Random thoughts
I have a bunch of random thoughts on the readings and the class discussion from Tuesday so I thought I'd simply vomit the contents of my brain on the blog.
First of all, in response the the debunking of Cartesian dualism in class, (and bear with me because I'm totally obsessed with "low" technology and "ancient" schools of thought and medicine), there is a tendency in Buddhist thought to be aware of the incredibly strong link between physical sensation and mental state, and also the fact that through training it is possible to divorce one's mental state from the constant stream of sensation that flows into it. So while I would agree that Cartesian dualism is not a natural state of existence, with sufficient attention and practice it may be possibe to achieve something that may resemble it. Why one would want to do that, I have no idea... just a thought.
Also, I was wondering why the natural human drive to create causal relationships between events wasn't really addressed in the readings, although it was probably just assumed. In any case, all of the approaches to tangible interaction in the readings seemed to rely on this fact and quite a few of them seemed to exploit the power of this drive novelly in creating relationships across the virtual/physical divide. I just think that it's interesting that people seem to want to create these relationships inherently.
And finally, I was really intrigued by the notion of sources and sinks in Ishii's paper, and how it may be possible to build on that and treat computation as a "source" that one "sinks" into an physical artifact to create a computational device. In essence, instead of embedding the computation into a single device, make it embeddable into a slew of devices, each of which manifests the computation differently.