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The Posthuman View: Embodied Minds, Extensionism and


Visual Indeterminacy
Critical summary of submission for PhD by Published Works
Robert Pepperell,
Reader in Fine Art,
Cardiff School of Art and Design,
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff

Overview
The nine publications in this submission were produced between 2002 and
2007. They form part of an inquiry into a 'posthuman' view of reality, which is
informed by debates in art, technology, consciousness studies, and the nature
of the mind-world relationship. Three key ideas are developed in the
publications: an embodied understanding of the conscious mind, an extensionist
theory of reality, and the role of indeterminacy in perception.

The first is an emphasis on the embodied or embedded nature of the conscious
mind. Here the mind extends through the body into the world, and
consciousness is seen less as dependent on the operation of specific nerve
cells than on the situated behaviour of the biological organism as a whole within
its environment. The case is made in publications 1, 2, 5, and 6. I draw on a
range of scientific and philosophical sources (e.g. Chalmers and Clark (1998),
Gregory (1963), ORegan and No (2001), Hayles (1999)) to critique the notion
of a disembodied mind of the kind often implied in various accounts of artificial
intelligence (e.g. Moravec, 1995). The consequence for the posthuman account
of reality is a dissolution of the boundaries between thought and the world, and
between the body and the world.

The case for an extensionist account of reality is made in publications 1 and 2.
Extensionism is a philosophical position in which objects and events are
regarded as extending indefinitely in time and space rather than being discrete
and localised. My principal concern is to challenge the assumption of an
inherent separation between objects that might appear to be distinct but are in
fact profoundly connected. I draw on a range of ideas from science, theory of
technology, and eastern philosophy (e.g. the morphogenesis of Thom (1975),
quantum physics (Polkinghorne, 1986), the Buddhist concept of dependent
origination (Matsuda, 1983)) and build on them to critique the view that objects
and events are physically discrete. I show that belief in the separation of objects
and events is inconsistent with knowledge gained about the nature of reality
from these fields of inquiry. Extensionism contributes to a posthuman
conception of humanity in which the boundary between humans and the
environment, including our technological environment, is dissolved an idea
further explored in publication 6.

I explore the notion of visual indeterminacy primarily in publications 7, 8 and 9.
In publication 7 I argue that the world experienced visually prior to perceptual
categorisation is indeterminate with respect to the existence of distinct objects,
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and that objects and their associated sensual properties are constructs of
perception rather than self-existing entities in their own right. This argument is
based in part on a first-person phenomenal account of a visually indeterminate
experience (discussed in publications 3 and 7) and supported through reference
to various literary sources (e.g. Huxley (1969)) and some neurobiological
studies (e.g. Humphreys and Riddoch (1998)) The importance of indeterminacy
to my own artwork is discussed in publications 7 and 8 and forms the basis of a
collaborative neurobiological study, described in publication 9. The importance
of this for my account of the posthuman is to further challenge the perceived
discreteness of the human, and to expose the anthropocentric nature of our
beliefs about the nature of reality.

Together these ideas consitute the posthuman view, as I present it, by stressing
the continuities between things rather than the distinctions including the
continuity between humans and technology, bodies and the environment, and of
the conscious mind with the world. Furthermore they foreground the inherent
indeterminacy in our experience of reality and the (often paradoxical) problems
of mind-world relations this poses. As such this posthuman view contributes to
contemporary debates in the arts, sciences and humanities about the nature of
spatial and conceptual boundaries (e.g. Jatsch, Debordered Space:
Indeterminacy Within the Visual Perception of Space, 2005), the nature of
human consciousness (e.g. Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action,
and Cognitive Extension, 2008), and the growing literature on posthuman
theory (e.g. Merrell, Sensing Corporeally: Toward a Posthuman
Understanding, 2003).

The origins and themes of the research
I give the following account of the origins and themes in my work to show how
an apparently disparate body of research covering ideas in the philosophy of
technology and mind, perception and psychology, and art practice is in fact
integrated and continuous. Although the research has developed over the years
it has always been concerned with problems of how to understand human
existence and the nature of mind and creativity.
I took a postgraduate diploma at the Slade School of Art between 1986 and
1988. As part of the final piece for my diploma I submitted a computer-based
installation produced in collaboration with a colleague, Miles Visman. My
interests at the time were centred on the creative potential of the new (as it was
then) technology of microcomputers. Together we had worked on a number of
digital artworks that explored the ways in which computers could generate
images using recursive mathematical formulae. This was driven by a desire to
find a way of automatically producing images that were suggestive of pictorial
content but devoid of explicit meaning what I later came to call visual
indeterminacy.
My interest in the creative potential of computers led me to form a small
multimedia and desktop publishing business, which grew into an enterprise
producing computer games, pop promos and video art installations. For the next
decade or so I was intensely involved in working with digital technology, and
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seeking new ways to exploit its creative possibilities.
During this period I was not only fascinated by the technology itself, but also by
its social and philosophical implications. In the early 1990s it was clear that
personal computers were contributing to changes in many aspects of life,
including the way we communicated, the way we accessed and stored
information, and the way we worked and played. Perhaps I was more aware of
these changes than many, working with computers on a daily basis in order to
make a living and being continually reminded of both their possibilities and their
limitations. This awareness spawned a growing intellectual curiosity about the
future trajectory of technological development and how it might affect the nature
of the relationship between humans and machines.
Others were interested the same questions, and the pre-millennial decade saw
a profusion of books exploring the impact of new technology on society, human
evolution and our understanding of nature (for example, Mazlish (1993), De
Landa (1991), Levy (1992), Drexler (1990)). Perhaps the most important for me
at the time was James Gleicks Chaos (1988), a work of popular science that
prompted a deeper inquiry into scientific models of reality.
What struck me most profoundly about the book was the paradoxical view of
technology it implied: on the one hand, computing power had opened up new
vistas of understanding about the structure of many natural phenomena. The
chaotic patterns in organic forms or the seemingly unpredictable behaviour of
complex systems could now be lucidly described with recursive mathematical
formulae. Moreover, they could be made evident (and especially visually
evident, as was the case with the then popular fractal images) through the
calculating power of computers and their graphical displays. On the other hand,
this same insight into the structure of nature was to demonstrate the absolute
limits of our own capacity for knowledge. Edward Lorenzs machine for
predicting weather, described by Gleick, unexpectedly showed that some
phenomena were so complex, so sensitive to minute perturbations, that no
amount of computational hardware would ever be able to keep track of them.
The butterfly effect is at once a beautiful insight into the fragility of nature and a
stark emblem of our explanatory limitations.
Reading Ren Thoms seminal Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (1975),
which inspired catastrophe theory in the 1970s, was a revelation and a
confirmation of the conclusion I had drawn from reading Gleick. Talking
primarily of the growth of biological forms, Thom set out a view of science that
resonated strongly with my own holistic inclinations. For Thom there are no
isolated systems in nature. The best we can do is to study confined local
models, but always recognize these are embedded in a wider dynamic
environment. I came to understand that although there is much to be said about
nature, and much to be discovered through the scientific method, we cannot
exhaustively account for the sensitivity and interconnectivity of the natural
world. It was a position further reinforced by a reading of basic quantum theory,
and expressed in the notions of observer dependency, quantum
indeterminacy and non-locality (for example, Bohm (1987), Peat (1990),
Polkinghorne (1986)).
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This conflicted somewhat with a childhood-acquired view of scientific and
technological development that potentially knew no bounds. From a perspective
informed by Tomorrows World, with its relentlessly optimistic promotion of new
devices and discoveries, and through a teenage-hood inflected by early
computer games and synthesised music, I was of a generation (born in the
early 1960s) for whom science and technology were almost entirely
progressive. Notwithstanding the threat of nuclear annihilation, one could be
forgiven for thinking it only a matter of time before brilliantly intelligent machines
would be solving the deepest riddles of nature, providing us with endless new
knowledge that continually improved our lives.
Finding myself as an adult in a world where the excitement of the space travel
bonanza was confined to memory and global environmental disaster was on the
horizon, it seemed there was a more complex, even contradictory, picture
emerging in which sheer ingenuity and resources were no longer enough to
maintain our hegemony over nature.
The first version of The Post-Human Condition (Pepperell, 1995) was an
attempt to explore some of these ideas, and more specifically to address the
question of whether human creativity could be synthesised in a machine such
that it might be supplanted by machine creativity. During the process of writing it
developed into a more broadly based book about the impact of new technology
on art, science, philosophy, and what it is to be human. It began by listing
some of the key technologies that then seemed to be rapidly emerging,
including nanotechnology, virtual reality, and genetic manipulation. My point
here was not original: that in various ways humans and machines, which had
hitherto seemed to inhabit quite distinct domains, were increasingly fusing
perhaps to the point of indistinctness. This, combined with the realisation the
human capacity for knowledge was at the same time circumscribed, was a
development of such historical significance that I felt it merited a term, and I
chose post-human as a compound that seemed to carry the requisite sense of
profound transition. The transition I had in mind was not only that between the
natural and the technological but also between the humanist and the post-
humanist periods of historical development, where the assumption of the
uniqueness and supremacy of the human race under humanism gives way to a
view in which humans are neither distinct from nor supreme within their
ecological and cosmological environment.

Much of The Post-Human Condition was concerned with exploring the various
ways in which the insights gained from Gleick, Thom and quantum theorists
could be applied to the general understanding of our (post)human condition in
the latter part of the twentieth century. I came to reject a number of my
previously-held assumptions about the constitution of reality and nature of
existence, such as the fact that the world appears to be made of solid material
objects; that human beings are separate from their environment and each other;
that it is possible to precisely demarcate the boundary of a human being (or
anything else for that matter); that the world is distinct from the mind that
conceives it. Most importantly, I came to reject the apparently obvious belief
that consciousness is located in the brain.

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My interest in understanding more about consciousness was threefold: First, I
was investigating to what extent computers might be used as aids to human
creativity, and then whether they might develop creative faculties of their own.
This drew me in to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, the
broader question of what creativity is, and the nature of the conscious mind that
supports it. Second, that if technophile commentators like Hans Moravec and
Marvin Minsky were right we had to face the prospect that human
consciousness would soon be replicated in machine form. In other words, the
locus of mind would move from brain to silicon (e.g. Minsky, 1994), at which
point we could no longer say the mind is in the skull it could be anywhere.
Third, I had a deep intuition, partly promoted by the possibility just mentioned,
that consciousness was not confined to the biological brain, or to put it another
way, that the brain could not be responsible for consciousness alone, and that
in fact consciousness extended beyond the brain into the world. This became
such a key part of my thinking and when I rewrote the book eight years later I
added the subtitle Consciousness beyond the brain. This I did to press home
the point that if we accept the brain cannot be solely responsible for
consciousness then we are looking at a quite different conception of what it is to
be human from that supposed by much contemporary thinking in the sciences
and humanities.

Between my thinking about the changing human condition, the nature of
consciousness and my multimedia enterprises I continued to paint and draw. In
doing so I was extending a line of investigation that had begun as an
undergraduate student and which had been central to those early computer-
generated image experiments during my time at the Slade. This was a study of
the perceptual problem of visual indeterminacy, which occurs when one is
presented with an apparently meaningful image that nevertheless defies
identification. When I returned seriously to painting in about 2003, it was to
address in a singular and focused way the problem of how to make images that
are strongly indeterminate.

During extensive contemplation in the studio I gradually became aware of the
connections between the ideas explored in the The Posthuman Condition and
the paintings I was making. As objects extend indefinitely across time and
space their apparently fixed boundaries become indeterminate. Moreover,
reality conceived as a continuous flow of energetic vibrations cannot be said to
contain isolated entities discretely partitioned from everything else in the
universe. I understood the job of the perceptual apparatus being to carve up
this continuous flow, creating distinctions at perceptible points of energetic
discontinuity and wholes across areas of energetic continuity. Through this we
construct a rich cosmos of individual entities that appear to exist out there. The
purpose of the paintings, then, is to try and depict the indeterminacy of object
boundaries and to expose the mental processes involved in carving our sensory
input into meaningful forms by presenting images that suggest objects but resist
precise recognition (see figure 1).
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Figure 1. Crucifixus. Oil on canvas, 121 x 155 cm, 2007. An example of an
indeterminate painting in which objects are suggested but never specified.
Summary of publications
In what follows I summarise the context and content of each of the publications,
indicating where they contribute to the overall thesis of the posthuman view. I
have divided the discussion of the publications into three sections. Section 1 is
mainly concerned with establishing the posthuman view, and introduces the
themes of embodiment and extensionism. Section 2 considers the implications
for consciousness and our understanding of the mind. Section 3 deals with the
issue of visual indeterminacy. In the final summary I will draw these themes
together to show how they each contribute to the overall thesis.
1. Posthumanism: embodiment and extensionism
Publication 1 is The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain,
written in 2003. I had been using the original edition, published in 1995, as a
teaching text since I began lecturing, and became increasingly aware of its
structural and methodological deficiencies. It had, after all, been written outside
academia and without the benefit of the formal and informal networks of support
that sustain much scholarly research.
During the rewriting process I felt confident in keeping most of the main
argument in tact. I had discussed, published and lectured on the ideas many
times since the original edition and was now able to draw on new sources that
added support to my general case, as well as being more aware of the various
counter-arguments and objections. I also got the sense that my thinking was
compatible with a general shift occurring a various fields, not least in cognitive
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science and artificial intelligence research.

Artificial intelligence was a field forged during the mid-twentieth century in a
climate of optimism about the computational model of mind. Essentially this
classical model was based on the proposition that the software of human
intelligence and by extension the mind as a whole was analogous to a
computer programme running on the hardware of the brain, which logically
manipulated symbolic information to arrive at meaningful outputs. Proponents of
strong AI (such as Hofstadter (1980), Dennett (1991)) believed that once this
symbolic code had been cracked it could be implemented in non-organic
substrates like silicon-based machines in order to construct artificial minds, and
therefore machines with human attributes such as the capacity for creativity.
The issue of whether, or how, human creativity could be synthesised became in
the book a key measure of the validity of proposed models of artificial
intelligence.

I argued against the classical view on two main fronts: (1) that a linear, logical
computational model of mind would be unlikely to accommodate the illogical
and unpredictable aspects of human thought, and (2) that it relied on a view of
the mind as being bound inside the head, independent of the body and world. In
respect of (1) my own experience as a creative practitioner led me to suspect
creativity was neither a logical nor predictable process. Creative works, such as
Salvador Dalis perplexing surrealist compositions of the 1930s, delight in their
exploration of the irrational. As I argued, creativity can be described and
possibly even replicated given the right conditions, but it is debatable whether it
is mechanical, if by mechanical is meant fully understandable in terms of logic.
(p. 142). With (2), I argued that classical AI theorists held to an essentially linear
model of the mind (p. 23) as machine-inspired central processor. Other parts of
the system, like the body and environment, tended to relegated to the status of
peripherals (p. 25). I proposed instead that these were just as central to the
process as a whole, with the consequence that the mind became unlocated (p.
29), distributed, and open to multiple determinants.
I had addressed the question, what would it take to replicate human creativity
in a non-human substrate? and concluded that for the reasons above the
classical approach to AI was inadequate. My response, set out in the book, was
not to suggest that algorithmically replicating creativity or even consciousness
was impossible, but to achieve it would require a system much more akin to
environmentally embedded humans than a desk-bound computer, however
powerful. It would be a system, as I argued, that would need to be endowed
with the capacity to behave randomly and unpredictably, and it would need to
be able to respond to the unforeseen contingencies of the environment in order
to be motivated to come up with creative solutions to ensure its own survival (p.
132). It might be a machine that even its designers would not understand or be
able to control, since it would no longer be constrained by pre-determined
logical algorithms. It may instead have reached a degree of complexity and
autonomy such that its behaviour was no longer explicable in terms of any
particular component or routine, or even necessarily rational. Crucially, it would
depend for its intelligent behaviour on moment-to-moment interaction with an
unpredictable world it would be embodied (p. 154).
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This call for an embodied view of mind and intelligence certainly did not
originate with me. The recent interest in embodiment and situated cognition can
be traced back at least to the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962) who was the main
inspiration cited by one of the most important early texts in the current debate,
The Embodied Mind (Valera et al, 1991). This offered an enactive alternative
to the dominant cognitivist models that underpinned AI and many
computational theories of mind. Following this came Andy Clarks work on
active externalism, which took a strong position on mind-world continuity and
embodied models of machine intelligence, and which was influential in shifting
cognitive science towards enactivism and externalism (Clark, 1997 & 2003).
Perhaps the more original move in The Posthuman Condition to dispense with
the inherent distinctions between mind, world and body and in fact between
all distinctions that might be thought to be independent of the mind. I proposed
a view of reality and human existence in which apparent distinctions are
contingent on an energetic relation between the environment and the perceptual
apparatus of the perceiver, not integral properties of the things in the world.
Things as such amount to no more than perceptible discontinuities in the
space and time (p. 74) arrived at through the coupling between energetic
modulations in the environment and the energetic responses of the perceiving
organism.
Consequently, distinctions normally taken as natural and eternal are in fact
arbitrary and contingent, including those between mind and body, body and
world, human and machine, human and human, object and object. The
realisation (drawn from fundamental physics) that reality is at base composed of
energetic fluctuations leads to a kind of monism in which all phenomena can be
understood as processes of energetic formation and transformation in which no
absolute distinctions inhere (p. 51). From this can be built up a picture of
(post)human existence that is profoundly integrated into the wider cosmos.
With this in mind a novel conception of the relationship between humans and
technology emerges (although it is a conception shared in part with Clark,
2003): it is not simply the case that the organic gradually merges with the
mechanic. Neither is it the case that the mechanic supersedes and absorbs the
organic (as is imagined in some of the more lurid technophobe or technophile
fantasies). The key move in posthumanism is to recognize that the organic and
the mechanic were never distinct at all. Technology is not a separate realm that
we have somehow given birth to; it is and always was an integral part of what
constitutes humanity in the first place. In succinct terms one could say:
Humans are not machines, machines are human, or as it is expressed in the
book:
Where humanists saw themselves as distinct beings in an antagonistic
relationship with their surroundings, posthumans regard their own being as
embodied in an extended technological world. (p. 152)
I take up the idea of extendedness in more detail in publication 2, Posthumans
and Extended Experience. The paper offers a posthumanist account of the
relationship between humans and technology, the nature of human existence
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and the potential for extended life. It contributes to the life extension debate
currently going on within posthuman studies, but rather than looking at
extending life-span in a temporal sense I propose an ontologically extended
view of human existence. Arguing against those who wish to reduce human
essence to a flow of symbolic information (uploading the mind, etc.), I posit the
posthuman as a radically extended and embodied being whose experience is
potentially boundless. To support this position, I outline the case for an
extensionist approach, which draws on recent philosophical notions of the
'extended mind' as well as more ancient Buddhist ideas of 'dependent
origination'. Extensionism stresses the continuities between objects and events
rather than the divisions. I use this to argue for the continuity between humans
and technology in contrast to those who see an inherent division, or even
antagonism, between them. I conclude by offering a description of
technologically-enhanced (post)human experience that transcends distinctions
but is nevertheless grounded in the world.
The journal in which this paper was published is the organ of the IEET (Institute
for Ethics and Emerging Technologies), which has as its mission statement:
Promoting the ethical use of technology to expand human capabilities. As a
browse through the web site will reveal (http://ieet.org/), the institute is mainly
concerned with issues like life extension, capability enhancement, and
biological modification. These are issues closely associated with
transhumanism, which sees the next stage of human evolution being a
transition between the current incarnation of the human being and the fully-
fledged posthuman. The transhumanist movement is well represented by the
Extropy Institute (http://www.extropy.org/), and there is an established literature
(e.g. Regis (1990), Pearson (1997), Dewdney, (1998)).
As can be seen from The Posthuman Condition, I am sceptical about the belief
in the capacity of computers (at least as they are known today) to replicate or
replace the human brain, and in this paper I adopted a certain scepticism
towards the notion of life extension, at least as normally presented by
enthusiastic transhumanists. In Posthumans and Extended Experience I start
by distinguishing between disembodied and embodied tendencies of
posthumanism. The disembodied tendency argues for a distillation of human
experience into symbolic code that can be uploaded (or downloaded) onto a
digital computing device. My objection, as set out in the paper, is that to think
about the human mind in this way is to misunderstand both its origins and its
function. Instead I argue for an embodied conception of mind in which human
experience can be ontologically rather than temporally extended (p. 31).
I then set out the extensionist view introduced above, starting with the notion of
the extended mind, which in various ways regards the mind as extending
beyond the brain into the world, and even the cosmos. This was essentially the
view of mind I arrived at in the original 1995 version of The Posthuman
Condition but I was now able to cite other philosophers and biologists who were
proposing similar ideas.
I then expand on the extensionist thesis proper, which is the position that:
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All objects have extended dimensions, but we normally acknowledge only a
fractional part of their true extent because of constraints inherent in our
perceptual apparatus and the coercive effects of time. Rather than regarding
discernible objects in the world as integral and discrete we must recognize that
they, and their repercussions, extend indefinitely through space and time.
These extended dimensions belonging to objects such as their material
provenance, their cultural origins, their internal composition, their indefinite
physical boundaries are rarely considered during the normal course of our
lives where we habitually assume objects to be of finite dimensions, having a
fixed place in time and space, and being normally viewed from one position.
I then go on to apply this idea to humanity in general (p. 33), proposing an
extended view of human existence that has some resonance with certain key
ideas in Buddhist thought. The paper draws to a close with a brief description of
what I regard as an aspect of the contradictory nature of experience (a theme
that will be returned to in publications 5 and 7), in which our perceptual activity
is characterised by the apprehension of both fragmentation and unity at the
same time. Finally, the paper summarises the extended view of human
existence of the title, distinguishing it from other, disembodied, conceptions of
the posthuman.
By staking out and drawing together the embodied view of the posthuman, the
extensionist view of reality, and some key concepts from Buddhist thought, the
paper offers a plausible and coherent account of human existence that is at
once challenging and traditional challenging because it dispenses with
deeply-ingrained assumptions about the inherent distinctions between things in
the world, and traditional in that it chimes with some ancient philosophical
insights.
Publication 3, Computer Aided Creativity: Practical Experience and Theoretical
Concerns (Pepperell, 2002), will be mentioned only briefly, since many of the
ideas it covers are dealt with either in The Posthuman Condition or in the later
work on visual indeterminacy in publications 7, 8 and 9. However, I have
included it in the submission to show the continuity between my early work in
computer-generated indeterminacy, the theories of computer-aided creativity
and their practical applications, and the posthumanist approach to
unpredictability and randomness all topics addressed in the paper.
The context of the publication was an international conference on creativity and
cognition, where many of the papers were drawn from the field of artificial
intelligence and computational approaches to creativity. Given the arguments
leveled against some aspects of the AI tradition in The Posthuman Condition, I
felt it significant to be making an original intervention in this forum.
2. Consciousness
The view that consciousness is a process located entirely in the biological brain
was, as it seemed to me in the early 1990s, dominant among philosophers and
scientists, much as the computational theory of mind had been some decades
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before. I opened the 2003 edition of The Posthuman Condition by quoting a
statement from the eminent philosopher John Searle to the effect that all mental
activity is caused by brain processes (p. 13), and I was aware that many of the
major figures in consciousness research at the time each held views that
located consciousness firmly in the head, or even in very small parts of the
brain. For example, Francis Crick and Christof Koch declared What remains is
the sobering realization that our subjective world of qualia ---what distinguishes
us from zombies and fills our life with color, music, smells, and other vivid
sensations --- is probably caused by the activity of a small fraction of all the
neurons in the brain. (Crick and Koch, 2000).
Much of the early section of The Posthuman Condition was concerned with
refuting this idea and proposing a model of mind that extended beyond the brain
and into the world. In other words, a more distributed and embodied conception
of mind. In fact the latter part of the 1990s and early 2000s had seen a growth
of interest in various kinds of externalist or extended mind approaches, and
an increasing number of philosophers seemed to be proposing views that I
sympathized with. The Towards a Science of Consciousness conference in
Copenhagen in 2005, for example, featured a key debate on Radical
Externalism.
My scepticism about the neurocentric and computational conceptions of
consciousness motivated a number of papers exploring alternatives. I did not
think that consciousness was necessarily inexplicable but neither did I think it
would be explicable in terms that reduce consciousness to symbolic code or the
activity of a small fraction of neurons.
Among my contributions to this debate was publication 4, which originally
appeared in the journal Technoetic Arts (Pepperell, 2003a), and was reprinted
in Engineering Nature: Art and Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era
(Ascott, 2005). It was also presented at several international conferences on
consciousness, including Towards a Science of Consciousness in Prague, and
the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British
Psychological Society conference at Oxford, both in 2003.
The paper addresses one of the most difficult problems in contemporary
science and philosophy, namely how to account for the phenomenal sense of
awareness we have about our own mental states and experiences. This self-
conscious aspect of mind, as distinct from its sub-conscious or unconscious
aspects, is particularly puzzling for a whole range of reasons, not least because
there is nothing detectable in the neural fabric of the brain that bears any
physical resemblance to what we experience; we can vividly see reds, or hear
sirens but close inspection of brain activity or anatomy reveals only
electrochemical pulses in a monochrome, silent mass of jelly.
A further puzzle concerns the fact that we are self-conscious. Its not just that
we sense the world around us but that we know we are sensing it. What can
account for this dual aspect of awareness that perhaps other conscious
creatures, like cats, dogs, and zombies seem to lack (at least to the same
degree)?
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The paper begins by laying out the background and citing key references, and
then heads straight into the issue of paradoxical circularity that so frequently
bedevils thinking on this matter. It proposes that the infinite regress often
associated with the notion of a self-referential internal observer, which is usually
avoided as a philosophical hazard (the homuncular fallacy) may in fact suggest
a mechanism that could at least allow us to visualise self-awareness, if not
explain it. Linking the concept of self-reflecting nen from Zen Buddhism with
the complex images that blossom under certain conditions of video feedback, I
argue that physically embedded infinite regress (as opposed to purely
conceptual regress of the kind that leads to logical absurdity) may offer a useful
insight into the operation of the self-reflecting mind.
Taking up Freuds description of consciousness as the sense organ for the
perception of psychical qualities (quoted on p. 126), I map out a possible
system that could model the integration of environmental stimuli, body and brain
(unconscious mental processes) in producing the overall effect of self-
consciousness. Key to this is the inclusion of an internal observation loop
(similar to that which generates video feedback) the function of which is to
observe both the combined sources from world, body and brain at the same
time as feeding those observations back into the loop such that the overall
behaviour of the system is modulated. The system self-referentially sees what it
sees. I propose that rather than leading to logical absurdity the system might
generate behaviour of immense complexity, coherence and variety, in an
analogous way to video feedback.
Crucially, the proposed model makes no assumption about the conscious effect
being located in the brain, but allows for the distributed collusion of brain, body
and world in producing the conscious experience. Thus it is consistent with the
embodied view of consciousness and extensionism set out above in which the
system as a whole, including the activity of the environment, contributes to the
overall effect. It is also consistent with the paradoxical view of experience
expounded in publications 5 and 7 that the notion of a mind, which is a thing
that thinks, is also the thing that thinks about itself it is separately and
simultaneously the subject and object of its own experience.
I explain that part of the purpose of this theoretical exercise is to explore on
what basis a conscious work of art might be constructed, by which I mean a
work of art that is aware of both itself and its environment as distinct from a
conventional wok of art, such as a painting or sculpture, which is not. I suggest
that were self-aware technologies to become available then artists would almost
certainly want to exploit their potential as a new medium, just as they have
exploited new mediums in the past, such as video, computers and
biotechnologies.
Publication 5 addresses specifically the problem of the location of
consciousness, returning to debates raised in earlier parts of the submission
about whether consciousness can be located entirely in the brain or not. The
occasion for publication was a contributory chapter to an anthology that I co-
edited with Professor Michael Punt on the theme of cinema, mind and world for
the Consciousness, Literature and the Arts book series published by Rodopi
13
(Pepperell, 2006).
The arguments have also been presented to conferences at the universities of
Exeter and Aberystwyth (both 2005), as well as an essay in the published
conference proceedings of the Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Conference (Pepperell, 2005a).
My essay took a question with a seemingly obvious answer Wheres the
screen? and showed that although common-sense reasoning might lead us
to believe the cinema screen (or any object in the world) clearly appears to exist
in front of our eyes, closer examination reveals this is far from straightforwardly
the case.
Setting the paper in the context of recent debates about internalist and
externalist tendencies in theories of perception I first lay out in general terms the
internalist (or representationalist) view, which tends to regard perceptual
consciousness about the external world entirely as a product of the
machinations of the brain. Arguments are offered from both the history of the
psychology of perception and recent neurobiological theory to support the case
for a conception of mind in which the internal representations generated by the
brain are quite distinct (sometimes surprisingly so) from what exists in the world.
This approach to understanding perception and cognition is widely supported in
the sciences and is, I would suggest, currently the dominant view.
Counter to this in many respects is the externalist position (of which there are
many flavours, not all consistent) which takes perception to be less the product
of brain activity alone than the interaction between organism and environment.
As has been shown already, I am clearly sympathetic to this tendency. Drawing
again on some historical studies of perception, which I argue demonstrate the
necessity of interaction between brain and world as the ground for perceptual
experience, I then move on to summarise some more recent ideas emerging
from the enactivist strands of contemporary thinking, ideas that stress the
sensorimotor contingencies inherent in visual consciousness.
The proposals I cite of Kevin ORegan and Alva No, who represent a larger
group active in this field, shift the locus of conscious perception firmly into the
world and away from the dominant representationalist tendency. Here the
coupling between perceiver, body and world is emphasized, to the extent that
they can claim: The outside world serves as its own, external, representation.
(quoted on p. 188).
My purpose in the paper is not to rehearse the arguments and counter-
arguments in the debate between internalists and externalists there is
already a substantial technical literature (see for example Adams and Aizawa
(2008), or Rupert (2004)). Despite my sympathy for the externalists, I try in the
paper to retain a roughly impartial position.
In summarizing each sides response to the question Where is the screen? I
propose that the internalist would view the screen as being experienced and to
some extent located inside the brain (although few of this persuasion would also
14
deny the existence of some material entity in the external world which serves as
the stimulus), while the externalist would view the screen as being experienced
at least in part in the world insofar as the mind is coupled to the externally
existing object. My sympathies with the latter approach are in part conditioned
by the extensionist principle outlined above, which would regard the screen as
extending to the mind and the mind extending to the screen. The screen,
therefore, exists in no determinate location but is fused across an indeterminate
space between the mind and the world, which in any case I regard as
continuous. However, I cannot refute the internalist approach completely, not
only because without the internal machinations of the nervous system the
screen would not be recognized at all (I argue the brain is necessary but not
sufficient for conscious awareness) but also because there are certain
phenomena, like misperceptions, dreams and hallucinations, which occur in
spite of or in the absence of any direct coupling to the world.
Recognising the support that both internalist and externalist positions enjoy, and
that each in its way seems tenable, I propose a solution that allows both to co-
exist simultaneously. I survey the possible combinations of relationship between
mind and world: that they are distinct, that they are unified, and that they are
both distinct and unified, the last option raising some obvious logical difficulties.
Looking again at Descartes meditations on this difficult question I come to the
view that, despite his historical and philosophical reputation, he was not
adamant in distinguishing between mind and world (or body), as is often
asserted. In fact, in more than one place he specifies that although mind and
world can be distinguished (on the grounds that one is indivisible and the other
divisible) they are also, so closely conjoined therewith, as together to form,
as it were, a unity. (quoted on p. 190).
Following this insight from Descartes, with its implication that the mind and
world are both distinct and unified, I review some recent literature that
addresses the question of mind-independence of reality and note that, for one
scholar at least, we cannot admit that a pair of contradictory statements can
both be true (in accordance with the well-established principle of non-
contradiction). Consequently, we cannot accept both the realist and anti-
realist views (in his terminology) without positing two worlds, in each of which
the contradiction is avoided.
I propose another solution, which draws on the controversial work in logic of
Graham Priest (2002). He argues that there are true contradictions, cases
where something both is and is not simultaneously, and that these are logically
valid and in fact reasonably common, certainly when questions about the nature
of mind and reality are concerned. The dialethic approach, as he terms it, is
then applied to the original question of the location of the cinema screen in
relation to the viewer, and I propose that it is a question that cannot be
answered without contradiction. There is a true sense in which the screen is
located internally within the perceptual apparatus of the viewer and a true sense
in which it is located externally in the world beyond. I close by unpeeling some
of the implications this might have for our understanding of the relationship
between audience and screen, although it might apply equally well to a
discussion of, say, the relationship between spectator and work of art.
15
The upshot of this paper is the suggestion that when we think about the nature
of mind and its relationship to the world we are drawn into paradox,
contradiction, indeterminacy, and self-referentiality. In one context the mind and
world are continuous since we cannot determine where one stops and the other
starts. In the other context they are distinct in that our knowledge of reality is
based on a perceptual construction that bears little physical similarity to the
world itself. Yet we have to remember where this distinction between mind and
world resides: in the mind itself a mind that also is embedded firmly in the
world. This seems an inescapably paradoxical situation.
I would propose that we either resist this paradoxical circularity and seek an
explanation consistent with conventional logic or we accept even embrace
it as a helpful and productive insight into the perplexing nature of the conscious
mind. However, dealing with such problems, which are traditionally the domain
of metaphysics and philosophy, may require that we adopt a transdisciplinary
approach, drawing in ideas from across the sciences, humanities and the arts,
The themes of paradox, contradiction, and especially a transdisciplinary study
of indeterminacy are addressed more fully in publications 7, 8 and 9.
Questions concerning the potential of conscious technology are addressed in
paper 6, published in the journal AI & Society. The basic arguments have been
presented at number of conferences: the International Conference on Usability
and Engagability (2004), Wearable Futures Conference (2005), and the
inaugural lecture of the Kinetica Museum, London (2006).
The paper considers the functional implications of conscious technology,
understood as a system or device as yet undeveloped that possesses the
kind of sentience or self-awareness we would recognize in each other. We are
largely familiar with intelligent machines, that is, machines that can process
complex data in an organized and useful way. Expert computer systems, for
example, can be regarded as intelligent agents capable of making informed
decisions and there are many robots that can learn from experience. What do
not yet exist are machines that have all these faculties but can also
demonstrate an awareness of their own being such as we might attribute to a
compos mentis human. Imagining that at some point in the future such
machines are developed the question I wished to pose is, why would we need
conscious machines, and how might sentient technologies be incorporated into
products and artefacts? (p. 46).
The argument begins by restating some of the ideas discussed earlier about the
relationship between humans and machines, but focusing on the notion of the
humanisation of technologies, this being the self-declared aim of the industrial
design discipline. I challenge the distinction between humans and machines
that the term humanisation implies, and argue that under a posthuman schema
(of the kind outlined above) human agency is no different in essence from
technological agency, the latter being merely an extension of the former. From
this comes the somewhat novel claim that all technologies can be regarded as
conscious or intelligent (eliding for a moment the distinction) insofar as they
manifest the conscious attributes of the people who create them and extend the
conscious agency of those who employ them. (p. 47). The obvious objection is
16
that I am anthropomorphically ascribing human attributes to technologies, yet
this objection only holds if one clings to a view of humans and technology as
intrinsically distinct. Removing this distinction also neutralizes the objection.
I then briefly survey some recent work on the theorisation and construction of
self-conscious machines and consider what functionality might emerge from
these models, concluding that none supplies concrete examples of what a
specifically self-conscious machine (as opposed to just a very clever machine)
might be for. What would my self-conscious shoes be able to do that my merely
intelligent shoes couldnt? (p. 51). I argue it remains an open and interesting
question to consider what the function of such conscious technology might be.
The paper closes with the proposal that the emergence of self-aware
technologies of the kind envisaged will further alter the perceived relationship
between humans and machines. We can consider current technology as a
physical and cognitive extension of the human being insofar as it embodies
human mental attributes, but would not yet regard it as having an autonomous
subjective agency. With devices that are truly self-aware, however, there arises
an intersubjective relationship between human and technological agents in
which each carries a sense of selfhood. This, I argue, would be a unique step in
human evolution.
By stressing the continuity between human cognition and the technological
environment the paper contributes further to the extensionist and embodiment
strands of the posthuman theme.
3. Visual indeterminacy
The fascination with visual indeterminacy, as already indicated, goes back to
my student days. I was intrigued by the possibility that we can see the world
differently from the way we are normally accustomed to seeing it, even if only
briefly. Rather than perceiving reality through the veil of acquired knowledge
that is, filtering our perceptions according to what experience and social
prescription has led us to expect to see I realised it was possible to see the
world without this determining lens. The world seen in this way is a mass of
shapes, colours and motions (art theorists would talk of its formal properties)
but at the same time devoid of distinct meanings. The visually indeterminate
moment is often accompanied by a reflexive desire to resolve the conundrum of
what is seen.
Only much later, after considerable contemplation, did further philosophical
implications of visual indeterminacy become evident. The world viewed
indeterministically reveals the contradictory nature of experience pointed to
elsewhere in this discussion. We normally take a world full of distinct objects for
granted, but visual indeterminacy presents us with a different picture of reality
no less valid at the moment it is experienced where such distinct objects
are temporarily absent. Our struggle to resolve the visual uncertainty is based in
part on the habitually-driven belief that objects must be present, and at the
same time the recognition that, briefly at least, they are not. We thus perceive
(and conceive) reality on two planes, one object-full and one objectless. The
17
objectless plane brings us closer to experiencing the world as conceived
according to an extensionist position, in which things do not exist as distinct
entities but in indeterminate states spread across time and space. They become
separate only through the differentiating action of perception and cognition.
Publication 7, Seeing Without Objects: Visual Indeterminacy and Art, was
published in the journal Leonardo. The ideas discussed have also been
presented at several international venues, including at the Altered States
Conference at the University of Plymouth (2005), the Consciousness and
Experiential Section Conference of the British Psychological Society at the
University of Oxford (2005), invited lectures at Max Planck Institute for
Biological Cybernetics (2006), the Department of Neuroradiology at the
University of Zurich (2006), and the School of Psychology at the University of
Cardiff (2007).
The paper considers the phenomenon of visual indeterminacy in a number of
contexts, firstly in art historical terms citing the work of Ernst Gombrich and
Dario Gamboni, each of who recognizes the importance of the indeterminate,
indistinct, or otherwise uncertain within the history of art. The paper then
discusses some empirical research from neuroscience that suggests the
biological responses to visual indeterminacy are marked by overall increases in
brain activity and greater detectable coherence. After briefly distinguishing
between the formal and semantic aspects of visual perception I link visual
indeterminacy with the breakdown of their habitual integration, such that one is
presented with the formal aspects of a percept without the accompanying
semantic aspect that would normally result in identification.
I go on to propose that a connection can be made between the altered states of
perception already referred to and the heightened awareness of experience
associated with aesthetic stimulation. Citing some literary examples, and then
looking at John Ruskin and the work of J M W Turner, I suggest that the
struggle to reconcile the indeterminate perceptual field with identifiable objects
plays a role in heightening visual awareness and intensifying experience.
The paper then moves on to make some wider claims about what the
phenomenon of visual indeterminacy might reveal about the nature of mind and
reality, and their relationship to each other. Returning to some of the arguments
presented publication 5, I refer then to the apparent conflict between our
conception of a world that is full of discrete objects existing independently of our
minds and the knowledge that such objects are produced only by the combined
actions of the senses and perception. This conflict, I argue, is central to the
experience of visual indeterminacy.
After a summary of my working processes I restate the contradictory nature of
experience discussed earlier, in which the world can be regarded as both
object-full and objectless. The paper then closes with a general appeal for a
cross-disciplinary approach to tackling questions such as those raised by the
paper, and a plea for the recognition of the value of the artistic contribution to
scientific and philosophical problems.
18
Publication 8, which appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Aesthetics,
covers similar ground as the previous paper, but aims at making a greater
intervention in the field of aesthetics. The phenomenon of visual indeterminacy
is again introduced, this time with different examples and a more detailed
analysis of my own working methods is then presented. The paper then goes on
to summarise a collaborative project undertaken with the University of Zrich in
which the behaviour of subjects viewing both determinate and indeterminate
images was compared (see publication 9).
Looking at some historical theories of art and aesthetic experience, I note that
defamiliarisation has been mooted as a significant strategy in heightening
awareness of perception in works of art, and that the indistinctness of Turners
paintings, which it seems made so many demands on the imaginative resources
of contemporary viewers, can in part be credited for his high reputation. I
summarise the paper by making the case that: Indeterminate images resist
precise or immediate codification and so force the focus of attention upon the
more formal properties of the visual stimuli while an intensive search for new
hypotheses to fit the pictorial facts is undertaken. This has the effect of slowing
down or suspending the normal operations of visual recognition. However, in so
disrupting these normal perceptual processes, we undergo a different kind of
experience, one that is difficult, out of the ordinary, but perhaps more intense
and compelling for being so. This proposal I believe to be a contribution
towards the contemporary understanding of aesthetics in that I connect some
well-established ideas from aesthetics to some new data from neuroscience.
The final paper included in this submission, publication 9, is a collaborative
scientific study conducted with Professor Alumit Ishai from the Department of
Neuroradiology at the University of Zurich, and her assistant Scott Fairhall. It
appeared in the scientific journal Brain Research Bulletin as well as being
presented at a series of international conferences, including the Association for
the Scientific Study of Consciousness Annual Conference at the University of
Oxford (2006), the European Conference on Visual Perception in St
Petersburg (2006), the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Atlanta
(2006) and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Annual
Conference in Las Vegas (2006). A follow up study is published in
Consciousness and Cognition (Ishai et al, 2008).
The study involved comparing the behaviour of a group of subjects when
looking at both determinate and indeterminate images. The determinate images
consisted of a selection of historical paintings in which objects were clearly
recognizable, while the indeterminate images consisted in a selection of my
paintings, which although similar in overall appearance to the determinate set
contained no recognizable objects.
A number of aspects of behaviour were studied, including recognition response
times, image recall and aesthetic preference. The context, methodology and
results are all clearly laid out in the paper, so I will just mention a few salient
points here. First, the main outcome of the study was to show that although
subjects rated the whole sample set as having almost identical aesthetic affects
whether indeterminate or determinate there were significant differences in
19
the way subjects perceived and remembered images without meaningful
content as compared with those with. We concluded:
Recognition of familiar objects and subsequent memory of art compositions
are affected by their content, whereas, aesthetic judgment of paintings is
independent of their meaning and is influenced by their formal visual features.
(p. 323).
This was the first study of its kind to compare determinate and indeterminate art
compositions, and I would suggest a novel and valuable example of art-science
collaboration, where the intention was to provide a contribution to both our
understanding of artistic experience as well as scientific knowledge of the
human mind. There were also some methodological innovations that arose as a
result of the collaborative exchanges during the experimental design phase. For
example, from my standpoint as an artist I was able to persuade my scientific
colleagues to rethink the orthodox measure of aesthetic preference, which is
normally a sliding scale between the poles of ugliness and beauty, and measure
instead the affective power of the image, on the basis that many works of art
are highly aesthetically stimulating without necessarily being at all beautiful.

Summary
I have proposed posthuman view of existence and reality that I believe
constitutes a substantially original thesis. It challenges a number of implicit
assumptions about mind and nature, including the assumption that human
beings are autonomous and distinct from their technological environment, that
the mind can be modeled in a way that is essentially rational, that objects in the
world are intrinsically discrete and distinct from those perceiving them, and that
consciousness is located solely in the brain.
Instead I offer a number of proposals about how we can understand human
existence and reality at this point in history by referring to an embodied and
extended conception of being and consciousness and through consideration of
visual indeterminacy. Rather than regarding the human body and mind as
discrete entities, detached from the world, they can be understood as deeply
embedded in, and continuous with, reality. Using an extensionist account of
reality, described in publication 2, we come to understand that humans cannot
be separated from their environment and that we blur into the energetically
constituted world around us; human beings, like all objects, extend indefinitely
across time and space, and consciousness is embodied in a world-embedded
organism. Because of this the boundaries that seem to demarcate objects are
rendered indeterminate, despite the fact that our perceptual apparatus normally
presents them as determinate and discrete. In particular, the illusory separation
between humans and technology is rejected, some consequences of which are
explored in publication 6.
An important function of the perceiving mind, I have argued, is to carve up the
extended continuum of reality into separate chunks, often guided by perceptible
discontinuities in the energetic structure of reality. The rapidity with which we
are able to extract recognizable objects from environmental data is the subject
20
of the collaborative study in publication 9. If we were only to perceive the world
as it is, i.e. devoid of discrete entities, it would appear to us as an
incomprehensible blooming, buzzing confusion, to quote William James
(2004). Our experience of a differentiated reality is constructed in the mind of a
perceiver, whereby all distinctions are generated, including the distinction
between the world and the mind itself a mind that is nevertheless firmly
embodied and embedded in the world.
Considering the relationship between mind and world in this way results in a
degree of self-referential paradox and contradiction in which the mind is both
continuous with the world (in that the mind extends through the body into the
world) and distinct from it (in that the mind distinguishes itself from the world of
which is it is a part, and then distinguishes between other things in the world).
As discussed in publication 7 we may have to knowledge, therefore, of the
world in two contradictory states: one on which there are no distinct objects and
one in which there are. The experience of visual indeterminacy, in which we see
clearly but where definable objects are nevertheless absent, presents us with
precisely this dichotomy, a dichotomy that I have attempted to manifest in my
artwork.
The paintings and drawings I produce, described in publications 7 and 8, could
themselves be seen as depictions of the extensionist principle, in that they
represent a pictorial world lacking fixed spatial or conceptual boundaries.
Objects, insofar as they exist at all in the images, have no definable edges or
limits. What remains is a matrix of potential objects whose existence is subject
to perceptual negotiation. Since the burden of interpretation is explicitly passed
to the viewer it becomes evident that the presence of specific objects depends
on the viewers active role in constructing them from the available clues. This is
precisely the process by which objects appear to us in perception generally,
with the difference that we normally take perceptible boundaries to be
coincident with an objects limits. Extensionism reminds us that these limits are
in fact contingent, and moreover ambivalent in that they are present and absent
at the same time.
Like the self-referential observer posited in the model of conscious art proposed
in publication 4, ambivalence, contradiction and paradox are not taken as
symptomatic of logical flaws in the description of the mind-world relationship but
as a source of potentially useful insight into the perplexing nature of
consciousness. I suggest in publication 5 that we need to embrace these
seemingly irrational aspects of our experience if we are to more fully grasp the
elusive character of the self-aware mind, and in doing so draw on a wide range
of academic disciplines and intellectual traditions.
In sum, the posthuman view reality and the human condition, as proposed here,
consists of the amalgam of three themes: (1) The situating of consciousness,
and the mind at large, as being embodied in the world, and so distributed
through the body and into the environment, including the technological
environment; (2) the extensionist principle in which objects that we normally
take to be discrete (including humans themselves) are instead regarded as
extending indefinitely in time and space; (3) the recognition of the importance of
21
the perceptual and conceptual indeterminacy that results from the world seen
without the boundaries that are normally imposed on it.
These themes are combined here to produce an original conception of the
human condition, which I have termed posthuman. The posthuman view offers
an alternative to other well-established views, such as those which regard the
mind as being entirely located within the brain, or assume humans to be
essentially distinct from their surroundings, or overlook the explanatory potential
of contradictory or paradoxical states.


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