Umwelt as a Perceptive Interface - Riviste digitali

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Didactics and “Simplexity”:
Umwelt as a Perceptive Interface
PAOLA AIELLO, STEFANO DI TORE, PIO ALFREDO DI TORE,
MAURIZIO SIBILIO
Abstract: his paper presents an approach to teaching within the simplexity framework. he authors present didactics as a complex science and highlight the link between
mind, body and digital environment. Finally, the concept of Umwelt is presented as the
basis to envisage new Educational Technologies that allow the creation of an “extended
body”. Umwelt is intended as a Perceptive Interface that increases the range of action.
Riassunto: L’articolo presenta un approccio alla didattica nello scenario della semplessità. Dopo aver proposto la didattica come scienza complessa e aver sottolineato il legame
tra mente, corpo e ambiente digitale, viene presentato il concetto di Umwelt come base
progettuale per tecnologie educative che permettano di realizzare un “corpo aumentato”,
un’interfaccia percettiva capace di aumentare le possibilità d’azione.
Keyworks: Didactics, Simplexity, Technologies of Education, Umwelt.
Didactics as a Complex Science
“Jusqu’au début du XX siècle – oùelle
où elle entre en crise – la science “clasoù
sique” s’est fondée sur quatre piliers de certitude qui ont pour cause et efet
de dissoudre la complexitépar
complexité par la simplicité. Le principe d’ordre, le principe
de séparation, le principe de reductio, le caractèreabsolu
caractère absolu de la logiquedéductive-identitaire” (Morin, 2002).
In the XX century we have witnessed a gradual and increasing crisis of
this epistemological perspective, and it’s interesting to note that the irst
signs of the “crisis” have been just observed in some of the “natural sciences”, such as physics and biology, that more than the others had contributed
to its spreading and legitimation. In particular, concepts like chaos, unpredictability and relativity of points of view are legitimated and assimilated
in a new scientiic perspective: complexity. Pedagogy and didactics, as other
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Paola Aiello, Stefano Di Tore, Pio Alfredo Di Tore, Maurizio Sibilio
sciences, have absorbed this new gnoseological conception, adapting their
methods of research and their models to the new scientiic scene. From the
epistemological point of view, complexity, for its interdisciplinary nature,
emerges as the study of complex adaptive systems and their related emerging phenomena. “Examples on Earth of the operation of complex adaptive systems includebiological
include biological evolution, learning and thinking in animals
(including people), thefunctioning
the functioning of the immune system in mammals and
other vertebrates, theoperation
the operation of the human scientiic enterprise, and the
behavior of computers thatare
that are built or programmed to evolve strategies –
for example by means of neuralnets
neural nets or genetic algorithms. Clearly, complex
adaptive systems have a tendency to give rise to other complex adaptive
systems” (Gell-Mann, 1995, 4). Complexity, in the educational research, is
presented as a functional approach bringing back the attention to the complex and articulate process of human education, involving teaching-learning
dynamics characterized by antithetic and complementary dimensions, constituents of a unique interdependent, interactive and inter-retroactive texture
(Morin, 2001). hough it doesn’t exist an univocal deinition of the concept
of complexity, we could assert, even in the didactic scope, that complexity
seems to be historically determined by the observer who acknowledges to
the system some conventionally complex characteristics:
1. he presence in the didactic system of several components constituted by a variable number of elements that in turn can be simple or
presenting diferent levels of complexity.
2. he presence of interactions among the non linear components of the
complex didactic system forming the basis of an emerging behavior
and recognizable in the self-regulating mechanisms of the system itself.
3. he “hologramatic” structure, relecting the characteristics of the
teaching-learning process, in which each component expresses information about the whole system where there’s no component that
all alone can rule the behavior of single parts or of the system itself.
4. he adaptive interaction with the environment, that is the fundamental property of the didactic action (Sibilio, 2012a).
hinking about didactics as a “complex science” calls the scientiic community for a deinition of its own object considered as the synthesis of
teaching and learning interacting in a systemic perspective (Aiello, 2012).
From an epistemological point of view, this concept has leaded to a clariBIO-EDUCATION, SIMPLEXITY, NEUROSCIENCE AND ENACTIVISM
Didactics and “Simplexity”: Umwelt as a Perceptive Interface
29
ication of the methodological backgroundtraditionally
background
background traditionally
traditionally attested on formal,
theoretical and operative synthesis, nourished by systems of interconnection on several levels of analysis (Oreice, 2009).
he concept of complexity therefore stands out as the only approach
that is able to ofer to didactic research the complicated connection of elements interacting in educational processes, stimulating scientiic research
in gathering local modiications by means of approaches allowing the comprehension of data emerging from didactic system, though they act in full
awareness of the impossibility of anticipating the future state. Indeed, if
systems tending to balance, which are object of study of quasi- classical
domain (Gell-Mann, 2000), can predict, after having described the initial
state, the following states by means of the analysis of the perturbing elements, didactic system seems to be unpredictable, due to its interaction
in a non linear way, inside and outside, changing its structure and making
necessary a re-modelling of its own characteristics in each state, causing at
the same time either the impossibility of predicting the future course of
the phenomenon, or a computational explosiondue to the need of recalculating, at every state, the structure and the characteristics of the system itself.
What does it happen to the educational research when the need of new
representations and theoretical models require diferent ways of interpreting and coping with complexity? (Sibilio, 2012a).
Speciically, it means to answer to the need of a reduction of the dimensionality in order to ofer new interpretative patterns, new ways of adapting
and solving practices; these solutions don’t misrepresent complexity, even if
they can provoke a number of deviations, an apparent additional complexity, but sure they always can address problems in an original way (Berthoz,
2011). herefore it’s increasing a conception of didactics acknowledging
to teaching-learning process its nature of complex adaptive system which
needs an epistemological redeinition and refounding in order to consider
and ind new methods, tools and procedures of research required by complex systems. From this point of view, it seems to be very interesting to
introduce the concept of simplexity created by Alain Berthoz in its homonymous work which emerges as the study of all properties and principles
that living beings – complex adaptive systems themselves – use to decipher
complexity.
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Paola Aiello, Stefano Di Tore, Pio Alfredo Di Tore, Maurizio Sibilio
Umwelt, Simplexity and Didactics
It doesn’t exist a forest considered as an objectively ixed environment:
there is a forest for the park watchman, a forest for the hunter, a forest for
the botanist, a forest for the wanderer, a forest for the nature lover, a forest
for the carpenter and, at the end, a fabulous forest where Little Red Riding
Hood loses her way (Agamben, 2002)1. With these words Giorgio Agamben introduces his consideration on environment, in relation to zoo-biological research made by Jakob von Uexküll and to “Die Grundbegrifeder
Metaphysik” by Martin Heidegger, who in turn referred and commented
von Uexküll’s work. Where “classic science saw a unique world which included all living beings organized in a hierarchy, from the most elementary
species to higher ones, von Uexküll, instead, considers ininite varieties of
perceptive worlds, all perfect and connected as in a huge musical score and
however not in relation and reciprocally exclusing” (Agamben, 2002)2.
he word used by von Uexküll to indicate this “perceptive world” is
umwelt. Umwelt includes the world of things in environment, the perceiving world, the signs produced by the subject and by the objects, and all the
actions that species are able to carry out. Above all, it includes the meaning of objects for each subject, and how they interact in survival and social
relations of the subject.
In the description of dog’s umwelt
umweltUexküll paints (literally) a room
whose chairs and dishes constitute signiicant elements in canine world,
unlike school books which are totally irrelevant for the dog. It has got an
idea, a researching image. All the characteristics of objects are perceptive
characters given from the subjects they interact with” (von Uexküll, mentioned in Berthoz, 2008, 17)3. herefore umwelt is a dynamic and interactive concept deining the relationship between physical world and living
beings, and constitutes the basis and premise of intersubjectivity (Berthoz,
2009), an interface where “the signiicance is conferred by the act of the
subject” (von Uexküll, Müller, 2004).
he subject builds up its world in accordance to its basic needs and its
action tools in a perspective which refers to Bergson, to phenomenological
tradition and authors such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, to enaction concept proposed by Varela (Varela, hompson, Rosch, 1992), to the secondorder cybernetics idea by Von Foerster, until the Mille Plateaux by Deleuze
and Guattari on a diferent level. Alain Berthoz proposes a perspective
where the subject sails in its umwelt guided by a series of simplifying prinBIO-EDUCATION, SIMPLEXITY, NEUROSCIENCE AND ENACTIVISM
Didactics and “Simplexity”: Umwelt as a Perceptive Interface
31
ciples which optimize the process of perception-action and minimize, or
even reset the computational need (Di Tore, 2012a).
“he price for these simpliications is, of course, the reduction of the
understanding we have about the world; it creates an Umwelt” (Berthoz,
2009, 22). hese principles recognize to the subject its role of active creator
of its own umwelt and deine the umwelt as an interface between an acting
subject and a “Umgebung” that is the surrounding that our umwelt can’t
incorporate (Merleau-Ponty, 1956). In this perspective, simplifying principles indicated by Berthoz, nucleus from which the author will develop
the concept of simplexity, have to face a complexity measurable in terms
of data elaboration and decision among diferent opportunities, in relation
with the meaning of complexity developed by the hard sciences. “A measure
that corresponds much better to what is usually meant by complexity in
ordinary conversation, as well as in scientiic discourse, refers not to the
length of the most concise description of an entity, but to the length of a
concise description of a set of the entities regularities” (Gell-Mann, 1995,
2).
Learning as main strategy to deal with complexity, is a typical adaptive process of living beings, which develops in the umwelt. “Cognitive
abilities are to be seen as the result of evolutionary and developmental
adaptations to an extremely narrow segment of the world as it is known to
us today. his has for reaching consequences for epistemic considerations
and perhaps also for management of cultural conlicts” (Singer, 2009, 39).
Learning-teaching processes reveal themselves as complex dynamic and
adaptive systems which difer for their attitude to grant the global coherence in non-linear interactions, similar to other complex systems which
are the key for understanding complexity in nature. (Prigogine, Stengers,
1984) “We should think about learning environments in terms of the
students’umwelten, because these contain the structures that students perceive and act
acttowards.
towards It is these umwelten that change as students interact
with their peers, teachers, and material structures” (Roth, Lawless, 2002,
17).
Learning umwelt therefore (inter)act as a non-trivial machine. “A nontrivial machine is mathematically unpredictable because every time it runs
a function it changes the state from which the function will run the next
time. In this way the next run becomes unpredictable” (Brier, 2008, 17).
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Paola Aiello, Stefano Di Tore, Pio Alfredo Di Tore, Maurizio Sibilio
Educational Simplex Technologies
Umwelt can be then considered as a sort of perceptive interface, being a simplex principle itself which, together with other simplex principles, rules and guides all the processes that living organisms, and probably the other complex adaptive systems too, carry out in the relationship
with their Umgebung. he umwelt is also conceived as a dynamic concept,
partly biologically determined, partly built through direct experience. In
this theoretic perspective body is no more considered as a simple medium
between our brain and the external reality, and it becomes the main device
through which, while living experiences, we learn and produce knowledge
(Rivoltella, 2012, 109)4.
he idea of a new possible alliance between biology, pedagogy
(Frauenfelder, 1994, 2000) and didactics, in this way, can be inscribed in a
new theoretical background. Educational corporealities (Sibilio, 2012b) become in this way the support of a teaching science based on the assumption
that “all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing” (Maturana, 1992, 27).
In the educational thinking, both in didactics and pedagogy, the concept
of body as the place of simplex processes and its relation with environment
becomes the focus. Similarly, the link between mind, body and digital environment becomes the focus of educational technologies which seem to
underline the need of a passage from technologies providing an “extendedmind” (Menary, 2010) to technologies realizing an “augmented body” (Di
Tore, 2012b).
hat is, technologies whose aim is to redeine, develop and give back to
digital context the strategies that body carries out in learning processes, in
full awareness that “motoractivity–not representationalist verisimilitudeholds the key to luid and functional crossings between virtual and physical
realms” (Hansen, 2006, 2). In the didactic and pedagogic ield, therefore,
attention moves from mind to person conceived as an inseparable unit of
mind and body, orienting didactic-pedagogic educational research to new
types of interfaces and H.M.I. (Human Machine Interaction) which consider “human body as an input device” (Harrison, 2010, 453). In this context, the NUIs (Natural User Interfaces) supporting an eicient use of body
and senses, could represent a useful didactic tool (Di Tore et al., 2011). hey
indeed allow a more natural interaction with digital environment, integrating the digital realm to the user’s umwelt, increasing action possibilities
and the opportunities of meaning co-deinition, developing and redeining
BIO-EDUCATION, SIMPLEXITY, NEUROSCIENCE AND ENACTIVISM
Didactics and “Simplexity”: Umwelt as a Perceptive Interface
33
processes that body carries out to face the complexity of reality (Berthoz,
2011).
Author’s Presentation: Paola Aiello, Stefano Di Tore, Pio Alfredo Di Tore, belong to research group coordinated by Maurizio Sibilio, full professor of Didactics
at Department of Human, Philosophical and Educational Sciences, University of
Salerno.
Notes
1
“Non esiste una foresta intesa come un ambiente oggettivamente issato: esiste una foresta-per-il-guardiano-del-parco, una foresta-per-il-cacciatore, una forestaper-il-botanico, una foresta-per-il-viandante, una foresta-per-l’amante della-natura,
una foresta-per-il-carpentiere, e, inine, una favolosa foresta in cui Cappuccetto
Rosso smarrisce la via”. Agamben, G. (2002), L’aperto: l’uomo e l’animale. Torino:
Bollati Boringhieri. he English translationisours.
2 “La scienza classica vedeva un unico mondo, che comprendeva dentro di sé
tutte le specie viventi gerarchicamente ordinate, dalle forme più elementari ino
agli organismi superiori, von Uexküll pone invece una ininita varietà di mondi
percettivi, tutti ugualmente perfetti e collegati fra loro come in una gigantesca partitura musicale e, tuttavia, incomunicanti e reciprocamente esclusivi”. Agamben,
G. (2002), L’aperto: l’uomo e l’animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. he English
translationisours.
3 “Tutte le caratteristiche degli oggetti sono infatti nient’altro che i caratteri
percettivi che sono attribuiti ad essi da parte del soggetto con il quale hanno una relazione”. Berthoz, A. (2008), Neurobiology of “Umwelt”: How Living Beings Perceive
the World: Springer-Verlag Berlin: Heidelberg.he English translationisours.
4 “Dispositivo principale attraverso il quale, realizzando esperienze, sviluppiamo
apprendimento e produciamo conoscenza”. Rivoltella, P. C. (2012), Neurodidattica.
Insegnare al cervello che apprende. Milano: Rafaello Cortina. he English translationisours.
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