Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Like me, seal meat probably isn’t your idea of a good lunch. But then again, we’re not polar bears. But maybe some of the seals are resting a bit easier now that polar bears have officially made the endangered list. The bears’ environment is melting - literally. And since that’s the environment that suits them best, their chances of surviving long term are melting too. The furry guys’ long suits are size, speed, strength and all that macho bear stuff. But when it comes to environmental adaptability, they fall a bit short. Like a poor hockey team, they are just not adaptable outside their home ice. But humans are. Politics of global warming aside, we adapt ourselves to almost any environment on earth, sometimes even fierce ones. And we can even uproot ourselves to from one place to another and do OK - or better. I’m sure this amazing adaptive ability comes from many sources. The one that I’m most interested in as a Feldenkrais practitioner is movement, or more specifically the combination of sensing and moving ourselves around in our environment. Now, it makes sense that the ability to move would be a big factor in surviving or thriving in almost any condition. Polar bears sense and move, too. So why aren’t they able to adapt (in the wild) to life off the ice? A couple of unusual ideas about movement and human adaptability come from an unlikely source. The online science magazine Edge recently ask a long list of scientists and writers what they could be optimistic about in 2007. In their answers, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier and philosopher Andy Clark touched eloquently on the idea of movement and adaptability, though not in those specific terms. Lanier is optimistic that the nature of human communication can take a giant leap as big as the one it took when we began using language. Lanier calls this “post-symbolic communication,” and would become possible when many of us begin to feel at home in virtual reality worlds.

Suppose you’re enjoying an advanced future implementation of Virtual Reality and you can cause spontaneously designed things to appear and act and interact with the ease of sentences pouring forth during an ordinary conversation today.

That’s pretty dramatic, but what’s most interesting to me is his reasoning about how this might occur:

Some of the most interesting data from VR research thus far involve Homuncular Flexibility. It turns out that the human brain can learn to control radically different bodies with remarkable ease. That means that people might eventually learn to spontaneously change what’s going on in a virtual world by becoming parts of it.

That aspect of the brain which is optimized to control the many degrees of freedom of body motion is also well suited to controlling the many degrees of freedom of a superlative programming and design environment of the future. It is likely, by the way, that the tongue would turn out to be just as important in this type of communication as it is in language, for it is the richest output device of the human body.

Fascinating. The one problem I have with it, though, is the notion of degrees of freedom of body motion. While it’s absolutely true that the range of possible movements is huge, the reality is that most of us don’t bother exploring these degrees of freedom - at least when we grow out of childhood. In fact, as adults our range of actual movements becomes pretty miniscule when compared to the possible. Would this somehow effect our abilities to move about virtual spaces, or would being in virtual spaces open up more degrees of freedom for us that being in the physical world? Philosopher Andy Clark is optimistic that we’ll be able to find ways of not just adapting, but of enhancing the ways that we think, reason and feel. I’ve written about Clark previously, and if I understand where he’s coming from, he’s more rooted to the idea that our brain’s self-image is malleable enough to incorporate the the stuff technology provides for us, and to make it seem like our very own.

The patient using a brain-computer interface to control a wheelchair will not typically know just how it all works, or be able to reconfigure the interface or software at will. But in this respect too, the new equipment is simply on a par with much of the old.

Though he doesn’t mention sensing and movement explicitly, in my mind it is through them that we build and maintain our self-image that’s so adaptable. The idea that sensing and moving wire our brains to make us so adaptable is not new. Moshe Feldenkrais talked about it long ago, and developed a still-innovative approach to learning and development using just these capabilities. Sensing and moving are connected with everything we do. The self image alluded to by Clark and the communicative adaptability put forth by Lanier touches on this. We possess this incredible adaptive ability, in no small part due to the dance of sensing and moving that wires and rewires us from start to finish. That’s a pretty wonderful thing. Still, I wish the polar bears well.