Why 3-D sound?

The evolution of extended perception (and stupidity)

ICAD 2015Peter Lennox

University of Derby

The narcissistic universe

• The universe is evolving self-awareness – through you.

In the beginning, 13.7 billion years ago

?

In the beginning, 13.7 billion years ago

?

Followed by:

• Spatio-temporal extensity• Fundamental Particles• “Things” made of matter, interacting

energetically.

Push causality

Then

• ( 4 billion years) the universe went mouldy• Replicant molecules led to RNA to

prokaryotes to Eukaryotes then multicellular organisms.

Perception comes out of:

• Replication • Sequestration• Interaction• Territoriality

Guided behaviour

• Movement – offensive and defensive• Guided movement• Goal-directed behaviour:

• Push-causality is supplemented with intentionality

The foundations of human perception and behaviour

• Pre-date humans, mammals, vertebrates, even multicellular animals

• The sophisticated modern software we have overlies ancient, primitive code

• Capacity for complex conceptual abstraction constitutes competitive elaboration of pre-existing principles

Perception:

"The mental action of knowing external things through the medium of sense presentations…"

- Cassell's English Dictionary

Caveats:• Assumes necessity of “mentality” – excludes

prokaryotes (no central nervous system), plants?• Refers to “external things” – what about stomach

ache?• Assumes sense presentations are coupled with

the outside world, but perception is necessarily mediated

• Implicitly separates perceiver from the external world

Definitions are representations

• It often does more harm than good to force definitions on things we don't understand…

• .. we still know so little that we can't be sure our ideas about psychology are even aimed in the right directions.

• In any case, one must not mistake defining things for knowing what they are. (Minsky, M. (1985)

Implicit models of perception

Perception: analytic signal processing

Multimodal Perception (…and the ‘binding problem’…)

THE PERCEPTION OF 'THINGS.'

PERCEPTION AND SENSATION COMPARED.

• …the general law of perception… that whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, part (and it may be the larger part) always comes … out of our own head” (William James, The Principles of Psychology 1890)

Richard Gregory

• The present is signalled by real time stimuli from the senses; but as perceptions are 90% or more stored knowledge, the present moment needs to be identified for behaviour to be appropriate to what is happening out there now. (Gregory, R.L., 1998)

Perception as analysis and synthesis(“hypothesis testing” Gregory 1974)

How do we know what’s real?

Bi-directional information flow?

Behaviour

Redefining “perception”

• Information transactions in the local causal context (“the

environment”) involvingagency

Extended Perception

On the Sound Related to Painted Caves and

Rocks

• http://www.sarks.fi/masf/masf_2/SLT_07_Reznikoff.pdf

An early example of artificial reverberation?

Time travel

Crowded reality

Telepresence?

• Explore environments you couldn’t otherwise access

• Get all the relevant experience of being there, without having to travel…

Replacement reality?

• Will people replace inconvenient truth with comfortable untruth? (see only what you want to see, hear only what you want…)

• Mp3 players (to block out the pressing crowds), pastoral scene in an art gallery, listen intently to music, but not to the world – ‘safe’ beauty…

• Project yourself as you’d like to be, not as you are…

Pretend me, in a pretend place

Visceral thrills?

• Could we lose something?• Artificial environments are (currently) less

complex than real ones• They are causally constrained (not dangerous)• Self-referential – but …the map is not the

territory

Plato warned us

Detecting stupidity

• Unsuccessful perception-and-action is popularly regarded as evidence of stupidity

• It is easier to notice stupidity in others than in oneself… (<90% Drivers are, by their own reckoning, better than average..)

Taxonomising stupidity: issues

• Causes of…• Types of…• Consequences of…

• These are often conflated

Many writers on the topic dwell on the pernicious aspects of stupidity

• William James On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings “…the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves”

• Carlo Cipolla The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (“A stupid person is the most dangerous kind of person”)

Defining and characterising stupidity

• Most definitions feature descriptors such as dull, slow-witted, unintelligent, foolish, incapable of learning, unreasoning.

• …emphasise poor-quality choices, maladaptive behaviour and sub-optimal consequences – harm to the stupid person or others.

• The concept of stupidity incorporates some element of blame and analysis of consequences after the fact

Rocks aren’t stupid

• Inescapably, “stupidity” is not necessarily the opposite of intelligence, it may correlate positively with intelligence

• The more an agent should have foreseen harmful consequences the more they are seen to have behaved stupidly in the event of such

The dangers of avoiding stupidity

• The only good decision is the logical, rational one that takes into account all relevant data (and nothing else)….

• The wise one is one who takes no decisions, for they can never be stupid…?

But where does new knowledge come from?

Stupidity has its advantages..

• Willful disregard of consequences can lead to spectacular failures, and (more rarely), spectacular success

Stupidity can lead to innovations that may not occur via any other means – a significant evolutionary principle

Conventional wisdom: Institutionalised stupidity?

• Stupidity can also constrain innovation –an institutional form of collective stupidity – “conventional wisdom” – the “legacy metaphor”, committee thinking:(… “I was only doing my job”)

• Can a society, political party, organisation, a profession be collectively stupid through becoming too self-referential?

Peter Medawar 1964• …the scientific paper is a fraud …it gives a

totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries. The inductive format of the scientific paper should be discarded.

• Hypotheses arise by guesswork …by inspiration…scientists should not be ashamed to admit that hypotheses appear in their minds along uncharted by-ways of thought ..they are indeed adventures of the mind.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

• “The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.” (Martin A. Schwartz 2008)

Ignorance… about “stupidity”

• Stupidity has had profound effects on our evolution, on our societal and technological development

• We are in a state of denial about the risks and benefits of unforeseen consequences

• Should we study stupidity? (we’ll have to call it something else, for funding reasons…)

Mis-perception, sub-perception and illusions and perceptual biases

• Kahneman and Tversky : Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011):

• “… decades of research have failed to significantly improve my own mental performance…my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy…as it was before I made a study of these issues,”

Through a glass, darkly…

• We should not confuse our actual motivations with the rationale we provide after the fact

• …Nor the rhetoric of the funding industry with the true academic motivations for conducting research

• The map is not the territory

So, why 3-D sound?

• What other kind is there?

• Because it might prove useful

• Because it’s interesting

After the physics engine:

• The causality engine• Complete with agents, having plausible

behaviours and intentionality• This is what “spatial perception” is most taken

up with• Will these “agents” know what they are?• Do you?