[PREV - FIRE_ISLAND] [TOP]
BOUNDARY_OF_METAPHOR
July 20, 2022
ENGLEBARTS_BARD
I was once again cracking the cover
of Thierry Bardini's problematic I must say, if you're an irony
"Bootstrapping"... addict there's nothing quite
like consulting some dead trees
Once again, this is a nice scholarly about hypertext systems.
job of recording some intellectual
history, but it's somewhat marred by I found that Bardini's
Bardini's attempts at doing heavy chapter notes (in the form of
insightful analysis, at which he's the traditional numbered
less than stellar (and at his worst, micro-superscripts) were
he turns into a blithering pomo nearly impossible to deal
idjit, a trend-hopper on trends with, in part because they
long-since gone passe...). were missing any sort of back
references. I started
grinding through the process
of looking up the footnotes
and entering the source page
The reason I'm re-opening the case number of each note...
is puzzling over some oddities in
Chapter 2, on p. 42 of my edition.
At the close of one section, he mentions
the "human-computer interface"-- a very This is a book nominally about
familiar phrase-- then at the beginning Englebart, whose team did a lot
of the following section he brings up the of creative work on
"human-computer boundary"-- though this human-computer interfaces.
is not at all a familiar phrase to me,
and Bardini presents no references to
anyone but himself using this phrase.
"The point of contact between human and
computer intelligence, the boundary that
separates and joins them, usually has I'm not sure anyone tries
been located only via metaphor. ... the to locate it, or finds the
very use of the word 'boundary' in this issue at all puzzling.
context is itself metaphorical: [7] it
suggests that there is a 'space' where
the process of the mind and the processes
of the machine are in contact, a line
where one cannot be distinguished from
the other except by convention-- the sort Actually, there are also
of line usually drawn after a war, if one boundaries that I think you
follows the lessons of human could call "natural
history. [8]" boundaries", in the same
sense as "natural kinds":
there are distinctions that
seem like more than mere
conventions: human skin,
cellular walls, etc
There are at least *two*
slights of hand going on here:
(1) the usual phrase is "interface", Notably, an "interface" seems
not "boundary". like an abstract concept, which
doesn't involve a metaphorical
(2) computers and humans both exist "this-is-like-that" at all.
in *actual* space.
But then, I also question
whether an intellectual
If you felt the need to talk "boundary" is necessarily
about the human-computer boundary, a metaphor.
it's easy enough to pin it
down in real space: I've got If you talk about, say, the
these keys under my fingers, boundary between sociology
I'm looking at pixels on the and psychology, I would say
screen. that usage is well on it's
way to becoming a pure
If this counts as metaphor, abstraction, though it may
is there anything that doesn't? very well have etymological
roots in the idea of a
spatial boundary like a
property boundary-- that gets
The following page (p.43) is phenomenal clear if you talk about the
in it's dumbness, it has that fractally "territory" of a discipline.
wrong quality of much of the academic
discouse of the 90s (this book was But you don't *need* to
published in 2000). think of this as a metaphor
to understand the phrase.
It veers off into an attack on the Turing
test, quoting Benny Shannon with approval: Also, it's also worth
remembering a property line is
"But, of course, there are ways to *already* a human idea, it's
tell the difference between something we impose on the
computer and man. Everybody know landscape, not some natural
them. ... look at them, touch feature of the world.
them tickle them, perhaps see
whether you fall in love with them. If this is "metaphor" it's an
Stupid, you will certainly say ... " odd form, grounding an
abstraction in another older
Well, now that you mention it. abstraction that's so familiar
it feels like a concrete
"... the whole point is to make the feature of the world.
decision without seeing the
candidates, without touching them, You could just say they're
only by communicating with them via two examples of the same
a teletype. Yes, but this, we have sort of abstraction.
seen, is tantamount to begging the
question under consideration."
It doesn't *beg* the question,
it ducks the question, puts TURING_REST
the question on hold.
Or rather the questions:
What is --
If the author doesn't
like teletypes, one o intelligence?
might wonder if they o humanity?
felt they could estimate
the intelligence of
another human being
through an exchange of
letters... or perhaps,
by reading their It has to be the silliset argument against
quotations in the human-scale artificial intelligence I've
academic press. ever seen: computers can't be *people*:
they don't piss every day.
Say what you will about the
millenials, but several decades
of dorky science fiction movies
have made it much less likely
you'll hear this kind of silliness.
But it's difficult to see what the
drive is underlying the line he's
taking. He's uneasy about the
mind-body dichotomy? He worries that
thinking of the mind as a kind of
computer might be yet another trendy
metaphor without solid basis?
Or maybe Bardini just
wants to jabber about
metaphors, and is too
intellectually sloppy
to notice he's made up Quick, is "straw man" a metaphor? It
a straw man metaphor on *used* to refer to practice dummies
the fly that no one for military drills, does it still?
else uses. You don't need to know the history to
use the phrase correctly-- whether it
can count as a metaphor depends on the
knowledge of the speaker, on how they
internally understand the phrase even
though this may not be at all evident
to the reader...
A subtlety that may not make it
through the Turing barrier.
Bardini:
"When one considers the mind-as-a-computer metaphor
as a means to make sense of the "boundary" metaphor
(a metaphor interpreting a metaphor), the obvious
conclusion is that the topographical aspects are
definitely not what determines the meaning: if the
compared materially of human beings and computers
is the false residual of the mind-as-computer
metaphor, one should conclude that there is no
'natural' way to locate the boundary that
distinguishes and joins them. But the ultimate goal
of the project to create artificial intelligence was I refuse to accept
to achieve the material realization of the metaphor any colleague that
of the computer as a 'colleague,' and therefore a can't be fired for
mind, a machine that can pass the Turing Test. " masturbating during
a zoom session.
To close at the end, which is where I came in:
Reading through Bardini's
footnotes, one caught my eye:
"7. Indeed, the consequences of Gödel's
theorem could be undersood as
justifying a proposition such as "any Puzzling over this lead me
boundary is arbitrary" and therefore to focus on P. 42, where
observer-dependent. Because in this this foot is noted.
case, we, human beings, raise the
question, it could be claimed that the Reading this again now,
answer is determined by the I wonder if Bardini has
intellectual equipment required to Gödel confused with
express the question (i.e., language, Heisenberg. This would
in its metaphorical dimensions). make more sense, albiet
Unless, of course you assume that there only slightly.
is such a thing as a 'concept of
boundary' independent of the word But then a close reading
'boundary.'" shows so much weaseling
("could be understood as";
If you pick up a thesaurus, I'm sure "it could be claimed")
you'll find many synonyms to express one wonders why one would
the notion... bother with a close
reading.
And it might be argued that in the footnote which
immediately follows, there is a suggestion which
in the light of the overall discourse of history
and the usual intellectual dodges of insecure
light-weights desperate for tenure even at the
University of Iowa if necessary, that this all
could be taken to imply that the entire project is
clearly under attack by the excessively empirical
rejection of the sophomoric semaphoric symphonic
metaphor:
"8. In this, the boundary metaphor is
different in the case of the
human-animal boundary, in which the
topological implications are inclusive,
rather than juxtapositive. As Bernard
Williams (1991, 13) puts it, "we are a
distinctive kind of animal but not any
distinctive kind of machine."
Truly distinctive: the only animal
that produces prose like this.
Other animals only piss literally.
Not in (or on) literature.
--------
[NEXT - TURING_REST]