Hermeneutic Heretic

LII: Constitution To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

I had no idea that copyright was part of the US Constitution until I read about this in an LA Times Op-Ed. The article was debating the semantics and metaphors related to filesharing on which I’ll probably have more to think. But, reading the section referenced in the article reminded me of a recent talk I went to on the default states in frames.

And it seems to me beyond much doubt that the framers had assumed a default state of “limited” that meant actually limited rather than potentially limited which is what the current laws enshrine. Of course, there are many other ‘default’ states in the constitution, for instance regarding what a ‘person’ is. But these defaults have been typically reset by amendments.

Also, it could be more than argued that the current copyright regime does not “promote the progress” of anybody but big corporations. What about the company that owns the rights to ‘Happy Birthday’? Where is progress or even the rights of authors and inventors in that?

I’ve been following this debate from a distance for a while but haven’t seen the conflict with the constitutional wording raised. But maybe I’ve just not been looking in the right places or am missing something.

On The Media I’m not a psychologist, but I think that at some deep level, if the situation you’re living is a lie, and the situation these boys were living was one, and, moreover, at least the father was complicit in some way in the murder of these children’s parents - that situation, I do not believe, can be healthy.

…

Argentina lived under terror. When societies emerge from these states, any society emerging has to balance truth with justice.

And then he had to say this:

Lost Children, Lost Truths - New York Times

But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime. We journalists are intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don’t know.

Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose. But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge. Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather than in absolutes.

This folk magical assumption about the elemental and deep-rooted nature of the truth that is so essential that it seeps into our very existence no matter how much we are trying to paint a veneer of ignorance over it.

Cohen is right. He’s no psychologist, but then neither are a lot of psychologists. Truth is like language. When you grow up in the context of a lie, you will speak the lie fluently and the truth will be just as disruptive as the introduction of a new language.

But this is not just a random quirk of an American journalist brought up on cultural reflections of the psychoanalytic therapeutic tradition. This is a demonstration of one folk theory of truth and it is the same one that underlies our myths about science that is most often represented through something called ‘reductionism’.

And as fractals seem to indicate, this will also be part of science’s undoing. Wilson’s failure in Conscillience to understand science (despite his grasp of the humanities) is a great example of this. Another one is Skinner’s reductionism and re-labelling of old problems with new words in Verbal Behavior which was so deftly analysed by Chomsky. And, of course, Chomsky’s own insistence on limiting language description to that which is subject to reduction. And it also pertains to things like the Sokal hoax and the science wars. And it drives the search for the Unified Theory.

The problem is that the folk assumption about the fundamental nature of scientific truth forces scientists into seeking further and further underlying principles in order for it to be scientific. For instance, genes driving all morphological development of an organism. This is a bad model for science and an even worse model for social science.

An insight from fractals and chaos might help us find a better way. (The following is simply a fractal-inspired metaphor). ‘Truths’ exist on levels of magnification. They exist as tendencies that are exact at certain moments but sensitive to initial conditions.

This might allows us to admit that there are certain things social scientists know with just as much certainty as natural philosophers know the laws of physics. Only the numerical outcomes and predictive powers are plotted on attractors rather than linear curves. For instance, we know that depriving a group of people of resources will result in social unrest, and that not all individuals will participate in that unrest. We don’t know what the breaking point is nor do we know what forms the unrest will take but that’s not insignificant knowledge.

Moreover, it’s knowledge similar to the knowledge of scientists. Scientists know a lot about the chemistry and physics of metals but all that knowledge is idealised (as in ideal gasses). To actually build a bridge engineers need lots and lots of manuals with translation tables that provide constants that can be plugged into equations. These constants are empirically established and can change with changing conditions.

Social engineers have history to do the same job but the translation tables have to be publicly negotiated analogy (as I’ve show in many other posts).

The job of the natural and social philosophers, then, should be to seek the right levels of magnification for their knowledge and proceed with extreme caution when finding causal links between layers.

[This is all very sketchy, at the moment, I suspect I will have a more to say about this later.]

BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again 11 Sept 2007 08:50 It’s the 50th anniversary of the British Computer Society. But what can we expect over the next half century? Will our levels of dependence on the internet and computers change?

One of the guests on the programme, Oliver Sparrow, made the following prediction:

“We will know whether there’s a transcendent bit to the human mind by 2050, we will know exactly what cognition is and how we think and probably be able to emulate it.”

Well, here’s an alternative prediction. No, we won’t! This prediction assumes a lot about both the nature of cognition and mind, e.g. that they are objective phenomena as described by the language of our daily speech and the language of experts, and about our ability to come to grips with it, e.g. that we can easily capture it through the same tools that we are used to capturing information about the accessible and the not so accessible world. But if we look at the last 50 years of computers and mind research, we should radically limit our expectations of the next 50 years. While computer power (or rather its transistor prerequisites as described by Moore’s law) as increased geometrically, our ability to emulate human cognition has increased almost not at all. Let’s look at expert systems. It has been over 40 years since ELIZA and we would be very hard put to find a system that can do much more than that, today. The same goes for machine translation. Speech recognition has not progressed almost at all in the last fifteen years. Sure, you can now dictate and have Word open at the same time but that’s just tweaking. Accuracy has increased by a guestimate of 20%, usability 10 times while computer power in the same time increased 256 times. The mind boggles why it took computers so long to even draw with humans at chess. Why couldn’t a regular calculator do it decades ago? Computer speed simply isn’t the answer. My speech recognition teacher said years ago that we need a change of paradigm rather than an increase in computer speed and he was right.

The complexity of human cognition is such that we don’t even know how complex it is, the factors of its social embeddedness are another unknown. My prediction is that we will be as far from being able to model cognition in 2050 as we are today unless we find a way of modelling it as it is rather than modelling it on the back of our incredibly reductionist description of it. Some of the work done on bottom-up robotics seems to point in the right way. Google’s stochastic processing of prestige is also pretty good. We can pretty much keep up wih the increase in the amount of information but I doubt that we will be able to achieve a corresponding increase of knowledge as defined by the speaker. He goes on to draw the following analogy:

If we look at the amount of knowledge that the human race produced and think of it as a nice simple analogy that you have a sheet of cloth about thousand stiches by a thousand stiches. Let’s call it a megabyte which is about a telephone directory’s worth of information. Everything humanity did in 1920 was a bedsheet to cover the Island of Mauritius, by 1940 it had got to Madagascar, by the 1950s it was the Congo, the whole of Africa by the 60s, all of the continents of the planet by the mid-1980s. By 1990 we had a duvet cover of information produced every year to cover the whole planet by 2020 we’ll have about 1800 planets’ worth of information.

The problem is that information and knowledge are very different. Information is a property of matter (inkblots on paper, magnetic charge of hard drive platters, etc.) while knowledge is a property of individual human beings embedded in the situational constraints of their social existence. Or possibly, it’s a property of the social group that can be shared and enacted by its individual human members. The maintenance of information requires relatively little effort (keep the books dusted and the CD-ROMs safe), the maintenance of knowledge requires tremendous cognitive (remembering, organizing, communicating) and social (putting into context, speaking to the right people, maintaining prestige, …) effort. Just like with the speed of computers not being commensurate with their ability to emulate cognition (let alone social cognition), the amount of information available (encoded in some storage devices) is not commensurate with the “amount” of knowledge, in least because it’s not even certain that knowledge can be measured or even that it can ‘increase’ rather than just being shifted around and refocused.

Let’s illustrate on this debate itself. The one thing we already do know about the mind and cognition, is that the mind is not at all like a computer: it doesn’t have memory that works as a storage or repository of information, and it does not apply serial algorithms to the information it works on. It is not independent of the body in which it exists and it is most certainly not something that can be easily transferred from one context to another. The problem with this ‘information’ is that it is the knowledge only of a limited group of people in the AI, NLP and general cognitive science community, and even the communities and individuals that do ‘possess’ this knowledge are not sure how to act on it. Kurt Vonnegut expressed it best: “Hi ho!”

Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar
The core behavior has existed for some time; “Image macro” is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon.

Two things are happening here. First, the very thing Anil Dash is describing. A “grammar” of LOLCats is emerging. However, this is a cognitive construction grammar rather than a traditional grammar in that it doesn’t provide generative (in the broad sense) but rather an inventory of conventionalized units have both highly schematic form and meaning (actually the distance between the semantic and formal poles is very narrow). Anil Dash’s descriptions of the grammar of LOL are actually very close to what a construction grammar would look like. Actually, construction grammar could probably take some lessons from him:

• I’M IN UR X Ying your Z.
• Invisible Item.
• Kitty Pidgin

These are three descriptions of rules a reader might recognize a lolcat utterance. (And it is possible, as Anil Dash notes, to get them wrong.) The interesting thing about it is that he uses a different format for each of the lolcat grammar constructions. And always the one that is most appropriate for recognition and storage. So, wonder I, should construction grammarians adopt the same approach (and run the risk of being accused of not being scientific enough) or should we even consider the fact that these rules may be “stored” in our brains differently? Some as paradigmatic constructions, some imagistic or scriptic, and yet others as schematic formulae such as those applied to the recognition or application of a genre or even a foreign tongue. Another thing, we could probably study how these rules are acquired, spread and developed.

Which brings us to the second point. The act of Mr Dash himself.

I was having a conversation with Ben and Ben a few weeks ago where I suggested this consistent grammar for lolcats could be a “cweeole”. Knowing a bit more about such things now, I realize this isn’t a creole but more likely a pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans. And since “pidgin” is already a cutesy spelling of a mispronunciation, there doesn’t seem to be any really cute way to rename it to reflect its uniqueness. “Kitty pidgin” might be the closest thing we have to a name for this new language.

There’s a consistent visual vocabulary to the construct, as well. If it ain’t Impact or Arial Black or some other nondescript sans serif font, it ain’t lolcat. White letters with a black outline are a must. But codifying a design guide for lolcats is well beyond my abilities.

Anil Dash is engaging in frame negotiation and acting as an agent similar to those described by Labov (and Asch) who is a significant vector in the spread  of a symbolic system. He is doing the same job linguists do but unlike many linguists, his work is intended to interact with the system itself (and it no doubt does). I’ve described something similar in the arena of fanfiction where along some incredible creative writing there also emerged a considerable body of critical opinion which contributed to the solidification of subgenres and offered a feedback loop to the spontaneously emerging classifications (Uberfic, Slash, etc.). Construction linguists need to investigate what role this kind of behavior plays in the functioning of “natural” languages where the tendency has generally been to neglect the human agency and imply an agency of the “system”. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does ignore something I’m finding more and more evidence for. Next, I’d like to determine how frequent that evidence is and what persistence and salience it has (since frequency isn’t necessarily the only determining factor).

BBC NEWS | Technology | Robot unravels mystery of walking

“Babies use a lot of their brains to train local circuits but once they are trained they are fairly autonomous.”Only when it comes to more difficult things - such as a change of terrain - that’s when the brain steps in and says ‘now we are moving from ice to sand and I have to change something’.

“This is a good model because you are easing the load of control - if your brain had to think all the time about walking, it’s doubtful you could have a conversation at the same time.”

This approach to robotics is not new (as far as I know it was pioneered by Brooks at MIT, and sure enough, the academic paper references Brooks). Neither is an equivalent view of language. But I like the simple way it is expressed in this quote. First, it is important to keep in mind that this is only an analogical rather than directly descriptive view of language. Much confusion has sprung up from taking Krashen’s notion of grammar as an ‘affective filter’ on language production too literally. However, there are many phenomena in language where such local effects are in evidence. They should not be confused with the notion of linguistic modularity, though. Many of these local phenomena overlap with other local phenomena and from certain perspectives disappear altogether.

One class of these are my favorite local grammars. We don’t need to know that much about English to be able to find ‘definitions’ in a large corpus. Another type are activities associated with parsing. In fact (recalling Krashen again), we could rephrase the above into “one could not process language (or the rules of language) and have a conversation at the same time.” Parsing a sentence is a local phenomenon handled away from regular speech (this does not necessarily require that there be a neural locus for any of this). First and second language learning bring forth another class of local language effects, as does text editing or writing poetry. None of these activities require the activation of a complex central neural process. They can happen locally (again, I have no idea what locally would really mean, it is the analogy that I’m trying to use to elucidate something puzzling).

The metaphoric mappings that structure most of our frames are usually seen as automatic. However, more often than not, they are negotiated through discourse prior to becoming fully blended (entrenched). This image is a great example of one such mapping negotiation done almost entirely visually. This Apple Lisa ad from the 1970s has two functions: 1. To frame the Apple computer in the business setting in general; 2. to provide a pathway to structuring the frame through a metaphor of the computer desktop and an office desk. That is done through the image where the mapping is actually graphically represented.

Coincidentally, this is not a bad illustration of the fact that the idea of metaphoric mapping as mooted by Lakoff and Johnson (although later modified) does have at least some amount of psychological realism.

The Mothership Apple Advertising and Brochure Gallery 2

TIME.com: Time’s Person of the Year: You — Dec. 25, 2006 — Page 1 America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Digg: On the Outside Looking In. « East Coast Blogging However, I fear that Digg itself has become irrelevant to most of us. Not that the site won’t continue to grow and prosper, nor will many of us stop using it. But we will only be using it as a member of the audience, not really good enough to participate, just good enough to watch the action unfold before us.

MercuryNews.com | 12/27/2006 | Technologist focuses on media and democracy Florin said he is concerned by both the cutbacks in traditional media, as well as the enormous increase in unconventional sources on the Web. “There’s a problem: It’s hard to know if you can trust the information that you can get. But there’s also an opportunity,” he said.

Just as time magazine was gushing over the social revolution
on the web, others have been putting a more realistic perspective on things. In particular, on how real groups work. It seems to be clear that there is no such thing as unlimited freedom in collective decision making or wisdom of the crowds. Any collective needs to have structure and that will always emerge no matter how flat the org-chart seems to be. Also, any collective can only exist if there are people on its margins and outside of it. And if the collective controls most resources…again…no freedom. And finally, crowds can be only wise about themselves. So if we want to know how the crowds will behave in the marketplace - we should ask them. But if we want to know things that are outside the interest of the crowd, the majority, the collective, then they are the wrong person to ask. However, these things are also only in the interest of some other crowd or collective so we need to join them. This, again, is nothing surprising or unusual - multiple identities have been with us for millennia.

So the conclusion is, the internet can bring nothing new to the table of human social behavior. However, it can bring a new demarcation of groupings and a reorganization of topological connections. But the ultimate complexity of the system can only increase in as much as its weakest link will allow. And that is the human brain’s capacity for social knowledge and the concomitant limits of time and space on maintaining social interactions. E.g. having 100 ‘friends’ on MySpace doesn’t mean that a larger group is being maintained. It just means that the maintaining of personal identity and certain groups includes short messages on the boards. Any close sociological interaction analysis will show the limits of these links (I’m pretty sure) to be similar to those of links maintained in more traditional ways.

Column by PC Magazine: Our Modern World—Weirder by the Minute
DIGITAL CAMERA ARM STRETCH. Okay, let’s get to the meat of this essay. Perhaps the weirdest societal change has to do with digital cameras and the practice of framing shots in the preview window by holding the camera out in front of yourself. Even ten years ago, nobody would have predicted that most people would now take pictures this way. Give people a pro digital SLR camera and they will still hold the thing in front of them at arm’s length. I find it amusing to go to a tourist area and see all these people using the cameras this way.

This observation points to something not often discussed in connection to new technologies, the change in our expectations of the visual world around us. We could call them visual frames or, as I prefer to think of them, image schemas. Image schemas are idealized images of variable richness but never completely photographic (indeed it could be said that even a photograph is schematic in some sense - for instance color richness, depth, framing, etc.) The original conception in Lakoff would differentiate between schemas and rich images but they are better thought of as the same thing on a scale. In this case, the typical image we have is someone taking a picture holding a camera to their eye. Now that is changing more and more to holding it in front of the face with arm slightly outstretched. Since that is the visual expectations, people who are not professionals will use even an SLR that way even though they are intended for use with a viewfinder.

Right now the image schema is in an interesting flux because all kinds of cameras co-exist. This becomes prominent when a group picture is taken and multiple people pass forward their cameras to someone. There is usually the odd film camera in the mix so the photographer has to adjust his or her behavior. Furthermore, some digital cameras have a viewfinder and some don’t. It would be interesting to study the behavior of people and see how their instincts are changing overtime. This pertains to the question of to what extent can our unconscious behavior be brought to the surface for willful decision-making.
Of course, what Dvorak fails to mention is that not so long ago, the stereotypical image was of someone looking down into the finder of the camera not holding it to their eye.

BBC - Radio 4 - Archive Hour - 21 October 2006
Matthew Parris uncovers the remarkable story of the Electrophone, the first sound broadcasting service to operate in Britain.

Electrophone (information system) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The name Electrophone was used for a telephone-distributed audio system which operated in the United Kingdom between 1895 and 1926, relaying live theatre and music hall shows and, on Sundays, live sermons from churches via special headsets connected to conventional phone lines.

Who knew that YouTube existed more than a hundred years ago. A fascinating program on the BBC showed a world full of excitement and technical innovation that was happening a hundred years ago. The question we have to ask is what is the real speed of innovation. If it took this long to deliver true ‘content on demand’, how long will it take for ideas like the ‘paperless office’ to become a reality? It is possible that many of the technical innovations we see know won’t bear fruit for decades if not longer.

The other, related, interesting aspect of this is Kuhnian notion of ideas being lost as well as found during paradigm shifts. While the Electrophone ultimately had to be superseded by the ‘wireless’ - simply because the ‘tubes’ were too narrow then - the idea of ‘content on demand’ was lost for many decades and could only be resurrected when the technology allowed it. Traditional radio itself (and push content in general) is now under pressure from new ways of offering content.

Buzz Out Loud: CNET’s podcast of indeterminate length on CNET.com [click here to listen to clip] recently featured this fascinating discussion of analogies. A caller suggests an analogy and the hosts discuss both the aptness of the analogy itself as well as the medium of analogies for elucidating certain issues. The combination of negotiating a frame and the framework (i.e. the medium of communication) at the same time is extremely intriguing and also something that happens all the time at all levels. The problem is that it mostly goes unnoticed in the relevant literature on language. Conversation analysts and ethnomethodologists know all about it but linguists often see it as something of no consequence to the study of ‘lower level structures’ such as morphology and syntax.

It goes without saying that this also underscores the importance of analogies and tropes in general in any kind of discourse. They are not only important structurally (very often they play the role of topoi) but also essential for the conceptual organization of extensive discursive interactions such as the thing often referred to as public discourse.