Meaning Fetishism
by rsbakker
He sits back on his haunches, looking at the bills and coins in his hand. He looks from the bag to Clayton and back again, suddenly shaken and terribly shocked. –Barre Lyndon, The War of the Worlds, Scene 268.
The 1953 version of The War of the Worlds has a wonderful scene where a well-dressed man offers a bag of money to board a Pacific-Tech truck fleeing Los Angeles, only to be violently rebuffed by more rugged souls. And so he’s left, perplexed and dismayed, to await his doom wondering how money, the long-time source of his power over others, suddenly possesses no power at all.
Money offers a paradigmatic example of the confusion of differential or relational properties with intrinsic properties. Given the reliability of a system, information pertaining to the system need not be known to master the capacities belonging to some element within the system. An individual need not know anything about political economy to know, locally at least, what money can do. Given ignorance of the system, attributing special powers to the available element becomes the default, the only way to understand how the element, in this case money, does what it does. We literally fetishize money. The attribution of ‘special powers’ actually allows us to solve a wide variety of practical problems. How did your brother-in-law get that mansion? Well, he won a million dollars in the lottery. Since the enabling background is a ubiquitous feature of all such explanations, it need not figure in them—it ‘goes without saying.’ Given the system, money makes things happen. Why did that stranger at the till give me the cigarettes? Because I gave him ten bucks.
Intrinsic efficacy, in other words, is a useful heuristic, a way to solve problems belonging to a certain ecology. No one needs to know how money works to know that money does work. Even though money only possesses power as a component of a far larger system, we can solve a number of problems within that system simply assuming that money possesses that power intrinsically.
Out of sight, out of mind. This is why financial crises regularly shock the assumptions of so many. Heuristic cognition is largely an unconscious, habitual affair: everyone assumes the stranger is going to run the same routines for the same gold. Instabilities in the system make plain the complex, differential nature of the properties assumed intrinsic. Though the notion of intrinsic value would die a hard death in economic theory more generally, the differential nature of ‘fiat money’ is apparent to anyone bearing currency that others refuse to recognize.
Some systems, however, never give us a heuristic reality check. Since we humans are embedded in a wide variety of systems that (until recently) we had no hope of understanding, yet filled with entities that required some kind of understanding, it makes sense to suppose that attributions of intrinsic efficacy provide humans with a general problem-solving strategy. As a cultural artifact, money is actually a good example of that generality, of the way intrinsic efficacy can be used to make sense of items in novel, yet otherwise occluded, systems.
Think about how many things, phenomenally speaking, just happen; we have no inkling whatsoever of the underwriting systems. By dint of what we are, we perpetually suffer the Inverse Problem, the problem of cognizing environmental systems given only the effects of those systems. Somehow our brain conjures a world from a thin stream of visual, auditory, olfactory, and haptic effects. This is why my daughter perpetually hounds me with origin questions: she’s trying to figure out what’s relational and what’s intrinsic, what’s part of the great Rube Goldberg machine and what stands alone. It’s almost as if she’s identifying all the little Big Bangs scattered across her environment, all points where effects, for all practical purposes, arise ab initio.
The Inverse Problem illustrates the extremity of our cognitive straits, and so explains the practical necessity of intrinsic efficacy. When consistently confronted by effects absent any cause—viz., a system that outruns our on-the-fly capacity to cognize—we assume such efficacy to be intrinsic to the entity occasioning it. Given the sheer ubiquity of such effects, then, we should expect attributions of intrinsic efficacy to be a ubiquitous feature of human cognition.
As indeed they are. Magical thinking, for instance, clearly involves the application of intrinsic efficacy, only to problem-ecologies it plainly cannot solve. A fetish understood in the anthropological sense provides what might seem a paradigmatic example, where occult powers are attributed to some object. In fact, the bulk of what science has labelled ‘superstition’ consists in the erroneous attribution of intrinsic efficacy to objects, actions, and events.
Of course, what makes magical thinking magical is the fact that the intrinsic efficacies posited simply do not exist. Where money does in fact mediate the functions attributed to it, fetishes do not. They may very well mediate ulterior functions—leveraging prestige, reinforcing social cohesion, and the like—but they do not do what the practitioners themselves suppose. A million dollars will buy you a house, but a fetish won’t make a rich relative sicken and die! Where systematic understanding demystifies money, clarifies the nature of the actual functions involved, it simply debunks fetishes.
All applications of intrinsic efficacy, in other words, are not equal. Some function in their domain of explicit application, while others do not. Since science has shown us that larger systems are always responsible, however, we should presume that all applications involve neglect of those systems. We should assume, in other words, that no such thing as intrinsic efficacy exists, and that if, for any reason, it seems that such a thing does (or worse yet, has to), it only does so for neglect.
And yet the vast majority of us continue to believe in it. Rules constrain. Representations reveal. Decisions resolve. Goals guide. Desires drive. Reasons clarify. According to some, the bloody apriori organizes the whole of bloody existence!
All these abstract or mental entities possess efficacies that we simply cannot square with our understanding of the various natural systems of which they should be part. We refer to these various loci of efficacy all the time; they help us predict, explain, and manipulate, given certain problem ecologies. Nevertheless, our every attempt to find them in nature has come up empty-handed.
In other words, they exhibit all the characteristics of what we’ve been referring to as intrinsic efficacy heuristics. As extreme as our cognitive straits are relative to our environments, they are even more so relative to ourselves. Given their complexity, brains simply cannot cognize brains in ‘plug and play’ terms. Intrinsic efficacies are not simply useful, they are mandatory when it comes to our intuitive understanding of ourselves and others. When our mechanic repairs our car, we have no access to his personal history, the way continual exposure to mechanical issues has honed his problem-solving capacities, and even less access to his evolutionary history, the way continual exposure to problematic environments has sculpted his biological problem-solving capacities. We have no access, in other words, to the vast systems of quite natural relata that make his repairs possible. So we call him ‘knowledgeable’ instead; we presume he possesses something—a fetish, in effect—possessing the efficacy explaining his almost miraculous ability to make your Ford Pinto run: a mass of true beliefs, representations, regarding automotive mechanics.
Since the point of the ‘representation fetish’ is to solve neglecting the systems actually responsible, our every attempt to explain representations in terms of these systems fails. Representation, like all intentional phenomena, is heuristic through and through. But for some reason, we simply cannot relinquish the notion that they have to be more. Even though intrinsic efficacy is obviously a ‘cognitive conceit’ everywhere else, the majority of cognitive science researchers insist on the reality of these particular loci, or at least the reality of some of them (because everybody thinks something has to be eliminated). The illusion—so easily overcome vis a vis money—remains the single most contentious issue confronting cognitive science today.
So why?
One reason is simply that the past never crashes. Where monetary systems possess limits and instabilities that regularly indicate the relational nature of money’s efficacy, individual and evolutionary history are fixed. The complex relationality of meaning, or ‘externalism,’ can only be demonstrated indirectly, via a number of different philosophical tactics. In lieu of crashing markets, Wittgenstein challenges us to source the efficacy of the rules governing our representations, showing how citing further rules simply defers the issue, and how no recollection of prior use can serve to warrant present uses, because any number of recollections can be made to accord with any given use. In lieu of crashing markets, Quine uses the problem of starting a meaning market from scratch, or ‘radical translation,’ to demonstrate how meanings are perpetual hostages of contexts. In lieu of crashing markets, Putnam poses a systematically attenuated world, a Twin Earth, demonstrating the relationality of meaning via the equivocity of meat. In lieu of crashing markets, Derrida devises a market crashing methodology, deconstruction, where the myth of the ‘transcendental signified’ is revealed through the incremental, interpretative deformation of meaning in texts. In lieu of crashing markets, Dennett provides an alternate evolutionary history of a meaning system, the ‘two bitser,’ showing how successively complicating a mere mechanism can generate the complicated behaviours we associate with meaning.
In each case, the theorist relies on some imaginative way of removing meaning from our present market to show its dependence on the greater system. But alternate worlds are not quite as convincing as actual ones, and the power of the ‘representational intuition’ seems to be commensurate with its local problem-solving power, so these arguments, as immanently decisive as they are, have failed to carry the field. Even worse, those they have convinced generally assume that representation alone is the problem, and thus that these arguments motivate some form of pragmatic normativism—which is to say, a different form of intrinsic efficacy! They miss the whole moral.
And this speaks to the second great difficulty obscuring the heuristic nature of meaning: the fact that it constitutes a component of a larger system of such heuristics. Representation begs reference begs truth begs rationality begs normativity, and so on. Overcoming one instance of intrinsic efficacy, therefore, simply results in becoming snarled in another, and the gain in understanding is minimal at best. One set of conundrums is exchanged for another, as we should expect. Since this heuristic system has remained invisible for the whole of human history, erroneous attributions of intrinsic efficacy characterize the sum of our traditional self-understanding, what Sellars famously called the ‘Manifest Image.’ Seeing this heuristic system for what it is, therefore, represents as radical a conceptual break with our past as one can imagine. And this radicality, accordingly, means that epistemic conservativism itself counts against the possibility of seeing intrinsic efficacy for what it is.
We find ourselves stranded with a variety of special purpose ‘meaning fetishes,’ floating efficacies that motivate and constrain our activities, bind us to our environments, solve our disputes, and so on. And like the well-dressed man in The War of the Worlds, we quite simply do not know how to go on.
Philosophy of Mind as Cargo Cult science?
I say Cargo Cult science because as you have pointed out elsewhere Alzheimer’s or a hit of LSD or a hit on the head with a piece of cast iron pipe should be enought to disprove any idea that there is mind separate from brain, yet the illusion persists.
Insofar as philosophers of mind think their explananda actually exist as something more than cognitive kluges!
This really gets to the nub from my perspective. About 20 yrs ago I became brain damaged. When it happens suddenly, rather than say through gradual aging, the contrast is vivid and revealing. My (then) new difficulties lined up quite nicely with my brain scans (yeah!).
Yet I can function at all, write this reply, only because I embrace the heuristics, the appearance of intentionality even though the executive functions of the brain housed in the cranium commonly referred to as Bob’s (or Atomic Geography’s on the internet) have concluded quite otherwise.
Knowledge of the scientific reality of why (as a trivial example) it suddenly became difficult to impossible to listen to music sometimes helps to optimize the systems commonly referred to as Bob’s, and sometimes doesn’t. The awkwardness of these kind of formulations illustrate a part of the issue, as does Scott’s phrase “local problem solving power”.
There is no other kind of problem. All problems are local.
The dissociative drift a complete embrace of a scientific understanding of experience will cause will be a problem just as the immunity to facts fetishization of the intentional causes is a problem.
And how could any problem be anything other than local to a given organism? The significance of this, for me, is that it means all cognition is local, and that general cognition is a myth. One of the things I’m enjoying so much about the new How We Got To Now series on PBS is the way Johnson continually emphasizes the interdependence of technological breakthroughs on the solution of multiple other, less momentous problems. Solving new problems, as he reads it, amounts to seeing new ways to combine existing solutions. This is the way I look at deliberative conscious cognition now, as a place where old tools can be applied to novel problems, producing, given metacognitive neglect, the illusion of general cognition. Get enough locals together, and you can approximate the global.
Okay, at this point I gotta hafta ask – how do you define “general” cognition?
Because, given that there is finite number of possible “lesser”, “local” cognition types (and this set can be further reduced due to cases where one type of cognitive heuristic apparatus can be used, somewhat less efficiently but still effectively, in anther’s “domain”), and given the possibility of “interconnecting” and “integrating” those systems, it would stand to reason that one would arrive at some sort of general cognition if one were to
catch enough pokeymanssuccessfully integrate a sufficient number of “lesser” cognitive systems together.Would this “sufficiently large and sufficiently diverse integrated cognitive system” be a “proper” general cognition system, and if no, then why ?
Gotta chirp for u! Life: the attrition of desire (as in, when i was little i wanted to be an astronaut, now i just want to pay the bills, someday all i’ll want to do is remember my own name and have a proper bowel movement).
Reblogged this on synthetic_zero.
experienced this earlier. guy at the Post Office ran up to me in line and started weaving a tale about how he was pressed for time, and just had to get in front of me. I said ‘sure, I am no rush’. He couldn’t let it rest and kept spinning the tale, as I nodded and smiled. The gentleman in front of me said ‘now are you going to need to get in front of me too?’ He proceded to launch into an exasperated elaboration of his story—but the other man cut him off and said ‘yes or no are you gonna have to get in front of me?’ He said ‘yes, thank you!’. And continued… to talk. The talk very quickly slid into morality, and who the good people are, and who the good people quickly slid into God talk.
the guy in front of knew a thing or two and he brought out occlusion, but kept it confined to language of god. he said ‘now the funny thing is even if you were actually a con man and just made that story up, he and i still would have let you in front, and god would be keeping score’
Man, its great having you back and posting. I miss you when you’re gone.
This post is the one of your easiest to read. Usually I have to focus up and read carefully or I miss something but this one was easy to consume. I don’t prefer it. I just thought it was interesting. I’m trying to figure out if that’s because the content of this post is less intensive than you’re average post or if there is some other reason but I’m tired and finding it hard to mentally weigh the content of two of your posts against each other.
In my Ignorance Abroad days I had the experience of speaking English more loudly and slowly to non-English speakers because everybody speaks English. Now I can say I was guilty of an inappropriate attribution of intrinsic efficacy to my native language, instead of just being an asshole.
If the experience of trying to spend paper money that other people don’t recognize and won’t accept points to the merely contingent nature of the efficacy of your paper money and thence to the merely contingent nature of the efficacy of all paper (fiat) money then perhaps the experience of speaking a language that other people don’t speak points to the contingent nature of the efficacy of my native language and the contingent nature of the efficacy of all language. This can be another way to make the argument that natural languages are ultimately just noises and squiggles and don’t have intrinsic semantic properties. The mechanical process by which spoken or written words affect our brains is not different in principle from the manner in which smells affect our brains. Nobody attributes semantic properties to perfume.
Which could be why so much externalism arises out reflection on the nature of language and language use. Those noise and squiggles simply trigger systematic cascades of astronomical complexity (of which we are but a wire-tap of some kind) that lead to the production of more noise and squiggles. Exactly the way aliens appear in the movies.
Smell is something I’ve thought about a lot simply because of the way the medium can be occluded (transparent) or opaque.
The truth is we all know that ‘money’ is like the Emperor without clothes: we all agree to agree in this fantasy until some greater reality impinges on the Real of this fantasy, overthrowing its ‘efficacy’ (as you so eloquently put it). So like the little girl who sees the naked emperor we all wake up and tell the fool who doesn’t: “Hey, bag man, the shit is just ‘shit’!”
Norman O. Brown’s wonderful chapter in Life Against Death would tell us the bag man thought his bag of gold was God, but the commoners knew better: he was holding nothing more than the devil of his own stupidity – his belief in false lucre. “…already Luther had seen in money the essence of the secular, and therefore of the demonic. The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God’s ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.”
Awesome quote. If you want to see my imperial arse bared check out Scientia Salon tomorrow. Massimo’s putting up a piece I wrote called “Doomsday (Or Why Philosophy Needs to Go Back to Square One).” It should be a good roast!
Oh, great! thanks … I’ll be looking.
Thanks for mentioning the Scientia Salon site. I had not been to the Scientia Salon website before and now have spent a good portion of my afternoon there (Massimo’s post on Graham Priest, Buddhism and Logic and Graham’s response is what I spent most of my time reading). I look forward to reading your contribution.
Also, thanks for the list of “philosophically interesting” scifi/spec. fiction work you provided to Eric Schwitzgebel (he posted the compiled list on his blog on Monday – http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.ca/2014/11/philosophical-sf-thirty-six.html). And it was awesome to see your work recommended by others.
Also you say: “Seeing this heuristic system for what it is, therefore, represents as radical a conceptual break with our past as one can imagine. And this radicality, accordingly, means that epistemic conservativism itself counts against the possibility of seeing intrinsic efficacy for what it is.”
Think about it: Hitler, Stalin, and other dictators have all done what? First they burned the past, burned all the books. They tried each in his own way to make a literal break with our manifest image. Tried and failed to enact an epistemic break with our humanist heritage. They failed because they then undid their own break and reimposed their own specific illusions and fetishes back on the gap of what they’d just closed.
I think we both agree that the folk heritage is an illusion: the Emperor’s new clothes, etc. Yet, until we wipe the slate clean, till we shape or educate or induce new thoughts and concepts beyond the narratives and frameworks of the folk era nothing will change. It’s like seeing things for what they are, then like the man crying fire or screaming the sky is falling down. People will look at him, then politely lock him up and say “What a poor man, he’s seeing things that are not there.”
So, the point, now that you’ve shown your truth, what now? You want convince the those who ‘believe’ in the efficacy of their secular or religious folk beliefs to change through the use of rhetoric? So what will change them? Are we to suddenly fall into a cultural moment or era of amnesia, a great historical gap? People will have to wake up blank, cleared of the past before new wine can be pored into their ready minds.
Fair question. Like I said in “Theory Industry,” it’s all triage to me. No one knows what’s going on, what’s going to happen. I throw my fantastic bricks into the abyss, listen for the splash, hope that I instill enough skeptical ripples to keep some people from running to shelter in chauvinistic–fascistic–dream worlds. And here I tap post-intentional acid into a few thousand veins every week, pondering possibilities precious few care to consider. The sense of futility comes from knowing just how utter the transformations to come will be–the explosions of scale. We’re ants on an anthill.
True. The more I read the various scientists, engineers, thinkers, academics, etc. in AI the more I realize its just a matter of time till the Rubicon is crossed in fact and deed. Problem is there want be any Brutus and friends to kill this emerging Caesar… 🙂 And, we don’t even know that…. it’s like a Ping-Pong match with one’s doppelganger: she is holding all aces, we are just holding a paddle with a black hole in its rubbery interface.
I’d like to replicate your “post-intentional acid” injection into many more veins, but I feel your method of transmission is only effective in a very small minority. To be applied more broadly requires different language, different analogies.
I believe there have been many who have pierced the heuristic veil throughout history. Many sociopaths. Many who were just preteranaturally rational but still possessing empathy/wider sense of self. They harnessed these heuristics intentionally, for power, stability, survival, etc.
Science continues to advance knowledge and drive back superstition, but people, especially people distracted by a thousand different things in their lives, have a limited capacity for grokking even a miniscule portion, even if they are actually interested.
It seems that until technological change grants the ability to change human physiology to be more amenable to rational thought and be less dependent on physical needs/desires there is very little reason to avoid retreating into the chauvinistic-fascistic dream worlds. Or to keep the more aware from retreating into their fantastic-intellectual dream worlds.
Nothing will change? Things change on a daily basis, so fast it looks like things are standing still. 15 years ago a cellular phone was a status symbol and now everyone living in section 8 housing’s got one. I can feinly remember when I actually didn’t want a cellular phone, when I feared how it would colonize and corrode the manifest sufficiency of authentic living, now I can’t live without one. Real change. You want libidinal materialism? Forget about this stuff, and make an instagram account.
Seems a pretty unscientific post – where’s the science experiment? Is it fair to both wave the science card AND try to wave the ‘Be moved by words to believe this!’ card at the same time? Particularly given the topic? Without any actual science you’re waving the last card when insisting on a conclusion.
Caloric frugality makes entertaining just one model of how things work the one most gravitated to practice – though clearly when we read fiction to some degree we entertain atleast two ways of thinking about how things could work. What’s the audience for this? Wouldn’t it be more fair to try to engage their inclination to humour a second way things could work? Which, like fiction, is not exactly the same as simply thinking about whether X could be the case.
ey you see this? requireshate finally getting called out for being petty hateful online bully: http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names/
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