My notes from the
dialogue session,
Why “bodies”? Because it makes it harder to have a theory of mind:
Intrinsic / extrinsic
Inherent / external
These dualities don’t hold up to careful critical examination. See for example the “expressive” and “technical” sides of piano playing. They interpenetrate, don’t exclude each other, in fact they form each other’s precondition.
Primacy of relation. Relations are not external but intrinsic—despite what centuries of training make us think. (Leibniz the thinker of constitutive relations.)
“Bodies” in the context of real / virtual and mind / body relationships. What it means to have a “theory of mind” (for developing children, for artificial intelligence, in the field of autism studies).
Ethnocentrism. Why this isn’t and can’t be a “Western Civilization requirement.” The need to recognize difference but not stop with that.
No pure exemplars of this or that civilization (L-S discovers he is never the first explorer to encounter a “wild” people)—we are working on already worked-up materials.
Bricolage (“cannibalization” of readymade machines, as opposed to going out and getting a new, specially-built machine for your needs). The writing and reading of literary texts is a kind of bricolage
Hybridity—what happens when you give up on asking for a cultural or ideological answer sheet (“How to be a Good [communist, Kentuckian, whatever]”). No pure categories; categories are invented after the fact to tame messy overlapping realities.
The texts we’ve been reading are each in its own way hybrids (it took an analytical reading to lay that fact bare); they come together in the course to form a new kind of hybrid, as we try to think them together.
Simulations, Frankenstein monsters, cyborgs, Sims: all seem to cross an important boundary between the organic and the pieced-together.
Models and expressions. How the term “expression” offers a way of going from the scientific realm (mathematics: a curve “expresses” an equation and vice versa) to the arts.
The effects of media: how media illusions operate. What you hear has a great deal to do with what you’re listening for; it’s an illusion that more bandwidth necessarily means more realism or more convincing illusions.
HS