Mr Brain and Mr seven-plus-or-minus-two.  And so was born my favourite whipping boy.  It was just some madness on a night out among the lads.  Damn.

But that entails the need to agree on what constitutes a measurement.  Without measurement, no price.  Measurement, in turn, always depends implicitly upon a model of the agent.  Cognitivist models come in many flavors.  But each of these has economic consequences; various models of rationality; various accounts of the Perception-Cognition-Action arc.  The assumptions of each of these accounts are used to validate a host of measurements.

This might be most fruitfully done within the book, when the P-world concept is first mooted, or shortly thereafter.

Good sound collage at this URL.  [via]

On the one hand we have O’Regan and Noe’s take on sensorimotor correspondences.  This is actually not far from a lot of Gibsonian work within Ecological Psychology.  The basic idea is that in perceiving, we are skillfully engaging with the world, and that practiced and tuned action gives rise to a corresponding characteristic change in the sensory array.  Gibsonians would say this is the basis of direct perception.  Enaction-heads would say this is skillful coping, or some such.

On the other hand, we have the peculiar issue of sensorimotor synchronization, perhaps best illustrated by a group of people dancing or beating drums together.  In the scientific literature, this has withered to a laboratory situation in which people tap in time to a metronome. (The horror, the horror.)  This is a singularly human achievement, the very odd animal counterexample notwithstanding (yes, Snowball, I’m looking at you and the Gelada baboons).  A fuller account of the basis for sensorimotor synchronization would help us enormously.  It may underpin a burgeoning theory of memes; it speaks to Gibson’s intuition that the nervous system displays resonant properties; it fits with a range of specific situations, from air guitar to stuttering.  All can be described, in some fuzzy essence, with a conceptually simple model in which two processes enter into a coupled form of synergy which looks like resonance within and among coupled systems with many degrees of freedom.

These two themes arise and mingle in understanding the peculiar, skilled, coordinated action that is speech.  Almost invariably, there is a corresponding auditory accompaniment to any speaking act. The two are almost always linked.  Unlike feedback based on communicative effect, that we might receive from others as we speak, this feedback is immediate and tightly coupled to the ongoing action.  My hunch is that this cybernetic link provides stability.  I think it ought to bear mathematical modeling, though I do not have the chaps (yet?).   One might view speech as such from an O’Regan and Noe point of view.

I have the hunch (hypothesis) that normal skilled action is based upon a tuned relationship between the consequences of movement and the urge to move.  Ordinarily, when one moves, one experiences the consequences.  But under the cybernetic picture I am painting here, an exogenous element, the speech or actions of others, plays a role that your own productions normally play.  The feedback signal comes from your joint production or action, and not from you, as an individual, alone.

Now, two experimental strands lend credence to this suggestion.  In one long established experimental tradition, subjects are asked to speak while listening to their own voices with a clearly perceptible time lag.  This is a horrible thing to do to a person, but hey. It’s also kinda fun.  With a delay of about 180 ms., people start to make all kinds of errors.  Well, not all kinds of errors, but some specific and interpretable errors: they prolong segments, producing elongated syllables.  (I need to actually study the detail of exactly what they do a little more closely.)

In the second experimental strand, my own synchronous speech experiments, we see that the sound of the other can play the same stabilizing role.  In speaking synchronously, your speech plays a stabilization role in the production of my own speech, that normally only my own speech plays.  That’s a bit intimate!

But recursion is a sign that we are free of the restrictions of the meat.  Animal “syntaxes” are, in fact, more akin to prosodic structures, with parts made out of the coordinative affordances of the vocal tract.  They do not have recursion, as it would make no sense to have a unit like the syllable inside another syllable, or a foot inside a foot.  These units are performative, and deeply engrained in the meat.

The recent work of Stan Dehaene, Liz Spelke and Susan Carey suggests something similar.  There, language is seen as a fluid vehicle for passing meaning around between domains of organization that have long phylogenetic histories, and that are, thus, special-purpose.  The emerging notion I am developing of the P-domain may help here.

*This has given rise to some discomfort with the claim that has recently arisen that the Amazonian Piraha tribe speak a non-recursive language – the jury is still out on that one.

From Weber and Varela:

The key here is to realize that because there is an individuality that finds itself produced by itself it is ipso facto a locus of sensation and agency, a living impulse always already in relation with its world.

Now that leaves much to be desired.  It uses the term ‘sensation’, which is not only mentalistic, it is positively Victorian!  It uses the term agency, and that argument is being made, it is not to be assumed.  The deep connection between self-production and subjectivity is not made at all.  My exegesis of the myth will hopefully help to restate that a bit more helpfully.