An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)

Book: Natural-Born Cyborgs by Andy Clark

Source: Oxford University Press 2003

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 4 Where Are We?

• Consider the simple example of using a phone. Then ask the question, Where am I? Does it make sense to say that I am "only" where my body is?
• http://www.robocam.net/ (a viewer controlled camera)
• http://ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/art/tele/
• http://www.africam.com (a passive camera)
• "The passive experience leaves the observer clearly at home ... Yet as soon as a distant camera responds to your controls, and especially if the mode of control is either natural (the helmet rig) or highly practical (a gamester with a joystick), you begin to feel relocated, as if you are in the distant scene." [p. 94 - 95]
• "Our sense of personal location has more to do with this sense of an action-space than with anything else." [p. 94]
• "Ramachandran's principle ... 'mechanisms of perception are mainly involved in extracting statistical correlations from the world to create a model that is temporarily useful' ". [p. 95]
• http://www.lynnhershman.com/tillie/index.html
• "Ramachandran, the neuroscientist ... speaks of 'the Zombie in the brain' meaning the mass of automatic subsystems which contribute so profoundly to our thoughts, actions, capacities and skills." [p. 102]
• "The full range of tasks that the brain carries out automatically is, however, now known to be much, much larger, and to include many of the operations involved in complex problem solving and even decision making." [p. 103]
• "What seems to matter ... is the presence of some kind of local, circular process in which the neural commands, motor actions, and sensory feedback are closely and continuously correlated." [p. 104]
• "The intimate web of closely correlated signals and responses necessary for such rarified reinvention of the body is, however, quite fragile and easily disrupted. The most important kind of disruption is temporal: if there is a noticeable time lag between issuing the command and receiving the sensory feedback ..." [p. 104 - 105]
• "But it takes time for signals to return from the bodily peripheries to the brain - too much time, it seems, for the signals to be used to generate the smooth actions to which we are accustomed! To solve this problem, the brain uses a very neat trick indeed. It uses a special piece of neural circuitry known as a motor emulator. This is a little circuit that takes a copy of the motor signal to the hand (say) and feeds it into a neural system, which has learned about the typical responses from those bodily peripheries that are likely to ensue. The emulator is thus like a little local scale model of the real circuit. It rapidly outputs a prediction of the signals that should soon be arriving from the bodily peripheries, and these are then used instead of the real thing. This emulator-based feedback is then used for ongoing error-correction and smoothing. ... In this way the brain constructs its own little 'virtual reality' in order to compensate for the temporal delays, which might otherwise impede smooth motor activity" [p. 106]
• "We should not simply assume that the most effective use of these technologies lies in the attempt to re-create , in detail, the same kinds of personal contact and exchange with which we are currently familiar. ... What if we instead allowed them to define brand new niches for genuine action and intervention?" [p. 108 - 109]
• "Consider email. Email is often used even when the recipient is sitting in the office next door." [p. 109]
• "We are essentially active, embodied agents ... the forms of our embodiment, action, and engagement are not fixed." [p. 114]

I found the section on neural motor emulators fascinating.

Email has opened a new niche for the use of asynchronous communication.

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 5 What Are We?

• "... the simple feeling of 'already knowing' the answer to a question as soon as it is asked is surely the knowledge-based equivalent of the more generic notion of 'transparent equipment'." [p. 133
• "This sequence of conscious contents is highly varied in type and radically discontinuous in content. Themes persist and whole trains of thought are, sometimes painfully, birthed, but the true principles of continuity lie largely underground." [p. 134 - 135]
• "Taking all this nonconscious cognitive activity seriously is, however, already to take the crucial step toward understanding ourselves. ... The relations between our conscious sense of self ...and the many nonconscious neural goings-on, which structure and inform this cognitive profile, are pretty much on a par with the relations between our conscious minds and various other kinds of transparent, personalized, robust, and readily accessed resources. When those resources are of a recognizably knowledge-and-information based kind, the upshot is an extended cognitive system: a biotechnologically hybrid mind." [p. 135]
• "it is just tools all the way down" [p. 136]
• "Just as the law lags visibly behind the complex realities of electronic commerce, so too our social structures and value systems lag visibly behind the accelerating cycles of biotechnological interdependence and interpenetration." [p. 139]

A good example of a biotechnologically hybrid mind is that of body + book, or body + movie.

The quote "it is just tools all the way down" is a beautiful paraphrase of a comment a lady made to Bertrand Russell about the earth resting on the back of a turtle, 'it is just turtles all the way down". (How did I just realize that!?)

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 6 Global Swarming

• "This general idea, of strengthening and weakening connections and trails as an automatic result of ongoing patterns of use, may one day turn the world wide web itself into a kind of swarm intelligence." [p. 148]
• Principia Cybernetica [p. 148]
• "Better search engines make the extensive use of electronic bookmarks redundant" [p. 153]
• "Early information retrieval routines, based solely on keyword searches and the like, were limiting and inflexible tools." [p. 155]
• "Bundling information into preset, pretagged physical packages (such as books, journals, and so on) may thus become less and less crucial, as users learn to soft assemble resources pretty much at will, tailored to their own specific needs." [p. 156]
• "... the interactions between primary and secondary materials (e.g., original discussions versus commentaries and critiques) will also mutate ..." [p. 157]
• "... dangers. Once we come to rely on these highlighted passages, we may actively ignore the rest of the document." [p. 158]
• "One rather familiar way in which fast, fluent, global information sharing already supports new kinds of collaborative creation is via the use of freeware and open source code for software development and testing (e.g. Linux)." [p. 161]

Combine the idea of swarm intelligence with the ideas of networks and small worlds (see book Nexus) and we have a nice image of where we are headed. This idea can be extended further by adding a Discussion Board to this web site to permit a few distant links and we have all the ingredients.

The warning on page 158 applies to this web site. These notes, ideally, at least according to me, should be viewed as door bells, offering one access to various rooms of information, but they are not sufficient on their own.

Technology Index