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.

The Stanford Facebook Class

Matt pointed me to a Stanford class on Facebook web site: Home The Stanford Facebook Class: Persuasive Apps & Metrics. Here is a quote from the home page explaining the interest of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab in Facebook,

In 2007 the most effective persuasive technology has been Facebook. People in our lab have researched persuasive technology since 1993, and we’ve found the fastest path to insight is studying what’s working best in the real world. Today’s Facebook experience has so many elements of persuasion, so we’ve decided to dive in deep. Our goal is to understand the psychology of Facebook. This page gives an initial overview of our project.

As a course it is impressive (see especially the speakers they lined up), but I found the press more interesting as they analyzed the phenomenon. Tim Oren in his blog entry, Facebook Apps: Playing the Viral Lottery writes the following,

 You’re better off thinking of a Facebook app as a virtual form of social stroke, a sort of networked take on what we called New Games once upon a time. “Here, have a hug, pass it on.” Indeed, among the most successful of the Stanford apps were hugs, kisses, send Love, and a pillow fight. There were more complex games and multi-user projects, but those were the teams that found they needed to simplify and/or restart with a new application to attract an audience. The summary learnings of the class were simple and to the point: Start simple, go viral, then deepen the engagement – before attempting to monetize. Watch your metrics and learn fast – teams were iterating versions on 12 to 48 hour schedules.

This doesn’t bode well for analytical widgets that are complex, but it is great to see there is still room for the small student team to do something that gets traction.

Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for her Nobel Prize for Literature

My friend Laurence pointed me to Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for her Nobel Prize for Literature in which she compares the hunger for books in Africa to the excess we have.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution.

I want to give all sorts of glib answers to Lessing. I could say that those who spend hours on the web are reading too. I want to say that the nostalgia for books reminds me of the nostalgia for an oral life before books one finds in Plato’s Phaedrus. But these quibbles miss the point. There is a hunger for books in many places and a waste of books in our places. Or, the point is a question to us all,

“Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.”

The web is not that space. It is a chattering noisy public space with endless distractions, not unlike our libraries stuffed with the excess we cannot grasp. The space of writing may be near the webrary, but not too close. Those who are far from webraries – those who hunger for just part of a book with a glass of water shame us.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

Nick Carr, in his blog Rough Type, has a post, Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians, where he sets out to calculate the amount of electricity consumed by a Second Life avatar, which ends up being the amount consumed by the average Brazilian. The comments are fascinating as people debate his math and Second Life folk corrent the calculations about servers (vs. CPUs) used. The point still stands that the average internet user is consuming a lot of electricity – not only does her PC consume, but the servers she connects to (Second Life, Google …) are consuming electricity. Is this ecologically sustainable? Is the use of energy when computing hidden from us because we don’t have exhaust coming out of our PCs (the green-house gases come out of the coal-fired electricity plants far from us)?

Instacalc Online Calculator

Screen Shot of Instacalc

Instacalc Online Calculator is a neat online sharable application by Kalid Azad of BetterExplained.com (which has some nice explanations of things like Ruby on Rails). It gives you electric math paper, not cells the way a spreadsheet does. It evaluates in real time and handles all sorts of everyday things you need to calculate like currency conversion. You can share a calculation like the budget for a workshop by sending a link so others can create variant versions. While I’m not sure how I would use it, I like the simplicity of it. What would a text analysis enabled version look like? Here is a tinyURL sample link to a Instacalc sheet with what text handling I could find. Here is the embedded object. Go ahead and edit in it live!

2007 Video Game Report Card

The 2007 Video Game Report Card from MediaWise.org is out. It focuses primarily on ESRB ratings, whether parents understand them and how they are being used by retailers. The summary reports that,

this year, our findings suggest that the unacceptable negative impact of excessively violent video games on young people is a problem depicted in an ever expanding body of research. Increasingly, the companies which create and market the games, the retailers who sell them and the parents who buy them have become too comfortable with the voluntary standards they set for themselves in previous years.

Complacency, especially on the part of retailers and parents, appears to have caused a backslide in ratings awareness and enforcement.

The full report (which can be downloaded) has a fairly succinct review on the research about links between gaming and violence along with a bibliography. The report obviously takes the stand that children should not be playing ESRB M or AO rated games and that retailers and places that rent games need to train clerks better to enforce rules about who can buy games. There is some interesting stuff about blurred sequences in M (Mature) games. They go further and suggest that we need a common rating for all entertainment media:

A universal ratings system is needed now, more than ever, to increase ratings knowledge and reduce confusion. A majority of parents favor one rating system for all media.

In Search of Stupidity, over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters

In Search of Stupidity, over 20 years of high-tech marketing disaster is an amusing book about the marketing and development of commercial software by Merrill R. Chapman. Some of the chapters deal with poor decisions by word-processing companies like MicroPro that ended up with two competing products (WordStar 3.3 and Wordstar 2000) and completely different programs. MicroPro International, according to Chapman was in 1983 the largest microcomputer software company with close to 70 million in sales. The problem was they the WordStart programming team was fired (or quit) and a new team bought up had a different word-processor in development.

One thing this book documents well is the battles between the management/marketing folk, on the one hand, and the developers, on the other. The fault does not always lie with the marketing folk. Chapman describes situations where the developers decide to totally redevelop a product from the ground up when the market is expecting a timely upgrade. Philippe Kahn of Borland, for example, decided to redevelop Paradox completely in object-oriented code and ended up alienating his users just when Microsoft released Access.

The one company that stands out as consistently avoiding fatal stupid mistakes is Microsoft which may explain why they are now so much bigger than any other software company. That Microsoft had an experienced programmer as lead probably meant there was never the sort of disconnect that doomed other software companies.

The book is partly a response to In Search of Excellence which lauded a number of high-tech companies as having excellent coporate cultures. Unfortunately many of the “excellent” companies didn’t last … hence the search for stupidity.

Check out their Museum Exhibits of stupid marketing.

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:

  1.  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.
  2. 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.