It's certainly true that the law makes the
distinction between conscious and unconscious harm, though
generally there's also an assumption that one is responsible
for or 'owns' the harm even if there is a difference in the
penalty or punishment or treatment. For instance, the difference
between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter, though in both
cases, the perpetrator will be held responsible, the punishment
is more severe in ratio to the degree of consciousness and
intent. I agree with you that we may make too much of this,
but it seems to me that it's basically originates in the
assumption that a person does have free will and a sense
that the individual is significant, hence his or her
state of mind, intent, is considered as having a counter
weight to the act itself.

And so, yes, the issue of free will may be more commonly
asked in IT testing, for there it is not assumed to exist,
as it is in the law for example. Much of the interest in AI
seems to me at least partly driven by the desire to
make complex and unconscious realities like gestures, wisps
of rhythm, and writing poems, into conscious and measurable
realities that can be programmed and reproduced and identified
in an objective and accurate manner. Consciousness everywhere,
and that too is a kind of ownership, even it would no longer
be owned by a particular self. So for all the perhaps too much
emphasis upon consciousness or un- as a measure of responsibility,
there's this other emphasis to make the unconscious entirely
conscious. And I'm not sure they're not two reflections of
the same face, which is basically the drive to own being,
rather than to be being, if that makes sense.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com


-------Original Message-------
From: Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 08/21/03 01:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Numbers games

>
> Alison:
<snip>
I actually don't agree with this idea of the equation
between consciousness and control
<snip>

No. I realise that. But it's a view that's commonly expressed. When the
law,
for example, distinguishes between mens rea and diminished responsibility.

If I may trail a coat, I think we make too much of the distinction between
consciousness/control on the one hand and unconsciousness/irresponsibility
on the other. This may, in other words, be a matter of rhetoric as much as
(or more than) it is a cognitive reality.

Which is why, given all of that, my reference to what you said was a
purely
local one: in using 'consciousness' as you did and when you did you were
making a (rhetorical) point about ownership. Or so it seemed to me.

<snip>
Poetry is a speech act, if it can be defined like that, which is
typically written and over-written, unlike speech in a conversation,
and in which formal properties are foregrounded to the point
sometimes of total artifice.
<snip>

It may be that meaning (rather than form) has been somewhat overbought,
even
in conversation. In some ways, conversation is also spoken then respoken
(even though it's sequential) so that different elements are foregrounded,
muffled into silence and so forth. And some of those things which are
foregrounded are conventional.

Hence my question as to why the _form_ of some poems causes outrage.

<snip>
I am not much exercised in denying/arguing for an algorithmic model
for writing poetry - it's an idea that makes a certain sense, given
that so many poems begin (consciously) with a wisp of rhythm and
nothing more.
<snip>

Crippled symmetry, as Feldman put it. But isn't the testing question
whether
and in what degree we have free will, nowadays asked most commonly in the
jargon of IT?

I like that 'wisp of rhythm': one sense to the tune of another; and a hint
of scaled self similarity.

But there's a certain pedagogic style which conceives of such processes
along the lines of a car assembly plant. Whereas it's as likely, it seems
to
me, that the _whole thing_ comes slowly (or not) into focus.

<snip>
But I did think the analysis of the poems in that
particular paper a little like those studies which say look at babies
waving their arms and announce what most mothers have known for
centuries, that they are learning how to move...
<snip>

I doubt the existence of 'those studies', except as a sort of illustrative
hypothesis. Suppose, on the other hand, a model: *movement > directed
movement > gesture*. Wouldn't it be interesting to test (a) whether the
model was valid, (b) whether the shifts were gradual (whatever that might
mean) or sudden, and (c) whether the shift *directed movement > gesture*
conformed to a Vygotskian view of the gesture (which in turn feeds into
Wittgenstein)? I mention this to show (I hope) how things become extremely
complex very quickly and because it is relevant to poetry as a socially
situated practice, albeit obliquely so. (This is not, I should say, a
defence or otherwise of the *poets* paper.)

Or one could as well look at how children learning language move from
sound
through prosody into full articulation. Again that seems relevant to
poetry.

One of the problems with age old knowledge, BTW, is that it can turn out
to
be wrong.

CW
>