spellcheck and consciuosness

[a_priori]

When was the last time you clicked the little spell-check box on your word processor? (Or selected 'check spelling and grammar' from the Tools menu? Or whatever you weird Mac people do, assuming you're not too cool for spelling

Comments

obligatory

[flamingjune07]

Re: obligatory

[a_priori]

Interesting. I genuinely thought it was spelled that way.

Re: obligatory

[flamingjune07]

Only if you're verbing the band name ;)

um phenomology or embodied mind or something? rant

[paulhope]

The conscious self is an anachronism.

This seems like an overstatement to me. The "conscious self" has always been unconsciously geared onto the world through unconscious know-how. Our understanding of space, for example, is grounded in the practical consequences of our body orientation. More concretely, our consciousness of a hammer is tied up with the affordances it provides us vis a vis grabbing it and hitting things with it.

So while implicit learning of practical skills may extend the reach of consciousness, it doesn't refute the role of consciousness itself. (Which is probably something like "selection of information for further downstream processing.")

It does make it really interesting to work on building new technology, especially when having to deal with issues of user interface design. Ideally, using software is as unconscious a process as possible, because attention is a limited resource and you want to make sure users spend it on solving the problems that matter to them and not manipulating their tools.

Re: um phenomology or embodied mind or something? rant

[a_priori]

Well, I was exaggerating for stylistic effect.

Still, though, I'm not sure I follow the argument here. True, various unconscious processes have always been so. But it does appear that many more mental activities have been handed off to the unconscious - many things that we would once have done consciously, deliberately, are now handled by intelligent-like machines.

Re: um phenomology or embodied mind or something? rant

[paulhope]

I think my point is that though technology now performs a lot of tasks that we used to do consciously, that doesn't diminish the role of the conscious mind. Rather, technology just allows us to be conscious about other things (and hopefully things that matter more to us).

[eve_prime]

I still use Word Perfect, not Word. I much prefer having embedded (and viewable and editable) codes doing my formatting, rather than styles. I have QuickCorrect turned off, and, yes, I do run the spellchecker manually. I find Word's colorful underlining and surreptitious auto-replacing more presumptuous/irksome than helpful.

[a_priori]

I've come to appreciate the red underlining, at least in Firefox. In Word I'll probably catch the mistakes myself eventually, but in emails or blog posts I don't have the time to check it over carefully.

[epictetus_rex]

Hey, G! Totally off-topic but Lauren and myself are in New York and we're visiting Seb on his birthday (this Friday). If you're in town it would be awesome to meet up with you as well and have a drink. I'm not sure if you are, though. Anyway, hopefully we can make something work... I'm definitely into givin ol' Seb a grand old birthday party.

Cheers,

-Nick

[a_priori]

That sounds great. I don't know yet if I can make it though, depending on time/location. Christine Korsgaard is giving a colloquium talk at my department that evening, and I've signed up to accompany her - and nearly all the senior ethicists in my department! - to dinner afterward.

If that ends early enough for me to get to wherever you all are, I'll try to join you.

[epictetus_rex]

WHOA. Korsgaard. Damn. Lucky you! I wouldn't dream of dragging you away from that. Have fun, and don't worry, I was just checking.