Jim Kaput University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth

1. Building Intellectual Infrastructure to Expose & Understand Ever-Increasing Complexity, From An Evolutionary-Psychological Point of View Jim Kaput University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth More Phenomena & More Connections Among Them New Theory, New Tools, New Explanatory Challenges A New Perspective on What We Are Doing: Evolutionary Psychology

2. The Expanding & Elaborating Phenomena • Abstract Cartesian brain-in-a-vat • Wet brain neurologically instantiated in a head • Embodied brain - in a walking, talking, seeing & gesturing body • Brain extended with cultural/symbolic tools, including newly interactive tools with responsive agency • Socially and culturally situated brain • Brain with personal identity/consciousness and affect

3. Responding to Complexity & Richness - And Generating More • New tools - e.g., eye trackers, miniature digital video systems, video-frame analysis & audio wave-form analysis (enable close analysis of gesture-speech) • New specific analytical tools - e.g., parallel vs serial analysis, semiotic constructs such as semiotic node, math-ed centric taxonomies of gestures • New analytical perspectives - e.g., view seeing as an interrogative action, view semiosis as an inherently multi-media phenomenon, use inclusive epistemologies (Radford’s knowledge objectification) and alternative epistemologies (Nemirovsky’s phenomenological perspective) • New explanatory resources - e.g., neurophysiology, evolutionary psychology

4. Being Aware of How Our Tools Constrain Our Work - Built-In Biases • Gesture has cognitive, linguistic/imagistic and social dimensions. However: • The social is tough to capture in systematic ways (which helps explain the diversity of the social sciences) • This applies in classrms (including our own CC work) • The same applies in evolution since all we have are the physical remains and need to infer social phenomena • The net effect is that we all worry about it, but accounting for the social dimension is hard, and requires good tools, material and intellectual - a major ongoing agenda of gesture research

5. The Evolutionary Psychological Roots of Gesture - Approximate Chronology FIRST STAGE: Episodic Mind - Situational-episodic knowledge • 4 million Yrs: Oldest known australopithecines • acute event-perception, erect posture, shared food, division of labor, nuclear family structure, larger numbers of children, longer weaning period … • 2 million Yrs ago: Oldest known habilines • crude stone-cutting tools, variable but larger brain size SECOND STAGE: Mimetic Mind - Roots of Gesture & Reference • 1.5 million Yrs ago: Homo Erectus • much larger brain, more elaborate tools, migration out of Africa, seasonal base camps, use of fire & shelters - cognitive foundations for language THIRD STAGE: Narrative Mind - Mythic Culture • 300,000 Yrs ago: Archaic Sapient Humans • second major jump in brain size, anatomy of vocal tract approaches modern form Fourth STAGE: Modern Mind - Written/Theoretic Culture • 50,000 Yrs ago: External (static) symbol storage, writing, mathematics, …

6. Key Factor: Each Stage Enveloped and Extended Its Predecessor Thus the Modern mind is a hybrid composite of an • Episodic Mind, a Mimetic Mind, a Narrative Mind (with its Mythic Culture), and the Modern Mind extended by external static symbol systems (with its Written/Theoretic Culture) • The Modern Mind is now transitioning to a newly extended mind, extended by the external application of autonomously executable processes yielding the Virtual Culture (Shaffer & Kaput, 1999 - ESM) • The essential factor is that we don’t throw anything away, so the organic, evolutionary growth of each stage includes elements of the earlier ones - Note how they are all present in our Research Forum today.

7. The Interactions of Earlier Minds Are At the Heart of the Phenomena We Are Studying Today (1) • The mimetic, pre-linguistic human mind encoded knowledge in replicable, even rehearsable, action. Further this mimetic knowledge could be idealized and socially shared. • I hypothesize that some of McNeil’s gesture categories, e.g., the emblematic, could be found among humans 100-300,000 years ago. • Now, as Laurie shows, new forms of gesture can be based in the Theoretic Culture’s symbol systems - some gestures relate to symbolic artifacts, both directly, as opaque objects, and indirectly, to their referential “content” as fraction-operators, for example.

8. The Interactions of Earlier Minds Are At the Heart of the Phenomena We Are Studying Today (2) • Michella & Maria show the interaction of gesturing, Episodic physical action and seeing, and oral language in the context of the Written Culture - indeed, the Narrative Culture is ubiquitous • As Ferdinando’s group shows, it is also at work in the early part of the Virtual Culture - in the presence of computation. They also help us study the interactions, in both their parallel and serial forms - to see them in two ways. • Ricardo/Francesca show the Episodic Mind actively at work parsing symbols in the context of the Written/Theoretic symbolic environment. • Luis’s work shows us exactly where to look for productive interactions among the several stages of human representational evolution - Semiotic Nodes - and he also helps identify what we are looking for, acts of Knowledge Objectification.

9. These Papers Help Begin a Larger, Bigger Stream of Inquiry that Examines a Fuller Version of the Human (Mathematical) Experience • They can also be regarded as uncovering and examining how the different stages of humanity complexly interact to produce the phenomena that we see today.Further, they can be seen as helping inform the design of the new extensions of humanity (and the new Virtual Culture) that the computational medium makes possible.After all, actions with a mouse or other analogic controls are simply new forms of intentional gesture - that support new forms of communication and action in new kinds of environments - including virtually extended ones (e.g., ours today).

10. Thank You! WWW.SIMCALC.UMASSD.EDU