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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841508153 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 319 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Recipient of the Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award for Visionary Pioneers of Media Art 2014, Roy Ascott has shown at the Shanghai Biennale, Venice Biennale, Biennale do Mercosul Brazil, European Media Festival, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, and more. His seminal projects include La Plissure du Texte at Electra, Paris 1984, (Second Life versions in 2010, 2012), and Aspects of Gaia Ars Electronica, 1989. His retrospective The Syncretic Sense was shown at Plymouth Arts Centre, 2009; at the Incheon International Digital Art Festival, Korea, 2010, and at SPACE, Hackney, London, 2011. Roy Ascott: Syncretic Cybernetics was part of the Shanghai Biennale 2012. Roy Ascott: The Analogues, Plug-In ICA Winnipeg in 2013. His work is in the Tate permanent collection.
He is president of the Planetary Collegium (World Universities Forum Award for Best Practice in Higher Education 2011), and the DeTao Master of Technoetic Arts at the Beijing DeTao Masters Academy in Shanghai; and honorary professor of Aalborg University, Copenhagen, and University of West London.
In 1960s London, he established the radical Groundcourse at Ealing and then Ipswich, and taught at the Slade, Saint Martins and the Central Schools of Art. In the 1970s he was president of Ontario College of Art, Toronto, and later vice-president of San Francisco Art Institute. He was professor of communications theory at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, in the 1980s, and professor of interactive arts at the University of Wales in the 1990s. He is a graduate of King's College, University of Durham. He is now a Doctor Honoris Causa of Ionian University, Corfu, Greece and a Professor Emeritus at University of Plymouth.
Roy lectures and publishes throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia. Founding editor of Technoetic Arts (Intellect), and honorary editor of Leonard (MIT Press). His books include: The Future is Now: Art, Technology, and Consciousness, Gold Wall Press, Beijing, 2012; Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art Technology and Consciousness, University of California Press, 2003; Technoetic Arts, Yonsei University Press, 2002; and テレマティック：新しい美学の構築に向かって。(Art & Telematics: Toward the Construction of New Aesthetics), NTT, Tokyo, 1998.
Roy advises new media centres, festivals and juries throughout Europe, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, the USA, CEC and UNESCO.
Read an Excerpt
Reframing Consciousness
By Roy Ascott
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 1999 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-815-3
CHAPTER 1
Models
Can There Be Non-Embodied Information?
Stephen Jones
Introduction
There are, in philosophies of consciousness, two kinds of theory which attempt to explain subjectivity, the phenomenal experience of one's mental representations: Dualist theories in which a mind and a body are independent and combine in making a person and identist theories in which the mind is a function of the living process of the body. Dualism is built from the idea that the mind is primary, existing in some superspace, attached to a body for a lifetime, endowing it with a self. This is the form of most theologies which posit a soul. Identist theories, on the other hand, attempt to show that consciousness is in some way a function of the brain-in-its-context. That is, that the physical system that we are is conscious.
Now, the mind is an information processing system. Subjectivity consists in information gained through perception and reflection on that information. In dualism this information is immaterial and apprehended by an immaterial mind, Cartesian Dualism rests on the idea that the only thing knowable with any certainty is the self, the thinking thing. But since one might be deceived about the actual existence of anything in the material world, this self needs to be completely independent of the physical world. The primary objection to Descartes' view of the mind is how would the perceptual data of the world be transmitted to the immaterial mind? Descartes suggested that it is transmitted through the Pineal body, the only non-twinned part of the brain anatomy.
Identist theories do not pose this problem of immaterial informational stuff. Information is a function of the brain. It is detected by distinguishing differences in things and attaching meaning to them. But of course the problem that identist theories suffer is, just where does the subjective experience come from? Subjectivity appears to have a status quite outside what can be explained by the physical laws of the world. This apparent difference in quality between the phenomenal and the physical is the driving issue of current debate about consciousness,, David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind, uses this apparent difference as the basis for his whole argument.
So subjectivity involves information having two kinds of description:
1. First person description, or phenomenology, pertaining to one's experience of things that is private, accessible solely to oneself and having an apparent special experiential quality. For dualism this information stands in mysterious relation to the information of the physical world, invoking quantum theories of consciousness.
2. Third person description, or 'physics', pertaining to the reporting, in culturally consensual ways, of information about one's perception: information which can only ever be physically embodied in the usual materials, brains, television, paper, etc.
What is information?
Information theory as developed by Claude Shannon is about the communication of a signal which should be as noise - and distortion - free as possible. But this is information without meaning, a syntactical information, simply a matter of the accuracy of the transmission through the communication channel. Nevertheless it is embodied information. But we want to know about the content of the channel, that aspect of information known as meaning.
The only possible ways for minds to have any content is for information to be either innate or to be gained by experience. One has to acknowledge that a complete mind produced a priori, even if only revealed over time, looks pretty unlikely given the number of different minds in the world. So information must be gained through experience and reflection on that experience.
Gaining information is a matter of detecting differences between things or changes over time. Gregory Bateson defined information as a difference which makes a difference. Difference is a product of the relations between things, it is not inherent in any particular thing. 'The unit of information is difference ... [and] the unit of psychological input is difference.' (Bateson 1972). Informationally, what travels along the neuron isn't an impulse but something more like 'news of a difference'. There is a vast range of possible differences, all physically embodied in the object or in the transmission. And they must all impact in some physical way on our brains to be perceived.
In the real world most of what goes on has little importance to a living system, e.g.. the random bumping of electrons into atoms in a wire. These things are differences but of no significance and so are background noise. The determination of significance becomes important. For us, there is the biologically significant, the culturally significant and the personally significant. The significant is the signal, largely determined by what has meaning, linking the syntactical and semantic aspects of information.
Difference is detected by variations in features in the senses. The various differences arrive by light, by pressure waves, etc. They are the physical embodiments of such information as we read of these transmissions and their variability. Changes are noticed and interpreted by processing nets of the brain and have physical embodiment as transient conditions of these nets as well as producing long-term memory traces. Reflection also produces physical embodiments of information as culture.
At any stage of the perceptual process a cross-section of the neural pathways involved would show that what is present as information about the percept is a transformation of the original physical data presented to the sense organ. Quoting Bateson:
'In considering perception, we shall not say, for example, 'I see a tree', because the tree (as such) is not within our explanatory system. At best, it is only possible to see an image which is a complex but systematic transform of the tree. This image, of course, is energised by my metabolism and the nature of the transform is, in part, determined by factors within my neural circuits: 'I' make the image, under various restraints, some of which are imposed by my neural circuits, while others are imposed by the external tree.' (Bateson, 1972).
Korzybsky coined the phrase 'the map is not the territory' to indicate that what we know is not the thing in itself but a representation carried within us, a sequence of transforms of the results of sense organ stimulation. We only ever have our subjective transforms, meaningfully interpreted. But Kant's ding an sich is forever unobtainable. There can be no knowledge of ultimate reality; everything we know is mediated, mere inference developed through experience.
Information and the Real World
So the world is informational. What are the implications for theories of consciousness? What do I imply by saying that the phenomenal and the physical are different representations of the same information? As Schopenhauer commented, 'The intellect and matter are correlatives, the one exists only for the other; both stand and fall together; the one is only the other's reflex. They are in fact really one and the same thing, considered from two opposite points of view ..." (Schopenhauer, 1966).
Kant originally realised that the intrinsic nature of external objects is utterly unknowable, that everything we know is in fact a mediated transform of the physical data originally perceived: the thing in itself, the ding an sich. So let's have a closer look at this idea of the unknowability of the 'real' world.
When I see or touch an object, e.g. a table, what I actually know is the result e.g. of certain neural processes in my brain. I know nothing of the intrinsic nature of the table. The only stuff I know intrinsically is my neurally produced information about it, my phenomenology. What a physicist knows about matter is the informational relations that have been built up over years of consistent inferential processes. For Bertrand Russell, 'the particulars which are [the table's] aspects have to be collected together by their relations to each other, not to it, since it is merely inferred from them' (Russell 1921).
Now, the table I know intrinsically will be different from the table anyone else knows. The descriptions individuals provide may well be sufficiently similar as to differentiate this table from that one but this is a function of common language. Ultimately the 'table' will be that collection of brain processes which are one's phenomenology of the table, coupled with inferential knowledge of the relations of those perceived objects.
Michael Lockwood defines 'self-awareness [as]: knowing certain brain events by virtue of their belonging to one's own conscious biography, knowing them ... as they are in themselves - knowing them "from the inside", by living them or one might almost say, by self-reflectively being them and argues 'that the phenomenal qualities presented in perception ... are amongst the intrinsic attributes of certain physical states in the brain ... [they] are realised - that is to say instances of them come into being - by way of being sensed.' (Lockwood 1989).
But information must still be represented in something even if what is represented is intrinsically unknowable. If it is differences that we detect, there must still be something in which those differences are detectable. You can't have a difference between this nothing and that nothing; it is meaningless. A consciousness has to be triggered by some external or internal difference.
Some Physics of Information
Quantum physics acknowledges that it is the formal description and analysis of our knowledge of the world, i.e. that information we gain from the world by experiment and measurement. Quoting Eugene Wigner, 'Thought processes and consciousness are the primary concepts, ... our knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness ... we do not know of any phenomenon in which one object is influenced by another without exerting an influence thereupon ...' This influence may be infinitesimally small, e.g. the pressure of light on a material object but it nevertheless occurs. 'Light quanta do not influence each other directly but only by influencing material bodies which then influence other light quanta ... Similarly, consciousnesses never seem to interact with each other directly but only via the physical world. Hence any knowledge about the consciousness of another being must be mediated by the physical world'. (Wigner 1962). However, though light can have a direct effect on a material body, a consciousness is mediated via the physico-chemical system of bodily sensors and effectors to enable any effect on a material body.
Our knowledge of the world, information, is the brain's experience of detectable differences in things, as dimensioned by their ordered relations with each other. We assign qualities to things on the basis of these detections. These brain states also carry logical relations and significance and point to a name. So information enters the physical world as a result of the brain's detection of differences. But can information enter consciousness by means other than as a detected difference? The main argument against the possibility of information not being embodied in some physical system arises from its relation to entropy, as follows.
The information carried in an event is inversely proportional to the probability of that event. When all events in a system are equally probable that system is in equilibrium and its entropy is at a maximum. There will be no apparent order to the system, i.e. there are no differences between one part of the system and another and the system contains no information. If we order the relations of the particles in any way then we reduce the entropy of the system, we expend energy and we can now detect differences in the relations of the particles from which we gather information. The production of information is the production of order in the universe. Information is the converse of entropy and randomness.
The idea that information could exist not physically embodied implies that this is information gained for free, coming out of 'nothing', produced without the aid of energy. Because the level of entropy in the universe has not been changed by the appearance of this information there can have been no changes in the ordered relations of things. For information to appear out of 'nothing', it has to be random, which contradicts the nature of information. Information production increases the order in the universe, subtracting from its entropy. Information cannot come into the universe from nowhere, in all ways it must be a function of the relations between things and so is embodied. If some suprasensual world does exist in the manner usually thought of, i.e. as consisting in an immaterial stuff, then the second law of thermodynamics is wrong. As it works so well otherwise, this is unlikely. For information to appear in my brain, without being produced by its activity, appears to be impossible, which forces the psychic realm to partake of the physical stuff of the universe. This is contradictory to what we mean by the immaterial.
On this basis, dualism fails because it requires an immaterial stuff entering my and others brains, violating the second law and generally wreaking havoc with the universe. Identity theories of course do not suffer from this problem.
In Conclusion
There is a lot more that one should say about all this. Although it appears that information must be embodied, the nature of this embodiement has rather shifted from the physical world to brain states within the physical world, brain states which we know intrinsically, unlike our knowledge of anything else in the physical world. So dualistic theories of the mind fail but the more interesting thing is what has happened to identist theories, and that is that they must now rest on the nature of information rather than on the nature of the physical world. Perhaps information is in fact the world in process; and consciousness is our experience of being that process.
In fact, some quantum physicists (e.g. Charles Bennett) have been suggesting that perhaps information is fundamental to the physical world, not simply a product of the world in some way (i.e. in the way that consciousness is said by some, e.g. Descartes or Chalmers, to be a product of the brain that is somehow logically separate from the physical sensing systems). We assign information to a particular or we detect a difference in some relation and label that difference as information about that particular. What we are detecting about a particle is information about it. Is it possible that the different relations are more fundamental than the particle which is essentially a system of different relations?
Acts Between and Between Acts
Ranulph Glanville
We observe observing.
Our observing is not of: it is. If we insist it is of, then it is of observing. We do not observe things. We observe observing. If we insist there should be things to be observed, these things come about through our constructing.
When we insist that our observing is of (some thing), we insist there is an object of observing. Call that postulated thing an Object (with initial capital signifying it is an artefact), the Object of our attention, of our observing. Objects are the artefacts of the Theory of Objects.
Because such Objects are fictions that may or may not exist apart from our contrivance, we can pretend/assume/insist that you and I, observing, observe the same Object. Thus, we can pretend/assume/insist our observing is the same.
In this way we can pretend/assume/insist there is common reference, a reality we can know that is independent of our observing.
But, actually, we observe observing.
We contemplate observing in two ways.
When we contemplate observing an Object, we think "as if ", for we do not know there is such an Object: we create it, invent it to account for our observing, permitting our observing to be of (some thing). When we think as if, we think not of observing, but of a description of or account for our observing.
In contrast, we may contemplate our observing as our observing. While Objects are mere postulates, we give them the reality of observing: Objects are, we assert. This is the way of Western knowing. It is a useful device. Both ways of thinking are used here.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reframing Consciousness by Roy Ascott. Copyright © 1999 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Introduction,
Part I - Mind,
1 Models,
2 Memory,
3 Transcendence,
Part II – Body,
4 Post-biological Body,
5 Space and Time,
Part III – Art,
6 Strategies,
7 Projects,
8 Architecture,
9 Creative Process,
Part IV – Values,
10 Values,