{"id":40378,"date":"2020-05-11T21:37:31","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T21:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=40378"},"modified":"2020-05-11T21:42:13","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T21:42:13","slug":"psychogenesis-w-koenderink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=40378","title":{"rendered":"Psychogenesis w\/ Koenderink"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"top\" \/>\n<p>Like you, I find von Uexk\u00fcll&#8217;s approach more convincing than Gibson&#8217;s; or to say it differently, I find the idea of an Umwelt truly ecological. Indeed, the environment and the agent are best seen as two interdependent parts of a single system (maybe this is von Uwexk\u00fcll&#8217;s bubble).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ecological Optics and the ambient optic array remain fundamental for the environment part, but they depend on the agent doing the perceiving. On the other hand, psychogenesis is fundamental for the agent part: it makes use of what&#8217;s available in the optic array, and even changes it through action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I don&#8217;t clearly understand in your work is the notion of &#8220;brute facts&#8221; and &#8220;experimental phenomenology&#8221; (as opposed to science). If I&#8217;m not wrong, it suggests that there&#8217;s no point in trying to study the agent part (in particular psychogenesis) with the objective tools of science. Instead, one should rely on the inter-subjectivity of sufficiently similar agents, and of course we&#8217;re talking about humans here&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then does it mean there is no hope to really model psychogenesis? And are we bound to forever be clueless about other animals (no sufficient inter-subjectivity)? But maybe you would instead suggest that one can design subjective&#8221; models? What would they be like? How can psychogenesis be implemented?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One possibility would be to look into artificial intelligence (and I&#8217;m not talking about deep convolutional networks here). I wonder for instance whether Dynamic Field Theory (where the notion of physical attractor is adapted to the behavior of an agent) could help here. I don&#8217;t work in this field, but a colleague of mine suggested reading the paper of [Beer 1995] on the subject: <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/000437029400005L\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/000437029400005L<\/a><br>His figure 2, even though extremely simple, looks quite reminiscent of von Uexk\u00fcll&#8217;s approach ; of course, what&#8217;s carried out by the S (sensory) and M (motor) arrows remains to be studied. I&#8217;ve found a more specific example of  this idea of dynamic fields and attractors in this paper: <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/hal.archives-ouvertes.fr\/hal-01966566\/document\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/hal.archives-ouvertes.fr\/hal-01966566\/document<\/a><br><br>My background is in Computer Graphics, so I&#8217;m naturally inclined to study Ecological Optics; but I also got interested in Vision, and I got increasingly frustrated with Psychophysics over the years. For me what&#8217;s lacking is a notion of a dynamic system; instead, most studies assume some kind of statically designed machine taking in image cues and outputting some behavior. Instead, I wonder how different subjects, or even the same subject in different conditions, might adopt different visual strategies (your<br>psychogenesis), and reach a stable perceptual state! And I would like to see this studied and tested with actual AI models, see if we can reach the same behaviors as humans or animals; is this what you call experimental phenomenology?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-text-color has-background has-very-dark-gray-background-color has-very-dark-gray-color\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">This topic is a non-issue for hard-core analystic philosophers. These are the people that tell you consciousness or awareness do not exist, for them there are no such things as &#8220;brute facts&#8221;, although it is certainly true that people may emit various noises depending on how to stimulate them. (Like mechanical stimulation, say kick them or pat them on the back.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">So make your choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">For me a &#8220;brute fact&#8221; is something I cannot possibly deny, although there can be no scientific fact of the matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">If you believe that brute facts exist, you&#8217;re a phenomenologist (the general idea is: not a scientist). But as far as I&#8217;m concerned you need to be both. Not everything is science (love, warm or cold colors, pains), but science allows many useful predictions based on current observations. (I also find physics beautiful, but that is nother brute fact.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">I&#8217;m a physicist myself, I love science. In experimental phenomenology I correlate brute facts with physical states. This is not science, and (in the interesting cases) not even Fechnerian psychphysics. But so what? It just isn&#8217;t science. I enjoy what I do (brute fact).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">Awareness is a brute fact, thus psychogenesis cannot have a scientific &#8220;explanation&#8221;. This does not not imply that you cannot do interesting AI (I&#8217;ve been in AI since the late 60&#8217;s myself). But it doesn&#8217;t let you explain awareness. As said, for hard-core analytic philosophers that&#8217;s not an issue. After all, I have no scientific way to prove that you (or anybody else) are not a robot. If you feel yourself not to be, then that&#8217;s a brute fact (for you).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">So brute facts are (scientifically) irrelevant. If you are a true scientist you will say that you have neither awareness (brute fact) nor consciousness (brute fact). Then ethics becomes impossible and it would only be natural to assume something like Hitler&#8217;s perspective on socociety. I feel that is indeed perfectly rational. From a scientific perspective I&#8217;ve nothing to say against that. It&#8217;s just that I it take for a fact that I&#8217;m aware and that others are too (including animals and even plants.) Such a perspective changes everything. All it takes is to see that there is more than just science. For me that is another brute fact, so I have no way to deny the opposite (all there is is science).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right\">See? You need to make a choice. I cannot help you there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-text-color has-background has-very-dark-gray-background-color has-very-dark-gray-color\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Let me see if I got it\u2026 By &#8220;brute facts&#8221; you designate that content of  experience that cannot be scientifically explained. Brute facts hence just occur to me\/you, and they can only be approached through experimental phenomenology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For me brute facts make intuitive sense then, because I don&#8217;t see why Science would have to account for everything in our experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I still have some concerns though\u2026 Science yields more than predictions: it offers explanations, sometimes even revelations, connecting seemingly unrelated phenomena or unveiling unexpected structures. Now, would it make sense to look for phenomenological &#8220;explanations&#8221;? Maybe this is what you mean by &#8220;correlating brute facts with physical states&#8221; , but I&#8217;m not sure\u2026 Said differently: how could psychogenesis be explained? And why not trying to reproduce bits of psychogenesis through AI and see what works or not?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like you, I find von Uexk\u00fcll&#8217;s approach more convincing than Gibson&#8217;s; or to say it differently, I find the idea of an Umwelt truly ecological. Indeed, the environment and the agent are best seen as two interdependent parts of a single system (maybe this is von Uwexk\u00fcll&#8217;s bubble). Ecological Optics and the ambient optic array &#8230; <a title=\"Psychogenesis w\/ Koenderink\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=40378\" aria-label=\"Read more about Psychogenesis w\/ Koenderink\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discuss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40378"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40383,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40378\/revisions\/40383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}