Post-Nothingism

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Digital Culture, Extended, Feminism, Philosophy, Technology

May 14, 2010 at 10:28 am

There’s been a lot of chatter about “post-genderism” and the like with the news of this recent work:

Virtual reality can get downright unreal. In this simulated realm, grown men given a new perspective on the world suddenly find themselves convinced that they inhabit the body of a young girl.

I understand the value of these experiments as a stepping stone in which we are learning how to project our experiences into a different sort of body and environment, and I understand the potential benefits that can come from this research (phantom limb mirror-boxes, for example, as well as some of the interesting work done by Henrik Ehrsson.)

But for people thinking that projecting into the body of a female somehow means you experience in the world as a female? You need to learn a lot more about phenomenal experience, cognitive science, and neuroscience. This may seem strange coming from someone who stresses the role of the body in cognition, but it really isn’t. This all calls for a much larger post than I’m planning to make here, but if you take seriously the brain-body-environment complex, you know that you can’t swap one aspect for a brief time and fundamentally change anything. A male doesn’t understand what it means to be female by changing what the body looks like any more than I understand what it feels like to be a female in a middle-eastern culture just by virtue of both of us having a uterus. These three things, brain, body, and environment, build up and create who we are over time. Having a female body is one small part of that process, but much more important is the way you are treated by your culture over time that builds the experience of being female (in that culture at that time, since there is no essential “feminine experience”). These experiments are mildly interesting as a step on the path, but they do not in any way, shape, or form, belong alongside the label “post-gender.”

Link to “Grown Men Swap Bodies with Virtual Girl” on Discovery.com

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Recommendations Sought

Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Critical Thinking?, Digital Culture, Evolution, Extended, Feminism, Philosophy, Science, Technology, ethics, literature

March 30, 2010 at 5:28 pm

I’ll be asking this repeatedly via all of my web-presences, but since this one sits idle these days I probably won’t have to ask more than once here; it’ll just stay on top since I never blog.

I’m teaching a First Year Initiatives course in the Fall. These are basically first-year seminar classes designed to teach college- and learning-based skills to incoming students. The content is meant to be highly interdisciplinary, but the content is also secondary in these courses. The primary goal is to give them training in critical reading and writing, public speaking, etc., as well as get them introduced to the college environment and the surrounding community and its needs.

I’m teaching a class with a cyborg theme, because the knitting theme I wanted to do just seemed too tough to sell (I wanted to attract the right sorts of students and I haven’t figured out how to do that with a knitting-themed course yet). I’ll be working on my syllabus once the semester is over (May) and I hope to have a sizable list of books, stories, and articles, both fiction and non-fiction, to examine and consider for the class by then. I have a few non-fiction items already to look at, but I don’t have many fiction pieces (aside from “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”). I welcome recommendations, and the ideal pieces will examine multiple facets of the cyborg concept (Hayles, Haraway, Stelarc, for example). The fiction pieces should do more than look only at the human-machine blending, although good fiction will always deal with more than one dimension. The social aspects, the economic aspects, and the philosophical aspects are all as important as the biological.

Please leave comments with recommendations, or also feel free to email me if you’d prefer that. And thanks in advance if anyone is still reading here and has something to contribute!

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Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, vindicated some more

Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Culture, Evolution, Extended, Philosophy, Science, Technology, ethics

March 17, 2010 at 5:06 am

So, you want to take the reporting on this with the usual “science-writing caveat,” (which I don’t normally have to give for Wired Science, but I think this time it’s necessary). I’m not thrilled with the methodology of the study itself, as there have been abundant rigorous studies done that already show the effects being described are real. I’m more intrigued by the fact that the scientific community is starting to take seriously some of the philosophical phenomenological arguments, which is what I’ve been basically yelling my head off about for the last 8 or 9 years.

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.

The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.

Link to article at Wired Science, with the title “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You.”

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Textbooks

Posted in Academic Life, Democracy, Extended, Science

December 28, 2009 at 6:05 pm

I don’t use traditional textbooks in most of my classes. I try really hard to be sensitive to the fact that textbooks are obscenely expensive, and work around it with chapters and journal articles compiled in various ways.

This semester, I’m teaching a really generic psychology course, with a $95 textbook. I really want to supplement it with a software package of experiments, which costs an additional $42. The software cannot be sold back at all (and in fact, you can buy a registration code and get all of the software and the documentation entirely online). This seems annoying expensive for something that I’m still not even sure how I’ll integrate into the course.

If anyone is still reading here, I’m interested in perspectives from both students and professors on how to deal with not only the cost of textbooks, but the software that cannot be resold. Do you use anything like this in your classroom? How do you feel about it? Is the hands-on learning worth the price of admission?

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Origin of Species at 150: A Celebratory Conference

Posted in Academic Life, Democracy, Evolution, Extended, Philosophy, Science

November 12, 2009 at 4:56 pm

150 Years After Origin: Biological, Historical, and Philosophical Perspectives
Victoria College, University of Toronto, November 21-24, 2009

Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “In July [1837] I opened my first notebook for facts in relation to the Origin of Species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for the next twenty years.” In 1842, he wrote a “very brief abstract” of his theory (35 pages), which in the summer of 1844 he expanded to 230 pages. Beginning in September 1858, after receiving an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” which outlined the central mechanism of evolution on which Darwin had been working, he began work on completing the manuscript of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray, the publisher, launched the book on November 24, 1859 by releasing 1,250 copies. The impact of The Origin of Species has equalled the impact of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It is the unifying theoretical framework for all modern biology.

November 24, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin and The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the Department of Philosophy at University of Toronto are mounting a Gala Celebratory Conference. The conference will culminate in a gala dinner on November 24 at which participants will toast the tremendous achievement of Charles Robert Darwin.

Five multi-disciplinary symposia have been organized. For each symposium, the panel consists of a biologist, a historian of biology and a philosopher of biology.

The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology is located on the elegant, historic Victoria University campus (one of the University of Toronto’s federated universities) and the conference will be held in that location.

Say hello if you’re in the area!

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John Scalzi continues to be brilliant

Posted in Digital Culture, Extended, Feminism, literature

October 13, 2009 at 9:33 am

This one is worthy of a post in the Big Important Column of Things You Really Ought to Take Notice Of.

Scalzi succinctly and beautifully suggests a course of action for the SF Boys Club folk:

At this late date, when one of these quailing wonders appears, stuttering petulantly that women are unfit to touch the genre he’s already claimed with his smudgy, sticky fingerprints, the thing to do is not to solemnly intone about how far science fiction has yet to go. Science fiction does have a distance to go, but these fellows aren’t interested in taking the journey, and I don’t want to have to rideshare with them anyway. So the thing to do is to point and laugh.

There are few things I love more than a wonderful writer who, when exposed on a day-to-day basis, continues to be brilliant. When I read columns or blogs by authors whose books I otherwise adored only to learn they’re backwards, close-minded fools, their books become tainted and unreadable. Scalzi’s books take on an aura of betterness when I read his blog.

Link to Whatever.

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Absurdist Literature is good for the brain

Posted in Extended, Philosophy, Science, literature

September 20, 2009 at 8:56 am

In news that is sure to annoy those “who needs the humanities or liberal arts” types, it unsurprisingly turns out that absurd literature does wonderful things to the brain.

Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What’s more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.
[...]
This suggests “the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities” are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.
[...]
To Prolux and Heine, these finds suggest we have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what they call “meaning frameworks.” Any threat to this process will “activate a meaning-maintenance motivation that may call upon any other available associations to restore a sense of meaning,” they write.

Of course, this “meaning frameworks” talk calls to mind Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s work on conceptual schemas and metaphor theory for me, but this particular understanding of frames can be found in most disciplines within cognitive science. Claims about the existence of conceptual schemas seem relatively uncontroversial at this point, but the fact that non-sequiturs activate pattern-seeking schemas is, while completely reasonable as a hypothesis, new and exciting to see come through in the data.

Link to article. (H/T to Nuclear Dwight on twitter.)

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Mixed Messages in the NY Times

Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Extended, Philosophy, Technology

July 27, 2009 at 11:04 am

This article in the NY times was sent to me by a colleague in the Computer Science department yesterday. It makes me want to pull my hair out and shove it down the throats of either the reporter, or maybe Ray Kurzweil.

It has a sensationalized headline “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man” (I suppose us women are totally safe, although the article is silent on that matter…)

While trying to scare us into believing the Robot Apocalypse is RIGHT! AROUND! THE CORNER! the author also writes:

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

Oh, gee, you think? Look, people have been saying this for centuries. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with automation. Samuel Butler, in 1863, wrote “Darwin Among the Machines” to basically argue that if you can’t imagine life without your automation right now, we’ve already lost, and are already on an inevitable slide into machine domination over humankind. This argument goes back further, but Butler gives a great “inevitable doomsday” reading of the situation.

Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

So, the current president of AAAI, a professional organization I’ve belonged to for the last 11 years (although it’s possible my membership has lapsed since I haven’t gotten an AI Magazine to laugh at in the mail lately) is happily jumping on the singularity nonsense bandwagon. Depressing enough, but then we get:

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

So he isn’t ignorant of the fact that this is the age-old doomsday-cult business, but somehow he still thinks we need to take it seriously?

Members of my field (leading members, in title at least) need to take their collective heads out of their collective asses and get back to work. I’m way too young to be this disillusioned over my work and my passions already.

Link to the NY Times article, if you’ve got a stronger stomach or less stake in this academic community than I do.

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Ok, Listen Up

Posted in Comics, Digital Culture, Extended

July 21, 2009 at 11:38 am

Ok, listen up, because I don’t say things like this lightly. Sometimes, people wonder what drives my love of Warren Ellis. I can’t always point to a single work of his that really illustrates why I love him. Sure, Transmetropolitan changed comics (for me, and almost certainly for others) at the time. Sure, he’s continued to write brilliant comics, including the on-going, weekly, free, online comic Freakangels. He’s also written quite a nice little book called Crooked Little Vein, that is more enjoyable if you already know the way Ellis’ head works (which isn’t something I recommend to those with weak constitutions).

But anyway, listen up.

Ellis has been writing a column (“Do Anything”) for a new comics site called Bleeding Cool recently. It’s been taking me awhile to read them all, because I can’t really read more than one a day (in theory. In reality, I’m getting through 1 every 3 or 4 days). I need to let the language roll around in my brain and choose which synapses to rest in. I decided at the end of the first one that these columns were activating the Hunter S. Thompson neural pathways in my brain, which have been atrophying since last I read HST’s ESPN columns (my only and ever ESPN experiences) and I still think that’s a fair description.

In other words? Warren Ellis is writing a column for Bleedingcool.com, and you should be reading it.

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Meet Phineas Gage

Posted in Extended, Philosophy, Science

July 17, 2009 at 5:30 pm

The wonderful Neurophilosophy Blog has a piece on Phineas Gage today. The interesting part? A newly discovered photo of Gage holding the spike that went through his head and made him history’s most famous jerk.

As mentioned over there, I think this is the only known photograph of Gage. There are many images floating around of his skull with the spike going through it, but as far as I know, they’re all recreations (although some were done during his life, I believe).

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