Hello everybody,
Sorry I couldn’t make our Nov 17 meeting. Noah filled me in a bit on what happened, and I am really happy to hear that we are collectively excited by moving forward with an expansion of the design from Lenay and Steiner. A few thoughts that I think are important, and some remarks about sources to read to help us out. I hope this won’t be too long, but thoughts keep on coming and I don’t want to lose them, ‘cause then, gosh darn it, they don’t never come back. (Ah well, it ended up being a bit long…)
1) I do hope we can use the virtual boundary model, where we dynamically generate the sense of running into room limits…
2) I would argue that the actuators for feeling like you are running into room limits MUST NOT be on the hands, and shouldn’t be on the torso, but should be on the ankles or feet.
2.a) First, I think now that we should NOT CONFUSE THE ROOMS WE SEE/PERCEIVE AS OBJECTS WITH THE SORT OF ROOM THAT WE ARE CONCERNED ABOUT, the room that is the BACKGROUND of perception. True, we see the rooms in which we move about, but I think that is only accidental to what we are investigating. THE ROOM THAT ACTS AS LIMIT AND CONSTRAINT on movement is not in the first instance identical with the room we happen to perceive. This is a hard and subtle point. But, first of all consider that we are interested in room as a sort of condition and background for seeing OTHER things. This is sort of background condition is not thematic. And consider waking up in an unfamiliar hotel room in the middle of the night and needing to get to the bathroom. In this situation, you try and make an objective mental map, and you grope around with your hands, trying to feel where walls are, paying attention to sound and felt air movements, so you don’t smash your knee on the night table etc. IT IS IN THIS SITUATION THAT YOU ARE TRYING TO PERCEIVE THE ROOM AS OBJECT. When you get up out of bed at home to go to the bathroom, probably for the most part your room is not an OBJECT, but is a vanishing, inborn background of movement which has the bathroom as its object. So, a nicer way to put the point here is that when we are probing rooms as enabling constraints of handling/perceiving objects (and as thereby having a role in the harbouring of memory), we are not thinking about the ROOM AS AN OBJECT, but as a habitual, albeit ‘external’ background of movement.
2.b)On the basis of the above, I am now inclined to think of there being a ‘room schema’ in analogy to the body schema, or perhaps as an elaboration of the body schema: my body schema, as crossing me and the world, is labile, so there is a body-schema-of-me-in-the-office, in-the-kitchen, etc. Yet I don’t have this schema on my own, but through limits of rooms I inhabit. The point here is the room as I inhabit it is NOT a perceived object, anymore than my body-schema is a perceived object; the body-schema and room-schema are limits sedimented in my habits of inhabitation. Sometimes you can correlate objective features of a room with limits in the room schema, but there is no materialist, reductive way of producing this mapping. The kid doesn’t go into the basement because it’s a scary place, how close you go to walls depends on all sorts of things, you don’t cross the taped lines on the art gallery floor, the carpet runner in the middle of the hall keeps you off the wooden margins of the hall. There’s a way of reading motives for room-schemas in perceived features of rooms, but these features are not the causes, and in any case when a room is enabling motion toward things, I think it is doing this precisely by the room vanishing as an object perceived (in the way that objective features of the hammer vanish in the hammering of other things). It’s only when things go wrong that you notice the room as such…(or when you’re designing a room, etc.)
2.c) All of which suggests: in the experiment, the modality through which you encounter objects IN a room, should not be the modality through which you encounter the ROOM, at least not in our minimal space design. I.e. it would confuse things if you perceived both things in the room and the room through actuators on the hand. (NB here I’m not really working with any principled thing vs. object distinction.)
2.d) Rooms are constraints/limits on overall movement, i.e., locomotion, movement from place to place. This limit enables body movement, i.e., movement of the body relative to itself as geared to things, lets call this manipulation for the movement. Generally we feel locomotion as happening in the lower body, and manipulation in the upper body; of course this is complicated and blurry, and if you’re swimming, etc., things are different, but in typical, prevalent situations this is a relevant distinction. This is why I think the feeling of running into felt constraints on movement should be felt in feet or ankles. You want participants to have two different feelings going on, which are going to eventually vanish as feelings of happenings in the body (vibrations in the fingers, etc.) and be experienced as feelings of something else: feeling of things to be manipulated; feeling of constraints in movement that make you feel like you’re in a room. What I am suspecting here is that this going to be more powerful and transparent if the happenings in the body are: in the hands as giving an experience of things; and in the lower body as giving an experience of rooms as limits in movement.
2.e) I think the transducers in both case should be in the kinaesthetic, proprioreceptive domain, not acoustic. Or maybe leave acoustic signals for room limits as a separate test.
3) Sources: Alva Noë’s book Action in Perception has a lot of material on sensory substitution, if you’re not familiar with it, and a good bit on how action is perception, etc. Mixes in a phen perspective. Also see the O’Regan article cited by Lenay and Steiner. Another useful source is Alain Berthoz’s The Brain’s Sense of Movement; this goes into the neuroscience of felt movement, with some phen inspiration. One thing this book emphasizes is receptors for felt movement are generally receptive to second order changes, i.e., to changes in changes, e.g., not to pressure, but changes in pressure. You could think of this as a ‘design principle’ of both the brain and of sensory organs, or more, third order changes. We don’t want to think this in a reductionist way, but note it as a constraint on that to which the body can become sensitive, and also read something about life into this artefact of evolved bodies: life is (unsurprisingly) evolved to feel movement, change, what we can do, not: what is (in a static sense). Unchanging stasis vanishes.
4) What we are probing, I think, is the way that perceiving things is in our case a feeling sensitivity to movement, where that sensitivity to movement internally divides in two: sensitivity to unmoving limits in movement (to room-schemas as constraining background) and sensitivity to things moving/movable within these limits—where the two sensitivities are not disjoint. Indeed, this division echoes a division within body-thing movement, where the limits on ways of movingly handling something, e.g., attune us to what we can feel in the thing. An example is knowing how to move and runch cloth to feel its properties as silk, taffeta, organza, tweed, whatever, and thence feel how it’s going to hang in clothing. The room is like a thing that already knows how YOU should move to get the feel of things. (Vs. you having to learn how to handle the fabric.) This is something I tried to capture earlier in terms of the room as an “I ALREADY can move this or that way.”
5) Don, if you’re still on this list: methinks the above point about movement internally dividing into unmoved limits and limited movement that is attuned to things by these limits…. is a point about JOINTS. I.e., the logic of joints within the body (that there are joints, that the positioning of these joints enables limited movement that is thereby better tuned and powered, more determinate) is here echoed outside the body, in the environment in which we move. I.e., rooms joint us and disjoint us. This is no surprise if we think of our jointed bodies as echoing the gravitational and material environment in which we evolved; our joints have evolved to NOT be disjointed by their environment, with different sorts of joints in land vs. sea animals. In building rooms we take over this sort of connection with the surround to give us new joins with the world. The hotel room disjoins us, because the joining is not in the material but in the habit or schema of inhabitation.
6) Notice too there are active/passive issues here too in the joint structure.
DM
