges have been of a general sort that I will call ‘interrelationist’. Characteristically, they accept as a premise that the mental, or at any rate the cognitive, has some essential feature, such as intentionality or normativity, and then argue that this feature is impossible except through participation in some supra-individual network of relations. [examples...
Descartes' separated mind
Among Descartes’s most lasting and consequential achievements has been his constitution of the mental as an independent ontological domain. By taking the mind as a substance, with cognitions as its modes, he accorded them a status as self-standing and determinate on their own, without essential regard to other entities… —Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded, p. 1. Chapter 9...