Privileging exploratory hands: prehension, apprehension, comprehension

Through our hands we construct our world and through our construction of our world we construct ourselves. We reach with our hands and touch with our hands, and with this reaching and touching we come to understand how things feel and are. It is not an utterable knowledge, yet it is knowing the world in a dynamically-engaged affective, effective way. Through affective feedback our reaching and touching be- comes a prehensive grasping which leads, through the enkinaesthetic givenness of the agent with its world, to a situated and embodied knowing, and the rudiments of apprehension. With each fresh comprehension a new enkinaesthetic enquiry is engendered; with each enquiry we have afresh the anticipatory dynam- ics of reaching, touching and feeling, with the hand-to-object of world-investigation, the hand-to-body of auto-investigation and investigating the Other

The mindsized mashup mind isn’t supersized after all

I rather like Andy Clark’s book, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, but it certainly hasn’t put my mind at rest. As always Clark’s writing is uncomplicated and energetic, managing to make everything, from the physiology of the moving body, through an analysis of the scaffolding role, he maintains is, played by language, to the strategic use of representation, computation and control by the biological brain, both intelligible and interesting. And I have a great deal of sympathy with his main thesis: that we must consider the whole body, rather than merely the brain, as the locus where sensing and acting are synthesized and through which cognitive systems can engage with their world. But still I find that I have a couple of rather fundamental reservations, alongside a number of ancillary comments that arise from my own puzzlement with some – of what can at first glance seem – disarmingly simple claims

Privileging exploratory hands: prehension, apprehension, comprehension

Through our hands we construct our world and through our construction of our world we construct ourselves. We reach with our hands and touch with our hands, and with this reaching and touching we come to understand how things feel and are. It is not an utterable knowledge, yet it is knowing the world in a dynamically-engaged affective, effective way. Through affective feedback our reaching and touching be- comes a prehensive grasping which leads, through the enkinaesthetic givenness of the agent with its world, to a situated and embodied knowing, and the rudiments of apprehension. With each fresh comprehension a new enkinaesthetic enquiry is engendered; with each enquiry we have afresh the anticipatory dynam- ics of reaching, touching and feeling, with the hand-to-object of world-investigation, the hand-to-body of auto-investigation and investigating the Other

Conscious machines: memory, melody and muscular imagination

A great deal of effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to developing consciousness artificially (A small selection of the many authors writing in this area includes: Cotterill (J Conscious Stud 2:290–311, 1995, 1998), Haikonen (2003), Aleksander and Dunmall (J Conscious Stud 10:7–18, 2003), Sloman (2004, 2005), Aleksander (2005), Holland and Knight (2006), and Chella and Manzotti (2007)), and yet a similar amount of effort has gone in to demonstrating the infeasibility of the whole enterprise (Most notably: Dreyfus (1972/1979, 1992, 1998), Searle (1980), Harnad (J Conscious Stud 10:67–75, 2003), and Sternberg (2007), but there are a great many others). My concern in this paper is to steer some navigable channel between the two positions, laying out the necessary pre-conditions for consciousness in an artificial system, and concentrating on what needs to hold for the system to perform as a human being or other phenomenally conscious agent in an intersubjectively-demanding social and moral environment. By adopting a thick notion of embodiment—one that is bound up with the concepts of the lived body and autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980; Varela et al. 2003; and Ziemke 2003, 2007a, J Conscious Stud 14(7):167–179, 2007b)—I will argue that machine phenomenology is only possible within an embodied distributed system that possesses a richly affective musculature and a nervous system such that it can, through action and repetition, develop its tactile-kinaesthetic memory, individual kinaesthetic melodies pertaining to habitual practices, and an anticipatory enactive kinaesthetic imagination. Without these capacities the system would remain unconscious, unaware of itself embodied within a world. Finally, and following on from Damasio’s (1991, 1994, 1999, 2003) claims for the necessity of pre-reflective conscious, emotional, bodily responses for the development of an organism’s core and extended consciousness, I will argue that without these capacities any agent would be incapable of developing the sorts of somatic markers or saliency tags that enable affective reactions, and which are indispensable for effective decision-making and subsequent survival. My position, as presented here, remains agnostic about whether or not the creation of artificial consciousness is an attainable goal

Privileging information is inevitable

Libraries, archives and museums have long collected physical materials and other artefacts. In so doing they have established formal or informal policies defining what they will (and will not) collect. We argue that these activities by their very nature privilege some information over others and that the appraisal that underlies this privileging is itself socially constructed. We do not cast this in a post-modernist or negative light, but regard a clear understanding of it as fact and its consequences as crucial to understanding what collections are and what the implications are for the digital world. We will argue that in the digital world it is much easier for users to construct their own collections from a combination of resources, some privileged and curated by information professionals and some privileged by criteria that include the frequency with which other people link to and access them. We conclude that developing these ideas is an important part of placing the concept of a digital or hybrid paper/digital library on a firm foundation and that information professionals need to learn from each other, adopting elements of a variety of different approaches to describing and exposing information. A failure to do this will serve to push information professional towards the margins of the information seekers perspective

Enkinaesthesia, biosemiotics and the ethiosphere

The dynamic plenisentient interrelation of agent and world is specified in kinaesthetic terms. Kinaes-thetic activity, with its temporal-spatial-energic qualities, is always affectively-laden, and through the formation of intercorporeal resonances, the activity necessitates enkinaesthetic entwining with those agents with whom, and those objects with which, we are in relations of perpetual community. I will argue that the capacity for enkinaesthetic dialogue is an a priori nomological condition for agency and the generation of a felt anticipatory dynamics both within and between agents. Enkinaesthesia emphasizes not just the neuromuscular dynamics of the agent, that is, the givenness and ownership of its experience but also the entwined, blended and situated co-affective feeling of the presence of the other (agential and non-agential alike) and, where appropriate, the enkinaesthetically anticipated arc of the other’s action or movement, including, again where appropriate, the other’s intentionality. The ‘other’ can be sensing and experiencing agents and it is their affective intentional reciprocity, their folding, enfolding and unfolding, which co-constitutes the conscious relation and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of integral enkinaesthetic structures and melodies. Such deeply felt enkinaesthetic melodies emphasise the dia- logical nature of the feeling of being as the feeling of being-with or being-among, and demonstrate the paucity of individuating notions that treat agents as singular. Enkinaesthesia, as the openness to and reception of myriad subtle multi-drectional cues in dialogical relations, provides grounds for saying, following Heidegger, that it is this which constitutes the pri- mordial mood of care for human relationships and the deep roots of morality. If this is the case, then we might think of it as composing an ‘ethiosphere’ consistent with the semiosphere and the biosphere as presented by Hoffmeyer [1995 and 2008]

Enkinaesthesia: the fundamental challenge for machine consciousness

In this short paper I will introduce an idea which, I will argue, presents a fundamental additional challenge to the machine consciousness community. The idea takes the questions surrounding phenomenology, qualia and phenomenality one step further into the realm of intersubjectivity but with a twist, and the twist is this: that an agent’s intersubjective experience is deeply felt and necessarily co-affective; it is enkinaesthetic, and only through enkinaesthetic awareness can we establish the affective enfolding which enables first the perturbation, and then the balance and counter-balance, the attunement and co-ordination of whole-body interaction through reciprocal adaptation

An Electronically Enhanced Philosophical Learning Environment: Who Wants to be Good at Logic

No abstract available