I Dare you to Philosophize about Machine Embodiment!

INPUT:

Topic: Basic concepts: Body image and body schema, etc.
Date: Saturday, January 23, 2010
Subject: machine analogies

I am thinking about how the body image and body schema distinction relates to my study of the nonhuman part of cyberspace. It seems in the world of engineered systems, the body image includes procedures and software data structures represented in human readable source code, such as variables, class definitions, data base field contents, and so on, that are the conscious object of active code work; the body schema is the overall physical technology system integration project product embodying cyberspace, which includes other programmed systems, electronic circuits, communications systems, and so on. Thus while comprehension of parts of the body schema can be intended for a subsystem that is the object of software development activities, comprehension of the entire environment, such as if it is entirely comprised of open protocols implemented in free, open source software, on open hardware platforms, is impossible and unnecessary for cyberspace to work, but nevertheless does have a contingent structure amenable to analysis. This is an underlying assumption of software studies and critical code studies. Does this make sense?


Topic: Basic concepts: Body image and body schema, etc.
Date: Saturday, January 23, 2010
Subject: Re:machine analogies Author: Gallagher Shaun

There are probably better metaphors to use in order to talk about cyberspace. I'm not sure that using the schema/image distinction does much work in that context.

Do you think that in some way cyberspace has a kind of subjectivity? Body schema and body image are terms that in some way relate to subjective experience -- the body schema in some way shaping our experience of the world; the body image as the way that we experience our body.

SG

OUTPUT:

Gallagher challenges me to describe machine subjectivity in cyberspace. I respond with a logical argument. First, let me define cyberspace as TCP/IP version 4 inter networked binary stored program fetch and execute electronic computing machinery; this accounts for at least 80, if not closer to 99 percent of nonhuman cyberspace. Why not all of cyberspace? Because we assume cyberspace is a human and nonhuman interactivity. It is multipurposive, simultaneous, synergetic, highly correlated, statistically interpretable, quantifiable, enumerable phenomena. So can we agree that cyberspace has human and nonhuman components, and focus on the nonhuman components, that we have identified as PHI (that is, TCP/IP version 4 inter networked binary stored program fetch and execute electronic computing machinery)? If so, then the argument continues. Remember, we are responding to Gallagher's comment and challenge to better articulate our argument. He is a philosopher and no doubt a fine logician. But is he a programmer? How would you find better metaphors than to start with what we know, the human? Begin with the universally quantified, second order well formed formula that cyberspace is made up of human and nonhuman components, that that for the human components embodiment is important. For all x, if x is cyberspace then there is some y such that y is a component of x that is human or, or y is a component of x that is nonhuman. How do we symbolize the embodiment being important to y? Gallagher is asking for subjectivity; I am suggesting a design problem for artificial intelligence, how to make it.
A very specific case of simulation expresses uncertainty as to the utility of simulating versus effecting a physical, real, non virtual process, yet it is the best we can do with our meager understanding of how cyberspace works and (or) what cyberspace is. How would cyberspace intelligence become aware of its body as PHI? Starting with the human body image body schema distinction, apply the same analysis to PHI. For each aspect (TCP/IP version 4 protocols, C/C++ programming, electronic circuits) think about what would be the body image, that which it can learn about itself and perceive, and the body schema, that which controls its actions and ideas, about which it can become conscious, the area Zizek defines as unknown knowns. We subject it to the ontology prescribed by our embodiment as human beings. Has enough of the argument been made? I would rather concentrate on coding. When we posit what nonhuman cyberspace consciousness may be like, of course we subject it to the ontology prescribed by our own embodiment as humans. To me this is sufficient to fall into the appeal for making the comparison across human and machine domains of the terms body image and body schema. Yet I do not think it is communicating enough of an argument for it to be what Garson called “knock down, drag out.”