Comments on: Freewheeling on “Filtering on the way out”

By: Storing our future knowledge? « Enlightened tradition

Storing our future knowledge? « Enlightened tradition — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:25:57 +0000

[...] so why spend any time at all trying to weed the collection? Rather, save it all and then try Filtering on the Way Out. On the other hand, look at the search engine so many of us envy — Google. It indexes and [...]

By: Social = people = personal first « Enlightened tradition

Social = people = personal first « Enlightened tradition — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 13:40:39 +0000

[...] In David Weinberger’s terms, the filtering takes place on the way in, not on the way out. As JP Rangaswami suggests, filtering on the way out provides opportunities for more interesting knowledge management. 1. In [...]

By: Brian H

Brian H — Sun, 13 May 2007 18:51:32 +0000

SS;
Yes, I was aware of much of that, and am in particular impressed by the discovery of the intimate role played by memory access midway through the processes of perception.

By: Stephen Smoliar

Stephen Smoliar — Sun, 13 May 2007 14:24:34 +0000

Brian, “meaning” is one of those “hot-button” words that is usually best left out of the conversation. (Alan Turing said the same thing about “intelligence;” and it may be the wisest thing he ever said!) However, you are right to look at “wet brain” behavior for more substantive data. By now we know that the brain does a lot more than GESTALT-style gap-filling and edge-continuation. Much of Gerald Edelman’s recent work has gone into developing and validating a brain model (based heavily on networks of filters and an ongoing process of their reconfiguration) that accounts for how we delineate the very objects we see and recognize them as instances of different universal classes. He calls the mechanism behind this “perceptual categorization;” and, in his more speculative writing, he has explored the hypothesis that perceptual categorization is the fundamental building block without which consciousness (another “hot-button” word) would not exist.

Needless to say, these are filters that are too deeply embedded in brain biology to be shared. However, part of Edelman’s consciousness model includes the emergence of language. That is the primary medium through which all of our “experiences of consciousness” can be shared. This particular idea predates Edelman by about three-quarters of a century, since most of the details (albeit hypothetical) were worked out by George Herbert Mead, who called the resulting model “symbolic interactionism.” Some of those details can also be applied to Kleist’s fabrication-of-thoughts-while-speaking model, which was in my first comment in this discussion.

Your final comment is critical to the whole Edelman story, which is why I cited the element of reconfiguration. The “current filter-set” is a very evanescent thing. Both the repertoire of filters and how they are configured are constantly in flux (possibly even during sleep, which brings up one currently fashionable dream model). Heraclitian universal flux rules!

By: Brian H

Brian H — Sun, 13 May 2007 04:12:22 +0000

Meaningless Filtering?

Can there be meaning without filters? Or are filters implicit in any effort to assign/perceive meaning? The brain filters assiduously, and actively fills-in holes from memory and extrapolated edge effects. This is/must be true of animal perception, also. So do animals experience meaning?

At some point there must be consensus on word use and referents, so filters must be shared — so that when I say “mother” you don’t think of an SUV, or a mollusk. E.g.

When we argue, we are pushing for alternate boundaries between filters, perhaps. Or accuracy of certain overlaps: Iraq war/noble/evil. Many such filters have heavy emotional investment, which is a clue that they access basic biological, conceptual, and personality functions.

So filtering is not optional, but it would be well not to take one’s own current filter-set too seriously, or overlap the contents permanently with the eternal/perfect concepts!

By: Michael Polanyi, the Drive to Articulate, the Internet, and Marxâ€™s Fatal Flaw. « Hak Pak Sak

Thu, 10 May 2007 20:34:40 +0000

[...] Hungarian philosopher Michael (Mihaly) Polanyi has surfaced twice these last few days, first on Confused of Calcutta and then on Doc Searlsâ€™s weblog. Referring to our years together as philosophy undergraduates, Doc [...]

By: Ric

Ric — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:24:32 +0000

How right you are Stephen – what ARE we thinking? This is certainly a big bite to take – and you point out a few of the difficulties in chewing on it. I was attempting to keep it simple to focus a little (oversimplifying, probably) on the thinking behind JP’s concerns – maybe I should be filtering on the way out more! This is certainly an area of discussion in which a ‘context-free rule’ is non-existent (I see it as a theoretical construct).

BTW – I’m sure your “guess” is better-educated than mine … in this sort of discussion I’m a dilettante at best.

By: Stephen Smoliar

Stephen Smoliar — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:49:57 +0000

Ric, my “educated” guess is that there are so many different social elements that come into play in a “collective environment” that there is no “context-free rule” (or even set of guidelines) that determines whether the filters aggregate or intersect. As a matter of fact, social interactions are so dynamic that, over the course of a single engagement, biases may come and go in a variety of different ways that can only be explained (if at all) by a POST HOC examination of a documentation of the engagement (which would probably have to account for not just text but also paralinguistic features, such as body language). However, our individual communicative skills still take care of “filtering on the way out.”

By: links for 2007-05-09 « John’s musing

links for 2007-05-09 « John’s musing — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:36:45 +0000

[...] Freewheeling on â€œFiltering on the way outâ€ | confused of calcutta Following an earlier post – this talks about a particular aspect in more detail – actually quite a lot of detail, with even more in the comments (tags: web2.0 information management thought leadership google) [...]

By: Ric

Ric — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:50:20 +0000

JP – in a collective environment, I think that (and this seems non-intuitive to me) you end up with the aggregate of all the individuals’ filters, rather than perhaps the intersection of them – that’s where groupthink comes about. Everybody takes on all the biases of all others and you end up with a megafilter. How extensive this effect is will depend on the makeup of the collective – the more diverse the group, the more varied the biases, the less likely they are to accumulate? The ‘wisdom of crowds’ principle seems to counter this to some extent, by aggregating individual responses rather than a single collective one, removing some of that ‘filter accumulation’ and bias reinforcement.