eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman) (11/22/90)
In article <1990Nov17.201222.22629@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> garry@cs-sun-fsc.cpsc.ucalg ary.ca (Garry Beirne) writes: [I wrote -- and please folks, the attributions to give] ; ;> My current line of work involves what I'm calling an "auditory cyberspace." ;> It's based around some notions of consciousness, especially of temporal ;> integration & the possibilities of transmitting cognitive structure, as ;> outlined in my PhD thesis "music as secondary consciousness: an ;> implementation," which ought to be on the shelf within a few months..... ; ;Can you give us an ;example of a cognitive structure that might be useful to transmit in a ;cyberspace? Yes. Consider Tom Nagel's famous article about what it's like to be a bat -- his point, of course, was that no amount of description of echolocation can give us an idea of "what it's like" (to use the phrase that rebounbed into countless followups in scattered philosophy journals) to actually see the world in that way, since it seems now pretty clear that bats really do see auditorily: that is, the world they perceive is felt, and modelled, auditorily, in some respects to a greater degree of detail and precision than our visual world. The problem of transferring this kind of mechanism to non-bats is a bit more complicated than sonar, since you have to find some way of promoting the integration of auditory information at the appropriate level. In short, you have to transmit the facilitation of this integration. Adaptation is a simple example of such structure transmitted, since in principle it's computable, though not trivially so. I've worked on that problem. ;Do you imagine that concrete messages can be 'encoded' in these ;structures? I don't know what you mean by "concrete" and I don't know what you mean by "messages." You say things in the most direct way possible. I'm interested in things that can't be expressed by present technologies. You invent a cyberspace as I see it, in inventing such a space you are inventing objects that can be mediated in that space, and preferably only in that space since otherwise it's redundant. ;> The concept that we're "visually oriented" is shallow and, I think, probably ;> incorrect: consult any textbook of auditory disorders ... ; ;The aural component of our virtual worlds should not be treated as second class ;citizens to the visual components; as nice little special effects to enhance th e ;so-called experience. Yes, I've looked through some articles concerning sound things in VR and, I must say, I'm pretty underwhelmed. In my concept, sound isn't some special little thing to enhance vision: it's the whole thing, and I'm pretty confident that it comes closer to the neurotech interface that makes Gibson fans drool than does the visual concept. Bear in mind that the problem I'm chasing is effectively the invention & transmission of an entire sensory modality derived from hearing, not hearing in the sense of recognizing when your mouse beeps. ;> The "musical" perspective espoused by most recent musical cognitivism is ;> based on some unfortunate misunderstandings of musical history: especially ;> problematic is the notion of musical generative grammars. There is no ;> such thing, in my view; worse, I think it is detrimental any sort of thinking ;> that goes on around music to insist on the ideas od a "semantics," be they ;> emotive, significative, or pseudo linguistic. Habituation entails ;> perceptual automatization, as already James pointed out. The reliance of ;> cognitivism on previous experience is at most a pedagogical blunder, not ;> an insight into how music "works." I am looking at things that force ;> involvement ;> and map out experience, not things that are, from an intercationist ;> stance, already dead. ; ;There's a lot of stuff in this paragraph. I would be grateful for further ;illumination of your ideas about musical grammars. I'm against them. --eliot
mukesh@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Mukesh Patel) (11/29/90)
In article <11565@milton.u.washington.edu> eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Ha ndelman) writes: > > > >In article <1990Nov17.201222.22629@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> garry@cs-sun-fsc.cpsc.ucal g >ary.ca (Garry Beirne) writes: > >;> It's based around some notions of consciousness, especially of temporal >;> integration & the possibilities of transmitting cognitive structure, as >;> outlined in my PhD thesis "music as secondary consciousness: an >;> implementation," which ought to be on the shelf within a few months..... > >Yes. Consider Tom Nagel's famous article about what it's like to be a bat >-- his point, of course, was that no amount of description of echolocation >can give us an idea of "what it's like". Here's my 2 penny worth - Surely Nagel's main thrust was not merely that we dont have the ability to "see" what a bat does/can but that this would be impossible because we dont have a semantics for what it "see". So what semantics can music/sound have (other than the usually catch-all terms like romantic, tragic, etc). Mukesh Patel The University of Sussex, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Phone: +44 273 606755 x3074 JANET:mukesh@uk.ac.sussex.cogs Fax: +44 273 678188 ARPA:mukesh%cogs.sussex.ac.uk@nfsnet-relay.ac.uk
eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman) (12/02/90)
In article <12073@milton.u.washington.edu> mukesh@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Mukesh Pate l) writes: ; ;In article <11565@milton.u.washington.edu> eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot H a ;ndelman) writes: ;> ;>Yes. Consider Tom Nagel's famous article about what it's like to be a bat ;>-- his point, of course, was that no amount of description of echolocation ;>can give us an idea of "what it's like". ; ;Here's my 2 penny worth - Surely Nagel's main thrust was not merely that ;we dont have the ability to "see" what a bat does/can but that this would ;be impossible because we dont have a semantics for what it "see". So ;what semantics can music/sound have (other than the usually catch-all ;terms like romantic, tragic, etc). Nagel didn't say that "it was impossible" to know what it's like to be a bat, which is to say to visualize auditorily, and sometimes in greater detail, it seems, than we visualize visually -- he said that consciousness isn't described unless "what it's like" is brought to bear on the description; otherwise you're not describing consciousness. Music has no semantics. To hear a piece of music, by, say, Anthrax, is not equivalent to labeling this piece of music "x," where x is one of "happy, sad," etc. To analyze the hearing of a piece of music is to say "what it's like" when you hear this piece in such a way that this account is equivalent to, and can substitute for, the experience which it describes, or conveys, or transmits. Similarly for the analysis of the consciousness of a bat. The relevance of this to vr/cyberspace/hypermedia is that this transmission, almost certainly, is NOT one which feeds off the semantics of language. The answer to "what it's like" is almost certainly the transmission of this consciousness on a suitable medium. --eliot