Re: [ontolog-forum] Cultural variation in cognitive machinery

[Ali Hashemi <ali.hashemi+ontolog@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Ontolog,

I apologize for the length of this message, I am generally internetted only through phone, so I am being thorough in my intermittent access. I have tried to make the last section of the message more relevant to the ontology mission.

============

Dear John, Dan and Pat,

Pat,

Thanks for that ... response. Perhaps as an exercise, we can 
reflect on the very fact that you and I are able to have such a 
conversation.

For fun, let's briefly devolve the history of 
languaged communication.

Before internet, we could phone. 
Assuming we'd had met or exchanged information, either you or I would 
have had to call the other. Additionally, if you made the call, I'd have
 to happen to have the time to talk (or pre the cell phone, had 
physically been in the same location that you were calling).

And 
before the phone? We could try to carry on this conversation via what, a
 telegraph? I suppose each day, we would excitedly go to the telegraph 
station to see the short, dotted response. You know, Twitter, but old 
school.

And before that? Well we could mail, I guess airmail or 
before that, rail or boat or perhaps horse, or lights along an imperial 
road. It might take days, weeks or months, but I guess it'd make the 
anticipation of how this conversation would evolve all the more 
intriguing.

Let's also consider the act of writing. Imagine 
instead of typing, at what, 40-120 words per minute, we had to grasp a 
pen and write these messages on paper. For me at least, the type of 
thought that comes out through pen is profoundly different than when on 
the computer. Imagine if we had to use a quill and ink, refreshing the 
tip every few minutes?

And what if we had to use stone? To 
communicate our ideas, you and I, living in different locale would 
either have to send each other stone carvings or happen upon one another
 in some fair town, a port most likely, and sit down to an enlightening 
discussion. If I were on another continent, to carry out this 
conversation, would require a commitment of months to travel to a common
 physical location. I would certainly hope that the results of said 
conversation would be worth that time!

Now, were you actually 
suggesting that the way we consider space has not changed? That the way 
we form, exchange, communicate and shape our thought has not 
fundamentally changed?

Our agency in space has increased. Our 
projection of mind, ability to share and engage has been transformed.
 
Our
 understanding of a social network has changed. The very notion of what 
it means to be a productive, living human being is radically different.
 
The
 fact that you and I take this projection of thought and language 
through space for granted – the fact that it is so trivial, trite and 
assumed that we, one located in Quebec, the other in Florida can so easily converse at near instantaneous speed is exactly the point. Remind me 
again, how is this all complete fantasy? 

It is incontrovertible 
that different senses, different sense modalities are more suited to 
different types of knowledge. Even if I turn my speaker upside down, 
sound still comes at me right side up... I can stare at sheet music all 
day, but I at least, won't really appreciate Bach's Cello Suite No.6 in D
 Major unless I hear it.

Now I certainly am not taking the strong
 position. I won't deny that there are other routes to such 
appreciation, but obviously, certain ones are better suited. And our lifestyles reinforce these choices and have other attendant effects...

==

As
 this email is long, I won’t go into the details of the rest of your 
post, but if you like, I can do so…  I do have to however remark on the 
attack on Postman (I don't recall McLuhan proclaiming "the world is 
going to hell, or at least to some undesirable place, in a handbasket.")

I
 wish I had Postman’s book physically with me (it’s been lent out to a 
friend), or that I had a pdf copy, but alas, my everyday assumptions of 
this work in space and time are challenged.

I have become so used
 to thinking of text as remotely accessible, that it is only in the 
absence of such access, I can appreciate that it is quite remarkable 
what was once considered an intimately physically bound artefact has 
been transformed into “mere” electricity…

Let's quickly unpack 
the implicit assumptions in McLuhan and Postman.

1) Our 
interaction with the world is mediated by our senses
2) Depending on 
what we are doing, we are engaging our senses in different ratios (i.e. 
watching TV, we are more aware of what our eyes see; playing basketball,
 we are more aware of our sense of touch; listening to music, we are 
more aware of our hearing...)
3) Habitual, repetition of the same 
types of actions affects one's disposition

And here's the "leap"
4)
 Different media, technologies, lifestyles will draw out and engender 
biases in those who repeatedly engage in them

 Does the above 
acceptable to you?

Now extend this basic premise to public 
discourse. Simply because of the over exuberant tone of your post, I'm 
tempted to ask if you've been hiding under a rock for the past 20 years.
 However, I’ll leave that as a voiced temptation.

More 
relevantly, consider a news broadcast in 2010 vs. one in 1960. Consider a
 "serious" interview today, to one 30 years ago. Is it even conceivable 
we might have a televised Chomsky - Foucault debate today (irrespective 
of whatever one thinks about their ideas)?

About the most complex
 message that the current US presidential election affords (quite 
literally), is "hope and change."

Policy is reduced to 
soundbites. Public awareness of issues is (with many many exceptions) 
dominated by knee-jerk reactions and cartoonish television 
personalities. Voters are spend inordinate amounts of time trying to 
decide whether evolution should be taught in school, or whether two men 
or two women should be allowed to enjoy the same rights as others.

I
 could go on and on… Again, due to my limited internetting, I would need
 to physically go to a library to access the requisite research, and I 
am not very inclined to do so right now. I'm sure you can see what I'm 
saying :D, but if you need more convincing, I suggest you consult the 
reading list of nearly any Public Relations, Media Studies or Critical 
Theory or any number of other related graduate level programs.

================
John and Dan,

I believe our 
misunderstanding if at all, hangs on the phrase “fundamental change.” 
See below for what I’m calling “fundamental change.” The Pirahá culture 
is indeed quite remarkable, and as Dan pointed out in the reference to 
Nisbett, there are indeed well demonstrated cultural effects. I would 
also add this recent study, http://www.physorg.com/news189262051.html 
 
(Daniel Casasanto, Olga Fotakopoulou, Lera Boroditsky, “Space and Time 
in the Child's Mind: Evidence for a Cross-Dimensional Asymmetry (p 
387-405)” Cognitive Science (2010). ) Now it would be interesting for a 
follow up study to see if children from societies which read right to 
left also look at the timeline right to left.

More recently, 
these works by Gianquinto provide some interesting insight to the 
differences that visual thinking affords:

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/philosophy/9780199296453/acprof-9780199296453-chapter-2.html

and
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/philosophy/9780199296453/acprof-9780199296453-chapter-3.html

And

 in the interest of making this post more relevant to ontolog in a 
direct way, I would recommend the following two papers:

Eugene 
Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural 
Sciences.” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 1960. ( 
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html )
and in
 response ( http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/feb102005/415.pdf )
and 
finally
Y.
 Lazenbik, “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? or, What I Learned while 
Studying Apoptosis.” Biochemistry, Vol 69, No 12, 2004. ( 
http://protein.bio.msu.su/biokhimiya/contents/v69/pdf/bcm_1403.pdf )

I
 mention these only as inspiration. I don't wholly agree with the 
conclusions of any, but they spur tasty thinking.

Mathematics
 and formal logics are media. They come equipped with a way of accessing
 or more accurately, fruitfully representing the world. Note that we are
 often interested in only those results which carry exploitable 
properties. The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis actually 
applies to formal languages, where certain thoughts are simply 
inexpressible. 

Moreover, when we use formal ontologies, our 
chosen 
language of description / representation biases, selects and focuses our
 attention on the useful constructs available via said language.

This

 is one of the reasons why COLORE pays so much attention to well 
developed theories in mathematics. It is also incidentally one of the 
reasons that semantic mappings are facilitated when one describes parts 
of the world using at least first order expressivity. The idea of 
logical lego-like building blocks follows quite naturally from this, and
 corresponds roughly to the modules and their arrangement into core 
hierarchies in COLORE. 

There are broadly to approaches to 
expressing something in a formal language. Fit the world into the 
language, or see which parts of the language correspond to the world. 
Both approaches at the same time make sense to me.

Now I'm not 
suggesting that this is the single correct characterization of 
the problem space, but simply that this perspective leads to (and has 
led to)
some useful results. It is not
 a panacea, but a woefully underused tool at our disposal.

==============
Best,
Ali

-- 
Founding Director, www.reseed.ca
www.pinkarmy.org

(•`'·.¸(`'·.¸(•)¸.·'´)¸.·'´•) .,., 
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