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It seems you're talking about STELARC and that the work you're referring to is this.

It seems you're talking about STELARC and that the work you're referring to is this.

But if we look at the weaker forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it really isn't that interesting. All it is saying is that previous experience colours our view of the world and affects the ease of picking up new information according to how closely related it is to our previous experience.

Clarifying question - are you suggesting that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has weaker forms in publication, or that there are less extremist ways to interpret and apply the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? You are suggesting that prior experience is the active force here, but another interpretation of these types of results is that epistemology affects learning (in chemistry, physics, and biology [PDF or "View as HTML"]). Within this framework for science education research, cognition is modeled from a "knowledge-in-pieces" perspective, wherein certain cognitive resources are active when a mind is thinking in a particular context about some particular concept or field of content. So, although prior experience certainly shapes the development of personal epistemology and personal epistemological cognitive resources, these aren't actually prior experiences, they are "filters" that, in a very "Kant-ian" sense, determine what information is "read out" from the environment and also affect the way that information input is processed.

That's so obvious that it almost goes without saying! Everyone knows that someone who studied maths in school will likely pick up new mathematical concepts more easily than someone who studied art or history. Everyone knows that we have cultural and political biases from our background which affect our ability to interpret new information.

So, to continue looking at this from an epistemological perspective, we can see that it's much more complex than just prior experience, even within a given domain. If a student has taken a bunch of math classes, but has had horrible experiences in those learning environments, they won't necessarily be any better at learning new math than someone who doesn't have the same experience in the subject. Of course, you can substitute just about any subject in for "math" in the above scenario. I would argue that it's more appropriate to think about culture and political frameworks as influencing personal epistemological development than it is to say that they affect cognition directly.

The weaker hypothesis just really doesn't say anything interesting. And the strong form is ridiculously bad logic (a language where it is you have a concept that can't be understood by someone without pre-existing knowledge of that language, is a language that can't be learnt, and therefore can't exist. After all, nobody is born knowing a language!)

I'm not sure that I agree here, either. Imagination is a powerful cognitive resource. There is a further "extreme" to your logic game, and that's at the level of generating language itself. I think your argument breaks here, and the reason is that we can imagine, and then use analogy to build the new image for another brain. See recent developments in mirror neuron research.

So in the end, we are left with the weaker form that is almost a truism, and doesn't give us any predictive power towards the boundaries of previous experience as influence on new information

What I'm missing from the discussion is a reference to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html): does our language shape/limit our thought! And this study clearly seems to contradict it...

I had Stelarc as my art teacher, many years ago in Japan. He has a third hand: http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/third/third.html/

STELARC! Steeeellllllaaaaaarrrrccc!!



Dang, why didn't I preview the first time?

So, you want more nerds oriented radio, hmmm...
have you tried free radio linux
you get bored after a while but you sure look geek by listening to the linux kernel source!

This is the website which duped the BBC news producer:

http://dow-chemical.va.com.au/

it is a copy of the real website. apparently the whole interview was organised by email and no other validation was used apart from the appearance of the website as being real. they just said as much on the bbc news channel.

i actually saw the interview this morning and thought it was real. anyway the hoax is by these people:

http://www.theyesmen.org/dow/articlenytimes.html

So in essense this seem to support the Sappir-Worph hypothesis (http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html) that the language strongly affect our ability to think.
This makes one wonder if a another language would give us the ability to better reason about other things. Would we be smarter if we had a better language in which to think?
There is an artifical language called lojban (http://www.lojban.org/) based on predicate logic but which is meant to be used as other "real" languages (compare with eg. esperanto, interlingua and swahili). The question is, would native speakers of lojban be better a rational thought? As far as I know there are no native speakers of lojban but what would happend if I raised my (hypothethical) children to speak if from birth?
Mathias

The performance artist Stelarc once hired scientists to work out whether it was possible to generate electricity by using the windtunnel in the throat... He was actually going to have a fan installed in his windpipe to use as wind power. Turned out it would have taken about 600 years of breathing to power a 9-volt battery....

Wanna know why there's no decent local stations any more? Go ask the FCC why they still aren't giving out Low Power FM Licences (or why many stations arean't applying for them), and why they are harassing the so called "Pirate" community radio LPFM groups with legal threats and the confiscation of equipment. For more info:

LPFM info and resources
Free Radio Network

Interestingly enough, here's a geeky footnote of sorts: free radio linux

This crazy Australian performance artist Stelarc gave this question some thought and decided that the throat was a natural wind tunnel that could be used to harness wind energy. So he hired a team of scientists to see what it would take to surgically install a windmill in his throat and to calculate how much energy could be produced there. He gave up on the project after learning that it would take some 600 years of heavy breathing to power a 9-volt battery....

Oh, so this is the hardware for listening to Free Radio Linux? Good, now I can listen to my kernel anywhere.

I have MP3s hosted with popular names, but they're just random bits of the Linux kernel as heard here

Exactly right.

And some gentle soul mentioned Sapir-Whorf. Man, what a doozy!

Sapir-Whorf Theory

For no other reason than the way that the phrase hits the ear.

"Phrases" don't hit your ear. Amplitude- and frequency- modulated sound vibrations are detected by your ear and eventually converted into electrical impulses that are interpreted by your brain. During the initial construction nothing jars. Yet at some level, the phrase "she" is recognized within your mind and this is what you find upsetting. "grammar fascist" is right. You need to ask yourself how deeply ingrained is sexist language within our minds that some simple pronoun usage can feel deeply disturbing to us. How important you think language is to the development of people's minds depends really onyour attitude to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity).

Didn't Stelarc already do something similiar to this in one of his performance pieces? I seem to recall in Parasite that he used custom-written search engine software to hunt for various images on the web and use them as triggers for muscular stimulation electrodes.

Commissioned by Gallery 9/Walker Art Center with the support of the Jerome Foundation, USA. *

Not the UK then.

another artist who has been doing the same sort of things probably for a much longer time & that might be worth sneaking a peek at is Stelarc. There is also an interview with him at ctheory in the archives.

Check out the work of Australian performance artist Stelarc - he's been controlling industrial robots and a third arm for many years using muscle control. Once rigged up my arm and controlled it remotely..weird sensation... He's really into the 'human body is obselete' stuff and has been looking at how he can extend the capabilities for a long time. He's got into some interesting internet based projects as well...(pingbody, evolving URL body)..

Check out the work of Australian performance artist Stelarc - he's been controlling industrial robots and a third arm for many years using muscle control. Once rigged up my arm and controlled it remotely..weird sensation... He's really into the 'human body is obselete' stuff and has been looking at how he can extend the capabilities for a long time. He's got into some interesting internet based projects as well...(pingbody, evolving URL body)..

Check out Stelarc's work ...

The only problem is that no linguist who has done any serious experimentation on the subject has been able to support Sapir-Whorf to any reasonable degree. Furthermore, they pretty much managed to undermine their own argument: in saying that an Inuit might have one word for snow lying on the ground, and another for snow falling, for example, you can see that we don't need a specific lexeme to grok the difference between falling snow and lying snow.

With that in mind, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that language ain't got much to do with it. Maybe our keyboards would look different, and we'd all having Unicode native operating systems - which, now that I think about it, would be pretty damn cool - but I don't see that programming languages would be otherwise greatly affected.

I imagine a time soon when we will just shoot up 50ml of net connectivity which will then pour through our bodies like ice 9. Every cell in our bodies, and the cells of almost any other living thing may be networked and able to interco-operate. the already blurry line between human and machine will be long gone. the blurry line between animal and plant will also evaporate as everything becomes digital. Everyone will live in their own personal space, whose fluid permissions will allow space sharing or not at the whim of the owner. My lounge may resemble the alps while your the beach in hawaaii, but when we are together a shared, consensual space with connonly agreed or familiar decor may be better. The future of th enet is beyond machines, beyond money and peyond people. It will be thriving when we as a species are long forgotten. The Future has begun. As Wlliam Gisbon has already made clear, we already live in the future.

Anthony - http://alife.org