Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0709180015120.12237@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Human modeling again (notes for a talk)
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:15:52 -0400 (EDT)
(first section at http://www.asondheim.org/ph.txt) Human modeling again (notes for a talk) I think 4 aspects - psychoanalytics, avatar-skin, medical modeling, AI communality/behavior/sociality - to be considered. Well: Avatar-skin: surface of being human which is always a fiction; there is no exacting boundary where body ends and environment begins (think of breath, other processes). So this is splines, Bezier curves, NURBs, early polygon work, etc. now automated by Poser etc. Avatar-skin also applies to audio (later touch, scent, taste, etc.) - everything perceived from one human or other organism to another. Well: AI communality/behavior/sociality: the internally-automated behavior of the avatar-skin; think of this as diachronic avatar, and avatar-skin as synchronic; each moves through the other. With AI, avatar is somewhat spread across the social; communication and communality extend the opaque body (metaphorically) into the translucent. Fundamental rules of the 'game' tending towards description. Well: Medical modeling: Both diachronic and synchronic, the projected/ introjected organs of the avatar-skin, always on the level of a model, i.e. a beating heart is fabricated on a subtextual level again from poly- gons, curves, splines, etc. The ontology is different as long as one remains within the realm of computational modeling. (One might say that _inscription_ in the real is paralleled by _fissure_ in the virtual.) Medical modeling is fundamental description tending towards explanation. Well: Psychoanalytics: Here is where the following have to be taken into account: 1. The abject: epistemological/ontological/inscriptive 'smears' across domains. Corrosive and irreducible to the other categories. 2. Introjection/projection ('jectivity') - formation of internalized images from virtual to real. 3. Obscenity and interjections: Breakdowns of communication within communication. Psychoanalytics are not susceptible to mathesis beyond topology. (Level of the metaphoric: No verification procedures.) But of course all of this is rough, not exactly accurate; ontology and epistemology, various branches and techniques of mathematics, can be thrown around heedlessly. Still I'd want to begin from the four aspects described here: body/surface, psychoanalytics/'mind', AI/habitus, and medical/observation-experimentation. One would have to further consider the role of apparatus, observation, observer, in all of this. One final note - the concern - that, with formal and informal modeling systems of organisms/physics/mathematics: How is consciousness in relation? In other words, _what are the effects on the reader/programmer/ experimenter? How do these relate to abjection and jectivity if at all?