Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!hlab From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: Report on Cyberspace Conference 2, Santa Cruz, CA, Apr 91 Message-ID: <1991May2.155144.3304@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 2 May 91 15:43:14 GMT References: <1991Apr28.231146.19029@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu (Human Int. Technology Lab) Organization: Human Interface Technology Lab, Seattle Lines: 98 Approved: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu Reposted from The WELL (415-332-6106), by permission of Don Byrd: Topic 14: Origins/Usage of Virtual, Cyber, and Hyper #226: Don Byrd (bird) Wed, May 1, '91 (08:07) 81 lines SOME THOUGHTS ON CYBERCON 2 SANTA CRUZ, APRIL 19-20, 1991 I should say that I was a speaker at Cybercon 2, so I will note only that I was astoundingly perceptive and leave myself out of it. It was an important gathering not for anything in particular which was said, but for the recognition that, increasingly, the technology is right up against the hardest philosophic questions. It is, in a sense, technology's loss of innocence, and it is a little sad. There is something charming, if the story is true, that the data glove was developed because a couple of teen-agers wanted a better air guitar. But I just finished reading P.R. Masani's *Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964* (Birkhauser Verlag, 1990), which is excellent in a dry, straight-ahead way, and, as it makes clear, the philosophical snake has been in the technological garden all along. However, I think its effects on the cultural-theoretical side (where I come from) is going to be good. It has been possible to jaw and jaw, endlessly; implementation has never been an issue. I found the conversations between talks perhaps the best thing, and I wish there had been more time for that. The whole organization of not just information (which is a problem in itself) but KNOWLEDGE as such is going to have to get redone, and the fact that literary critics were talking to engineers is the first sign that it might actually be possible. In *Cybernetics*, Wiener says that "the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions." But the NEW questions have still not been adequately stated. The engineers still tend to mechanists and the cultural-studies people still tend to be vitalists. It seems to be that some head way on this problem was made in Santa Cruz. The difference between mechanism and vitalism, to sum up in a few words a controversy which has been going on since the 17th Century is this: mechanists assume that all of the virtualities are implicit in the variables of a function; vitalists assume that for living things (and for things which living things construct by way of observation) the functions themselves change. The arguments, therefore, center around the question of time's reversibility (a movie running backwards of a mechanism will still exhibit quantities computable by the same functions) and questions of purpose and teleology. A mechanism's purpose is inherent in its design, a living thing or organism revises itself in relation to its ever changing and non-reversible purposes. The reason western thinking has been relentlessly dualistic is that these are both important aspects of our experience, and it is not possible to give a coherent account of both from either point of view. The conclusion that I draw, after little more than a week to digest the intensities of Cybercon 2, is that machines and life are now so intertwined that we cannot go on with the pretense that they belong to separate realms. Neither mechanism nor vitalism "win." The entire problem is pushed up to a higher level of abstraction. Working in this new space is not going to be easy, because both mechanism and vitalism have both functioned as religions, that is, beliefs which give finals answers. Those from the mechanistic tradition, which want to make things work now, will be impatient; the people from the vitalistic tradition will have to put their thoughts into forms which can be implemented. Everyone is likely to be grumpy about the situation. A good start on the philosophic problems was made at the Macy Conferences, organized by Warren McCulloch and Wiener, in the 1940's, but it did not go far enough, and frankly I think its way was blocked because it tended to draw more heavily on the mechanistic than the vitalistic tradition. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead presented the culturalists point of view, but there were other people around, such as the poet Charles Olson (with whom Wiener was acquainted, though I do not know how well) who could have held their own in that heady atmosphere. At any rate, everyone circled their intellectual wagons during the Eisenhower era. Cybernetics and information theory provided fashionable vocabularies for various disciplines (they were like the Deconstructionism of that time), but the old disciplinary structures did not break-down, and so the kind of metasystemic study which was required did not emerge. Instead we got a new, jivey computerized version of Cartesian mechanism in Cognitive Science, and a new, nervous version of romantic vitalism in cultural studies, both essentially nostalgias. The important thing about Cybercon 2, it seems to me, is that it was drawing back to the place where we lost in the late 1940's. I would like to see the discussion move further in that direction at Cybercon 3 in Montreal.