AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

A term proposed by Phil Agre in his essay @Writing and Representation , meaning, the environment in which a mental homunculus operates. In the classical AI planning model, the homunculus is some kind of general problem solver or optimizer, that operates within an environment made up of representations.

Orality and Literacy is another questioning of representationalism (via Agre's @Writing and Representation). The argument boiled down is that representionalism implicitly assumes a model of brain contents that is like writing (eg, symbols are stable, passive things operated on by external processes). The realization of orality, and how it is much more fundamental to mental operations, completely changes how you think about minds.

@Writing and Representation

03 Jan 2023 - 17 Dec 2023

This paper collects several notes I've written over the last year in an attempt to work through my dissatisfactions with the ideas about representation I was taught in school. Among these ideas are the notion of a 'world model'; the notion of representations having 'content' independent of the identity, location, attitudes, or activities of any agent; and the notion that a representation is the sort of thing you might implement with datastructures and pointers. Here I begin developing an alternative view of representation whose prototype is a set of instructions written in English on a sheet of paper you're holding in your hand while pursuing some ordinarily complicated concrete project in the everyday world. Figuring out what the markings on this paper are talking about is a fresh problem in every next setting, and solving this problem takes work. Several detailed stories about representation use in everyday activities-such as assembling a sofa from a kit, being taught to fold origami cranes, following stories across pages of a newspaper, filling a photocopier with toner, and keeping count when running laps-illustrate this view. Finally, I address the seeming tension between necessity of interpreting one's representations in every next setting and the idea that everyday life is fundamentally routine.

The notion of symbolic representation is near to the hearts of most everyone in artificial intelligence. Indeed, within the technologically informed human sciences, cognition is almost universally understood to involve, in some fashion or another, the manipulation of assemblages of symbols called representations. The vast majority of this research assumes symbolic representations to have certain properties: they are

static (not apt to undergo any reconfiguration, decay, or effacement, except through an outside process or a destructive act of some agent),

structured (composed of discrete, indivisible elements whose arrangement is significant in some fashion),

portable (capable of being transported to anyone or anything that might use them without thereby being altered or degraded).

...Although the cognitivist understands symbolic representations as abstract mental entities, observe that all of these properties are shared by texts written on pieces of paper. Indeed, words like 'structured,' 'inspected,' 'modified,' 'transported,' and 'altered' must be interpreted metaphorically, by extension from similar operations performed on physical materials such as paper, in order to apply to abstractions inside of computers.

This paper was a big influence on the evolution of my own thinking about representation, and one of the founding documents of Narrative Intelligence. Oddly for such a work that I found so important, it has very few citations: Google Scholar (13 at present, one of which is Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction )