The nine publications in this submission were produced between 2002 and 2007. They form part of an inquiry into a 'posthuman' view of reality, informed by debates in art, technology, consciousness studies, and the nature of the mind-world relationship. Pepperell: 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.
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The nine publications in this submission were produced between 2002 and 2007. They form part of an inquiry into a 'posthuman' view of reality, informed by debates in art, technology, consciousness studies, and the nature of the mind-world relationship. Pepperell: 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 nine publications in this submission were produced between 2002 and 2007. They form part of an inquiry into a 'posthuman' view of reality, informed by debates in art, technology, consciousness studies, and the nature of the mind-world relationship. Pepperell: 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 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, 2 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 3 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)). 4 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.
5 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). 6
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 7 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). 8 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 9 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: 10 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 11 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)? 12 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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