Another topic for today: Thought as a Technology, a fascinating article by M. Nielsen. Initially I was going to just throw it in the monthly kitchen sink of the links post with a short comment, but soon I noticed that my “short comment” was already several hundred words long…

(Unfortunately I can’t promise this scattered collection of ideas is entertaining or even readable, but who reads this blog besides myself anyway.)

(One could then ask why I keep writing these things.)

(Writing is good. Writing helps you to either organize your thoughts, or if not, at least the attempt at writing reveals where your thoughts are unorganized.)

(The only problem is that writing is a time-sink.)

So, first a bit about the background: I don’t actually remember where I found the link to the essay first time. (Might’ve been somewhere on IRC? Might’ve been a stray comment on many other blogs I read. Maybe a long lost HN thread. Who knows. I had no other notes in my bookmarks folder than the link itself.)

Contents in brief: Nielsen notices that graphical user interfaces are, in fact, metaphors, though he does not use the word himself. Nielsen calls them “interfaces”.

Thoughts: Interfaces are a kind of metaphor. But the power of the metaphor is that the resulting concept of interface is stronger than just the metaphor; Saying “interface” tells you something that “metaphor” does not, especially if you are programmer by vocation and thus a person who deals a lot with APIs. Metaphors are interfaces are metaphors.

And world is full of metaphors, especially when it comes to understanding the world around you.

In computing, the once much-used (but today maybe a bit outdated) term is desktop metaphor. (I’ve understood that mobile interfaces are not anymore explicitly utilizing desktop metaphor?) Before desktops (and after the desktops), we had (will have) terminals that are under-the-hood simple text teletype emulators1, with lots of added goodies such as colors or ncurses. Nielsen himself starts the essay by recalling how seeing the MacPaint-with-a-pointer-device graphical interface was revelatory experience to him after the time spent with the bare text C64 console.

In mathematics, especially when learning and teaching mathematics, visual metaphors are very important method of conveying mathematical ideas. Consider this link I posted a while back, on a fancy complex number visualization. Questions to ponder: To what extent the ability to understand an abstract, complex, difficult thing is really about the ability to visualize (either by concretely drawing on e.g. paper or in their mind)? Einstein famously told that he came up with theory of relativity by “imagining what it would be like to ride a beam of light”2. These kind of metaphors Nielsen also considers himself (he built fancy interactive visualizations for simple physical systems, see the YouTube vids in the article).

Some of the more obvious everyday interface-like-metaphors he lefts unmentioned. Have you ever given thought to system of street signs, traffic lights, legal codes, and maps? This system could be viewed as an interface or tool to navigating the reality that is the everyday urban landscape. (And emergence and then abundance of GPS navigators has changed that landscape to us all, for ever). When you are walking around a city or driving a car on a freeway, you are not engaging with the whole world as it truly is, marveling the beauty of a leaf in a tree you pass on your way; you operate in a restricted subset of the world, the one characterized by street signs and notation on a map.3

And so we come to the key observation of the essay: All these metaphors can also be seen as interfaces to the physical world. Tools that enable us to understand it.

Nielsen presents here an idea which sounds oddly familiar yet novel, and of course, self-evident after it’s been stated. I’m certain these themes (signs, symbols, metaphors) have been explored by many philosophers before. Nielsen states some sources: Lev Vygotsky, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay. But the same is at the heart of academic philosophy in general: what is the reality behind the map; what do we know about it? (Ontology, epistemology.) What is the relation between the reality and the language we use to talk about it? (Philosophy of language.) What about the cognition, not just the part that is characterized by the use of language? (Cognitive science.) I remember reading about these subject on high school philosophy class. The shameful part is that I’ve forgotten too much details of it.

The curious thing is how Nielsen views these tools in terms of interfaces. The generations before Nielsen thought that maps and visualizations (and then later the computer interface when they saw it) was a metaphor; Nielsen’s generation thinks about metaphors in terms of computer interfaces. (Metaphors are interfaces are metaphors.) Maybe this is because (in this day and age) we live in a computerized society – have lived for decades now – and spend significant portion of our lives in a world of fiction existing behind screens that we manipulate with certain rituals, and that reality is best described with the concept of interface.

Relevant / Related

The Map is not the Territory. For starters, see Wikipedia, Map-territory relation. Google for more.

Actually, the same general sentiment goes much further back than Korzybski. As far as I’ve understood Plato, that’s probably one of the central ideas going on in the Allegory of the Cave. The interface is the shadows on the wall of the cave; the true reality lies underneath, but we are like the prisoners, to whom observing the true world is difficult. (And of course then there was the topic of the ideal forms, but that appears to be just a misguided and misunderstood idea about what the reality is.)

Tristan Harris on how technological interfaces may shape our cognition in not-so-pleasant ways, linked previously in August 2016.

Footnotes

1:

Concerning terminal emulators, see Neal Stephenson’s essay “In the Beginning, There Was Command Line” from 1999. Link.

Also, difference between shell, console, and terminal.

2:

Concerning Einstein’s thought experiment (assumes a passing knowledge of physics), see http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Chasing_the_light/index.html

3:

Another fascinating thing about maps are the places that do not appear on them: to borrow Harry Potter lexicon, the unplottable locations. Concerning untrustworthy maps with blank spots, some time ago there was a fascinating article on Wired about Soviet cartography:

Greg Miller, 2015, “Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers”, Wired. link

Indeed, not all maps were created equal in the USSR. While the military maps were extremely accurate, the maps available to ordinary citizens were next to useless.

More on sovietmaps.com.