Very well expressed Alan, But as I gather you know and are hinting at there is nothing shocking at all about Shannon's pragmatic dismissal of the semantic aspects of communication in his focus on the engineering problem of "message" transport. He leaves that more vexing engineering problem, if it is one, for others to muddle over.
Your post says as much with the words it avoids as the words that it uses. In place of of the more common pragmatism or Peirce's pragmaticism you use "functionalism" and in place of machine you use animal. We've been dropping metaphysical baggage (or sone of us have been trying to) in the name of pragmatism for generations now, but the gum or the baggage keeps sticking to the shoe. Pragmatic COG/SCI theorist, or some of them, would make do without qualia, or would like to. But they are all of them flumoxed when it comes to describing how "consciousness" appears. Unless they take the radical and downright funny position that Dennet once did that we may not be conscious at all, but just fooling ourselves into thinking that we are conscious when we are merely automotons, or zombies, or mimics. That sure makes AI that much less ambitious, if only mimicry is required. Less ambitious is still quite ambitious, as mimicry is quite an engineering feat. I digress a little, I start to drift, in no small part because all of these topics bleed into one another. The sociological and political ecomonomics of engineering, of knowledge, and of meaning are all material, they matter. They are of a piece. To concur with your basic point, it is indeed about the "doing." I think that basic point is very important. You lose me here: > If we purge away residual, old-humanist guilt-feelings about universalism so > as to surmise that universal inter-functionality or interoperability is not > the same as universal meaning or being, then it may be possible for cultural > criticism of the Semantic Web to end up confessing a utopianism of its own > that is curiously similar to that being criticized in Berners-Lee et al. > Today's cultural-critical dream is of a world in which there can be local > cultures not enslaved by, indebted to, or otherwise under the shadow of the > so-called "universal" culture of any dominating force, imperialist or > Googlist. I don't see why the notion of an extensible ontology--where there > is an overall framework for human interaction but not necessarily an overall > meaning of humanity--is foreign to that dream. It is an extension of that > dream. Of course, vigilance of the sort Florian recommends is still needed, > since the mold has not set and the great imperialists today, whose native > institutional form is not the nation but the corporation, are waiting to > bend the dreams to other purposes. I don't think we share the same assumptions. I confess to no such guilt about universalism or the failing attempt to posit the universal. I'm in fact fond of the old-old humanist attempt to posit the universal. I don't share the dream you are referring to here. Guilt feelings if there are any, about universalism, are of relatively recent vintage. As for Empire and the mash up with the Google thread, it is interesting to me to note that the businessweek article revealed that Google is effectively taking the press away from those who are shifting the ground of intellectual property and actually existing implementation out from underneath the current Google regime. None of this is Google's invention or innovation. It is crafty, after the fact, public relations. Why not lay claim to open source software that is eroding your actual ip edge if you have any at all. If there really is no ip edge, there is certainly an implementation edge. The implementation edge is of scant comfort. The ground is shifting, and Google is smart enough to jump on the bandwagon. Google was never about page-ranking or about any secret sauce. They were first and foremost about just search and nothing more. It was their Map/Reduce and BigTable and GFS that gave and give them preemminence; it was and is their actually existing massively distributed architecture that makes them the default "doer." As they say in their public presentations on BigTable, they use massive networks of "commodity" (read Linux) servers. They have always been about leveraging open source software. But the open source game is constantly moving, constantly overtaking and freeing itself. It is a fast moving game that eats its own fathers and children. Unless they move with it and faster. Hadoop and now Hbase are being developed outside of Google, and have been funded by Yahoo among others; the others now include PowerSet. They are offshoots of the Lucene and Nutch open source projects. Google's current edge will be no more, shortly. But they can as well ride the open source wave and make use of new open source solutions as any. The search people keep talking about the long tail; many searches are novel. Page rank has little to do with effective search. My next jump in this syllogism is "Google was never about page rank". Ask anyone who has hacked together a search engine. The biggest problems are those of scale. The secret sauce is a ruse or a marketing gimmick. It gets you noticed. The importance of PowerSet, for example, is not their use of natural language. The math and the theory were in place long ago. Their importance is the fact that they need to scale massively and they need to use the open source hackers to help them scale. Their importance lies in the fact that they are shifting the "secret sauce." They are giving lie to the last ruse. I want to make one more point in this mashup. We live in an age of de facto "universals." Google can lay claim in the imagination and the press to the data cloud and even, hilariously enough, to what their competitors have done to chip away at their edge, because they are the de facto universal search platform. The nation state has never been so large as it is now. The oil majors have never been so vertically integrated. Yet, we talk of "little narratives", of "local" speech. So many Epicureans in little gardens. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
