williamb@milton.u.washington.edu (William Bricken) (05/20/91)
Here are some comments to amplify Randy Farmer's very diplomatic
posting on 2ndCyberSpace:
Damn it, Cyberspace *is* a technical subject. No one should have to
apologize for sharing the technical details, that is what conferences
are all about. And good cross-disciplinary papers at Cyberspace
conferences will enhance our knowledge both of our central interest in
the virtual and of a speciality domain which intersects with the
virtual.
My puzzlement at 2ndCyberspace was "How come no one is talking about
the same thing?" Why was *the virtual* so different across
disciplines?
Is cyberspace really so amorphous that it readily incorporates models
of society as mummies? So ill-conceived that it is defined by some
minor characters in a small work of science fiction? So ambiguous
that photos of the Iraq war combine with clips from a Walt Disney
movie to anchor its essence?
This is what I tell my Virtual World Development class: If you are not
an implementer, you must express your worlds formally in order to be
understood.
Try this example: Imagine a virtual cube in space. Grab a pair of
diagonal vertices with each virtual hand and pull. What happens?
The point is that the answer is not consensual. Strongly held
intuitions vary across people. What happens is task dependent. What
happens is idiosyncratic. What happens is computational.
A common ground for what happens can be negotiated across
participants. Negotiation requires a common language, but the
*computational process* implementing cyberspace constrains the choice
of languages.
Which is to say: If you want to talk about cyberspace, and hope to
make sense, then you must be prepared to talk mathematically. (Yes, I
believe programming is specified by mathematics, in its broadest and
most intimately imperfect sense.)
The painted-into-a-corner test: Can a literary or social critic say
anything about cyberspace?
1) An existing cyberspace could be evaluated as a literary experience.
It would have been great to see Virtual Seattle analyzed for dramatic
tension.
2) Responses to cyberspace experiences could be described
sociologically. It would have been great to see the 200+ VR articles
analyzed for ethnic biases.
3) Cocktail party stories about cyberspace could be criticized
literarily. It would have been great to know just how much
misinformation is embodied in the urban folklore of cyberspace.
If "cyberspace" is defined as all media and all literature and all
imagination and all sorts of things, then let's meet after the circus
to talk about the work. If it is not all things to all people, then
let's define taxonomies, let's focus on communal definition of what it
is that we are spending our lives building.
What we heard a lot of at 2ndCyberspace was contempory criticism of
<fill-in-the-blank>, and that fill-in-the-blank happened to be
"cyberspace". The philosophical position was more important than the
content, so it really didn't matter if we didn't develop a group
understanding of cyberspace, so long as our politics matched.
Now, I believe that cyberspace is something to be explored and
experienced. Something that will require conceptual pioneering, to
dwell, to learn, to report. I believe that the cyberspace is more
important than current theories of criticism, that it will redefine
criticism as we explore it. We really need information, not analysis.
I'd suggest focusing the content of the next conference on the
definition and mutual understanding of the subject matter. The
central idea is a convergence of vocabulary; the important point is
that presented papers should help the convergence by paying particular
attention to the *intersection* of fields.
Here is one possibility:
DEFINITIONS
Cyberspace:
electronically mediated experience.
Virtual Reality:
broad bandwidth first-person participation in cyberspace.
Artificial Reality:
third-person virtual reality.
Virtual Worlds:
virtual reality configured and presented for natural perception.
Virtual Body/Virtual Environment:
the coupled subjective/objective components of virtual worlds.
Presence:
the goodness measure of experience in cyberspace
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS
Participant:
environmentally interactive sentience.
Inclusion:
subjective experience of environmental closure.
Information:
comprehendible symbolic structure.
Using this vocabulary, cyberspace is electronic information which
mediates by inclusion the experience of participants; it is being
inside symbolic structure.
William Brickeneliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman) (05/22/91)
In article <1991May20.090324.9906@milton.u.washington.edu> williamb@milton.u.was hington.edu (William Bricken) writes: ; ; ; ;Damn it, Cyberspace *is* a technical subject. No one should have to ;apologize for sharing the technical details, that is what conferences ;are all about. Damn it, how soon we forget. Cyberspace *is* Gibson's metaphor for the universe of communication. The technical implementation of cyberspace, if you mean the neurotechnical interface, is potentially eons away, and the technical implementation of virtual reality is hardly in the same league as the much greater question, what to do with the damned thing. And that is not so much a "technical" issue as a problem of extending the imagination, inventing new strictures of information and experience that go beyond our presently impoverished concepts of the nature of any reality at all. The "hand in your face" concept of virtual reality is, after all, just one of many possible ways of enclosing a subject in a computer-generated universe, and probably not one of the more interesting ways.
williamb@milton.u.washington.edu (William Bricken) (05/23/91)
I posted the commentary on 2ndCyberspace to initiate a discussion of what it is that we are consensually hallucinating about. So here goes: In article <1991May22.185610.4614@milton.u.washington.edu> eliot@phoenix.princet on.edu (Eliot Handelman) writes: >Damn it, how soon we forget. Cyberspace *is* Gibson's metaphor for the >universe of communication. I am not a Gibson scholar. I disagree with the above generalization. >From reading the Gibson books, he seems to be presenting a fantasy of neural interface to digital data which is experienced as a reality. The universe of communication includes real world interaction. My goal, however, is to identify just what is meant by terms like "universe of communication". Where are the delimiters which make the concept comprehendible? What is *not* cyberspace? >The technical implementation of cyberspace, >if you mean the neurotechnical interface, is potentially eons away, There is a community of folks currently implementing cyberspace. No, we do not know a symbolic structure for biological cognition. I personally do not believe such a structure exists (see Putnam's Representation and Reality). Is it possible to talk about Cyberspace from a perspective of actual work in the field? >and the technical implementation of virtual reality is hardly in >the same league as the much greater question, what to do with the >damned thing. And that is not so much a "technical" issue as a problem >of extending the imagination, inventing new strictures of information >and experience that go beyond our presently impoverished concepts of >the nature of any reality at all. I believe that the technical implementation is tightly coupled to questions like what it is and what can we do with it. To be redundant: Just what is the *it* that we are doing something with? Neurotechnical linkage? (no) Science fiction stories? (no) Implementations? (perhaps). Implementation is the byproduct of generative theory building, a methodology which expects you to be able to demonstrate what you are talking about. In all the implementations I have been involved with, extending the imagination, defining new strictures, and studying closely the apparent nature of reality is a central focus. It's just that in a realm as treacherous as metaphysics, we have found it necessary to be as clear as possible, in particular to express ideas as implementations and then to experientially validate the ideas within the VR implementation. I believe that the new strictures will arise out of experience within implementations. What is irritating is hearing various parties expound the rules and limitations and character of cyberspace without direct experience in VR. The choice of the word "stricture" (an abnormal narrowing) is apt. I believe that cyberspace has laws. If we can find consensus that cyberspace is expressed computationally, then we know where to look for constraint: cyberspace is digital and algorithmic. One of the first things you learn from watching many people experience VR is that cyberspace is a relation between a sentience and an algorithm. Physical reality is a similar relation, between a sentience and a set of laws. VR provides the first tool of metaphysics, it permits us to ask comparative questions between two relations, coming to a more eclectic notion of reality. I share Eliot's apparent desire to find more satisfactory definitions of reality. The central problem is that *representation*, particularly in the form of words, abstracts reality, and that abstraction denies reality (see Korzybski, Spencer-Brown, Watts). So I have a great difficulty finding guidance about the nature of reality from streams of tokens. Fortunately, VR provides access to experience that both has a digital substrate and does not require linear symbolism. This dual capability (transparent representation) allows us to experiment with symbolic experience, to form new regimes of semantics. So that's my response to "what to do with the damned thing". Define it as what exists, and use that as a tool to guide us to an understanding of the reality of the virtual. As we construct different generative theories, new ways to in-form, we can explore the new possibilities. So, a final lobbying effort: Programs are words, science fiction is words, discussion is words. Which words describe cyberspace? If cyberspace is electronically mediated experience, then we must minimally address the words that constitute the electronic implementation. More directly: It is the words of the implementation which define what we can experience as cyberspace. Words that are not implementations can guide the construction of implementations to the extent that they are stated formally. william