>I agree that we need to have some kind of notion of the person
(not a >la Latour in his review of Hutchins an empty desk with
everything >farmed out).
for I don't think Latour meant in saying at one point that the
desk was empty that there was no personal activity, or even
agency (just not the sort of agency needed to support the
classical notion of a psyche). I read Latour at this point as
saying that while the desk is empty, we do still indeed have the
desk itself. That is, the empty desk is not an emptied mind, but
stands itself for the mediational space of the person as a
'medium' in/through/across which co-ordinations of
representations take place.
I read Latour this way because just before he has said, agreeing
generally with Hutchins' view, that the human is now 'lightly
equipped' -- rather than bare of all equipment. This farming out
is the farming out of the excess baggage with which cognitive
science in the 70s and 80s tried to load down the mind. The
'robotics' view in AI, itself a reaction against the classical
cognitive AI algorithmics, similarly farms out representations
and processing to the environment. It takes only a few internal
rules for interaction, plus a rich and dynamic environment
coupled to the system's responses via those rules, to produce
wonderfully complex, and life-like behavior, which could never be
simulated by endlessly explicit internal computation. One can
either say, rather dramatically, that the environment does most
of our 'thinking' for us, or, more sensibly, that what we call
the thinking is just our cultural view of processes which are not
taking place 'in us' as such, but in some larger system of which
'we' are a part.
In that larger system representations are constructed materially,
they are co-ordinated with one another, transformed and
transduced, and some of this process continues across the
boundary we use to define Us and takes advantage of us as _a_
medium of intelligent activity. The intelligence lies in the
larger system, which does its deeds in part through our
participation.
We have not been emptied; we have just been put back inside the
networks of community where, alone, intelligent activity can take
place.
We do indeed need a notion of person, including of uniqueness of
individual persons, but as intermediate links in extended social
processes, not as sovereign and autonomous agents. We are not
made in the image in which we made our God, but in the image in
which we made our Nature. JAY.
-----------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU