Aphorism of the Day:
“A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers. Some unwittingly even take the most recent form of man, as it developed under the imprint of certain religions or even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one must proceed.”
– Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Hello, all! I’m Roger Eichorn, a guest-blogger, back from a rather lengthy sojourn in which I did a lot of philosophy, studied German, and started home-recording an album of original music. 2012 was a busy year for me. I expect 2013 to be even busier—but with more pay-offs. To begin with, I have an article on Sextus Empiricus coming out in the journal Ancient Philosophy this spring, which is nice. Looking ahead, my dissertation (on the history of Pyrrhonian skepticism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy) should be well on its way to completion by year’s end. In addition, I hope to finish my album and, biggest of all, my fantasy novel, The House of Yesteryear, before celebrating another New Year.
But enough about me. I’ve been watching from the sidelines as Bakker has developed his ‘Blind-Brain Theory’ here at the TPB. I freely admit that I did not follow all his posts last year—but not for lack of interest. For my money, the BBT (given what I understand of it, anyway) is the most promising and philosophically exciting project currently on the philosophy-of-mind market. It emerges from a rare combination of scientific literacy and philosophical virtuosity, the latter in the sense both of (a) a wide-ranging knowledge of the field and (b) the sort of inherent creativity all truly great philosophers possess. Too often, philosophers suffer from a lack of sufficient appreciation for (or ‘fluency in’) science, while scientists’ lack of philosophical sophistication leaves them unable to articulate the philosophical implications of their own discoveries—even when they explicitly set out to do so. (Take, for example, Hawking’s latest book.) It is surprisingly rare, in my experience, to find a thinker willing to approach science philosophically without presuming the superiority of philosophical modes of reflection and to approach philosophy scientifically without taking on board some sort of neutralizing conceptual framework that allows him or her to settle or dismiss intractable philosophical problems with a shrug or a wave of the naïve-epistemic-optimism wand.
The BBT theory suffers from neither of these problems, as far as I can see. It is a monument to Bakker’s intellectual conscience: his willingness to place question-marks over anything and everything, and his restless search for a unified, coherent, and compelling account of the human ontologico–epistemic predicament.
As philosophers—as thinkers—we are all of us, however, at sea on Neurath’s boat, able to repair planks of our ship, but not all of them at once. In order to question, some things must be put beyond question; they must be taken for granted. (I’m intrigued by the idea that this might represent an epistemological parallel to Bakker’s idea of neural ‘informatic occlusion.’) What I want to explore in this post is whether Bakker’s theory incorporates science and philosophy so well at the expense of history, in particular intellectual history (including the history of philosophy). I want, in other words, to see if the BBT stands up to the test of what Nietzsche called ‘historical philosophizing.’
It is tempting, from the perspective of the BBT, to react to the raising of this question by claiming that ‘intellectual history,’ according to the BBT, can be nothing but a tissue of half-truth and outright confabulation. The BBT comes before intellectual history, as it were, and demolishes its foundations. But it can do so only given the truth of elements of our intellectual-historical heritage. This is the sort of double-bind in which the BBT finds itself, for it itself is nothing if not a positive philosophical theory. Most obviously, in order for the BBT to stand up, we need to hold in place an account of (or a blind faith in) science such that its explanatory power can underwrite the data and premises of the BBT. Blind faith is an affront to any healthy intellectual conscience, so we must reject it. Yet there is no satisfactory philosophical account of science. Arguments can be made in science’s favor, of course—loads of them. But any attempt to defend science must eventually, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, run out of reasons. We ask, ‘Why?’, and can find a ‘because’ for a time—but eventually our ‘becauses’ peter out. In the end, we can only point to science’s achievements, its apparent autonomy from (its utter lack of any need for) philosophical underpinning. Science simply marches on, regardless what people at any given time think or say about it. Moreover, science seems to be remarkably successful at shifting intuitions, or altering the way in which we ‘intuitively’ see ourselves and the world, how the world ‘shows up’ for us—regardless, again, of what anyone says or thinks at any given time about science. This is truly remarkable, if you think about it. Generation to generation, science alters our world-pictures without anyone’s consent. As I like to say, you can lock up Galileo, but sooner or later your descendants will exonerate him. Science simply doesn’t care what you think—but you should sure as shit care what it thinks, for it is quite likely that (in general outline, at least) what it thinks represents what future generations will take for granted.
These considerations are enough, in my view, to demolish the objection from the philosophically problematic character of scientific knowledge. Ultimately, the objection misses the point. Yet it suggests a different sort of objection. The efficacy of science is, after all, not the only thing that must be held in place in order for the BBT to do the work Bakker wants it to. We must also hold in place an account of the ‘appearance’ of consciousness. In a sense, this is a different sort of objection from the first, for it does not directly target the epistemic credentials of the BBT; rather, it targets the radicality with which Bakker is eager to credit it. Still, it seems to me that the BBT can only be understood as Bakker would have us understand it if it is understood as being radical. If this is right, then to undermine its radicality is to undermine the theory as Bakker understands it.
Now, the putative radicality of the BBT follows from the way in which it is said to deviate from our ‘intuitive’ understanding of ourselves. In Bakker’s previous post, he refers to “consciousness and intentionality as we intuit them.” It is given the ‘fissure’ that the BBT theory opens up between our ‘knowledge’ of ourselves and our ‘experience’ of ourselves that is prophesied to harbinger the ‘Akratic Culture’ whose coming Bakker ‘mourns.’ Such a culture is ‘akratic’ because our knowledge of ourselves, it is supposed, can never be squared with our experience of ourselves, in which case we will never be able, experientially, to believe what we know about ourselves, i.e., we will never believe we are other-than-we-experience-ourselves-to-be with the sort of lived conviction that only comes from ‘inhabiting’ a fact. Our experience is bound, Bakker claims, to be unmasked as “vacant affirmation and subreptive autonomy.”
But it seems plausible, I want to suggest, that our ‘intuitive experience’ of ourselves and the world is an artifact of a given biological and historico-cultural situation. It is not fixed, not an ‘eternal fact.’ There is, in other words, no stable ‘enemy’ for the BBT to pit itself against. It can, of course, pit itself against our intuitive self-understanding (or self-experience), and that may be radical enough. But why should we think, with Bakker, that “if the [BBT]… turns out to be correct, it will be the last theory in the history of philosophy as traditionally conceived”? That may be true (more on this point in a moment), but let’s consider Bakker’s reasons for advancing this view. The BBT, he claims, will effectively destroy philosophy because it will “transform the great intentional problems of philosophy into the mechanical subject matter of cognitive neuroscience.” This too may well turn out to be true—but it is hardly a necessary consequence of confirming, ‘scientifically,’ the truth of the BBT.
If the argument I made above (regarding the efficacy-of-science objection) is right, then the ‘confirmation’ of the BBT (if confirmed it is destined to be) is likely to be more a matter of a shift in world-picture than of a shift in what scientists or philosophers are willing or able to draw as the conclusions of their arguments. This is why the BBT is a “precursor of the posthuman.” Bakker’s alarming remarks about the possible technological applications of neuroscience, when seen from a ‘posthuman’ perspective, all apply to the nebulous period in which our knowledge outruns our experience in such a way that we are unable to believe what we know. Upon the advent of the posthuman, however, this problem ought to disappear, for there will no longer be a gap between our ‘manifest image’ of ourselves (as ‘humans’ with ‘minds’) and our ‘scientific image’ of ourselves (as ‘machines’). It seems, then, that the ‘akratic culture’ is merely an intermediary stage. Humans used to believe that the sun orbited the earth. We do not believe this any longer, but not because we were ever convinced of the claim that the earth orbits the sun. No, we inherited this belief as part of our world-picture. The menace of the BBT is the idea that the same shift in world-picture is going to occur with regard to ourselves—but with the key difference that, in the case of ourselves, the only way to square our knowledge with our experience entails transforming that experience such that we are no longer ourselves, no longer human.
Yet—and here’s my main point—what does it mean to be ‘human’? A survey of intellectual history suggests not only that the ‘intuitive’ conception of the human against which Bakker pits the BTT is a contingent artifact of a particular cultural tradition, but also that it is in fact a relative novelty in human history. It is a novelty not so much in its particulars as in the purity of their expression. Some of the most prominent traits of our self-understanding include autonomy and agency, intentionality and individuality. These ideas, it seems, go back to what Karl Jaspers called ‘the Axial Age,’ the original flowering of intellectual enlightenment—simultaneously yet independently—in Greece, India, and China. The Axial Age saw the emergence of a conception of the human that our more recent Western enlightenment spent several centuries refining. Prior to the Axial Age, it seems that ‘consciousness’ did not ‘appear’ to human beings the way it is said to ‘appear’ to us today. Even more recently—and still today, in most places—the enlightenment conception was typically diluted with something more like a pre-enlightenment conception.
The easiest way to differentiate the two conceptions is with respect to their views regarding practical agency. Bruno Snell argued, in his fascinating book The Discovery of the Mind, that “Homer’s man does not yet regard himself as the source of his own decisions; that development was reserved for tragedy… [P]rimitive man… has not yet roused himself to an awareness of his own freedom.” We can of course quibble endlessly over the accuracy of Snell’s claims; but if we take evolution seriously, then we’re bound to suppose that there is some similar sort of story to be told. The important point here is that Snell’s book is an account of the discovery of our enlightened natures: the discovery that we are free, autonomous individuals, ‘in the world but not of the world’ (or ‘locally nonlocal,’ as Bakker would say). In a reversal with astounding implications, the pre-enlightened ‘manifest image’ of Snell’s Homeric humanity, which once-upon-a-time gave way (at least in part) to a ‘scientific image’ that was given voice by tragedians and was later refined by philosophers and theologians—thereby becoming, in time, a new manifest image—is now itself giving way to a ‘scientific image’ that can be seen as a reversion to something much closer to the ‘manifest image’ of Homer’s time!
The enlightened conception of the human, it seems, was in all likelihood not a discovery at all, but an invention—and an artistic invention, at that. As this broad historical sketch makes plain, abandoning the invented enlightenment conception of the human does not entail endorsing the conception of the human that is said to follow from the BBT. To claim otherwise is to open oneself to the ‘efficacy-of-science’ objection I discussed above. It seems, then, that the apocalyptic overtones of the BBT depend ultimately on predictions regarding possible technological applications of neuroscience that are capable of transforming the way our brains work. There may be a host of excellent arguments to support such predictions, but the fact (if it is a fact) that the supposed radicality of the BBT depends on such predictions renders it tenuous.
Demonstrating the falsity of the enlightenment conception of the human is not sufficient to determine its replacement conception, especially given the fact that there are a great many alternatives conceptions—ones far more congenial to the BBT—already in existence. Alan Watts, for instance, begins his book The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by claiming that “the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.” What we need, Watts argues, is “a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be ‘I.’” Why should we not think that such ‘new experiences’—such new ‘appearances of consciousness’—might arise? Looked at from an intellectual-historian’s perspective, we might say: Why should we not think that the BBT, far from being the last theory in the history of philosophy, is merely a doorway to a new kind of philosophizing? Doesn’t it remain an open question, even given the BBT, just how exactly we conceive of ourselves? It seems to me that the answer to this question is yes, in which case the ‘radicality’ of the BBT is either (a) dependent on possible future events (viz., regarding technological applications of neuroscience) going a particular way, with particular results, or (b) the implausible notion that there is such a thing as ‘human nature’ that can be ‘discovered’ by means of any known scientific or philosophical techniques. If our experience of ourselves is instead a sort of invention, then though the BBT theory may close down some inventive options, it is bound to open up new ones—or, as the case may be, old ones.
Watts characterizes the self-experience afforded by Eastern religious practices in the following way: “We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’ Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” Strip away the poetry and we’re left with a picture that strikes me as surprisingly congenial to the BBT. My point is not that Watts—or Hinduism generally—is right; I use him merely as an example of a different sort of self-conception, one that, like Snell’s ‘Homeric man,’ seems less at odds with the BBT than is our modern, ‘enlightened’ self-conception.
Poetry can be writ slantwise across even the ugliest and most prosaic facts—and, in doing so, can even be ‘enlightening,’ though it lies.
YES. Great post, Roger. The part that struck me particularly was your more-or-less exoneration of science from the “blind faith conundrum.” It has of course led us down some false paths in the past, but that was from poor interpretation of incomplete data. In other words, a failing of the humans, not the method. And its telling that, when corrections to scientific theories have to be made, they are still made using the scientific method.
I had an argument at work with a contractor some years ago who had the gall to call himself engineer after telling me he “didn’t care about the physics” of the problem we were discussing (spoiler alert: it was because he cared more about the money his company was going to lose if the answer he wanted wasn’t the answer I gave him). I responded much as you did above, that physics doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not, it just happens.
Speaking as one of those scientists with no philosophical sophistication you mentioned, I share your enthusiasm for the promise BBT shows. But boy oh boy will there be tough sledding ahead even should it continue to pan out. Attacking an aspect of people’s sense of self is difficult enough (you already cited Galileo being locked up for all his mischief). Attacking the entire CONCEPT of self is something else entirely. But this plays into your argument that this could lead to a new type of philosophizing. Until science inevitably starts resulting in physical alterations to our meat-brains, the current view of our sense of self is still what we are going to default to unless actively fighting against it, and even when you fight against it, you’re still doing so from within that same set of constraints. It’s turtles all the way down. Nothing that pervasive, however wrong-headed it may prove, can be deemed irrelevant. If all the world behaves as if something *is* a certain way, that’s not something you can ignore, whether it’s right or wrong. The key is, as you yourself said, to shift those intuitions using the ammunition science provides.
The part that struck me particularly was your more-or-less exoneration of science from the “blind faith conundrum.”
It’s a small point, but I’d say no, it doesn’t. And that’s from someone who’d like to see scientific methods taken up. It seems to work if you’re in favour of it, but I think anyone against it will ironically be very scientific in their analysis of that and pick up it’s a ‘well, everyone thinks that’ claim – and everyone thought the sun revolved around the earth once.
Maybe in my youth I watched to many science shows for kids (Ah, ‘The curiosity show’!), but essentially our lives are full of little scientific experiments. Even if only opening the cupboard to see if any comestibles are within. And further than this, when we see there is no food, we accept our former hopeful hypothesis is false. A disproval method.
For some reason this just doesn’t reach over to the admittedly far more complicated principles the idea of BBT rests on. I think we need to get at that whatever it is – otherwise it seems to break down to everyone thinks or jokes about pizza delivery philosophers.
Blind faith is an affront to any healthy intellectual conscience, so we must reject it.
Also I don’t know if a more subtle approach is going on than I’m aware of, but one could point out that ‘we must’ rejection of blind faith is itself a blind faith that ‘we must’ reject. I’m not quite sure how to describe the middle space of that, neither metal to a magnet embracing blind faith nor adopting a blind faith about dealing with blind faith. I guess it’s vague and like this paragraph, ends without a particular climax. Difficult communicative ground.
Roger, I’m becoming a fast admirer.
I wonder at any thoughts you might have concerning Snell’s Homeric Man leading to humankind of the Axial Age. Also, I’m very struck with the idea that consciousness as it’s experienced, the differences between Buddhist worldviews, BBT, and the ‘neurocommons’, and the similarities between the form two, reflect cortical configurations.
If practice, embodiment changes the structure of the brain, then it seems we should suppose that different lifestyles, rituals, have similar neurological structures common to them. Collections of like-minds then reflect collections of group specific, shared, neurological configurations. Different structures reflect different ways of integrating perception.
Now I’ve some personal theories that modern man is actually at a developmental disadvantage to many during the Axial Age. But there is easily an argument to string the consciousness from ‘First advent through Homeric Man to Axial Age.’ First by the changing cortical structure of certain areas based on the generational dividend – say, something as simple as the 36th generation ever to use opposable thumbs, achieves a neurological density and structure allowing for… well, any aspect of consciousness possibly, albeit constrained by structural relation. We’re only beginning to imagine how neuronal recycling might highlight the ways in which GB gives rise to heuristic and encapsulated BB, even if they aren’t using those distinctions in the literature. Then, arguably, since cultural evolution also seems to affect physical changes in structure, each and any of those might have allowed for the ongoing changing experiences and accounts of consciousness.
Lol and, of course, I’m reminded of a Bakker quote.
Cheers, Roger, good read. I’m just rapping.
“We’re a lock that opens a billion doors. The world is the great safecracker, using this or that set of circumstances as its picks. Give it enough time, and it will crack the combination and let the murder out” (LTG, Harvest. 127)
Or the Buddhist, BB, Mormon, Christian, cannibal, or American? Perhaps… Might have read LTG a couple times
.
Except in rereading I misquoted. That should reader murderer, not murder.
Lol. No words for this. Read*. Roger, apologies for flooding your post with this linguistic nonsense
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This article raise some important questions. Where does culture fit into BBT’s rejection of the manifest image? Is there a minimal idea of the self that’s common to all cultures? The Axial Age may have been the birth of the modern emphasis on the ego, but do we really want to say that there was no trace of ego in earlier peoples? We should distinguish between acting egoistically and acting in a self-consciously egoistic way because you have some theoretical understanding of the ego (the individual inner self). In any case, religion preceded 400 BCE by many thousands of years, so people in those earlier periods had some spiritual notion of the self. The point is that if there is some minimal naïve image that’s manifested in all cultural conceptions of the self, the differences between the cultures become irrelevant and BBT retains its radical implications.
Religion (in a general sense, not trying to step on anyone’s faith here) strikes me as some combination of a way to explain natural phenomena whose underpinnings are not intuitively obvious, a method by which to rationalize the randomness of a capricious universe and a means to accept the awareness of eventual mortality. Those may not be conceptions of the self as you mean them (though an awareness that “I” would cease to be at some point in the nebulous future certainly would qualify as part of a sense of self). But I think those questions are raised by all cultures at some point.
As for cultures in general, might they “simply” be complex series of emergent behavior, welling up from basic physical questions of survival and reproduction and metaphysical questions of explaining the world and death? They would be dependent on specific stimuli for specific regions (in the early going) and evolving in their own ways over time.
I think what you say here, Litg, is consistent with what I said. As long as part of the way cultures generally emerge is from neural conditions, as BBT describes them, BBT remains pretty radical because it undermines all cultures, contrary to this article. There are differences between cultures; as you say, they emerge and then they’re free to go their own way, like biological species. But all species have much in common too, depending on which branch of life they’re on. For example, mammals have similar skeletal structures, which Darwin used to show common ancestry. I think Roger Eichorn would have to show, by contrast, that cultures are incommensurable, to make his argument stick.
Is there a minimal idea of the self that is common to all cultures? That question has to be understood, of course, as elliptical for: Is there a minimal idea of the self that is common to all cultures *at all times*? I think the answer is clearly no — though it depends on how ‘minimal’ such a conception can get before the explanandum has been ‘minimalized’ out of existence. Really, though, my argument doesn’t depend on *actual* incommensurability; *possible* incommensurability is enough.
Regardless, one of my points in writing the post is that it seems that Bakker is *not* pitting the BBT against anything like a ‘minimal sense of self’; he seems quite clearly to be pitting it against a rather specific and elaborate conception of the self, what I’ve been calling the ‘enlightened’ conception. The radicality with which the BBT undermines that conception is quite extraordinary, but my question is whether the theory has similarly ‘radical’ consequences when pitted against other conceptions. Now, at this level (where we’re clearly not dealing with a ‘minimal’ self-conception), there can be little question that there is a variety of ways of understanding ourselves as human beings.
(I’m reminded of a book that’s been on my reading list for some time. I haven’t read it, but I do have a good idea what it argues. It’s Joseph Levenson’s Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Levenson argues that communism took root in China’s Confucian intellectual soil because communism presupposes a conception of the human that is more congenial to traditional Chinese thinking than is the ‘enlightened’ conception of modern Western liberalism, with its emphasis on ‘individuality,’ etc.)
Simply consider the difference between (a) conceiving of oneself (experiencing oneself *as*) an autonomous rational and moral agent, ‘in the world but not of the world,’ and (b) conceiving of oneself as an expression of the world, as the plaything of forces beyond one’s comprehension and control. Both such conceptions — and, it seems to me, both sorts of self-experience — are actual. The BBT utterly destroys all prospects for (a) to turn out as ‘true’ (or sustainable), but what about (b)? The BBT theory seems to say that ‘we’ (understood a certain way, at least) are a sort of illusion that arises from the operations of our brains. To the extent that ‘we’ exist at all, it is only as expressions of forces that lie outside of ‘us.’ But we only get the vision of the human that Scott seems to think (I emphasize SEEMS, since I don’t pretend to know the theory inside and out) follows automatically from the BBT if we join that theroy with a rather austere scientific naturalism. No doubt there are a great many excellent arguments for austere scientific naturalism — I incline in that direction myself. But if what I’m saying is right, then short of an auxiliary argument ‘proving’ the ‘framework’ of scientific naturalism, then the BBT does not, in and of itself, determine the conception of the human that follows from it — though it does place constraints on what can count as a viable self-conception. The ‘enlightened’ picture is done-for… but that hardly entails that philosophy or the ‘poetry of the soul’ are done-for.
In short, it’s not obvious to me that the BBT could not be joined with, say, a ‘no-self’ view, in which ‘we’ are simply ‘expressions of the world,’ transient waves on the great ocean of the universe. Radical? Sure. But apocalytically radical? I don’t think so.
Delavegas,
Well, I agree there are these two folk conceptions of the self, the Western and the Eastern. I think one way for RSB to go would be to say that these are two interpretations of the same experience of the self through introspection. What BBT undermines should be the layperson’s experience of his or her self, not every cultural interpretation of that experience–or at least not directly. If there’s no common experience of the self that underlies Western and Eastern cultures, and if BBT deals only with the Western conception, then I think you’ve made your case and BBT isn’t as radical as we might have thought.
If you look closely at the Eastern conception, though, I suspect you’ll find that they too have a way of recognizing what modernists call the ego. Indeed, in Buddhism the ego (the set of grasping desires) is what’s responsible for suffering, and enlightenment is realizing that there’s a deeper consciousness than what you find on the surface. Like BBT, Buddhists say that the ego is illusory, but in explaining the deeper reality of the self, they replace a neurological perspective with a mystical one. The point, though, is that Easterners too experience the ego at some level of consciousness. For many reasons, their cultures interpret that experience differently than do Westerners. In general, Western cultures are more individualistic and thus egoistic, but the West and the East aren’t incommensurable; they’ve gone in different directions from what BBT would call the common brain-generated projection of the illusory self. But the underlying, pretheoretical act of ordinary self-consciousness would have to be pretty universal; after all, our brain structures tend to be the same, so cultures should be bound by some common features. Cultures make for differences, too, but the brain’s universality comes first. Otherwise, we’re into postmodern theories of the social construction of reality, no?
I agree with you, though, that the Eastern conception is more amenable to BBT. Indeed, I can see a posthuman’s self-conception being more Eastern than Western. The key is that Easterners are less materialistic (in the sense of atomism) and so they don’t reify as much; they think of the world more in terms of processes, not of things. Assuming a posthuman, who has merged his biological form with technology, would leave behind all naïve notions of the self in favour of scientific naturalism, the posthuman would have to think of himself as part of a process, or perhaps even as a new force of nature. (I talk about this in an article I sent RSB; maybe he’ll put it up on this blog.)
It’s good to see guests of such caliber engaging on TPB, especially after the Vox/RoH skirmishes – though those yielded much in ways of information. Welcome back, Cain.
I hardly want to interrupt but I’d hazard that BBT undermines all brains equally, irregardless of culture.
@Cain
I think there are a number of confusions going on here, no doubt the result of my somewhat vague and sloppy presentation of my ideas. I think perhaps what I’m getting at can be clarified if I respond to a few of the things you wrote in your latest post. In their order of appearance:
(1) Regarding competing ‘folk conceptions of the self’: “these are two interpretations of the same experience of the self through introspection.”
–> Part of what I’m trying to get at — admittedly without being very clear — is the idea that ‘self-interpretation’ and ‘self-experience’ can plausibly be seen as _interpenetrating_, or mutually illuminating. Thus, in my view we’re not talking about ‘different interpretations of the *same* experience.’ It may be that we’re talking about different interpretations of the same underlying neurological facts, but what I’ve been trying to suggest is that we might want to distinguish between those facts and the range of experience they are capable of giving rise to.
(2) “What BBT undermines should be the layperson’s experience of his or her self, not every cultural interpretation of that experience–or at least not directly..”
Again, you want to separate ‘self-experience’ and ‘self-interpretation.’ I want to reject this, or better: I want to question this. Moreover, it strike me as incorrect to say that the BBT ‘undermines… the layperson’s experience of his or her own self…’ On the contrary, the BBT is a theory *of* the *appearance* of consciousness, i.e., it’s a theory that purports to *explain* the layperson’s experience of the self. What it undermines — or so I’m suggesting — is not the experience of the self, but a particular *interpretation* of that experience, roughly: an interpretation in which that experience is seen as (straightforwardly) ‘true,’ ‘sufficient,’ ‘whole,’ etc.
(3) “If you look closely at the Eastern conception, though, I suspect you’ll find that they too have a way of recognizing what modernists call the ego.”
–> But, again, I’d remind you that the BBT does not explain *away* ‘the ego,’ in the sense of claiming that it does *not* appear. It merely (merely!) argues that the ‘ego’ as ‘intuitively’ experienced is an illusion. But I’ve been trying to suggest (a) that there is such thing as THE one, global intuitive experience of the ego, and (b) that self-experience can be shaped by self-conceptions. Given that the BBT is simply an account of the ‘illusory’ character of the ‘ego’ (as ‘traditionally conceived’), and not an account of the ‘disappearance’ of the ‘ego-experience,’ then it would only be ‘radical’ with respect to a conceptually-shaped experience that experienced the ‘ego’ as, inter alia, ‘true,’ ‘sufficient,’ ‘whole,’ etc.
(4) “Like BBT, Buddhists say that the ego is illusory, but in explaining the deeper reality of the self, they replace a neurological perspective with a mystical one. The point, though, is that Easterners too experience the ego at some level of consciousness.”
–> Regarding the last sentence: again, the BBT is a theory of the *appearance* of consciousness, so it does not ‘undermine’ the bare experience of the self. As for the first sentence, this is precisely my point: the BBT seems to rest its radicality on a commitment an austere scientific naturalism; but short of that (which is not a simple entailment of the BBT), then it seems to remain an open possibility that the BBT allows for ‘mystical interpretations.’
(5) “Assuming a posthuman, who has merged his biological form with technology, would leave behind all naïve notions of the self in favour of scientific naturalism, the posthuman would have to think of himself as part of a process, or perhaps even as a new force of nature.”
–> A number of interesting things here. First, why should we think (without begging the question) that a ‘posthuman’ whose ‘biological form’ has been technologically supplemented will abandon his naive self-conception for a scientific-naturalistic conception? My point, again, is that the BBT in and of itself seems to underdetermine this move. In order to underwrite it, you need a separate argument both for the ‘ultimate, exclusive truth’ of scientific naturalism AND for the claim that a technologically-modified human being would have a self-experience that experientially ‘revealed’ this truth. There may be interesting and even convincing arguments for these claims, but they would be separate arguments — *and* it seems that the BBT gives us reasons to be suspicious of our ability to establish truths by means of arguments of this sort. They are not, after all, themselves claims made on the basis of the scientific method!
Secondly, given the underdetermination of self-experience (if we allow that self-experience can be conceptually molded) by facts, even neural facts — and this, I would add, seems like a consequence built into the BBT itself, since (if I understand it correctly) it argues that our self-experience is a consequence of NO neural facts whatsoever! — then I don’t see why it would not be open to a ‘post-human’ to think of herself in ‘mystical’ terms. As you put it, “part of a process, or perhap even as a new force of nature.” The ‘individual,’ then (from the neural ground up), is an ‘expression of the world,’ a wave on the ocean of the universe, etc.
In short, I still see no reason to think that such self-conceptions — and the ‘philosophizing’ and ‘poetry of the soul’ that would create and sustain them — are foreclosed by the BBT.
Delavagus,
First, a clarification: I’m arguing not my view here, but what I think is the strongest defense of BBT, to test the two sides.
It looks like the main disagreement here is about the extent to which the content of experience is determined by culture or some other level of interpretation. Strictly speaking, I think your points (1) and (2) contradict each other. First you say that self-experience and self-interpretation “interpenetrate,” but then you say that BBT undermines only a certain interpretation rather than an experience of the self. If the two interpenetrate, the one falls with the other.
My understanding of BBT is that it says the illusions that make up a naïve picture of the self have neurofunctional rather than cultural causes. That’s supposed to support the theory: it can explain why the illusions arise and why they’re so hard to get rid of, because they’re based on how the brain (rather than culture) works. Thus, assuming everyone has the same brain structures, everyone should be led to the same illusions (apparent experiences). If culture somehow intervenes, BBT is false: that is, the neurofunctional mechanisms it posits to explain how the illusions arise don’t exist. Thus, a proponent of BBT needs to distinguish between the interpretation of experience and the experience itself. The latter would be naively explained in terms of qualia, the contents of conscious states, whereas the interpretation would consist of theories or stories we tell to explain those states. Clearly, there are many possible interpretations of what we experience when we attempt to model the brain without the benefit of science, but according to BBT (as I understand it), there’s a universal, human experience of that self-modeling. That experience is caused by the various neurofunctional mechanisms BBT posits (medial neglect, occlusion, asymptosis, etc).
For example, in “How to Build a First Person,” RSB says “In the absence of information pertaining to our (medial) causal relation to our environment, we experience aboutness. In the absence of discriminations (in the absence of information) we experience wholes. In the absence of information regarding the insufficiency of information, we presume sufficiency….This is all just to say that the intentional, holistic, sufficient, and asymptotic structure of the first person simply follows from the fact that the brain is biomechanical.” There seems no room here for culture to step in between the brain’s functioning and the experience of the self. Culture enters only at a separate, interpretive level, according to BBT.
So what would BBT undermine? Is the illusion at the experiential or the interpretive level? From my discussions with RSB, I’d say BBT implies that while the theory-neutral experience of the ego exists, the universal nonscientific characterization of that experience is false (note that the distinction between true and false is itself part of the naïve characterization). So you’re right that BBT grants the existence of the appearance of an ego, but BBT denies that the ego as such exists. In other words, BBT does have ontological consequences, since it denies positive ontological status to what the naïve interpretation of the self says exists. Folk psychology posits intentionality and normativity to explain how the self appears to itself, and BBT denies that there is any such thing as intentionality or normativity. There is only the illusion of such things. BBT relegates those concepts to the dustbin of history that contains the many superstitions and presumptions that science has made obsolete.
Again, then, to make your case I think you’ve got to show that culture does intervene between the brain and self-experience. That is, you’ve got to defend a constructionist view of mental reality; you’ve got to blur the line between metaphysics and epistemology and take up some kind of metaphysical idealism. You’ve got to say, for example, that what Westerners and Easterners experience at the mental (as opposed to the neural) level differs because those contents are culturally determined. BBT assumes philosophical naturalism and thus metaphysical materialism, which are contrary to any such idealism.
I too am not defending my own view — I have none on these matters — but simply exploring possibilities. So let’s see if I can do better at explaining what I’m groping toward…
First of all, at this point I suspect that I’m running up against the limits of my understanding of the BBT. Still, it seems to me that my points are not being understood quite properly.
For instance, you say that the idea of interpretive-experiential ‘interpenetration’ contradicts the claim that the BBT can undermine an interpretation-of-self while leaving an experience-of-self intact. I think this represents a serious misunderstanding of what I’m trying to say. First, it should not be thought that my points depend on any crude sort of constructivism whereby simple acts of (re)interpretation are capable of substantively altering experience. I don’t think this is the case with respect to our experience of (the rest of) the world, nor do I think it is the case with respect to our self-experience. But that does not preclude the possibility of the interpenetration of interpretation and experience; it simply places that interpenetration at a far deeper level. Thus, a given self-experience does not simply ‘fall’ with the (mere intellectual) abandonment of a particular self-interpretation.
My point is simply this: there appear to be different modes of self-experience which can be differentiated in terms of their interpertive underpinnings. (Perhaps we need to differentiate, as Scott does in his first response to my post, between the ‘naive image,’ which you keep referring to, as the ‘manifest image,’ which is what I’m talking about.) As an example, I argued that science is capable of altering our experience of the world at apparently sub-cognitive levels, i.e., it alters our experience of the world not through convincing us of anything, but by changing our inherited ‘picture’ of how the world is. (Consider ‘primitive’ mythical modes of experience of the world vs. our ‘enlightened’ modes of experience. Do you want to say — or do you want to say that the BBT must claim — that there’s *no difference* here worth remarking?)
The picture I’m painting, as far as I can see, requires only a sort of metacognitive freedom (the freedom to ‘reflect’ in various ways upon our experience), joined with a sort of sub-cognitive theoretical picture (which partly determines what it is we meta-cognitively ‘reflect upon’ when we reflect upon our experience). I’m not sure this necessarily involves committing oneself to any sort of robust metaphysical idealism.
Nor, I should add, do I think that ‘self-experience’ requires the existence of the ego. The BBT seems to agree, since, as you say, the BBT claims that the ego ‘as such’ doesn’t exist — yet we clearly have self-experience (which is part of the explanandum of the theory). What I’m suggesting is the possibility that self-experience itself does not require the *experience* of the ego. Of course there’s a flat-footed reading of this where it comes out as an oxymoron, but all what we need to do is expand our notion of the ‘self.’ If the ‘self’ is simply defined as “what *we*, meaning literally *us*, modern Westerners, experience the self to be,” then I think the question I’m raising has been begged.
Secondly, you say “BBT assumes philosophical naturalism” — which is precisely one of the things that, I think, leaves open the possibility of philosophizing in light of the BBT
Delavagus,
You say that “self-experience itself does not require the *experience* of the ego.” I think that RSB would agree: the perceptual illusion of the ego (experience of the conscious, unified, autonomous self with mental representations and values) is persistent and global but not absolutely permanent. Indeed, if we study cognitive science, we can see our way around thinking of the self in that intuitive way, and we realize that what we experienced when we thought we were encountering the ego was really the set of mechanisms that BBT posits, such as informatic neglect. The facts of the experience remain the same, but the theories change, as can the resulting behaviour and culture.
This is all very tricky because there are a lot of categories to keep straight. Crucially, as you know, there’s the metaphysical question of what exists when we experience the self, and then there are semantic and epistemic questions of how best to understand what we posit. Assuming, then, you agree we should keep these categories separate and avoid any kind of metaphysical idealism, it looks like the disagreement turns on what you mean by the “interpenetration” of interpretation and experience. According to BBT, I think, the self-experience *begins* with the illusion that Westerners call, roughly, the ego, which Easterners may differently name. We can also have altered or transcendent states of consciousness, but I take BBT’s point to be that the brain causes everyone to experience themselves in the same *default* way. Cultures then develop and interpret that experience differently, emphasizing some features and recommending different courses of action.
Now, if you deny metaphysical idealism and keep the psychological facts of experience separate from how they’re understood by theories or myths, you should grant at least the possibility that BBT is “radical” in that it goes after the default, universal introspective experience of the self. Your criticism seems then to be that culture intervenes in what you call the interpenetration. But either the facts and the interpretations are separate or they’re not. Can you say more, then, about the interpenetration?
You distinguish between primitive and modern “modes of experience,” but this word “mode” elides the distinction at issue. Are there different psychological facts on the table or just radically different theories and names for understanding those facts? Then there’s the question of the modern interpretation of the primitive interpretation. In any case, a premodern person might use various metaphors to explain what she introspects, but underlying those will be the brain-based illusion. For example, she may compare the spirit to something ethereal like rising smoke, and the spirit’s supposed insubstantiality will be a matter of informatic neglect: the self seems detached from the body because when we try to model the self, we lack information pertaining to the brain, and so the brain’s model of itself is very thin on detail.
The point is that just because a culture doesn’t talk about the ego doesn’t mean its members’ default self-experience is of something other than what modernists call the ego. Of course, this is an empirical issue. We’d need an example of a culture whose self-experience is so far from being of what we’d call the conscious, free, unified self that it’s an overstretch to talk of the universal, default perceptual illusion.
Mike Hillcoat,
What are the Vox/RoH skirmishes, I wonder?
The vox day blog and the requires only hate blog. I’m not sure how to describe each, but certainty runs rife on each even as much as eithers certainty is incompatable with the other. The former describes himself as a super intelligence. The latter did a ‘review’ of The Darkness that Comes Before, after having read a whole five pages. Annoyingly (to me) the vox day site also reviewed that book, but did a more thorough job of it and even gave a rating around what Scott said he’d give (though Scott undercuts himself, obviously).
Bruno Snell argued, in his fascinating book The Discovery of the Mind, that “Homer’s man does not yet regard himself as the source of his own decisions;
…
The important point here is that Snell’s book is an account of the discovery of our enlightened natures: the discovery that we are free, autonomous individuals
I wonder if this was an inspiration for Jaynes’s Bicameralism?
Shiyit. All the interesting stuff happens when I’m outta town. Awesome post.
Let me rehearse your argument, Roger, just to make sure I’m not misinterpreting you:
1) You concede what might be called ‘scientific implacability,’ it’s nasty habit of rolling over philosophy that seeks, no matter how minimally, to constrain it.
2) In this respect you concede BBT it’s empirical credentials (whatever they turn out to be). In other words, you acknowledge that transcendental arguments against the possibility of BBT have no teeth.
3) But, you realize (quite shrewdly) that BBT as I present it, is more than just an empirical possibility, it’s an empirical possibility swaddled in numerous interpretations, among them being my contention regarding it’s radicality. The assertion of radicality, of course, is intrinsically historical.
4) And thence, we can see that what BBT threatens to overturn is arguably artifactual, and that its demolition may do nothing more than throw us back to the drawing board, or as you put it:
Let me begin with my own concession. I think you’re picking up on an ambiguity that has haunted almost all of my posts on the topic, going all the way back to “The Last Magic Show,” namely, to put it in Sellars’ terms, the degree to which I’m ‘debunking’ the manifest image, which is obviously an elaborate historical construct, or what Sellars terms the original image, the implicit, pretheoretical mind that millennia of ‘makings explicit’ (many of which scientistic) have transformed into the manifest image.
So, yes, I do think you’ve put your finger on an important problem. But I think you might be overplaying your hand at the end, depending on how you meant the passage above.
On a constructivist reading of what you’re saying, where our self-conception ‘can be whatever we (as a community) choose,’ I’m not sure whether it’s anything a naturalist such as myself (or you!) needs to worry about. Science will eventually sort out the specific nature/nurture dynamic in our explicit self-conception, and I think it’s pretty evident that the constructivist will lose (or has already, more like). Most all the particulars of BBT fall out of hypothesized structural features of the brain. I’m not a fan of ‘retro-prediction,’ but for what it’s worth, it predicts that acausal intentionality will characterize any pretheoretic (let alone prescientific) conception of mind. What we can think is constrained by our neurophysiology–obviously (budgies can’t do algebra, and we can’t do X, etc.). Likewise, what we can think easily is constrained by our neurophysiology–cognitive psychology has already produced a mountain of (much of it cross-cultural) evidence to this effect. Buddhist thought famously rejects Cartesian subjectivity, going so far as to characterize ‘mind’ the way I often do here, as a ‘fragmentary waystation,’ but from what limited exposure I have had, this rejection of ‘self’ comes nowhere near to the wholesale rejection of intentionality suggested by BBT.
The upshot is that unless there’s something ‘special’ about the human corner of nature aside from it’s complexity, then ‘human nature’ is as susceptible to scientific explanation as anything else in nature. On BBT, how we conceive of ourselves isn’t even ‘an open matter’ if we ignore the science. We remain blind to the neurofunctional context of conscious experience no matter what… just for starters.
On a Dennettian reading (which I’m less inclined to think is what you meant, but I consider far-and-away the stronger of the two) all BBT requires is that we revise our existing conception of mind in a way consonant with the picture it paints. I’ve actually spilled quite a few pixels on this particular topic, precisely because it is so attractive. In fact, my next post considers this issue in detail. The point is that the manifest image is a product of metacognition, an evolved, neurophysiological based capacity (like our ability to speak or love or judge or… Pinker has an enormous list of universal human traits at the end of Blank Slate), and as such is constrained: there are only so many basic ways for us to intuitively conceive of ourselves absent institutionalized scientific investigation.
So all in all, even though I am in ‘historical hawk’ with BBT thus far, I think its radicality is a pretty robust conclusion to draw given what the cognitive sciences have shown us thus far…
A few comments…
It did not intend to burden myself with a ‘constructivist’ view according to which ‘our self-conception can be whatever we, as a community, choose.’
Frankly, I’m always puzzled whenever the notion of ‘constructivism’ is tossed around, since I have difficulty pinning any paritcular meaning on it — it seems even more flexible than most airy philosophical notions. In a sense, I’m suggesting something that could be thought of as ‘constructivist’: that our experience-of-self is partly shaped by (‘constructed on the basis of’) concepts, i.e., that our self-experience, much like our experience of the (rest of the) world, is theory-laden, shot through with conceptual content. But it doesn’t follow from this that our genuine self-conceptions can be whatever we want them to be. I’m too much of a Heideggerian to think that: we cannot simply step outside of our inherited backgrounds.
That said, self-conceptions — and with them, I’m suggesting — experiences-of-self do change over time, in tandem. As I argued concerning science and world-pictures, these changes *just happen*. They do not seem to result from being convinced of anything; they do not seem to be the direct result of any argument, theory, or bit of poetry written at some particular time. Thus, I’m not ‘Dennettian,’ as you describe it. Perhaps there are ways of revising our existing self-conceptions so as to make them consonant with the latest conclusions of science; but in my view, such activity, in and of itself, is effectively pointless. Dennett can reconceive until the cows come home; it will have at best only a small and indirect impact on whatever self-conceptions are actually taken up by people in the course of historical development. It follows from what I had to say about science and world-pictures that it seems to me that this process it outside of our control: whatever science decides will ‘shape us’ no matter what Dennett or anyone else has to say about it.
So how *should* my comments be read? My main target, recall, is your claim that the BBT will put a stop to all philosophizing — that it will effectively shut down that sort of speculation with respect to the human. Granted, you amend philosophy to ‘… as traditionally conceived,’ and I’m unclear on the scope of such a category. Still, my interest is in philosophizing as such, as a whole, and I take it that, at the end of the day (perhaps at the beginning of the day too), you think the BBT theory will do away with *that*, not just some ‘tradition’ of philosophizing. This is what I’m not convinced of.
My position (or better: my question) might be restated this way (this is a bit of a mess, but hopefully not entirely incoherent):
(1) The BBT theory is a theory of the appearance of consciousness: a theory that furnishes an explanation not only of consciousness but also of how it appears to be. In the other words, the BBT explains something true (‘what consciousness is’) as well as something false (‘what consciousness appears to us to be’).
(2a) The positive side of the BBT depends on a host of supplementary theoretical commitments, including a commitment to an austere scientific naturalism.
(2b) The ‘conceptual framework’ in which the BBT theory is developed and presented is not itself a consequence of the BBT, nor does it simply follow from the neurological facts appealed to by the theory.
(2c) Hence, it remains an open question — or at least a separate question — whether we ought to accept the ‘conceptual framework’ in question.
(2d) Thus, to the extent that the conception-of-the-human said to follow from the BBT depends on this ‘conceptual framework,’ then that conception is underdetermined by the BBT itself: we can accept the BBT theory without endorsing any particular view of the human (though of course the BBT would place constraints on what counts as a viable self-conception).
(3a) The negative side of the BBT purports to explain something that appears to be historically variable, e.g., ‘how consciousness appears to us to be,’ or simply how we experience ourselves as human beings. The question arises: is it equally effective at showing all possible self-experiences to be illusory?
(3b) Given the possibility (if it is a possibility) that our experience of ourself is at least partly shaped by conceptual content, then it seems possible, at least in principle, to experience oneself *as an illusion*, as it were, much as it is possible to experience oneself as ‘an instrument of God.’
(3c) Given 2c-d, it seems to follow that there are, at least in principle, any number of possible ‘conceptual frameworks’ within which one could place the BBT and that different conceptual framework would give rise to different conceptions of the human (since, in my view, conceptions-of-the-human do not arise directly from the BBT, but rather from the BBT + conceptual framework/auxilary theoretical commitments).
(3d) Thus, it seems that the BBT allows for the possibility of future philosophizing in light of its conclusions. When you write, “On BBT, how we conceive of ourselves isn’t even ‘an open matter’ if we ignore the science,” that may be right, but (if I understand you correctly) not in such a way as to determine how we do actually end up conceiving of ourselves in light of the BBT.
Short of technical intervention to transform the way the brain works, we’re still left with basically the same brains we had before the BBT came along. I don’t see how it can be maintained that the BBT in itself is capable of forestalling the possibility of developing, say, a mystical conception of the human that supervenes on the same facts that, given a different conceptual frame, would seem to underwrite nihilism.
Which is why I asked for clarification: “the implausible notion that there is such a thing as ‘human nature’ that can be ‘discovered’ by means of any known scientific or philosophical techniques” seemed like an uncharacteristic claim! It’s certainly a strong one. And you’re right, toothlessness is the biggest problem for the Dennettian approach.
The philosophy that BBT signals the end of is transcendental philosophy – which is to say, fairly all philosophy as historically conceived. Philosophical speculation will continue, certainly – and I have no doubt the bulk of the activity will be devoted to, as you say, finding some workable ‘conceptual framework’ consistent with what neuroscience has to say (and failing, because this is Dennett’s project). But it will be caught up in an empirical straightjacket, and so will drastically limit the possibilities for ‘neuro-mysticism’ the way biological science limits the possibilities for bio-mysticism (‘Gaiea’?), for example. Put differently, the lines between what counts as cognitive and what counts as wishful thinking will be much more sharply drawn, with the fairly the whole of intentional, dogmatic philosophy clearly on the wishful thinking side.
But I take your point: I really only have my nose pressed at the glass at this point. Who the hell knows what lies around any potential post-intentional bend? Pumping the balloon with so much drama is almost certainly premature at this point…
You might almost think I write epic fantasy or something…
Cool. I think we understand each other — or at least, I think you understand what I’m trying to say at least as well as *I* do, which is quite imperfectly. As I mentioned to Cain, I’m not pimping here for any *alternative* account of the BBT, since I don’t have any fixed views on the subject. All I have are questions, uncertainties. In a sense, my post is just an exploration of a particular line of thought that followed from thinking: “Scott seems awfully sure of himself here… Shouldn’t he be a bit more skeptical?”
But let me acknowledge that asking this sort of question — having my skeptical qualms — does not directly or positively contribute to the development of the BBT, which is what you’ve been engaged in doing these past months. In other words, I want to acknowledge that my post is essentially one big ‘aside.’ Put another way, my concerns here — as is so often the case with me — are ‘meta’-level concerns. As such, I’m not under the illusion that they speak directly to the first-order business of developing the BBT theory, which should be continued apace.
Sometimes, though, it can be refreshing to break up the hard first-order work with a little second-order reflection.
One final note: You will raise MANY eyebrows by claiming that ‘fairly all philosophically as historically conceived’ can be characterized as ‘transcendental philosophy.’ I think I know what you mean, more or less, but it is a deeply contentious historical claim, one worth exploring in its own right. (I suspect that it’s in the area of this sort of historico-metaphilosophical ‘priming’ for or ‘framing’ of the BBT that I might actually be able to contribute to its presentation…)
This post is eating responses
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Wow, TPB must not like links or my campus IP.
Cain, I’ve tried a number of times to respond to your question. If you are interested in the VOX/RoH engagements, the first real instance of back and forth starts with In Contempt of Contemplation (August 2011), dies down within a couple posts, and then picks up again with Misanthropology 101 (February 2012). Its a shame that Vox deletes his comments because a number of us went to Vox Day to engage the Dread Ilk.