Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 182.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "C. Perry Willett" <pwillett@indiana.edu> (11)
Subject: Re: 16.180 gatekeeping & its perils
[2] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance) (37)
Subject: Re: 16.166 embodiment
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 08:10:01 -0700
From: "C. Perry Willett" <pwillett@indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: 16.180 gatekeeping & its perils
Willard,
As A. Bartlett Giamatti was fond of pointing out, the root of
"paradise" is from Persian for an enclosed garden, or, as the
OED has it, "for a (Persian) enclosed park, orchard, or pleasure
ground." Giamatti, in his dual role of Commissioner of Baseball
and very public intellectual, liked the idea of a baseball park
as paradise, but perhaps virtual paradises require a wall as well.
Perry Willett
Main Library
Indiana University
pwillett@indiana.edu
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 08:10:35 -0700
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Re: 16.166 embodiment
Arun-Kumar Tripathi recently invited the souls of Humanist to consider
"Understanding the world by virtue of having Bodies". There is in that
invitation a reference to "a machine without a body".
> understand the world by virtue of having bodies and a machine without a
> body would never understand the world the way we do.
>From a systems perspective, is there such a thing as a body without a
machine? Another way of restating the question is to ask if the human
does not exist except in a prosthetic condition. The human is always in a
state of mediation.
If this inescability of the prosthetic condition and the necessity of the
state of mediation is the human destiny, then the question asked by our
learned colleague is unanswerable. We cannot know "a machine without a
body" and if we cannot know such a machine, how are we to judge whether it
is capable of understanding the world as we do?
I find it difficult to imagine humans as reasoning beings free of all
technological augmentation since for me reason proceeds by the use of
tools (rules are tools). I am also still to be convinced that unmediated
contact is possible between the human and the world. If I as a human being
were to know a "machine without a body" in that very act of knowing I
would be endowing the "machine without a body" with a body.
The computer and the user form a system. And in this system the human
gives mind to the machine. The question for our time is whether machines
give "mind" to the human or whether machines that appear to "give mind" to
humans are but mediating instances and instruments through which other
humans mind humans. It is a question if our time is the time and place of
Western-inspired ideological systems that place the human in a particular
situation vis-a-vis the natural in an exploiter-exploited relation.
The question of the autonomy of the artefact is familiar to text encoders
and ethnobotanists. It is a moral and aesthetic question that is older
than fancy talk of technological ecologies and textual economies. And yet
I am curious as to what the meme "machine without body" can do in the
streams of networked discourse.
Old enough to be curious,
f.
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm
per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
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