Dear Adam,

Of course I could preface everything I write with an epistemological statement that what I know is what I know and how I know is how I know - or as Blake wrote in response to the challenge of "how do you know?" - by my senses five. And, the challenge, as I have often commented, in English, presumes that I, as the knower, am somehow faulty (How do YOU know?).

In some languages we find an epistemological account which means something like "seeming is" - that is, meaning arises in a world of things and knowers. In English we assert "it seems to me" meaning that I am the potentially faulty (delusional) part of the knowledge/experience moment. English is very moral.

As a game designer I would have thought you might be more interested in designing the girl's state-of-mind than in questioning whether that actually was her state-of-mind. That is, games wouldn't get very far if everyone kept cleaning their epistemological rifles in case a speck of dust might distort their next shot at the rampaging bear. The quality of a game can be measured in terms of the logical / phenomenological possibilities of the play world and the engagement of the player along with ontological considerations and identity affects arising in response to actions. All these need to be determined as if there were states-of-mind such that characters might behave in such and such ways in response to responses and fixed events. Please help me out with other criteria that you might see as indicative of a good game.

Beyond games, as a possible designer of systems that might lead to a more safe iPod experience in worlds co-habited by cars and trucks and trains, I might like to speculate about the state-of-mind of distracted users rather than simply writing a legal document that relieves Apple from any and all claims that end-users were put in harms way by a design fault in their product.

The divergent stories we tell are generally really not all that divergent. That is, we can be perverse and generate an infinite number of possible accounts but that is what drugs can do for the brain anyway without any extra effort from us playing at epistemology. I thought my account of the girl's experience was rather poetic and an invitation to further elaborations rather than a closed account suited to a Skinner experiment. 

I am more than happy to be wrong about her experiences, but I am not happy to give over my accounts as somehow less than what they are simply because there could be many more. We need criteria other than brute possibility to compare accounts.

Criminal courts require beyond reasonable doubt; civil courts just require balance of probabilities. Designers have many more kinds of reason for taking up and using accounts of experiences. Each kind of reasoning needs to be tested and validated in some kind of way which might simply mean that a community thinks such-and-such reasoning is ok in such-and-such a context. Hey, we might be talking about pragmatism.

cheers

keith




 
>>> Adam Parker <[log in to unmask]> 12/01/10 10:17 AM >>> 
Hi Keith,

It's instructive in terms of this somewhat circular debate that you might
well have been deluded about her actual cognitive states at the time.

After all, she was equally likely to simply be not paying attention to
traffic, and have the music too loud to hear, as to be "deluded into
thinking she was in a private sensory world where music was the guide and
pleasure was the journey".

Are you sure you weren't simply deluded yourself about her delusion?

...And are you sure that anthorpomorphising spiders will help? ;^)

Terence, how might you nail down this girl's state of mind when she mightn't
even be self-aware enough to know her own intentions sufficiently to
validate your appraisal phenomenologically? (...leaving you standing bereft
on a street corner in Skinnerville, lever in one hand, cheese in the
other...)

All that this debate shows so far is that people tell divergent stories to
explain their responses to perceptions. We thus moved onto epistemic turf
some time ago, yet where are the actual, real-life epistemologists? Ahh,
designers waffling on about areas out of their pay grade again ;^)  Fun, but
perhaps circular.

(I'm just as bad, btw; I have a lengthy response pending to Terence
above...)

Cheers,
Adam

-- 
Adam Parker
Senior Lecturer, Games Design (Melbourne)

Qantm College Pty Ltd (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne)
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South Melbourne VIC 3205

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