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So Descartes concluded that the world and even our own
bodies are never directly present to us but that all that we can
directly experience is the content of our own minds. And,
indeed, when we engage in philosophical reflection, it seems
we have to agree with Descartes. It seems to us that we do
not have direct access to the external world but only to our
private, subjective experiences.
If this were our true condition, then the mediated informa-
tion concerning distant objects and people transmitted to us
over the Internet as telepresence would be as present as any-
thing could get. But, in response to the Cartesian claim that all
our experience of the world is indirect, pragmatists such as
William James and John Dewey emphasized that the crucial
question is whether our relation to the world is that of a dis-
embodied detached spectator or an involved embodied agent.
On their analysis, what gives us our sense of being in direct
touch with reality is that we can control events in the world
and get perceptual feedback concerning what we have done.
But even this sort of control and feedback is not sufficient
to give the controller a sense of direct contact with reality.
As long as we are controlling a robot with delayed feed-
back, such as Ken Goldberg s Telegarden arm10 or the Mars
Sojourner, what we see on the screen will seem to be medi-
ated by our long-distance equipment, and therefore not truly
tele-present.
There comes a point in interactive robot control, how-
ever, where we are able to cope skillfully with things and
people in real time. Then, as in laparoscopic-surgery, for
example, the doctor feels himself present at the robot site, the
way blind people feel themselves present at the end of their
cane. But even though interactive control and feedback may
give us a sense of being directly in touch with the objects we
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manipulate, it may still leave us with a vague sense that we are
not in touch with reality. Something about the distance still
undermines our sense of direct presence.
One might think that what is missing from our experience
as we sit safely at home remotely controlling our car,
for example, is a constant readiness for risky surprises. To
avoid extremely risky situations is precisely why remotely-
controlled planet-exploring vehicles and tools for handling
radioactive substances were developed in the first place; but,
in the everyday world, our bodies are always in potentially
risky situations. So, when we are in the real world, not just as
minds but as embodied vulnerable human beings, we must
constantly be ready for dangerous surprises. Perhaps, when
this sense of vulnerability is absent, our whole experience is
sensed as unreal, even if, involved in a sort of super-Imax
interactive display, we are swaying back and forth as our car
careens around dangerous-looking curves. But aren t believers
in the triumph of technology such as the Extropians right on
this point? Couldn t we develop a technologically-controlled
world so tame that being on our guard all the time was no
longer necessary? And wouldn t it still seem real?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty has attempted to answer this ques-
tion, and refute Descartes, by describing just what gives us
our sense of the world being directly present to us. He holds
that there is a basic need we can never banish as long as we
have bodies. It is the need to get what Merleau-Ponty calls an
optimal grip on the world. When grasping something, we
tend to grab it in such a way as to get the best grip on it.
Merleau-Ponty points out that, in general, when we are look-
ing at something, we tend, without thinking about it, to find
the best distance for taking in both the thing as a whole and
its different parts. Merleau-Ponty says:
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For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is
an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen: . . . at
a shorter or greater distance we have a perception blurred
through excess or deficiency. We therefore tend towards the
maximum of visibility, and seek a better focus as with a
microscope.11
According to Merleau-Ponty, it is the body that seeks this
optimum:
My body is geared into the world when my perception
presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly
articulated as possible, and when my motor intentions, as
they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world.
This maximum sharpness of perception and action points
clearly to a perceptual ground, a basis of my life, a general
setting in which my body can co-exist with the world.12
So, perception is motivated by the indeterminacy of experi-
ence and our perceptual skills serve to make determinable
objects sufficiently determinate for us to get an optimal grip
on them. Moreover, we wouldn t want to evolve beyond the
tendency of our bodies to move so as to get a grip on the
world since this tendency is what leads us to organize our
experience into the experience of stable objects in the first
place. Without our constant sense of the uncertainty and
instability of our world and our constant moving to overcome
it, we would have no stable world at all.13
Not only is each of us an active body coping with things,
but, as embodied, we each experience a constant readiness to
cope with things in general that goes beyond our readiness
to cope with any specific thing. Merleau-Ponty calls this
embodied readiness our Urdoxa14 or  primordial belief in
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Disembodied telepresence
the reality of the world. It is what gives us our sense of the
direct presence of things. So, for there to be a sense of pres-
ence in telepresence, one would not only have to be able to
get a grip on things at a distance; one would need to have a
sense of the context as soliciting a constant readiness to get
a grip on whatever comes along.
This sense of being embedded in a world with which we
are set to cope is easiest to see if we contrast our experience of
the direct presence of other people with telepresence such as
teleconferencing. Researchers developing devices for provid-
ing telepresence hope to achieve a greater and greater sense of
actually being in the presence of distant people and events by
introducing high-resolution television and surround sound,
and by adding touch and smell channels. Scientists agree that
 full telepresence requires a transparent display system, high
resolution image and wide field of view, a multiplicity of
feedback channels (visual as well as aural and tactile informa-
tion, and even environmental data such as moisture level and
air temperature), and a consistency of information between
these .15 They assume that the more such multi-channel, real-
time, interactive coupling teletechnology gives us, the more
we will have a sense of the full presence of distant objects and
people.
But even such a multi-channel approach may not be suf-
ficient. Two roboticists at Berkeley, John Canny and Eric
Paulos, criticize the attempt to break down human human
interaction into a set of context-independent communication
channels such as video, audio, haptics, etc. They point out that
two human beings conversing face to face depend on a subtle
combination of eye movements, head motion, gesture, and
posture and so interact in a much richer way than most
roboticists realize.16 Their studies suggest that a holistic sense
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of embodied interaction may well be crucial to everyday [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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