Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 38

The only way to escape this trap is to give a non-spooky theory of how
representations arise from referents. Brian Cantwell Smith tackles this challenge
by developing a theory of representations that explains how they arise tempo-
rally (1996). Imagine Ralph, the owner of a URI at which he wants to host a picture
of the Eiffel Tower, finally gets to Paris and is trying to get to the Eiffel Tower in
order to take a digital photo. In the distance, Ralph sees the Eiffel Tower. At that very
moment, Ralph and the Eiffel Tower are both physically connected via light-rays.
At the moment of tracking, connected as they are by light, Ralph, its light cone, and
the Eiffel Tower are a system, not distinct individuals. An alien visitor might even
think they were a single individual, a 'Ralph-Eiffel Tower' system. While walking
towards the Eiffel Tower, when the Eiffel Tower disappears from view (such as from
being too close to it and having the view blocked by other buildings), Ralph keeps
staring into the horizon, focused not on the point the Eiffel Tower was at before it
went out of view, but the point where he thinks the Eiffel Tower would be, given
his own walking towards it. Only when parts of the physical world, Ralph and the
Eiffel Tower, are now physically separated can the agent then use a representation,
such as the case of Ralph using an internal “mental image” of the Eiffel Tower or
the external digital photo to direct his walking towards it, even though he cannot see
it. The agent is distinguished from the referent of its representation by virtue of not
only disconnection but by the agent's attempt to track the referent, “a long-distance
coupling against all the laws of physics” (Smith 1996). The local physical processes
used to track the object by the subject are the representation, be they 'inside' a
human in terms of a memory or 'outside' the agent like a photo in a digital camera.
This notion of representation is independent of the representation being either
internal or external to the particular agent, regardless of how one defines these
boundaries. 11 Imagine that Ralph had been to the Eiffel Tower once before. He
could have marked its location on a piece of paper by scribbling a small map. Then,
the marking on the map could help guide him back as the Eiffel Tower disappears
behind other buildings in the distance. This characteristic of the definition of
representation being capable of including 'external' representations is especially
important for any definition of a representation to be suitable for the Web, since the
Web is composed of information that is considered to be external to its human users.
However fuzzy the details of Smith's story about representations may be, what is
clear is that instead of positing a connection between a referent and a representation
a priori, they are introduced as products of a temporal process. This process is at
least theoretically non-spooky since the entire process is capable of being grounded
out in physics without any spooky action at a distance. To be grounded out in
physics, all changes must be given in terms of connection in space and time, or
in other words, via effective reach. Representations are “a way of exploiting local
freedom or slop in order to establish coordination with what is beyond effective
reach” (Smith 1996). In order to clarify Smith's story and improve the definition of
11 The defining of “external” and “internal” boundaries is actually non-trivial, as shown in Halpin
(2008a).