Re: [-empyre-] superficiality and immersion

[David Loughton <david@gallere.com.au>]

It's a bit long, but here goes...

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For those who have not had a 'Nuremberg Funnel' (university) style of 
education and are wondering what some people are talking about...

The monumental question is how does the brain construct the 
magnificent richness of our experience?
The answer to this question emerged from the insight that sensation 
alone is insufficient for perception.

If this is so, then what does it say about the sensory depravation of 
virtual reality and the tunnel vision of computer monitors? And, I 
say, ultimately, what effect does this have on your's and my humanity 
[relationships]?

Read on...

============

To Know and to Let Know - An Applied Theory of Knowledge.

On June 11, 1982, Heinze Von Foerster gave the Keynote Address to the 
37th Annual Conference of the Canadian Library Association. This 
presentation was later published under the above title in the 
Canadian Library Journal, Volume 39, Number 5, October 1982.

--------------

... I always believed that thinking of knowledge as packagable, 
transmittable, marketable commodity was a recent perversion until I 
ran into a broadsheet printed in the late 16th century that 
dramatically depicts an elementary educational situation.

 A young lad, apparently a student, is seated on a chair and has a 
funnel inserted through a hole into his head. Next to him stands a 
teacher with a bucket full of knowledge which he is in the process of 
pouring through the funnel into the student's head. A few letters, 
numerals and a simple equation are seen just falling from the bucket. 
Since this broadsheet was printed in Nuremberg, this remarkable 
educational device is usually referred to as the 'Nuremberg Funnel'.

 From this I learned that some of the present day notions of 
teaching, for example, computer-aided information, can be traced back 
to respectable precursors, as funnel-aided instruction. ...

 Let me present a perspective opposite to the view just given; it is 
the constructivist's position. How does one recognize a 
constructivist? Very easily. If you were to ask one whether 
something, say, a formula, a notion, an object, order, symmetry, a 
taxonomy, laws of nature, etc., etc., is discovered or invented, a 
constructivist would tend to say invented. Moreover, if hard pressed, 
a constructivist would even say that the world as we know it is our 
invention. Since whatever we invent is our responsibility the 
constructivist position contains the seed for an ethic.

 I realize that I might not easily get away with such far out 
propositions. I will, therefore, muster whatever help I can get. One 
thing I could do is toss a variety of literature at you that ranges 
from child psychology to the foundations of mathematics.

 Another thing I could do is give you a flavor of what 
constructionism is all about. Let me read a charming vignette written 
by Gregory Bateson. He packed a lot of epistemology into a minimal 
space by using the literary device of dialogues between a precocious 
daughter and her father. He called them 'Metalogues.' I shall give 
you, along with some of my comments, the one entitled 'Metalogue: 
what is an instinct?'

Daughter: Daddy, what is an instinct?

 Let me interrupt by asking you to stop and think how you would have 
answered your daughter's (or son's) question. I would have proudly 
come up with a lexical definition: 'An instinct my dear is the innate 
aspect of behaviour that is unlearned, complex, etc., etc....' Since 
the daughter could have found this kind of answer in my dictionary, 
her father reframes the context of the question by ignoring the 
semantic significance of the word 'instinct' and shifts to its 
functional (even political) significance when used by one partner in 
a dialogue:

Father: An instinct, my dear, is an explanatory principle.

 Let me pause again and invite you to reflect on the question of 
whether a library could accommodate the contextual switch 
demonstrated by the father. I consider this transition from a 
monological to a dialogical situation of the greatest importance, and 
I shall return to this later. Now let us hear what the daughter has 
to say to this answer.

D: But what does it explain?

F: Anything, almost anything at all. Anything you want it to explain.

 Please note that something that explains almost anything at all, 
most likely explains nothing at all. The daughter senses this:

D: Don't be silly. It doesn't explain gravity.

F: No, but that is because nobody wants instinct to explain gravity. 
If they did, it would explain it. We would simply say that the moon 
has an instinct whose strength varies inversely as the square of the 
distance, and so on and so on.

D: But that's nonsense, Daddy.

F:  Yes, surely, but it was you who mentioned instinct, not I.

I shall not interrupt the dynamics of this dialogue any more but I 
ask you to pay attention to father's consistent reference to 
descriptions of observations and not the descriptions per se (e.g., 
'...if you say... there was a full moon...' and not: '...if there was 
a full moon...' etc.). Most likely, you, as librarians, would have 
caught this anyway. Well here we go.

D: But what does explain gravity?

F: Nothing, my dear, because gravity is an explanatory principle.

D:  Oh. Do you mean that you cannot use one explanatory principle to 
explain another-never?

F: Hum, haw, hardly ever. That is what Newton meant when he said 
hypothesis non fingo.

D: And what does that mean, please?

F: Well, you know what hypotheses are. Any statement linking together 
two descriptive statements is an hypothesis. If you say there was a 
full moon on February 1, and another on March 1, and then you link 
these two observations together in any way, the statement which links 
them is an hypothesis.

D: Yes, and I know what non means, but what is fingo?

F: Well, fingo is a Latin word for 'to make'. It forms a verbal noun, 
fictio, from which we get the word fiction.

D: Daddy, do you mean that Sir Isaac Newton thought that all 
hypotheses are just made up like stories?

F: Yes, precisely that.

D: But didn't he discover gravity? With the apple?

F: No, my dear, he invented it.

The dialogue continues, but I shall stop here because I just wanted 
you to hear this punch line.

 Constructivists would insist that not only do we invent the laws of 
nature, we construct our realities. Let me support this with two 
examples, one from neurophysiology, the other from biology that, in 
the context of this lecture, I intend to be only pointers for where 
to look. Should you be tempted to look closer, my short reading list 
may let you do this painlessly. [if anyone wants the pointers, send 
me a e-mail. DL]

 In my neurophysiological example I will appeal to your high school 
memories. You may recall that all nerve cells, whether in the brain 
or distributed over the surface of the body (the sensory receptors), 
consist essentially of a cell body from one end of which grow 
branch-like ramifications (the dendrites) and from the other emerges 
a long, thin tube (the axon) which terminates in a small knob close 
to the surface of some dendrite of another (or sometimes the same) 
neuron. Only the moto-neurons terminate on muscle fibres. Almost all 
sensory receptor cells have no axons terminating on them. Neurons are 
electrically charged (about one-tenth of one volt) and when 
perturbed, say, at the dendrite, send a short electric pulse along 
the axon that, upon arrival at its termination, may produce one of 
two effects on the contingent neuron.

One is to initiate a pulse like the one that triggered it or to 
inhibit the effect of an arriving pulse from another axon which 
otherwise would have initiate a pulse. A sustained perturbation will 
produce a sustained train of pulses whose frequency is commensurate 
with the intensity of the perturbation. The figure at the left [see 
below] shows a recording of such a train of pulses that have been 
measured with an extraordinary small electrical probe placed in the 
vicinity of the axon of a touch receptor.

 Instead of mechanically recording this electrical activity one can 
connect it to a loud speaker and listen to the 'language of the 
neurons:' As you may have all ready guessed, what one hears is just a 
sequence of pips that follow each other, either slowly 
'pip-pip-pip...' or quickly 'pippippippippip_ .' depending on the 
intensity of the perturbation that caused their activity.

 The important point to appreciate is that, whatever specific sensory 
receptors one is listening to - a heat or cold receptor, a touch 
receptor, light sensitive cells in the eye, the hair cells in the 
cochlea of the inner ear - they all report only the intensity of 
their stimulation with no clues whatsoever as to what physical agent 
caused this activity. This is the principle of undifferentiated 
encoding. In other words, the signals that stream from the body's 
surface toward the brain don't speak the language 'hot', 'cold', 
'green', 'sweet,' etc.; they say only 'much here,' 'little there,' 
'less here,' etc., at these and those points of my body.

 The monumental question that arose is how does the brain construct 
the magnificent richness of our experience from these anonymous pips?

 The answer to this question emerged from the insight that sensation 
alone is insufficient for perception. It is necessary to correlate 
changes of sensation with one's own motor activity; that is, with 
one's own control movements, turns of one's eyes or head, changes of 
one's position, etc. As one of my friends, an eminent 
neurophysiologist, is fond of saying: 'We see with our legs' or, as 
another one put it 'Behaviour: the control of perception'

 Perhaps a certain circularity in this explanation can already be 
seen, namely, the need of movements for perception, and, of course, 
the need of perception for the control of movements. Indeed, it is 
this sensory-motor loop, its mathematical representation, and the 
emerging dynamic equilibria that have lately been given considerable 
attention.

 It is these sensory-motor equilibria or, perhaps more to the point, 
it is these sensory-motor competences that ultimately can be 
associated with an organism's knowing. I mention this because I wish 
all of us to see how far we are from an epistemology that considers 
knowledge a commodity. ...

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There is a graph that goes with this text that demonstrates ...

PRINCIPLE OF UNDIFFERENTIATED ENCODING:
Electrical impulses activity measured with a microprobe on an axon of 
a sensor neuron under different pressures. High frequency corresponds 
to high pressure. The electrical activity of a receptor call [and of 
all nerve cells as well] encodes only the magnitude of the 
perturbations that caused its activity, and not the nature of the 
perturbating agent [encoded is only 'That much at this point of my 
body' but not 'What'].
--
.
.
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Art History -

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future.
The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that 
no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer

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