Aphorism of the Day: Am I a man pinned for display, dreaming I am a butterfly pinned for display, or am I a butterfly pinned for display, dreaming that I am a man pinned for display? Am I the dream, the display… the pins?
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Things have been getting pretty wank around here lately, for which I apologize. If the market is about people ‘voting with their feet,’ then nothing demonstrates the way meaning in contemporary society has become another commodity quite so dramatically as the internet. Wank goes up. Traffic goes down. It really is that simple.
Why do people, in general, hate wank? It makes no sense to them. We have a hardwired allergy to ‘opaque’ communicative contexts. I crinkle my nose like anyone else when I encounter material that mystifies me. I assume that something must be wrong with it instead of with my knowledge-base or meagre powers of comprehension. And go figure. I’m as much my own yardstick for what makes sense as you are of yours.
This is why there is a continual, and quite commercial, pressure to be ‘wank free,’ to make things as easy as possible for as many people as possible. Though I think this can be problematic in a number of ways, I actually think reaching people, particularly those who don’t share your views, is absolutely crucial. I think ‘lowest common denominator’ criticisms of accessibility have far more to do with cultivating the ingroup prestige of wankers than anything. Culture is in the process of fracturing along entirely different lines of self-identification, thanks to the information revolution. And this simply ups the social ante of reaching across those lines.
But, as I keep insisting, there is a new kind of wank in town, one symptomatic of what I call the Semantic Apocalypse, which is to say, the utter divorce of experience, the ‘meaning world’ of cares and projects that characterizes your life, from knowledge, the ‘world world’ as revealed by science. This new wank, I believe anyways, is in the process of scientific legitimation. It is, in other words, slowly being knitted into fact with the accumulation of more scientific information. It is, in short, our future–or something like it.
So I thought it would be worthwhile to give you all an example, with translation, from what is one of the world’s premier journals, Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The following is taken from a response to Peter Carruther’s “How we know our own minds,” published in 2009. Carruther’s argument, in a nutshell, is similar to one I’ve made here several times in several ways: that we understand ourselves, by and large, the same way we understand others: by interpreting behaviour. In other words, even though you assume you have direct, introspective access to your beliefs and motives, in point of fact, you are almost as much ‘locked out’ of your own brain as you are the brains of others. As a growing body of experimental and neuropathological evidence seems to suggest, you simply hypothesize what your ‘gut brain’ is doing, rather than accessing information from the source.
What follows is Bryce Huebner and Dan Dennett’s response to Carruther’s account, interpolated with explanations of my own–as well as a little commentary. I offer it as an example of where our knowledge of the ‘human’ is headed. As I mention in CAUSA SUIcide, we are entering the ‘age of the subhuman,’ the decomposition of the soul into its component parts. I take what follows as clear evidence of this.
Human beings habitually, effortlessly, and for the most part unconsciously represent one another as persons. Adopting this personal stance facilitates representing others as unified entities with (relatively) stable psychological dispositions and (relatively) coherent strategies for practical deliberation. While the personal stance is not necessary for every social interaction, it plays an important role in intuitive judgments about which entities count as objects of moral concern (Dennett 1978, Robbins & Jack 2006); indeed, recent data suggest that when psychological unity and practical coherence are called into question, this often leads to the removal of an entity from our moral community (Bloom2005, Haslam2006).
This basically restates Dennett’s long time ‘solution’ to the problems that ‘meaning talk’ poses for science. What he’s saying here, quite literally, is that ‘person’ is simply a convenient way for our brains to make sense of one another, one that is hardwired in. A kind of useful fiction.
Human beings also reflexively represent themselves as persons through a process of self-narration operating over System 1 processes. However, in this context the personal stance has deleterious consequences for the scientific study of the mind. Specifically, the personal stance invites the assumption that every (properly functioning) human being is a person who has access to her own mental states. Admirably, Carruthers goes further than many philosophers in recognizing that the mind is a distributed computational structure; however, things become murky when he turns to the sort of access that we find in the case of metacognition.
‘System 1’ here refers to something called ‘dual process cognition,’ the focus of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, a book which I’ve mentioned several times here at TPB. System 1 refers to automatic cognition, the kinds of problem-solving your brain does without effort or awareness, and System 2 refers to deliberative cognition, the kinds of effort-requiring problem-solving you do. What they are saying is that the ‘personal stance,’ thinking of ourselves and others as persons, obscures investigation into what is really going on. Why? Because it underwrites the assumption that we are unified and that we have direct access to our ‘mental states.’ They applaud Carruthers for seeing past the first illusion, but question whether he runs afoul the ‘person fallacy’ in his consideration ‘metacognition,’ our ability to know our knowing, desiring, and deciding.
At points, Carruthers notes that the “mindreading system has access to perceptual states” (sect. 2, para. 6), and with this in mind he claims that in “virtue of receiving globally broadcast perceptual states as input, the mindreading system should be capable of self-attributing those percepts in an ‘encapsulated’ way, without requiring any other input” (sect. 2, para. 4). Here, Carruthers offers a model of metacognition that relies exclusively on computations carried out by subpersonal mechanisms. However, Carruthers makes it equally clear that “I never have the sort of direct access that my mindreading system has to my own visual images and bodily feelings” (sect. 2, para. 8; emphasis added). Moreover, although “we do have introspective access to some forms of thinking . . . we don’t have such access to any propositional attitudes” (sect. 7, para. 11; emphasis over “we” added). Finally, his discussion of split-brain patients makes it clear that Carruthers thinks that these data “force us to recognize that sometimes people’s access to their own judgments and intentions can be interpretative” (sect. 3.1, para. 3, emphasis in original).
This passage isn’t quite so complicated as it might seem. They are basically juxtaposing Carruther’s ‘person free’ mapping of information access, which system receives information from which system, with his ‘person-centric’ mapping of information access betrayed by his use of first-person pronouns. The former doesn’t take any account of whether you are conscious of what’s going on or not. The latter does.
Carruthers, thus, relies on two conceptually distinct accounts of cognitive access to metarepresentations. First, he relies on an account of subpersonal access, according to which metacognitive representations are accessed by systems dedicated to belief fixation. Beliefs, in turn, are accessed by systems dedicated to the production of linguistic representations; which are accessed by systems dedicated to syntax, vocalization, sub-vocalization, and so on. Second, he relies on an account of personal access, according to which I have access to the metacognitive representations that allow me to interpret myself and form person-level beliefs about my own mental states.
This passage simply recapitulates and clarifies the former. Carruthers is mixing up his maps, swapping between maps where information is traded between independent city-states, and maps where information is traded between independent city-states and the Empire of the person.
The former view that treats the mind as a distributed computational system with no central controller seems to be integral to Carruthers’ (2009) current thinking about cognitive architecture. However, this insight seems not to have permeated Carruthers’ thinking about metacognition. Unless the “I” can be laundered from this otherwise promising account of “self-knowledge,” the assumption of personal access threatens to require an irreducible Cartesian res cogitans with access to computations carried out at the subpersonal level. With these considerations in mind, we offer what we see as a friendly suggestion: translate all the talk of personal access into subpersonal terms.
Carruthers recognizes that the person is a fiction, something that our brains project onto one another, but because he lapses into the person stance in his consideration of how the brain knows itself directly (metacognition ), his account risks assuming the reality of the person, a ‘Cartesian res cogitans,’ or ‘thinking substance.’ To avoid this, they recommend he clean up his theory and get rid of the person altogether.
Of course, the failure to translate personal access into the idiom of subpersonal computations may be the result of the relatively rough sketch of the subpersonal mechanisms that are responsible for metarepresentation. No doubt, a complete account of metarepresentation would require an appeal to amore intricate set of mechanisms to explain how subpersonal mechanisms can construct “the self” that is represented by the personal stance (Metzinger 2004). As Carruthers notes, the mindreading system must contain a model of what minds are and of “the access that agents have to their own mental states” (sect. 3.2, para. 2). He also notes that the mindreading system is likely to treat minds as having direct introspective access to themselves, despite the fact that the mode of access is inherently interpretative (sect. 3.2). However, merely adding these details to the model is insufficient for avoiding the presumption that there must (“also”) be first-person access to the outputs of metacognition. After all, even with a complete account of the subpersonal systems responsible for the production and comprehension of linguistic utterances, the fixation and updating of beliefs, and the construction and consumption of metarepresentations, it may still seem perfectly natural to ask, “But how do I know my own mental states?”
They suspect that Carruthers lapses into the person fallacy because he lacks an account of the subpersonal mechanisms that generate ‘metarepresentations’–representations of the brain’s representations and representational capacities–which in turn require an account of the subpersonal mechanisms that generate the self, such as those postulated by Thomas Metzinger in Being No-one. Short of this more thorough (and entirely subpersonal) account, the question of the Empire (person) and what crosses its borders becomes very difficult to avoid. Again, it’s important to remember that the ‘person’ is an attribution, not a thing, not even an illusory thing. There just is no Empire according to Huebner and Dennett, so including imperial border talk in any scientific account of cognition is simply going to generate confusion.
The banality that I have access to my own thoughts is a consequence of adopting the personal stance. However, at the subpersonal level it is possible to explain how various subsystems access representations without requiring an appeal to a centralized res cogitans. The key insight is that a module “dumbly, obsessively converts thoughts into linguistic form and vice versa” (Jackendoff 1996). Schematically, a conceptualized thought triggers the production of a linguistic representation that approximates the content of that thought, yielding a reflexive blurt. Such linguistic blurts are protospeech acts, issuing subpersonally, not yet from or by the person, and they are either sent to exogenous broadcast systems (where they become the raw material for personal speech acts), or are endogenously broadcast to language comprehension systems which feed directly to the mindreading system. Here, blurts are tested to see whether they should be uttered overtly, as the mindreading system accesses the content of the blurt and reflexively generates a belief that approximates the content of that blurt. Systems dedicated to belief fixation are then recruited, beliefs are updated, the blurt is accepted or rejected, and the process repeats. Proto-linguistic blurts, thus, dress System 1 outputs in mentalistic clothes, facilitating system-level metacognition.
I absolutely love this first line, if only because of the ease with which it breezes past the radical counterintuitivity of what is being discussed. The theoretical utility of the ‘personal stance’ is that it allows them to embrace the sum of our intuitive discourse regarding persons by simply appending the operator: ‘from the person stance.’ The same way any fortune-cookie fortune can be turned into a joke by adding ‘in bed’ to the end, any ‘everyday’ claim can be ‘affirmed’ using the person stance. “Yes-yes, of course you have access to your own thoughts… that is, when considered from the personal stance.”
The jargon laden account that follows simply outlines a mechanistic model of what a subpersonal account of the brain knowing itself might look like, one involving the shuttling of information to and fro between various hypothesized devices performing various hypothesized functions that culminate in what is called metacognition, without any need of any preexisting ‘inner inspector’–or notion of ‘introspection.’
Carruthers (2009) acknowledges that System 2 thinking is realized in the cyclical activity of reflexive System 1 subroutines. This allows for a model of metacognition that makes no appeal to a pre-existing I, a far more plausible account of self-knowledge in the absence of a res cogitans.
The point, ultimately, is that the inner inspector is as much a product as what it supposedly inspects. There is no imperial consumer, no person. This requires seeing that System 2 thinking, or deliberative cognition, is itself a recursive wrinkle in the way automatic System 1 functions are executed, a series of outputs that ‘you,’ thanks to certain, dedicated System 1 mechanisms, compulsively mistake for you.
Dizzy yet?
I’m sure that even my explication proved hopelessly inaccessible to some of you, and for that, I apologize. At the very least I hope that the gist got through: for a great deal of cognitive scientific research, you, the dude eating Fritos in front of the monitor, are a kind of mirage that must be seen through if science is to uncover the facts of what you really are. I imagine more than a few feel a sneer crawling across their face, thinking this is a perfect example of wank at its worst: a bunch of pompous nonsense leading a bunch of pompous eggheads down yet another pompous blind alley. But I assure you this is not the case. One of the things that amazes me surfing the web in pursuit of these issues is the degree to which it is being embraced by business. There’s neuromarketing, which takes all this information as actionable, but there’s economics as well. These guys are reverse-engineering the consumer, not to mention the voter.
And knowledge, as ever, is power, whether it flies in the face of experience or not.
Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse.
Scott wrote:
“Wank goes up. Traffic goes down. It really is that simple.”
The Heidegger wank post was your most difficult blog post in 3 years, so you should not be surprised about the low traffic… I mean, I’m sure you’ve met people who claim to have have finished B&T but how many of them really actually did? I’ve tried, honest, but it’s like… hard. The Study of Anosognosia was an easier read. (And I haven’t finished that either.)
Scott wrote:
“We have a hardwired allergy to ‘opaque’ communicative contexts. I crinkle my nose like anyone else when I encounter material that mystifies me.”
There’s probably a good reason for this: opaqueness may underline that speaker doesn’t fully understand what they are trying to communicate. An old educational adage is that you only understand something if you can communicate it eloquently and effectively. That said, particle physics is legitimately opaque, and no matter how many times someone explains the blackbody radiation catastrophe problem or Bell inequality, it’s always going to be a bit hard to understand. The key to distinguishing is asking what it accomplishes. And cognitive neuroscience has begun to accomplish some rather startling things.
Dennett and co. wrote:
” ….a complete account of metarepresentation would require an appeal to a more intricate set of mechanisms to explain how subpersonal mechanisms can construct “the self” that is represented by the personal stance…”
Not only that, but such an account should include an explanation as to why systems that adopt the personal stance inwards end up in a confused muddled mess known as ‘philosophy’. Perhaps it can also pave a path out of the mire? (see BBT)
Dennett and co. wrote:
“…it may still seem perfectly natural to ask, “But how do I know my own mental states?” ”
Oh, look, they address that.
Scott wrote:
“Again, it’s important to remember that the ‘person’ is an attribution, not a thing, not even an illusory thing. There just is no Empire according to Huebner and Dennett, so including imperial border talk in any scientific account of cognition is simply going to generate confusion.”
If I understand your perspective advocated in BBT correctly though, you reject this interpretation and instead propose that there is an ‘illusory thing’ generated by asymptotic information horizons. Or at least the illusion of an illusory thing? Yeah, I’m dizzy alright.
Scott wrote:
” you, the dude eating Fritos in front of the monitor”
Chewing gum…
Scott wrote:
“I imagine more than a few feel a sneer crawling across their face”
Busted.
Scott wrote:
“Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse.”
This morning I was driving and I saw a bunch of idiots picketing an abortion clinic like 2 minutes from my house. I was half-tempted to debate with them, but then this thought, pretty much verbatim popped up into my head:
“Don’t bother. They’ve already fractured into an irredeemable sub-cultural splinter group. Arguing would be a waste of time. Semantic apocalypse and all that.”
Some prophecies are self-fulfilling.
Suddenly I’m proud for having read the beast three times! It really was a revelation for me, back when…
As usual you’ve put the red sniper dot on the very issue roiling in the back of my mind while writing this, Jorge. I do think BBT does a fair job of explaining several of the central problematics (subjectivity, time, transcendence, truth, and intentionality especially) of philosophy, and that this is one reason to fear it. But it doesn’t so much contradict what Huebner and Dennett are saying as reorient the focus. One of the things worth noting about the piece is the way all the mechanisms posited perform what most would say are ‘intentional’ functions: believing, desiring, representing, and so on. The big question I had reading it was: So are you taking a ‘belief stance’ guys? A ‘desire stance’? No I know that Dennett uses these terms in the Dennettian ‘redefinitional sense,’ which is to say, sans intentionality. But that just means he’s explaining what the brain is doing, and leaving utterly mysterious what it is we think we are doing. This problem raises a second problem, which is the fact that Dennetts intentional experience of beliefs, desires, etc., is what he MUST map backwards in his attempt to explain them. Because he has no plausible way of explaining them away (he can only assert their ‘projective’ character) he’s stranded with them in his attempts to map the mechanisms and info-flow of the subpersonal. This is where I think BBT shows its real muscle, and where it becomes much more friendly to PA analyses like Schwitzgebel’s, where it really becomes unclear whether the actual structures uncovered by a ‘more mature neuroscience’ will in any resemble what we take to be their folk-psychological expression.
Regarding the illusory thing, I’m not sure there’s much distance between what I’m saying and Dennett. Everything really is ‘distributed’ (truncated, depleted, and disjoint), it just doesn’t seem that way. Metzinger is actually the one with the ‘simulation,’ which was why I was surprised that they cited him – and glad as well. BNO has been too slow getting the credit it deserves.
A little dizzy, yeah. But also grateful (and intrigued, as its not an area of study I was aware of) for the tolling resonance I felt as I read this.
When it comes to philosophy I’m strictly a tourist, but one who enjoys re-visiting. Thanks for the walk through.
You’re welcome, Paul. The stuff will cross your eyes for peering, I find.
I dislike the ‘blurt’ passages, in as much as they are not self referentially recognising themselves delivering that AS a blurt. It’s like watching a scientist with a cigar hanging out of their mouth talk about them thar cancerous cigarettes. As if they are coming from some kinda higher ground. I think rather than realisation it’s shit like that creating an unquestioned…I dunno, what would you call it? Ground? Playground? As if they aren’t in the same old space when they are. When it’s just regular old human, but can’t quite manage the hop, skip and jump to bring these onto any kind of moral map, as if it’s like studying sea slugs or lightening – you can just do so without thinking of the consequences. In a kind of autistic euphoria. I mean, science does seem pretty autistic – can you imagine that blurt passage actually self referencing itself? Where do scientific texts ever self reference? (sounds kinda philosophical…and science is like “Ick! Girl germs!”) Where do they ever stop going out and it actually comes back? No, scientific texts are high and mighty and…autistic. That’s the culture they’ve bred and reinforced and you can see it here, shining like a baboons ass. Meanwhile it sounds like (from my ignorant evaluation) that contemporary philosophy does the exact opposite and regularly not just comes back, but dissapears up it’s own arse as fast as it can manage.
brevity is the soul of wit.
You’re just projecting, you think people don’t like wank so the traffic went down, thus you interpret the data.
But traffic went down because posting frequency dropped and traffic went down because post length exploded by several orders of magnitude.
The neutron bomb 30,000 word posts are a slog of slogs–personally I haven’t read a complete post in months because the length is so exasperating.
Oh look, I’m doing the same thing, making my interpretation THE interpretation.
Folks read on the internet when they’re goofing off from work, primarily, a novella blog post is just asking for someone to ‘catch’ you.
I wrote exasperating, and meant to write exhausting, but perhaps I did mean exasperating and my brain typed that instead? I don’t know.
You want traffic? Start a flame war! It’s really easy nowadays. Find a subculture. Then find a fracture line inside that subculture and dare to voice an opinion. (I recommend performing this experiment inside a fume hood and with proper PPE)
Shit, maybe next week I’ll troll the abortion protesters by at first appearing to agree with them and then voice the opinion that life begins at implantation, not conception.
*grinch grin*
(Personally, I like the philosophy, but I’m one data point. If all else fails: dragons. You can never go wrong with dragons. I’m serious.)
I think it’s a lack of interpretive range in statements – and on top of that, multiple statements with zero interpretive range needed before you can get to a conclusion with zero interpretive range. It all ends up at ‘run my gestalt…with no forseeable end to that!’. Possibly in a teacher habit, these posts don’t ask others how they might describe a problem. Instead it’s the lectern pattern of telling.
On the abortion protestors, be sure to think of their side to some degree. Everyone deserves a moral lawyer, even if you have to lend them one from your own intellect. Otherwise where’s the sport? Surely if lent a lawyer they become more challenging to engage, that shows its not really engaging them when it’s all just heavily asserted emotions.
I honestly don’t understand the slightest bit of what you write. I do try from time to time. Are your posts intended for the academics, hobbyists, the lay man? I do try but I don’t think you have ever once explained a concept which I could completely understand.
Cheers
Daniel
Daniel, you inspired me to write this. I hope it will be useful, if not to you, to someone else!
http://secondapocalypse.forumer.com/philosophy-101-t1239708.html
Awesome!
You have gone someway to demisting the car window of understanding. Demisting, demystifying..haha……er..ha.
Seriously though, thanks for the info. Philosophy is something that fascinates me. I basically gather that most of it highlights how little anyone really knows about themselves, and how no one knows that they don’t know. The ramifications of which I guess are pretty dangerous? Please correct me if I’m a mile off any kind of accuracy.
Cheers
Daniel
Nope. You’re on the money. The picture this post paints is basically one where consciousness is little more than a fold in the Darkness the Comes Before.
Somewhere in the muddy between, maybe? It’s difficult. Every specialized discourse sits on a mountain of assumptions, usually requiring years of specialized training to follow, let alone master. I regularly bump into stuff that leaves me feeling the exact same way. The fact is, I don’t think there’s any easy solution other than continually throwing yourself into the murk. That’s been my tactic, anyway.
These posts always leave me feeling (in a super good way) like I’m reading a science fiction novel where the author is trying to depict a human protagonist encountering an alien mind…only the twist is that, at the end, it’s A HUMAN MIND! Has anyone written that book yet? Bakker, you oughta make that your entry into sci-fi. More like sci-FACT!
Speaking of your fiction, I am rutting stinkily with the corpses of the men I eat in primal, carnal anticipation of The Unholy Consult. My body count, and internal unfillable void, grow erratically with every passing day I can’t read the juicy details of WHY IN THE FUCK [CENSORED CLIFFHANGER FROM WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR]?!
Check out the second apocalypse forum and feel free to ask your questions. I’ve found it at least a bit more sustaining than the rotten corpses of long dead men. At least the idea’s and theory’s tend to add a bit of flavor if nothing else.
Site: http://secondapocalypse.forumer.com/index.php
I actually think this sounds like Neuropath!
I loved Neuropath, but I could see the concept explored with a human waking up from cryo and typing at a terminal with this consciousness he doesn’t understand on the other end, not knowing if Earth’s been taken over by aliens and humans are slaves or curiosities, or if humans all died out long ago, and he learns about this “alien” culture, all of these “alien” philosophies and advanced “alien” science, only to discover in the reveal of the alien apperance that the aliens are just what humans neurosurgically evolved to, and it’s only 100 years later rather than the millions he thinks it is (maybe they use tiny units to measure time and keep giving him these massive numbers of time units since “his time”). I don’t know if that reveal would work best as the end of a short story or the middle of a novel, but I’m leaning towards end of a short story.
I guess in Neuropath, what caught up with me at the end was the dread chill of the beginnings of that future, but I’d rather see a contemporary human thrust into the midst of the further reaches of that future. It could definitely take on a Lovecraftian/Ligottian vibe at that point, a sort of all-encompassing horror at the inevitable yawning abyss of things beyond conceptual limits, driving the contemporary human mad…only to have him “repaired” by a neurosurgeon/philosopher/psychologist (are they even different things in this future?) with hedonistic libertine leanings (or some monstrous melting abstraction that approximates those leanings in this post-mind) that tinkers his brain into an artistic message about the progress from then to now, some post-structuralist profundity filtered through a post-skeptical dada.
Or is that just what Mog-Pharau is to a planet?
An old quote that your first few paragraphs reminded me of (haven’t read it all yet).
“truth and error, no less than human freedom and dignity, become empty notions when the soul is reduced to chemicals” -Krass
I wonder about such quotes in terms of looking back at human history? What? Instead of being terrorfied into good behaviour from the very idea of a lack of good, the past that saw itself soaking in a moralistic universe would then go off and rape and butcher some village or castle every five minutes. Suddenly you have to work for your morality (suddenly that’s all morality can be – work/physical labour. Deeds, not words), instead of having an intravenous line from god pumping in more morality into you than you were pissing out through your sword arm and cock.
Haha I don’t know about all that, just thought they ideas where reminiscent of each other.
And people do work for morality dont they, at least to some degree. I dont think people are inherently ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but everything is learned, and the same lessons can be learned in rather different ways. i.e if you cloned hitler and raised him in a similar environment, there isn’t a very good chance he’d end of the same way (right?).
N on ‘needs’ god to be good or do good, but certainly if there was some definitive proof that everything was meaningless, there was no heaven/hell reward/punishment for action, of any kind, then there would be more people inclined to do whatever they fancied regardless of ‘moral’ ‘righteousness.
i.e if you cloned hitler and raised him in a similar environment, there isn’t a very good chance he’d end of the same way (right?).
Actually my own estimate is that he’d be pretty much the same – maybe plus or minus a few thousand victims (really it’s a question of how much you need to clone the infrastructure that enabled him (he hardly did all the killing personally) Vs how much that infrastructure just exists anyway).
N on ‘needs’ god to be good or do good, but certainly if there was some definitive proof that everything was meaningless, there was no heaven/hell reward/punishment for action, of any kind, then there would be more people inclined to do whatever they fancied regardless of ‘moral’ ‘righteousness
Strange – you think like foul food, such reward/punishment simply exists inherant in a sense of something wrong in mutilated corpses.
Perhaps heaven/hell is rather like a hard drug – any milder drug of just human distaste for the ill condition of other humans just isn’t enough of a high anymore.
Glad to see you back to form with recent posts after that extended slog through the wilderness. It’s posts like this that got me excited about this blog in the first place.
One of the reasons I don’t think I’m cut out to be a blogger is that I’m so damned obsessive. More and more TPB seems to be becoming a reservoir for my tertiary obsessions.
So is “tell me what you see?” a “reflective blurt” or a system requiring external self-referential information, no longer internally modellable, for utilitarian purposes?
BTW Thanks for these recent wnk posts also, I both do not understand them very well, perhaps at all, and find them very interesting.
Shrewd, AD. Very shrewd.
Not sure how interesting it may be, since I’m not as good as parsing this stuff, but these days I bumped into two interesting books.
- The Mind’s I
- The Web of Life
I was looking at Manturana’s autopoiesis because I saw it described as this:
The relational domain is a meta-domain with its own structure and with its own structure determined causation patterns. And we, individual humans, we are the substrate where those causation patterns manifest themselves. And enaction tells us that we cannot distinguish between what is caused from within from what is caused from elsewhere.
Now, because I’m not familiar with these ideas, I tend to mistake the vague concept for the familiar one. So that last line sounds to me very much like the theory here: that consciousness is unable to differentiate (Spencer Brown’s Theory of Form). And since it can’t differentiate then it takes credit for everything.
Essentially I’m looking at the most different theories to find out the points where they meet. So this one looked like a beginning of common ground.
My problem here is on the idea of science, related to what you write here, and those books. This necessity of differentiating things and make them into parts is a very human thing. And it is not natural at all. The digital, “bitty” aspect of the world is indeed produced by linguistic consciousness. It’s artificial by definition.
The same as the idea of the “narrator”. Consciousness as a form of spectation, where this consciousness watches something happen and then produces some sense in the story, by re-narrating it again. Selectively picking the parts that are “meaningful” from the parts that aren’t.
What happens over there is rebuilt here, in consciousness.
This is what consciousness does every day: being limited to a very narrow information horizon, it connects the few dots it sees, and creates a fancy narrative. It draws shapes, gives them names, and put a “sense” into them. Which is essentially this:
Human beings reflexively represent themselves as persons through a process of self-narration.
So consciousness is a spectating, sense-making machine. It works entirely through language (which is reflexive and autopoietic). And language is digital. Bitty. Built through differentiation and opposites.
But you say:
we are entering the ‘age of the subhuman,’ the decomposition of the soul into its component parts.
This breaking into small parts appears to me extremely non-natural. It follows the pattern of how consciousness operates, as opposed to the natural world.
On another tangent: by the end of that post I was thinking that it was risking coming back home. System 2 and system 1. If x = a and y = b ; a = b ; therefore x = y. So system 1 = system 2.
“System 2 thinking is realized in the cyclical activity of reflexive System 1 subroutines.”
That’s the risky conclusion in saying that system 2 is “embedded” into system 1. Once again a matter of how accurate is the picture that system 2 gets.
Or like a mirror. You mistake the image for the real thing, but whatever. It still does the things you see it does.
You keep hitting on the same nails and I do too
It’s good to see you’re finally coming around, Abe!
Autopoeisis and second-order systems theory is something I find interesting. I’m not familiar with Manturana, but Luhman’s stuff leaves me cold simply because of the way it continually presupposes the very intentionality one would hope systems theory (or cybernetics more generally) would be bent upon explaining. So you get ‘accounts’ of ‘meaning’ that really don’t provide all that much traction when it comes to explaining (or explaining away) all those things that make it so peculiar.
I wouldn’t be so quick to jump on the ‘artificiality’ of the digital bandwagon, especially given things like quantum mechanics. If anything, the degree to which the ‘digital’ (loosely understood) perspective actually works, far, far outstrips the dividends of holistic paradigms. If its ‘not natural’ as you say, then why does it give us such command over nature? My guess is that people assume its ‘artificiality’ simply because it cuts against their cherished self-understanding – and the conceit is to assume that you are the most ‘natural’ thing of all.
Dual process cognition will almost certainly be replaced by something less granular, not to mention less binary. The point Dennett is making can be clarified by pausing to think about speech. Imagine giving yourself a ‘little pep-talk.’ Speech is formulated and organized outside the threshold of awareness (or ‘global broadcasting’ to use their terminology) and as such ‘comes out of the blue,’ where global broadcasting allows other systems to soak up its informatic ‘content,’ once again outside the threshold of awareness (without being globally broadcast), leading to systematic revisions that generate different speech outputs that again are globally broadcast downstream, allowing other systems to soak up content, and so on and so on. The idea is that System 2 cognitive processes – conscious deliberation – are actually a collection of unconscious cognitive processes brought into serial, cyclical confluence. All the actual work is accomplished behind the scenes.
Sooo….
System 2 is the bit that we think of as us, which is constantly trying to construct a personal identify narrative based on the machinations of System 1. The problem is that System 2 a) doesn’t have a good chance to assess the workings of System 1 because it doesn’t have a complete view of cause and effect (and that relationship isn’t simple either) and b) in some part System 2 arises from the activity of System 1.
Blind Brain Theory is a variation of the ‘your thinking bit is an evaluator and long term attitude/goal setter for the bit that runs separately from your thinking bit’ whereby System 1 is a black box that we can’t sense very well so not only do we not know how it works, we don’t really know how it behaves ?
Just as we’re trying to guess what is going on inside the heads (System 2) of other people, we’re constantly guessing what is going on inside our own heads. Only we don’t know we’re guessing, and we think we have direct it (we) do.
Or something.
Good recap of the System 1/System 2 relation, as well as the self-as-other theory of self-knowledge. The Blind Brain Theory is actually far more general than this particular theory, which it takes as a confirming instance. The picture it paints is far, far more dismal!