Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 29

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was an early advocate for the idea that we can only understand the mind by accounting for the person plus the environment. After decades of research that spanned everything from anthropology and semiotics to cybernetics and schizophrenia, Bateson concluded that boundaries were the essential question for understanding the complexity and messiness of human experience. Broadly speaking, that’s what embodiment does: redraws the boundaries of cognition.

To comprehend the consequences, Bateson proposed a simple thought experiment:

Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions ... If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior ... you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.³⁰

The blind man, in Bateson’s metaphor, uses the stick to navigate the world. It provides spatial understanding. But we can make all kinds of “sticks” for all kinds of people to help them figure out all kinds of problems. Today’s stick is the smartphone, so we can rephrase Bateson as follows:

Suppose I am a person, and I use a smartphone. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the surface of the phone? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway into the glass? But these are nonsense questions ... you need the world, the phone, the person, the world, the phone, and so on, round and round.

If you have ever designed an app, or a website, or anything for a screen, the impulse is to start by arranging menus, images, buttons, and other widgets on a smooth pixelated surface. This decision means that understanding is hugely dependent on one place, the screen, and while not irrevocable, adjusting “where” understanding actually happens—in and through the world, the person, the phone, and so on—requires conscious effort.

This is what we mean when we say that “understanding is about a system of resources distributed across the environment and then dynamically assembled to perform the activity and achieve a goal.” This is also a good, quick example for how these two evolutions, the evolution of technology and the evolution of our understanding of the mind, converge to unlock new possibilities.