Yessireeya. There it is once again: the age-old discussion between the realists and the instrumentalists.
It came up in a reply by Sander to my earlier posting on perception. Sander suggested that theories are only 'useful' and 'just mathematics'. Electrons are formulae, not real things. I replied quoting a philosopher who's name I'd forgotten, about spraying electrons, but it turned out that the example was about spraying photons (oh well) The correct story, with the name of the philosopher included, I refound on the web here.
'When Ian Hacking, for example, once asked a physics colleague what he was doing, the physicist replied that he was "spraying photons". Impressed, Hacking wrote: "From that day forth I've been a scientific realist. As far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them, then they are real."'
(I just love Google: I searched on "spraying" and "philosophy". Got a first hit!)
Turns out that this article that Google popped up for me is very interesting in itself. A researcher did an internet poll among physicists asking what kind of things they consider to be real, and which things they consider to be 'not real'. The list is long, including things like "concepts", "phlogiston", "electrons", "earth", "colours", basically everything you can name. He then writes a long review, discussing all issues involved, and along the way you basically learn about all the different philosophical positions one can possibly take.
Like, unreal dude!
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Friday, October 13, 2006
Nijntje's restaurant
Currently I've been listening a lot to a CD with tracks that tell the story of a particular female rabbit. If you happen to sync in my developmental zone, you probably know about this rabbit. Here name is Nijntje.
In one of the songs Nijntje is playing 'restaurant'. She puts on a paper hat, made of a news paper, and sings "Now I am the chef of Nijntje's restaurant".
From a certain age, children start to use physical objects as symbols, representing something else. The 'something else' can be a physical object, but it can also be some agreement, some fact, or a relation between objects. In the example above, there is a double-take as far as representational content is concerned: first, the newspaper is used as a stand-in for a real chef's hat. Second, putting on this chef's hat automatically signifies that Nijntje is now a chef. (In fact, there is a three-double take considering that Nijntje is implicitly representing a small child, where in fact she is a rabbit, or even mor factual: she doesn't exist at all). It is remarkable, if you come to think about it, how young children, in the age of 4+, are actually able to understand such subtle semantical relations.
There are several possible explanations to this representational capacity of young children (and adults, likewise). What I want to discuss here, however, is that regardless of the underlying mechanism, one sees that throughout development and over cultures human beings have a tremendous *need* to use physical objects as representational stand-ins, in going about their daily business. It is as if we couldn't achieve what we are achieving everyday, if we were not able to use physical stand-ins. Consider the effort Nijntje would have to display in convincing the other children that she is a chef in a restaurant, if she didn't have some physical object with which to symbolize this role in the game.
Adults still have the same need as children, although we have learned, in various ways, to strech our abilities of dealing without them. But at significant points we need physical stuff in order to help us pin down the ideas and concepts that flow in our mind. In my work as a teacher I couldn't explain anything without using practical examples, metaphors, pictures, schemata, and physical models. Our students learn that end-users of technology often have difficulty in using the technology precisely because the designer has not provided the user with obvious physical clues that reveal the underlying 'mental model' of the interaction. That is: if you don't have a clue about how to operate the machine, it is probably because there are no physical clues, that represent the functional possibilities and how to operate them. A good interface provides a natural mapping: the physical form of the interface 'maps' in a natural way to the functional effects each part of the interface will have. When designers want to explain to customers, or end-users, about the design they have in mind, and whether or not this satisfies the customers whishes and demands, it is also obligatory to make the design 'tangible', to physically represent your ideas, either in a scale-model or a good sketch.
All of this shows that human beings, even in adult life, always need a chef's hat in order to understand the restaurant-game...
Monday, October 09, 2006
Interactions (2)
The mind-body problem is about how mind-stuff relates to body-stuff. Body-stuff is the stuff we all know about (tables, chairs, molecules, planets, billiart-balls), whereas mind-stuff describes the knowing itself: the thoughts, ideas, opinions, beliefs, desires, cravings and intentions that make up the mental realm.
The mind-body problem is essentially the question of how to make a thought out of a kilogram of brain matter. The question itself is already 'strange', imagine how the (ultimate and correct) answer would look like.
Now to turn to my previous discussion on interactions (here); the difference between interaction on the communicative level (between two active agents) and interaction on the physical level (between two physical systems), is not unlike the difference between mind and body.
When we say that two human beings 'interact', what we mean by the word interaction is a transmission of messages in, to take Fodor's term, the language of thought. Human beings do so by physically moving about their bodies (which is detected by the other's visual system) and emitting sound-waves (which is picked up by the nerve cells in our ears), but these physical changes are not crucial to the interaction that is taking place. In order to understand the interaction we have to look at all these events on a meaningful level, and the meaningful level, whenever human interaction is concerned, is on the "informational level". And with information it is meant: messages that are passed from one mental system to another.
When we say that two physical systems interact (for example, one nerve cell's nerve impuls ignites, via a chemical transmission system, another nerve cell that is connected to it), the meaningful level *is* the physical level. Physical levels (there are lot's of them, with their own translation problems between them) have a general description in terms of energy. I'm not that much of a phycisist, but as I understand it one of the laws of thermodynamics states that "things" (physical systems) over time generally get more and more disorderly. When a system has less order, it also contains less energy. The energy leaks out, and the system 'falls apart', so to speak. Any sand-castle will eventually become a flattend pile of sand again. We all turn to dust, someday. The disorderly-ness of a system is measured by its "entropy". Lot's of noise in a system means a high entropy. Lot's of rigidness/structure in a system means low entropy.
Now the funny thing is that although there is a huge theoretical gap between "people talking to one another" and "nerve cells talking to one another", there is a very straightforward way in which the concept of "information" is related to the concept of "entropy". Shannon equated information with uncertainty in this article, and since uncertainty can be - sort of - equated with entropy, information is entropy! Which seems paradoxical but that is because I'm being overly blunt here, see a discussion on this topic.
Now at first I thought this might be interesting because a theoretical closure between what they call thermodynamics and information theory via the concept of entropy might be, in effect, a solution to the mind body problem. Thermodynamics is about stuff, and information theory is about communication, about agents sending messages to one another (this is really the level at which Shannon speaks about it in the article and in his writings there is always a 'sender' and 'receiver' involved, how are not machines, but are considered to be sentient active agents)
However, I quickly found out that *within* entropy theory there is a lot of discussion about what the concept really means. For instance, it is only a matter of wordchoice that Shannon chose entropy to equal certain concept in his theory that he needed a name for. On the above website it is said:
"The story goes that Shannon didn't know what to call his measure so he asked von Neumann, who said `You should call it entropy ... [since] ... no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage'" (see reference)
Still, all of this has to go into my thesis. If you want to know even more about it, read this book, by Ashby, one of the founders of cybernetics.
This last cybernetics link is also very interesting and funny with many anecdotical references. In it, it is described that Heinz von Foerster allegedly has said the following:
"FEEDBACK: An unpoetic inexpressive word that shrieks for replacement. Correct use of the word would refer to eating your own vomit. ".
The mind-body problem is essentially the question of how to make a thought out of a kilogram of brain matter. The question itself is already 'strange', imagine how the (ultimate and correct) answer would look like.
Now to turn to my previous discussion on interactions (here); the difference between interaction on the communicative level (between two active agents) and interaction on the physical level (between two physical systems), is not unlike the difference between mind and body.
When we say that two human beings 'interact', what we mean by the word interaction is a transmission of messages in, to take Fodor's term, the language of thought. Human beings do so by physically moving about their bodies (which is detected by the other's visual system) and emitting sound-waves (which is picked up by the nerve cells in our ears), but these physical changes are not crucial to the interaction that is taking place. In order to understand the interaction we have to look at all these events on a meaningful level, and the meaningful level, whenever human interaction is concerned, is on the "informational level". And with information it is meant: messages that are passed from one mental system to another.
When we say that two physical systems interact (for example, one nerve cell's nerve impuls ignites, via a chemical transmission system, another nerve cell that is connected to it), the meaningful level *is* the physical level. Physical levels (there are lot's of them, with their own translation problems between them) have a general description in terms of energy. I'm not that much of a phycisist, but as I understand it one of the laws of thermodynamics states that "things" (physical systems) over time generally get more and more disorderly. When a system has less order, it also contains less energy. The energy leaks out, and the system 'falls apart', so to speak. Any sand-castle will eventually become a flattend pile of sand again. We all turn to dust, someday. The disorderly-ness of a system is measured by its "entropy". Lot's of noise in a system means a high entropy. Lot's of rigidness/structure in a system means low entropy.
Now the funny thing is that although there is a huge theoretical gap between "people talking to one another" and "nerve cells talking to one another", there is a very straightforward way in which the concept of "information" is related to the concept of "entropy". Shannon equated information with uncertainty in this article, and since uncertainty can be - sort of - equated with entropy, information is entropy! Which seems paradoxical but that is because I'm being overly blunt here, see a discussion on this topic.
Now at first I thought this might be interesting because a theoretical closure between what they call thermodynamics and information theory via the concept of entropy might be, in effect, a solution to the mind body problem. Thermodynamics is about stuff, and information theory is about communication, about agents sending messages to one another (this is really the level at which Shannon speaks about it in the article and in his writings there is always a 'sender' and 'receiver' involved, how are not machines, but are considered to be sentient active agents)
However, I quickly found out that *within* entropy theory there is a lot of discussion about what the concept really means. For instance, it is only a matter of wordchoice that Shannon chose entropy to equal certain concept in his theory that he needed a name for. On the above website it is said:
"The story goes that Shannon didn't know what to call his measure so he asked von Neumann, who said `You should call it entropy ... [since] ... no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage'" (see reference)
Still, all of this has to go into my thesis. If you want to know even more about it, read this book, by Ashby, one of the founders of cybernetics.
This last cybernetics link is also very interesting and funny with many anecdotical references. In it, it is described that Heinz von Foerster allegedly has said the following:
"FEEDBACK: An unpoetic inexpressive word that shrieks for replacement. Correct use of the word would refer to eating your own vomit. ".
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Interactions
Someday I want to write a PHD-thesis on the concept of interaction. Just for starters, let's make a quick inventory of types of interaction, based on the number of active agents involved.
1. No active agents involved
In physical systems with nog active agents, like human beings, other animals, or artificial intelligent systems involved, there is physical interaction based on the flux of energy between two physical sub-systems. For instance, when a billiartball hits another billiartball, energy is moved from one ball to the other, and the two balls thereby influence one another's behavior. Or when two chemical substances meet, there might be a chemical reaction, leading to a new stable state, in which some or all of the chemical substances have been combined, or falled apart, etc.. It is interaction of stuff with stuff. Stuff (or energy, which is the same) is being exchanged, moved about, all involved systems change state, i.e. they undergo some behavioral change, and new stabilities arise as a result of that.
2. Two active agents involved.
Interaction between two agents is different from interaction between two 'substances' since the interaction does not take place in the form of energy flow but in the form of *information* flow. Another word for this kind of interaction is "communication". It means that two active agents continously *interpret* the physical changes as they are received on their sensors, coming from the other agent, *as signals*, with an associated *meaning*. The level at which the interaction has meaning is on this informational level alone, the physical level is not interesting just so long as it exists, otherwise the information channel could not be physically realised, which would render communication impossible. But, where in case of the billiartballs the physical structure and energy processes in the system determined the nature of the interaction, in the case of two active agents interacting the nature of the interaction is determined not by the physical structure and energy flux that realises this interaction, but by the *meaning* of the communicative message that is send from one agent to the other.
Of course, one could envision a situation in which two agents bump into each other, as a purely physical accident. But in this case, I argue, the agent's should not be conceived of as active agents, but as passive physical systems only.
3. One active agent involved.
This is the most difficult case because it embodies a blend of the two definitions of interaction above. It is the case where a human agent 'interacts' with his (her) environment. Such kind of interaction is of central concern to cognitive science. The usual question there is: how does the active agent come to understand the (physical) environment or, how does the active agent know how to act appropriately in it? (which basically amounts to the same thing depending on your philosophy). Sensors on the active agent register input, the agent generates behavioral output on its 'actors' (body movement), which in turn leads to new sensory input, and so on. This perception-action cycle, which evolves over time, defines "the interaction". The interaction can be 'functional' with respect to the internal goals of the agent, or, likewise, it can be 'appropriate given the environmental situation. Biologically, one often speaks of 'adaptive' behavior, which relates to underlying evolutionary forces.
Now, what I want to discuss, in a later blog, is how one can mix physical interaction with communication, because I have a feeling that type 3 above contains some theoretical problems...
1. No active agents involved
In physical systems with nog active agents, like human beings, other animals, or artificial intelligent systems involved, there is physical interaction based on the flux of energy between two physical sub-systems. For instance, when a billiartball hits another billiartball, energy is moved from one ball to the other, and the two balls thereby influence one another's behavior. Or when two chemical substances meet, there might be a chemical reaction, leading to a new stable state, in which some or all of the chemical substances have been combined, or falled apart, etc.. It is interaction of stuff with stuff. Stuff (or energy, which is the same) is being exchanged, moved about, all involved systems change state, i.e. they undergo some behavioral change, and new stabilities arise as a result of that.
2. Two active agents involved.
Interaction between two agents is different from interaction between two 'substances' since the interaction does not take place in the form of energy flow but in the form of *information* flow. Another word for this kind of interaction is "communication". It means that two active agents continously *interpret* the physical changes as they are received on their sensors, coming from the other agent, *as signals*, with an associated *meaning*. The level at which the interaction has meaning is on this informational level alone, the physical level is not interesting just so long as it exists, otherwise the information channel could not be physically realised, which would render communication impossible. But, where in case of the billiartballs the physical structure and energy processes in the system determined the nature of the interaction, in the case of two active agents interacting the nature of the interaction is determined not by the physical structure and energy flux that realises this interaction, but by the *meaning* of the communicative message that is send from one agent to the other.
Of course, one could envision a situation in which two agents bump into each other, as a purely physical accident. But in this case, I argue, the agent's should not be conceived of as active agents, but as passive physical systems only.
3. One active agent involved.
This is the most difficult case because it embodies a blend of the two definitions of interaction above. It is the case where a human agent 'interacts' with his (her) environment. Such kind of interaction is of central concern to cognitive science. The usual question there is: how does the active agent come to understand the (physical) environment or, how does the active agent know how to act appropriately in it? (which basically amounts to the same thing depending on your philosophy). Sensors on the active agent register input, the agent generates behavioral output on its 'actors' (body movement), which in turn leads to new sensory input, and so on. This perception-action cycle, which evolves over time, defines "the interaction". The interaction can be 'functional' with respect to the internal goals of the agent, or, likewise, it can be 'appropriate given the environmental situation. Biologically, one often speaks of 'adaptive' behavior, which relates to underlying evolutionary forces.
Now, what I want to discuss, in a later blog, is how one can mix physical interaction with communication, because I have a feeling that type 3 above contains some theoretical problems...
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Movie-talk
Today I've been watching two movies at the same time, zapping between the one and the other with my remote control. Both movies were interesting. One movie was about a famous club called studio 54. The owner was rich, famous, eccentric, addicted. He hand-picked his guests every night. Of all the hundreds of people shouting in the line, only few would get in. His 'door-policy', was the key to the succes of the club, however unfair such a policy might be, of course. Reflecting on it, I thought about how the talent for one specific thing might build you a complete empire (and bring you tons of money). Even being the famous owner, he still hand-picked the guests. This made the club special, attracting more special people (with money). He created a myth, but I did so by doing just one thing: going out there picking his guests. Of course he could not hand over this task to someone else, because the club was built on *his* talent and this talent was personal, which made the club personal, and the personality (unicity) of the club was the fundamental reasion why people wanted to be there in the first place. The great thing about going to this club is that once you were in, you knew that you had been 'handpicked' by this one guy.
The club, as it evolved, was driven entirly by a talent (based on intuition) and a forceful internal drive for success, and a continuous need for having more and more of it. Talent, intuition, need for succes; these are concepts completely alien to most of cognitive science. But as this movie shows: such human characteristics drive large parts of our society (the club being just an example, perhaps even a metaphor, of the human ways in general).
The other movie was about a guy who lied about almost everything, pretending to be a school-teacher, a crook, a policeman, and at some point even being appointed a doctor in a hospital, without having had the education (learning to talk and act like a doctor from television shows). Reflecting on this, I thought about how a pattern of behavior, on the outside, can be so completely fundamentally not be the same as "the real thing", which is somehow defined "on the inside". He was not a real doctor, but nobody noticed, since he said the right words. He even got somebody the right medicin or cure just by 'going with the behavioral flow' of things. Did he actually cause anything functional to happen in that hospital? Is it possible to get the effects using a system in which there is 'nobody home'? Ultimately, at least in this movie, his scheme exploded, something was bound to go wrong at some point, and it did. But if that wouldn've happened, would we have a right to say that this guy was not a doctor? Or should we accept the idea that a doctor is however does exactly as a doctor should do? What I ask here is of course exactly what Turing has asked of computers in his famous thesis on artificial intelligence: a classic.
The two movies, in all, couldn't have been more different. The one being about basic internal human capacities that are unexplained by objective science, the other being about the objective behavioral view of a human being, knowing that inside there is no body home. Objective science versus human intuition. Although I'm a real scientist, I liked the Studio 54 movie better. Why would that be?
The club, as it evolved, was driven entirly by a talent (based on intuition) and a forceful internal drive for success, and a continuous need for having more and more of it. Talent, intuition, need for succes; these are concepts completely alien to most of cognitive science. But as this movie shows: such human characteristics drive large parts of our society (the club being just an example, perhaps even a metaphor, of the human ways in general).
The other movie was about a guy who lied about almost everything, pretending to be a school-teacher, a crook, a policeman, and at some point even being appointed a doctor in a hospital, without having had the education (learning to talk and act like a doctor from television shows). Reflecting on this, I thought about how a pattern of behavior, on the outside, can be so completely fundamentally not be the same as "the real thing", which is somehow defined "on the inside". He was not a real doctor, but nobody noticed, since he said the right words. He even got somebody the right medicin or cure just by 'going with the behavioral flow' of things. Did he actually cause anything functional to happen in that hospital? Is it possible to get the effects using a system in which there is 'nobody home'? Ultimately, at least in this movie, his scheme exploded, something was bound to go wrong at some point, and it did. But if that wouldn've happened, would we have a right to say that this guy was not a doctor? Or should we accept the idea that a doctor is however does exactly as a doctor should do? What I ask here is of course exactly what Turing has asked of computers in his famous thesis on artificial intelligence: a classic.
The two movies, in all, couldn't have been more different. The one being about basic internal human capacities that are unexplained by objective science, the other being about the objective behavioral view of a human being, knowing that inside there is no body home. Objective science versus human intuition. Although I'm a real scientist, I liked the Studio 54 movie better. Why would that be?
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