The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
Telepath Tactics is being funded on Kickstarter and I really, really want it to succeed so go give the guy your money. The Telepath series has been around since… wow, 2006, and it’s pretty impressive to see the improvement between instalments. The creator’s blog has a lot of good content, actually, particularly under the design principles and game development tags.
Anyway, the link in the title will take you to a post where the creator explains all the currently planned classes for the game. I like the sounds of it, so go take a look if you’re interested in stuff like balance in RPGs. I’d like to see what he could do with a decent budget, honestly, so I hope this campaign goes well.
[This is an essay I put together for a philosophy of mind class. It’s probably not a good philosophy essay, but it’s still a philosophy essay - you’ve been warned. It’s sort of esoteric, but I kind of like it. This was written at the end of our first (of three) units, which was about identifying what exactly the mind is, what it would mean to have one, and so on. We were given a specific structure to follow: first section describe the author’s views, second section give your criticisms, and third section try to modify the author’s idea to be immune to your criticism. I’ve kept the same format because the transition between the seconds is just impossible to smooth out.
The topic I was responding to was “the mark of the mental” - trying to identify what belongs in the mind, and what doesn’t. Descartian dualists like this question because they want to know what’s part of the mind, and what’s just part of the physical body. But it’s also something that would allow us to identify when a creature has a mind. If we decide that expressing sadness is only possible with real cognition, and a computer program expresses something we’d call sadness - we have to say that computer is conscious.
Katalin Farkas proposed that the only things that are part of the mind are those we can introspect on (and that no one else can introspect on). So your belief that this essay is going to be boring is a mental phenomenon, because no one else can introspect on that. But can you introspect without verbal thought? Can bees introspect? You’ll see what I have to say about that in section two.]
In The Subject’s Point of View, Katalin Farkas sets out to propose a solution to the problem of the mark of the mental – one unifying feature for all mental phenomena. Her answer relies on the special access introspection grants us to our mental phenomena. In short, the things that we can know through introspection (and that no one else can know about us through introspection) comprise the contents of our minds. Farkas extends this to include whole categories, rather than individual instances of them – for example, all beliefs are mental. This includes beliefs we may not consciously be able to reflect on, or beliefs held by beings unable to introspect (such as animals). Following this train of thought, Farkas proposes that anything identified as a mental feature of human minds can be used to identify non-human minds – even those with no powers of introspection.
Farkas explicitly distances herself from claims that introspection is infallible (Farkas, 24), and accepts so-called standing states as part of the mind because they are accessible to introspection (Farkas, 43-44). The fact that someone might receive incorrect or incomplete knowledge of their mind, in theory, has no effect on her proposal. It’s intended as a tool for identifying things that are mental, special and separate in some way from things that are “merely bodily” (Farkas, 35). Its role as an epistemic tool for acquiring knowledge is an entirely separate issue, so the difficulties present for introspective knowledge are largely irrelevant to the mark of the mental.
Farkas also acknowledges a necessarily human perspective on our philosophy of the mind. However, her view is that once we have identified which sorts of things are mental in humans, we can look for them in other creatures to determine whether they have a mind (Farkas, 44). This mind may be lesser in some way than our own minds, but provided it exhibits some of the things we discover through introspection, it qualifies as a mind. How we might investigate these mental processes in creatures incapable of introspection, or at least incapable of communicating with human language, is up for debate.
The mark of the mental is intended to capture a “common sense” conception of the mind (Crane, 2), which would generally extend to family pets and other animals. We’re likely to say that our pets desire certain things, or have basic sorts of beliefs; and so Farkas provides a mark of the mental that accommodates these intuitive judgements on what has a mind, and what does not. This extends the possession of a mind to creatures with weaker abilities than those Farkas possesses herself. However, one thing that Farkas fails to consider is minds that have greater abilities than her own – some of the things that are a part of their minds may be entirely outside what we can introspect. This is the objection I intend to develop in the next section.
One doesn’t have to look far for examples of minds with abilities outside those considered by Farkas. Animals may have mental capabilities completely foreign to the human mind – one example is spatial memory in honeybees, an ability which allows them to solve the infamously difficult “travelling salesman problem” (Lihoreau, Chittka, & Raine, 2010). Even closer to home, autism advocate Temple Grandin frequently speaks about the ways in which the autistic mind differs from the “neurotypical” mind, such as their ability to think visually rather than verbally (Grandin, 2010). Bees, given the complexity of their behaviour, surely have some sort of mind. And autistic people, unquestionably, have minds. Yet the character of these minds, the nature of their thoughts and desires, even the nature of their introspection, is likely so different as to require a wholly separate vocabulary. The systems developed in philosophy of mind are, by and large, developed by what Grandin calls “verbal minds.” Farkas proposes that introspection should serve as the mark of the mental for all minds, without considering different types of minds – all she considers is weaker minds of the same sort the “average” human has.
Farkas requires that for something to be a mental feature, it must be “available to conscious acts of reflection” (Farkas, 44). The way that Farkas characterizes reflection, however, has more bias than just the anthropocentric one she admits. Introspection in a verbal human mind could be entirely different from the introspection of an imagistic mind. An imagistic mind may not even be capable of introspecting things that have no visual component, which comprises a large portion of what Farkas considers as part of the “mental realm”, such as beliefs and attitudes (Farkas, 22). Considering non-verbal variants of “the mental realm” raises the criteria for a single, unifying mark of the mental. Not only could some mental features unique to imagistic minds be “unconscious”, as Farkas considers in sections 2.2 and 2.3, but fundamentally inaccessible by introspection. The default definition of introspection relies on linguistic terms. Non-verbal mental features would escape a classification of “mental” which relies on this definition.
A reply to this objection that preserves introspection as the mark of the mental is difficult, as it deals directly with the limits of the term “introspection.” If introspection can’t be used to access the entire possible scope of the mental realm, then it couldn’t serve as the mark of the mental. If the term “introspection” can be extended to include the thought processes of non-verbal minds, then it would still serve as an appropriate mark of the mental. The number of ways in which it would have to be extended appears limitless, however – there are likely more possible sorts of minds than we can even imagine.
Not only that, but as someone with a distinctly verbal mind, I’m likely unqualified to speculate on the nature of imagistic minds. Not to mention minds that think in terms of space-time, or scents and hormones, or subtle interactions of taste and touch, or any number of things I can’t even begin to conceive. However, the general principle of extending the term “introspection” remains the same: Consider what is meant by verbal introspection, and then look for a way to define it in a new modality. The challenge of this defence is not only conceptualizing a different sort of mind, but how to properly explain and illustrate it for others. We may find, in the end, that we’ve come so far from the original meaning of “introspect” that a whole new word is required, which could then safely serve as the mark of the mental in the system Farkas proposes.
Crane, Tim. (2010). Elements of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Farkas, Katalin. (2008). Subject’s Point of View, The. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 October 2011, from http://lib.myilibrary.com.proxy.library.carleton.ca?ID=182555
Grandin, T. (2010, February). Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds [Video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html
Lihoreau, M., Chittka, L., & Raine, N. E. (2010). Travel Optimization by Foraging Bumblebees through Readjustments of Traplines after Discovery of New Feeding Locations. The American Naturalist , 176 (6), 744-757.
I have this really, terrible habit of writing incredibly long e-mails. They’re as long, if not longer, than my blog posts. This is something I’ve done since junior high, and I’ve essentially never gotten the hang of writing short e-mails. I apologize for the length, I edit to remove junk, and they still wind up being huge. To the recipients of these e-mails over the years: I’m sorry! It just happens!
I was trying to come up with an excuse, and I had a really brilliant thought: I write e-mails the same way I write letters. I sit down, I try to fill them with everything I wanted to say, and then I send them off with the intention of taking a bit of time before the next reply. It used to be that I didn’t have notifications for new e-mails, so it was something I only checked every once in a while - so it feels like I need to have all the information there in the original message. Even now that I have notifications, and I can get updates to an e-mail thread in Gmail without even refreshing the page, I still have a hard time thinking of e-mails as a fast form of communication.
Instant messaging feels much more free, like a slowed down version of a face-to-face conversation. I speak in sentences rather than paragraphs. I like being able to take the time to figure out what I’m going to say; I’ve never felt comfortable saying “hang on, I need to stare into space for a few minutes while I decide how to answer your question so I don’t stick my foot in my mouth”. I… really don’t think people do that, even though an internet advice article said it was okay. At any rate, I do a lot of instant messaging and I’ve always loved having quick, easy contact with my friends while I’m doing other things on my computer. For a while, I guarantee I had more IM conversations than I spoke to people in person.
What I’m getting at is, there seem to be analogues between how I treat digital communication and more primitive things. The interesting bit is how much the ability to send offline messages changes the situation. I suppose they’re like the phone call, if IM is like a conversation face-to-face, because it doesn’t require both people to be in the same place (but they do require you to be around at the same time; I can’t think of a better analogy, if only because nobody checks their voice mail anymore) Calling someone on the phone to tell them something you just thought of seems so… primitive by comparison. They have to be available at the exact same time you are, and you’re potentially disrupting something because there’s no way to know what they’re doing at the moment. Offline messages can be sent whenever you want, and read whenever the recipient wants, and they don’t carry the long-form expectations I personally have of e-mail. If nothing else, I don’t need to think of a title for the message, which is always a challenge with e-mails.
When Facebook chat was merely IM, I didn’t see the point of it - I rarely spend more than a few minutes at a time on Facebook, and I only visit a few times per day. I’d get ambushed by people I didn’t really talk to when I logged in, and it sucked because I got tired of being a jerk and saying every time “sorry, don’t have time to talk right now”. But now that they’ve merged the chat with messages, it’s actually become my primary method for IM. To the best of my knowledge, AIM and Xfire don’t support offline messages, and those are where I have most of my other conversations. When I have a link or something IM-worthy, I can send it over Facebook and the conversation tends to stay there rather than moving somewhere there’s less surveillance. Not to mention the people who don’t feel the need for dedicated IM now that they have Facebook messaging, which is a totally valid option, just like not everyone needs to use IRC.
The one downside to offline messages on Facebook are that they’ve hidden away little artifacts that used to land on people’s walls. The other day, a friend of mine discovered Facebook’s “view friendship” feature - with the Timeline update, you can give your friendship a cover photo, provide a picture and a story for the first time you met, and it’s like the best photo album ever. There’s all these little pieces of conversations we were having that continued after the other person had logged out, full of references to games we’ve long forgotten about playing and jokes that are still pretty funny. But it’s all old stuff, from before Facebook messages existed as an alternative. And when I look at the page for my friendships with some other people, the amount of activity just doesn’t reflect how close we are. That’s perfectly fine right now, but it’s a missed opportunity for reminiscing in a few years.
Anyway, I’m not sure there’s some grand thesis for me to argue for here. I just thought it was really illuminating to think about the influences of older forms of communication, and the expectations and norms that go with them, on more modern ones. It’s a relationship that goes both ways, too, though I’m mostly happy to discard phone calls, sending letters, and physical photo albums as entirely inferior to the alternatives. But I can say for sure that I’ve started to really appreciate actually spending time with people, in a way I’m not sure I would if I expected all interaction to be face-to-face. IM isn’t exclusive, though after a certain point it’s hard to manage a lot of high-volume conversations at once. But hanging out with someone is, and that means there’s nothing they’d rather do with that time than spend it with you, and I think that’s important.
But not the sixth sense you’re thinking of. Instead, the Northpaw gives people a natural sense of which direction is north at any given time - and from there gives them knowledge of all the compass directions.
I never gave much thought to compass directions for navigating anywhere other than the middle of a forest, until I met a few people in Ottawa who navigate by cardinal directions. I’m so used to GPS directions, as a driver, that I just give directions like that. “Turn left on Main Street, go past three sets of lights, turn right on Water Street,” etc. They want me to say “go east on Main Street, go past three sets of lights, then go south on Water Street” or something like that. Unfortunately for them, this doesn’t make any sense to me and I really can’t understand directions like that - much less give them. So from that perspective, I find the Northpaw pretty interesting.
But what really makes me interested is how the principle could be extended. What kind of information could you convey to people in a tactile way? The first thing that comes to mind is the passing of time. I have a pretty bad sense of time, so when I was working on papers near the end of the semester last spring, I tried the Pomodoro technique (aided by Workrave, actually). After a few days, I started wanting to take breaks every hour, even getting a bit antsy a few minutes before the hour. It turned into a natural rhythm, but it didn’t really stick after I turned off the timer. So I’m wondering, if you had something like the Northpaw that buzzed strongly on the hour and weakly on the half hour (possibly a faint buzz for quarters of an hour?) - would you develop a natural sense of time? I think so.
You could probably implement this on your phone (Tasker seems like the obvious choice on Android) I guess, but I often miss slight vibrations from my phone, and it needs to reliable. On the other hand, modern cell phones aren’t huge and bulky like the Northpaw is (though I do understand their design, I imagine it would be noticeable through your clothes).
I’m having a really hard time thinking of what kind of information would be useful to have on a constant basis, aside from time passing or compass directions. Most information along the lines of, say, getting a new e-mail can’t really be improved above what smartphones already do. The important idea here is that the information is constantly available and eventually becomes second-nature, just like your other kinesthetic senses. But if you’ve got any brilliant ideas, let me know so I can steal them! Just kidding, I don’t have time to implement my own idea, much less yours.
I don’t know if this will go out via RSS or be visible on Tumblr or anything, but there’s no proper URL for my tumblr at the moment. I tried to change matthewdarling.com to point to lamattgrind.tumblr.com - I hoped they would both exist concurrently, but no such luck. I didn’t want to mess with anyone who had lamattgrind.tumblr.com for its RSS feed or bookmarked or whatever, so I undid the change, but it’s taking a bit to readjust.
Oops. Lesson learned. Will try to setup a some sort of invisible redirect from matthewdarling.com to lamattgrind.tumblr.com, instead.
