Mixed Attributes

“But diversity is a characteristic of a population, not, in most cases, of individuals.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/opinion/millennial-means-nothing.html

Good article and an example of of the confusion and misappropriation that can happen when scaling.

It is easy for attributes to become mixed when I shift between an individual lenses and a community/group lens, in part because fluency doesn’t have a chance to keep up.

Language is meant to represent reality and, being human, my reality most of the time is through an individual lens. Seeing through a wider scale just isn’t the way I normally operate.

I need to be careful about human-created distinctions, the attributes they supposedly have, the purposes they serve. I need to be clear and explicit to myself about the perspective I am using, which isn’t easy.

Language differs between scales, or at least it should.

 

More: I think this relates to point number one in this post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/

There’s just so much categorizing going on these days, and attributing characteristics of the group to the individual. It’s as if the category is the binding cause, and not just an afterthought brought in by the speaker.

More: Unwarranted Distinction

The Walls of the Chinese Room

This is a short essay I wrote for the Intro to Philosophy course that concluded last week. The one I post on the course site needs to be a bit shorter, so I’ll have to edit some stuff out. This isn’t really as tight as I’d like, either, but I think an extended version of the idea here might get a bit boring to read.

**************

Despite being thoroughly refuted John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment still generates notoriety (it was included in this course). Perhaps it is that the Chinese Room provides a useful background for counter arguments hat are particularly revealing about the relationship between body and mind. My own analysis of the thought experiment would be categorized as a “system reply argument”, with a focal point on the separation provided by walls of the room.

There’s an uneven comparison that Searle makes in presenting the Chinese Room thought experiment: he compares human to human. That is, he compares Humans (in general) not to any idea of artificial intelligence or machine, but to the human in his experiment. With the presence of the room, Searle creates a barrier of information flow between the human on the inside and the one on the outside. Yet, when he considers the mind of Humans in relation to this thought experiment, he looks at the distinction of separation created by the skin of the human inside the room, not by the room itself. His claim that “I would not be able to understand the conversation” would be analogous to saying that a microchip, or a mouse, or some other component of the machine does not have capabilities at that level as the machine does on a whole.

As much as the Humans rely on their limbs, senses and interaction with environment for presence of mind, so does the human in the experiment rely of the walls of the room. What would our concept of intelligence be if we disregarded the barrier of separation that distinguishes humans, in the same way that Searle does away with the walls? How does “ability” exist in this way?

Imagine a brain in a vat inside the room, and suppose this brain can actually understand Chinese, unlike the monolingual poor soul in Searle’s example. Someone on the outside of the room slides a piece of paper with a Chinese character on it into the room and (even if it could perceive the symbol) the brain goes through all of the mental states of replying, yet nothing happens. There’s no action, no evidence of mind. Humans include their inputs and outputs, as do machines, displaying the importance of the distinction of separation.

Searle’s anthropocentric bias is evident, making Putnam’s functionalism argument relevant. The Chinese Room is a human centered test, illustrating the limits of the communication technology (here, spoken language). Ask a question in a different way, to Putnam’s octopus or to a computer, and get a mindful response. If I want to find out what an octopus feels about sandpaper, I rub the paper on its skin and watch the octopus’ reaction. It may be difficult to interpret its reaction meaningfully, but, well, translating between distinctions of networks is never exact. Presence of Mind isn’t limited to language use, or even to interaction in Searle’s example – it’s about contained knowing. The octopus certainly contains its own reaction to sandpaper.

Thus, if we think of a similar situation with a machine or a computer, a non-living object, the ways of interacting might be more limited, but the responses will be more exact. If I want to know which program is best to install on my computer, I use the most relevant method (ie: clicking in the right places) to get the response that will best inform me.

Distinction of separation implies an extended account about multiply realisable and mind. Let’s take the brain in the vat example and reduce the distinction even further. Why not say that the area of the brain that processes language has a mind, in this case? What about only the neurons and synapses? Distinction needs to be considered with more thought to the action, or else the Chinese Room is pointless, simply expressing that: Only humans can have human minds.

An expanded version of multiply realisability is also valid. A community itself can have knowledge that an individual contained within that community does not. Networks of people can have space travel capability, or can be literate, for example..yet, a single person need not be able to command a rocket, nor be able to read. The claims at one distinction are independent of claims made on a larger or smaller scale. The point of distinction is relevant when considering how mind experiences knowing.

This is especially relevant in today’s world. Gone is the strictly dominant Vygotskian idea of internalization of knowledge (it certainly holds up as one way to consider knowing). Modern communication technology has pried open the depths of distributed knowledge and mindfulness that lies in communities, objects and networks of all types. Such external-to-the-human knowledge impacts our world at a much more complex and frequent degree than the previous limits of the long asynchronous and one-way interaction of the plain old paper printed book.

The course notes bring up the idea that the internal structure is a useful determining factor for deciding mindfulness – but, how well do we know the internal structure of anything, let alone humans? Go deep enough into the physical structure of anything and particle physics is still unsolved. As well, at barely more than a century old Psychology’s major insight thus far is the realization that an iceberg sized (minus the tip) unknown we call sub-conscious controls most of our actions. This is digression however, as Consciousness, the relationship with the self, is another story. When it comes to mere mind, our human perspective is not the only one that exists – human mind and mind are not interchangeable.

Massive and Diverse

At x28’s new blog a recent post about Massiveness and Diversity stirred some thought processes in me. I wouldn’t quite call this a response to Matthias’ post, as he seems to be tackling the subject of Massiveness and Diversity with respect to how MOOCs have run up until now. My thoughts here are about what Massiveness and Diversity mean when applying MOOCish principles to other or existing settings, with a focus on language learning.

And, in trying to adapt such Ecological/Connectivism approaches to non-MOOC, non-Educational-Technology-as-Topic settings, the term Massive becomes a tricky word. Obviously, the word big and all of its linguistic neighbors have relative meanings: a large kiwi fruit and a large department store are not the same size of large from our human perspective. What this shows is that the concept of massive is tied to situation, not merely to number of participants alone. And, if massiveness is linked to diversity (as suggested in the x28 post), then they are both conditions of the educational situation. For example, I once taught a series of courses to 300 beginner language students. I consider this an extremely massive course, because of the content: language learners need to practice language in high feedback settings; and because of the level: beginner students require more guidance, explicit feedback, basic skill acquisition, and especially limits on information/language overload. Both of these factors would generally decrease as student numbers increase, with such an effect starting in single digit student presence. For such massively open courses like the Stanford classes or the Change11, 300 participants is not massive enough…unless activity can somehow be maximized.

In fact, I might guess that it is better to link massiveness and diversity individually to the situation, rather than to each other. Course design, including resource diversity, certainly doesn’t need to be curated or controlled completely, but complete authenticity isn’t the only other option. Connectivism course design isn’t an all or nothing game. New teacher roles are emerging in this approach, so that educators may need to introduce materials and media based on the situations of the learners. This would require educators to actively take a individualistic, observant analysis of the situations (connections) that maintain the Network for that particular educational system. Additionally, it should be good practice to include explicit description of the limits and bias of the connections in place.

There is also the point that subject matter has its own minimal depths and breadths; educators need to be able to fill in any essential gaps of knowledge without the dogmatic guilt of promoting singular points of view. Topics of study are distinct for reasons, and these processes of knowledge have placed certain values on information in the past that are essential for learners to learn…not as a description of what comprises that body of knowledge (ie: not of what is true or right in that field) but of where that field has been, why it is positioned where it is, and to be able to ask relevant questions that build themselves as learners and their field of study. Matthais mentions the term Field Trip in opposition to things that are inauthentic or too controlled, however, there is still a certain degree of control in any field trip. Schools choose where to go, when to go, and quite often have a planned tour of their destination site. A field trip is not simply a day to wander around aimlessly anywhere. Quite often, I imagine, educators plan in-class work based on such field trips, supplementing their coursework with the experience into the authentic world outside the brick and mortar walls.

photo: Alan Dorin

An even more interesting, and useful term is the Authentic Wilderness that his post introduces. Wilderness is very much tied to a situational environment. Different climates produce different types of wilderness, and within any given wilderness the scale can be adjusted to look at more local or more universal area. We can think of the wilderness of forests or deserts; The wilderness of America, the wilderness of Texas; The wilderness of a bamboo forest, the parasitic community on a bamboo tree, or on a leaf; the natural by-products that emerge in cities, neighborhoods, or in households; In a University setting, or in a class of fifteen language learning students. Within that group of fifteen, middle-class University students is a wilderness, a something natural, that the educator must discover, observe and uncover for those students to better access and respectfully exploit in that intentional learning setting. At times, it can be a matter preparing inexperienced campers to house in this wilderness, suggesting the types of shelter, clothes, food and devices that they would need to enjoy the beauty of nature’s wonder. And with each different type of wilderness, comes a different type of inexperience.

In physics, relative mass changes with velocity. Learning at the fringe of a process of knowledge is quick and fast paced; learning at the core is of a slower, more contemplative pace. The former requiring more mass, the latter less…both in terms of participants and facilitators. Come to think of it, the current Change11 could use about 10-20 more facilitators at any given time, spread out much more than the existing ones are now.

 

note: comments are closed for the post because I started to get a ton of spam for some reason.