| Post-symbolic communication viral for Google Wave | 2 0 0 9 |
Oct 20 |
Postsymbolic Communication
19 posts under this tag.| this is how we will talk after symbols | 2 0 0 9 |
Jun 23 |
World Builder is a stunningly beautiful video.
A few years ago, I learned from Jaron Lanier about a beautiful dream he calls post-symbolic communication. It’s a dream that has stayed with me since, a powerful, subtle idea. It’s the dream that in the near future we’ll be able to talk not only through words and our voice, but through anything we can dream of. Instead of describing something with words, we would build it, as naturally as we now shrug or wag our finger. It’s about how gods might talk.
If art is already there, perhaps we’re closer than we think.
| A piece of Peirce | 2 0 0 7 |
Nov 22 |
I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.
How not to be intrigued by a man who could explain reason in a sentence?
For reasoning consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain others are found, and it accordingly requires the exhibition of the relations reasoned within an icon.
Charles S. Peirce, On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation (!)
OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”SOURCE
Then there’s Peirce “discovery” of abductive reasoning, the third major class of logical reasoning and for which I’ve found no better (or shorter) intro than the logical reasoning pedia.And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.
| Automatic interfaces | 2 0 0 7 |
Oct 25 |
Who would have thought the new Mathematica would introduce one of the coolest interface design innovations in recent years: automatic inteface building?
You should browse this nice showcase of examples but to really grok the idea you’ve got to watch the Author and Deploy an Application in 60 Seconds screencast.
That above is a screenshot of the presentation: the code above generates the application below. Isn’t it beautiful?
Wolfram Research calls it the day documents and applications merged and they’ve got a point. This makes creating an application as automated and straightforward as creating a graph, and similar ease is being introduced for embedding these tiny apps in documents (“Documents are, quite simply, talking things”).
It’s no panacea but it do makes simple things easy, difficult things possible. In Rails jargon, you could call this a very elegant scaffolding functionality, a victory of convention over configuration (:“At its core it means that what you do (especially if you’ve done it a lot) should carry a lot more weight than having to configure (and reconfigure) things over and over”).
| Beyond books | 2 0 0 7 |
Oct 16 |
People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea.
Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid
Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.
Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.
Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.
The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.
| Faith in facedesign | 2 0 0 7 |
Apr 25 |
We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form
—perhaps the art form of the next century.
—perhaps the art form of the next century.
Steven Johnson, Interace Culture, p213
Dasher
“Hello, how are you?” being written in Dasher. (Hit escape to halt animation.)
A text-entry interface for the tetraplegic, it’s like nothing you’ve seen. Not only does using it have the same rush and exhilaration of playing SonicWP, it is also unbelievably efficient. And again, sheer fun.
It will take you some 5 minutes to get the hang of it (not out of difficulty, out of profound weirdness) but believe you me, you won’t regret it. Read the quick, 3-page explanation and try the Java version in-browser or download it. It’s free software and there are localized versions in many languages.If such deep novelty, such striking unrealityELZR lies in something as mundane as text-entry, what wonders lie yon in the craft of interface design?
Scratch
The brilliant breakthrough has been to Lego-fy programming, making control blocks actually, well, blocks, and turning programming into block stacking. Yes, it’s messy and you have to fumble around for blocks but it’s visual, incredibly intuitive, and—get this—syntax error free (since blocks have shapes and will only fit in ways that make syntactic sense).
It was scary, you know, when I first knew about Scratch, just some days after it was launched, my evangelizing streak came back with a vengeance and I felt this strange calling to go and teach it somewhere, wherever. Here was finally an easy way to show “normal” people what programming was. Here it is.
| Some definitions | 2 0 0 7 |
Apr 24 |
Here some definitions—some funny, but all out of sadness. «Whimsical» to be (mostly) understood in the not so standard sense of “subject to our whims”—of course.
Reality: that which is not whimsical.
Technology: that which makes Reality whimsical.
Technologist: that who believes Reality can and should be whimsical.
Hacker: a Technology maker.
Body: that which is whimsical and its manifold possibilities.
Health: the body’s actual whimsicality.Culture: the exploration of Body.
Art: Culture making.
Artist: a Culture maker.
Science: Knowledge making.
Scientist: a Knowledge maker.
Good: the creation or exploration of Body.
Evil: the destruction of Body.Virtual Reality: whimsical Reality; Technology’s ultimate success.
Religion: the belief that Reality is self-servingly whimsical.Some inspirations and context:
| Synthetic Synesthesias | 2 0 0 7 |
Apr 24 |
Sunny Bains’s Mixed Feelings is a cool article in last month’s Wired about synthetic synesthesias: using technology to give us new senses by using old ones’ bandwidth. Stuff like using the tongue to see, or, below, using touch to locate.
For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it’s time to build them.
“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, ”I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place1.”Some intriguing stories here about the brain that will delight anyone who has read Jeff Hawkin’s mind-bendingly good On IntelligenceAM. Another example:
More than 50 years ago, Austrian researcher Ivo Kohler gave people goggles that severely distorted their vision: The lenses turned the world upside down. After several weeks, subjects adjusted — their vision was still tweaked, but their brains were processing the images so they’d appear normal. In fact, when people took the glasses off at the end of the trial, everything seemed to move and distort in the opposite way.Of course any true Jeff fan would nod knowingly and immediately quote back with:
Patterns are all the brain knows about. Brains are pattern machines. It’s not incorrect to express the brain’s functions in terms of hearing or vision, but at the most fundamental level, patterns are the name of the game. No matter how different the activities of various cortical areas may seem from each other, the same basic cortical algorithm is at work. The cortex doesn’t care if the patterns originated in vision, hearing, or another sense. It doesn’t care if its inputs are from a single sensory organ or from four. Nor would it care if you happened to perceive the world with sonar, radar, or magnetic fields, or if you had tentacles rather than hands, or even if you lived in a world of four dimensions rather than three.
Jeff Hawkins, On IntelligenceAM, p2
Being a fan of the concept since my soundscape post, however, I was surprised the article doesn’t mention the inspiration for my post and the most widespread example yet of a synthetic synesthesia: the beeping proximity sensor in many vehicles—space as sound. My brain has become so used to it that at times glancing back seems like a distraction.
fn1. This quote on space perception got me thinking about time. Is time perception a sense? Are there animals who can, say, stand in an isolated room and yet be able to tell the time? Do watches (time perception through vision) count as synthetic synesthesias? Would something like the above belt—with different intensity buzzers in the place of clock hands—work for time? It would be different from a watch in that you would always know the time, probably not even be conscious of knowing it after a while. Would people become time oriented in a similar way that they become space oriented? Would time become intuitive?
| Buy LITs instead of PDFs | 2 0 0 7 |
Feb 17 |
Turns out you can easily break DRM-ed LIT ebooks while as far as I know your PDF ones—if tightly DRM-ed, and these days they all are—are lost for good—leaving you as a sucker who can’t even copy paste and interesting quote; heck, a sucker who can’t even lend the ebook to a friend (hurrah for technology!).
Interesting how piracy can actually be a good thing for business: yesterday I bought a digital version of Peter Watson’s 800-paged IdeasAM (to go with my paper version) only because it was available as a LIT. I then immediately broke the DRM (Microsoft Reader is a joke) and had the—again, 800-paged book—as an HTML mine to edit and tweak. This is just the encouragement I needed to start reading the book—just imagine, I can now tweak the format just like I want it (and as you may have noticed I am a format freak—I like my italics in a slightly more remarkable tone, my parenthetical text slightly subdued, my quotes highlighted), I can turn footnotes into sidenotes, I can 1-click-Answers.com every word, I can copy-paste to Evernote and Devonthink (these days I just can’t conceive of reading a book without highlighting, now it’s getting intolerable not being able to immediately save select quotes in a digital form1), I can upload to my webserver and have it always some seconds away, I can read it in my berry, I can print it, I can find-as-I-type, I can link, annotate, or rewrite, I can…
1 “I never quite feel like something’s real until it’s ’virtual”. A note on paper just doesn’t feel real—once it’s on the computer, though, I can actually do something with it.” (pigpogm, commenting own Storing Nuggets of Information post.)
| More on post-symbolic communication | 2 0 0 7 |
Feb 13 |
Jaron Lanier’s answer to the 2007 Edge question, What are you optimistic about?, is, predictably enough, post-symbolic communication. But the more I hear about it, the more I’m overwhelmed by the grandeur and sheer magic of the vision. As beautiful a dream as I’ve ever seen.
One extravagant idea is that the nature of communication itself might transform in the future as much as it did when language appeared. This is not easy to imagine, but here’s one approach to thinking about it: I’ve been fascinated by the potential for “Post-symbolic Communication” for many years. This new style of interpersonal connection could become possible once large numbers of people become virtuosos at improvising what goes on in Virtual Reality.
We are virtuosos at spoken language. Adults speak with what seems like no effort at all, even though everyday chats might be the most complicated phenomena ever observed. I see no reason why new virtuosities in communication could not appear in the future, though it’s hard to specify a timeframe.
Suppose you’re enjoying an advanced future implementation of Virtual Reality and you can cause spontaneously designed things to appear and act and interact with the ease of sentences pouring forth during an ordinary conversation today.
Why bother? It’s a reasonable hunch. Words have done so much for people—so alternatives to them with overlapping but distinct functions ought to lead to new ways of thinking and connecting.
An alternative to abstraction might arise—the possibility of expression through a fluid and capable concreteness. Instead of the word “house” you could conjure up a particular house. How do you even know it’s a house without using the word? Instead of falling back on whatever the word “house” means, you might toss around a virtual bucket that turns out to be very large on the inside- and contains a multitude of house prototypes. In one sense this “fuzzy” collection is more precise than the word, in another, less so. It is different.
If all this sounds a little too fantastic or obscure, here’s another approach to the same idea using more familiar reference points. Imagine a means of expression that is a cross between the three great new art forms of the 20th century: jazz improvisation, computer programming, and cinema. Suppose you could improvise anything that could be seen in a movie with the speed and facility of a jazz improviser. What would that mean for the sense of connection between you and someone you love?
The most valuable optimisms are Infinite Games, and imagining that new innovations as profound as language will come about in the future of human interaction is an example of one.