LSTD response

LSTD response Everything about our intelligence is situated, bound up in its context. It is plausible that a computer could come to make sense of the world like humans do with silicon-based hardware, but only if the computer were situated in its world the same way humans are situated. The chapter presents scientists and babies as epitomizing human learning, partly because of the sociocultural situation they are afforded: “We invented institutions that re-created the conditions of childhood–protected leisure and the right toys. We call those institutions science.” (p. 159) The fact that leisure and toys for computers seems ridiculous suggests we have a long way to go. The cognition of computers is currently not very situated: there is a discrete boundary between inside (where the thinking happens) and outside. There are sensors which convert external stimuli into internal electrical signals. Human sensing, on the other hand, lacks this clear inside-outside structure. Where does vision start? Certainly not in the visual cortex. The visual processing stack which has inspired convolutional neural nets starts in the eyes, whose cells process incoming light into basic patterns like lines, before they are processed into more complex edges and objects. But it goes even further out. We are sensitive to three bands of light–red, green, blue. One of them is attuned to detecting the light that can’t be photosynthesized (that’s why plants are green.) So it could be said that human vision is bound up in photosynthesis. Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhlalso emphasize the Vygotskian developmental nature of seeing: “a new artistic achievement changes the way we see the world, sometimes quite literally.” (p. 154) Beyond sensing, humans are embodied. As Kelly notes, this lets us act on the world, creating a feedback loop affecting which kinds of experiences we may have in the future. Our embodiment also makes us vulnerable to the actions of others, and to being swept up in shared processes of meaning-making, as Bakhtin described in our reading last quarter. Finally, being like a human is a moving target because what it means to be human is constantly changing. We’re all cyborgs; our sense-making is extended and fundamentally altered by technologies ranging from Google Maps to mobile phones to new theories about what we are.