VT

1
VT
2
The Ecological Approach to Mobile Communication

• Barry Smith
• Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical
  Information Science
• University of Leipzig
• http//ifomis.de

3
Frank Zappa

• everything in the world is resonating to the One
  Big Note
• Murray Schaefer Tuning of the World
• Tony Schwarz Resonance theory of communication
• L (advertising follower of MacLuhan)

4

• Formal Ontology

Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical
Information Science
5
Roman Ingarden

• Material Ontology
• Realism
• Theory of Causality
• Theory of Relatively Isolated Systems
• Modularity

6
Adolf Reinach
Ontology of Social Reality
7
Maurice Merleau-Ponty J. J. Gibson

• Ontology of Cognitive Prosthetics

8
(No Transcript)
9

• Part One Ontology of Cognitive Prosthetics
• Part Two Situated Computing and the
  Intentionality of E. Coli
• Part Three How is Unified Cognition Possible?

10
Technologies of Mobile Communication

• Global Positioning Systems (GPS)

11
Technologies of Mobile Communication

• Digital cameras

12
Technologies of Mobile Communication

• Digital video cameras

13
Technologies of Mobile Communication

• chemical
• biological
• wearable computers
• brain-wave sensors to catch cheaters

Microsensors
14
PalmPilot context aware

• Display the wiring/plumbing behind this wall
• Display seismographic features of a terrain a
  geologist is viewing
• Display vital signs of a patient a doctor is
  examining

15
European Media Lab, Heidelberg

• Tourism information services
• Intelligent, speaking camera plus map display
• Display all non-smoking restaurants within
  walking distance of the castle
• Read out a history of the building my camera is
  pointing to

16
Intelligent mobile phones

• Inform a person walking past a bar of his
  buddies in the bar

17
How to Understand Mobile Information Systems?
18
Traditional Syntactic/Semantic Approach to
Information Systems
01101110101000100010001001001001001001000100111100
1001011011110110111011
19
Husserls Methodological Solipsism
noesisnoesisnoesisnoesisnoesisnoesisnoesisnoesis
noema noema noema noema noema noema noema noema
20
Fodors Methodological Solipsism
01101110101000100010001001001001001001000100111100
1001011011110110111011
21
Knowledge

• what can be transmitted down a wire
• (effectively reducible to patterns of 1s and 0s)

22
Humans, Machines, and the Structure of Knowledge

• Harry M. Collins
• SEHR, 4 2 (1995)

23
Knowledge-down-a-wire

• Imagine a 5-stone weakling who has his brain
  loaded with the knowledge of a champion tennis
  player.
• He goes to serve in his first match
• -- Wham!
• his arm falls off.
• He just doesn't have the bone structure or
  muscular development to serve that hard.

24
Types of knowledge/ability/skill

• those that can be transferred simply by passing
  signals from one brain/computer to another.
• those that cant

25
Sometimes it is the body which knows (the
hardware)
26
I know where the book is

• I know how to find it
• I know what the square root of 2489 is
• I know how to calculate it

27
Not all calculations are done inside the head

• Not all thinking is done inside the head

28
A. Clark, Being There

• we rely on
• external scaffolding maps, models, tools,
  language, culture
• we act so as to simplify cognitive tasks by
  "leaning on" the structures in our environment.

29
Merlin Donald

• Origins of the modern mind Three stages in the
  evolution of culture and cognitionCambridge, MA
  Harvard University Press, 1991

30
Merlin Donald

• radical transition in the emergence of modern
  human culture when humans began to construct
  elaborate symbolic systems ranging from
  cuneiforms, hieroglyphics, and ideograms to
  alphabetic languages and mathematics

31
Merlin Donald

• from this point human biological memory becomes
  an inadequate vehicle for storing and processing
  our collective knowledge.
• from this point the modern mind is a hybrid
  structure built from vestiges of earlier
  biological stages together with new
• external symbolic memory devices

32
Types of knowledge/ability/skill

• those that can be transferred simply by passing
  signals from one brain/computer to another.
• those that cant
• -- here the "hardware" is important
• abilities/skills contained
• (a) in the body
• (b) in the natural world
• (c) in the marked-up world

33
From

• The Methodological Solipsist Approach to
  Information Processing (Fodor, Husserl)
• To
• The Ecological Approach to Information Processing
  (Gibson, Merleau-Ponty)

34
Ecology

• The digital streams connecting one mobile phone
  to another are not so important
• What is important is the environment in which
  both are embedded

35

• Deliberative intellectual reasoning is not so
  important
• Hayek General concepts are tools for being lazy

36
Fodorian Psychology

• To understand human cognition we should study the
  mind/brain in abstraction from its real-world
  environment
• (as if it were a hermetically sealed Cartesian
  ego)

37
Gibsonian Ecological Psychology

• To understand human cognition we should study the
  moving, acting human person as it exists in its
  real-world environment
• and taking account how it has evolved into this
  real-world environment
• We are like tuning forks tuned to the
  environment which surrounds us

38
Fodorian View of Information Systems

• To understand information systems we should study
  their manipulation of syntactic strings

39
Gibsonian Ecological View of Information Systems

• To understand information systems we should study
  the hardware as it exists embedded in its
  real-world environment
• and taking account the environment for which it
  was designed and built
• Information systems are like tuning forks they
  resonate in tune to their surrounding
  environments

40
Merleau-Ponty

• what we see, what we experience, what the world
  in which we find ourselves is like
• depend upon our purposes of the moment

41
The Basic Layer of Experience

• When seeing an event, reading a page
• we find, as a basic layer of experience, a whole
  already pregnant with an irreducible meaning not
  sensations with gaps between them, into which
  memories may be supposed to slip, but the
  features, the layout of a landscape or a word, in
  spontaneous accord with the intentions of the
  moment
• (Phenomenology of Perception, 21f.)

42
Special Role of the Body

• If my arm is resting on the table I should never
  think of saying that it is beside the ash-tray in
  the way in which the ash-tray is beside the
  telephone. The outline of my body is a frontier
  which ordinary spatial relations do not cross.
  This is because its parts are inter-related in a
  peculiar way they are not spread out side by
  side, but enveloped in each other. (PoP, p. 98)

43
Affordances

• The bench, scissors, pieces of leather offer
  themselves to the subject as poles of action
  they delimit a certain situation which calls
  for a certain mode of resolution, a certain kind
  of work. The body is no more than an element in
  the system of the subject and his world, and the
  task to be performed elicits the necessary
  movements from him by a sort of remote attraction
  (PoP, p. 106)

44
Gibson Environment as Array of Affordances

• The affordances of the environment are what it
  offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes,
  either for good or evil.
• James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to
  Visual Perception

45
Gibson We are tuned to our environment

• the phenomenal forces at work in my visual field
  elicit from me, without any calculation on my
  part, the motor reactions which establish the
  most effective balance between them,
• the conventions of our social group, or our set
  of listeners, immediately elicit from us the
  words, attitudes and tone which are fitting.
  (PoP, p. 106)

46
The Ecological Approach to Human Communication

• When I motion my friend to come nearer, my
  intention is not a thought prepared within me and
  I do not perceive the signal in my body. I beckon
  across the world, I beckon over there, where my
  friend is the distance between us, his consent
  or refusal are immediately read in my gesture
  there is not a perception followed by a movement,
  for both form a system which varies with the
  whole. (PoP, p. 111)

47
Embrangled Styles

• When I chat with a friend whom I know well, each
  of his remarks and each of mine contains, in
  addition to the meaning it carries for everybody
  else, a host of references to the main dimensions
  of his character and mine, without our needing to
  recall previous conversations with each other.
  These acquired worlds (PoP, p. 130)

48
Geometry in the Legs

• the word sediment should not lead us astray
  acquired knowledge is not an inert mass in the
  depths of our consciousness. My flat is, for me,
  not a set of closely associated images. It
  remains a familiar domain round about me only as
  long as I still have in my hands or in my
  legs the main distances and directions involved,
  and as long as from my body intentional threads
  run out towards it. (PoP, p. 130)

49
the unity of the body is not simple coordination

• I desire a certain result and the relevant tasks
  are spontaneously distributed amongst the
  appropriate segments ..I can continue leaning
  back in my chair provided that I stretch my arm
  forward . All these movements are available to
  us in virtue of their common meaning. (PoP, 149)

50
Language

• The speaking subject does not think of the sense
  of what he is saying, nor does he visualize the
  words which he is using. To know a word or a
  language is not to be able to bring into play
  any pre-established nervous network. But neither
  is it to retain some pure recollection of the
  word (PoP, p. 180)

51
Speaking as Being Faithful to Ones Self

• I do not need to visualize the word in order to
  know and pronounce it. It is enough that I
  possess its articulatory and acoustic style as
  one of the modulations, one of the possible uses
  of my body. (PoP, p. 180)

52
Language

• one particular cultural object plays a crucial
  role in the perception of other people language.
  In the experience of dialogue, there is
  constituted between the other person and myself a
  common ground my thought and his are interwoven
  into a single fabric, my words and those of my
  interlocutor are called forth by the state of the
  discussion, and they are inserted into a shared
  operation of which neither of us is the creator.
  (PoP, p. 354)

53
A miniature civil society

• We have a dual being, where the other is for me
  no longer a mere bit of behaviour in my
  transcendental field, nor I in his we are
  collaborators for each other in consummate
  reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each
  other and we co-exist through a common world.
  (PoP, p. 354)

54
Spontaneous unification

• Consider how the human mind copes with complex
  phenomena in the social realm, e.g. a promise,
  which involves (REINACH)
• experiences (speaking, perceiving),
• intentions,
• language,
• action,
• deontic powers,
• background habits,
• mental competences,
• records and representations

55
Prosthetic Cognition

• When a typist performs the necessary movements
  on the typewriter, these movements are governed
  by an intention, but the intention does not posit
  the keys as objective locations. It is literally
  true that the subject who learns to type
  incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily
  space. (PoP, p. 145)

56
The Organist

• Between the musical essence of the piece as it
  is shown in the score and the notes which
  actually sound round the organ, so direct a
  relation is established that the organists body
  and his instrument are merely the medium of this
  relationship. Henceforth the music exists by
  itself and through it all the rest exists. There
  is here no place for any memory of the position
  of the stops, and it is not in objective space
  that the organist in fact is playing. (PoP, p.
  145)

57
The Organist

• In reality his movements during rehearsal are
  consecratory gestures they draw affective
  vectors, discover emotional sources, and create a
  space of expressiveness as the movements of the
  augur delimit the templum.

58
TEMPLUM

• from the Greek terminus to cut off
• templum any place which was circumscribed and
  separated by the augurs from the rest of the land
  by a certain solemn formula

59
(No Transcript)
60

• Part One Ontology of Cognitive Prosthetics
• Part Two Situated Computing and the
  Intentionality of E. Coli
• Part Three How is Unified Cognition Possible?

61
Computerized Agents

• computer systems
• situated in an environment
• capable of flexible, autonomous action in that
  environment
• interacting with other agents, including
• communicating, negotiating, coordinating actions
• often within some organizational context

62
Rodney Brooks
63
Orthodox methodology

• described by Brooks
• as the SMPA view

64
SMPA

• Sense Model Plan Act
• the agent first senses its environment through
  sensors
• then uses this data to build a model of the world
• then produces a plan to achieve goals
• then acts on this plan

65
SMPA

• belongs to the same methodological universe as
  Fodorian cognitive science (solipsism)
• If we want to build an intelligent agent, there
  need to be representations (models) inside the
  agent of the domain within which the agent acts
• The agents reasoning processes act not on the
  real-world environment but on these models

66
Brooks Engineering Approach

• takes its inspiration from evolutionary biology
• lends very little weight to the role of
  representations or models
• AI should use the world in all its complexity in
  producing systems that react directly to the world

67
The starting-point for our understanding of
intentionality

• should be the insects relations to its
  surrounding physical environment

68
(No Transcript)
69
Intentionality tactile and chemical
70
The movement of E. coli as a biased random walk

• In the absence of a stimulus, E. coli simply
  wanders around, smoothly swimming by rotating its
  flagella counterclockwise.
• These runs are terminated by chaotic events,
  called tumbles, when flagella rotate clockwise.
• Following a tumble, the cell runs again, picking
  a new direction, more or less at random.
• When the cells swim in a spatial gradient of a
  chemical attractant, runs that happen to carry it
  up the gradient are extended, whereas those that
  happen to carry it down the gradient are not.
• Thus, the cell drifts in a favourable direction

71
The life of E. coli

• is a life of falling
• down
• sugar
• wells

72
the bacterium is a single cell,

• Thus it does not have a multicelled nervous
  system
• But it has receptor molecules acting as sensors,
  it has a signal transduction system, and a highly
  complex machinery of movable flagella.
• Different receptors react to different stimuli,
  including single oxygen molecules as well as
  bigger carbohydrate molecules.
• See Bruce Alberts et al. The molecular biology
  of the cell

73
E. coli bacteria

• react to differences in concentrations of sugar
  molecules with a behavior shift (as a dog reacts
  to a smelt trace of another animal)

74
Attribution of intentionality

• does not depend upon the existence of a nervous
  system
• we can ascribe simple biological intentionality
  to single, movable cells
• intentionality is dependent only upon the
  existence of sensors, information mediation
  (automatic interpretation, if you like)
• and motor responses resulting in adaptable
  behavior.

75

• Frederik Stjernfelt, Biosemiotics and Formal
  Ontology", Semiotica 127 - 1/4 1999, 537-66

76
E coli bacteria

• are attracted by peaks of sugar density
• but they can be fooled

77
Brooks Engineering Approach

• An intelligent system embodies a number of
  distinct layers of activity (compare
  sub-personal layers of human cognition)
• These layers operate independently and connect
  directly to the environment outside the system
• Each layer operates as a complete system that
  copes in real time with a changing environment
• Layers evolve through interaction with the
  environment (artificial insects/vehicles/teenagers
  SMS-module)

78
Brooks An intelligent system

• must be situated
• it is situatedness which gives the processes
  within each layer meaning
• because
• the world serves to unify the different layers
  together and to make them compatible/mutually
  adjusting

79
Organisms, especially humans,

• fix their beliefs not only in their heads but in
  their worlds, as they attune themselves
  differently to different parts of the world as a
  result of their experience.
• And they pull the same trick with their
  memories,
• not only by rearranging their parsing of the
  world (their understanding of what they see), but
  by marking it.
• They place traces out there and this changes
  what they will be confronted with the next time
  it comes around. Thus they don't have to carry
  their memories with them.
• Intelligence without Representation

80
J. J. Gibson The Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception

• we are like (multi-layered) tuning forks tuned
  to the environment which surrounds us
• (we have evolved in such a way as to be attuned
  to our environment
• in part because we ourselves have created it via
  what Lewontin calls ecosystem engineering)

81
Organisms are tuning forks

• They have evolved to resonate automatically and
  directly to those quality regions in their niche
  which are relevant for survival
• perception is a form of automatic resonation
• when the insect stumbles through uneven terrain
  the insects motor system is resonating to the
  reality beyond

82
Merlin Donald

• the modern mind is a hybrid structure built from
  vestiges of earlier biological stages together
  with new
• external symbolic memory devices
• together with cognitive prosthetic devices
• (keyboards, touch-screens, mobile phones, )

83
A New Biological Theory of Intentionality

• cognitive beings like ourselves resonate to
  speech acts and to linguistic records
• cognitive beings like ourselves resonate
  deontically
• mathematicians resonate to the structures of
  mathematical reality

84
Gibsons Ecological Approach

• To understand cognition we should study the
  moving, acting organism as it exists in its
  real-world environment
• and for human organisms this is a social
  environment which includes records and traces of
  prior actions in the form of communication
  systems (languages), storage systems (libraries),
  transport systems (roads), legal systems

85
Humans

• resonate on many levels to patterns
• and to patterns of those patterns
• Humans differ from animals in that they can train
  themselves to resonate to new sorts of patterns
• ( nursing expertise )

86
Gibson Environment as Array of Affordances

• The affordances of the environment are what it
  offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes,
  either for good or evil.
• The environment of a commercial organism
  includes affordances such as prices.

87
The world of affordances

• includes not merely walls, doors, furniture,
  temperature gradients, patterns of movement of
  air and water
• but also traffic signs, instructions posted on
  notice boards or displayed on computer screens
  whole strata of what is marked by signs

88
Roger G. Barkers Eco-Behavioral Science

• Gibson Ecological Psychology of Perception
• Barker Ecological Psychology of Social Action
• P. Schoggen, Behavior Settings A Review and
  Extension of Roger G. Barkers Ecological
  Psychology. Stanford, CA Stanford University
  Press, 1989.

89
Roger Barker Niche as Behavioral Setting

• Niches are recurrent settings which serve as the
  environments for our everyday activities
• a newspaper kiosk in the morning rush-hour,
• your table in the cafeteria,
• the 5pm train to Long Island.

90
Behavior Settings

• Each behavior setting is associated with certain
  standing patterns of behavior.
• We are tuned to an environment of behavior
  settings

91
The Systematic Mutual Fittingness of Behaviour
and Setting

• The behaviour and the physical objects are
  intertwined in such a way as to form a pattern
  that is by no means random there is a relation
  of harmonious fit between the standard patterns
  of behaviour occurring within the unit and the
  pattern of its physical components.

92
Settings, for Barker,

• are natural units in no way imposed by an
  investigator.
• To laymen they are as objective as rivers and
  forests
• they are parts of the objective environment
  that are experienced as directly as rain and
  sandy beaches are experienced. (Barker 1968, p.
  11)

93
Barker on Unity of Social Reality

• The conceptual incommensurability of phenomena
  which is such an obstacle to the unification of
  the sciences does not appear to trouble natures
  units.
• Within the larger units, things and events from
  conceptually more and more alien sciences are
  incorporated and regulated.

94
Barker on Unity of Social Reality

• As far as our behaviour is concerned, even
  the most radical diversity of kinds and
  categories need not prevent integration
• Because we have been tuned both phylogenetically
  and ontogenetically to resonate to environments
  like this

95
Lacan

• The style is the man
• to whom one is speaking

96
The life of a human being

• is a life of falling
• down
• style
• wells

97
(No Transcript)
98

• Part One Ontology of Cognitive Prosthetics
• Part Two Situated Computing and the
  Intentionality of E. Coli
• Part Three How is Unified Cognition Possible?

99
How does a Global Positioning System work?

• Your GPS device knows its location because at any
  given moment it is receiving quite specific
  signals from satellites
• and because these signals contain information to
  which it is sensitive in virtue of its precise
  location in any given moment.

100
Organisms are tuning forks

• Homing pigeons are sensitive to highly nuanced
  features of the earths magnetic field.
• Human beings are sensitive to the information
  contained in other human beings faces.
• Human beings who can drive are sensitive to
  traffic signs, to small variations in movement of
  the vehicles around them.
• Human beings who can read are sensitive to the
  astonishingly variable types of information
  contained in printed texts.

101
Recall how the human mind

• copes with complex phenomena in the social
  realm, involving
• utterances,
• intentions,
• action,
• deontic powers,
• background habits, style, mental competences of
  the speaker,
• records and representations

102
How do we, directly and spontaneously, bring
about the integration of such transcategorial
phenomena?

• ANSWER We do not
• It is the world which is responsible for
  unification

103
A theory of intentionality

• must be a (biologically based) theory of the
  sorts of environments, on different levels of
  granularity, into which human beings have evolved
  and are still prosthetically evolving
• our patterns of behavior and cognition on
  different levels are unified together not via
  some central monad but by the world itself
• (our environments fit together physically)

104
The riddle of representation

• two humans, a monkey, and a robot are looking at
  a piece of cheese
• what is common to the representational processes
  in their visual systems?

105
Answer
The cheese, of course
106
END