Archive | distributed knowledge RSS feed for this archive

Substituting the Senses

20501_1

Check out this essay forthcoming from the power team of Clark, Kilverstein and Farina.

Sensory substitution devices are a type of sensory prosthesis that (typically) convert visual stimuli transduced by a camera into tactile or auditory stimulation. They are designed to be used by people with impaired vision so that they can recover some of the functions normally subserved by vision. In this chapter we will consider what philosophers might learn about the nature of the senses from the neuroscience of sensory substitution. We will show how sensory substitution devices work by exploiting the cross-modal plasticity of sensory cortex: the ability of sensory cortex to pick up some types of information about the external environment irrespective of the nature of the sensory inputs it is processing. We explore the implications of cross-modal plasticity for theories of the senses that attempt to make distinctions between the senses on the basis of neurobiology.

Leave a Comment

Sketch this: extended mind and consciousness extension

images

This from PCS

Leave a Comment

Stigmergy in Web 2.0

stigmergylogo

Here’s a recent paper.

Leave a Comment

THE WEB-EXTENDED MIND

Brain-Earth-300x182

Well, this article was inevitable - first mentioned here). Francis Heylighen has been talking about this for a few years now as has myself in discussing Hayek, distributed cognition and co-evolved mind and sociality not to mention my ongoing interest in stigmergy which I argue is a species of EM.

Abstract: This article explores the notion of the Web-extended mind, which is the idea that the technological and informational elements of the Web can sometimes serve as part of the mechanistic substrate that realizes human mental states and processes. It is argued that while current forms of the Web may not be particularly suited to the realization of Web-extended minds, new forms of user interaction technology as well as new approaches to information representation do provide promising new opportunities for Web-based forms of cognitive extension. In addition, it is suggested that extended cognitive systems often rely on the emergence of social practices and conventions that shape how a technology is used. Web-extended minds may thus depend on forms of socio-technical co-evolution in which social forces and factors play just as important a role as do the processes of technology design and development.

Keywords: cognition, cognitive extension, cognitive technology, extended mind, Internet, linked data, Web science, World Wide Web.

Leave a Comment

Stigmergic Dimensions of Online Creative Interaction

images

Uncorrected proof of final contribution to Stigmergy 3.0 line-up.

Leave a Comment

Stigmergy in Human Practice: Coordination in Construction Work

stigmergy

The latest in press article from the special issue.

Leave a Comment

Recognizing group cognition

s13890417

The penultimate paper to the CSR EM issue by the super team of Theiner, Allen and Goldstone.

Leave a Comment

Stigmergy 3.0: From Ants to Economies

S13890417

Marge and my intro now available as an uncorrected proof. Stay tuned for the rest of the papers comprising this special issue.

According to Andy Clark “[M]uch of what goes on in the complex world of humans, may thus, somewhat surprisingly, be understood in terms of so-called stigmergic algorithms” (Clark, 1996, p. 279; 1997, p. 186). Pierre-Paul Grassé, the brilliant mind who first conceptualized the notion probably wouldn’t disagree (Grassé, 1959). Grassé was as much a zoologist as he was an entomologist. Under his editorship the monumental (17-volume) Traité de Zoologie, Anatomie, Systématique, Biologie was guided.

Leave a Comment

The Spatial Market Process

1529-2134

My chum David Emanuel Andersson has just had this edited collection published. Here is an excerpt from his intro:

In what is perhaps the best-known article in the history of the Austrian school, Friedrich Hayek (1945) asserts that market prices distill and thus reflect the unique local knowledge of a multitude of individuals, each of whom resides and works in a particular place. Because only an autonomously acting individual can take advantage of her unique creativity, skills, and personal connections to others, centralization of economic decisionmaking guarantees that much useful local knowledge is irretrievably lost. It is impossible to communicate the totality of all local entrepreneurial ideas and tacit knowledge to a small group of top-down planners; their cognitive limitations guarantee substandard economic performance (Hayek, 1952). We should therefore not be surprised that it is valuable to possess ‘‘knowledge of people, of local conditions, and special circumstances’’ (Hayek, 1945, p. 522). Given the great number of citations to Hayek (1945) in the general economics literature, it would require no great stretch of the imagination to imagine that Hayek – and by extension the Austrian school – had set in motion a way of theorizing about economic phenomena that later gave rise to theories about knowledge spillovers, urbanization economies, and local social networks. But this was not to be. There are virtually no references to Hayek or any other Austrian economist in the spatial economics literature prior to the year 2000. The lack of interest in Austrian economics among spatial economists was reciprocated by a similar lack of interest in spatial economics among self-professed Austrians. To my knowledge, Pierre Desrochers (1998) wrote the first explicitly Austrian contribution that deals exclusively with spatial economic phenomena. In spite of this historical disconnect, Austrian ideas have entered the spatial economics, economic geography, and urban planning literatures because of the close parallels between the influential ideas of the urbanist Jane Jacobs and Austrian market process theory. While Jacobs (1961) does not refer to Hayek or any other Austrian, her Death and Life of Great American Cities at times reads like an Austrian theory of urban planning: [N]obody, including the planning commission, is capable of comprehending places within the city other than in either generalized or fragmented fashion. They do not even have the means of gathering and comprehending the intimate, many-sided information required, partly because of their own unsuitable structural inadequacies in other departments. Here is an interesting thing about coordination both of information and of action in cities, and it is the crux of the matter: The principal coordination needed comes down to coordination among different services within localized places. This is at once the most difficult kind of coordination, and the most necessary. (Jacobs, 1961, quoted in Ikeda, 2006, p. 22) With her emphases on (implicit) methodological individualism, the importance of local knowledge, and complex evolving orders, Jacobs provides a rich source of insights for those who wish to combine Austrian economic theory with a dynamic approach to agglomeration economies. Such a dynamic approach focuses on entrepreneurial processes rather than on idealized equilibrium states. Unsurprisingly, both Hayek and Jacobs figure prominently in this volume. But they are far from the only influences. This book is a collection of 13 essays that address spatial aspects of the market process from refreshingly diverse approaches. They range from the extension of Austrian theory to spatial phenomena over hybrid combinations of ideas from distinct traditions to state-of-the-art spatial models that integrate Austrian concepts such as ‘‘roundaboutness’’ or entrepreneurial innovation.

Leave a Comment

Towards an externalist neuroeconomics

npe-150

Here is a recent paper kindly brought to my attention by the author.

To achieve the aim of establishing the case for externalist neuroeconomics, I rely on other approaches to externalism in the cognitive sciences which focus on the role of external causal processes establishing mental phenomena in terms of interactions between neuronal states and external facts. These approaches are to be found in the growing literature on “distributed cognition” or the “extended mind” (e.g., Clark, 2011; Hutchins, 1995; Hutchins, 2005; Sterelny, 2004; Ross, Spurrett, Kincaid, & Stephens, 2007; for a critical view, see, e.g., Sprevak, 2009). In this literature, the operations of the human mind are seen as being fundamentally dependent on external facts, referring not only to the obvious role of devices which leverage cognitive skills, but more fundamentally to the externalization of all cognitive processes in the sense that cognitive performance essentially involves the external world and includes both physical entities and social interaction. Therefore, a straightforward sketch of an externalist approach that is different from the externalism of standard economics is possible. This would offer a fresh view on neuroeconomics (for a related argument, see Wilcox, 2008). In this view, if one continued to use the term “utility” in explaining human choice, “utility” would not correspond exclusively to a neuronal state in a neuro-reductionist approach, but to a causal conjunction between a neuronal state and an external fact.

Leave a Comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 215 other followers