Friday, April 07, 2006

Dance floor blues



Rather than an ontological bifurcation, the distinction between an agent and the world is more like the distinction between a knot and the rest of a rope, which is itself an interweaving of both organismic and environmental fibers. One can easily point to the knot and to the rest of the rope, but it might be difficult to specify where the knot begins and where the rest of the rope ends. In the case of an agent in the world, unlike an ordinary knot in a rope, various transactions and changes of perspective occur from one set of circumstances to the next which make a clean boundary between the two even harder to locate (as if the knot were to be incessantly changing size, shape, and position on the rope).

The different frames of a system describe the scene from different viewpoints, and the transformations between one frame and another represent the effects of moving from place to place... a Minsky's analysis of perception-dynamics by Sam Renseiw. View it here or enter the frame above