- Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 14:58:58 -0500
- From: Bill Barowy <wbarowy@lesley.edu>
- Subject: Intersubjectivity, ecology, and mediation
At 12:47 PM -0500 2/16/99, Gerhard Werner wrote: >The motivation for bringing the Intersubjectivity issue up in the first >place was a very simplistic notion: (1) StarLogo would generate in current >standard applications performance data which would serve as reference for >whatever gains/losses are incurred when the turtles become endowed >incrementally with additional communication and self-perception tools; >(2) what are consequences of providing trutles with individuality >(i.e.turtles having individual rather than aggregate attributes). >Both features have turned out to be of considerable interest for studying >artificial societies: see e.g. Epstein & Axtel, Growing Artificial >Societies, MIT Pess 1996). This study is a significant departure from the >standard game theoretic approach to modeling societies in that it >parametrizes individually various attributes of the agents. My interests have been less in pursuit of the heterogeneity that might come out of including individual ontogenies, but rather on the ecological considerations when one assumes that mind is distributed to and mediated by artifacts. This assumption also appears to be missing in the artificial society work, but is considered essential in the theories coming out of Vygotsky, 1978; Leont'ev, 1975; and Cole and Engestrom, 1993. In the starlogo model with which I have been playing, communication is mediated by emails - the emails are the turtles and people are the patches. Starlogo does provide some individuality, that is through patch and turtle specific variables, but what might be considered 'interaction patterns' are the procedures that are common among turtles and separately common among patches. The variables are not really attributes, however, they act to provide ecological constraints on interactions. The model is a very simple way to explore the ecology of interactions between people when mediated by email. Subject-object issues become subject-artifact-object issues, with subject-artifact-object interrelated in an ecological system, what some call mutual constitution. So far it is very simple - there is no modeling of intrasubjectivity per se. The model forms a plausibility argument that inclusion of a temporal ecology is important when modeling certain aspects of collective cognitive and communicative activity. Unfortunately there is no evolution of such things as memes - the communication in the model is quite content-free - but that is the essence of isolating the temporal ecological contributions to the self-regulation of intersubjective activity. I appreciate the reference to the models of meme transmission, that seems to also include some ecological relationships between memes and grazers - http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/1/4/2.html It would be interesting to contrast the meme transmission models with the quantitative data that folks have obtained in 'innovation diffusion' studies. ------- Cole and Engestrom, (1993) A Cultural-Historical Aproach to Distributed Cognitions' in Distributed Cognitions, Salomon ed. Leont'ev, A. N. (1975). The Problem of Activity in Psychology. Soviet Psychology, XIII, No. 2, 4-33. (Translation from Voprosy filosofii, 1972, No. 9, 95-108.) Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. The development of higher psychological functions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bill Barowy, Associate Professor Technology in Education Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790 Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169 http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html _______________________ "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful." [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]