Some quick thoughts that might move us along:
1) Some theoretical points:
Our hypothesis all along has been that the memory place relation is rooted in body-world movement, where habitual dimensions of that movement mean that the past is in play in the “I can” of movement; further, because body-world movement is inhabited by the concrete places in which it unfolds, places inhabit our movement too, by limiting/facilitating and thence stylizing the I can in distinctive ways. Places we inhabit are thereby a sort of outer habit that calls upon inner habits, and thereby also liven a past in the present. (The inner-outer language here is insufficient.)
Some points about rooms in this context:
a) Last time Noah had us notice how rooms act as limits, constraints, on movements—but enabling ones that let us focus on things. (In MP terms, rooms are perhaps like an augmentation of the body/body schema as the third term in the figure-ground relation.)
Further conversation with Noah led me/we to the following:
b) Rooms are something like ‘knots’ in the ‘string’ of body-world movement: they tangle movement against itself, through boundaries and doorways; this provides a sort of stability by limiting movement in robust ways. (I am trying to capture the way that turning indeterminacy against itself can engender determinacy.)
c) But it’s wrong to say the room does this itself, as material object. (This is the issue about hallways, and rates of movement through places.) A hallway in which you stop and do things, in which *you let* your movements get tangled by your surround, is a room; a hallway as mere passageway is not. A tiny cupboard may be a room for a child playing in it, but not for the adult just taking things in and out. (Material) rooms are (phenomenological) rooms in relation to our movement, yet it is our movement that ‘rooms’ (using this as a transitive verb meaning “to make something into a room”) (phenomenological) rooms in relation to constraints of (material) rooms. To make a vast hangar a room, you probably have to bound it in some way, ‘nest’ in it.
Rooms are generated as rooms by our nesting behaviour. And nesting seems like a really powerful thing in the life of humans and other motile animals.
d) On the other hand, we don’t just nest in rooms, rooms nest our bodies and things: we feel at home, our bodies come back to themselves, when crossing the doorway into the ‘nest.’ And things are what they are when appropriately nested in rooms. Identities are nestled in places. Turrel’s lit ganzfeld removes all possibility of nesting, and so ‘de-things’ things inside the ganzfeld.
So, we could look descriptively at what’s at stake in nesting: the way we do it to make a room a room; the way nesting in a room arises from tangles in movements.
e) Rooms are recursively nested, rooms within rooms, with some ‘smallest’ point where we just have movement through some space, without the scale allowing ‘tangling’ (the cubby that only allows one thing to be dropped in it), and some largest point, beyond which tangling is not really an issue (the McGill campus, which, although it has doors, is really too open ended to tangle you up and focus you on such and such).
2) Two thoughts re experiments:
A) The article below (which I’m still studying) seems to give confirmation of some Merleau-Ponteian and phenomenological views of lived space, that I’ve also worked on quite a bit, and by very simple means. Basically, the apparatus is a light sensor on a finger, linked to a tactile stimulator on that finger, and a light bulb. The subject is blindfolded, and the experiment is to see how the subject orients to the light. Not surprisingly to those who are in to Merleau-Ponty, when given time to explore and move around, the subject eventually comes to see/perceive the light ‘through’ the finger, but crucially, not via feeling tactile stimulation in the finger—the subject directly perceives the light where it is. What we learn here (in my view) is how space is engendered in body-world movement. The advantage of the experiment is it really focuses on movement, since in the objective framework there is only a one dimensional points stimulus. I.e., this paradigm really lets us zoom in on body-world movement.
All we would need to do is multiply the targets that can be seen by the finger (e.g., different rates or kinds of stimulation, or stimulation on different digits) for different coloured lights. And let the subject move around more, but tangle their movement with boundaries, so as to create a room. For safety reasons, we might want to have the subject seated in a rolling chair, and we can mark out two rooms with bump boundaries, and then test for the room effect via the above paradigm. Importantly, we’d watch what they are doing via video, and have them give free form self reports (there are interesting ones in the article).
I recently had the opportunity to meet a psychologist who is doing experiments on the cognition as dynamically embodied. His most recent stuff has people selecting between two choices on a computer screen, where this is some cognitive complication about the choices; they do this using a wii controller, and what he’s really interested in is the dynamics of their hand movements in the time of making the choice, as revealing that choosing and cognition are dynamic and embodied phenomena. (Rick Dale, U of Memphis,
http://www.cognaction.org/rick/pdfs/papers/spivey_dale_curdir.pdf, http://www.cognaction.org/rick/cv.php?id=4,5,6,7.) We could potentially use a Wii for this. Rick is willing to give us the software for hacking into it. Also, Rick noted that once you make an experiment into something like a game, or rather, once their whole bodies are involved and they’re not just pressing buttons on a computer, they really get into it, and become active participants in the experiment. I think we’d want this too.
Consciousness and Cognition
Volume 19, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 938-952
Beyond the internalism/externalism debate: The constitution of the space of perception
References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.
Charles Lenay
Abstract
This paper tackles the problem of the nature of the space of perception. Based both on philosophical arguments and on results obtained from original experimental situations, it attempts to show how space is constituted concretely, before any distinction between the “inner” and the “outer” can be made. It thus sheds light on the presuppositions of the well-known debate between internalism and externalism in the philosophy of mind; it argues in favor of the latter position, but with arguments that are foundationally antecedent to this debate. We call the position we defend enactive externalism. It is based on experimental settings which, in virtue of their minimalism, make it possible both to defend a sensori-motor/enactive theory of perception; and, especially, to inquire into the origin of the space of perception, showing how it is concretely enacted before the controversy between internalism and externalism can even take place.
B) Nesting: we could just watch how people nest in a big room, i.e., make smaller rooms, and especially see if giving them some sort of memory demanding task conduces nesting. I.e., see if people spontaneously make rooms in order to remember things better. I bet they do: this what kids do, and what goes on in making shrines, I bet. Watching what happens, and listening to free form reports, might generate insight.