A Virtual Black Box
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: Middle-age is that peaceful epoch between having boners and committing them.
Having read what must be one of the worst reviews of Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One I’ve ever encountered, I just had to respond, particularly given the resonances it has with our awesome debate on Infinite Jest. Graham Harman thinks that Metzinger’s recent influence on Continental Philosophy, which I consider a tremendous breakthrough, is in fact a deplorable development. Why? Primarily because Metzinger thinks thinkers like Harman are simply wasting their time, when Harman thinks they are doing precisely what “any serious philosophy” should do. At stake, then, are two very different conceptions of philosophy: one that draws as much scientific water as possible (Type I), and one that draws its own, conceptually prior water (Type II).
Let me begin with some New Theory disclaimers: First, I admit that I was almost offended by Harman’s introduction, where he cherry picks various texts to paint Metzinger as something of a condescending, sneering prig. Having corresponded with the guy, I know for a fact that he does not confuse his speculation for gospel, that he’s quite willing to chuck any number of his commitments (his representationalism, for instance) for the sake of honestly considering alternatives. He knows how tentative his claims are. That said, he is a philosopher, and as such, prone to make sweeping judgements, and therefore easily accused of any number of character defects. There’s a reason our relatives roll their eyes when we ‘get worked up’ at Thanksgiving dinner. The only thing worse than a critic is a know-it-all, and philosophy requires that one be both. We’re all condescending, sneering prigs!
So be warned, my reading of Harman is probably as motivated as Harman’s reading of Metzinger.
Harman’s critique follows precisely the same pattern I once used in all my critiques back in my Continental Philosophy days: First, you attribute a series of Problematic Ontological Commitments to your victim, then you argue a number of Ontological Corrections. So with Heidegger, most famously, you argue that Philosopher X is trapped within the “Metaphysics of Presence,” an ancient, foundational conceptual mistake that became an implicit assumption in almost all subsequent philosophy – the inferential Wrong Turn that means all subsequent inferences will lead to Dead Ends.
The idea, you see, is that you need to get your assumptions right, if you’re going to have any hope of finding whatever it is you’re hoping to find – Being, in Heidegger’s case. This approach makes philosophy Very Important, because these foundational assumptions are inaccessible to empirical investigation.
The glaring problem, however, is that we have no way of arbitrating between differing sets of ontological assumptions, simply because they don’t admit empirical investigation. Even if you happened to win the “Magical Ontology Lottery,” you could only hope that you might have won, and otherwise assume that over time your ticket would be lost in the shuffle with all the others.
If philosophers like Metzinger, scientific naturalists, express commitment to a realism they feel no need to defend (because they really don’t take philosophers like Harman all that seriously), they generally do so because they think science implies it. (I personally think it’s a historical artifact – most of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition finds its historical roots in a reaction against Hegelian Idealism – because I don’t see this particular scientific implication). Otherwise naturalists just don’t think human beings are qualified. This is almost certainly the case with Metzinger. And I think it illuminates what it is that Harman finds so objectionable (to the point of larding his paper with the loaded rhetoric noted above) about philosophers of his ilk: their dismissiveness of Type II philosophy.
So here’s the single, simple question I want to pose to Harman: given the abstract ambiguity of his subject matter, and given that he almost certainly suffers from (to crib the list I used for my Nietzsche paper): actor-observer bias (fundamental attribution error), ambiguity effect, anchoring effect, asymmetric insight illusion, attentional bias, availability heuristic, availability cascade, the bandwagon effect, Barnum effect, base-rate neglect, belief bias, black swan effect, clustering illusion, choice bias, confirmation bias, congruence bias, consensus fallacy, contrast effect, control bias, cryptonesia, deprivation bias, distinction bias, Dunnig-Kruger effect, egocentric bias, expectation bias, exception bias, exposure effect, false memory, focusing effect, framing effect, future discounting, gambler’s fallacy, hindsight bias, halo effect, impact bias, ingroup bias, just-world illusion, moral credential effect, moral luck bias, negativity bias, omission bias, outcome bias, outgroup homogeneity bias, planning fallacy, post-hoc rationalization, post-hoc ergo propter hoc, projection bias, observer-expectancy effect, optimism bias, ostrich effect, positive outcome bias, positivity effect, pareidolia, pessimism bias, primacy effect, recency effect, reaction bias, regression neglect, restraint bias, rosy retrospection effect, selective perception, self-serving bias, Semmelweis reflex, social comparison bias, stereotyping, suggestibility, sunk-cost bias, superiority illusion, status-quo bias, trait ascription bias, transparency illusion, unit bias, ultimate attribution error, wishful thinking, zero-risk bias, why should anyone think he’s doing anything other than waving yet another cognitive lottery ticket around?
This was the question that I couldn’t answer, my private road to Damascus.
The fact is, I’m every bit as dismissive as Metzinger is. And I’m dismissive of Metzinger for his occasional (apparent) Type II lapses – much as I’m dismissive of myself! (I think I lapse all the time).
Humans are theoretical incompetents, Dude. Otherwise, we only think you’re silly to the degree you take yourself seriously. I would argue that it has never been more obvious that no one knows what the fuck is going on, and that’s what makes this such an exciting time for speculation: Being No One is a profound, magisterial exploration of several new possibilities that cognitive neuroscience has opened up, an early salvo in what will quickly become a barrage as more and more thinkers try to figure out what all these crazy new facts mean.
The idea isn’t to give up on speculation, just to recognize how bad we are at it – which is just to say, to be self-critical. If you want to start with categorical assumptions, cook up some new Problematic Ontological Assumption to replace, say, ‘Correlation,’ knock yourself out, just please don’t commit to them, and for God’s sake, don’t proselytize. Show a little psychological and historical self-awareness. Is this Problematic Ontological Assumption the One? Pardon me if I say, Not bloody likely.
Those of us looking to the sciences to cook up our assumptions are doing so for good reason: Because we know we’re stupid! We know that, for better or worse, humans are incapable of rationally resolving theoretical debates outside of the institutional framework of the sciences. If we’re out on a limb, you guys are clinging to twigs. And now that science is making real inroads across the humanities, that annoying empirical breeze you feel is about to get a lot more gusty.
The fact remains, science has finally cracked open the Black Box of the soul. If the historical pattern holds true, this means all the old speculative discourses of the soul are are doomed to suffer the fate of other prescientific discourses. It may not seem like it now, but as the steady drip-drip-drip of empirical data points spawns new guesses, new theories (not to mention technologies that utterly reorganize the soul and not just the world), you will find yourself contributing to what is likely just another obscure historical curiosity.
Three Pound Brain 
While listening to the Mind & Life Institute’s most recent dialogue with the Dalai Lama (Mind & LIfe XIII Ecology, Ethics and Interdependence) one of the speakers (Clare Plamer – ethicist/Prof. of Philosophy at Texas A&M) commented, “wherever there are two philosphers in the room there will be at least three opinions.” To which the Dalai Lama responed, “That’s why more reason to believe scientists.”
This is brilliant! I love every bit of this post; esp. “Humans are theoretical incompetents, Dude. Otherwise, we only think you’re silly to the degree you take yourself seriously. I would argue that it has never been more obvious that no one knows what the fuck is going on, and that’s what makes this such an exciting time for speculation: Being No One is a profound, magisterial exploration of several new possibilities that cognitive neuroscience has opened up, an early salvo in what will quickly become a barrage as more and more thinkers try to figure out what all these crazy new facts mean”
That’s quite a list. I have a dark feeling it would take a couple of years to follow all that up. The curse of finding out there is yet more important stuff to learn. I haven’t learned all the other important stuff yet.
Earlier, I googled Hume and ended up utterly failing to understand an essay by Quine. But it did raise a question I want to ask you. If the findings of science do turn out to spell our doom, if they do turn out to be socially destructive, I don’t understand why you don’t say, “So much the worse for science”. To take the example you raise in your own work – what if science found that there was something fundamentally inferior about women (or black people, or Jewish people)? It could be socially disastrous, as you show. My philosophically illiterate thought: it would be better to ignore those findings. As you said in a different context, better or worse, not true or false. Obviously a good answer could be that science has mostly proved there are no such inequalities (unless you’re Charles Murray), but it’s a what-if question.
While in college, a neuroscientist came to lecture for an ethics course on the subject of animal experimentation. I enrolled in his course the following semester.
I eventually finished the Philosophy major in college (English, too), but got my doctorate in Neural Science, essentially because I came to believe that neuroscience was the only method to make any useful headway on many “philosophical” problems, and that “critical theory” (my focus in that major) was…[expletive laden rant not worth the time to type].
I believe that classical and particularly analytic philosophy still has great pedagogical value. That said, running on a treadmill can get you shape, but won’t get you anywhere else.
I don’t have much hope for productive “interdisciplinary” work on these subjects. To me, that suggests biophysicists collaborating with geneticists, systems physiologists, and computational modelers. Not what I recall of Ned Block annoying everyone during neuroscience seminars with his dipshit “But what about consciousness?!?!?” questions back in grad school.
The thing to remember though is that it’s pretty much impossible to say what will be of value at this point, not just to any future neuroscience, but to a society trying to accomodate its cultural and technological consequences. It could be that we do need to seriously revise some core conceptual assumptions before making headway with the ‘Hard Problem’ – just for instance.
While it may be “impossible”, that does not relieve anyone of the burden of making those predictions – for example, members of study sections allocating research funding, scientists doing peer review for publications, etc.
I am not sure what you intend by the “Hard Problem” but I assume it is related to consciousness, and its instantiation. If so, I agree it is hard, but I don’t see it as much of a problem. What would solving it solve? That is, what is the proposed clinical intervention (e.g. correcting autistim, or Asperger’s)? Is this what you mean – that we cannot yet identify the material benefit of having solved the Hard Problem? Plenty of scientists are trying to solve the concrete problems (i.e, the neural and genetic bases of those and other “consciousness-y” disorders). Is your claim that they are missing something that Dennett or Searle could provide?
It “could be” that yadda yadda yadda, but I think it’s a bad bet to assume that
“What we call red, he calls green!” style arguments about qualia, rather than fMRI and electrophyisiology, will ever drive needed revisions to said assumptions. Of course, I could be wrong, as you pointed out (I think that is what you meant by your reply to my comment).
I still maintain that we ignore the Deeper Philosophical issues at our – [what’s the opposite of peril?]. There’s only so much time in the day, after all.
(Of course, this argument applies equally well to the time I spent typing this, rather than working on, well, neuroscience. Irony’s a bitch.)
It’s one of those things that get harder and harder as you dig into. There’s nothing wrong with your damn the conceptual torpedoes approach as far as it goes, Ocho, so long as it isn’t prescriptive. Science has been forced to hit the conceptual reset button many, many times in the past. The implicit assumptions you presently (and unconsciously) work with possess a long philosophical pedigree. So there’s a sense in which your dismissing the very process that makes your possible. You need Thales to get to Galileo, I’m afraid. As I see it, the problems only really start when people (like you or Harman) begin insisting the autonomy of one or the other, that philosophy doesn’t need science or vice versa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_JaCb1K6ns Light, Time, and Gravity sample anyone? I hope you don’t mind RSB. Thanks and well done.
Also Some lyrics I think are relevant..
“If someone grew up in a cubicle as Plato once suggested
They would only know the cubicle and not the world outside it
And they wouldn’t view the cubicle as something geometric
We only know it’s a cubicle because we live outside it
Now the one inside the cubicle can’t comprehend his measurements
Because measurements are models made up for and by observers
Relative to their position on the outside of the cubicle
Though understand objectively so they can study further
If I grew up in a cubicle the walls are in my universe
I have no knowledge of the entirety like the outsiders do
If you follow what I say and can swallow the powerdered water
Close your eyes and open your minds, this one’s for you
And the brain equals a cubicle we’ll never think outside it
Now inside wanna try to tie a diagram to modify them
I’m there as a hybrid of a body of a pirate
Of a soul that can fly without control
Realizing the brain ticks at six billion signals per second
And most of hidden and not given to the senses
Whether to do a few futile primitive tools to perception
livin in a universal pool of first hand deception
The mind’s job is to recieve the signals
And block the ones out that coincide with imprinted symbols
That way the information you obtained is recognized
Reality is thinkable and comparable to space and time
It makes a map of the territory that gives us the gives us
The topic of the Copenhagen interpretation of modern quantum
Physics which states we dont know the meal
We only know the menu that our brains tell us is real
We dont know the rules of our heads
From inside these cubicles we cant see the truth
No one really knows exactly what happens when we think
Therefore we can never really ever know anything
This is the consciousness revolution
You got the right to think
Don’t think about it just do it” Eyedea RIP
Speaking of repeating patterns 😉
At least I have another book on the to-buy list (wish it was cheaper).
Even the beginning of that “review” mimics some of the discussion that went on the IJ comments. He starts right discussing this problem of empirical proof versus abstract theory. I think we argued a good motivation there in the comments, so I wonder if he also touches that aspect (that science “works”).
You pitch not commiting, Scott, but you can see Harman thinks he’s pitching for not commiting just as much. That along comes this Metzinger guy with his empirical this and his empirical that and acting like he KNOWS what the truth is! Oh yeah, and how do you prove science is the case, huh, Metzinger? With more science!??? Ha!
Harman probably thinks he has a strong grasp of non commitment already. And you know what’s horrible? What if he does?
Add ‘doubt bias’ onto the list?
I think the way out is primarily looking at why he freakin’ philosophises in the first place, then triggering philosophy about why his philosophises AND linking it to a series of further what if philosophical questions. Like maybe, why did anyone bother philosophising in the first place? Just for fun, fuck whatevers happening in the real world?
What if it was, atleast in part, a concern for the welfare of ones fellow man?
What if dynamite, the atomic bomb, immunisations, etc, although piffling physical things, what if the processes behind them are significant and those processes will produce more and more things that affect the welfare of ones fellow man in intimate ways?
Merely as a what if. No one has to believe this science crap understands the metaphysical depths. But shit, were philosophers and surely even if this proposition wobbles on a set of what ifs, can one be certain it isn’t worth, with a glass of wine in hand, investigating for an afternoon or two?
Pitch it as a fantasy as much as any other. But can one be sure one can just not consider this fantasy and its future fantasy ramifications?
What if you were, just hypothetically, to try it that way? Can you be certain that ways not worth mulling over?
*Yeah, smart assery on my part there, hehe…but what if?*
don’t proselytize.
That almost seems an oxymoron.
I wish i had a clue about most of what you say sometimes… But i got the gist… i think. *Sigh, looks like ill do philosophy at uni.
Super cool. I’m supposed to do a presentation in a class I’ve been taking on phenomenology, and the one complaint I’ve always had is its dismissive attitude towards scientific findings, especially those of cognitive psychology and neurology, Who cares about Heidegger, especially when we have entire fields of study based on a principle of skepticism.
Frankly, I’m not a big fan of empricism which always came off as a pretension, the sort I get from religious fundamentalism. It’s always been the skepticism that attracted to me science.
“Who cares about Heidegger, especially when we have entire fields of study based on a principle of skepticism.”
Don’t be too quick to think that, just because you can’t swallow them whole, the towering geniuses of the past have no intellectual nourishment to provide. At the end of the day, we have to admit that even scientific discoveries do not come prepackaged with a conceptual framework.
The question I have to wonder is how would a person come to a non-conceptual framework. Something that defies expectation; it must be an experience of some sort. I guess I like to think everything is an experience when it comes down to it. An experience of the shelf, or vision of the room, or sunset. So then would this be a boundless experience of person hood. transcendent basically. Or do we perhaps just work in continual conceptual or referential, or cartoonish world that we live in. Working out practicalities and basically move.
Looking around I found this video lesson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthDxnFXs9k
Only watched the first chunk AND then the last. It’s ends with the “outlandish” concept of the immortality of the soul, and it’s Metzinger himself to explain it. If someone is more comfortable with these ideas I’d like the hear a simpler elaboration of it.
Also interesting that this video lesson seems based on a series “Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul”.
Is this the von Foerster I was quoting in the IJ comments? 😉
Okay, I fear for my internet download limit for the month! Abalieno, could you give the start and end time points for the two parts you watched?
Having had just watched ‘Transcendent Man’ it occurred to me that Kurzweil resembles another Aronofsky movie main character: the one from ‘The Fountain’. They both don’t accept death.
It’s as if he’s still recovering from experiencing the death of his own loved ones. How can you not accept death? By living in an absurd fantasy is one way. I mean, I don’t disagree that we might at some point overcome dying, I just don’t think it’ll happen before Kurzweil dies. Does he?
Also another train of thoughts, after finding this other video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFjY1fAcESs
I think one broad generalization was that “we are not as smart as we think we are”, after living with the myth that we only use a fraction of the power the mind could have. Bakker says we are theoretically incompetent and suffering from pervasive delusions. So, in a broad view, we have a mythic, godlike image of ourselves that is completely fictional. And so the praxis: thinking about thinking.
But at least in the description of that video, this idea is overturned to its common level:
As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined.
And now I’m kinda lost (watched that whole video).
I can’t pinpoint what is that Metzinger says that is DIFFERENT from the idea that the majority of people have already without going through esoteric studies like these.
Everyone kinda knows we are limited to five senses, or that we perceive only a part of the light spectrum. So everyone already knows that we have that “invisible interface” that reduces the world to our perception (or inner projection/model of it). The same can be intuitively said for animals that may have limited senses. They also will have a “construction” of reality limited to their needs. So maybe they perceive the world without colors, as “colors” is a quality not strictly necessary for their survival (hence omitted, superfluous).
This is the great process of adaptation and it works even in language. Language develops only as far as it is practically needed. For example you may have in different cultures different ways to organize colors, depending on those practical needs.
This would be also the “mainstream” idea in science. So where’s the part where Metzinger is saying something “new” and revolutionary?
His intuition seems limited to realize that the interface we use is invisible to us. Which appears to me almost obvious: it simulates a direct-access in order to be efficient. It’s like reducing the lag of controls in computer games: you can only play efficiently when you internalize the game’s controls to the point that they “disappear”. You can’t constantly THINK of the medium and process and how you press this button and trigger that movement on screen. You need to internalize that process so that you instinctively lose the idea of the interface. You are the interface. See these Wii games where you swing the control itself like a racket. It’s meant to make you believe you are really on screen.
But, huh, it seems to me that this happen on a certain level every time you go watch a movie. It’s a virtualization machine that works on many levels. You match your experience with the one you see, it’s a form of projection and “correlation”.
And it’s also kind of obvious that this virtualization can be manipulated and lead to hallucinations: it happens all the time in dreams. The mind constructs its experience differently and you are fooled by it.
So where’s the fascinating turn of theory? Where is the lie or deeper world that has been unveiled?
Imho, the fascinating aspect of all these studies is about developing a strategy to PEEK outside. To crack the frame. As when in a dream and developing a strategy to gain consciousness of what’s outside. Otherwise it’s just hard science and minutiae that is only interesting for scientists whose work depends on that. It doesn’t in any way revolutionize the way we think.
For example Von Foerster was interesting for me because he explained that the science moved on, while common belief and thinking is still stuck to a primitive idea of science and the world (it got desynched, not up to date). So it’s meaningful the process of making that transition for the advanced scientific ideas TO the common thought of everyday.
That’s why I’m interested in the idea that we have a very delusional idea of ourselves and that we betray ourselves constantly (the video on procrastination: you can’t TRUST the you in the future, you are not reliable), because THIS idea poses problems that make you RETHINK your every day life in concrete ways.
Have you ever played a two player game on the one screen, and started following the other players character instead of your own (and increasingly wondering why your controls aren’t working)? I’ve done that tons of times and so have my friends.
Okay, theres the words written here been seen. The interesting idea is – why assume they are being seen by ‘you’? What if your tracking the wrong character, for example? Or more so, drop the idea of wrong or right – which character is to betracked – the one behind the eyes that see these words? Like the rubber hand and the sympathy connection formed, is it ‘you’, or just the thing most sympathised with? Tracking the body behind the thing behind the eyes that see this word, simply out of habitual sympathy? Suddenly that sense of self dissolves, as perspective shifts on it and reveals whats behind the curtain, to instead be a sense of habitual sympathy?
How do you crack a frame when it’s so utterly reinforced, invisibly, constantly? If your not seeing the value in this/not seeing how to crack the frame, it’s because your frame is still pretty rigid and as Metzinge tries to open up a gap against the window glued to, seemlessly the gap is filled in just as rapidly.
Thanks for the link, DLR.
A few things:
1. Meme rhymes with gene.
2. The concept was, in fact, coined by Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene”.
3. I’M THE ASSHOLE.
Thanks for thanking DLR i would have missed the video otherwise.
This may be of interest to you, or not, since it’s pretty much a confirmation that the marionette is well on its way.
Another casual discovery, I recommend everyone to treat themselves to this spiked food: http://www.mangafox.com/manga/homunculus/v11/c002/35.html
couldn’t be more appropriate, imho.
😉
I just watched the Metzinger video that Abalieno posted earlier.
It’s great, and he brings up a lot of interesting things. But, that nail that I cannot help but pound into oblivion still remains: he never answers the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He doesn’t even come close.
He builds a good story for what self (or ‘being’ or Dasein or Ka or soul or whatever the fuck you want to call it) is from a materialistic perspective, but he cannot even begin to address why these logical rules of systems and networks and self-referentiality would ever give rise to “what it is like to be something” (qualia experience).
I mean, he ends the talk on a poetic turn, saying that no one is born and no one dies. But I think he would readily come to the opposite conclusion if I strapped him to a chair and endless bombarded him with pain qualia via sulfuric acid. Or whatever.
Think of it like this:
I will give you $1,000,000 if you agree to the following-
I will hook you up to a device that for 10 days will keep you in a state of constant agony. At the end of those 10 days, I will erase all memory (conscious and subconscious) of the event, but not of the deal. You will receive your money, and you will not remember having suffered.
No one in their right mind would take that deal! Because ‘you’ have to ‘exist’ through that instantiation of gruesome pain, and even though you won’t remember it at the end of the experiment, it still ‘matters’ from the first-person perspective.
“Gödel, Escher, Bach” is a big book all about that problem of consciousness, and why it is peculiar of certain “loops”.
I haven’t gone far into it, but there’s a new preface in the book that basically gives a very good summary of what is explained in the following 800 pages. I’d suggest reading that, and mixing the preview from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk you can read it all online.
Have you ever had Versed (generic name Midazolam) Jorge? It is a benzodiazapine used to create amnesia, mostly for outpatient medical procedures. Propofol is another drug that does essentially the same thing. There is a procedural sedation effect with these drugs as well, but at least in the case of Versed (the one I have had) there is a lag time between the end of sedation and the end of the anterograde amnesia.
I sat in recovery after the procedure and had a conversation with the nurse and my wife which I do not remember. This was an event at which some person very much like me was present, and which was also an event for that nurse and my wife, but which did not occur for me (i.e. who I am now).
In any case–whether you buy this or not–your argument for qualia is an appeal to intuition. “No one in their right mind would take that deal!” But I can honestly report that my intuition is to take the deal. I posed the question to my wife also, and although she (to my knowledge) has never experienced one of those drugs, her intuition was also to take the deal, though for different reasons. So, in at least two instances, your appeal to intuition fails.
I might feel sorry for the person that had to suffer for ten days (and maybe even feel guilty), but that person is not me, and he will only exist for the duration of the pain.
*evil grin*
OK, now that you know your wife’s answer…
I’ll put her through it, but I’m only offering YOU the deal. How comfortable are you now?
Exotic new ways to die. Or kill.
How about the other way around, rather than that person is not you, you actually died and there’s an imposter who took over?
Ten days. A whole different turn of life. Then gone. Dead.
If I take a cutting from one tree and set it to grow, then kill the tree, is the tree dead? Certainly if I took no cutting and burnt the tree, you’d say the tree is dead (even if other trees of it’s species are around).
Jorge, yeah, I think some of it just twiddles with definitions, which does help illustrate the idea but is twiddling with definitions. I mean, conciousness doesn’t exist – it’s not a thing. Oh, it’s a process? But wait, I call computer programs ‘things’. I don’t go to a store and say “I wanna process!”. Talking in terms of process certainly illustrates stuff, but I think the whole “Conciousness doesn’t exist because it’s not a thing” is nostalgic speaking. Or some sort of ex smoker like grudge. Process is a thing as much as it requires things for any process to occur around at all – but that ambiguity seems too much like the past assumptions to include.
I mean, he ends the talk on a poetic turn, saying that no one is born and no one dies.
Yeah, there’s a kind of weird contradiction here. It’s like he tries to see it all without the born and dies and stuff. Except if he cares about being born and dying and pain, then emperically that structure that aims itself toward or away from events exists in the universe and further, is an absolute extension of the big bang itself. Part of the universe ended up forfilling a pattern that sees being born and dying. Concepts (cartoonishly percieved or not) that link, eventually, to emperical circumstances and situation. The concept of birth and death came up through all that causality. They are existant things, though the detail of their existance is hidden by and large whilst enacting those processes. Yet still, those processes are existant processes UNLESS suppressed and begun to be closed down. Then in one person, the processes that managed to erupt from a big bang long ago, the things of birth and death, those processes start to fade and fall to entropy.
Yes, romancing the entropy knife (so as to avoid blunt physical death by other bias processes) seems the trial of our future. But I’m not sure he’s being careful with the knife?
He also looks a bit like a bad guy from a die hard movie! Especially with that little earpiece! Watch him, he’s cooking up a plot to steal gold bullion from a yacht or something, I’m sure of it!
Question begging: There is only a hard problem of consciousness if you cannot account for consciousness in terms of functional or representational properties (or similar). Metzinger is a kind of representationalist, so part of his intent is to show that there is no hard problem. The assumption that there is a hard problem, he claims, is product of our epistemic limitations. I admit you don’t have to buy representationalism, but you can’t ignore it either.
I would just amend this to say ‘account for consciousness in terms of ‘non-intentional properties.” Representations are hard to make sense of absent normativity.
My own take on all this is that the Hard Problem is real insofar as ‘what we experience’ is not.
The thing to remember about a lot of these guys is the (often convenient) way they slip between registers. He could refuse your bet and argue his point consistently because he isn’t saying that your experience of self isn’t real, only that your self isn’t real. He playing on the semantics to play up his point.
Where I disagree (New Theory alert – it’s been several years since I read Being No One) is with his VR trope, the notion that self-hood is a neuro-evolutionary construct, rather than (the way I see it) a mixed bag of selected circuits and structural defaults. So for him, the all-important Now is a kind of neurophysiologically instantiated representation, whereas for me, it’s simply the empty frame of our temporal field. Without exception, everyone I’ve read assumes that positive features of experience require NCCs, neural circuits to make them happen. My argument is that most all of the most perplexing features of experience – such as the Now – are structural byproducts of the limits of neural processing. So, if you take the focus/fringe/margin model of visual attention as your analogy, you could say that the Now is simply the margin of temporal awareness. Since the margin can only be internally differentiated, there is a sense in which it always remains the same – that differentiation hangs against an absent field of identity (Heidegger’s hypokeimenon/Kant’s transcendental ego/etc.,).
So on my account, the self isn’t a ‘simulation’ at all – at least not entirely. Self-identity is literally a byproduct of the thalamocortical system’s (structurally (and developmentally) mandated) inability to self-differentiate. It is a necessary ‘cognitive illusion’ that would be suffered (in some form) by any conscious system whatsoever – something that every conscious brain is stranded with, and that evolution scrounges to exploit. On Metzinger’s account you at least have a ‘phenomenal self model,’ whereas all you have is a hodgepodge of illusions on mine.
On Metzinger’s account you at least have a ‘phenomenal self model,’ whereas all you have is a hodgepodge of illusions on mine.
I’m trying to construct for myself the model your describing. It sounds like water poured into an urn – there is no model for that water, it just hits the limits of how far it can goes, and that means the water turns out to be urn shaped. I guess my example is a bit crap, because an urn has a model. But really were talking a whole bunch of senses, touch, sight, hearing – all of these are, in a very bumpy way, a container. So a person isn’t a person by a model, but simply by something hitting the walls of a container?
Am I getting close at all or is this a “Where the fuck did you get that from?” responce on my part, heh?
Great analogy for structural effects. To use visual attention as an analogy again: the margin (where vision runs out) is arguably the most important structural feature of the field, and yet it has no ‘neural correlates of consciousness,’ but simply arises as a structural feature of a finite information processing system.
Jorge: Well, my wife actually found this to be an easier decision. lol Now I have to sleep with one eye open. I’ll grant you the point.
This is great polemical response, Scott. I focused on Harman’s selective distortion of Metzinger’s neurophenomenology claim, but your general (Humean?) point about the extreme difficulty of speculation is well made. If you are implying that we can be speculative and yet still admit naturalistic epistemological filters, I’m in complete agreement. I also agree about the astonishingly awful opening of that article. It doesn’t say much for the quality of reviewers over Cosmos and History.
I checked out your enemyindustry blog, David – looks fascinating! It strikes me you would have a much better sense as to what ingroup dynamic animates Harman’s animus. It just struck me as so unmotivated – as far as motivated reasoning goes!
[…] R. Scott Bakker has a polemical post on the strange case of Harman and Metzinger here. […]
Hi Scott. I don’t know what Harman’s beef is. There are philosophical differences with Metzinger, but Harman is usually much more scrupulous than this. His piece on Delanda for Continental Philosophy Review registers some disagreements but it’s accurate, systematic and useful. Strangely, the differences between Harman and Metzinger apply in the case of Delanda who makes extensive use of physical science in developing his ontology. .
Have the latest Aspect Emperor book on order, btw!
I had a chance to look at your critique and you’re dead on. It’s actually one of those oversights that needs an ill-will to adequately explain.
I’ve never heard of Delanda. For the past few years talking to my old theory and philosophy friends I always had this sense that everyone was casting about looking for something fresh to replace all the stale post-structuralist bread. My advice has always been to collapse back to fortress Nietzsche, read him as someone who saw past post-structuralism rather than a naive progenitor. He’s all about neurophysiology and psychology.
The White-Luck Warrior, eh? Speaking of metaphysical mysteries!
Scott wrote:
“My own take on all this is that the Hard Problem is real insofar as ‘what we experience’ is not.”
Scott, I like your “edge of the visual field” argument a lot, but the above is very very hard for a non-specialist like me to understand. I mean, what you’re saying is that there is a feature of consciousness that defies reconciliation with a materialistic world view, but that this argument is not contingent on subjective frames being ‘real’?
I am very confused.
I would say defies “functional explanation,’ the kinds of things we call facts. Whether it’s ‘material’ or what have you I remain agnostic, primarily because I have so little faith in reason or concepts. What I suspect is that there is no way of ‘explaining consciousness’ without explaining it away.
So to return to the coin trick analogy I use all the time: We are hardwired to the magician (brain), so the coin (experience) appears magically every time. When we study other brains, the trick becomes ‘obvious,’ and the magic dissappears. This analogy is problematic because it imports multiple agents and observers, but the moral holds true. Since the lack of information regarding the functional history of the coin is constitutive of the trick, accessing that information has the effect of ‘spoiling the magic,’ in this case, the coin appearing from nowhere. So you can watch all the manipulations, and still ask, “Yes, but explain to me how it came out of nowhere!”
“But it didn’t come out of nowhere.”
“Oh yes it did.”
“But I just showed you where it was hidden!”
“You showed me a coin that came from somewhere. What I want to know is how it came out of nowhere!”
“But it really came from somewhere!”
“The coin I saw came out of nowhere. That’s the coin I’m asking to explain, not the one I didn’t see!”
“But they’re the same coin!”
“Except that mine has the essential property of ‘coming from nowhere’!”
“But that’s the illusion, you idiot! There is no such property.”
Now this is well and fine as far as the coin goes, but what happens when you are the illusion, the ‘no such property’ of ‘coming from nowhere’? This is the crux of the Blind Brain Theory: as the most super-complex element in its environment, the human brain is literally the one thing your would expect the human brain to most thoroughly misapprehend. Since we are that missapprehension, comprehension of the brain will only have the effect of deepening the mystery, and a complete explanation would simply seem to render us altogether incomprehensible. It’s not the brain (the coin we can’t see) that we’re interested in, it’s the brain’s missapprehension of itself – consciousness.
Thus the tortured logic of the debate as it stands: some arguing ‘no such property,’ others arguing ‘unique and irreducible property’ (I originally developed all of this (in the late 90’s) in an attempt to argue the autonomy of consciousness from the natural sciences), and a few saying ‘hopeless imbroglio.’ The first are right, insofar as consciousness is a kind of ‘auto-missapprehension.’ The second are right, insofar as this ‘auto-missapprehension’ is the very frame of any comprehension whatsoever. And the third are right insofar as it induces the cognitive equivalent of grand mal epileptic seizures.
And my guess is that every conscious species in the universe finds itself grappling with a version of this. It simply follows from the structural and developmental constraints placed on any organic information processing system that begins tracking more and more of its own functions. Complexity constraints necessarily strand it with cartoons. Metabolic constraints necessarily mean that utility will trump accuracy. And so on. Alien consciousness, like human consciousness, will be a profoundly blinkered subsystem of a much larger system.
OK, so to summarize:
P1. Reductionist materialism is true.
P2. Qualia exist.
P3. P2 and P3 are irreconcilable.
P4. Premises 1-3 are true.
Conclusion: ????????????????????????
Grand mal seizure indeed.
I don’t think you need to go as strong as ‘reductive materialism’ for (1).
I wonder if anyone serious has ever tried to parse this particular thicket (as I try to do here). It has to have something to do with the fact that a) the brain can be wrong about itself; and b) that this misrecognition can be the frame of all determinations of right and wrong.
I’ve always thought there had to be some deep connection between this and the problem propositional attitudes pose for compositionality.
Hey, you asked me “where the projection happens”, so I’ll have to ask you: where’s the larger system?
Spiritual upper reality? God? Alternative universes or dimensions? Virtual machines used like in The Matrix?
I understand that it’s simply too far to even be tentatively guessed, but how you can enter “ethics” if you don’t have a frame to append things to?
Because in that perspective you should really simply follow whatever impulsive and selfish instinct you have. Being unable to “judge” as the basic starting point, you are absolved from responsibility. Meaning that everything is justified as long it is done for your personal advantage (here I’m reminded of the long discussion between Marathe and Steeply). You should have, as consequence, a materialistic worldview.
Another direction: if the brain is an achievement and consequence of natural evolution (Metzinger seems to say this), what is then science? Is science a passive phenomenon (as we are machines tricked into believing of being exceptional by their own devices) of natural evolution or is it something else? And if it’s only part of natural evolution, shouldn’t we expect that it regulates and balances completely on its own?
Where do you want it to be? We all presuppose some kind of transcendence: you have to work to believe that the kitchen vanishes from existence when you scratch your nuts in the living room. So ‘more’ seems like a powerful metaphysical bet. The question of what this more IS FUNDAMENTALLY (cue, reverb)? I prefer buying tickets for lotteries that have a possible draw date.
I do agree that solipsism demolishes ethics, but then I find the notion of a self-contained, self-sufficient perspective conceptually incoherent. A perspective has to be a ‘perspective on’ to make sense.
Really, I think it’s a worthwhile point to consider.
If “consciousness” is the property of a transparent device, creating a self-model of reality, and if other animals as well have self-models, this means that we are a cog of the machine that is “nature”. A cog that is maybe a more complex system than other systems/animals, but qualitatively similar.
Hence whatever we are able to do, through science, in order to survive in the external world is simply another step of natural evolution, selecting behaviors (and generally doing “the right thing”). It’s almost a stance of blind faith.
Hence whatever we are able to do, through science, in order to survive in the external world is simply another step of natural evolution
I would say no. Evolution basically hangs creatures out to dry via their instincts hanging them out to dry without grasping that. Our brains have given us the ability to contemplate and so no just take the stick of blind evolution sacrifice. We don’t just walk into the meat grinder blindly on the darwinistic off chance someone is configured the right way to come out the other side. But the application of scientific tools can super complicate the environment enough that we submerge right back into uncomprehending and blind darwinism/who ever survives by chance, survives. Back to wandering blindly into meat grinders. Worse, meat grinders made by men. When saber tooth tigers end your species, atleast there’s a sense of going out fighting. What is it when the species grinds itself to dust?
Seems like Harman offends people from various branches of philosophy:
http://itself.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/so-what-on-graham-harmans-abominable-review-of-laruelle/
“Where do you want it to be? We all presuppose some kind of transcendence: you have to work to believe that the kitchen vanishes from existence when you scratch your nuts in the living room.”
You should really give The Name of the Wind a read some day Scott, when you need a break from DFW torturing you. There is some really bizarre thematic overlap with your own work: the ability of contradictory thoughts to have magical results, the importance of textual interpretation, an ancient evil that hides its presence by corrupting the texts of the past, a being that ‘proves’ strong determinism (in the sequel), the (corrupting?) power of science. Some of these might naturally emerge from fantasy conventions, but I’ve read a lot of fantasy and the parallels are rather intriguing.
*shrug*
I already have, and I found myself wondering if Rothfuss had read PoN. It would be cool if he had.
Scott — is the point of doing Metaphysics to win the Ontological Lottery? What does it mean to win here? To get it right from some omniscient view? Is there a point when what we know empirically meets the practical need to come up with a way to think about things that is coherent and useful (and cool, maybe)?
I would say the point is to experiment with various ways to conceptualize reality, existence, what have you, to see what kinds of more applicable conceptual cartoons we can derive from them. Certainly not to believe in them!
Otherwise, it seems the proof of applicability is always in the pudding.
I always liked that experience comes from the latin expiriri or something like that, but expiriri means to ‘try’.
That reminds me of the christian who came up to me in the mall the other day “But you haven’t tried it!”
Gah, only now the witty come back occurs to me – I don’t think he had tried christianity either, as trying implies being able to stop doing it. He appeared to have done something he was incapable of ceasing to do. Heh, if experience is trying and he had ceased to try, does that make him a zombie? Just poking fun at him >:)
My GF asked Rothfuss about PON in person. I’m sorry to report that as of about 6 months ago Rothfuss was apparently unaware of your work. He’s also apparently disappeared from blogging so we can’t rightly pester him about it currently.
You predate him by a few years, so any parallels make him seem derivative and not vice-versa.
Great analogy for structural effects. To use visual attention as an analogy again: the margin (where vision runs out) is arguably the most important structural feature of the field, and yet it has no ‘neural correlates of consciousness,’ but simply arises as a structural feature of a finite information processing system.
In terms of your hypothesis, certainly the naturalism of the explanation is very elegant, I think. I’m thinking of the observation tapping ones own knee and how the knee jerk reaction just happens – there is no extra component, just input to output. Nothing else there. Of course that’s very simple compared to a multi branching synapses, but really that’s the point – the knee is graspable. I don’t think I’m making this up, but when I first considered the knee example, it felt like part of my mind stopped buzzing with a kind of resigned shrug? Maybe made it up, who knows.
I presume in the hypothesis, well, I’m not sure I’d say illusion of conciousness, but perhaps a confimation bias style house of cards? I can’t find the link now, but there was a study where people were given numbers and they had to describe the mathematical relation between them. They would sometimes give very complicated explanations of the relation, when actually it was very simple relation. So, in your hypothesis, the perception of conciousness could be the growing house of cards explanation? Perhaps it’s superiority on my part, but I imagine people in medieval times and before to be simpler (or atleast those who weren’t nobles). Less of a house of cards accumulation at that point in history? Mind you, putting it that way in when applying the hypothesis, I’m not exactly at the superior end, technically.
So basically the synapses keep hitting the edge of the container – or more specifically and importantly, they run out at the edge and so are unaware of hitting that edge (like vision running out). This absence creates alot of strange, anomalous data. Confirmation bias builds up explanations from the anomalous, building houses of cards upon which more houses of cards are built upon which more are built. Until you get a very complicated structure, based on the synapses (in the way they try and figure what is true (or atleast true in terms of surviving))….wait, no, now I’m dropping the naturalism again. The synapse is a knee jerk…
It’s complicated stuff, I wouldn’t recommend anyone jump to conclusions. Particularly, atleast looking at the historical goals of securing food and shelter, any conclusion that there is nothing to salvage in the house of cards. Or maybe … I dunno, complicated.
In case you’re feeling hoarse shouting the obvious to the people who most of all should be paying attention, it might make you feel better to know that you have some vocal kindred spirits out there in the humanities who still hold tenure.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=701615010247647606#
I’m going to stop cluttering the comment page after this, but here’s another presentation of his that directly addresses what he sees as need for integration of the sciences with the humanities and the challenges facing such an endeaver.
http://blip.tv/ucla-behavior-evolution-culture/edward-slingerland-1-5-3-10-3611260