"Doing deep science, e.g. newtonian mechanics, electromagnetic theory, quantum physics, molecular biology, theoretical linguistics (as opposed to the kind of shallow science that merely collects data and looks for correlations), involves coming up with a theory that cannot be derived from the evidence, but can be tested against it, where the theory has a collection of core 'axioms' embedded in a system of logic or mathematics in which inferences can be made.
This could be done for a theory about the structure of a collection of concepts. Then demonstrating that such a theory (a) is internally consistent, and (b) has the right set of consequences to explain facts of usage about which there are (usually, though not always) no dispute, would be more like a mathematical and therefore non-empirical task than like the empirical task of collecting evidence about usage using surveys."
Sloman is advocating treating concepts with similar rigor to mathematics. Douglas Hofstadter in I Am a Strange Loop (2006) describes Godel's incompleteness theorem as a conversion of Whitehead and Russel's Principia Mathematica into numerical terms. All of this migrational throughput between disciplines suggests that envisioning epistemology as a topological dynamic landscape is both fruitful and accurate at the empirical level.
Sloman distinguishes in his essay between
"Logical Topography (the structure of the space within which the divisions can be made), and Logical Geography (a particular set of subdivisions that happens to be used in some culture)."
Sloman continues to refine this distinction :
"...logical topography involves: not just exploring the connections in existing usage, but exploring the variety of possible concepts that can be defined in connection with the subject matter that is being investigated, analysing the relative merits of different partitionings, and showing how actual concepts do or do not relate to those."
What I am suggesting with a usage of 'topological epistemology' differs slightly in emphasis from Sloman’s concept in that I am advancing a notion of the subject-terrain as a dynamic landscape, and drawing an analogy between truth-validity and species survival (which echoes Dawkins' memes). Laws are not static; even universal physical, conceptual, and metaphysical truths are simply structures in this philosophical system. Structures are subject to time, decomposition, maturation and all the other life-processes of birth, death, change.
Geometry is the study of static surfaces; topology (for me) is those same surfaces animated and evolving. Human ideas grow on convulsive substrates.
To cite my own thesis: 'I conceive of knowledge as a landscape and theories as neighbours. I do not believe in the necessity of defending ideas; and I believe that approaches to epistemology can have political implications. In this ontology, ideas are living; they may have differing validity dependent upon the viewpoint but that does not alter their status or right to exist. Evidently there are limits to this attitude; I am not advocating an empirical absolute relativity; and I do not accept as true everything that occurs within my own mind. '
Labels: epistemology, sloman, topology
[+/-] reactive, deliberative, self-reflexive According to Rosalind Picard, in 1981 the philosopher Aaron Sloman was “one of the first to write to the computer science community about computers having emotions.”(p.211) Sloman hypothesized 3 architectural layers in the brain: reactive, deliberative, and self-monitoring. For the most part, my software interfaces for the net consist of algorithms that are predominantly reactive: simple reflex flocks jolted around. Deliberative activity is assigned to the user, who must as all users decide how to navigate, what to touch. Self-reflexive activity is contained in the writings which are emerging from states of self-reflexive where the activity of consciousness becomes transparent.
Inadvertently, Sloman's 3-tiered simplification maps onto the proposed sound architecture of the Thoems which is to use three simultaneous sound files coming from numerous different categories: 1111 ( a suite of hundreds of my own environmental audio samples of length 1 minute and 11 seconds), some online poetry radio samples and spoken word (some of my own, some inspired, some inept, none edited) creating a sort of psychic sandwich designed to randomly induce an archetypal electro-acoustic composition which bypasses mimesis and simply maps the users mind to an arbitrary amalgam of a net archive.
Moods: If the activity level of the user increases above an agitation threshold, the interface maps the users' mouse to an invisible audio head scrubber which shreds the dominant playing sounds; as the mood gets stronger, more of the sounds are shredded; velocity distorts the auditory environment.
Auditory archives exist as a shared cultural dna; the implementation technique is in the lineage of Stockhausen, Cage, and John Oswald's plunderphonics.
Picard, R.W. (1997). Affective computing.
Labels: 3, affect, model, sloman
