At issue here: Mind-Body Dualism, Consciousness, and Interaction within the world

Some ideas from Larry Hickman's "Technology as a Human Affair," pages 119-159

Embodiment

Traditional Philosophy: Little regard for the body. Descartes- Body as a machine, guided by the soul/consciousness: "I think therefore I am."

Many social sciences- Behavioralism in psychology, strands of Functionalism and other forms of positivism in sociology- view the body and/or the individual as a machine or "empty vessel."

Exceptions: American Pragmatism, Existentialism/Phenomenology, and some Marxism.

Don Ihde: "Technology and Human Self-Conception"

• "Some form of human action precedes or grounds conception,..."
• Being/Doing precedes thinking: "I am therefore I think."
• Descartes conception bifurcated Western images of existence, shifted analysis to an independent, autonomous "self"
• Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology (Hegel -and by extension Marx- presents another version of phenomenology and dialectics):

1. Every self is in some world, so it is senseless to speak of self and world as separate and distinct.
2. Self and world are both experienced as phenomena- therefore (at least) equal.
3. Perhaps the world is primary: It is only in and through my participation in the world, (the world I share with others) that I can come to be aware of and understand myself. Consciousness is intentional, relative (reflexive), and interactive.
   • Technology forms the basis of human interaction with the world (natural and human).
   • Technology as technic, method and "activity-form" is an extension of our intentional interaction in the world.
   • As technology embodies our intentional interaction with in the world, it reflexively constitutes our understanding of ourselves as active agents in the world
   • As we extend ourselves through technological developments, we extend our "Selves"??
   • Ihde calls this relationship- "Projective-Reflective."
   • Three Examples:
     1. Hunting and Gathering Societies- low level technology, daily life constituted by basic tasks of hunting and gathering. Knowledge of self and world determined by this interactivity, which also inform the method of transmitting knowledge- ceremonial rituals. "Likeness/similarity" characterize the relationship between the human being and the world. "We are the world."
     2. Agricultural societies: higher level of technological interaction with the world, control. Natural cycles and rhythms- growth, decay, death. No longer a notion of similarity, but one of correlation, repetition, traditional thinking, change from the established order is threatening. "We are part of the world." (It's a natural fact!)
     3. Industrial societies: High level of technological interaction, machines dominate the natural environment (or at least try to). Technological systems: impersonal, machine-like relations, rationality, even the human body is characterized as a machine. Objectification, reification, alienation. "We make the world"

• Ihde suggests that all three forms are related and at certain levels equivalent: Interaction within the world precedes knowledge of self and the world, and "Self" is constituted as part of the world.
• Progress does not equal improved self-knowledge, but just a different mode of understanding our relationship with the world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception

• We experience ourselves through several "bodies"- and fundamentally we have the body "as anchorage in the world"
• Habits: not the products of applying "rule" to situations to order experience, but the "grasping of the motor significance" of our actions. Practice in "motor space"
• The technologies around us become extensions of our bodies, we learn to use them, not "rationally" but through 'the give and take of practice.' "Thinking" seems to destroy the "bodily" connection.

The Self

The Self as Process

Sherry Turkle: "Second Self" (1984) and "Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet" (1995)

• Traditional metaphors of self (and society): Stable, relatively rigid (role structure)
• Today: Fluid and "subject to change."
  1. Health: ability to adapt
  2. Emily Martin: "Flexible Bodies" The new virtues of change. "Flexibility practicums"
  3. Virtual Communities: Playing and shaping multiple selves- similarities to real life (RL): blended and extended families and multiple households.
• "Selves" as 'evocative objects'- constructed through encounters, playing 'at' them awakens us to their multiplicity.
• Gergen's "The saturated self"-- modern communication allows us to 'colonize each others brains'=> Social saturation: continuous construction and reconstruction; negotiation.
• Positive aspects of identity as multiplicity?? The WELL
• Multiplicity and Coherence? Source of "grounding?"
• The web and constructing a "Home." Identity through linkages and associations.
• Postmodernism and the self: Variety and multiplicity fused into identity. Playing with our selves vs. The fragmentation of our 'selves'
• Unitary Self <====> Flexible Self <====> Multiple Personality Disorder
• Daniel Dennett: "Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness." Flexible self- open lines of communication- respect for the many.
• Recognition of incompleteness==> join with others.
• Acknowledgment of diversity.
• Virtuality as transitional space- explore choices.
• Cyborg reality: Brains and computers in symmetry (internet) combining together in an emerging structure
• Real and Virtual: separate or mutually permeable?
• Meaning emerges out of the relationships between "things"
• Identity and the Internet

Michael Wessells' "Minds and Selves"

In "Computer, Self and Society"

Point to develop: If we understand ourselves and others through our interaction within the world, if technology is the embodiment of self , then in an age of technologically mediated (computer) communication, virtual communities, and technological "ways of life"-- what do we become?

Minds and Computation

• Computers as a medium for discovering personal identity (Turkle, 1984)
• Computers as the center of social communities- real and virtual
• Mind and Machine- Descartes "dualism"-- free choice. People as machines-- determinism
• Early this century, psychological study emphasized-Behavioralism vs. Symbols, Meanings, and Rules. This doesn't seem to provide an adequate understanding of the complexities of human cognition
• Computer as metaphor- AI
• Computers and Minds- both symbol processing systems. Both encode, store and retrieve information.
  1. Hierarchal Model
  2. Serial Model (one thing at a time)
  3. Parallel Model (multiple processes simultaneously). "Connectionist" models
• Computational Theory of the Mind: Physical symbol processing system. (Minds and computers- binary representations; program (rule) driven)
• Physicalist theory: states of mind are really states of the brain. Mind is a physical entity. (Or vice versus??)
• Still, although there are physical (neural) events associated with sensation and feeling they do not appear to be one and the same. "Redness" does not exist in the "circuitry."
• "Emergence" (similar problems to dualism)
• Back to computational theory: Mind is physical, but mental events can not be reduced to physical events. The medium of the process is physical, the result, the products are not, necessarily.
• Still, computational theory has problems with emotions, feelings; Meaning and Skill (behavior that doesn't follow rules)
• Connectionist models (link for neural net information): not rule following, but patterning which builds and varies based on experience. "Fuzzy Logic" (see also, Connectionist Models of Cognition)
• Computers and meaning- lack of the "social context" and the process of socialization.

Computers, Culture and Identity

• Computers are Interactive, Captivating, and Challenging
• Turkle's "Evocative objects"-- stimulate reflection
• Element of "mastery" and personal style. Turkle- two types: "Hard" and "Soft"-- elements in the formation of self-esteem.
• The computer as a stage upon which an identity is expressed and shaped.
  1. Express indivduality
  2. A tool for discovery- "Safe haven"

Computers, Identity, and the Group:

Hacker Subculture

• The Computers as end itself, rather than a means to an end
• Individualistic and unconventional
• Aesthetics of programming
• Distinctive lifestyle
• Male
• Code of Ethics: Freedom and Elegance
• Conflict with institutional cultures, security and privacy
• Hazards:
  1. Burnout- "sport death"
  2. Loss of interpersonal skills and relationships ("solitariness and avoidance of intimacy")

Yet: Creativity

Computers and the disAbled

AI (see also, http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ai.html)

(In part from Michael Wessell's "CSS" chapter 8)

• Expert Systems: rule following, information sorting, hypothesis building.
  1. Who benefits? Cost and Profit, Unemployment.
  2. Who is responsible?
  3. Mystique of Credibility
  4. Dehumanization: New freedom or uselessness?
• Problem-solving and language
  1. Turing's Test (see also, Eliza, and the Loebner Prize)
  2. AI development has centered on developing limited systems:

Games: Chess (element of perception)

• Game of Life

Simulation (simple tasks)

• Flocking
• Artificial Life
• http://secondlife.com/

General Problem Solver

• Break down tasks into limited goals
• Means-end analysis
• Identify difference between current state and goal
• Search for methods to reduce difference.
• Success limited to logical and mathematical problems

Language

• Unique to humans?
• Problem of social context and meaning (SHRDLU, also limited knowledge of the world) (see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU)
• SAM and "scripts"- data structures that describe 'typical' situations
• PAM and non-scripted stories- goals, plans, inferences
• Still, these programs do not have the "capacity for linquistic creativity or productivity," knowledge of the extensive taken-for-granted norms and ambigguity of human communication

Myth of the intelligent computer:

ELIZA

• Mimics psychotherapist's interview
• Becomes viewed as a "person"

Decision making and rules?

• Sole source of decision making
• Unforseen events, unpredictability
• As we turn over decision making to computers, do we not invest them with "intelligence" and power over us??

Artificial Intelligence: How strange consciousness is- (see Time Magazine 03/25/96, vol 147, no. 13: "Can Machines Think") (see also http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0099.html?printable=1

• Why the "extraness" of consciousness- feeling and emotion
• Pandemonium: "How do data become a part of consciousness?"
• Is "consciousness a "nonphysical" property of the universe...., accompanying certain configurations of information, such as brains."? (reference to Chalmers, "The Conscious Mind")

Artificial Life?

Everyday Life (EDL)

McGuinn, chapter 10

• The impact of Technology on 8 dimensions of EDL
  1. Multiplicity: numbers of things, liberating, yet confusing. (60 models of can openers) Need for filtering system. Extremes of non-choice and "hyper-choice."
  2. Material Abundance: yet distribution and the illusion of choice?
  3. Flow: throughput- continual "processing" at ever increasing rates- consumerism, information, natural resources, continual "sales", drive-throughs. Filtering (again)
  4. Pace: ever-quickening- faster is better, impact on interaction and intimacy
  5. Transience: composition of the flow is constantly changing: yesterdays news, outdated material, etc. The "generation gap."
  6. Scale: Big versus "Human Scale"
  7. Mobility: social, geographical, and informational. Problem of community and attachment.
  8. Technicity: immersion in the "technical system." Increasing technical "mediation" of interpersonal relationships and relationships with nature.
• Question: To what extent are these dimensional impacts considered in the development of social policy?
• Irrationality of rationality: McDonaldization

URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~keelr/280/tecself.html
Owner: Robert O. Keel: rok@umsl.edu
Last Updated: Monday, November 13, 2006 14:04