Consciousness Studies , by Professor Joseph Goguen, University of California, San Diego

This paper discusses the field of consciousness, and reports on recent developments and current trends within the area.   It says that the field is highly interdisciplinary, including many fields that might not otherwise be considered related to consciousness, such as religion and literature.  The paper is divided into 3 sections: 1) Shape of the Discipline, 2) Issues, Paradigms, and Results, and 3) Some Emerging Trends.

Shape of the Discipline

Journals-

·         Journal of Consciousness Studies

·         Consciousness and Cognition

·         Consciousness and Emotion

·         Psyche

·         Behavioral and Brain Sciences

·         Mind

·         Consciousness and Emotion

Many universities around the world are offering courses on consciousness, and popular Internet discussion groups exist.

Issues, Paradigms, and Results

Issues-

·         How to study consciousness?

·         Are mind and body the same thing, or different – Dualism vs. Mental monism

·         Determine the modularity and plasticity of the brain and the mind

·         Modeling of neurons, networks of neurons, and brains

·         How does the brain integrate sensory input from different times

Paradigms-

·         Cognitivism – early cognitive science and artificial intelligence

·         Phenomenology – grounds everything in the actual experience of human beings

·         Naturalism – study of cognition as it actually occurs in living things

·         Experimental neuroscience

·         Relevance of quantum mechanics

·         Attempts to prove the existence of God

·         Embodied cognition

Results-

·         Attempts to relate consciousness to quantum mechanics has been unsuccessful

·         Dialectic of refutation and refinement of God has been productive in the area of formal logic

·         Voluntary acts are preceded by a readiness potential about 550 ms before the action occurs, and about 200 ms before subjects recorded conscious intention to act.

Some Emerging Trends

·         Biologists are applying socio-biology and evolution to consciousness

·         Merging phenomenology and science

·         Cultural psychology

·         “second-person” – relate consciousness to society rather than just individuals

·         PET and fMRI techniques will help to further explain brain functions

·         Ecology, feminism, and literature may make contributions

A Cultural-Historical View of Human Nature, by Michael Cole and Karl Levin

The purpose of this paper is to point out that culture and the exterior environment are an integral part of the nervous system, and hence consciousness; this exterior environment is known as culture.   Alexander Luria, a Soviet psychologist, and Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist, both view human beings as hybrids of cultural, phylogenetic, and ontogenetic entities.

Developed within the paper is the tripartite nature of consciousness, made up of an active subject, and object, and the cultural medium.  They have   a dynamic mediational triangle, whose base represents natural, phylogenetically controlled processes and whose apex represents a cultural medium.   It is dynamic in the sense that it interfaces with time; the natural and cultural intersect, and that the precise coincidence of the two sources of information about the object is rare and fleeting.   The subject is constantly reconciling information that are not in agreement.  This is illustrated in Figure 1.

In Figure 2, they show how an HB fused hieroglyphic is what a subject sees when the image is allowed to slide freely across the retina during normal saccadic (rapid  and intermittent) eye movements.  They see only combinations of lines with cultural significance.   Correspondingly, cell assembly refers to a configuration of brains that fire in unison because they have been repeatedly experienced as a unique pattern.  In summary, a complete image of the world is obtained when only three elements are present: phylogenetic contributions, cultural contributions, and human brain reconciliation.  

Voobrazhenie is vo (intro), obraz (image), and zhenie (process), or the process of making an image.   The question becomes how to blind-deaf people generate and represent images.  A school is developed to teach the blind-deaf, and ultimately language is used by way of Braille and by using fingers.  The authors note the development of these children.  It begins with consistent routine, and then exploratory play, all made up of interaction with others.  The school is successful in that some of its participants are able to read and write Russian, and become contributing members of society. 

Six principles are mentioned that characterize advocates of cultural-historical perspective of cognition:

1.       Culture is central to human and non-human interaction.

2.       Culture is construed as “social inheritance”

3.       Artifacts are constituents of culture

4.       Mental life is made up of the differing activities one involves oneself with

5.       One understands human nature by studying culturally organized activities

6.       Cultural development appears in two planes: social and psychological 

The main purpose of the passage is to point out that being human and cognition is all about interaction with others in a cultural context.

Towards a Social, Ethical Theory of Information, by Professor Joseph Goguen, University of California, San Diego 

1.  Introduction and Summary

This paper presents the beginning concepts towards a theory of information; a theory that is needed for understanding and designing systems that process information.  The paper argues that although a formal representation of information is needed when processing information, like computer-generated information, an actual theory of information must also take into account the social aspects that are present while the information is being processed.   Ideas from ethnomethodology, sociology, logic, and semiotics are used to construct the theory.  The goal of the theory is to help make the design, analysis, and construction of information more responsive to the users who process the information.   A conclusion that the paper reaches is that information has an ethical component.

Criteria for success for a theory of information:

·         Useful for understanding and designing information systems

·         Address the meanings users give to events

·         Address ethical issues

·         Must take into account that different individuals and groups can interpret information in different ways.

2.       Formalization and Information

Definition of information and consequences of such a definition

2.1     Member, Analyst and Designer

·         Member – an object of a social group

·         Designer and analyst – individual or group engaged in understanding and designing information systems

2.2     Formalization and Metalanguage

A formalization requires a distinction between an object level and a meta level

·         The object level models the world of members

·         The meta level provides the language of the analysts doing the modeling

·         The metalanguage contains technical terms and rules

2.3     Information

Definition of information: an item of information is an interpretation of a configuration of signs for which members of some social group are accountable.

Dry information – understood in a wide variety of contexts.

Wet information – so thoroughly situated that it cannot be understood except in relation to certain very particular contexts.

Formalization is the process of making information drier, that is, less situated, by using a more explicit and precise metalanguage for expressing information

2.4     Tacit Knowledge

The say-do problem – People know what they do in their jobs; they are experts, yet they cannot articulate what they do 

2.5     Qualities of Information

·         Situated – understood in a particular situation

·         Local – interpretations made in a particular context

·         Emergent – understood at a group level

·         Contingent – interpretation depends on the current situation

·         Embodied – tied to bodies in particular physical situations

·         Vague – only explained to the degree that it is useful to do so

·         Open – cannot have a final and complete form

2.6     Sociology of Science

Re-representation: new representations that concentrate previously available information

De-representation: undoing chains of formalized representation

·         Immutable mobiles are information structures that have been dried out. 

·         A formalization is successful to the extent that it exhibits immutable mobility and concentration.  

·         Boundary object – information that is used in different ways by different social groups.

2.7     The Retrospective Character of Explanation

Retrospective hypothesis: Only post hoc explanations for situated events can attain relative stability and independence from context.   Or, while events are unfolding, they cannot achieve a final social accountability, since member can always revise their assessment of the significance of past events in the light of new events.

3.       How to Get Information

Methods for obtaining information needed to support the design of information systems.

3.1     Some Methods and Their Limitations

·         Introspection – imagining what kind of system the designer would want

·         Questionnaires – limited by their stimulus-response model of interaction

·         Interviews – less constrained interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee

·         Focus groups

·         Protocol analysis – engage in a task and concurrently talk aloud

3.2     Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology tries to reconcile a radical empiricisms with the situatedness of social data, by looking closely at how competent members of a group actually organize their interactions.

·         Principle of accountability - members are held accountable for certain actions by their social groups; exactly those actions are the ones constructed as socially significant by those groups

·         Principle of orderliness – social interaction is orderly, in the sense that it can be understood by analysts

Ethnomethodology looks at the categories and methods member use to render their action intelligible to one another.

3.3     Some Limitations of Ethnomethodology

·         requires the use of naturally occurring data

·         requires the analysts to understand members’ concepts and methods

·         requires grounding observations in the concrete circumstances of their social problem

·         labor intensive

3.4     Discourse Analysis

In linguistics, discourse analysis refers to the study of structures larger than sentences.  A discourse unit is a structural, linguistic unit directly above the sentence.

Properties of discourse units:

·         Bounded - turntaking

·         Precise internal structure

Narratives are important for understanding information.   The Jack and Jill nursery rhyme suggests that water is important and men come before women and women take care of men.

3.5     Ethnomethodology and Ethics

Ethnomethodology does not assume pre-given value systems for members.  However, the group being studied, analysts, and the ambient society all have values.  

·         Values are produced, sustained, and modified by members of the relevant group

·         Values are different at each level, and may interact in complex ways. 

·         Values do not exist as abstract ideal entities, but rather emerge interactively in actual instances of accountability.

3.6     Case Studies

Figure 1: a value system tree obtained by Goguen and Linde for a small corporate recruitment firm.   Real value systems are not necessarily consistent.   Higher level values are more important

3.7     Combining Methods and Zooming

Even though methods have limits, they still may be useful.   For example, discourse analysis can be useful when verbal communication is important to the system being developed.   Ethnomethodology should be sued continually to provide context for results obtained by other methods.

A zooming method of requirements elicitation is where the more expensive but detailed method are only employed selectively for problems that have been determined by other methods to be especially important.

4.  Summary and Conclusions

·         Ideas from ethnomethodology and semiotics were used to define information as an interpretation of a configuration of signs for which member of some social group are accountable, or an interpretation of information.

·         Used ideas from the sociology of science and logic to explicate the nature of dry information, which often loses the property of embodiedness, and is less emergent, contingent, and local.

Final conclusions

The formal and social aspects of information is not one of antagonism; recognizing the intrinsic ethical dimension of information and social interaction will help find a path towards meaning in social life and nature.