Robert K. Logan

... RK LOGAN Physics Department, University o] Illinois - Urbana, Ill. L. SERTORIO Institute ]or Atomic Research and Department o/ Physics Iowa State University - Ames, In. (ricevulo il 13 Febbraio 1967) ... (2) RK LOGAN and L. SERTORIO: Phys. Rev. Lett., 17, 834 (1966). ...

RK Logan Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. J. Beaupre and L. Sertorio * Institute for Atomic Research and Department of Physics, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. Received 3 January 1967. ... 8R. K. Logan and L. Sertorio, Phys. Rev. ...

We address the question of whether AI, and in particular the Singularity—the notion that AI-based computers can exceed human intelligence—is a fallacy or a great opportunity. We have invited a group of scholars to address this question, whose positions on the Singularity range from advocates to skeptics. No conclusion can be reached as the development of artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, and there is much wishful thinking and imagination in this issue rather than trustworthy data. The reader will find a cogent summary of the issues faced by researchers who are working to develop the field of artificial intelligence and in particular artificial general intelligence. The only conclusion that can be reached is that there exists a variety of well-argued positions as to where AI research is headed.

RL: Szkołę z Toronto odróżnia zainteresowanie medium, a nie przekazem. ST wykorzystuje metaforę pola sił, ponieważ w badaniach bierze się pod uwagę nie tylko samo zjawisko, ale również cały kontekst czy też otaczające je środowisko, więc tak naprawdę bada się wszystkie czynniki, które wytwarzają dany efekt. W innych teoriach komunikacji zazwyczaj nacisk kładzie się na treść przekazu medialnego, po czym łączy się dany efekt z jego przyczyną. ST jest teorią środowiskową, zaczyna od badania efektów i stara się znaleźć ich przyczyny. Ważnym aspektem ST są kategorie figury i tła, czyli środowiskowe własności mediów. Nie da się zrozumieć figury bez uwzględnienia jej kontekstu, czyli tła, na którym się pojawia. Wzajemne relacje między figurą a tłem wyjaśniają wiele z aforyzmów McLuhana. Na przykład w sformułowaniu: „medium jest przekazem”, przekaz jest figurą, a medium tłem. Z kolei

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:This extended article is published in two parts, with this issue featuring a review and precis of Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature. Part II will be featured in the next issue of ETC and is titled Are Culture, Language, Organization, Science, Economics, and Technology (CLOSET) Teleodynamic Phenomena? The second portion of the article extends Deacon's notion of teleodynamics to CLOSET, for which it is posited that each may be construed as a living organism that reproduces itself and evolves. It is also demonstrated that these social systems also act in their own interest and that they are self-creating, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, and are to a certain degree autonomous even though they are obligate symbionts dependent on their human hosts for the energy that sustains them.1. IntroductionTerrence Deacon (2012), a U.C. Berkeley professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience, has written a fascinating study, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerg...

We suggest that despite McLuhan’s claim not to have a theory of communication that in fact the body of his work does indeed constitute a theory of media and their effects which I have called his General Theory of Media (GToM) that also includes his Laws of Media (LoM). Both McLuhan’s GToM and his LoM are described. A comparison is made of three notions of law: i. McLuhan’s notion of law as used in his Laws of Media; ii. the notions of the Law in the legal sense and iii. the notion of law as formulated in scientific laws. McLuhan’s understanding of media is used to analyze some of the negative effects of social media suggesting that laws need to be formulated to prevent the misuse of social media that are antithetical to democracy and the invasion of the privacy of the individual users of these apps. McLuhan’s Laws of Media are then used to provide insights into the nature of scientific laws, the Law in the legal sense and his own Laws of Media.

Media ecology is shown to embrace not only the study of media but also the study of language, culture and technology and the interaction of these four domains. It is demonstrated that language, culture, technology and media behave like living organisms in that they are emergent phenomena and that they evolve, propagate their organization and interact with each other in a media ecosystem. This model allows us to explore the biological dimension of media ecology, which it is claimed has been hitherto ignored. It is shown that both biological and media ecosystems may be considered as media in themselves and that an ecosystem is both the medium and the message.

1. Introduction: Lessons from the Study of Notated LanguageA model for the emergence is developed making use of complexity theory and recognizing the difference between percept-based thinking and concept-based thinking. We also make use of lessons learned from the study of the evolution of notated language. We begin with our former studies of notated language. In McLuhan and Logan (1977) and Logan (1986) the effects of the phonetic alphabet and literacy on the development of deductive logic, abstract science, codified law, and monotheism were revealed. We showed that these five developments, which emerged between the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers and the Aegean Sea between 2000 and 500 BC, formed an autocatalytic set of ideas that supported each other's development. The alphabet not only served as a convenient way to notate speech it also taught the lessons of analysis (breaking up words into their basic phonemes), coding (writing), decoding (reading) and classification (alphabetizati...

It is argued that language is an emergent phenomenon that emerged from the autocatalysis of the various mechanisms that make speech possible. 1.0 Introduction and Objective We will attempt to show that the origin of language or speech, like the origin of life, is the result of autocatalysis and is an emergent process. Emergence as pointed out by Hofkirchner (2002) cuts across disciplines and allows concepts like autocatalysis from one field to be used in another. Autocatalysis is the mechanism that Kauffman (1995, p. 49) used to explain the emergence of life: “A living organism is a system of chemicals that has the capacity to catalyze its own reproduction.” An autocatalytic set of chemicals is a group of organic molecules where the catalyst for the production (or really reproduction) of each member of the set is contained within the set itself and as a result the system can, in the presence of a source of energy and the basic atoms needed to build organic compounds, become a “self-...

When we think of the human mind we most often think of its capacity for verbal language as we are the only living organism capable of speech. We are aware of the fact that the human mind is capable of mathematical thinking and think that mathematics was a later development of the human mind long after humankind had acquired language. In a book soon to be released in the Springer series Mathematics in the Mind edited by Marcel Danesi entitled A Topology of Mind—Spiral Thought Patterns, the Hyperlinking of Text, Ideas and More, we (Logan and Pruska-Oldenhof 2019) argue that human verbal language was as much a product of mathematical thinking as mathematics was a product of verbal thinking. We argue that the origin of verbal language, the origin of the mind, and the origin of mathematic thinking all happened at approximately the same time and that these three elements are basically interlinked. The human mind is a product of the brain and verbal language as was argued in The Extended M...

Marshall McLuhan made many predictions in his seminal 1964 publication, "Understanding Media: Extensions of Man". Among them were his predictions that the Internet would become a Global Village, making us more interconnected than television; the closing of the gap between consumers and producers; the elimination of space and time as barriers to communication; and the melting of national borders. He is also famously remembered for coining the expression the medium is the message. These predictions form the genesis of this new volume by Robert Logan, a friend and colleague who worked with McLuhan. In "Understanding New Media" Logan expertly updates "Understanding Media" to analyze the new media McLuhan foreshadowed and yet was never able to analyze or experience. The book is designed to reach a new generation of readers as well as appealing to scholars and students who are familiar with "Understanding Media". Visit the companion website, underst...

With digital media, not only are media extensions of their human users, as McLuhan posited, but there is a flip or reversal in which the human users of digital media become an extension of those digital media as these media scoop up their data and use them to the advantage of those that control these media. The implications of this loss of privacy as we become “an item in a data bank” are explored and the field of captology is described. The feedback of the users of digital media become the feedforward for those media.

The term citizenship is usually defined in relation to membership in a state with its attendant rights and responsibilities. It would be an appropriate term for membership in a world state had we achieved a form of world government more powerful than the existing United Nations. Lacking this development, and focusing on consciousness and civic responsibility (in particular, the importance of educating the public about the need to develop a sense of responsibility for the whole of mankind), rather than on formal legal rights and privileges, world citizenship can be seen as an aspect of a sense of community which can coalesce around any number of possible identities. The multiplication of such identities is indeed a hallmark of the postmodern age. Identities based on gender, sexual orientation, privilege or its absence, disability, have taken their place alongside more primordial identifications based on ethnicity, language, religion or race. All of these identities vie for recognition and formal attention.

Using Regge poles with SU(3) and exchange degeneracy, a theory of all experimentally accessible polarizations arising from pole-pole interferences is presented for pseudoscalar-baryon and baryon-baryon scattering and exchange reactions with all parameters (except for one sign) determined from differential cross-section data. All available data on pip, Kp, p¯p, and pp elastic and pi+p-->K+Sigma+ polarizations are compared with this theory at

The question of the energy dependence of inclusive reactions such as a+b-->c+ anything is discussed. Factorization arguments are used to show that the condition that abc¯ and ab be exotic for energy independence leads to the energy independence of a number of nonexotic reactions. It is suggested on the basis of simple Regge-exchange diagrams that perhaps a sufficient condition for energy independence, when b fragments into c, is that abc¯, ab, and ac¯ be exotic.

The thesis of this article is that notational systems have had a critical impact on the creation of social, economic, and educational institutions and systems from the first inception of writing to the latest developments with computers and telecommunications/connectivity as ...

We compare the nature of the meaning, the medium, the content, the message, the communication and the information within the domain of human symbolic interactions. This domain includes language and culture and the domain of non-symbolic interactions of living organisms defined as biosemiosis. We argue that for biosemiosis the information and organization that is propagated in a living organism cannot be separated from the medium in which it is instantiated, unlike human symbolic communication. We show that the symbol-based human activities of language, culture, technology, governance and economics represent the propagation of organization parallel to the propagating organization of living organisms. We show that McLuhan’s notion that “the medium is the message” is not equivalent to technological determinism. Finally we show that for human symbolic communication one can distinguish between the medium, the content and the message whereas for biosemiosis the content, the medium and the message are all the same, i.e. “the medium is the message is the content.”

What is information? - a fitting question given the importance of information and the central role it plays in the economic and cultural life at the beginning of the 21st Century. It is said that we live in the Information Age, a claim that is hard to dispute given the ubiquity of the vast array of information technology (IT) at our disposal to generate, communicate, interpret and exploit information. We are surrounded by information thanks to computing and the digital “new media” such as the Internet, the Web, blogs, email, instant messaging, text messaging, cell phones, VOIP, Web cams, iPods, Blackberries, iPhones, virtual reality, virtual worlds, RFID or smart tags, nanotechnology and ubiquitous computing. In addition to the proliferation of these many informatic devices we also have to contend with the information explosion in the physical and biological sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities. In addition computing and IT have become the principal metaphor through which so much of our life and our world are understood as well as forming the underpinning of artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL). The ultimate information conceit, however, belongs to Edward Fredkin who insists that the universe is a computer and that life including human life is merely a program running on that computer (Hayles 1999, p. 240-42).

The focus of our recent research has been on Marshall McLuhan as an educational theorist, which has been less than adequately covered by McLuhan scholars. Marshall McLuhan had a lot to say about education, in fact it was one of his principal concerns, but even after his passing, he still has much to teach us about contemporary education. We can learn about today's education in two ways from McLuhan. One is directly from his analysis of the educational system of his day, presented in lectures and writings from the 1950s until his death in 1980. Although some aspects of education have changed since then, particularly the arrival of digital technology, many of McLuhan's observations are as valid today as they were during his lifetime. Another way we can learn from him is to apply his principals of media ecology, with their key idea that "the medium is the message" (McLuhan 1964, p. 7), to understand the impact of new technologies and new media on education. After all, a classroom is a communication medium, as are a chalkboard or whiteboard, a textbook, a lecture, or an online learning management system like Moodle. As McLuhan (1964) observed, "A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them…. Once a new technology comes into a social milieu it cannot cease to penetrate that milieu until every institution is saturated." (p. 174). This has been the promise of computers, the Internet and a whole host of other more recent digital media, which have the potential to transform education and the nature of schools, which are both a medium and an institution. However, such transformation at present is only partial at best and the full promise continues to be unfulfilled. Each step in the evolution of communications systems and hence language affects the way a society sees the world, operates its economy and organizes its educational system. In this chapter we look into the rearview mirror to consider the history of learning, education and schooling in relation to each of the major types of communication media that emerged in human history. McLuhan built on the ideas of Innis, dividing human history into three distinct periods, based on the modes of sensibility their dominant media made available to them: oral, writing/print, electric. We examine the impact of oral communication, written communication, separating the impact of scribal writing from the impact of the printing press. We then look at the impact on education and learning of electric mass media, including mainframe computers, and finally we begin to study the impact of personal computers, the Internet and other digital

It is suggested that despite the fact that McLuhan claimed not to have a theory of communication that in fact the body of his work does indeed constitute a theory of media and their effects, which is termed as Marshall McLuhan’s General Theory of Media (GTOM). It is shown that his reversals of figure and ground; concepts and percepts; cause and effect; visual and acoustic spaces; a medium and its content (i.e. it’s message) and the fourth Law of Media are interconnected together with his systemic ecological field approach and they form the basis of his GTOM. Sixty-two reversals that appear in his writings have been cataloged in Appendix I.

Use is made of Daniel Lewis's idea that " awareness depends not only on involvement, but detachment as well " to better understand McLuhan's notion of the following ideas: the subliminal effects of media and technology; Narcissus narcosis; figure/ground and the relationship of environment and anti-environment.

Important aspects of human cognition are considered in terms of patterning, a key factor in the development of human cognition and culture, which also represents a shift from focusing on what is present to what is absent. We make use of Deacon's (2012) notion of absentials with which he understands the emergence of life and sentience from abiotic matter. Logan and Tandoc's (2018) assertion that the patterning that underscores human cognition is reexamined in terms of Deacon's absentials. Several important aspects of human cognition are considered that represent a shift from focusing on what is present to what is absent, namely, language as representing the transition from percept to concept-based thinking (Logan 2007), mathematical grouping and patterning of items into sets (Logan & Pruska-Oldenhof 2018) that gave rise to verbal language as well as imaginative thinking so critical for the development of the arts, mathematics and science. The connection between information and absence is also examined in which we claim that information is an absential paralleling an idea of Deacon's. There is more here than stuff. There is how this stuff is organized and related to other stuff-Terrence Deacon The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way-Marshall McLuhan

Chalmers' (1995) easy and the hard problems of consciousness correspond to the problem of explaining Block's (1995) access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness respectively. Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness is basically explaining how living organism are able to perceive or experience their percepts. Chalmers' easy problem of consciousness or explaining Block's access consciousness is the problem of how humans are able to access phenomenal consciousness for use in reasoning and rationality. This requires the ability to conceptualize one's phenomenal consciousness, which requires the use of language. Therefore, Chalmers' easy problem entails the problem of understanding the origin of the verbal language that makes conceptualization possible. It is argued that Chalmers easy problem in the harder one and vice-versa the hard one is the easier one. The universality of phenomenal consciousness among all living organisms is demonstrated and is shown to be something impossible for an AI device to achieve. Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives-Susan Schneider and Max Velmans (2008)

The idea of the Anthropocene is investigated in a multidisciplinary study by combining the perspectives of geography, biology and media ecology (i.e. the study of the impacts of technology). The hypothesis is developed that the Anthropocene did not have a precise starting point (i.e. there is no " golden spike "), but that the Anthropocene began in starts and fits and that it was not evenly distributed over time and space and that as time increased the severity of the changes to the Earth's environment due to human activity increased with time to the point that it now threatens the very possibility of human existence on this planet. We have identified six stages in the evolution of the Anthropocene starting from the global dispersal of Homo sapiens to today's looming crisis of global warming, climate change and the Earth's sixth mass extinction event which we are currently in the midst of. The six stages of the emergence of the Anthropocene that are identified include the Paleo-anthropocene with the extinction of megafauna and the large-scale forest clearing by fire; the Neo-anthropocene or the Neolithic Revolution and the beginning of the Holocene; the Tradeo-anthropocene with the spread of flora and fauna globally through global trade; the Industrio-anthropocene or the Industrial Revolution; the Benzino-electro-anthropocene beginning with the gasoline powered motor car and the electrification of lighting and motors; and the Extremo-anthropocene with the onset of global warming and climate change. A description is made of anthropocentric technology defined as the digital technology that emerged in the sixth stage of the anthropocene, namely the 1980s. This includes the flip from McLuhan's notion of technology as an extension of its users to include also the users as extensions of their digital technologies by virtue of the information they share via the Internet. In the concluding section, we discuss the possible switch in the climate change coping strategy from sustainability to resilience to cope with the existential threat to human survival on planet Earth.

We argue that the premise of the technological Singularity based on the notion that computers will one day be smarter that their human creators, is false making use of the techniques of media ecology. We also analyze the comments of other critics of the Singularity as well supporters of this notion. The notion of intelligence that advocates of the technological singularity promote does not take into account the full dimension of human intelligence. They treat artificial intelligence as a figure without a ground. Human intelligence as we will show is not based solely on logical operations and computation but also includes a long list of other characteristics unique to humans which is the ground that supporters of the Singularity ignore. The list includes curiosity, imagination, intuition, emotions, passion, desires, pleasure, aesthetics, joy, purpose, objectives, goals, telos, values, morality, experience, wisdom, judgment, and even humor.

With digital media not only are media extension of man as McLuhan posited but there is a flip or reversal in which man or the user of digital media becomes an extension of those digital media as these media scoop up our data and use them to the advantage of those that control these media. The implications for this loss of privacy as we become " an item in a data bank " are explored and the field of captology is described. The feedback of the users of digital media become the feedforward for those media.

Technologies are merely extensions of ourselves – McLuhan (1967, 261)

All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical – McLuhan & Fiore (1967)

Digital industrialism turns human data into the new commodity-Rushkoff (2016, 44)

This is Google's model of giving away everything in return for looking at their ads and sharing all our data-Rushkoff (ibid., 37)

In this presentation I begin with an enquiry made by a collaboration of system biologists, information scientists and physicists in which it is shown that information in biotic systems and hence biosemiosis is equivalent to Propagating Organization (Kauffman et al. In Press). We have also demonstrated that Shannon's classical notion of information does not apply to biotic systems or to human communication in which meaning plays a role but is limited to engineering applications. The presentation then examines a number of examples of the propagation of organization involving: