Philosophy of Computing – Page 8

Harvard and Open Access

Peter Suber in Open Access News has reproduced the text of the motion that the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard passed requiring faculty to deposit a copy of their articles with the university.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles.

According to another post by Peter Suber, Harvard is the first North American university to adopt an open access policy. He calls it a “permission mandate” (granting permission to the university to make research open) rather than a “deposit mandate.” It has the virtue that the university takes responsibility for maintaining the access, not the faculty member.

More on this can be found here (another Suber post) and here (Chronicle of Higher Ed.).

Ian Hacking: analogue bodies and digital minds

The Cartesian vision fulfilled: analogue bodies and digital minds is an essay in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2005, v. 30, n. 2) by Ian Hacking that first argues that despite the dislike for the Cartesian mind-body split in philosophy there is a degree to which Western culture is acting as if the body was analogue and the mind digital. Our metaphors, our representations, our sciences are Cartesian. Medicine treats the body as a messy mechanism, cognitive science treats the mind like a computer. Here is the abstract:

Current intellectual wisdom, abetted by philosophers of all stripes, teaches that the Cartesian philosophy is both wrong and dead. This wisdom will be overtaken by events. Present and future technologies – ranging from organ transplants to information coding – will increasingly make us revert to Descartes’s picture of two absolutely distinct types of domains, the mental and the physical, which nevertheless constantly interact. We as humans are constituted in both domains, and also must inhabit them. This is less a matter of facts – for what a person is, is never simply a matter of fact – than of how we will come to conceive of ourselves in the light of the facts that will press in upon us.

What is impressive and distracting about the essay (and what makes it accessible) is that he takes us on a tour of contemporary media culture from Japanese entertainment robots, manga, to Stelarc. It is only at the end that he makes his second move, which is to declare, without giving us a similar tour, that the representation of the mind as digital is “dated”.

Minds, on the other hand, we represent as information processors. And in this age we represent the processing of information by sequences of binary digital operations. Here I am less confident of the metaphor, which I find a bit dated. (p. 164)

He concludes by talking about Antonio Damasio’s theory which is that, “A human being is a neurologically nested triad of mind, brain and body.” (p. 165) The science that is showing the importance of the body to emotion and emotion to mind “leaves the digital mind in the dust.” (p. 165) Hardly. I find it hard to believe that science will give up on trying to formally model the mind as a method for testing hypotheses and understanding.

Barry Allen on the Tool: Artifice and Design

On Friday I heard Barry Allen talk about tools. His talk touched on points he makes in his forthcoming book, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience. He defined a tool as having two distinctive qualities:

Â Artifactual economy. A tool is an artifact and it is part of an economy of tools. Tools are made by other tools, they are controlled by other tools, and often operate on tools. This is what characterizes modern technology – a technical culture of machines driving machines making machines and interacting with machines.
Functionless functionality. By this Allen, I think, meant that tools do not have a single function or purpose – that they are often used for unanticipated functions, but are still functional. The general purpose computer might be the paradigm of a tool with no fixed function that is therefore adaptable to all sorts of functions.

After the talk Barry and I talked about software as tools. He would say that a book or a movie is an artifact, but not a tool. At what point does a digital artifact go from being data to being a tool? When it is executable? Is a web page information or a tool?

Barry also made an interesting point about first-order and second-order machines. First-order machines are “devices that extend human capacities by exploiting a mechanical advantage.” Second-order machines are like factories, “an assembly of first-order machines, coupled to produce a multiplying effect. Exploits the economic equivalent of a mechanical advantage.” These second-order machines are the factories of tools that make our culture more than tool using, but an economy of technology. Allen warned that it is these second-order tools that so easily turned to waste.

Zonbu: cares about the planet too

Zonbu is a environmental personal computer with some interesting features. It runs a version of Linux and comes with bundled applications. You buy it with a monthly plan that gives you off-site storage and maintenance. It has no hard-drive, just a flash card for local storage. All of this means it is extremely energy efficient (consumes as much as a light bulb) and that it is easy to run. They also promise to take it back and disassemble it for recycling.As interesting as the green aspect of Zonbu is, I’m also struck by their service model. You buy it for $99 (without keyboard or monitor) and then pay $13 a month or more for the storage and support. You don’t get root access and they manage the computer for you. It comes with all the basic applications. As some commentators have put it – the Zonbu makes for a good second home computer for the family (at least those who don’t want to run PC games.)

Guy sent me this after reading my Blog Action Day grumbling.

As It Happens, Privacy, and the Mechanical Turk

As It Happens on CBC Radio just played a good double segment on “Google Eyes”. The first part looked at the Amazon Mechanical Turk task looking for Steve Fossett’s plane on satellite images. The second part looked at privacy issues around street level imaging from outfits like Google.

Mechanical Turk (Artificial Artificial Intelligence) is a project where people can contribute to tasks that need many human eyes like looking at thousands of satellite images for a missing plane. It reminds me of the SETI@home project which lets users install a screen saver that uses your unused processing cycles for SETI signal processing. SETI@home is not part of a generalized project, BOINC that, like the Mechanical Turk, has a process for people to post tasks for others to work on.

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced yesterday that she has written both Google and Immersive Media (who developed the Street View technology used by Google) “to seek further information and assurances that Canadians’ privacy rights will be safeguarded if their technology is deployed in Canada.” The issue is that,

While satellite photos, online maps and street level photography have found useful commercial and consumer applications, it remains important that individual privacy rights are considered and respected during the development and implementation of these new technologies.

This is a growing concern among privacy advocates as a number of companies have considered integrating street level photography in their online mapping technologies.

In street level photography the images are, in some cases, being captured using high-resolution video cameras affixed to vehicles as they proceed along city streets.

Google, according to the commission on the radio, has not replied to the August 9th letter.

Richard Rorty Dies at 75 – New York Times

The New York Times has an obituary for Richard Rorty by Patricia Cohen, Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75 (June 11, 2007). Rorty, when I was a Haverford, was presented to us as a philosopher looking to the American tradition of James and Dewey to reconcile Continental and Anglo-American philosophy.

Gary Madison has an essay online, Coping with Nietzsche’s Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer that nicely positions Rorty in postmodern philosophy.

Robotic age poses ethical dilemma

The BBC has a story about roboethics, Robotic age poses ethical dilemma, triggered by a South Korean initiative to develop a Robot Ethics Charter as part of a focus on robotics as a growth area.

In the past, robots were considered just a useful tool in the manufacturing industry. But it is gradually embedded in human life by cleaning homes, protecting them from thieves and providing education. Nowadays robots are also used to rescue people at accident spots such as fires.

This year, various robots are to be introduced: a robot that teaches English and sings songs to children, a robot that guides people at the post office and a robot designed to save people at disaster areas. (Korea.net, Robots, cars, batteries hold key to future growth)

Poking around I found this Painter Robot from Yahoh. (Sounds like Yahoo to me.) The BBC story also mentions the Roboethics.org – Official Roboethics website which has issued a Roboethics Roadmap.

Roboethics is the ethics applied to Robotics, guiding the design, construction and use of the robots.
In this site you may find: birth and history of Roboethics; all the information concerning the development of the concept of a human-centered Roboethics; the events which have marked the update of the original proposal; the international projects on Roboethics; the EURON Roboethics Roadmap; the activity of the IEEE-RAS Technical Committee on Roboethics.

Thanks to Daryl for this link.

Web Mining for Research

Web Mining for Research is a white paper I’ve just written to get my ideas down about how we should be using the Web as evidence not just for social science research, but in the humanities. Digital humanities is more than studying old wine in new digital bottles – the challenge is to do humanities research using the digital as evidence. For me the challenge is how to rethink philosophy now that we can mine concepts in their sites, to paraphrase Ian Hacking.

Derrida: “The Word Processor”

A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation – which are also, in their own way, word-processing mechanisms. (p. 32)

Paper Machine by Jacques Derrida and translated by Rachel Bowlby has an essay on “The Word Processor” that is one of the better discussions of how word processing is changing writing. Some quotes:

“But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and ‘mechanical’ writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology.” (p. 20)

The machine remains a signal of separation, of severance, the official sign of emancipation and departure for the public sphere.” (p. 20)

As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another ‘subject’ (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screeen. Like a hidden god who’s half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (p. 22)

With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how ‘it responds.’ Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking — at any rate, I don’t know — how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. … We know how to use them and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, in them, on their side; and this might give us plenty to think about with regard to our relationshi with technology today – to the historical newness of this experience. (p. 23)

Is it really new to use technologies without understanding?

For Derrida the age of the book is passing.

This is not the end but we are probably moving to another regime of conservation, commemoration, reproduction, and celebration. A great age is coming to an end.

For us, that can be frightening. We have to mourn what has been our fetish. (p. 31)

I like the French term for word processor, “traitement de texts” – seems more accurate to what is happening.

Meditation on Electronic Tools

A tool would have a handle with grooves to hold tight. It’s easy to swing into place.

It would have an inhuman steel end. An end unlike my soft flesh. Perhaps the nail dead at the end of the digit.

A tool scratches out its world. A tool outreaches, extends the hand in sight, and where it doesn’t fit (so often), it scrapes a groove. It claws what it can afford.

And when it’s finished there’s a pop, a clunk, a ping, and a burr to be swept away. When it’s left, the palm is open to stroke the surface of the craft. A satisfaction puts the tool away.

So few parts of the world fit this tool, other than my hand. Perhaps they are not made for work but for the stroking, the holding, and the gripping turn.

Which is why I need so many of them, within reach, laid out in frames, carried in bags, on belts, and ready-at-hand and unforseen.

Then, I’ll pause in the workshop and not do anthing at all. I’ll hold these tools in my mind which is not how to use them.

Images all from the TAPoR portal and TAPoRware.