Embodied Cognition

Just a quick post to note that the Boston Globe ran a story today on “Embodied Cognition” titled “Don’t Just Stand There, Think.”  It mentions George Lakoff and Raphael Nunez’s book Where Mathematics Comes From, which I’ve blogged on before.

When I read about “the role that movement seems to play even in abstract thinking,” it made me think of my presentation for the Imaging Place Conference last February, the PowerPoint slides for which are available at slideshare.net (there are two parts).  In that talk I asked about how we might think differently given the use of 3-D virtual worlds.  Now I’m thinking that I should have said how we can enhance or engage our embodied cognition by thinking in 3-D worlds.

Here’s an example.  For a particularly abstract and complicated theory, we create an allegorical space in Second Life that allows the user to use his or her avatar to move through the space and thereby allow the engagement of embodied cognition (via mirror neurons) to facilitate comprehension of the subject.

Imaging Thought

I have finished the essay that I’ve been working on since the 2007 Invent-L Conference on Imaging Place.  It is now available on the conference’s publication page.  The essay is called “Imaging Place as Imaging Thought:  Deleuze, Electracy, and Second Life.”  I introduce the essay more extensively on my other blog.  It includes a kind of allegorical quest/act of thought that I carry out within Second Life. 

“The Materialist Phenomenology of the Concept”

I just returned from a trip to Gainesville, FL, where my sons just graduated from high school, a trip which always requires, whenever possible, a stop at Goering’s Bookstore, where this time I bought Eric Alliez’s The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?  The translator’s preface invokes “the passage to a materialist phenomenology of the concept” (xx), which made me think of my own “concept” (if we can call it that) of energonomics.  Now it’s likely or probable that I’m yanking this out of a very specific context—not to mention my need to study up on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology—but when I read this phrase it makes me think of my goal of discovering the material basis of thought, the energy-flow through the mind-brain and how this makes thought possible.   

Since returning from the Imaging Place conference in Gainesville in February 2007, I have been thinking about thinking, wondering “what is thought?”  I came to this after trying to ask the question of how a 3-D space like Second Life can change the way we think, insofar as the movement through space is a kind of thinking both for aborigines (think about the “storylines” of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines) and for Greeks (moving through the 3-D space of a memory palace as a way of making an argument).  One of the anecdotes Greg Ulmer offered in his keynote speech told of his inability to use a doorknob to move from one space to another, and this made me think of Lakoff and Johnson’s “metaphorical concepts” and how the abstractions of thought are based on conceptual metaphors developed from being a physical body moving through a three-dimensional space.  When I think hard enough about all of this, I continue to come back to the question of what thinking is (which might be different than asking “what is thought?”) and this needs to be answered to some extent before we can think about how moving through physical space and interacting with objects in that space becomes the foundation of abstract thought. 

It’s easy to think that a question like “What is thought?” is too simple, but I am reminded of a quote from somewhere saying that an artist (or in this case, a philosopher) is “the great simplifier,”  as well as another quote:  “A thing is simple or complex depending upon how much attention is paid to it.”  So when I read the following at the end of the preface to the Alliez book, I was re-affirmed:

But what is perhaps most significant about Alliez’s operation… is the absolute centrality he accords to the question of *thought*, which he places at the very heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s recasting of materialism for the twenty-first century as a materialism of the concept.  For *What is Philosophy?* clearly shows that it is impossible to answer the question without also expanding it to “What is Thought?”. . . (xxiii)

It’s a lot to think about….

Books as Dragon’s Teeth

I attended a seminar on “Emerging Libraries” a couple of weeks ago in Second Life where I heard Michael Keller of Stanford mention “the Library of the Mind” as something that 21st century technology will expand.  He was referring to technology as what I call a “mnemonic prosthesis” which extends our memories and other aspects of our mindbrain beyond the body.  In an email clarifying comments about this concept of the “Library of the Mind” he made at a different conference (”the future is here; what are we waiting for?”), he recommended an old book called The Sources of Western Literacy by Felix Reichmann.  Browsing the book, I found this quote from John Milton’s Areopagitica:

Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.  I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

This captures something of the sense that I have of books being energonomic conduits: they capture and store brainenergy, which is released when another reads them.  The physical energy that one uses to write ideas, compose a book, and publish and distribute that book, is stored in the form of the book.  The book therefore comes to embody all of the energy (or “emergy“) used to produce it, including the years and decades of the writer’s education as well as the fruits of cultural and political infrastructure.  Positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi recognizes this in his book Creativity, in which he provides 5th century Greece, 15th century Florence, and 19th century Paris as three exemplary milieu in which surplus attention led to remarkable achievements and advancements (see pp. 8, 32-36, 332-35).  Such surpluses come about when a convergence of economic, political, and cultural factors allow for a particular matrix of individual, field of study, and domain of knowledge to give birth to a creative (i.e. culture-changing) phenomenon.

One thing Milton forgot to mention:  the dragon that has books for teeth is green.

Wandering into Second Life

Back on October 5th, I created a character in Second Life, an online virtual world or “participatory social network” as they are saying these days.  (I am Abaris Brautigan “in world,” by the way).  I was encouraged to do so by John Craig Freeman, a professor of new media studies at Emerson College.  I did a collaboration with Craig four years ago in which he included me in his “Imaging Place” project (scroll down to the bottom and click the movie link to see me in action!), and he’s been adding his work into Second Life.  As a result of this invitation, my interest in my scholarly work has been resurrected, and I’ve been revisiting the work of my dissertation director and mentor Gregory L. Ulmer.  This is the work that I had wandered away from after being cut loose from the academy. 

Now that I have stumbled into Second Life, I feel like the very relevant work that I did in my dissertation (which in the general sense was developing a method of information storage and retrieval in the 3-D writing space of hypertext) can now offer some direction in terms of figuring out how to store information in Second Life.  I am very excited to return to these ideas and hope that I can contribute in some way to the revolution in communications technology that we are experiencing right now.

I will create a new category called “electracy” to indicate posts that involve my work with the theories and ideas of Greg Ulmer, who invented this term to capture the major shift in cultural evolution away from alphabetic and print literacy to this third phase (orality and literacy being the first two). For a general introduction, read my article at Wikipedia on Electracy.