The Rant Within the Undead God – by Benjamin Cain
by rsbakker
Some centuries before the Common Era, in a sweltering outskirt of the ancient Roman Empire, a nameless wanderer, unkempt and covered in rags, climbed atop a boulder in the midst of a bustling market, cleared his throat and began shouting for no apparent reason:
“Mark my harangue, monstrous abode of the damned and you denizens of this godforsaken place! I have only my stern words to give you, though most of you don’t recognize the existential struggle you’re in; so I’ll cry foul, slink off into the approaching night, and we’ll see if my rant festers in your mind, clearing the way for alien flowers to bloom. How many poor outcasts, deranged victims of heredity, and forlorn drifters have shouted doom from the rooftops? In how many lands and ages have fools kept the faith from the sidelines of decadent courts, the aristocrats mocking us as we point our finger at a thousand vices and leave no stone unturned? And centuries from now, many more artists, outsiders, and mystics will make their chorus heard in barely imaginable ways, sending their subversive message, I foresee, from one land to the next in an instant, through a vast ethereal web called the internet. Those philosophers will look like me, unwashed and ill-fed, but they’ll rant from the privacy of their lairs or from public terminals linked by the invisible information highway. Instead of glaring at the accused in person, they’ll mock in secret, parasitically turning the technological power of a global empire against itself.
“But how else shall we resist in this world in which we’re thrown? No one was there to hurl us here where as a species we’re born, where we pass our days and lay down to die–not we, who might have been asked and might have refused the offer of incarnation, and not a personal God who might be blamed. Nevertheless, we’re thrown here, because the world isn’t idle; natural forces stir, they complexify and evolve; this mindless cosmos is neither living nor dead, but undead, a monstrous abomination that mocks the comforting myths we take for granted, about our supernatural inner essence. No spirit is needed to make a trillion worlds and creatures; the undead forces of the cosmos do so daily, creating and destroying with no rational plan, but still manifesting a natural pattern. What is this pattern, sewn into the fabric of reality? What is the simulated agenda of this headless horseman that drags us behind the mud-soaked hooves of its prancing beast? Just this: to create everything and then to destroy everything! Let that sink in, gentle folk. The universe opens up the book of all possibilities, has a glance at every page with its undead, glazed-over eyes, and assembles miniscule machines–atoms and molecules–to make each possibility an actuality somewhere in space and time, in this universe or the next, until each configuration is exhausted and then all will fly apart until not one iota of reality remains to carry out such blasphemous work. How many ways can a nonexistent God be shown up, I ask you? Everything a loving God might have made, the undead leviathan creates instead, demonstrating spirit’s superfluity, and then that monster, the magically animated carcass we inhabit will finally reveal its headlessness, the void at the center of all things, and nothing shall be left after the Big Rip.
“I ask again, how else to resist the abominable inhumanity of our world, but to make a show of detaching from some natural processes of cosmic putrefaction, to register our denunciation in all existential authenticity, and yet to cling to the bowels of this beast like the parasites we nonetheless are? And how else to rebel against our false humanity, against our comforting delusions, other than by replacing old, worn-out myths with new ones? For ours is a war on two fronts: we’re faced with a horrifying natural reality, which causes us to flee like children into a world of make-believe, whereupon we outgrow some bedtime stories and need others to help us sleep.
“We conquered masses in what will one day be called the ancient world have become disenchanted with Roman myths, as the cynicism of the elites who expect us to honour the self-serving Roman spin on local fables infects the whole Roman world. Now that Alexander the Great has opened the West to the East, we long for revitalization from the fountain of exotic Eastern mysticism, just as millennia from now I foresee that the wisdom of our time will inspire those who will call themselves modern, liberal, and progressive. And just as our experiments with Eastern ideas will afford our descendants a hiding place in Christian fantasies, which will distract Europeans from their Dark Age after the fall of Rome, so too the modern Renaissance will bear tainted fruit, as technoscientific optimism will give way to the postmodern malaise.
“Our wizards and craftsmen are dunces compared to the scientists and engineers to come. Romans believe they’ve mastered the forces of nature, and indeed their monuments and military power are staggering. But skeptics and rationalists will eventually peer into the heart of matter and into the furthest reaches of the universe, and so shall confirm once and for all the horrifying fact that nature is the undead, self-shaping god. The modernists will pretend to be unfazed by that revelation as they exploit natural processes to build wonders that will encourage the masses: diseases will be cured and food will be plentiful; all races, creeds, and sexes will be made legally equal; and–lowly mammals that they are–the future folk will personally venture into outer space! Alas, though, I discern another motif in reality’s weave, besides the undead behemoth’s implicit mockery of God: civilizations rise and fall according to the logic of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Take any group of animals that need to live together to survive, and they will spontaneously form a power hierarchy, as the group is stabilized by a concentration of power that enables the weaker members to be most efficiently managed. Power corrupts, of course, and so leaders become decadent and their social hierarchy eventually implodes. The Roman elite that now rules most of the known world will overreach in their arrogance and will face the wrath of the hitherto conquered hordes. As above, so below: the universe actualizes each possibility only to extinguish it in favour of the next cosmic fad.
“And so likewise in the American civilization to come, plutocrats will reign from their golden toilets, but their vanity will undo their economic hegemony as they’ll take more and more of the nation’s wealth while the masses of consumers stagnate like neglected cattle, again laying the groundwork for social implosion. For a time, that future world I foresee will trust in the ideal of each person’s liberty, without appreciating the irony that when we remove the social constraints on freedom of expression, we clear the way for the more indifferent natural constraint of the Iron Law to take effect, and so we establish a more grotesque rule of the few over the many. Thus, American government will be structured to prevent an artificial tyranny, by establishing a conflict between its branches and by limiting the leader’s terms of office, but this hamstringing of government will create a power vacuum that will be filled by the selfish interests of the mightiest private citizens. In whichever time or place they’re found, those glorious, sociopathic few are avatars of undead nature, ruling without conscience or plan for the future; they build economic or military empires only to bring them crashing down as their animal instincts prove incapable of withstanding temptation. Conservatives excel at devising propaganda to rationalize oligarchy; modern liberals will experiment with progressive socialism only to inadvertently confirm the Iron Law, and so liberalism will give way to postmodern technocracy, to the dreary pragmatism of maintaining the oligarchic status quo while the hollow liberals pretend to offer a genuine political alternative to conservatism.
“What myths we live by to avoid facing the horror of our existential predicament! We personify the sun and the moon the way a child makes toys even out of rocks and twigs. The scientists of the far future, though, will investigate not just the outer mechanisms, but will master the workings of human thought. They’ll learn that our folk tales about the majesty of human nature are at best legends: we are not as conscious, rational, or free as we typically assume. Our ridiculous lust for sex proves this all by itself. We have contempt for older virgins who fail to attract a mate, even though almost everyone would be mortified to be caught in the sex act; at least no one remains to pity the throngs of copulating human animals, save the marginalized drifters who detach from the monstrous world. Psychologists will discover that while we can deliberate and attend to formal logic, we also make snap, holistic judgments, which is to say associative, emotional and intuitive leaps. Most of our mind is unconscious and reason is largely a means of manipulating others for social advantage. But even as modern rationalists will learn as much, rushing to exploit human weaknesses for profit, they will praise ultraconsciousness, ultrarationality and ultrafreedom. These secular humanists will worship their machines and a character named Spock, and they’ll assume that if only society were properly managed, progress would ensue. Thus, Reason shall render all premodern delusions obsolete, but that last, modern delusion of rationalism will be overcome only through postmodern weariness from all ideologies.
“The curse of reason is that thinking enough to discover the appalling truth of natural life prevents the thinker from being happy. That curse might be mitigated, though, if we recognize that the irrational part of our mind has its own standards. We crave stories to live by, models to admire, and artworks to inspire us. Our philosophical task as accursed animals is to assemble all that we learn into a coherent worldview, reconciling the world’s impersonality with our crude and short-sighted preferences. Happiness is for the ignorant or the deluded sleep-walkers; those who are kept awake by the ghost story of unpopular knowledge are too melancholy and disgusted by what they see to take much joy. When you face the facts that there is no God, no afterlife, no immortal soul, no transcendent human right, no perfect justice, no absolute morality, no nonhuman meaning of life, and no ultimate hope for the universe, you’ll understand that a happy life is the most farcical one. We sentient, intelligent mammals are cursed to be alienated from the impersonal world and from the myths we trust to personalize our thought processes. We are instinctive story-tellers: our inner voice narrates our deeds as we come to remember them, and we naturally gossip and anthropomorphize, evolved as we are to negotiate a social hierarchy. But how do we cope with the fact that the truest known narrative belongs to the horror genre? How shall we sleep at night, relative children that we all are, preoccupied with the urges of our illusory ego, when we’re destined to look askance at optimistic myths, inheriting the postmodern horror show?
“Shall I proceed to the final shocker of this woeful tale that enervates those with the treacherous luxury of freedom of thought? Given that nature is the undead self-creator of its forms, what is the last word, the climax of this rant within the undead god? While there’s no good reason to believe there is or ever was a transcendent, personal deity, we instinctively understand things by relating them to what’s most familiar, which is us; thus, we personify the unknown, fearing unseen monsters in the dark, and so even atheists are compelled to blame their misfortune on some deity, crying out to no one when they accidentally injure themselves. But if there’s no room in nature for this personal God whose possible existence we’re biologically compelled to contemplate, and there’s nothing for this God to do in the universe that shapes itself, the supreme theology is the most dire one, namely the speculation that Philipp Mainlander will one day formulate before promptly going insane and killing himself: God is literally dead. God committed elaborate suicide by transforming himself into something that could be perfectly destroyed, which is the material universe. God became corrupted by his omnipotence and insane by his alienation, and so the creativity of his ultimate act is an illusion: the world’s evolution is the process of God’s self-destruction, and we are vermin feeding off of God’s undying corpse. Sure, this is just a fiction, but it’s the most plausible way of fitting God–and so also our instinctive, irrational theistic inclination–into the rest of the ghastly postmodern worldview to come.
“Is there a third pattern manifesting throughout the cosmos, one of resistance and redemption? Do intelligent life forms evolve everywhere only to discover the tragedy of their existential situation, to succumb to madness or else to respond somehow with honour and grace? Perhaps we’ll learn to re-engineer ourselves by merging with our machines so that we no longer seek a higher purpose and we’ll reconcile ourselves to our role as agents of the universe’s decay and ultimate demise. Maybe an artistic genius will emerge who will enchant us with a stirring vision of how we might make the best of our predicament. From the skeptical, pessimistic viewpoint, which will be so easily justified in that sorrowful postmodern time, even our noblest effort to overcome our absurd plight will seem just another twist in the sickening melodrama, yet another stage of cosmic collapse; a cynic can afford to scoff at anything when his well of disgust is bottomless. But there’s a wide variety of human characters, as befits our position in a universe that tries out and discards all possibilities. I rant to the void until my throat aches and my eyes water. The undead god has no ears to hear, no eyes to behold its hideous reflection, and no voice with which to apologize or to instruct–unless you count the faculties of the stowaway creatures that are left alone to make sense of where they stand. So may some of you grow magnificent flowers from the soil of my words!”
The sun had set and most of the townsfolk had long since returned to their homes, having ignored or taken the opportunity to spit upon the doomsayer. A few remained until the end of his diatribe, their mouths hanging open in dismay and when they glanced at each other, asking what should be done, they lost sight of the preacher as he had indeed scurried away as promised, homeless, into the dark.
Three Pound Brain 
Awesome stuff. Since I’ve come to realize that you’re actually a good deal more positive than you often sound in your blog posts, Ben, I was wondering what you think the authentic response to the coming deluge should be. Are you Nietzschean in substance as well as style? Or is the ‘act of ranting’ itself a kind of self-interpreting rule, something that must be done because it is all that can be done?
Thanks, and thanks for the opportunity of guest posting on TPB.
I’m ranting my way on my blog to discovering what I think an existentially authentic person should do. I think existentialists in general–and not just Nietzsche–are important for raising the possibility that there are better and worse ways of living even in the worst case scenario. So I think we internet doomsayers should take existentialism seriously at least as a starting point, which is what I intend to do in some upcoming posts on my blog that will focus on that philosophical movement. I’ve been calling my philosophy existential cosmicism, but this is only a tentative and a lousy name. I’ve written a lot on cosmicism but not so much on existentialism and I’m going to rectify that soon, with the intention of critiquing existentialism and thus of working out the positive aspect of my philosophical viewpoint.
I suspect that ranting is all that can be done if our goal is to alter the cosmic conditions of life. In other words, the most we can reasonably be expected to do is to live up to some private ideal, to be existentially virtuous regardless of the ultimate consequences. As for me, I do tend to confine my ranting to that alter ego of mine who posts on my blog. I rarely get angry in daily life, but that’s partly because of what I’ve learned from my my studies and other experiences. I think I’ve got reason to be Nietzschean (courageously creative in overcoming obstacles) in substance, given the circumstances of my life and the big choices I’ve made, but I leave it to the reader to muse about when on my blog I’m speaking for myself, playing devil’s advocate, or writing to decide just what I should believe.
So I guess the obvious question is one of how you define the worst-case scenario. For me, it means the growing inability to arbitrate between ‘better and worse ways of living,’ an inability, in effect, to be ‘authentic.’ So Adorno, for instance, would critique this approach as one that simply facilitates the barbarism of contemporary society by providing a sop for its victims to convince themselves they are in charge of the ‘meaning’ of their life.
I haven’t read Adorno, but I came across a summary of his case against existentialism (the link’s at the end of this comment). According to this summary, Adorno argues that existentialism is religion without the theistic content, relying on empty jargon that has the mere aura of authority and so that compels fascist submission from its audience. Adorno uses Heidegger to illustrate how this works.
Now, I think this case can be made best against Heidegger, since he’s a notorious jargon-monger who wants a substitute religion, but offers only a highly abstract ontology instead of concrete myths. My big problem with Heidegger is his anthropocentrism: he says we can understand Being (with a capital “B,” mind you!) precisely by understanding ourselves (through Dasein). This is the opposite of cosmicism.
Anyway, I don’t think Heidegger represents all existentialists on these questions of jargon, empty religion, and fascist submission. For example, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and the other early existentialists were hardly jargon-mongers.
But I have another objection, which is that Adorno reverses things: he assumes that mainstream religions are preferable to existentialism, because of theism’s concreteness, but what he seems to miss entirely is that theistic religions are bastardizations of esoteric mystical traditions which are opposed to such concrete interpretations of myths and which are mysterian and thus compatible with cosmicism. Existentialism returns us to the problem of mysticism, bypassing the folly of theistic literalism.
Finally, though, I take Adorno’s point as a warning. As for how I plan to use existentialism, I have no interest in abstract, empty jargon. Instead of talking about authenticity as a relationship to Being, I take my myths from philosophical reflection on biology and cosmology and I speak of nature as the undead god. So I don’t think Adorno’s criticism will apply to me, although I will want to come up with my own take on authenticity.
As for the worst-case scenario, it comes from Nietzsche’s removal of the whitewash from the surface of atheism, as it were, whereas New Atheists often want to reapply that whitewash for political purposes, to sell their books, and to compete with religion’s happy-talk. The worst-case scenario also derives from science’s conflict with the naïve introspective image of the mind. Some of the consequences are those I list in my rant here: no absolute morality or justice, and so on.
You say we’re left with complete absurdity, with no reason to favour any way of living and thus with no meaning of “existential authenticity.” We’re like the pair in Waiting for Godot. This is certainly a danger, but I think aesthetics comes to the rescue at this point. Sartre also faces up to this possibility and speaks of the need to take responsibility for our choices as personal creations. These will be my starting points and we’ll see what I can come up with. It’s certainly a tough problem, since we’re after a meaning of life despite so much absurdity.
http://www.srcf.net/pipermail/theory-frankfurt-school/2003-May/002345.html
Adorno’s position is actually much more comprehensive than his polemic against Heidegger might suggest (Negative Dialectics is the best source text, for my money). I actually disagree with the man in many respects, but his insistence on contextualizing our attempts to overcome the problem of meaning within the ‘social apriori’ is hard to fault. To use a crude analogy, the problem is that our oars are broken (‘rationality’ can only compel consensus relative to our shared biological imperatives – thus the barbarism of consumerism), not that we need to row harder or to row in a different way (aesthetically say). If it is the case that we, as natural, are every bit as ‘undead’ as the natural, but only natural in such a way that we cannot conceive of ourselves as natural (the possibility BBT sets out to explain), then Nietzschean, Heideggerean, Sartrean, etc., attempts to recover some kind of intuitively appealing ‘redemptive rationality’ is precisely what we should expect. But we should also expect that this redemptive rationality will turn out to be fractionate and ineffectual, while the diremptive rationality of the natural sciences allows institutional interests to manage us ever more effectively.
Let’s call this the ‘redemptive rationality trap.’ It’s the reason I’ve adopted a negative strategy: if offering redemptive models simply contributes to the ‘cacophony of meaning’ that serves more to conceal the creeping encroachment of diremptive rationality than otherwise, perhaps the best thing to do is to embrace diremptive rationality, see if it truly is capable of overcoming meaning. If it isn’t, then we’ve learned that the pursuit of redemptive rationality is not a fool’s errand. If it is, then we’ve saved ourselves protracted heartbreak and can get down to reconceptualizing the future.
The question I have is one of whether there might not be other ways, alternatives to exploring redemptive or diremptive possibility space. The transhumans, for instance, seem to be seeking redemption in diremption, but this strikes me as a nonstarter. What else is there?
By redemptive rationality do you mean some attempt to escape diremptive, scientific rationality? An attempt to extract a transcendental meaning or value from the latter? I’ve mostly come at this issue separately from ‘continental’ writers, excepting Nietzsche and Brassier.
I literally don’t know what I mean, other than some kind of consensus-commanding alternative that redeems meaning (which might entail redeeming the transcendental as well). If Ben (and most everyone else in the philosophy of mind community) is right, scientific rationality will itself ultimately redeem meaning, either by revealing ‘original intentionality’ or by demonstrating both that meaning tracks ‘real patterns’ in a manner that assures its viability and autonomy. I think this approach is suspiciously analogous to believing that science would redeem the Biblical creation myth in the early 19th century. Science doesn’t give a damn what we want to be the case, for one. For another, there’s an infinite number of ways to miss, and only a handful to hit.
I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far, but it’s a hell of a lot to digest in just one post! It has taken a few hours to merely scratch the surface. It seems like you’ve tried to regurgitate a life-time’s thought in just a few paragraphs. Any chance of something simpler, lighter – ruminations more suited to my mammalian proportions than your sauropodomorphic scales?
Something that always strikes me about existentialists is the pessimism that is characteristic of so many of them. Tying in with Bakker’s comments above, is pessimism truly an authentic position for Existentialism to take? For me, Pessimism implies certain basic assumptions which just reek of inauthenticity.
On this same point, is cosmicism truly reconcilable with existentialism? I’m a great fan of Lovecraft, but only artistically, not ideologically – I think it’s an interesting, very novel idea (at least within his time-frame and cultural context), but also find the rational-irrational dialectic deeply flawed from a critical stance.
What’re your thoughts?
Forget about whether the oars are broken or not, I think you or Adorno (it’s hard to decipher from your comment which views are yours and which are his) have missed the existentialist boat entirely.
When Nietzsche reacted against morality I don’t think he was speaking of discarding old moralities and starting from scratch. The whole point of the will to power is that will must replace morality entirely.
In other words, its not so much about abandoning the morals themselves – rather its about abandoning their restrictions. It’s not about abandoning morality, it’s about embracing morality. All moralities. All those that exist and all those which we can possibly conceive may ever exist. It’s about embracing morality to such an extent that morality no longer exists.
At this point it’s not a matter of right and wrong – everything is both right and wrong when all moralities have been embraced – it’s only a matter what can and can’t be done. As Crowley so eloquently put it: “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”. Will replaces Law. Will becomes Law.
I can perhaps understand why you view Existentialism this way, coming from a background in Heidegger, but I think that most agree that even though he was the most influential existentialist, Heidegger also wasn’t a very good one.
Thus, regarding your diremptive-redemptive question, an existentialist would typically argue that adopting either the one or the other would be equally inauthentic – that regarding them as in opposition is in itself inauthentic.
Moral restrictions themselves are inauthentic – there is only the will, which surpasses all morality, all belief, all thought.
This perhaps is the true challenge for existentialism, to overcome the inability of the mind to grasp the I.
Adorno would be happy to hear you say that! I’m not sure Nietzsche would be happy with your conclusion, NewB. Will, in Nietzsche, is impersonal, is it not?
Newb,
Actually, that rant was meant to summarize much of what I’ve been writing on my blog for the last couple of years, which in turn does summarize much of what I’ve been thinking over an even longer period. This was just to introduce me on TPB, though. I usually write on much more specific topics.
I agree that pessimism can be inauthentic, or at least based on some vices. Notice that the doomsayer in my rant contrasts himself with a complete cynic, near the end when he says “a cynic can afford to scoff at anything when his well of disgust is bottomless.” I’m actually not a pessimist in that I don’t look on the dark side of absolutely everything. My goal, in a nutshell, is to find the meaning of life even in the worst case scenario. Pessimism comes in when I have to clear the field of nonsense, of the politically correct delusions that prevent us from seeing how bad things are, or at least how natural life differs from our theistic and other popular caricatures of it. Only then can we develop some intellectual integrity and other existential virtues. A complete pessimist is really a nihilist who’s interested in destroying everything. That’s not me; I’m interested in destroying only a great many things, as it were, so that only what’s of ultimate value remains.
Is cosmicism reconcilable with this limited pessimism? The question’s an interesting one, although it’s not strictly relevant to my project since I’m not really a follower of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, or anyone else. I’m inspired by much of what they say, but I’m synthesizing my own worldview here. Cosmicism can be read, though, as indeed nihilistic and completely pessimistic. The scientist in Lovecraft’s stories who tries to understand reality goes insane, and that’s pretty much as far as Lovecraft goes. I take that scenario–which I call the curse of reason–as my starting point, and the question becomes this: Are there better and worse human lives, given the horrors that lie all around us, such as the horror that reason leads us to understand when we investigate nature and what’s natural in us? Existentialism, in turn, seems like a good starting point for a positive answer.
RSB,
These are great social questions you’re asking. I’m not so sure about what you call your negative strategy. Doesn’t it seem like you’d be fighting for the wrong team? You wouldn’t even be trying to destroy diremptive–meaning “ripping apart,” right?–rationality from within, but would be trying to push this assault on folk conceptions as far as it can go.
Suppose cognitive science eventually exposes folk psychology as a complete misunderstanding, so that we learn somehow that there’s no such thing as meaning and value. As far as I can tell, short of the posthuman way of thinking which I naturally now lack, all that would be left to shape history would be the power hierarchy. The strong would rule the weak and the weak would lack even their comforting folk delusions to pretend that there’s any more equal playing field, such as the semantic or normative one. Without meaning, truth, or value, I can’t see any basis for criticizing or even resisting the corruption that naturally follows from the concentration of power. The future would be shaped by sociopathic oligarchs and the illusions of any other creative power would obsolete. Only were our hardware changed in the transhumanist manner might that dynamic be changed. Maybe then we’d each become godlike, corrupt, and live in a world of our own imagination. This is sort of how the internet is already functioning.
Now as for redemptive rationality and the sailing metaphor, if our oars are broken, why not get out and swim? Even if we’re then eaten by sharks, that might be the most heroic course. As for Adorno, I believe he was pretty much a Marxist, right? So I can see how he might have thought that the fad of existentialism a number of decades ago fed into what he called the culture industry, the monoculture that’s the opiate of the masses and that prevents the class conflict leading to the communist paradise. Well, existentialism is no longer a fad and it’s not part of mainstream culture. In any case, like I said, existentialism wasn’t new, but was a return to the problem of mysticism and thus of mysterianism/cosmicism, which is thousands of years old. The problem is that our cognitive faculties are limited compared to what there is to know. Thus, we shouldn’t trust in Reason; moreover, what Reason does uncover alienates us by revealing a world in which we feel we don’t belong, because our relative intelligence and freedom are curses. Thus, we should find some purpose in life to withstand our natural fears that there are monsters lurking in the dark.
We are as undead as the rest of nature, but this means only that the theistic caricature of creativity is superfluous, because nature shapes itself. We have our tools to shape our corner of nature, and our tools differ from those of other species. Our tools are accursed, because they make happiness aesthetically tasteless. But the point is that nature is shaped; it develops both synchronically and diachronically (complexification and evolution). Your point is that the folk standards of any such creative development are wrongheaded. I think it’s better to do the best we can with what we have, even if we have only broken oars. Tragic struggle itself can be heroic; for one thing, it can inspire more powerful creators whose struggle might not be doomed.
As for some other alternative, we should talk more about this. I’m not sure transhumanism is a nonstarter. We’ve already merged with our technology and we’ve always been artificially intelligent zombies, so transhumanism, or rather transanimalism has already started. We’re the clownish, hypercreative animals.
Since the prize is simply the question of what is the case with meaning, I’m not sure teams or sides matter so much. The undead God picks the winning theory. Besides, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ and with the possible exception Ray Brassier, I’m the only person I know working this particular angle! 😉 Seriously though, a disconfirmation strategy has some obvious advantages when it comes the problem of meaning: 1) confirmation approaches have proven (spectacularly) fruitless so far; 2) it sidesteps any number of human biases for meaning (everyone’s on the same team for a reason!); and 3) win or lose, it will almost certainly reveal hitherto unseen dimensions of the problem.
I agree with your dismal prognosis, but I still don’t see what motivates your approach. The heroism, I think, simply falls out of the tragedy. It’s something that is (or will be) forced upon us.
But to the extent that I think I could argue that my approach is the heroic one, I think we see the real dilemma, and what it is that Adorno exposed coming out of the nightmare of the Second World War. So I could argue that adopting BBT forces the theorist to sacrifice theoretical desire, rather than indulge it, to prove the immortality of meaning by attempting to murder it. But I don’t need to win this argument to make my point: What prevents the turn to the occult from lapsing into an exercise in wish-fulfillment. This is ultimately the kernel of Adorno’s beef against the existentialists: because their myriad accounts are incapable of commanding consensus, they serve only to blind us to the depredations of scientific rationality, and thus facilitate the very barbarism they claim to battle. Heidegger, for him, is simply a sophisticated Eckhart Tolle. A sop for the very thing he claims to ameliorate: meaningless existence.
And this is the cornerstone of what I call Akratic culture, society where knowledge and experience have become almost entirely incompatible. The more science reveals experience to be subreptive, the less discursive credibility experience wields, the less consensus its interpretations actually command (the explosion of New Age spirituality is a great example of this). The existential approach, which begins with the human condition (lived experience), literally amounts to seizing on the problem as the solution on this interpretation.
I think this is one big problem you face: the concept of the Rant itself is absolutely brilliant, but there has to be a better way of cashing out it’s significance and authority than ‘going existential.’
Bakker:
I don’t see how you connect Nietzsche’s moral revolt to Adorno, or construe the will to power as impersonal. Could you clarify?
Sure. Adorno’s critique of culture is a self-conscious extension of Nietzsche’s critique of Enlightenment rationality (as the Will to Truth). Nietzsche’s Will to Power is only nominally related to ‘will’ as it is commonly understood. It is the IT that thinks, never the ‘I’ (which is an self-serving illusion, a pathological expression of the Will to Power via the Will to Truth).
Cain:
As to the summary, I was just mentioning that I found it hard to digest without following the links, which lead to other links, and so on. I wondered whether in the future you mightn’t post something even more concise – just the bare basics?
As regards pessimism:
Just because you aren’t an absolute pessimist doesn’t absolve you from the consequences of a pessimistic stance. It’s as inauthentic as saying “I’m not a rapist because I’ve only raped one person while most rapists are multiple offenders. To call me such is to equate my lesser crime with their greater crimes and therefore to condemn me for crimes which aren’t my own.” Sure the argument has some validity, but it would be false to say that it absolves our imaginary villain. Pessimism is pessimism, whether to a small degree or a larger.
Your ideology is reminiscent of what I call the ‘doctrine of blasphemy’, a ethic popular among modern satanists which I found quite attractive once, and to a certain degree still do. Simply put, the doctrine of blasphemy is this: to blaspheme against everything you hold as sacred. Why? Because blasphemy, if you think about it, is the surest proof of the sacred. That which is sacred in name only will become laughable in the face of blasphemy, but that which is truly sacred cannot be tainted by any amount of blasphemy. Ultimately it’s a tool similar to sceptical scrutiny, but escapes many of its flaws because it is more than just intellectual – it is something real and physical, with consequences you can’t just ignore.
However, the problem I eventually found with all such critical stances is that they are inhibiting, and ultimately even debilitating. When you put everything you have into the negative you’re missing out on all the positive. You become like the sheep which is so scared of danger that it dies of fright, regardless of whether that danger was real or only imagined.
Pessimism is authentic only as a stance which you can adopt or discard as you will. The moment it becomes a belief it becomes your enemy, an artificial inhibition against the will to power.
My own goal is similar to your own, but where you say your goal is to find meaning in even the worst case scenario, I would say mine is to find meaning in any and every scenario.
Regarding cosmicism:
Lovecraft’s fiction for me is about the tension between what you call ‘cosmicism’ and automatism, perhaps best illustrated in the story ‘What the moon brings’. There is the automatized world of the familiar, safe and known, and the cosmicist world beyond, alien, threatening and incomprehensible. In the logic of symbolism each is necessary for the other to exist and it makes for a good narrative device, but I find that real life simply isn’t so clear cut. The familiar is at once also the unknown, and the unknown is never wholly unfamiliar. It is this distance between art and reality which I was curious about in your Lovecraftean inspired philosophy.
Again, regarding the perceived horror of cosmicism, aren’t you missing the beauty that Cthulu reveals, the unworded, unconscious, mesmeric moment of apocalyptic ecstasy which forces you to turn the page and continue reading even as all your rational inhibitions seek to thwart you? If you see only horror, I think perhaps that you are blinding yourself to an important part of who you are.
Bakker:
Ahhh! Now I understand…
But I still have more questions.
This is one that’s been been bugging me for a while.
You say that BBT is different from everything else, better. But I just don’t see why. For you the difference seems to lie in BBT’s scientific foundations. But isn’t science ultimately just another kind of speculation, like philosophy, theology, fantasy?
In short, what would you say is science, and what makes it so special? And why is BBT more scientific than everything else?
I ask this as a scientific heathen, to whom scientism is simply incomprehensible quackery.
What primarily distinguishes BBT is simply the positive explanatory role it accords information privation in the interpretation of intentionality and consciousness. It’s no more scientific than any other serious theory of consciousness out there, and quite a bit less than some, in fact.
I’ve actually come to regard the charge of ‘scientism’ as an excuse not to think! At least that was how I used it back in the days before I started reading cognitive psychology. Outside of science, humans have no reliable way out of the maze of biases we suffer. How do you find your way out?
Why do you believe your doctor when he tells you you have a brain tumour? Why do you go to a neurologist? Why does the neurologist refer you to the fMRI technician? How does the fMRI technician rely on theories postulated by physicists? And so on, and so on. The clothes you wear, the food you eat, the shelter that keeps you warm, the life expectancy you enjoy, the rising carbon levels that heat your climate, and so on and so on, all depend on science. It is far and away the most powerful claim-making institution in the history of the human race, don’t you agree?
Newb,
Thanks very much for your insightful comments.
Regarding pessimism, I think what you’re saying is that even a small degree of pessimism still speaks to an attitude taken towards the world, a chosen perspective that filters experience. I think that’s right. But in that case, I’m not sure I’m at all pessimistic. You’ve probably heard the standard retort, “I’m not pessimistic, I’m just realistic.” The question is whether it’s the world itself that spoils more of our hopes than it fulfills them or whether all negativity in a worldview is subjective, while the world itself is neutral. I think RSB and I would both say that nature itself, as explained by science, is not as comforting a place as we think it is given our traditional, intuitive perspectives (theism, politically correct conventions, folk psychology). So objectively, things may not go well for us in the end, although the world itself won’t care one way or the other.
My blog is meant to be iconoclastic, but putting aside the question of literary style, I’d say that the negativity of my writings reflects reality as opposed to being just a projection of my character. Now, as I say in my July, 2012 article, “Defending Existential Cosmicism,” things get a little more complicated, because if you come to step outside of the mainstream, pragmatic and antiphilosophical way of looking at the world, your character develops accordingly. You become something of a detached outsider or even an omega man or woman. Thus, your negative philosophy will reflect both the world and your character, because your understanding of the world shapes your character.
Your thought on blasphemy is most intriguing. Indeed, I think there’s something to this strategy of all-out war, of forcing the weak to perish so that only the strong survive. And I take your point about the danger of this lifestyle or personality, which is that such a person can become trapped in an ideology and can miss much of what’s good in the world. Take a look, though, at my Jan, 2012 article, “Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion” (links below), where I begin to lay out the positive side of my worldview and I talk about the need for grim humour and for an aesthetic appreciation of nature. I’m a visual artist, so I tend to see things as creations that can be aesthetically evaluated. Existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre have similar views, for their own reasons (will power and freedom). Remember that this one rant of mine on TPB doesn’t summarize everything I want to say.
As for the danger that this hostility towards the world, or rather that the retaliation against nature’s inhumanity, with detachment and renunciation, can be self-destructive as in the sheep who dies of self-inflicted fright, I can see how that might be the natural end of this particular process. As I say in many places on my blog, happiness isn’t for everyone.
Regarding cosmicism, I’m not sure what you mean by “the distance between art and reality.” If anything, I’m interested in the extent to which aesthetics can inform metaphysics and we can understand natural processes as nature’s self-creative destructions. I agree that the mysterian aspect of cosmicism can be an oversimplification, but there is an absolute unknown consistent with what Kant called the mere Ideas of reason. As Hillary Putnam says, we inevitably put a human face on our realism, even if only by assimilating our abstract, inhuman science with the human experience brought to bear by our intuitions. Much of science is perfectly counterintuitive, but this just means we stretch our intuitions to the breaking point. And yet there’s no guarantee that everything in the universe can be intuited by us. As Kant says, we’ll push reason as far as it can go, even where it doesn’t belong. This leaves us with the fear that we’ve gone too far, as in quantum mechanics, for example, that we don’t belong in the world and are alienated from it by even our limited appreciation of what’s really going on around us.
For example, we now know that nothing whatsoever stops a meteor from destroying all current life on Earth except chance. That’s a consequence of atheistic naturalism. The impersonality of such a world is as unsettling as the inhumanity of a sociopath. At best, nature and the sociopath/oligarch simulate personhood, a human face, if you will. In reality, they’re objectively monstrous, since they wield enormous power with an absent or at best an incomplete mind: the natural universe is itself a blasphemy against the human conceit that creation is a spiritual endeavor, that God is needed for the ultimate goodness of keeping something from falling into nothing, of developing the universe in various dimensions. Science, not any pessimistic personality, says No.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2012/07/defending-existential-cosmicism.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2012/01/inkling-of-unembarrassing-postmodern.html
RSB,
I agree BBT may have scientific advantages. But when you say that confirmation strategies, that is, explanations that preserve some folk intuitions, have so far proven “spectacularly fruitless,” surely you’re only talking about science. Fruitfulness, which is another word for pragmatism, is itself a scientific standard of epistemic justification. A defender of folk psychology (FP) could say that FP is philosophically rather than scientifically justified, given a nonscientific standard of epistemic justification such as the classic Greek one of self-knowledge as a precondition of wise living. Maybe the wisest thing to do is to find some myth that comforts us by retaining some measure of human dignity. A wise person knows that we’re the sort of creatures who like to be flattered, because we’re vicious primates.
Now you may say wisdom is itself a normative, folk ideal that needs to go. But here I think we will need to talk a bit about scientism. What do you think the difference is between science and philosophy? Do you think science should replace philosophy, because philosophy is just folk science? Do you think that, regardless of whether science is the best means we have of telling us what the facts are, which it is, there’s nothing else to knowledge and thus no role for nonscientific disciplines? I talk about this on my blog, the problem being that knowledge requires coherence and not just correspondence, and nonscientific narratives help the products of our various mental faculties hang together. We have reason but we also have feelings, instincts, and personal dispositions. So who says all meta reflections should be scientific? That really would be scientism. Now I agree with you that “scientism” is often thrown around as an empty accusation, especially in theistic and in postmodern philosophy circles. However, I do think there’s a scientistic phenomenon, and it has to do with being so smitten with science and opposed to religion and superstition, that the baby of philosophy gets thrown out with the bathwater, leading to the untenable antiphilosophical philosophy of positivism/pragmatism/secular humanism.
I agree that wish fulfillment is unheroic, but there’s a real problem I see in what you say is Adorno’s criticism of existentialism, the criticism being that the varieties of existentialist philosophies are “incapable of commanding consensus” and thus “blind us to the depredations of scientific rationality,” facilitating “the very barbarism they claim to battle.” If anything, the insistence on consensus in finding an answer to the nonscientific question of how we should live betrays the imperialism of scientific rationality, which is the essence of scientism. Existentialists are opposed to the notion that there’s only one right way to live; they’re opposed to the consumerist monoculture, to the dumbing down of society. So there are multiple ways to be authentic, because creativity and thus individualism are existential virtues. I don’t see an objection here from Adorno that doesn’t beg the question against existentialism and raise the issue of scientism.
I agree that advances in science will deprive folk theories of any empirical validity we may have hoped they’d have, which is to say that many of our intuitions about ourselves will be proven not to match up with the facts. But knowledge isn’t just about collecting a set of statements that corresponds to a set of facts! Only robots in the pejorative sense would think that way about the world. We’re animals with a nonrational side. We want to know what the facts are but we also want to feel a certain way and we want to express our instincts, our character, and our culture. Our worldview should be coherent, not just accurate. This doesn’t mean we should favour whatever intuitions may come along. No, we have to balance science, traditions, intuitions, and everything else in the search for reflective equilibrium, for a worldview that satisfies the technoscientific project but also the existential project of living in the world as the best person we can be.
Should my rants have authority? Again, aren’t you importing a technoscientific standard here? My rants are philosophical and so they’re as artistic as they are scientific. I include arguments and evidence, but also a lot of rhetoric and hopefully creative writing to appeal to the emotions and the instincts. Still, I take your point that there are pitfalls in being too content with existentialism. Really, everything I’ve said so far about the role of existentialism in my approach is preliminary, since I haven’t yet written anything directly on the question. I’ve been rereading some existentialist texts, and soon I’ll critique existentialism on my blog, discovering what I believe by going through the process of writing it out.
Cain:
This to me is the problem with pessimism – it implies a negative reaction to the negative. But that one reacts this way implies a positive commitment, perhaps not happiness, but then some other – it is a positive commitment which inspires one’s revolt against the negative.
This is all good and well, but when it becomes a habitual attitude, it means you’re no longer positively committed, but actually negatively committed. Pessimism only makes sense as a temporary stance. Why revolt against the negative if not to promote a positive ideal? As a habitual attitude It becomes incongruent, explicable only as an act of bad faith, a moral tick, an empty compulsion devoid of purpose.
In moral terms, you can say that fighting evil only ever makes sense as part of a greater struggle toward the good. It is the riddle of Pandora: How can you feel despair in the absence of hope? Despair only exists because hope exists.
Iconoclasm itself was only a means to a greater end, not an end itself – the destruction of materialistic faith in the name of advancing spiritual faith. Without a greater purpose, you blog cannot be iconoclastic.
If I could be so arrogant as to extend advice: Root out the source of your pessimism, that one thing which is so precious to you as to inspire all your revolt against everything else and devote yourself to that instead.
But as I’ve said before, this irk of mine isn’t really about you – it’s against the inconsistency of pessimism which seems to affect almost every existentialist pundit out there.
There is perhaps some value to your view though. As so many political philosophers constantly remind us, society is inherently nihilistic. It teaches us to fear everything else except societal authority, and to fear that while loving it as well. And in our constant immersion in this incessant drone of paranoid mutters, it is hard not to revolt. But contrary to most political philosophers, you and I aren’t just social animals. We can transcend society. Social nihilism is an excuse, but not a justification. Just because society and science tells us that the universe is big and scary doesn’t mean we have to believe it. All those things we hold sacred like sex, cigarettes and alchohol, are also part of the universe, so it can’t really be all that bad.
A complete pessimist is really a nihilist who’s interested in destroying everything. That’s not me; I’m interested in destroying only a great many things, as it were, so that only what’s of ultimate value remains.
Here’s a fun one: What if the pessimist nihilist who wants to destroy everything can only see so much, thinks there is only so much that exists to be destroyed. And what if you see more…and yet what you want to destroy covers everything the nihilist wants to destroy and more?
What does that make you?
A: A philosopher.
Hur hur hur. Okay, bit of an in joke sort of thing…worse in joke for being the funny for not being funny kind…
Newb,
I’ll certainly want to keep in mind what you say about the absurdity of pessimism when I write up my critique of existentialism within the next few weeks. But by your definition, I’m not pessimistic, since I do have a positive ideal, a greater purpose. In fact, existentialists do too–something they call the authentic character. Someone without such an ideal would be pessimistic about absolutely everything, in which we might rather call such a person a nihilist. I’m not a nihilist. On the contrary, I’m interested in thinking of what even an atheist might hold as sacred (as ultimately valuable).
I’m not sure I understand your advice. Are you saying I should focus on my greater ideal and stop criticizing everything that annoys me? As I say to Mike Hillcoat below in these comments, there might be a need for uncompromising social critique to counterbalance the prevalence of politically correct happy-talk. That would be a pragmatic justification for my blog. But what I’m trying to work out is how to make the best of the worst-case scenario. Without some understanding of our predicament, we won’t see the need for the desperate measures to redeem ourselves or to extricate us.
By the way, if sex is so great, why are most people so embarrassed about their sex acts that they’re loath to speak of them in public? I suspect that one of the reasons we’re so secretive about sex is that we resent what sex teaches us about our existential predicament (our animal nature, mortality, genetic overlords, lack of freedom, and so on). I’ve written about this on my blog.
Probably because sex is rather like fan fiction someones written outside of the blessings of any establishment. No ones given the nuances of any particular act the go ahead and people are instinctively (if not intellectually) aware of that. On the other hand, for being secretive, sex somewhat escapes the clutches of the status quo. An underground.
It’s the thing of human conversation – like throwing a ball to someone, and they throw it back – throw the sex ball, it bounces against their chest and flops to the floor. Perhaps it’s not sex in particular, but having ones ideas flop to the floor in general, not caught, not tossed back with new spin, that is the reminder of an existential predicament?
Cain:
I’m just starting to navigate your blog. I read your post on inkling of unembarrasing postmodern and I see that you do have positive aims. However, I started with defending cosmicist existentialism, thinking that would be more of a manifesto of sorts, based on the title, but found this too to be quite pessimistic. I’m beginning to see that you are optimistic, but that you just hide it quite well. Sorry if my assumptions were a bit overhasty. However, perhaps you could incorporate more of your optimism into your next apology.
I guess what my advice comes down to is that positive arguments are stronger than negative arguments. It’s rather like skepticism. No body really cares about what a skeptic says because he only attacks other people’s opinions. He doesn’t propose a better alternative. Perhaps my opinion is misguided, but the posts I’ve read so far tend to go into greater detail regarding the flaws of other theories than your own alternative proposals.
What does an atheist hold as sacred? Speaking for myself, I hold everything as sacred, or at least I try to. The atheist revolt is not against the sacred, but the definition of it. Theism depends on the segregation of sacred and profane. As I argued above, the failure of theism lies in its limitations. It not that theism is wrong, its just that its not right enough. Life is infinite, and eventually even the greatest profanity will proves itself to be sacred, and the the most sacred will become profane. To live requires the ability to recognize the sacred or the profane in anything, and by precluding that possibility, theism ultimately condemns life. In this way, true atheism I believe is also true pantheism.
Newb,
Well, I think optimistic arguments may be more popular than pessimistic ones, but that’s just because most people want to be happy. Whether we ought to be happy is another question. My blog is meant to challenge the reader, but not with arbitrary and unbalanced criticisms of all possible points of view. My constructive ideas are works in progress. That’s why I spoke only of an “inkling.” I’ll be critiquing existentialism soon, and that will give me another opportunity to contemplate my ideals. The reason my posts may go into more detail in their criticisms is that those are more fun to write! One of my more recent constructive posts is “The Philosophy of Existential Cosmicism,” at:
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-philosophy-of-existential-cosmicism.html
A great piece of writing! I look forward to reading more.
Thanks. I hope to post more.
Bravo, Cain. That was awesome.
I think the choice to rant is an act of respite. Doing nothing with that kind of knowledge might be suffocating.
Also, at the moment the only working links are artists, outsiders, and mystics, liberty, and curse of reason.
Thank you. But I wonder which is more suffocating, having little or much knowledge? One of the foundational posts on my blog is The Curse of Reason. In some ways, those who know the least are the freest or at least the happiest–unless their ignorance makes them impotent in the face of indifferent natural forces.The movie Pi addresses this question in an interesting way.
And thanks for pointing out that most of the links don’t work. I’ve emailed Scott and hopefully we can get them all working. I intended this guest post to be an introduction to my blog since it summarizes much of what I’ve written so far.
I’m enjoying the evolving dialogue your presence and words have prompted, Cain.
For my own part, I’d just thought to offer two cents towards Bakker’s inquiry of your choice to rant.
The High-Feeler/Low-Feeler dilemma is tricky – I’d suggest that HF’s literally have more neuronal architecture devoted towards their “feeling circuits,” say, and that because of the elusive nature of sufficiency, HFs and LFs seem as deep as the other… internally, anyhow.
Would you say dissonance through impotence is the only thing that forces a climb of that ladder?
I’ll have to let your curse of reason gestate a little. Newb’s right, it’s hard to digest all the intellect in a single dose.
Cheers.
Mike Hillcoat,
Are you asking me or RSB those questions? I’m not sure what your technical terms there mean, so if they allude to BBT, maybe RSB should try to answer them.
Are you saying, though, that ranters are more emotional than non-ranters? This would seem to conflict with your claim that my rant is full of intellect. Honestly, though, can’t we just say that ranting is a literary device? The deeper question is why we should wage an existential rebellion against nature. The rebellion would be the life strategy while ranting would just be a tactic in the service of that strategy.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the discussion. I am too.
Definitely attempting to engage you, Cain :).
In some ways, those who know the least are the freest or at least the happiest–unless their ignorance makes them impotent in the face of indifferent natural forces.
I might have prefaced my second comment with the above quote from your original reply.
I think you’re suggesting here that more knowledge is more suffocating. Your words above also seem to paraphrase that memetic virus “ignorance is bliss” and that, at least by my reading, an ignorant life is not a tragedy unless that ignorance prevents in overcoming a hard wall in circumstance. You highlight a gradient of ignorance – I simply substituted by connotations, low-feelers reflecting those that are freest or happiest in their ignorance, whereas high-feelers might reflect those with more complex explanatory styles, more comprehensive knowledge of their experiences, or more experience with introspection.
Coincidentally, HF/LF distinctions are something Bakker and I have discussed but are seeming to gain pervading usage as well – in my experience, anyhow, littered with bias it may be. Sufficiency may be Bakker specific in this sense of denotation – the apparent, illusory, unified sense of our experience.
Just rapping but lets see if I can tie this back to your blog and our thread of conversation.
Addressing the second part of that quote, are you saying that ignorance will probably never address that which it is ignorant of unless circumstances force some kind of referential conundrum, cognitive dissonance – which was my question above, now worded a little differently?
Are you saying, though, that ranters are more emotional than non-ranters? This would seem to conflict with your claim that my rant is full of intellect. Honestly, though, can’t we just say that ranting is a literary device? The deeper question is why we should wage an existential rebellion against nature. The rebellion would be the life strategy while ranting would just be a tactic in the service of that strategy.
I wasn’t attempting to say that ranting or ranters are more emotional, though, by their nature, I think more effective rants are emotional and that HFs probably use the literary device of ranting with greater deft than LFs – not to say that they too don’t, on occasion, have equally powerful oratory, and its written equivalent. I think your questions here might have been born out of our misunderstanding each other.
I’m intrigued by your comments – your blog makes you seem more the lonely Holy Man of the Undead God than its Heretic.
Why have you decided to wage existential rebellion against nature? I like the distinction of strategy.
Also, my intellect comment reflected the growing dialogue surrounding this blog post – which as interesting as the artifact that began it. Though, consider your blog bursting with it, sir.
Mike Hillcoat,
Yes, I think you understood what I was saying, but I hadn’t heard the term “high-feeler” before. It seems like that term does come out of BBT or at least out of a part of cognitive science I’m not familiar with. Anyway, the issue is whether knowledge is always a good thing. You seem a bit more optimistic than I am. Scientific knowledge has changed the world in very good and in very bad ways. Some of the bad ways are less appreciated, and that’s where my blog and RSB’s blog too, for example, come in. We’re talking about the threat of scientific discoveries to our politically correct, feel-good commonsense notions.
My point about ignorance was that I can see ignorance sustaining a state of bliss, but ignorance has the obvious disadvantage that it puts you at odds with the facts. There’s a roll of the dice here, as it were, since many of the facts (those that aren’t psychological or social) are neutral with regard to our welfare. So if we’re ignorant about weather conditions, we may build our house in the wrong spot and see it washed away by a hurricane. Is science so dangerous that we ought to go back to a primitive way of life? The happiness we’d have in such a life, thanks to our ignorance of certain unpleasant existential facts, such as the fact of the world’s godlessness, would have to be balanced against the suffering of any relatively ignorant animal that plays nature’s game strictly on nature’s terms, as it were, without fighting back in a sophisticated fashion.
Why do I talk about waging existential rebellion against the world? This is just how I see things. It’s my religion or my big art project, if you like. Creative writing is fun and philosophy is partly artistic. But why is my worldview so gloomy? That’s a psychological question which would require me to lay out my whole life experience. But there’s also a pragmatic answer: currently, there’s too much happy-talk in Western societies, so we might need to balance that out with uncompromisingly harsh talk.
You raise an interesting question: Should we worship the undead god or be heretically opposed to that monstrous deity? Maybe the best way to pay our respects would be to ascetically renounce natural processes, as much as we can, just as we’d honour a monster best by putting it out of its misery. If the cosmos is a hideous, blasphemous place, as the Gnostics saw it, we may have an ethical mission not to leave our corner of the cosmos as we found it, not to play the most primitive version of nature’s game (oligarchy, delusions to maintain existentially inauthentic peace of mind, etc). We can even make existential rebellion a sort of religion in which we hold as sacred (as ultimately important) nature’s capacity to recognize its absurdity and tragedy through us.
It looks like the links are all working now.
Azathoth wins.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/
Ah, thanks for that link, Jorge. I’ve much enjoyed seeing Eliezer Yudkowsky on TVO and Bloggingheads. Yes, at the end of that article on evolution as an alien god, he goes ahead and calls evolution an impersonal god like Azathoth. It’s a short step to pantheism, since the relevant laws in biology (the statistical correlation between the gene and how often the organism reproduces) and in, say, cosmology are equally impersonal and creative. Stars and galaxies, too, have their “life cycles.”
It’s all well and good, though, to dump on Christian theism as Yudkowsky does. But I wish he’d have faced up to the sheer horror in the scientific picture of our true god. I suppose the allusion to Azathoth and thus to Lovecraft’s cosmicism points us in that direction, but when he says at the end that “I like having a Creator I can outwit. Beats being a pet. I’m glad it was Azathoth and not Odin,” he sounds too much like a modern secular humanist for my taste. I hear Yudkowsky has a genius-level IQ, and yet transhumanists like him are frequently accused of betraying adolescent naivety in their social expectations. I’m sure Yudkowsky doesn’t make the dubious near-term optimistic predictions that Kurzweil does, but Yudkoswky reveals here a similar kind of carefree attitude that I call a pragmatic whitewash of atheism, in my Nov, 2011 blog article, “Lovecraftian Horror and Pragmatism.”
I have also tried to get them to understand the full implication of Azathoth winning. They want to bring about a ‘positive Singularity’ but they don’t understand that ‘positive’ loses all meaning once you fully embrace the disenchanted world of the first Enlightenment.
Lovecraft understood.
I’ve actually wondered whether I could entice Yudkowsky into a debate on this very topic. A couple of months ago I spent several afternoons rooting through his stuff on lesswrong, amazed at some of the parallels (particularly with regards to reconceptualizing thought in heuristic terms), but I became increasing troubled by the dogmatic conviction he continually exudes. It began smelling almost religious at turns.
Singularity = Rapture of the Geeks.
When the nanobots start melting him into computronium, I wonder if he will think Azathoth is so feeble after all.
The irony being that Yudkowsky’s transhumanist project is to create a god that will be more Odin than Azathoth. Although their model for a benelovent strong AI resembles Christ more than anything else, an ommibenevolent being that will come to save us all. You could basically sum their movement as atheists who are so dissatisfied with the absence of a Christian God that they are trying to build one.
Looking at it from outside their movement, I’d say if they end up we’re fortunate if they end up building an Odin (much smarter than you, has own goals but relatively benevolent) we’d be fortunate. They could also just end up building a Cthullu.
The parallels between them and the Consult as those that build a god that may enslave them to further their personal goals I’d be surprised to hear that wasn’t something Scott was thinking about when he came up with them.
“When the nanobots start melting him into computronium, I wonder if he will think Azathoth is so feeble after all.”
Well said, Jorge, and LOL! I’m torn as to what to think about transhumanism. Some of it’s just naive, I suppose, but like science fiction, it’s main message about our merger with technology, making us stranger and stranger beings, isn’t a prediction so much as a description of where we’re currently at. They speak of AI, but we already are artificially intelligent, with no immaterial spirit, “designed” by Azathoth, as it were; moreover, compared to the other animals, we’re super-intelligent, and we already threaten the planet, not yet with a swarm of nanobots, but with our pollution and our bizarre tastes that extinguish most species. If the singularity is the entry point of true weirdness into nature, that happened with the advent of language which gave the earliest humans relatively extensive control over their own thoughts (although Scott will say introspection gives us only an illusory view of ourselves!). Of course, we are just animals, in one sense, but we’re animals that behave very strangely. Anyway, I’m tempted to think that our transhuman future will differ from where we are now only in degree.
Good point, Stephan Cooper! Indeed, from a Christian perspective, this is the essence of Satanism: we atheists build our substitute gods, who are of course just idols. Thus, Nietzsche worshipped the overman and the transhumanist worships AI Odin. Unfortunately, theism doesn’t have the last word, since the theistic notion of God derives in turn from our instinctive anthropocentrism and personification, in something like the way Dennett lays out in Breaking the Spell. Throw in psychedelic religious experiences, owing to DMT flashes from drugs, chanting, and so forth, and you’ve got the wacky theistic projections and the trappings of mainstream literalistic religions. So the AI may be a substitute monotheistic deity, but that deity in turn is a substitute human and more specifically a substitute oligarch.
“When the nanobots start melting him into computronium, I wonder if he will think Azathoth is so feeble after all.”
That assumes such an end is not what some in that movement are after. Sounds like just another search for eternal life to me, a different version of a pathway to “heaven” as some would see it even if that path is food for some “higher” being of our own (initial) design. Replacing the undead god of evolution with one of our making, even if deep down it’s all just Azathoth.
If a yearning for meaning and spiritual guidance is incorporated into the human brain (as it seemingly must be) we aren’t ever going to burn that out entirely unless we rewire the brains of the entire species. Failing that, we’d simply replace one “god” with another, consciously or not. The only question is, what is yours?
Excellent 21st century update to the Nietzschean Madman from the Gay Science. I wonder how Nietzsche, or someone of a Dionysian pessimistic view would respond to the ranting madman?
Instead of a corpse of an immortal being, I’ve espoused along similar lines with the carcass of philosophy here: http://www.hyperboreans.com/heterodoxia/?p=595
That’s some fine prose poetry you’ve got there. Is philosophy dead or dying, though? It’s got plenty of competitors now from science, pseudoscience, and religion. But like history in general, the philosophical canon is picked by the winners to explain their triumph. There are so many people speaking out now on the internet that the winners of the future will be able, with the benefit of hindsight, to add to the canon even from current writers, scattered as they may be, dealing with any currently unforeseen transitions as though some great writers were destined to be born to address what are later seen to be pivotal historical developments. It’s all just an analogue of natural selection with the illusion of intelligent design as told in the winner’s oversimplifying myths.
This makes me more sure than ever that The Great Filter might actually be sentience itself. On the plus side, I think this post helped crystallized the end of a story I’ve been mulling. I’m going to check out your site right now, Benjamin!
I plan to join Bostrom’s cult and get murdered by a Neo Nazi.
(This has been a fanboy inside joke. Have a pleasant day.)
Glad to be of help, Litg. Don’t take too much, though; I’m planning to use my blog’s worldview in a series of novels I’ll be writing.
Haha, no worries, it just triggered on something else tangential I’d been thinking about for a story way down the road. I’d be interested in reading novels along the lines of your blog, probably while cuddling a puppy to keep the despair from creeping too close.
to create everything and then to destroy everything!
Romantically, this appears like “seeking”. As if trying to crack a code, finding the right combinations.
how else to resist the abominable inhumanity of our world
That our world is “inhuman” is true, but stating it means you are already creating a differentiation. That we are not part of the world, and that what we consider “human” is elsewhere.
The representation space of the brain models itself, and then sets itself apart from the world. We see the world as if it lays out there. While we are “in here”, separated from it. Not part of it. With our own morals that can conflict with the morals of the world.
So the fabric of the brain, is also out there. And we do not identify with the hard matter. That’s the origin of the dualism and it starts exactly by stating “the world is inhuman”.
to respond somehow with honour and grace?
Instead this ominously reminds me of “die with a degree of dignity”: jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/Tapes/Tapes/DeathTape/Q042fbi.html (removed “http” since it usually ends up with the comment made into spam)
Which is not a good thing.
But again, the point of ranting lies entirely in the premise that we can live and exist separate from the world. And that our illusion is a virtuous place (as opposed to a virtual one).
I agree with what you say about Cartesian dualism. I’ve discussed this in my blog in the contexts of monistic mysticism and naturalism. From physics or some other deep perspective, high-level patterns are ignored or explained away, and so we lose the distinction between the ego and everything else. I take the Blind Brain Theory to imply that the appearance of the Cartesian divide is an illusion based on introspection’s ignorance of the brain. So really there’s no difference between a person and a rock, say; we’re all just molecules, right? And at a deeper level, everything’s just the collapse of wavefunctions or string vibrations or whatever else.
But this is where I like Dennett’s way of speaking about levels of reality in terms of the opportunity to explain real patterns. I know Scott is critical of Dennett, but the fact is that introspection is the starting point of a dualistic perspective which addresses some patterns that really are there even though they vanish from other perspectives. The question for me, for example, is whether a neurofunctional theory of mental processes explains how mental patterns emerge and thus enjoy their own level of reality, as opposed to explaining away those patterns as really nonexistent or as not worth talking about.
I agree, we set ourselves apart from the world, whereas mystics and physicists alike see everything in the world as united. Talk of this alienation goes back at least to the Eden myth. But until transhumanists give us the technology to escape from the egoistic perspective for good, I think we’re stuck with the importance of the dualistic patterns. Don’t you think it’s worth talking about the distinction between human behaviour and all other natural processes? Aren’t we pretty unique and peculiar in terms of our communication, our relative self-awareness and self-control, our complex mental states, our angst and search for meaning?
I assume Scott will say we just thereby flatter ourselves; of course we’ll say we’re special, since we’re talking through the mouthpiece that can’t do otherwise, filtering out everything else, as it does. But this is also the Kantian’s dualistic point: for now, we’re stuck with the hardware we have, which gives us a limited perspective on ourselves, and however much mystical religion or cognitive science we imbibe, we’ll feel strongest about what we experience from our egoistic perspective. The dualism will matter to us, because we care a lot about our puny, individual life. The genes make us care, but that’s really what we are: animals built to take up a largely deluded perspective and then to swim in a sea of angst thanks to the curse of reason which gives us wider perspectives so that we see how ridiculously parochial our default view is.
The point is that we know that there’s no difference between a person and a rock. Take this as a postulate.
The fact is that, given that postulate, we could still accept to distinguish ourselves. To give a validity to our virtual realm. But if that happens, then it means that we draw this difference. We create it. We don’t simply recognize it as something that is “true” out there. Dualism, and the human being apart from thee real world, are artifices. Man-made.
So all of this is only possible as a “choice”. But then if it’s a choice then it does matter whether we do have real choice or if the choice is also an illusion.
It’s like finding a true original myth, a pattern that has no escape.
So the dualism is acceptable only if you “will” it. But then is intention real or just another fragmented illusion?
Don’t you think it’s worth talking about the distinction between human behaviour and all other natural processes?
According to Bakker the distinction exists because we are blind to ourselves. And this blindness creates the distinction. It’s flawed perception that creates flawed representation and false ideals.
Even in Kabbalah there’s a similar idea. You exist as a human being who perceive an egoistic “self” in the measure you are “broken” (and so flawed) from the substance of “god” (a degree of coarseness). Your goal in life and spirituality is the “equivalence of form” with god. Which means being really indistinguishable from all creation.
I think given how animals, even small ones like mice, tend to distinguish each other as different from the inanimate objects around them, I’m not sure it’s just a hardware constraint/BBT. But actually that the distinction exists in as much as it’s effective at sustaining life (effectiveness being key, as in if nothing was effective, life would never have come into cyclic existance).
If you manage to dodge the necessity of it (a parasitic Neil Cassidy, perhaps), okay. Otherwise you can’t just look at everything like it’s all the same. That’d just be pulling the plug on your own life support machine.
That’s about as far as I can argue for dualism.
That’s not the point. We know that our brain is different than someone else’s brain. And that two of them drive two different bodies. That’s not the idea of self that was concerned.
The point is when we perceive ourselves as different and elsewhere from the materials that make us. That’s the dualism: not the line between you and other people, but the line between the “spiritual” you and the material you.
It’s dualism within yourself.
P.S.
That’s why Bakker doesn’t say the human mind is inappropriate at driving the human body. He says that the human mind is inappropriate at introspection. So at correct self-perception/description.
The “flaw” is the spiritual dualism. Or the artificial dimension of the map we live in. Animals, as far as we know, use the map as a map. They don’t live this introspective artificial recreation of the world.
Abalieno,
The sense in which we’re no different from rocks requires a monistic ontology, according to which all distinctions are illusions and all concepts are partial and thus misleading. But RSB’s Blind Brain Theory is pro-science and thus not so monistic or mystical. He thinks the nonscientific conception of the self is misleading, but he’s not opposed to all reasoning or use of concepts. But once you allow for the good of reasoning and of conceptual distinctions, contrary to Buddhism, say, you’ve got every reason to acknowledge the apparent differences between people and rocks.
As for whether we choose our conceptual distinctions, I see this in more of a Kantian way. We have innate cognitive equipment that processes information as it does, revealing the world as having one structure rather than another. I do think we should be creative in finding meaning in life and in searching for a viable myth, but what moves us is largely a matter of taste which is likewise not so freely chosen.
One of my questions for RSB is what he can mean by saying that folk psychology is “flawed.” In what sense could the concepts of meaning, truth, and value be flawed that doesn’t lead to outright self-contradiction?
Distinctions are illusions. The world is analog, continuous.
As opposed to language, which is digital. The difference is born with language, that is the separation between symbol and meaning. The most relevant feature of language is the metalinguistic, which is the property of “speaking about itself”. So self-observing and self-describing.
All this simply creates a dualism. A displacement of the map from the territory. Distinction is linguistic, and it is definitely not something of the world. Which is why science has a problem with emergence and non-reductive laws.
The point is always that human beings (the conscious part) live within this digital/artificial dimension. This linguistic artificiality is exactly what distinguishes them. There’s nothing nonscientific about this. It’s science that says there are no differences in truth.
You’re wander into Big Metaphysics territory, now, Abe! How would you define causality, then? Or time? Or space? Analog or not, distinction abounds – analog distinctions.
I’m surprised. How would you?
You are the one announcing the post-semantic and then you tell me we require definitions of abstract ideas like time or space?
Definitions are linguistic. If you trust the linguistic system then you trust this fabricated reality and the sense it MAKES. This is always the point. I don’t think I’m saying things differently from how you are saying them.
Language is the first conscious representation. It’s the map of your heuristic model.
I’ve spent many a year floundering in the philosophy of language, and now see it as an unmitigated disaster. The point is, there is no ONE ‘fabricated reality’ proper to language. So saying that language is digital, that there’s no distinction without language and so forth is a nonstarter for me. Language works, and that’s enough. It’s only our second-order reflection on language where things get genuinely screwy. Let me put it this way: I believe in language, but I don’t believe in symbols. And this is just to say that I think we’ve been staring at language through a metacognitive straw since the beginning, and that neurolinguistics will offer up some big, likely ugly, surprises.
I don’t think we are understanding each other.
there is no ONE ‘fabricated reality’ proper to language
You recognize that there’s a reality out there, and that we live within a model of it that we call conscious experience. That’s the fabricated reality. It’s the map built through heuristics.
Language is simply the substance, the material that BUILDS conscious experience. Without language there’s no conscious experience, that’s the point. The two are bound together. Language isn’t coming AFTER you think. It’s not merely an expression of a thought. It’s not like you articulate your words after you articulate the thought. Absence of language is absence of thought. You literally can’t think, cause and effect does not exist.
The qualia of experience is everything circumscribed by conscious experience. Everything that falls in, or emerges into consciousness. Whatever can be there, can be expressed. It is language.
And in the same way you can draw a certain difference from human beings to other animals, so you can find the same differences if you examine their language. Animal language lack metalinguistic functions. Self-reflection is an exclusive property of human being because it’s an exclusive property of their language.
And if language “works” it is simply in proportion to how the map works representing the territory. The representation is language. You rely on the fact that language represents well enough the world out there. Drawing meaning. Which is: heuristically erasing the great majority of stuff in order to “represent” what’s meaningful to you. That’s why language is arbitrary and you make new words representing new stuff you need to know. Or why you forget words when they apply to objects that are no longer relevant.
When you say “language works” you just repeat what you say with “heuristics work”. At least the part of heuristics that happens this side of consciousness. That is: after the material has been already selected and filtered.
RSB and Abalieno,
I agree with RSB that BBT doesn’t imply metaphysical monism or idealism, for that matter. Even if you’re right, Abalieno, and language is required for conceptual distinctions, that doesn’t mean we should be metaphysical idealists, because differences needn’t be distinguished. Making a distinction is a mental/linguistic act, but surely real differences needn’t be noticed, recognized, or represented/simplified by concepts or symbols of any kind. I think RSB can distinguish (i.e. represent) the real, ontological difference between distinctions and differences. Distinctions are made by minds, whereas differences are more general and can be made directly by matter, energy, and the whole undead rigmarole of natural forces.
But, RSB, once again I wonder what you can mean by saying that language “works.” Assuming FP is inferior as a second-order explanation of anything, I suppose you could give a biological explanation: language increases our genetic fitness into an environment. If that’s what you mean, technically we should strip all normativity from this concept of “working”; in that case, though, galaxies likewise would “work” in that they’re part of natural processes minus the teleology, which is all natural selection is, of course. To the extent that the normative connotations tag along, because we’re incorrigible in seeing the world through FP lenses, the world seems undead as we marry those intuitions with science.
But language without symbols, that is, without intentionality? Have you read Marr on the three-tiered analysis of “computation”? Syntax is the level of rules that perform a job in the teleological sense, and these rules are implemented by a dumb physical system that does what it does regardless of any goals. And the rules make no sense without the semantic interpretation of the units as symbols.
I take it you must disagree with this standard, FP analysis. But this is why I asked you earlier what you can mean by “information.” Analogously, I can ask what you can mean by language without reference to symbols. I think there’s a danger here of resorting to weasel words, of using “information” and “language” but draining these words of content after disposing of FP as our second-order conception. I assume, though, BBT supplies at least the beginning of an alternative way of seeing not just how we get confused about language, but how we should think of language without FP.
Semantics is simply what we bring to the picture, I’m sure you agree. So I would ammend what you say to ‘rules make no easy sense to us short of semantic interpretation.’ I’ve been assuming you’re a Dennettian on these issues, Ben, but I wonder if you’re conflicted the way Dennett is? He’s generally careful in his defenses of the intentional stance to relativize his pragmatic justifications for taking the intentional stance vis a vis the way things stand. So he admits, going all the way back to the early 70’s, that although the intentional stance is pragmatically inescapable at a given point in time, there’s nothing to guarantee it will always be so. I actually see BBT taking off from the point where Dennett chickens out.
The neurolinguistic account of language, when it finally arises, will be mechanical. Short of solving the symbol grounding problem (developing a natural, yet positive, account of meaning), it will necessarily cut against our intentional intuitions regarding language. You agree with this much, don’t you? What makes BBT so potentially significant is that it actually discharges the explanatory burden of how the intentional arises from the mechanical – it just does so in negative terms. Language, as we experience it, BBT says, is best understood as a kind of cognitive illusion arising out of medial neglect (and heuristic misapplication). So the question is, If BBT is empirically confirmed, what are we to make of intentional phenomena then? Or to put a Dennettian spin on the question, How would this impact his contingent interpretation of the intentional stance?
Because of medial neglect, our acts appear to arise ex nihilo – very many have become accustomed to viewing this as a kind of cognitive limitation forced upon us by our structural blindness to our neurocausal antecedents. I’m guessing this is the way you’re looking at it. Even Dennett, who goes through heruclean acrobatics attempting to preserve the term ‘free will’ admits that our feeling of free will is illusory. BBT provides a way of seeing how all intentionality can be seen as a consequence of what amounts to the same kind of blindness…
If it is scientifically confirmed, what happens to the status of Dennett’s intentional stance then? I think it’s obvious that it will suffer (as it is in the course of suffering) a huge cognitive demotion. The fact that we can not see our way past certain, systematic illusions, in no way changes the fact that, from a life sciences perspective, they are best seen as illusions.
RSB,
Instead of saying I’m conflicted about the need for FP, I’d say I’m open to the possibility of a posthuman revolution. As I said in our other exchange, regarding the alien Al from your dialogue, “Thinker as Tinker,” were we presented with a scientific theory of the mind that greatly empowers us, but that also makes nonsense of our prejudices, intuitions, and politically correct notions, we might opt for the new way of thinking. We could then interpret that revolution in pragmatic, implicitly normative terms, or perhaps we’d have a new interpretation thanks to that scientific perspective.
As for me, I’m not committed so much to Dennett’s formulations as to the perspective of property dualism. I just like Dennett’s talk of patterns. If FP is innate and inevitable, I think this can be explained in the Kantian manner. In fact, BBT is consistent with the basic idea of Kant’s transcendental idealism: certain illusions are forced on us by the quirky way our brains work. Short of rewiring our brains, we’ll tend to interpret things using the concepts of meaning and value. Even Kant might have agreed that such an innate perspective on the world isn’t absolutely necessary, given the possibility of radically changing our mental structures. We’d just naturalize this by saying that our minds would change as a result of neurological or genetic tinkering. Either way, though, we’re explaining patterns in our experience by referring not just to the given data but to our mental or neural structures.
Neurolinguistics explains how language is comprehended and acquired at what Marr would call the implementation level, right? Will this science contradict semantics or just change the subject? More likely, neurolinguistics presupposes semantics. The alternative is that this science will unify language with some broader subject matter. I don’t rule out this possibility with a pure Kantian transcendental argument. I’d just like to know what the broader concepts would be that don’t actually presuppose semantic ones. For example, I’d want to know how we should define “symbol” and “linguistic rule” without recourse to the concepts of meaning and value.
If BBT is empirically confirmed, what would happen to FP? Well, we’d know, then, that our intuitions correspond only to embarrassingly parochial appearances, not to objective facts. Likewise, when we see a stick in the water, and the stick seems to be bent, we know that what we see is an illusion rather than the deeper reality. But here I think we should go back to my point about the difference between idiosyncratic and mass illusion, which I think I make in our other discussion. I said that when only one person is forced to see the world a certain way, she’s put in a mental institution, but when everyone is forced to see the world in the same way, for the Kantian reason, we call that the norm of cognition for that species.
Now you say that an illusion is still an illusion even if it’s forced on us. Sure, but then I’d return to my point about weasel words. What’s the definition of “illusion” if the natural appearance of reality to creatures with certain mental structures is called an illusion? If an illusion is just a superficial or otherwise partial or mind-dependent view of reality, illusions aren’t so bad since even scientific theories are limited, including as they do models which are simplifications; moreover, these theories won’t proceed from something like Spinoza’s neutral God’s eye view. They’re still mammalian artifacts, for pity’s sake.
It’s good to be clear about Dennett. So you believe in original intentionality then? Either way, we disagree with him for opposite reasons!
Neurolinguistics presupposes semantics? This is the traditional, prescientific view, I grant you that! The fact is, you have to admit we know very, very little about what the brain is doing when we speak. What we do know is that semantics rises and falls with brain function. A little lesion on Broca’s area or so on, and ‘semantics’ is shattered. The prescientific intuitions underwriting semantics will be either revolutionized or they’ll be vindicated by a mature neuroscientific account of language: ceteris paribus, the odds of the former drastically exceed that of the latter, given the history of prescientific discourses. What do you personally think short circuits the ceteris paribus clause?
‘Symbols’ in computer science are simply mechanisms possessing ranges of applications and systematic consequences. The same is almost certainly true at the neural level: the mystery is really one of how this links with our intuitive sense of the semantic. All I’m trying to impress on you is a) how open these questions are (because our manifest intuitions are pretty much useless); and b) just how magical, obviously supernatural all our talk of the ‘formal,’ the ‘apriori,’ and the ‘transcendental’ will seem post Semantic Apocalypse.
BBT, btw, actually has a very parsimonious explanation for our intuitions of the transcendental (especially understood a la Kant): Since medial neglect utterly conceals the neurofunctionality of conscious experience, leaving only our (lateral) generative models of our environments (and to a far sketchier extent, ourselves), the lateral seems to be all there is. But since medial neurofunctionality makes these lateral models possible, they all bear the footprint of that functionality, which deliberative cognition can (and has) interpreted in very many different ways (so with Kant, formally (Allison), ontologically (Heidegger), psychologically (Kitcher) and so on) simply because of the ambiguities generated by the absence of any direct medial information. What makes the transcendental transcendent, on this account, is simply neglect: the medial represents a dimension of information that deliberative cognition simply cannot ‘plug into’ the causal economy of its lateral environment.
Of course. In some cases it’ll be a matter of degree, but in other cases it’ll likely be outright delusion, purely an artifact of information privation or cognitive misapplication. You think you see colour in your periphery but you don’t. That clearly qualifies as an illusion. How about the ‘apriori’? What AI researchers call the ‘curse of dimensionality’ almost certainly afflicts our interpretations of ‘consciousness.’ The loss of dimensionality almost certainly means that we are thoroughly deluded in a number of respects, and given the profusion of conundrums and impasses in philosophy of mind, does BBT’s claim that these are the result of informatic deprivation (not to mention it’s ability, in many cases, to elegantly explain why they arise) actually all that difficult to believe? Trust me, I want to believe as you do, but it really does seem to do little more than preserve some ancient (prescientific) experiential conceits at the cost of comprehension.
Distinctions are made by minds, whereas differences are more general and can be made directly by matter, energy, and the whole undead rigmarole of natural forces.
Imho, this is a “turtles all the way down” type of discussion.
Language is simply the building block of conscious reality. You can’t define matter and energy in language, then remove the language and still have a definition of matter and energy.
If distinctions are made by minds, then you grasp differences only within distinctions.
As if it’s a time paradox where an element creates the other, then the other goes back in time to create the first.
Or like Godel. You can’t define a full mathematical system from the inside and make it completely closed. Same for language. Same for reductionism. We don’t get the luxury of “stepping out” and see the big picture, then describe it from this newfound perspective. You are completely blind to what sits outside language, because language defines what’s knowable. Yours is a relative position that is stuck in a single state.
If anything, you escape language through complexity. Which is the number of secondary observations you can make (all the looping self-observing, reflexive stuff).
RSB,
I haven’t read Dennett in a while, but I recall that his explanatory stances are pragmatic. At least, he says the intentional stance is valid as long as its categories help us predict behaviour. Pragmatism is still normative, though, so this meta defense of the stances would presuppose the normative logic of goals. I take “original intentionality” to be the idea that the content of external symbols derives from the intrinsic content of mental symbols. I don’t have a strong opinion on this, since I have no idea how language evolved. Did internal or external symbols come first, many thousands of years ago? I’m more interested in the question of whether semantic properties/patterns in general metaphysically emerge, so that a lower-level explanation of those patterns doesn’t necessarily mean we should stop talking about them as such (in the higher-level way). This is the crux of our disagreement, I think.
My point about neurolinguistics was that on a Marrian analysis of computation, the three levels are interdependent. You’re surely right that semantics would vanish without the brain, but so too would the brain processes’ function as a mechanism that implements an algorithm vanish without the usefulness of talk of the resulting meaning of symbols. For Marr, there’s no reason to speak of implementation or syntax without semantics. So it cuts both ways: if you wipe out semantics, you lose the whole computation analysis, including the lower-level, neurolinguistic one.
Semantics might be irrelevant to the immediate business of computer science, but there would be no such science without the appearance/illusion of a symbol’s meaning. A computer scientist abstracts from the semantic level of interpretation, since that can always be tacked on at the end, just as a phenomenologist abstracts from physics to describe the apparent contents of conscious states. The reason in each case is that there’s plenty of work to do on either level. But this doesn’t mean that only the one level in either case is worth talking about. A computer scientist surely presupposes that all the syntactic work she does writing code will yield symbols that are intelligibly such to the folk who don’t know the first thing about computer programming.
You have indeed convinced me that the questions here are open ones. I don’t want to rest my case on any transcendental argument about the necessity of folk concepts. In fact, I think you could stress the inductive argument that seems implicit in some of what you say. The argument would be that since so many folk intuitions have failed in the past, the remainders are likely to fail as well. The past ones have included the prescientific superstitions and prejudices that modern folks would be embarrassed even to speak of. People once intuited that the world is flat. Science showed that it’s spherical. I am indeed open to the very same thing happening in the case of our intuitions about ourselves. In fact, I think science has already undermined the theistic (substance dualistic) outliers of such intuitions.
Where I put my foot down, though, is on top of what Dennett might call greedy reductionistic arguments. Now, it would be a miracle if a single one of our intuitions turned out to be either the full story or perfectly accurate. What are the odds that a guess, resting largely on ignorance and bias, will turn out to be correct regarding something as complex as human nature? Clearly, scientists are telling us much we didn’t know about our bodies. But once again, the key question for me is about ontological emergence as a justification for speaking at higher levels of discourse. It turns out that when scientists discovered the planet’s true shape, we lost the incentive to speak of the world as flat. Nevertheless, it’s not entirely wrong to call the world flat. Phenomenologically, the world does indeed seem flat, not round–at least, not to those standing on its surface. So who says the average ancients were talking about geometry as opposed to phenomenology? This speaks to the autonomy of the phenomenological level, which is the level of how things seem directly to consciousness.
My point is that whether scientific discoveries delegitimize prescientific intuitions is largely a pragmatic issue, the question being whether the intuitions remain useful for certain purposes. When we discovered the planet’s shape, the world also became a smaller place, thanks to advances in communication and transportation technologies, so that there was practically no reason to think of the planet’s surface as having a straight edge that drops off into nothing, because we could actually conceive of going literally everywhere on Earth without finding any such edge. Instead of calling the planet flat, we can think of it as a very large sphere. Dispensing with folk psychology will require that the concepts of intentionality and value no longer be so useful. I’d need to see at least preliminary versions of the independent, replacement concepts for me to think that those folk intuitions are likewise becoming obsolete.
So science will show that meaning and value are projections of the brain, like the colours we see everywhere. Does it no longer make sense to speak parochially of the sky’s blueness now that we know this appearance of colour is mind-dependent, and we know many of the details of how the brain produces that appearance? Surely not! But decades from now, when we’ve implanted technology in our brains that allows us to see the world in black and white, we may lose the intuition that the outer world is itself coloured, because we’ll have much more control over that appearance. Either way, I think the Kantian account is the most balanced. What he’d say is that what’s objective, or noumenal, is the outer world’s potential to be carved up in various ways, depending on the tools (i.e. mental/neural structures) you bring. Semantic intuitions are fundamental and relatively indispensible, precisely because they’re grounded in the brain and in social norms of upbringing, which don’t (yet) change much.
“Where I put my foot down, though, is on top of what Dennett might call greedy reductionistic arguments.”
The issue of reduction is neither here nor there, for me. I’m more interested in what kinds of claims will carry the cognitive day and what kinds won’t. Your example actually illustrates this quite well.
And what does the autonomy of the phenomenological level turn on? How does it differ from the autonomy of the evangelical level? You can embrace flat out relativism, contextualism, what have you, refuse the hegemony of any one cognitive yardstick, but then I’m not sure how this is a counter-argument so much as a change of subject. And meanwhile, science will continue to revolutionize the ground beneath your feet. It’s tropistic efficacy, I’m talking about, not bound to any ends or norms, just the kinds of ‘knowledge’ that enable ideological and technical transformation. So when you say, “My point is that whether scientific discoveries delegitimize prescientific intuitions is largely a pragmatic issue, the question being whether the intuitions remain useful for certain purposes” you are not only seem to be saying, ‘whether scientific discoveries upend rationality is a question of whether they are rational,’ you are also proposing that the process is rational to begin with, rather than something continually rationalized post hoc. Collectively, it all just lurches forward, mindless, thanks to the law of unintended consequences. On the personal level the discoveries are rational given… ? Quagmire looms.
The challenge is one of finding some consensus-compelling way of keeping the phenomenological in and the evangelical out, of distinguishing between flat-earthers.
All semantic intuitions are fundamental? How are they ‘grounded in the brain’? What, exactly, are ‘social norms’?
Say 50 years hence we finally discover their is no such thing as the apriori, that the ‘laws of thought’ so-called are simply empirical laws of computation, flattened by intuition into the ‘formal’ because of losses in dimensionality suffered by metacognition, truncated by intuition into ‘normative rules’ by the way neglect occludes the empirical regularities producing them, rendered ‘prior’ to experience because these are the natural laws cognitive systems must perform to discover, and leached into ‘abstract entities’ by the metacognitive lack of the information required to distinguish between instances/tokens.
Once you see this as a possibility, the traditional understanding is plucked from the ‘only game in town effect,’ and you can ask the question (which you have already asked above) what are the odds that our ‘semantic intuitions’ are as fundamental as they seem? You can turn Fodor’s compatibility proof and ask whether Church-Turing simply a coincidence? Maybe it is all mechanical all the way down. It would certainly solve a number of perennial problems.
RSB,
To clarify, when I said that semantic intuitions are fundamental because they’re grounded in the brain, what I meant was that we keep going back to them because they’re caused by limits on the brain’s access to itself, in the sorts of ways you specify. Semantics isn’t just habitual for us, since the illusion in the way we pre-reflectively appear to ourselves isn’t accidental or chosen by us, right?
You’re right that I need a way to dispense with something like fundamentalist religion while defending folk intuitions about the self. The difference is that the literalistic, non-mystical theists mean to compete with scientists on empirical grounds, reading the Bible as though it tells us the deep, objective facts. By contrast, I’d interpret the semantic and normative patterns in something like Kant’s way, as partly objective and partly subjective. For example, mental states and external symbols seem to creatures like us to relate intentionally to other things. What’s objective there is the way symbols point us in certain directions, as though the symbols were substitutes for their referents. So if I read about a dog, the scribble “dog” may cause memories in me of dogs, which in turn were caused by actual dogs. There are more or less simplified models to explain this process, the simplest being the semantic one which posits the relation of intentionality.
Now, a true-believing theist can interpret God as being implicit in everything, even though God is invisible. Likewise, intentionality is invisible even though we can interpret our rational behaviour as being directed by that relation. That is, both God and semantic or normative properties are theoretical rather than observational, but there’s still a difference. Semantics has more scientific validity because it’s a simplified form of whatever lower-level model fully explains and thus allows us to understand and to predict human behaviour. Theism has no such cognitive validity; instead, theism is an unfalsifiable pseudo-theory.
You say that semantic properties have efficacy only because they systematically track neural ones. Sure, but this doesn’t mean the higher-level reduces to the lower one or that talk of the higher one becomes counterproductive. As they say in philosophy of mind, mental properties may only supervene on the mechanisms. Just because the meaning of symbols depends on neural mechanisms doesn’t mean we should speak only of the latter. Besides, semantic properties are multiply realizable: writings and computer bits contain meaning and they’re not made of neurons. So the tracking isn’t quite so systematic, which adds to the utility of the semantic and normative ways of speaking.
But I agree with you, in principle, that folk psychology isn’t necessarily the only game in town and potentially faces competition from scientific theories. I still don’t know how I’d explain the revolution without appealing to pragmatic and thus to normative considerations, but I grant the possibility that some other way might become available with the revolution (or is currently found somewhere on your blog).
Maybe the direction I’ve taken in the debate is not as interesting but when I say that conscious experience is digital I also intend it in the full agnostic sense.
You seem to want to label me as idealist, or talking metaphysics, but what I really pointed out is that we know “A”: the digital space of consciousness. What’s beyond is “non-A”, but just because it’s so it doesn’t mean that it’s a negative image of A. It’s just something you don’t know. I don’t pinpoint it. Maybe it was a mistake saying that this “non-A” is analog and continuous, because this seems a way to define it accordingly to the properties of “A”.
What I intended to say is that the categories that we use won’t apply too well. Those categories are still a map. So what’s outside requires dropping these categories for what they are. In this, the world is continuous: lacking a map. We know what it is not, but we don’t know what it is.
Evoking this kind of agnostic void means that you have the tendency to replace it with some other map. So you use “information” or “energy”. Or call me idealist.
The point remains that we are trapped on the digital side. The underlying rule here is relativity. You have just one point of view. Meaning in life is relative to a position, since you lack the right from changing that position. That’s what grants value to the illusion: the one perspective.
Things look as they do because we are trapped in relativity. But without being able to switch positions, you can’t call anything “illusion”. Or better: it doesn’t matter.
As if you are trapped in a dream. You escape the dream and land in real reality when you wake up. But if you don’t wake up? It means you stay on one perspective. And you’ll have to judge yourself and the world from that relative position. Authentic or not. Delusional or not.
Following the previous comment.
Another proof of the necessary duality of experience is how you need this duality to recognize a dream. You can recognize a dream when you can hold on a “foreign” experience. Lucid dreaming happens when you bring in the picture something that doesn’t belong to it. If you have a failing barrier between dream and waking state, then something alien seeps in your dream and you can realize it’s a dream while you are still trapped within.
But the point is: only when you have one element outside you are able to make a distinction, and recognize the difference. So this drawing of distinctions to build conscious experience is the constant in the process. Lack of distinction means lack of cognition. It means: the same. Or: “I can’t see shit.” Stuff that is undifferentiated is simply stuff that does not exist. Or more correctly, stuff that we don’t have on the map. So it doesn’t exist as far as conscious experience goes. If you have, like you have, only conscious experience, then it means you have one perspective that defines all that matters and is real.
Without other perspectives you’re trapped in relativity, and the way relativity make things appear. So the debate is how science actually lets you find a new perspective. And if this is enough to actually drag conscious experience outside of itself. Which I think is impossible because going outside of conscious experience can’t be done without giving up conscious experience.
UNTIL TODAY, science has just brought stuff within conscious experience. It translated more of the world into conscious experience. From unseen, to translated. From undifferentiated to known and differentiated. It carved its space out the chaos of uncertainty. The world is a bit less mysterious. But science didn’t breach the substance of conscious experience. Science as a tool is made of conscious experience and can only translate conscious experience.
So we never got beyond one perspective.
See Ayn Rand:
Reality, the external world, exists independent of man’s consciousness, independent of any observer’s knowledge, beliefs, feelings, desires or fears. This means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what they are – and that the task of a man’s consciousness is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it. Thus Objectivism rejects any belief in the supernatural – and any claim that individuals or groups create their own reality.
What’s wrong with this?
That it’s extremely presumptuous. It completely lacks humility. It simply banishes doubts and affirms human consciousness is undeceived.
You shall have no perspective outside of myself. So it’s basically the inverse of being agnostic. Human beings at the center of creation because the arrogance is in the assumption that the one perspective we have is the sole one possible.
Abalieno,
Your clarification of your digital-analogue distinction sounds more like Kant’s compromise between metaphysical realism and idealism. I agree with you about the need for humility. That’s what cosmicism is about, in my view, and it’s what annoys me not just about libertarians but about optimistic New Atheists like Richard Dawkins. There’s a whitewash of atheistic naturalism that I try to peel away in my blog.
“they lost sight of the preacher as he had indeed scurried away as promised, homeless, into the dark”. Well, thank god that blowhard self-important self-styled prophet of the esoteric is gone!
Ah well, you can’t please everyone.
Got the message – clear all boulders from the market place! Understood! 😉
It seems like an idea based off of knowing the whole deal – as if what comes after is the entire deal. What came before the big bang? Doesn’t everything seem inexplicable – why should anything exist, ever? EVER? It literally feels kind of blasphemous to me to really ask it, as if everything will be gone, whisked away like an emperors new clothes not in the sense of going now, but having never been. But still, WHY? Why is anything anything? The fundiment of anything, life or otherwise, a rediculous stack of turtle upon turtle. How could anything ever be? You look forward, toward an undeath, when if you turn your head, look backward, there is the animating absurdity behind! What the hell is going on? Where is the suspicion? Where is the suspicion in your heart? How do you know what lies ahead, when you do not know what lies behind? Like so much dead skin encasing you, what does the undead universe potentially encase? What the hell happened before the big bang? Doesn’t this all seem bogus, even as it all keeps going on, outside your window, as the window, as your eye, as your mind, as if it’s all perfectly innocent and absolutely nothing untoward is happening? Seriously, who buys that? Suspicion is a story without an ending. What is that last page?
How’s about that for a mini rant!? So may the flowers of my words grow magnificent soil in ye…
That is indeed a fine rant, Callan. You curiously reverse the flower-soil metaphor, though.
It’s in theme with looking backward, causally, and all that! And thanks! 🙂
Abalieno,
That’s not the point. We know that our brain is different than someone else’s brain. And that two of them drive two different bodies. That’s not the idea of self that was concerned.
The point is when we perceive ourselves as different and elsewhere from the materials that make us. That’s the dualism.
I’m refering to the effectiveness of the perception. That effectiveness in regards to continuing cyclic life is something that is aligned with the physics of this universe. As much as cyclic life could only exist if that cyclical nature was possible within that physics structure.
After all, it’s the pattern of the materials that make you that’s relevant – take the materials of you in a blender and – it’s all the same material as before, isn’t it?
In as much as yourself and your blended self are not the same, there is a duality.
I mean in a sense it’s never going to be ‘duality’, because my description is something explained and duality is supposedly this unexplainable thingie, except unless someone perhaps says it doesn’t exist. In a way that non existance is kind of belief based – the only way to disprove it is with an explainable duality. And the duality has to be within someones self or something.
I think the ‘were the same as rocks’ doesn’t cut it as dismissal method.
[…] anyway through google cache. And because vaguely related to what I was writing in comments over at Bakker’s blog (continues up and […]
Also, perhaps rants within an undead god should go onto the blog roll? Maybe, anyway! 🙂
[…] Quote taken from: The Rant Within the Undead God– by Benjamin Cain (by R S […]
This is such an enjoyable read (there must be a better word. ‘Remarkable’? Joy doesn’t come into it. “Inspired?” Too dark. I feel an “AMEN” but thats dubiously pentecostal-sounding. “Ah, someone has looked as I have” seems arrogant and presumptuous. Well, perhaps “thanks” must suffice. Your rant is like a strange map laid out on which I recognize certain coastlines and notations while others are veiled. I follow some of your words and some of are opaque. “resistance and redemption” interested me: a Quaker writer suggested that perhaps all God is is a certain wildness at the heart of life (the human soul, or a supernova), an Insistance, (which makes me think of Caputo’s “God doesn’t exist, God insists”). But if course this is all conjecture, God is simply a word exhausted from multivalent meanings. Our prophets have become dumb, our seers blind.