{"id":104,"date":"2009-05-07T20:51:02","date_gmt":"2009-05-07T20:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/wordpress\/?p=104"},"modified":"2021-12-22T20:22:10","modified_gmt":"2021-12-22T20:22:10","slug":"formalising-the-unformalisable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/?p=104","title":{"rendered":"Formalising the unformalisable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Research into affective computing has prompted a question from some in the HCI community about formalising the unformalisable.\u00a0 This is articulated in this 2005 paper<\/a> by Kirsten Boehner and colleagues.\u00a0 In essence, the argument goes like this – given that emotion and cognition are embodied biopsychological phenomena, can we ever really “transmit” the experience to a computer?\u00a0 Secondly, if we try to convey emotions to a computer, don’t we just trivialise the experience by converting it into another type of cold, quantified information.\u00a0 Finally, hasn’t the computing community already had its fingers burned by attempts to have machines replicate cognitive phenomenon with very little results (e.g. AI research in the 80’s).<\/p>\n

OK.\u00a0 The first argument seems spurious to me.\u00a0 Physiological computing or affective computing will never transmit an exact representation of private psychological events.\u00a0 That’s just setting the bar too high.\u00a0 What physiological computing can do is operationalise the psychological experience, i.e. to represent a psychological event or continuum in a quantified, objective fashion that should be meaningfully associated with the experience of that psychological event.\u00a0 As you can see, we’re getting into deep waters already here.\u00a0 The second argument is undeniable but I don’t understand why it is a criticism.\u00a0 Of course we are taking an experience that is private, personal and subjective and converting it into numbers.\u00a0 But that’s what the process of psychophysiological measurement is all about – moving from the realm of experience to the realm of quantified representation.\u00a0 After all, if you studied an ECG trace of a person in the midst of a panic attack, you wouldn’t expect to experience a panic attack yourself, would you?\u00a0 Besides, converting emotions into numbers is the only way a computer has to represent psychological status.<\/p>\n

As for the last argument, I’m on unfamiliar ground here, but I hope the HCI community can learn from the past mistakes; specifically, being too literal and unrealistically ambitious.\u00a0 Unfortunately the affective computing debate sometimes seems to run down these well-trodden paths.\u00a0 I’ve read papers where researchers ponder how computers will ‘feel’ emotions or whether the whole notion of emotional computing is an oxymoron.\u00a0\u00a0 Getting computers to represent the psychological status of users is a relative business that needs to take a couple of baby steps before we try and run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research into affective computing has prompted a question from some in the HCI community about formalising the unformalisable.\u00a0 This is articulated in this 2005 paper by Kirsten Boehner and colleagues.\u00a0 In essence, the argument goes like this – given that emotion and cognition are embodied biopsychological phenomena, can we ever really “transmit” the experience to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[9,28,61],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pY315-1G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4756,"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/4756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.physiologicalcomputing.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}