Aphorisim of the Day: Some argue against yesterday. Some argue against tomorrow. But everyone kisses ass when it comes to today.
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‘Continuity bias’ is a term I coined years back to explain how it could be that so many people could remain so unaware of the kinds of fundamental upheaval that are about to engulf human civilization. I sit with my three year-old daughter watching little robots riding bicycles, walking tightropes, doing dance routines and so on, thinking how when I was her age the world was electrified by the first handheld calculators. So I ask myself, with more than a little apprehension, I assure you, What can my daughter expect?
The only remotely plausible answer to this question is almost entirely empty, and yet all the more consequential for it: What can my daughter expect? Something radically different than this…
Something fundamentally discontinuous.
To crib concepts used by Reinhart Kosselleck to characterize Neuzeit, or modernity, we are living in an age where our ‘horizon of expectation’ has all but collapsed into our ‘space of experience.’ My daughter will live through an age when the traditional verities of human experience will likely be entirely discredited by neuroscientific fact, and where the complexities and capacities of our machines will almost certainly outrun our own complexities and capacities. And this, as much as anything else, is the reason why I find any kind of principled defence of traditionalism at once poignant and alarming: poignant because I too belonged to that tradition and I too mourn its imminent passing, and alarming because it does not bode well when the change at issue is so fundamental that the very institutions charged with critiquing the tradition are now scrambling to rationalize its defence.
So it was I found myself shaking my head while reading Jason Bartulis’s recent defence of nooconservativism on Nonsite.org. I decided to write on it because of the way it exemplifies what I’ve been calling the ‘separate-but-equal strategy’ and how it tends to devolve into question-begging and special pleading. But since head-shaking whilst reading is never a good sign, I encourage people to challenge my interpretation, particularly if you find Bartulis’s position appealing. Maybe I am overlooking something. Against all reason, thousands of people are now reading these posts, more than enough for me to become sensitive to the consequences of any oversights on my part.
Bartulis summarizes his position thus:
I’ve been arguing …. that engineering questions can only be answered in engineering terms. Conversely, I’ve tracked the infelicities attending the importation of the explanatory vocabulary of the natural sciences into human sciences to demonstrate why engineering explanations can’t work as explanations to normative questions. Thinking they can is one way of committing, not the Intentional, but the Naturalistic Fallacy in (literary) epistemology and in the philosophy of mind that subtends most attempts to make cognition a category for literary and cultural analysis.
Now since I once defended a position similar to this, I understand the straightforward (if opportunistic) nature of its appeal: ‘Your cognition has its yardsticks, my cognition has mine, therefore keep your yardstick away from my cognition.’ But it really is a peculiar argument, if you think about. For instance, it’s a given that functional explanations and intentional explanations are conceptually incommensurable. This has been part of the problem all along. And yet Bartulis (like Zizek, only less dramatically) has convinced himself that this problem is itself the solution.
Bartulis is arguing that because the functional and the intentional are incommensurable, the traditional intentional discursive domain is secure. Why? Because once you acknowledge the cognitive autonomy of intentional discourse, you can label any functional explanatory incursion into that discourse’s domain as ‘fallacious,’ a version of G. E Moore’s ‘Naturalistic Fallacy,’ to be precise. A kind of ‘category mistake.’ And why should we acknowledge the cognitive autonomy of intentional discourse? Well, because only it can cognize its domain. As he puts it:
My point, of course, is an anti-reductionist one. No amount of mapping of which synaptic vectors alight when can explain why I think that I should interpret a passage (or character, or author) one way rather than another. Nor can visual mapping, in and of itself, explain what I mean to do by interpreting a passage one way rather than another. And that’s because neither normative significance nor meaning is something that synapses, simply, have, and so normative significance and meaning aren’t things that we can, simply, see. Stating the position a bit more carefully: at least in the case of human perception—say, listening to a work of art or, more ordinarily, conversing with a familiar foe—there certainly are cases when normative significance and meaning can be seen and heard straightaway. Moreover, there are interpretive contexts when would-be explainers immediately perceive, and so can intelligibly claim to know, that a given subject is herself immediately perceiving the meaning of some object. But our best account of those instances proceeds…by placing those instances in the space of reasons.
Here we can clearly see how the separate but equal strategy requires that the nooconservative make a virtue out of ignorance and the failure of imagination. I could pick this passage apart phrase by phrase, fault Bartulis for cherry-picking neurofunctional elements that rhetorically jar with traditional conceits (as opposed to ‘tracking infelicities’), or I could take him at his word, and devise the very interpretations that he finds unimaginable, argue–along lines at least as plausible as his own–that ‘normative significance’ is something that only neurofunctional accounts will allow us to cognize. Why, for instance, should the subpersonal prove any less appropriate than the psychoanalytic?
But all I really need to do is invoke the what I’ve called the Big Fat Pessimistic Induction: Given that, throughout its historical metastasis, science (and functional explanation) has utterly revolutionized every discursive domain it has colonized, why should we presume the soul will prove to be any different? What plucks us from the sum of natural explanation, and so guarantees the cognitive autonomy of your tradition?
The fact that Bartulis needs to recognize is that these are questions that only science can decisively answer. The only way we have of knowing whether the brain sciences will revolutionize the humanities is to wait and see whether the brain sciences will revolutionize the humanities. He and innumerable other traditionalists will float claim after territorial claim only to watch them vanish over the cataract of academic fashion, while the sciences of the brain will continue their grim and inexorable march, leveraging techniques and technologies that will command public and commercial investment, not to mention utterly remake the ‘human.’ Once again, it’s a given that functional explanations and intentional explanations are conceptually incommensurable. This is a big part of the problem. The other part lies in the power of functional explanations, the fact that they, unlike the ‘dramatic idiom’ of intentionality, actually allow us to radically remake the natural world–of which we happen to be a part. The sad fact is that Bartulis and his ilk are institutionally overmatched, that the contest was never equal, but only appeared so, simply because the complexities of the brain afforded their particular prescientific discourse a prolonged reprieve from the consequences of scientific inquiry.
“How uncanny,” Bartulis writes of those bemoaning scientific literacy in the humanities, “to find the language of change, force, and progress surfacing in an intellectual domain whose defining critical gesture, for better or worse, have involved critiques of those very terms as they operate in liberal discourse and other Enlightenment ideologies.” But this is simply a canard. He thinks he’s rapping critical knuckles–‘You should know better!’–when in point of fact he’s underscoring his own ignorance. Personally, I think science will cut our collective throats (using, of course, enough anaesthesia to confound the event with bliss and transcendence). Science builds, complicates, empowers, no matter what one thinks of Old Enlightenment ideologies. And the fact that it does so blindly does more to impugn his nooconservative stance than support it.
So, to return to the quote above: Yes, it is the case that we often, in those instances, enjoy the ‘feeling of knowing.’ But we now know the feeling itself is an indicator of nothing (fools, after all, have their convictions). We also now know that deliberative metacognition is severely limited: veridical auto-theorization is clearly not something our brains evolved to do. And we have no clue whatsoever whether ‘our best account of those instances proceeds by placing those instances in the space of reasons.’
‘But you’re arguing in the space of reasons now!’ Bartulis would almost certainly cry, assuming that I necessarily mean what he means when I use concepts like ‘use’ (even though I do not).
To which, I need only shrug and say, ‘It’s a long shot, but you could be right.’
I wanna believe, but traditions and their centrisms generally don’t fare that well once science jams its psychopathic foot in the door.
Seems to be exactly my thoughts on this issue – just a lot more eloquent than what I can express
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It seems like almost everyone inside the humanities refuses actually face the bull of science, take it by the horns. Instead they just dance around it like some stupid matador in a shiny outfit…
So long as they wear the mickey mouse hat…
What you’re seeing is groupishness in action. People are far more interested in who’s listening than in what’s being said. It’s the fact that academics think they’re exception that transforms the sand they bury their heads in into concrete.
Scott wrote:
“I wanna believe, but traditions and their centrisms generally don’t fare that well once science jams its psychopathic foot in the door.”
Yes, but science is a NICE psychopath, like Dexter. Or Hannibal Lecter. Well, he wasn’t so nice, but at least he had a sense of humor. (Not so coincidentally, both Dexter and Hannibal are scientists.)
Well, at least psychopaths lend themselves to interpretation as intentional systems.
Well, first and foremost, I’d like to toot my favorite definition-horns (vuvuzelae?
) since I do still think that the way I conceive intentionality and the way a hotdog-eating philosopher conceives intentionality are different (though reading you has caused me to refine my position a bit).
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In a comment long ago, you suggested that one could “do away” with term like “goal” in favor of a term like “behavioral attractor”, and while I don’t necessarily disagree, I’ve got to ask, do attractors (behavioral and otherwise) exist ? For that matter, do sets exist ? Methinks that intentionality and other such shenanigans share a lot with somewhat abstract constructs. For that matter, do databases exist? (you can describe a “database” as a combination of magnetic domain states, transistor states, and such… but would that mean that there is literally no such thing as a database behind this blog of yours ?
Now, getting more more on topic…
I radically disagree with your assessment of scientific outlook as “psychopathic” and your assessment of the effects of possible future neuroscientific revelations.
Irrespective of what “values”, “goals” and “intentionality” really are, the very knowledge of that fact isn’t going to “kill” us in any meaningful way. For as long as I remember myself, I’ve always considered humans to be just another kind of machines (extremely complex ones, but machines nonetheless), and always considered myself as one of those machines.
That did not, as far as I can tell, affect my relationships with other human beings, or social integration.
I see no particular reason why the revelation regarding nonexistence of intentionality (whatever that is
) would cause me to go on a rape spree or something. The only things “future neuroscientific revelations” might cut the figurative throats of are several branches of philosophy (continental especially).
Why would anyone miss those?
I see no particular reason why the revelation regarding nonexistence of intentionality (whatever that is
) would cause me to go on a rape spree or something.
Do you think the line dividing between doing something else Vs doing that is thin? Perhaps made even more thin by such revelation?
Well, it probably is thin (myself, I am quite fascinated, and maybe a bit concerned, about the way my own mind works in this regard – being a sadist, I find that enjoying infliction of pain upon people you have sex with while sincerely caring about their well-being and their consent presents a perplexing non-linearity of values. What exactly brought about that assert (consent = 1) statement ? Who knows…)
I just don’t think there is any reason to believe that revelation regarding nonexistence of “intentional” would somehow make that line thinner.
Of course, it may the that it’s just my attitude towards other people that is not dependent on neurophilosophical curiosities, and everyone else will go fucking bonkers the moment they read the article in Neuron or whatever
Well, I heard an account (I think from a Richard Dawkins book) of a largely christian town, who had the most looting when the police went on strike.
You might think of yourself as radical due to habits – it’d be ironic if you were actually more restrained.
I don’t think of myself as “radical” (radical is rather meaningless anyways), I just find my own value system to be fairly nonlinear and thus a bit perplexing. Not that there’s any problem in that, nobody said value systems have to be linear.
By the way, if you think about it, nonlinearities in human behaviour are incredibly common – and whenever present, they are always perceived as counterintuitive and confusing. Consider the discussion regarding (apparent lack of) effects of porn that we had on this very blog a while ago. If one’s “intuitive” model of human mind involves a kind of linear extrapolation of behaviors as its default operation mode, it would seem that porn should have negative effects. However, that hypothesis turns out to be unsupported by evidence – humans being weird like that.
My point here is that until we have a brain-debugger to actually do a stack backtrace and track a person’s values to their “proximal causes”, most claims about some events or entities undermining the “intellectual basis” / “cultural roots” of civilization will remain untenable.
I see no particular reason to believe that sustainability of a certain form of philosophical discourse is crucial for humanity (though I do think I see why some philosophers might like to believe that
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I dunno – I like feminism. But didn’t that undermine the ideas women don’t get to vote? Didn’t it undermine that they do what their man says and they work in the home? And how long have those values gone on for previously, in a historical sense (and still do in many parts of the world)?
I’d like it if only the things I like can undermine values I don’t like.
But then again maybe the intentionality idea itself is so emotionally bland, it might not spike much at all.
Though engaging the bland if it enters a profit is definately what corporations would do.
Intentionality is what the world looks like when viewed through a human straw. My point all along has been that the scientific disenchantment of the natural world isn’t going to make any magical exception when it comes to us. Are you saying that science actually cares? Otherwise the relationship between intellectual beliefs and the ways we treat one another is supercomplex. The fact that your intellectual belief that humans are machines hasn’t impacted your treatment of humans in any way you can fathom isn’t surprising. But to suggest that scientifically discrediting the entire intellectual foundation of human civilization isn’t going to have dramatic consequences strikes me as implausibly optimistic. It could be the case that it saves us, that it will allow us to move finally move past our traditions at a time when technological change requires unprecedented ideological versatility. But my guess is that it will lead to the kind of Akratic society depicted in Neuropath.
I am not convinced “classical” normative discourse in its current state is actually the intellectual foundation of civilization, and not a coral of lies, misconceptions, and delusions (coral of lies and delusions… that’s pretty poetic lol
) that is almost literally nourished by ignorance.
I am not convinced human attitudes towards ought stem from tenability of sophisticated philosophical arguments.
We just end up wired up this-a-way or that-a-way (and we don’t get much say about which way).
And I see no reason why the revelation of which exact way I happen to be wired would somehow induce a radical change in my attitudes or behaviors.
Why should “reading my own source code” change me so profoundly, let alone “antisocially” ?
I agree it will have consequences and if they are large enough (and they will be because canny opportunists will take advantage of these new revelations the way canny opportunists always do), they will impact the average person to a noticeable degree. Where I have doubts is that the average person would connect the consequence to the unraveling of the psyche knot that science is currently picking at. Look at the amount of willful ignorance at work in other areas where science has already settled on a consensus yet public perception remains very much split. Climate change would be the obvious present-day example. It’s no coincidence that the “everything is fine” side of that argument has an easier time gaining traction. The same will be true here. The “your free will is imaginary” side of the argument is never going to have the comfort-food appeal of the “you have free will” side. People will look for any excuse to avoid the unpleasant truths. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the core points of BBT.
I guess what I’m getting at in my meandering way is that if the new neuroscience survives the rigors of scrutiny and becomes universally accepted fact (in the scientific community), the vast majority of people will still go about their days under the continued grips of the illusion. It’s long been that way for illusions a lot less fundamental than this one.
I think this is in part a fair point. It just comes with some dags clinging onto it.
I mean, you call science a psychopath. Would you ask Neil Cassidy for advice on how to live your life? Indeed, engineering explanations can’t work as explanations for the normative, unless you let Neil into your heart. Benjamin Cain seems to argue something like this.
The clinging dag is that the idea this matters somehow. It’s a bit like if he said if someone has a nut allergy, then clearly there’s a principle that exists that that person does not eat nuts. Or like saying that elbows bend one way, there’s an existant principle that they will not fold the other way. Only to a degree is that true (ooh, inadvertant pun, ouch!)
If you don’t acknowledge the first part as being atleast somewhat true, then to try and argue about the second part is to try and argue Cassidy into their heart. They need teasing apart as the two seperate subjects they are.
But apart from the cling, I think he has a point in the first quote.
In other news; Nice to see 01 and Jorge back (or am I just missing Jorge from the second apocalypse forums and he’s been here regularly still…?)! How about 03?
Third is currently on assignment, but she will be back, eventually.
Man, that makes me even more curious!? Now it’s like I can skim material for that female operative I wrote for nanowrimo! Tell me more! >:)
I used psychopath as a metaphor for the institutional indifference to traditional discourse that has so distinguished science over its history, that’s all. If you value those traditions (as I do) then that indifference is malignant. If not, then it’s a matter of wait-and-see.
The thing to realize is how profoundly ‘engineering explanations’ already permeate our ‘normative contexts.’ There is no ‘separate.’
I agree, Cal: it’s good to see the old gang back!
I guess that you hit the nail on the head here.
I don’t value traditions at all.
I value business processes, technological processes, standards, logical explanations and testable theories – to some degree or another. But traditions… Traditions… overgrown, bloated fads, every single one of them.
I’m not sure this is taking it as two seperate subjects? With the first subject I’d say no, there is a resistance there. Maybe resistance fails to make a neat ‘seperate’, but there is a resistance. I’m not sure why the traditional discourses would be accademic only – what about the discourses on who to go out with? No, computer matchmaking doesn’t count until someone says “Well, the computer says they are right for me, so it must be true!”. Yeah, granted, flip side: they listen to the computer at all – but that’s why I say resistance, not dominance.
It feels like talking past someone to just skip any acknowledgement that they resist such influences to some degree, even if they do phrase it that engineering explanations have absolutely no place and also act as if that’s some sort of existant barrier rather than heels dug in.
I mean, if you want people to resist stuff like encroaching commercial science, that resistance seems to be there in part of what he says (it just has crummy assumptions tacked onto it). To not acknowledge that to some degree seems to be to talk past it?
I haven’t read through it yet with total understanding but taking this statement below; what he is actually defending is metaphor which is the root and stock of arts and literature but in this the age of McDonalds we also have hundreds of cable TV channels with McEntertainment and other McArts. What’s sense in defending metaphor when popular culture is going to relegate you to the history channels but of course academics reserve the right to preserve their disciplines. However your point Scott is that until science really understands how the brain makes metaphors then his defense of the two realms relegates his realm to the Alamo and we know how that turned out.
“One way of cashing out Rorty’s point here is to say that I might explain your affective state, say, your sadness, by reminding myself of the cruel remark that I made last week. Alternatively, I can cite the frequency and rate at which sound waves hit your eardrum, triggering a chain reaction that includes the passage of vibrations through a coiled tube in your ear, and the subsequent swaying of hair-like nerve endings or cilia, which are thought to be responsible for the transmission of messages from the auditory nerve to the brain. In the first case, I’m placing your affective experience in what’s commonly referred to as ‘the logical space of reasons’, a normative space constituted by reasons, beliefs, feelings, and desires of which I am or can become aware and possibly defend.3 In the second, I’m making your affective experience intelligible by giving an empirical description, by detailing the subpersonal processes that belong in ‘the logical space of causes’.4 Both spaces demarcate kinds of “human knowledge” and Rorty isn’t out to secure privileges for one explanatory space over and against the other. On the contrary, he’s exposing a temptation to think that there is such a thing as a privileged explanation, and that the natural sciences are uniquely equipped to furnish us with them. Acceding to these two premises, suspects Rorty, invites a third temptation, the fantasy of “a jargon that would apply equally to plants, nervous systems, and physicists” (81). But there is no single “jargon” that applies “equally” to the explanatory practices of physicists—which are irreducibly normative, given the interplay of beliefs with the relevant, theoretically laden, perceptual experience—and the evolutionary adaptations of an oxalis—which involve causal processes that can be captured by a non-normative vocabulary. Or, to make the same point in slightly different terms: whether or not you can derive a theoretical, or practical ‘ought’ (the metaphysical component in Dewey’s scheme) from an ‘is’ (the naturalistic component), you cannot reduce an ought to an is.”
The Alamo is a great metaphor. Let me give you the acknowledgement here and now, because I’m pretty certain various subpersonal mechanisms will make use of it in some future post!
I don’t think I realized how bad his reading of Rorty was until rereading it in your quote VicP. Man he twists himself into knots!
First of all: fascinating stuff. “The only way we have of knowing whether the brain sciences will revolutionize the humanities is to wait and see whether the brain sciences will revolutionize the humanities.” Yes! I do like this line. But in the spirit of speculation, let me press on this question of the fate of literary criticism a little more, because Bartulis doesn’t quite make it clear (perhaps I need to re-read that essay) what would be so wrong with using brain science to explain responses to a poem/novel, and likewise I’m not sure why you think this will annihilate these discussions. In practice, what is it that an academic literary essay is no longer entitled to claim about a work, in the light of neuroscience? And would whatever we’re losing be so fatal to the whole field? Isn’t the third position, the mainstream evo-lit-crit view, also reasonably plausible, ie it will help us have more profitable debates about literature than ever before?
I think this is the question where the rubber really hits the road, Murph. What is it he’s defending? The practice of interpretation? Or the privileges of a certain ideological perspective? In a sense he has to avoid posing this question, since it is tantamount to a concession that what he’s really talking about is turf and authority. There’s no way for him to engage this without running afoul his own rhetoric, which is to say, without coming off as an obvious cultural conservative.
“And would whatever we’re losing be so fatal to the whole field?” Sorry; I mean, would losing X be so fatal.
Have you checked out the bestiary of future literatures under Speculative Fragments, Murphy?
From what I understand, literature depends entirely on the other humanities for its speculative fodder? How else do you anthropomorphize an artifact?
And what happens when novel computational models begin producing narratives, which are vastly superior to human literature?
Thanks, Mike: this very thought floated through my mind while replying to Murph, only to be lost, then snatched by your question. The question of loss is one that can be posed at two different levels: that of interpretative practice, where arguably all we are talking about is a shift to a new interpretative paradigm, and that of culture as a whole, the problem of meaning more generally, where I fully share Bartulis’s incipient anxiety.
Mike, I remember reading the Bestiary and thinking the most disquieting thing about it was that I wouldn’t mind checking some of them out if they came to pass (or when they come to pass).
That’s useful, that does clarify it. Those two levels create, not an ambiguity as such, but I think an interesting ambivalence in your own position. To me, you’re not quite arguing FOR the incorporation of brain science into the humanities, so much as warning against Bartulis’ belief that it can be dismissed-until-it-doesn’t happen. I think both of you see allowing science into literary theory as being like letting a fox into a chicken coop. It’s just that Bartulis is saying “oh, how pointless to let the fox in, the chickens are indestructible.” At least that’s what he’s saying officially – I suspect his real concerns are those on the second level, and he hasn’t quite disentangled them to the point he can say, “I find these prospects alarming rather than, as I previously claimed, tedious.” Fair?