antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:28 am on November 25, 2024
Tags: cybernetics ( 14 )

Heideggerian AI, Xerox PARC, and Metarationality with David Chapman – Max Langenkamp (substack)

Nov 23, 2024

link
Heideggerian AI, Xerox PARC, and Metarationality with David Chapman

https://substack.com/home/post/p-152022351?selection=62abbc6e-f8dd-4723-8818-b119f322e932

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:44 am on November 25, 2024

Key portion #cybernetics

Max: So would it be accurate to say your interactionist AI research [e.g. Pengi, Sonja] and the enactivists’ biological systems theory [The Embodied Mind, Tree of Knowledge] were both downstream of Dreyfus?

David: Yes. I’d also say all those things are downstream of Merleau Ponty, and Heidegger too. And Merleau Ponty is downstream from Heidegger, but Merleau Ponty made Heidegger a great deal more concrete than Heidegger was. Heidegger is, he worked out the ideas in a structural way, but he’s [00:12:00] basically got one example, which is hammering.

There’s a few other examples in passing, but none of them are actually worked out in any detail. So Merleau-Ponty worked those things out in a lot more detail, and his major work is called the psychology of perception, I think. And he recognized that perception is actually the key thing, which is not really a theme in Heidegger at all.

Heidegger was interested in language and action, but no, he didn’t really think about perception that I remember.

Max: You’re saying that it’s obvious is, strikes an interesting note in me because it’s I think incredibly obvious once you’ve made the shift. Like the ethnomethodological shift, but not to almost everyone else.

David: There’s also the cybernetic shift, which is not quite the same. And that book is obvious if you have got the gestalt of cybernetics, which I did. I first encountered cybernetics when I was like 14 or something and got it then and had been working out the implications of that already for 10 years when I read The Embodied Mind.

Max: Could you give a concise summary of this cybernetic shift?

David: Yeah it’s also interactionist. It’s interactionist at a different level. The cybernetic worldview is that of the dynamic coupling between an organism and its environment or a system and its environment more generally. The idea is that you’ve got a very rapid flow of information perception and action going back [00:14:00] and forth such that there isn’t actually a boundary there, or the boundary is nebulous and fictitious.

Some patterns of action. You can’t understand perception and action other than in terms of the coupling of the environment and the system. And the mentalist, the alternative to the cybernetic view is the cognitivist, rationalist view where basically the mind is in a box and as much as possible try to ignore everything outside the box and you’re looking at what’s happening inside the box.

And the shift is just in getting yourself out of the box.

Max: So that, what do you feel like that point of view was present in the earliest form of cybernetics? Did you end up interacting much with Gibson or with ecological psychology?

David: We read it. Yeah, it was very influential. Thoughetics

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