CSC 587, Winter 2016-2017 Ideas file, 5567 words Erik McGuire * I’m somewhat familiar with Ramachandran’s mirror boxes by indirect means years ago through an anime called Ghost Hound. It in part discussed Penfield, with some neat images, and dealt with the idea of exposure therapy via VR; so I looked into this and found out about ‘virtual’ mirror boxes. Figure 1 Screenshot from Ghost Hound This fed into my larger ideas of how imaginary worlds/narratives affect us and can be used therapeutically. This is something that continually informs my thinking with regards to Cognitive/Computational Creative Writing. Recently, the advent of consumer VR has spawned some interesting ideas that I think extend from this; perhaps a more obvious one is meditation in VR, taking advantage of the ‘presence’ in certain settings, such as nature. They even use biofeedback headbands alongside VR to enhance meditation. 1 CSC 587, Winter 2016-2017 Ideas file, 5567 words Erik McGuire A newer game called Lucid Trips features a locomotion system where you essentially swim with your arms; while reading the Ramachandran I thought of the above and wondered if this game or something like it can be used along with some biofeedback techniques to ‘reprogram’ our brain maps in various ways. I suspect there’s already plenty of literature on the topic. With programs like Unity, it’s surprisingly easy to create one’s own VR environments, albeit simple ones, so I can imagine DIY virtual therapies… Using a simple tutorial I was able to create a virtual ball in a small virtual space in VR, and manipulate it with the HTC Vive controller; I couldn’t help but think back to when I taught myself to juggle when I was younger, inspired by Gelb’s How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci; the idea was to enhance connectivity between the hemispheres through ambidextrous skills (the prototypical example being the size of the corpus callosa of pianists, I believe). Juggling virtual balls seems like it could be not just more convenient (not knocking things over by dropping real balls), but enhanced, manipulating the size, shape, color, mass, etc. * While reading Bermudez on p. 24, regarding the intelligence of Turing machines (defining it as unintelligent but also that in some ways it’s difficult to be more intelligent, to paraphrase Bermudez), I thought of my feelings about AI and Go/Chess— in light of AlphaGo and such; I’ve never seen a game of computer chess or computer Go as being like a game against a human, because the computer lacks situated intentionality. I feel that a ‘game’ arises through opposing minds, embodied and situated, and intentional. A bout, in my opinion, against a computer, is actually just a single player using software written by a team of programmers to solve computational problems within the abstracted constraints of chess or Go rules, not a game. I suppose this has echoes of 2 CSC 587, Winter 2016-2017 Ideas file, 5567 words Erik McGuire Dijkstra and Turing’s quotes suggesting that the “Can machines think?” question is meaningless, akin to “Can submarines swim?”; which brings to mind this paper (PDF Warning) by Konagaya, et al., which concludes: “We suggest that even though today’s machines may not be able to think, they can make us think and encourage us to strive for new insights and knowledge.” Bermudez’s prehistory, especially with regards to Chomsky’s influence, makes me think about how modern linguistics has moved on from Chomsky on even the fundamentals, with ideas like infinite recursion and the alleged hierarchical nature of language being challenged (as seen in those two links). That is, we’ve already seen the growing use of statistical learning in AI, which is also in vogue in linguistics, and now I wonder how the very ideas of recursion and hierarchy being shifted might change AI approaches. I know that Google and others have been seeing better results in their machine learning tools with the dependency, rather than constituency, perspective on grammar. * Zelinsky’s eye-opening take on vision and the myriad influences on cognition, visible and invisible, that we have makes me paranoid about VR, a bit—that is, what sorts of side-effects might these goggles and virtual worlds have when our retinal system input is so intimately encompassed? We might not be consciously aware of these side-effects, and discovering them seems difficult without the kind of specialized knowledge of neuro- optometry that Zelinsky describes. * Going back to ‘intentionality’ a bit, in the Markus where intentionality is important for transference/learning—and I believe there’s a remark on unfamiliar languages, I found myself thinking about learning a new language with a different writing 3 CSC 587, Winter 2016-2017 Ideas file, 5567 words Erik McGuire system (morphographs like the Chinese characters rather than the phonographic alphabet) as a sort of counterpoint to how you can’t ‘unsee’ what you’ve learned, in some cases. While learning Japanese over the years (trying to, at least), I’ve had to make a deliberate habit of being intentional in how I look at swaths of Japanese text, because it’s so tempting to zoom out and see a mass of complex visual glyphs rather than meaningful and phonological referents. Even when I’ve become very familiar with certain characters and words, the phonological orientation of my English use biases me away from the visual-spatial orientation of written Japanese. The less I use Japanese, the more I must use intentionality to ensure more transparency to meaning/sound when reading… * Some things that didn’t make it into my discussion posts, while reading Markus: Autism and storytelling: that is, the use of narratives with dialogues to improve theory-of- mind ability in autists. Rather than pointing to specific papers (e.g. on Bubble Dialogue), this book on dialogic learning seems to capture some of these ideas. I minored in history, focusing on the French Revolution and literacy (via Robert Darnton mainly), and as the masses became more literate, imaginary dialogues became tools of Enlightenment counterculture to feudalism. Specifically ‘philosophical pornography’—the works of the Marquis de Sade featured lengthy philosophical conversations occuring amidst bawdy sex acts, and these kinds of works went ‘viral’ in a sense, changing the popular mindset which previously treated the clergy and nobility as sacred. Cognitive literary theory also looks at the development of ‘free indirect speech’ in novels and its impact on readers (e.g. increasing mind-reading ability), and we might conceptualize this as a development similar to the Vygotsky/Piaget theory of the shift from ‘external/private speech’ to ‘inner speech’ in children. 4 CSC 587, Winter 2016-2017 Ideas file, 5567 words Erik McGuire There’s also expressive writing in therapy. So it seems to me that the purposeful use of dialogue with an emphasis on moving from explicit to implicit processes is a recurrent theme in culture and cognition. To delve deeper into “successive relearning” and Markus (I connected them while reading), his talk of balance relates to the balance required through paradigms like “desirable difficulties” and the “region of proximal learning”, as well as that popular concept of “flow”. The ability to quiet mental chatter (rather than reinforce it as with ‘white bears’) is a benefit of “open monitoring” meditation, in my experience, by allowing you to monitor and ‘let go’ of inner speech till it sort of dissolves (a great sleeping tool). At the same time, mental chatter’s a useful tool, as we’ve seen above. This reminds me of the notion of ego death vs. the utility of having a self-model as discussed by Thomas Metzinger: in one sense, ego-death is the goal of ‘enlightenment’, but on the other hand, the centralized “I” helps us navigate the world. It’s hard to conceive of a decentered consciousness without that centralized self- model, able to function for long in the world. The ability to reflect and adapt to a complex environment I think relies on our own personal narratives; the trick is learning to customize them flexibly, using not just the technology of language (if we look at language and its multisensory manifestations of sign/speech/writing as technologies) but others we develop. An idea I return to often is that as the world becomes more technologized and malleable in a sense, it’s more important than ever to use metacognitive awareness to cultivate these flexible personal narratives and filter information according to the kinds of lives we wish to lead. 5 CSC 587, Winter 2016-2017 Ideas file, 5567 words Erik McGuire In the literature there’s some analysis of inductive vs. deductive styles of essays— a stereotypical/traditional Japanese style is said to be inductive (really current use is more of a hybrid), vs. a ‘Western’ deductive style. Senko Maynard discusses this here. The idea of different approaches to those tests in DSM reminded me of that, I wonder if similar approaches to counter rigidity in reading should be considered; there’s Padgett’s idea of “creative reading” one might think of there. Perhaps we can systematize ways of reading for targeted therapies, and/or design materials to nudge certain types of reading, testing their effects in experiments. Figure 2 From Padgett's 'Creative Reading' 6 CSC 587, Winter 2016-2017 Ideas file, 5567 words Erik McGuire I’m not sure of the intent behind the use of “I-Ching” in Markus’s DSM description (“I-Ching exercises… “) but superficially it reminds me a bit of “glyphomancy”, a Chinese practice (historically, at least) of visually decomposing the characters into constituent meanings and attempting to divine the future that way.