sims 290-1 cmc
Alessandro Acquisti	The ancient Chinese encyclopaedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge classifies animals into the following categories:  "a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (c) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance." So at least claims Jorge Luis Borges, in "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (an essay whose English translation can be found in Borges, Other inquisitions 1937-1952, 1993).  Conceded: there is something wrong with these categories. They are arbitrary, overlapping, and - what's more - blatantly illogical. Therefore, the Celestial Emporium cannot be a real and respected encyclopedia: it rather must be another of those literary inventions that made Borges famous.  Or, is it? Take another case - women, fire, and dangerous things. Put these concepts in one category. In absence of a better name, call that category 'balan'. Then include in 'balan' also birds that are not dangerous, and other fantastic animals.  Weirder still?  Well, Balan is a real category of a real (Australian, aboriginal) language, called Dyirbal. And real is also the Celestial Emporium, according to Martin Johnston (Games with Infinity - The Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, 1974). What do they have in common? What links Jorge Luis Borges to George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Sandy Stone, passing through categories, metaphors and virtual reality? Many things, probably. But one in particular that is of interest in this context: embodiment. Categories, as well as metaphors, are ordinarily discussed as abstractions, analyzed and deconstructed in logical terms. It could well be, however, that categories are not only a  matter of common properties, and metaphors are not only figures of speech where one concept is clearly structured in terms of another. It might be, instead, that they way we formulate categories and use metaphors is affected by our bodies, and in particular by the way logic and reason are embodied in our brains. Berkeley professor George Lakoff (Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, 1987) together with Mark Johnson (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors we live by, 1980, from which the chapter on Orientational Metaphors is taken; and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999) discuss two opposite approaches to cognitive studies: the traditional view of cognition, where "reason is abstract and disembodied" (op. cit., p. xi), and a newer view, for which reason has a "bodily basis".   In the traditional view, "reason [is seen] as literal, as primarily about propositions that can be objectively either true or false." Under the alternative view, "the imaginative aspects of reason - metaphor, metonymy, and mental imaginery - [is taken to be] central to reason". Under the alternative view, "meaning is a matter of what is meaningful to thinking, functioning beings. The nature of the thinking organism, and the way it functions in this environment are of central concern to the study of reason." In other words, the  way thought is embodied and "the structures used to put together our conceptual systems grow out of bodily experience and make sense in terms of it; moreover, the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social character" (op. cit., p. xiv).  The analytical language of John Wilkins, described by Borges in his essay, is an example of what the first view (reason and logic are disembodied) would produce. Around 1664, an Oxford professor called John Wilkins started defining abstract categories with the intent to develop a general, universal language, which could organize and cover all human ideas. He tried to divide "the universe in forty categories or classes, these being further subdivided into differences, which were then subdivided into species. He assigned to each class a monosyllable of two letters", so that - for example - if 'de' is taken to mean an element and 'deb' the first of the elements, fire, 'deba' will be a part of the element fire: a flame. On the other side, the 'illogical' categories of the Celestial Emporium or those of the Dyirbal language can be understood at the light of the second view (reason is embodied; categories are influenced by culture and body). A similar dichotomy is to be found among metaphors. On the one hand, there are 'structural' metaphors, where "one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 14; for example, "he is swimming in a sea of gold" to talk about a wealthy individual surrounded by money). On the other hand (and this itself is a categorization...), there are metaphors where whole systems of concepts are organized with respect each to the other (for example, "I'm feeling down today", where the metaphor lies in the concept of sadness being given a spatial orientation: down). The importance of these 'orientational' metaphors lies in their originating from cultural and physical experience: health is up and sickness is down ("he is in top shape"), because "[d]rooping posture typically goes along with sadness and depression, erect posture with a positive emotional state"; having control is up and being subject to control is down ("he is under my control"); and so on. Of course, while in some cases coherent, orientational metaphors not always are (UNKNOWN IS UP, BUT FINISHED IS UP as well), and hence they mimic the kind of inconsistencies that the categories in Dyirbal and the Celestial Emporium exhibit.  Whether one accepts or disagrees with Lakoff and Johnson, the conclusions the authors draw from their analysis certainly challenge our maintained views of logical discourses and universal concepts. In some cases, the authors note, spatialization is "so essential a part of a concept that it is difficult for us to imagine any alternative metaphor that might structure [that] concept"; in other cases "concepts in a scientific theory [...are] based on metaphors that have a physical and/or cultural basis" (Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh offers an exciting theory about how even logical concepts such as cause and effect are deeply routed in metaphorical thinking).  More importantly (in this context), Lakoff and Johnson note (p. 19) that "[i]t is hard to distinguish the physical from the cultural basis of a metaphor, since the choice of one physical basis from among many possible ones has to do with cultural coherence." In "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up", Stone (1991) repeatedly resorts to Haraway (cf. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs", 1985) and François Dagognet to stress how false just another categorization - the dichotomy between nature and technology - can be. There is a link between her position and Lakoff and Johnson's comment on the difficulty of disentangling the physical from the culture basis of a metaphor. That link resides again in the idea of embodiment. Stone considers the concepts of community and body in cyberspace, and describes the latter as "without its high-tech glitz, [...] the idea of virtual community." By this Stone means that cyberspaces are not new: they have been historically "virtual communities, passage points for collections of common beliefs and practices that united people who were physically separated". They started with texts in the 17th century (that "became ways of creating, and later of controlling, new kinds of communities"). They were shaped by electronic communication and entertainment media in the 20th century (that replaced communities "previously constituted in the physical public space of the concert hall" into "a new kind of virtual communal space around the phonograph"). They were transformed by information technology after the 1960s (CommuniTree, SIMNET, Habitat). Then, sometime in the 1980s, virtual reality and cyberspace emerged, fascinating because "[in VR] you not only program a world, but in a real sense inhabit it. Because cyberspace worlds can be inhabited by communities, in the process of articulating a cyberspace system, engineers must model cognition and community; and because communities are inhabited by bodies, they must model bodies as well".  Was this a process of disembodiment, resulting in a weightless web in which - to quote Bruce Dammer (Alphaworld and Active Worlds) - race, sex, or anything else which is body is lost? Probably not. These emerging social spaces "are simultaneously natural, artificial, and constituted by inscription. The boundaries between the social and the natural and between biology and technology are beginning to take on the generous permeability that characterizes communal space in the fourth epoch." (Stone, op. cit.). As Lakoff and Johnson orientational metaphors show that brain and environment are tangled together, so the disembodied web might not be that disembodied after all. There is still the physicality of the brain, and the reality of the perceptions it receives. "No matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached", Stone notes, and Gonzales ("The Appended Subject") would add that "human bodies continue to be the material and visible form through which human subjectivities are defined and contested today". So, this is a process of embodiment at the same time that it is a process of disembodiment. We still think through our brains and sense through our sensory input channels.  We are changing the nature of those inputs, but the channels they use to reach our minds are the same. In this sense, it is a process of embodiment, through which we place our body in a new environment. At the same time,  we also enlarge the possibilities of our senses beyond those of our natural body, and we delegate parts of our consciousness to external machines, giving them agency. While Stone's interpretation of the cyberspace as representing our need to become one with the environment, to penetrate and posses the cyberworlds, might be debatable, it is true that VR creates cyberworlds to engulf us and bombard us with sensorial inputs that we would not have had in other, 'physical' ways. This is the disembodiment part.  Both are at work, and their combined outcome might not be clear at all (the philosopher and cognitive scientist D. Dennet has collected, together with D. Hofstadter, several essays around - well, more or less - this topic, in the volume: The Mind's I). "If the information age is an extension of the industrial age, with the passage of time the split between the body and the subject should grow more pronounced still. But in the fourth epoch [i.e., the cyberspace] the split is simultaneously growing and disappearing", write Stone; "[t]he boundaries between the subject, if not the body, and the 'rest of the world' are undergoing a radical refiguration." The consequences of this process of dis/embodiment might be very surprising. If our logic and our reason are embodied in the brain and influenced by our physicality, what new metaphors and new categories will emerge from a brain that receives stimulus created anew by itself? As Stone puts it as an example, "[s]ex in the age of the coding metaphor--absent bodies, absent reproduction, perhaps related to desire, but desire itself refigured in terms of bandwidth and internal difference--may mean something quite unexpected".  Whether they are digital or physical, the inputs from the external world still remain 'other' from us. The signs I see on my screen as I type these comments are not less real than the pen I was using a moment ago for some annotations. Beyond the mind, there is the reality - perhaps - of perceptions, be them digital, or analogic. And beyond the latter, we have no idea. "It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is." (Borges, op. cit.).