Property:AnnotationComment
A
a linguistic message, under any circumstances, can be interpreted only in terms of the receiver’s experience. +
I submit that whatever one might choose as the measure of justification, plausibility, or correctness when one is concerned with literary interpretation lies beyond the realm of linguistic competence (which is taken for granted as prerequisite) and involves relations one establishes between the conceptual structures called forth by the text and the conceptual network that constitutes one’s own experiential world. These relations, by definition, are subjective, in the sense that they cannot connect anything but the reader’s own conceptual structures with the reader’s own experiential world. +
and again, any such adaptation and abstraction must be based on the individual construction of patterns of concepts and actions which turn out to be compatible with actions and reactions of other users of the language. +
It is important to realize that the compatibility of two items does not entail their identity. +
At the beginning of the 18th century, Giambattista Vico formulated a constructivist epistemology by saying that humans can know only what humans can construct. +
“Shut the door!,” for instance, must be responded to with a sequence of motor acts which has to be learned in a succession of experiential situations, a succession which provides occasion for the acquisition of simple but nevertheless specific skills and, above all, occasion to experience what has to be avoided. Most of us have been scolded at one time or another for slamming a door when the instruction was to shut it. +
Compatibility is a matter of avoiding clash, passing between obstacles, fitting into space that is not encumbered by the conditions that have to be complied with. +
The constraints within which it attempts to achieve viability are set by the text alone and not by any external area of experience. Hence, the quest for the interpretation of a text turns out to be a futile undertaking. +
Insofar as we remember these structures, we can recall them—and then they are Re-Presentations. I write this with a hyphen, to indicate that they are pieces of experience we have had and are now reviewing. They are not pieces of an external reality. +
In other words, reality leaves sufficient room for them to work in our experiential world. +
One can therefore say: in perception, sensory signals call up a concept, in re-presentation, on the other hand, a concept calls up sensory impressions. In neither case is the experience caused by what philosophers want to call “reality”. +
so, to have survived does not tell the biological organisms anything about the constraints they have not met, i.e., the constraints that eliminated those that could not survive. +
According to the neurophysiologist’s model of the nervous system, it therefore appears that the discrimination of sensory modalities—seeing, hearing, touching, etc.—must be the result of the system’s own computation. From this perspective, then, whatever sensory structures, patterns, or images a living system compiles are its own construction, and the notion that they represent something that was there beforehand, has no empirical foundation. +
You may, for example, dream that you are in a room, but all you see of the room is a door (perhaps because you expect someone to come in through it). You have no idea of the size of the room, and there are no windows, curtains, pictures, no ceiling or furniture, or anything else that usually characterizes a room. These items may come in later—as the plot of the dream develops— but at this point, they are irrelevant in your dream-presentation of a room. In contrast, your perception of a room starts from sensory impressions that you proceed to coordinate, and they then allow you to consider them compatible with your concept of “room”. +
The argument that our concepts, which we abstract from experience, cannot grasp anything that lies beyond our experiential interface, applies not only to the divine but also to any ontological reality posited as independent of the human experiencer. +
Compatibility, to repeat it once more, means no more and no less than to fit within constraints. Consequently, it seems to me that one of the most demanding tasks of A.I. would be the plausible simulation of an organism’s experience of social constraints +
We can visualize it with the help of a metaphor: the environment “selects” in the manner of a screen used to grade gravel: the screen admits what falls through and discards what does not. +
This principle is, indeed, universal. If there is something we would like to create or have, we look for some specific event or action to which experience has tied the desired item as ‘effect’. If we find it, we try to implement its causal function, hoping that it will produce what we wanted. +
To my mind, this illustrates what is perhaps the most valuable feature of the cybernetical analysis of phenomena in general, and of 2nd-order Cybernetics in particular. It leads us to think in terms, not of single causes and effects, but rather of equilibria between constraints. This helps to avoid the widespread illusion that we could gather “information” concerning a reality supposed to be causing our experience; and it therefore focuses attention on managing in the experiential world we do get to know. +
The good old thermostat, the favorite example in the early literature of cybernetics, is still a useful explanatory tool. In it a temperature is set as the goal-state the user desires for the room. The thermostat knows nothing of the room or of desirable temperatures. It is designed to eliminate any discrepancy between a set reference value and the feedback it receives from its sensory organ, namely the value indicated by its thermometer. If the sensed value is too low, it switches on the heater, if it is too high, it switches on the cooling system. Employing Gordon Pask’s clever distinction (Pask, 1969, p.23–24): from the user’s point of view, the thermostat has a purpose for, i.e. to maintain a desired temperature, whereas the purpose in the device is to eliminate a difference. +
