Another Goddamn Anti-Transcendentalist Manifesto
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: If the eye is every bit as cracked as the mirror, then cracked reflects true, and true looks cracked.
Aphorism of the Day II: My larva hurts.
Definition of the Day – Phenomenology: A common, hysterical variant of Anton’s Syndrome; a form of philosophical anosognosia (secondary to reading Husserl and other forms of blunt-force trauma to the frontal cortex), involving blind subjects endlessly arguing things they cannot see they cannot see.
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The Hard Problem. The Hard Problem breaks the back of Levi Bryant’s argument against continental transcendentalism. Otherwise I want to show you the lion that shares the litter box with his pussy cat.
Bryant’s brief challenge has spawned numerous critical responses across the web: Agent Swarm, An und fur sich, and one of my faves, Enemy Industry. People are unimpressed, and for good reason. Freud’s metaphor of the narcissistic wound is not a serious explanation of the kinds of generalizations Bryant makes, let alone one that would past the muster of his own criteria. Nevertheless I definitely like this particular story, or a social psychological variant of it, simply because it seems clear that we do the same groupish things we do, no matter how rarified the context. Everyone protects their interests by arguing what seems most obvious to them. It’s the frick’n program. How often do institutions collectively realize their futility?
Never. They huddle and pat asses. They waver and they rally. They grow old, wait for their apostate students to guide them with ink and condescension to the door.
You’re no different.
Let’s brush away a little straw in the interests of honesty and clarity. Embracing naturalism does not entail embracing reductionism. Science is a mess. Embracing naturalism need not entail embracing materialism, though many naturalists are materialists. Many are instrumentalists, inferentialists, or like Rorty, pragmatists more generally, just as inclined to load the horse and whip the cart as you. But it does entail embracing the mitigated skepticism that forces naturalism upon us in the first place. Humans are, as a rule, theoretically incompetent outside the institutional confines of the natural sciences. These very claims lay outside those institutional confines, suffer the same incompetencies. Naturalism isn’t about playing the same old bullshit game with a different vocabulary. Things are upside down when it comes to all the most difficult questions. In naturalism, you play the concept game, and you inevitably over-commit on something, and you catch yourself, and you’re all like, ‘Fuck, maan, I overcommitted again.’ Embracing naturalism means embracing epistemic humility, appreciating just how, given the levels of abstraction we roll and smoke, we’re doomed to confabulate more than cogitate. That’s the way it works in philosophy now: What was an implicit inability to resolve or arbitrate disputes short of fashion or exhaustion has become explicit.
It’s hard to imagine what things should look like. Very hard. This is the beginning the Great Conceptual Transition, the point where all our semantic intuitions are about to be stressed like never before, where everyone, no matter how deeply cemented in the academy, has heard the thundercrack through the stone. The smart money, I think, is that it’s all going to be swept away, that science, being science, is going to pick up the cup and empty us out–one final, errant libation.
We always forget. We always think our seeing is as big as the things we think we see, truth big, existence big, and so we confuse our own immobility for immovability. We forget the naturalist need only shove a knitting needle through our tear duct, rewrite us with a wiggle. We forget that our grand theories are smoke, and that science is the stack, the engine, and the screw propelling us toward the edge of the world–the void of the posthuman.
We always forget–and yet somehow we know. Imagine including all the ambient ambivalence you have regarding your work and profession in these packaged little proof-read pills you call ‘papers.’ Imagine including all the off-the-academic-record comments, the myriad petty condemnations, the she’s-strong-he’s-weak estimations, the between-sips-of-coffee conviction that it’s all bullshit, a game, another status rat race, only dressed in the world’s most voluminous robes. Imagine bottling that nagging sense of disproportion…
Think of the way ideas get you high.
It’s heady stuff, the sheer power of the natural–of theoretical knowledge. Given our incompetencies, it is perhaps inevitable that many will want to lay claim to it. It seems clear that as soon as people begin asserting that ‘social constructivism is a naturalism’ the concept has been stretched more than my sexy underwear. In his curious, ‘gotcha’ followup, Bryant introduces the crucial criterion of naturalism: Everything is natural. But this is meaningless if ‘natural’ is a barrel-wide thong, so let’s stipulate another criterion: Naturalism entails openness to the possibility that intentionality is illusory. If you cannot bring yourself to believe that this is a real, empirical possibility, then you are a transcendentalist plain and simple, one of those kids who dresses cool, but slips away as soon as some jock cracks the Jack.
Because the empirical possibility that intentionality is a kind of cognitive mirage, that meaning is merely an ‘informatic blur,’ is very real. Naturalism has to be as open as science is open to be naturalism. There’s no reason to assume that evolution did not saddle us with a profoundly deceptive self-understanding. We are need-to-know, and given the steep metabolic requirements of the brain, not to mention the structural infelicities incumbent upon any self-tracking information system, it is certainly possible, perhaps even probable, that we are fundamentally deceived about our own nature, that the counterintuitive gymnastics of the quantum has us as a qualitative counterpart. In naturalism, meaning is an open question, one that scientific research, not theoretical confabulation, will answer.
You continental philosophers suffer the same myriad cognitive biases as the rest of us, and what’s more, you’ve been trained to take astute advantage of them. You see science overthrowing the self, troubling the subject, and you see confirmation, when what you should worry about is the trend. You never pause to consider in your celebrations of fragmentation the possibility that everything is broken all the way down, that with the subject goes meaning and morality and so on. You need to realize that your noocentrism could be of a piece with biocentrism and geocentrism, that in essence, you’re simply stamping your feet, demanding that science leave, at the very least, this one last cherished conceit intact…
Man as meaning maker.
The Hard Problem is your crack in the door–your Messianic moment, as Adorno would say, summing Nietzsche’s divine post-mortem. And my Messianic moment, too. The difference is that I think attacking it is the surest way to settle the matter. The world is filled with fucking apologists.
But in the end, it really doesn’t matter whether you rationalize some defence or not. Trends be trends, my friends. Call it the Big Fat Pessimistic Induction: Yours is a prescientific discourse, one whose domain is about to be overrun by the sciences. The black box of the brain has been cracked open, revealing more than enough to put your conceptual conceits on notice. Did you really think you would be the lone exception? That your discourse, out of all of them, would be the one to prevail, to hold back the empirical philistines that had conquered all corners of existence otherwise? It’s not quite that point yet, but the longer you continue your discourses independent of the sciences, the more magical you become–the less cognitive. And with legitimacy goes institutional credibility. Like it or not, you have begun the perhaps not so long drift toward Oprah spots with Eckhart Tolle.
So sure, Bryant was wrong. But he’s also right. Regardless of any argument, any wank pro and con, the bonfire of the humanities has begun.
Three Pound Brain 
“Everything is broken all the way down” sounds good to me. I formulate it as “pluralism in a world of becomings” but that’s just because I like Feyerabend and Deleuze, and I think that people could find some very interesting stuff in them. “Science is a mess” seems to follow and you say it. But then you seem to become more conservative as you begin to talk apocalypse, so i am confused. Levi boors me to tears but you did not bore me. I am all for the Great Conceptual Transition if science becomes more massively naturalist in your sense than it is today. I GCT myself every day and I heartily recommend it to everyone, Levi included
My little dispute with you (remember my big dispute is that I think that the concept of science itself must be GCTed and that this GCTification must be retroactive) is over your declaration: ” It seems clear that as soon as people begin asserting that ‘social constructivism is a naturalism’ the concept has been stretched more than my sexy underwear”. I said this and I think that I have just as much a right to stretch whatever as anyone. I tried to give an example (as Levi talks very vaguely indeed) of social constructivism: the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge. I was thinking of David Bloor, who has the merit of being clearer than Bruno Latour, who hedges quite a bit. Bloor goes back to the later Wittgenstein, who actually claimed he was doing natural history of forms of life. The enemy was the transcendental philosophers, including his own prior self. Social constructivism refuses the publicity around science and treats it as a natural phenomenon. Maybe it is not yet transversal enough, but it does not detract from the power of science, it only shows up the messiness. Everything is messy all the way down.
Welcome, Terrence! In that case my complaint is primarily terminological, and I apologize for the superficial reading – especially since what you describe sounds so damned interesting! Sociological constructivism. On the Anglo-American side I have a real problem with the way so many want to follow Dennett in keeping the old FP vocabulary to describe scientific explanations that are plainly incompatible with what seem to be baseline intuitions regarding the first-person. If you’re going to be using a term in very different ways, such that the contact with the old usages recedes to the verbal, then it seems to be more about packaging than anything. A pragmatic sop. Social constructivism traditionally understood intentionalizes the natural, subordinates it to the very heuristic regime that the cognitive sciences are presently interrogating and – apparently – taking apart. Asymbolia, all the way down!
Look Scott I’m an Australian who has been living in France for 30 years and I’m bilingual, I guess, so that means that I don’t always know the correct term and have to bluff or at least surf through some conversations. So please don’t scold me over wrong “terminology” if that is the right word hear.
Anyhow, Bachelard said “nothing is given, everything is constructed” and so even the first-person perception and conception is constructed. Constructed for me means structures, and so structuralism is one form of social constructivism. And their big thing is getting rid of intentional explanations and showing that intentionality itself is just as constructed, and meaning too. So meaning is not given, and asymbolia triumphs QED (I almost wrote GCT but you get the idea, anyhow). Post-structuralism is not a return to meaning and intentionality, it just emphasises the messy construction of the structures, including the structures of science.
So Dennett should have listened to Rorty, but Rorty should have listened to Feyerabend who told him it was a waste of time talking to such uninteresting figures, or even referring to them.
So I won’t even ask you who you are thinkig of when you say “Social constructivism traditionally understood intentionalizes the natural”, as they are the uninteresting ones. On that we agree.
Just trying to get an honest handle on what you’re saying, Terrence. And now, as a result, I’m not sure I know what the hell you’re talking about! I spent quite some time waving the post-structural flag, and it was soaked in semantic colours. Feyerabrand has been lurking on my radar for quite some time – perhaps his time has come! Any suggestions as to where I should start? Do you have any posts of your own I should look at?
The ‘given/constructed’ dichotomy doesn’t make much sense on my account: in fact, I have a hard time making sense of them short of intentionality. For me, its all about informatic availability, heuristic applicability, and mechanistic effectiveness. You might be interested in this: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/thinker-as-tinker/
Great Polemic Scott. And true.
Or cracked 😉 Danke, David.
Agreed, on both counts! I think pulling the black box wider is going to leave everyone cracked one way or another. That read was strangely refreshing. I guess I’ve been wallowing in my own sense of exceptionalism too much!
Thanks for chatting with me last night Scott. It was great to finally meet in person! I’ll be in touch. And I don’t know if you’re done at WFC but if you’re still about I’m sure I’ll see you around.
It was good to see you as well! I hope the whole Con was as much a blast as the Friday night! Keep building shit.
[…] Scott Bakker fires a dirty nuclear device into the naturalism row over at Three Pound Brain. […]
Hello Scott,
here is a recent paper I gave where I begin with Althusser and Graham Harman (bad!) and finish with Feyerabend (good!): http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/is-ontology-making-us-stupid-diachronic-vs-synchronic-ontologies/
Here is Feyerabend’s letter preface to AGAINST METHOD (4th edition), a must read: http://www.kjf.ca/31-C2BOR.htm.
I’m sorry I’m still not clear, I made a big effort but I do not know your theoretical references. My post-structuralism is Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Derrida, Michel Serres, and Bernard Stiegler, and so not “semantic” at all.
I’m keen to take a looksee! As much because I’ve read all the authors on your list (with the exception of Stiegler, whom I’ve seen speak), some in great detail, and they all are explicitly semantic! This makes me think we’re operating with two definitions of ‘semantic.’ But for now, it’s halloween, and I have a house full of kiddies eager to aggravate their cavities!
My idea of “semantic” is very vague and inclusive, but it does have its limits. I think Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on pragmatics is one way they relativise its hegemony, and their emphasis on “a-signifying particles” is another. One of their big themes is the critique of the signifier as a hegemonic construct (that word again!).
I think you would be quite alienated by my position were it all laid out for you, Terrence. I know I am! I approach all these issues from the cognitive sciences angle, and spend almost all my time reading analytic philosophy of mind when reading philosophy at all. Whenever I encounter Deleuze, for instance, I see breathtaking creativity, magisterial attempts to reconceptualize traditional problematics, an important resource for taking new perspectives to ancient impasses, but nothing even remotely warranting belief. Check out Sperber’s position on argumentation, for instance: http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/MercierSperberBBS.pdf
Humans are theoretically incompetent – period. I’m generally averse to theories regarding What Science Is because, for one, they so often seem motivated (as a means to police discursive boundaries for instance (the debate I’m having with Levi right now)) but also because science is supercomplicated, and we think in stick-figures and cartoons. For whatever reason, science allows us to overcome our cognitive shortcomings, to make theoretical claims that stick, as well as intervene in natural processes in ways that facilitate our self-destruction. And one of the ways it does this is by providing us a high resolution informatic discourse. It’s when you look at the conceptualities of the life and technological sciences and the human in informatic terms that, I would argue at least, the stark difference between the semantic and the nonsemantic leaps out at you, as wells as the details of their incommensurability.
The holy grail, as I see it, is finding some way of figuring out how the nonsemantic generates the semantic, or as Brassier might put it, how the reflexive could arise from the irreflexive. The Hard Problem. I find it difficult to see any ‘materialism’ that fails to grapple with this problem as any thing other than a semantic discourse pretending to be otherwise. But I’m entirely open to the possibility that this is an artifact of bias or ignorance on my part. What would Deleuze say?
Thanks for continuing the conversation, Scott. You know very well the definition, still useful in my eyes, of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement ie alienation I think of philosphy in the same way. So if it is not alienating, in this sense, it’s not worth much. I had a look at the Sperber article, I know and like his work but always feel that he doesn’t go far enough. This article does not alienate me because it seems very old news indeed to claim that arguments do not serve truth but our own opinions.
You note that “Humans are theoretically incompetent” and then you go on theorising. This does not disturb me at all. However you attribute incredible potency to something called “science” that I claim does not exist. Some parts of some sciences are incredibly potent in some ways some of the time, if you really believe that everything is broken all the way down. You must get an idea of the history of science. I am assuming that you have read Thomas Kuhn, so I advise you to stop everything and read Feyerabend’s AGAINST METHOD, the first version, the essay of 1972, which can be found here:
http://www.mcps.umn.edu/philosophy/completeVol4.html
Ray Brassier is pre-the Feyerabend of 1972. He is no avant-garde thinker, and he is less alienating than he would pretend to be.
Have you read RHIZOME? Deleuze and Guattari are all about a-parallel evolution and exchange of fragments of code. And, I must insist, a-signifying (ie not semantic, a-symbolic) particles – your techno-dithyrambic style almost makes me not notice that you very carefully ignore this part of what I said and merely repeat your mantra of “semantic semantic semantic”. I think that information is weirder than they say, and that even cybernetics and cognitive science have their weirdos, so beware you may be getting edulcorated versions of everything.
Levi Bryant used to publish my comments on his blog, but never bothered replying to them or to my blog posts (except once) and then banned my comments without warning, thus giving me complete freedom of speech. With you I say what I think and it hasn’t gone too badly. Alienation can be some sort of conformist disindividuated groupspeak or it can be our perpetual becoming other, our process of individuation. I am an alien in France, but I already was one in Australia too. I prefer alienation to joining so alienate me as much as you want and i will do the same.
At least your comments made it past moderation! I’ve weighed in a couple times at Larval Subjects to no avail. Oh well. He’s debating me now.
Otherwise, you were made for Three Pound Brain, Terrence, which I always try to keep on the ‘crossroads between incompatible empires.’ I just hope you don’t find belonging too alienating!
I agree with you about Sperber not going far enough, but I appreciate his institutional position. I’ve corresponded with Mercier regarding my concerns, and he assures me the shop is most certainly not closed, that they continue groping forward. I most certainly will check out AM. Danke for the link.
I almost mentioned the rhizome as an example of nonsemantic conceptualization in Deleuze, but so much of his ontological work in LS and DR bears the imprint of intentionality. This might not be a problem for him at all: my position falls over a radical cliff when it comes to modal concepts, for instance. But as it stands, I have a very spare set of concepts that seem to travel quite far, offering tight explanations of any number of conundrums, including the Hard Problem. I understand full well the difficulties pertaining to information, which is why I adopt it as an ‘unexplained explainer’ beyond the notion of ‘systematic differences making systematic differences,’ which is to say, the mechanistic paradigm of the sciences outside physics proper. I’m not interested in the ‘fundamental truth’ of information as much as what kind of explanatory work it can do.
Reblogged this on lazyrealism and commented:
Good stuff, give it a read!
Semi-related, this free anthology was posted on /r/philosophy today.
http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.
Back on topic:
“The Hard Problem is your crack in the door–your Messianic moment, as Adorno would say, summing Nietzsche’s divine post-mortem. And my Messianic moment, too. The difference is that I think attacking it is the surest way to settle the matter. The world is filled with fucking apologists.”
I can really get behind this. I have never been able to square the peg and fit consciousness into the greater scientific worldview, and instead of trying to rationalize philosophical positions why this may be so, it’s better to simply pass “the hard problem” through the acid test. The claim that ‘even if we knew the NCCs, there would be an explanatory gap’ is untested, mainly because we still don’t have a clear grasp of the NCC’s form, function (and just as importantly) evolutionary provenance!
Once we have a clear grasp of the NCCs, THEN we can start to look at the way information flows through the system and ask if there’s still a mystery, or if it might be possible to ‘enhance’ one’s internal monitoring systems until the truth of our phenomenology becomes more obvious and this will either lead to some Semantic Apocalypse type scenario, or reveal even bigger mysteries… exciting either way!
Exciting is an understatement. The fact is, there’s a very real sense in which we get to start all over. ‘Freaky’ and ‘disastrous’ are often just code for ‘new.’ And either way, the new will be thrust on us whether we want it or not.
“I have never been able to square the peg and fit consciousness into the greater scientific worldview”
The Thinker as Tinker piece I posted a while back argued that the problem was that the latter was actually not universal, but rather one way we have shoehorned science into what are ultimately heuristic assumptions regarding ‘reality’ – that science, in effect, outruns ‘Scientific Realism’ – and that ‘fitting consciousness’ becomes possible (even if initially intuitively jarring) as soon as we understand the details of those heuristic assumptions. What did you make of this argument?
I can’t seem to get that link to work for me, Jorge.
I screwed up the link, here a fixed version:
Click to access OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf
Scott wrote:
“The Thinker as Tinker piece I posted a while back argued that the problem was that the latter was actually not universal, but rather one way we have shoehorned science into what are ultimately heuristic assumptions regarding ‘reality’ – that science, in effect, outruns ‘Scientific Realism’ – and that ‘fitting consciousness’ becomes possible (even if initially intuitively jarring) as soon as we understand the details of those heuristic assumptions. What did you make of this argument?”
Seems plausible. Look at quantum mechanics or relativity. In some sense, we went past “scientific realism” right there! Look how shitty our intuitions regarding causality and position and even ‘existence’ are when you talk about electrons and orbitals and entanglement.
You end up getting stuff like this:
Click to access 0709.4024v1.pdf
And of course, it turns out I already have the thing! My sense is that the SpecReal movement was born out of frustration with the status quo as much as anything. For my part I was never able to get around their characterization of ‘correlation’ as a philosophical choice, as opposed to the trap that the likes of Hume and Wittgenstein had revealed. Here everyone is working to find some way around their questions, How do we slip the nooses of subjectivity and normativity respectively, and they simply ignore them. From the correspondance I’ve been receiving it seems a number of them are taking a hard look at BBT. I’m not sure they’re going to like the answer though! The only way to escape is to leave the subject and meaning hanging on the gibbet. I certainly don’t like it.
Part of me wonders if this isn’t kinda what a parent of a psychopathic murderer feels.
Thanks for the mathematics link. I’m in the market for stuff exactly like that. Fascinating stuff. I’ve always been gobsmacked by mathematics, and so very horrible at it. I’m inclined to think Chaitin and Omega will have something to say all about this: there seems to be a powerful Platonic presumption lurking in the Mathematical Universe thesis. But then I’m to think my intuitions count for shit when it comes to math!
Stumbled onto your site a couple of days ago and have really liked it and agree with the program, including the BBT. I especially liked the autobiographical account through poststructuralism, which somewhat struck home. The strong attack and reframing of the hard problem and intentionality is the way to go, but is a rough road.
If you saw it, I was wondering your thoughts on the Moving Naturalism Forward meeting?
Anyways, I’ll keep reading and will hopefully have something more substantive to say someday.
Lyndon
Thanks Lyndon, and welcome to the board. I’ve yet to check out any of the MNF stuff, but my o my, what a lineup! By all means chime in, especially if you catch oversights or smell crucial knowledge gaps. I am 100% fox and 0% hedgehog. I remain a novelist first, theorist second, and scholar when life lets me get away with it.
I’ll try to resume the discussion broken a few posts ago, but the question I have is fairly simple anyway.
After reading again the “Thinker as Tinker” post I was able to follow it, but when I reached the end of it I was left with a question that we discussed a while ago but that seems to take new life after that post.
If the exquisite “human” quality is about creating representation models, like Cartesian theaters, and consciousness is bound and limited within one of those models. And if this situation is the consequence of natural selection/evolution that modeled those heuristics to be cost efficient and useful for troubleshooting the environment.
THEN, as consequence, this gives new life to the concept of “consciousness as CEO”. That’s my question. Have you reconsidered this concept, or there’s a further step in your theory I’m missing that goes against it?
What I’m saying is that your “evidence” toward the representation model, coarse heuristics justified as the consequence of evolution, at the same time give some legitimacy to the “consciousness as CEO” idea. Because those heuristics, exactly for how they filter information, create a hierarchy of stuff important and stuff that isn’t. So consciousness, dealing with this selected layer directly or indirectly, is part of a hierarchy, and “what it does or sees” is what was deemed essential.
We became good at parsing the environment, and that’s why our heuristics work that way, but we never became good at self-observing, because those heuristics weren’t made for that purpose. That’s what you’re saying, I think. But doesn’t that mean that, as far the environment is concerned, those heuristics have a strategic importance, and so everything within the light of consciousness also shares that strategic importance?
Abalieno, my take on your question.
When the single cell creature “represents” sunlight and moves toward it so that its body can survive longer and reproduce, it does not require a Cartesian theater; nothing about more complex “representational” patterns will give rise to such either, though phenomenal feel gives rise to bad theories. The world can be divided into useful and not useful for the organism, as representational beings we even form models and representations of those basic models and their relation to the health of our self— “food is good”; but this does not require an arising of a Cartesian theater. The inner representational structures and patterns of the organism (including whatever it is we call consciousness) never gives rise to some separate theater of choice making. Our representation of a “creature at the center representing the world” and then acting, and the looping representational system that occurs from that structure, is what produces that “feeling”. Heuristics come as our representational structures take shortcuts, in modeling both the world and our self and our actions. Science and reflection helps us see some of those useful but misleading heuristic structures. Bakker is claiming that consciousness and intentionality itself has a structural feature, mainly in the gap between presented representational knowledge (consciousness, etc.) and the structure of the brain, that necessitates that we misrepresent what the whole system is doing; perhaps a gap that means that even with our best modeling and science that we will not have the brain/mind capacity to overcome.
But that is my reading of his program (and Dennett’s, Metzinger’s, materialism, etc.) . . .
I would agree with your last statement, but that is under a deflated view of consciousness. I believe much of what our consciousness “sees” are representational processes that (obviously) are beneficial to our organism, but we have to be careful about what it is we mean or include in the concept of “consciousness” or in the “light of our consciousness.” Perhaps before we get to consciousness and the self-represented-self, we need to come to grips with the first problem of what is a representation or “intentional system,” or whatever we call the structuring process within the being that is manipulating the environment for that being’s benefit. The BBT says, from my reading, that we first have to come to grips with what those processes are, but we have the problem that our self-heuristic is the most prominent way we can measure and interpret our intentions, those environment manipulating processes. In other words, what is happening in our representational and intentional system is far different than what we have traditionally believed those structures to be.
As I said, I agree with the generality of the last statement, what is within our consciousness is useful (much of the time very useful) in manipulating our environment to our benefit. But humbleness or deflation should be in order for what “consciousness” is or for the idea that it is in itself a property or object. My latest take is that consciousness is not anything extra at all, and that it is actually of the same “representational” order or structure as other representations of more highly-representing creatures (humans, mammals, high functioning computers). Humans, through language and self-programming through learning, have a high concentration of representations about the conditions of the self, which we take to be “consciousness” and which sets us aside from mammals, babies, and computers like Watson, who lack those numerous self-representations.
That dodges the point. I’m asking how accurate is the representation we receive.
If the representation is the result of selective heuristics, then the representation is coarse, but accurate for our own purposes. It means that as far as we are concerned, the picture we get is overall a correct one.
This was a point of previous dispute, so I’m asking Bakker specifically what he thinks about it right now, and in regard to these explanation of representation theories.
The argument is very close to the one in physics. We don’t get the totality of physics, but certain scientists believe that the bubble where we live has been completely understood and explained. Bakker argues against this.
Similarly, one could say that our representation model of life and reality are partial (very obviously) and not complete/accurate description of reality. But is this model we get still CENTRAL and sufficient? It’s the same argument.
The ideas about naturally evolved heuristics that SELECT relevant information give legitimacy to this argument (because the selected information, and the model it gives life to, are deemed relevant and strategic). And this argument is one that Bakker went against.
If this isn’t 100% disproved it would be very easy to prove that consciousness exists exactly as we perceive it.
[Abalieno on heuristics] “It means that as far as we are concerned, the picture we get is overall a correct one.”
To me, an heuristic structure gives us a view that is not “overall correct” but instead gives us one that is very useful most of the time, with occasional serious flaws both in performance and in baseline understanding. From what I understand, heuristics covers a great deal of differing phenomena, including within the activity of the brain/mind, but Bakker may have a more narrow heuristic in mind.
“Similarly, one could say that our representation model of life and reality are partial (very obviously) and not complete/accurate description of reality. But is this model we get still CENTRAL and sufficient? It’s the same argument.
The ideas about naturally evolved heuristics that SELECT relevant information give legitimacy to this argument (because the selected information, and the model it gives life to, are deemed relevant and strategic). And this argument is one that Bakker went against.”
There seems to be two issues here, though the first may at some point merge with the second, in the way you suggest. First off, I am confident that a heuristic shortcoming, or in general the transparency of brain to mind, means most of the views of consciousness are flawed. And that is because what our self does is more than what our consciousness does- I don’t know how to separate those two. The functions of our brain/mind are extremely complex and they are mapping the world in all sorts of fine grain ways that our “consciousness” is using and believes that it is controlling, even when in fact those processes that it erroneously claims to own and to control are hopelessly detached from it, at least from consciousness qua some property. I do not think we can hang much on the presentation of consciousness in other words. Simply put, in a fine tuned world we are going to make enormous strides by tinkering with neurons, DNA, and behavioral dispositions, that will subsequently effect consciousness (and this will be the reason we are tinkering with such), but it will not be because our consciousness is delivering appropriate information about the self and even consciousness itself, that is, it is not delivering the best information about what kind of world and structures of the self makes up the “best conscious life” or the most robust consciousness.
The intentionality problem is a different issue for the most part, though it may attach to consciousness at times, but this is a problem that applies to our explanation of any representational system. One framing of that is the problem of real patterns in the Dennett sense. I reject there that “new patterns” emerge and are interpreted in the representing being that are not fully reducible to the lower levels. I reject the idea that beings that take and run with “real patterns” or use some massive heuristic shortcut create some behavior that is not reducible to a relational structure that engulfs the “entirety of the pattern” or has “complete” information. If the being is truly running on that “real pattern” in a meaningful way, as beings do, then it is akin to flipping a coin or engaging in behavior based on randomness, the structure or usefulness of the behavior can be read in the structure of the being itself and we can see why that heuristic or random behavior is beneficial to that being given what the world is. But again those facts have to do with the totality of the information of which I see the “pattern” as pointing the being towards, that is, culling information in a way that a limited being can use without absorbing the totality of information, which would take too much energy. The chimp needs to know there is a banana in the tree and bananas taste good (are nutritional), it doesn’t need to know about the process of photosynthesis or its digestive system or even that it is a chimp on planet earth, but those facts are parcel and necessary for the usefulness of the thought “I want a banana.” I can only think real patterns will bottom out in a similar kind of information culling. Or some other explanation.
Your last statement also makes the problem incomprehensible to me: “consciousness exists exactly as we perceive it.” I see the word “perceive” just to mean the “way it is presented to us,” hence consciousness.
To rephrase to something that might make sense, our “model of the property ‘consciousness’ exists exactly as we have postulated from our bare perceptions.” That’s loose as in we can define perceptions as not requiring consciousness, but there is still going to be some problem there. In other words, if we define “my qualitative feeling of seeing the red ball” as whatever “I am experiencing when I see red balls,” then yes consciousness exists exactly as you perceive it. But we have done nothing to try to explain what consciousness is or whether it is a property or object or whatever. Does it exist? As some kind of realist, there is, “something happening in your brain when you are ‘seeing the red ball,'” that we can agree.
I certainly wouldn’t argue against this as an empirical possibility. It’s just that when you’re chasing out the implicature of a certain set of assumptions you find yourself welded to an outlook far longer than I think is epistemologically healthy. It strikes me in retrospect that I had these blinders on when we were debating back when. On the BBT account, these ‘control approaches’ (you would probably like Cisek) become problematic with reference to consciousness because it seems very clear, in the instance of volition and metacognition, certainly, that the information we access, though almost certainly causally efficacious (I ain’t no epiphenomenalist you know) is pretty obviously downstream. This is what I call the ‘Positioning problem’: consciousness provides access to efficacious information without providing access to the efficacy of that information, so that we can’t know, short of a mature neuroscience (that phrase feels more and more like a fig leaf every time I use it) just where conscious experience fits in the control foodchain.
In other words, I think consciousness is efficacious through and through, but that our second-order intuitions (reflective intuitions) could be pretty much hopeless.
This is problematic because it pours legitimacy to that idea of the “bubble” of reality where in the video Carroll was saying that we completely know all the laws that apply to us.
My idea is that if reality is perfectly deterministic, as science tells us, this fact may be completely irrelevant:
Determinism depends on the observer. If you are an external entity that looks at the world as a finite system (the machine theory), then you could just take a single point and predict everything that happens in the future, and deduce everything that happened in the past.
It’s obvious that “free will” doesn’t exist in this model. You don’t have to look further. Even being aware of this, and so getting depressed because there’s no purpose, IS PART of the deterministic model that predicted that type of reaction. Awareness of the model of reality brings no consequence whatsoever.
But the point is that we aren’t an external entity that can look at reality as a finite system, and before we get even close to that kind of tech we’ll be long extinct. So the truth is that we are instead blocked within the finite system, and from our observer’s point, reality is infinite. It’s like if a character in a movie started to argue about his own free will.
This kind of “layering” of reality is similar to the concept of “emergence”. Emergence is representation as a model. Emergence is the map that comes out at certain levels. A map that you can trust (with some limits), even if it’s not made into a finite system. A map that can’t be reduced, because THIS MAP is pertinent to our representation model, and not to the finite deterministic system. This map is relevant to us the same as God, religion, myths, politics, and every other cultural value. This map is the reality we navigate.
So the limited scope of the observers define the applicability of theories. Knowing the world is finite, doesn’t make it so for us. The description of reality, the same reality, changes if you are within or outside. So everything that wouldn’t matter from outside still matters for us.
Just heads up, episode 5 of season 5 of Fringe seems written for “us”.
The last couple seasons of this TV show have gone downhill, but I started watching this last season by superimposing a fictional layer on it: that the struggle between humanity and the totalitarian “Observers” symbolizes the current argument between consciousness (humanity) and the Greater Brain (Observers technocrats).
This is just *me*, adding some subtext that the show doesn’t really have. But then comes this episode that goes rather close to make that fictional layer manifest. At least the premise of “hacking” into the brain.
See this dialogue:
You don’t even know what you don’t know.
Your friend was correct. Emotions get in the way of judgment. Your assertion regarding the involuntary response of the body to physical threat was interesting but highly antiquated.
It does not apply to us.
In truth, there was a fly on the window. As my cerebral cortex registered it, there was a small irregularity in my heartbeat, causing a slight deregulation of my oxygen to my brain which in turn affected my oculomotor nerve. This oculomotor nerve is what caused my pupil to dilate.
That’s what you picked up on, my observation of a fly.
But you ascribed meaning to something that was not there. You saw what you wanted to see. You believed what you wanted to believe, because that’s what your emotions do. They ascribe meaning to something that is not there. They fool your perception as to what is real.
A dog does not smile, no matter how many times your kind might think it does.
Would be even more pronounced if they said emotions get in the way of judgement, because emotions are judgement – emotions are logic stretched on the rack of millenia.
My wife and I are just finishing up the first season so I almost didn’t read this for fear of spoilers. This is indeed a wink at the problem meaning as posed by the cognitive sciences.
Thanks for your neuro-endorsement of my three-pound-brain-edness. have you seen this “reply” to your post: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.fr/2012/11/somebody-writes.html
Just checked it out. Thank you. Performative contradiction complaints are the one’s I most often hear, and the most dissappointing when deployed as hand-waving. I had a long-winded, fantastically fruitful debate with Pete Wolfendale (who I think is a frick’n genius) on this topic, which ended in exhaustion. Performative contradiction simply begs the question against BBT. The ‘logic’ I’m using to argue that his logic isn’t what he thinks it is just isn’t the logic he thinks it is! No contradiction on my part, but he is clearly begging the question – on anybody’s logic.
But I am going to have a ‘Mr. Eliminativist’ T-shirt made. That’s a cool handle, even though I’m not an eliminativist in the strict sense. I’m not sure who is, after Stich.
In all fairness, I liked this: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.fr/2012/10/an-eliminative-materialist-responds.html so maybe you should put a Dalek on that Eliminativist t-shirt.
I’m pretty sure Feyerabend was advocating eliminativism before anyone else. He discusses it at least as early as 1958 in his essay “Attempt at a realistic interpretation of experience”, and kept coming back to it, e.g.in “Science without Experience” dating from 1969 and included as an appendix in AGAINST METHOD here: http://www.mcps.umn.edu/assets/pdf/4.2.3_Feyerabend.pdf (attention big pdf, but “Science without experience” is only 4 pages long).
His basic idea is to reject the principle of stability of meaning which would prohibit new scientific theories from changing the meaning of our older “mental” vocabulary. Feyerabend thought we could keep the old mentalistic terms, alongside whatever new terms we need, but give them a physicalist meaning. His enemies called his position the “disappearance” theory of mind.
Lol! I know analytic types regard him as the first. Thanks for the link…
By the way I replied to your comment here: http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/is-ontology-making-us-stupid-diachronic-vs-synchronic-ontologies/#comment-1391
Morton has “replied” to you: “Assertions that thoughts are totally reducible to the squeezings of a brain are the question begging ones. For they are palpably self-refuting. There is no basis for the assertion otherwise than said brain, and truth collapses. But keep on partying like it’s 1889 eliminitavists…knock yourselves out.”
(http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.fr/2012/11/of-question-begging.html)
I see no self-refuting circularity: just because the brain says it about itself just shows it finally knowing the truth about itself. my body can say it is made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen etc without circularity, so my brain can say its material with no vicious circle. I myself am not so much “question-begging” as answer-begging and argument-begging, but that’s the philosopher in me.
I’m guessing he was offended by my ‘manifesto.’ Who said thoughts were ‘reducible to brain juice’? (although I love the image!) All BBT is about is effective ways of looking at things. Brain science, as it so happens, is pretty damn effective, enough to restore sight to the blind! Jesus effective, you could say 😉
[…] interesting discussion of naturalism going on at R.Scott Bakkers blog Three Pound Brain. While I do not know if I fully […]
Hey R. Scott, great blog. Quite enjoyed Neuropath (I should have avoided reading it in an airport post-breakup…)
One of the stand out elements of Neuropath is that it avoids any positive spin on cog sci (even Metzinger has his attempt at neuroethics and the Churchlands their own positive spin) and you never evoke any get out clause.
I am hugely sympathetic to your views, but just want to get a handle on what you are reading in analytic philosophy of mind or cog sci that leads you to the conclusion: ‘Humans are theoretically incompetent – period.’
Is this a kind of meta-conclusion you have arrived at or found in the literature?
Welcome, Paul. Back when I was researching Neuropath there was no single source, and I found myself running down a lot of articles via hints and innuendos I gleaned from the web. Dunning’s Self-Insight was immensely helpful, but his research was specifically directed at our problematic metacognitive abilities. I remember thinking that someone had to write some kind of general interest book accumulating all these disparate studies and experiments. And then, boom, human stupidity literally turned into a publishing cottage industry. So, by way of orienting overviews, Cordelia Fine’s A Mind of its Own: How the Brain Tricks Distorts and Deceives was one of the earliest and is still one of my faves (I’ll be appearing with her on an upcoming episode of Ideas next spring, so I’m biased). My most recent favourite is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. The references from Dan Sperber’s and Hugo Mercier’s “Why Do Humans Reason” in Brain and Behavioural Sciences provide an excellent road map to research regarding human cognitive shortcomings spanning decades.
But nevertheless, TI is my conclusion, as well as that of many others outside of philosophy, to various skeptical degrees. It’s on a par with something like saying, ‘human cognition is continuous with animal cognition,’ something obvious that arises out of science, but too general to be a ‘scientific finding.’
That said, I am a novelist and just a tourist in these climes.
In my periodic blog wars with political extremists I always like to link this, and ask them how they manage to pluck absolute, other-annihilating truth from such a cognitive tangle. Or as I like to put it, Why they think they’ve won the Magical Belief Lottery.
Thanks a million and I would not sell yourself short as a tourist. Unless, of course, we are, as I have long suspected, all tourists when it comes to philosophy (or reason for that matter). Keep it up.
That Ideas segment is going to be unreal. Congrats, Bakker, Fine and yourself rapping together is going to be awesome!
What is Ideas?
It’s a show Bakker’s made a couple references to him doing an episode of. Apparently, according to the comment above, with Cordelia Fine.
I assume its ideas with Paul Kennedy but that’s just based on the fact that that’s a Canadian show and its all that comes up on Google in my haphazard search.
I assumed it was a TV show, but then started thinking that it could possibly be a podcast or maybe a Youtube series or something.
I would def. love to see Mr. Bakker on my TV screen. Actually, I’ve sent a couple tweets and emails to the MSNBC shows Up with Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry with links to this blog to convince them they should try to book him (post election season).
I was going to respond to you on Levi’s blog, but I think it might be better here. In fact, it’s not really much a response to what you said per se, but a related question that perhaps you could explore. If you have already addressed this issue on your blog, then please just link me to the appropriate post.
This is a question that comes up in OOO and SR, but it surely isn’t exclusively related to those movements: do you see the relationship between an entity, event or process and our knowledge of that entity to be an important topic for philosophy, or philosophy of science? And I don’t mean direct or intuitive or common perception of that entity (object, process, event, whichever) but scientific data and theoretical explanation of that entity—what is knowing in that sense, and what is, ontologically, knowledge of an entity? What is the ontological status of scientific knowledge in relation to the object of that knowledge?
This really isn’t meant as a trap of any sort—I am genuinely interested in how you might tackle this question. Again, if you have addressed this already, please just let me know because I know it can be very trying to have to repeat arguments endlessly to newcomers.
And I have to say, even though I’m not sympathetic to many of the arguments and conclusions on this blog, it is fantastically written, without question. In fact, it makes me want to pick up one of your novels, if this blog is any indication of your skill as a writer. Yes, I’m embarrassed to admit I haven’t read any of your books yet, but that will change.
Welcome, Joseph. What we think of as our most basic ways of thinking are on the table with everything else. Aboutness relations, which are purported to obtain between knowledge and its object, systematically neglect the causal information that underwrites that relation. Aboutness is heuristic, plain and simple–exactly as evolution would lead us to suspect. Consider the way our folk physical intuition of an object being either ‘here or there’ is violated by ‘objective indefiniteness’ in quantum theory. Science literally allows us to overcome our heuristic limitations, and forces to think outside brute intuition, in this case, those involving objects. To quote Bohrs: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
I don’t know What Science Is, and I’m pretty damn sure no one else does, but I got a pretty good grip on what it tells me. So like Quine, I guess, I’m inclined to think What Science Is is ultimately a scientific question. (And trust me, I think this is disastrous).
In the interim, at least, there’s all kinds of cool, cool ways to speculate. Right now, I’m trying to puzzle through ways to see without wearing the heuristic spectacles of subject and object. Pending the posthuman, aboutness will always assert itself like a dumb and inescapable reflex, which means it all feels like you’re playing brain-twister, but there are ways to think past all the old formulations.
How do you know that what science tells you is what is real independent of science?
Thus the game of brain-twister. Blind to its own limits, the A-heuristic reasserts itself as universal, and all the traditional problems come tumbling back in! Cognition organizes the possibilities of cognition, or thinks it does, and us dopes are left scratching our backsides. You do agree that quantum field theory demonstrates that our most basic intuitions are heuristic in nature, which is to say, adapted to specific problem-solving environments?
I’m not advocating a ‘specific truth,’ I’m raising a very real possibility: that natural science is going to revolutionize the discourses of the soul the way it revolutionizes every discursive domain it finds tractable to its techniques and methodologies. This ‘pessimistic induction’ is strong enough, I think, to place a significant argumentative burden on those who think their particular discourse is immune or autonomous.
I absolutely adore philosophical speculation! I just don’t trust it. Do you?
“So, how do we access this causal information in order to talk about it?” Scientifically.
Check out this, Joseph. I’m not sure how far I agree, but this is where my thoughts are lurching lately…
You are very strongly advocating a very specific truth: that science, whatever it is, is going to replace philosophy (and everything else). So what is it that you know when you know scientifically? Surely you must have more than a guess since you so strongly dislike philosophical speculation.
“Aboutness relations, which are purported to obtain between knowledge and its object, systematically neglect the causal information that underwrites that relation.”
So, how do we access this causal information in order to talk about it?
No vicious circle here either. I keep coming back to Feyerabend, because his naturalism developped in the 50s anticipated and refuted in advance any objection based on circularity, as basically presupposing stability of meaning and forbidding the incommensurable leap.
But Feyerabend explicitly acknowledges Wittgenstein, and I would argue that this ultimately goes back to the naturalism of the TRACTATUS
” [5.542] It is clear, however, that `A believes that p’, `A thinks p’, `A says p’ are of the form “`p” says p’: and this does not involve a correlation of a fact with an object, but rather the correlation of facts by means of the correlation of their objects.
[5.5421] This shows too that the soul2–the subject, etc.–as it is conceived in the superficial psychology of the present day is a monstrosity. For a composite soul would no longer be a soul.”
Not only does this, I think anyway, mark one the more important points of continuity between the two Wittgensteins, this distinction between the personal and the subpersonal is of paramount importance in much cognitive science and philosophy of mind. It’s a cornerstone of Dennett’s ‘stance stance,’ for instance, and his arguments against original intentionality. Bennett and Hacker, on the other hand, argue that the use of intentional concepts at the subpersonal level is an instance of the ‘mereological fallacy,’ using concepts whose scope of application (and therefore intelligibility) is restricted to the ‘whole person’ at the subpersonal level, and falling into numerous confusions as a result.
But I’m not sure how this links up to the argument against performative contradiction.
I was thinking of Joseph’s comment: “How do you know that what science tells you is what is real independent of science?” which looked to me like vicious circle entrapment.
I think Wittgenstein does not go far enough, the proper conclusion of his argument is that we are a multplicity of subpersonal instances and so the soul IS a monstrosity, but that this is no catastrophe
Who sounds like an eliminativist now!
I see. Answering on this masterboard has the effect of breaking up the sequence across all comment threads.
So aboutness is reduced to the causal theory of reference, one of the prongs of the naturalist programme. All talk of “access” goes back to even before the 20th Century, where all this talk of aboutness and “propositional attitudes” was considered in terms of reference (remember Wittgenstein reduces aboutness relations to the form “p” says p) which is in turn explained in terms of causality. Talk of “access” tries to have physical sounding theory and then propound horrible gaps coming from a mentalist framework.
Scott you must believe me. A week ago I was having a nap on my couch and musing “this blog thing of mine is OK but my style is still too boring, I need to interact with people who can open all that up”. I got up and saw your post citing mine and suddenly it seemed the catalyst to expressing myself differently. I try out a different way here:
http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/a-one-sided-debate-is-not-a-monologue-charity-towardstouchy-and-edgy-intercesseurs/
but it is still too boring. What can I do?
I always find that my provo pieces are more effective when, despite their complication, they hang my ideal interlocutor upon some straightforward question. Otherwise it just seems like bitch’n. Typically the question is one I’ve worked my way toward gradually, have asked in several different contexts, and the bombast builds around it, driven by frustration maybe, or simply by a dawning confidence in the question’s significance or strength (the bully in me?) – I’m not sure. But I’m in a peculiar position here at TPB. I’m not an academic philosopher, so there’s a whole dimension of unconscious status calculations that I’m blind to (often to my detriment, I’m sure), but I am by nature wank, jargon prone and grandiose, and what’s more, there’s thousands of far more sensible souls who have been faithfully checking in on this blog, hanging on by their fingernails trying to understand what I’m saying. So I feel like everything I write is product of a kind of war of considerations, and it seems, on enough occasions at least, to work enough to be way it should be. How’s that for a pompous nonanswer, Terrence!
So reading your piece, what I found myself wanting is a modicum of exposition: I’m not familiar with Simondon, for instance. And you just convinced me that Feyeraband isn’t simply a kooky Kuhn last week. (Christ – I feel like I’m seeing him everywhere now). I feel that if you could have opened the door a bit wider, I would’ve had far more success feeling the concerns animating the piece. You’re writing is anything but boring! Give people tools, ways to understand you and whatever, and they will, for better or worse, find you useful.
” How’s that for a pompous nonanswer, Terrence!” Thank you for your advice. I know your P-level (pomposity level) is high but so is mine. Who has the highest P only time will tell. As I explained to you, I was getting fed up with my habitual way of expressing myself (a habit by the way that didn’t exist 2 years ago, where my decades-lasting habit was rather not to express myself at all) and I feel a mutation coming on. Nietzsche spoke in favor of “brief habits”, so I am trying to write differently, I filmed myself talking and uploaded the videos to youtube, but all this is inconclusive. I have decided to try out making a podcast where I can do monologues if I want, but where I will dialogue with people and hopefully get myself moving. I have come to realise that I am not as “clear” as I thought and have sometimes been a victim of and sometimes provoked avoidable misunderstandings. As for Simondon I translated a video interview with him that you can watch and read here: http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/interview-with-simondon-on-mechanology-1/ . He is well worth looking into. He was a big inspiration for Deleuze, and is an even bigger inspiration for Stiegler, and is only now coming into his own. Feyerabend strove for a less academic style and he recounts in his autobiography KILLING TIME how the big intellectuals picked him up, told him in a teacherly fashion where he was wrong, and then put him down again, leaving him in what to them was obscurity. When people have wanted to seem up to date and a bit daring in the philosophy of science they have tended to quote Kuhn, finding in him a “serious” reference. Yet Feyerabend is by far the more serios philosopher: broader and deeper and more thought-provoking.
Hello Scott, you say “Who sounds like an eliminativist now!
I see. Answering on this masterboard has the effect of breaking up the sequence across all comment threads.”
I think you broke the sequence of comments first but who’s looking. You’re the one who said “everything is broken all the way down” but i shall respect your consignation so as to de-fragment things a little.
I don’t know if I am an eliminativist or not, but I am definitely an incommensurabilist, and I get upset at limiting possible options by conservative employment of entrenched meanings. Vicious circles and reductio ad absurdum often have this caracter of semantic entrapment, and I reject that.
I don’t read the same things as you. How could I? I am living in Nice, working as an English teacher, with no access to that sort of literature. I did buy Cordelia Fine’s book on my kindle, on your recommendation. But the Ecological Rationality book, which looks very interesting, is 60 euros!
But I have other sources. This year I followed Bernard Stiegler’s seminar on line and he talked about Catherine Malabou’s book “What should we do with our brains?”, and her stuff on neuro-plasticity as a way of unifying and going beyond Deleuze and Derrida via the neuroscience connection I really like this approach. However, Stiegler criticised her at one point for identifying the psychical apparatus (in a Freudian paradigm) with the brain. Stiegler says he needs to keep the two separate. So while I am favorable to Malabou’s ideas, I suspend judgement on eliminativism or not. But if ever my answer is not, it will have to be for a very good reason, and not out of semantic entrapment.
I think with Feyerabend that we should not be afraid of taking an incommensurable leap, in this case out of all mental talk, and of giving the rupturing theory its full force, and not try to find a consensual version. It is only in this way that we can become aware of and examine critically certain deep-rooted presuppositions and have a chance of forming a free opinion for or against.
I have to say I think there are a lot of assumptions here being made about what I was asking. I was not talking about mind, certainly not a “soul,” whatever that…is supposed to be. And even less classical subjects and objects.
You write this:
“Aboutness relations, which are purported to obtain between knowledge and its object, systematically neglect the causal information that underwrites that relation.”
What is the causal information that underwrites the supposed relation between an object and its knowledge? This particular question interests me more. I don’t really want to defend minds, souls or objects or subjects of any kind. I am really trying to understand your view of things.
I’ve read that piece you refer to, in fact I’ve read almost everything on this blog. You’re an excellent writer so it isn’t a chore.
What do you take to be the difference between a prescientific and scientific discourse? You say our “basic intuitions” are heuristic—then what does science construct, or reveal, or whichever, that is the alternative to these basic intuitions that enable you to, at least in some way, step outside them? You don’t think that quantum field theory succumbs to these basic intuitions, right?
You believe it is incredibly successful at something, I just don’t understand what precisely you think science does that is successful or what criteria you use to judge its success. Is this applying my basic intuitions to science itself and therefore still using an extremely tentative heuristic of aboutness, merely turned to science? That’s also possible, even very possible!
By the way, I have to say I agree, even like, the idea of the brain as a very inefficient information engine or machine that has no interest in information as such. It still seems to me, though, that you have to some robust reality or agent working somewhere even in that system, which would be, it seems to me, either the heuristics themselves and/or their own neuronal components, not to mention the larger or deeper forces of environment and evolution.
But the two questions for me to better understand you: causal information and the alternative to basic intuitions that science provides.
Also, I find all of this, as you do, very exciting.
Just working with what you gave me and what I got, Joseph. The point about mentioning soul/mind/consciousness was to simply give an example where the epistemic attitude trips over its own shoelaces and reveals its parochialism. Thus the example of quantum mechanics as well. I raised both of these to motivate the notion that science allows humans to overcome their heuristic limitations, and thus the problem with attempting to nail down its ‘ontological presuppositions’ in any convincing manner. Basically my way of explaining my evasion!
“What is the causal information that underwrites the supposed relation between an object and its knowledge? This particular question interests me more. I don’t really want to defend minds, souls or objects or subjects of any kind. I am really trying to understand your view of things.”
Information pertaining to the neurofunctions underwriting the experience. I understand information in the vague sense of systematic differences making systematic differences, the minimal sense, I think required by the mechanistic paradigm of the life sciences. I treat it as an unexplained explainer otherwise, something warranted by the explanatory comprehensiveness it enables (and perhaps revised, post hoc). I expect to be posting on this very soon, btw – this time with diagrams.
“What do you take to be the difference between a prescientific and scientific discourse? You say our “basic intuitions” are heuristic—then what does science construct, or reveal, or whichever, that is the alternative to these basic intuitions that enable you to, at least in some way, step outside them? You don’t think that quantum field theory succumbs to these basic intuitions, right?”
Prescientific discourse is generally unable to overcome our theoretical cognitive shortcomings. Science enables us to cobble together heuristic approaches adapted to the ecology of problems that we simply could not tackle prior to its institutionalization. It allows us to survey a certain domain of questions/problems, and develop heuristics that match those domains, even at the cost of some pretty basic intuitions.
“You believe it is incredibly successful at something, I just don’t understand what precisely you think science does that is successful or what criteria you use to judge its success.”
You don’t think science is ‘incredibly successful’? The question of criteria is just about bottomless, and I am no philosopher of anything, let alone science, but among the things I find most remarkable are its ability to arbitrate between theories, isolate theories that enable environmental interventions, its consilience/comprehensiveness, its theoretical ‘fecundity’ as Quine would call it… But for some reason, I get the sense I’m misunderstanding the question!
Also, sorry for the separated, random questions last night—we had the election here, lots of agitation, discussion, uh, drinking, you know how it is. 🙂 I hope this last post is at least a bit more…organized.
[…] of explanation as reduction. While materialism often claims realism often focuses on reduction or is eliminativist this often overrides the necessity of limiting one’s field of thought or experimentation in […]
Hello Joseph, I am glad you are no longer talking about “access”, apparently it was a misunderstanding! as to “aboutness”, I think that the causal theory of reference undercuts such questions. This is the whole sense of the Wittgenstein reference, where he abandons aboutness by reducing it to the more direct affirmation that “p” says p. as you know there has been a century long (at least!) reflection over the question of propositional attitudes, and Quine, among others, naturalised epistemology by treating it as dealing with questions of causal relations between “mental events”, to be reconstrued as behavioural and thus physical events, and other physical events. So where in fact are your questions coming from?
You ask: “What is the causal information that underwrites the supposed relation between an object and its knowledge”. This question is malformed. If you have a physiclaistic interpretation of “information” it is already in the causal domain, and it does not “inform” anyone, and certainly not a “subject”. If you think that information “informs” anyone, then it is no longer causal but semantic. So there is no “underwriting”, that idea belongs to a non-naturalist epistemology, where legitimation, or as you call it “underwriting”, plays an important role. if there is no originary intentionality, something that Derrida argues as well,then there is no originary underwriting.
Terence:
You write:
‘You ask: “What is the causal information that underwrites the supposed relation between an object and its knowledge”. This question is malformed. If you have a physiclaistic interpretation of “information” it is already in the causal domain, and it does not “inform” anyone, and certainly not a “subject”. If you think that information “informs” anyone, then it is no longer causal but semantic. So there is no “underwriting”, that idea belongs to a non-naturalist epistemology, where legitimation, or as you call it “underwriting”, plays an important role. if there is no originary intentionality, something that Derrida argues as well,then there is no originary underwriting.’
When I wrote that question, I was using the words that our host, Scott, was using. By the way, Scott—Scott? R Scott? This sounds horrible, but what name should I use? Mr Bakker…that seems a bit formal for the net.
Terence, getting back to your response to my question, I don’t think I have a physicalist interpretation of information, in fact at this moment I have no commitment to any particular interpretation of it. I really do want to know what Scott is talking about when he talks about information. Information, and information neglect by systems such as ourselves, is the common theme of this blog, or an important theme, at least, and I just have questions about it. If my using terms such as “underwrites” is a problem, I assumed that this would naturally come out in our dialogue, as the concepts are better defined or more specifically defined by our respective questions.
I can see that access will probably dissolve when aboutness does, too. That’s fine. My question, as I tried to formulate it above, apparently in a malformed way, as you put it, is how science gets us out of that or at least offers us an alternative to our heuristics, if it does. Of course, I may be strongly misunderstanding Scott on these points and so I hope to correct that, too.
I just want to say, maybe in a more meta way about this, that I have not had these specific discussions before, that is, philosophy in a very general sense in conversation with neuroscience or informatics. One of the exciting things for me is that I am seeing that that all of the usual ways of discussing this are simply not useful, since we are not dealing here with naive realists or idealists or Hegelians or Heideggerians and so on. So if I stumble with malformed questions, surely this is part of the reason.
You’ve just stumbled into a dark room filled with blind men, Joseph. Either that, or a big, empty blackboard.
Joseph, my use of the expression “malformed” was not meant as some personal slight, but as a conceptual remark. I found, but i may be mistaken, that your questions, as I understood them, oscillated between a causal sense of “information” and a semantic sense. My apologies if this was not the case! As I explained with the recent example of Malabou vs Stiegler I have not yet decided on all these issues, but they are a very important part of my recent reflection.
Terence:
No need to apologize; I thought you meant it as a conceptual and not a personal slight. I was just drawing attention to the fact that those particular words were used by Scott. But your point remains nonetheless: I may in fact be oscillating between a causal and semantic sense of information, and so the very basis of the conversation would at least be unbalanced or tilted.
This particular area is so new to me, and it has such profound consequences for philosophy and the humanities, I am trying to get a sense of the basic concepts first. Naturally, I come from where I am, like we all do, and so begin to contrast and compare with what we are already working with. But these ideas are so radical in their most basic assumptions, this might take some time to inch my way to seeing things as a neuropsychiatrist might, as Scott would put it.
Anyway, I’m not here to be an apologist for any philosophy. Again, if my questions do come from a particular realist philosophical viewpoint, that’s at least inevitable for the moment, but hopefully that will change, too.
[…] Bakker says in a very intereting blog post: “Everything is broken all the way down”, which sounds good to me. I formulate it as […]
Hey Scott! I couldn’t find any better way of communicating with you as I don’t have your email address. I was thinking of you and your brilliant mind when I came across this newsgroup on google:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/everything-list
It’s dedicated to this kind of mathematical (or quasi-mathematical) proof that the universe consists of numbers and that we are 1p viewers of a 3p reality in which all possible number strings (or structures, or whatever defines a person in numbers)… there is actually only 1 1p, but because of the dovetailing of the universal algorithm, we all experience our own realities…
whaddaya think, man?
I only ever took a bachelor’s in philosophy (so I realize I’m out of my league), but it seems like this argument flirts uncomfortably close to scientism. I’m still left with the unease that Kant was probably right about the groundings of natural science, and cannot bring myself to accept the pragmatist route as anything less than a cop-out.
But whatevs. I stumbled across this looking for tidbits on the Inchoroi and one of my pet theories about your books. Kinda nice to see authors so obviously tuned into the really great problems of our age (like the Hard Problem). You’ll get my Husserl when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, though.
Be wary of ‘scientism’ as a term of objection. Too often people use it as a form of canned critique they can open without having to do any thinking. I personally think science is going to cut our throat. But I also think the historical pattern of what happens to traditional discourses when science colonizes their domain is pretty clear. My question, Why isn’t science going to do the same in the case of transcendental philosophy? in no way turns on ‘scientism.’
Science has no problem with prying fairy tales from corpses!
[…] 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 […]