How to Build a First Person (Using only Natural Materials)
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: Birth is the only surrender to fate possible.
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In film you have the famous ‘establishing shot,’ a brief visual survey, usually a long or medium shot, of the space the ensuing sequence will analyze along more intimate angles. Space, you could say, is the conclusion that comes first, the register that always precedes its analysis. Some directors play with this, continually force their audience into the analysis absent any spatial analysand. The viewer is thrown, disoriented as a result. Sometimes directors build outward, using the lure of established space as a kind of narrative instrument. Sometimes they shackle the eye to detail, mechanically denying events their place, and so inciting claustrophobia in the airy void of the theatre. They use the space represented to wage war against the space of representing.
If the same has happened here, it’s been entirely inadvertent. I’m not sure how I’ll look back at this year–this attempt to sketch out ‘post-intentional philosophy.’ It’s been a tremendously creative time, to be sure. A hundred thousand words for the beast that is The Unholy Consult, and easily as much written here. I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed such a period of intense creativity. These posts have simply been dropping in my head, one after another, some as long as journal articles, most all of them bristling with detail, jargon, and counterintuitive complexities. When I think about it, I’m blown away that Three Pound Brain has grown the way it has, half-again over last year…
For I wanketh.
Large.
Now I want to think the explanation is simple, that against all reason, I’ve managed to climb into a new space, an undiscovered country. But all I know for sure is that I’m arguing something genuinely new–something genuinely radical. So folly or not, I pursue, run down what seem to be the never-ending permutations of this murderous take on the human soul. We have yet to see what science will make of us. And we have very little reason to believe our hearts won’t be broken the way human hearts are almost always broken when they pitch traditional hope against scientific indifference. Who knows? Three Pound Brain could be the place, the cradle where our most epic delusion dies.
Either way, the time has come to pan back, crank up the depth of field, and finally provide some kind of establishing shot. This ain’t going to be easy–for me or you. At a certain level the formulations are almost preposterously simplistic (a ‘machinology’ as noir-realism, I think, termed it). I’m talking about the brain in exceedingly general terms, after all. I could delve into the (of course stochastic) mechanics in more detail, I suppose, go ‘neuroanatomical’ in an effort to add more empirical plumage. I still intend to write about the elegant way the Blind Brain Theory falls out of Bayesian predictive-coding models of the brain.
But for the nonce, I don’t need to. The apparently insuperable conundrums of the first person, the consciousness we think we have, can be explained using some quite granular structural and developmental assumptions. We just need to turn our normal way of looking at things upside down–to stop viewing our metacognitive image of meaning and agency as some kind of stupendous achievement. Why? Because doing so takes theoretical metacognition at its word, something that cognitive science has shown–quite decisively–to be the province of fools. If anything, the ‘stupendous achievement’ is the one possessing far and away the greatest evolutionary pedigree and utilizing the most neural resources: environmental cognition. Taking this as our baseline, we can begin diagnosing the ancient perplexities of the metacognitive image as the result of informatic occlusion and cognitive overreach.
We could be a kind of dream, you and I, one that isn’t even useful in any recognizable manner. This is where the difficulty lies: the way BBT requires we contravene our most fundamental intuitions.
It’s all about the worst case scenario. Philosophy, to paraphrase Brassier, is no sop to desire. If science stands poised to break us, then thought must submit to this breaking in advance. The world never wants for apologists: there will always be an army of Rosenthals and Badious. Someone needs to think these things, no matter how dehumanizing or alienating they seem to be. Besides, only those who dare thinking the post-intentional need fear ‘losing’ anything. If meaning and morality are the genuine emergent realities that the vast bulk of thinkers, analytic or continental, assume them to be, they should be able to withstand any sustained attempt to explain them away.
And if not? Well then, welcome to the future.
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So, how do you build a first person?
Imagine the sum of information, understood in the deliberately vague sense of systematic differences making systematic differences, comprising you and your immediate environment. The holy grail of consciousness research is simply understanding how what you are experiencing this very moment fits into this ‘natural informatic field.’ The brass ring, in other words, is one of understanding how you qua person resides in you qua organism–or in other words, explaining how mechanism generates consciousness and intentionality.
Now until recently, science could only track natural processes up to your porch. You qua organism are a mansion of astronomical complexities, and even as modern medicine overran your outer defences, your brain remained an unconquerable citadel, the one place in nature where the old, prescientific games of giving-and-asking-for-reasons could flourish. This is why I continually talk about the ‘bonfire of the humanities,’ the impending collapse of the traditional discourses of the soul. This is why I continually speak of BBT in eschatological terms, pose it as a precursor of the posthuman: if scientifically confirmed, it means that Man-the-meaning-maker is of a piece with Man-the-image-of-God and Man-the-centre-of-the-universe, that noocentrism will join biocentrism and geocentrism in the reliquary of human intellectual conceit and folly. And this is why I mourn ‘Akratic Culture,’ society fissured by the scission of knowledge and experience, with managerial powers exploiting the mechanistic efficiencies of the former, and the client masses fleeing into the intentional opacities of the latter, seeking refuge in vacant affirmation and subreptive autonomy.
So how does the soul fit into the natural informatic field? BBT argues that the best way to conceive the difference between the first and third person is in terms of informatic neglect. Since the structure and function of the brain is dedicated to reliably modelling the structure and function of its environment, the brain remains that part of the environment that it cannot reliably model. BBT terms the modelling structure and function ‘medial’ and the modelled structure and function ‘lateral.’ The brain’s inability to model its modelling, it terms medial neglect. Medial neglect simply means the brain cannot cognize itself as a brain, and so must cognize itself otherwise. This ‘otherwise’ is what we call the soul, mind, consciousness, the first-person, being-in-the-world, etc.
So consider a perspective on a brain:
Note that the target here is your perspective on the diagrammed brain, not the brain itself. Since the structure and function of your brain are dedicated to modelling the structure and function of your environment, the modelling nowhere appears within the modelled as anything resembling the modelled, even though we know the brain modelling is as much a brain as the brain modelled. The former, rather, provides the ‘occluded frame’ of the latter. At any given moment your perspective ‘hangs,’ as it were, outside of everything. You can pause and reflect on your perspective, of course, model your modelling, as say, something like this:
but only from the standpoint of another ‘occluded frame,’ the oblivion of medial neglect. This second diagram, in other words, can only model the medial, neurofunctional information neglected in the first by once again neglecting that information. No matter how many times we stack these diagrams, how far we press the Rylean regress, we will still be stranded with medial neglect, the ‘unframed frame’ of the first person. The reason for this, it is important to note, is purely mechanical as opposed to semantic: the machinery of modelling simply cannot model itself as it models.
But even though medial neglect means thoroughgoing neurofunctional occlusion–the brains only appear within the first person–these diagrams show it is by no means complete. As mentioned above, the brain’s inability to model itself as a brain (another natural mechanism in its environment) means it must model itself as a ‘perspective,’ something at once situated within its environment, and somehow mysteriously hanging outside of it–both local and nonlocal.
Many of the apparent peculiarities belonging to consciousness and intentionality as we intuit them, on the BBT account, turn on either medial neglect directly or one of a number of other structural and developmental confounds such as brain complexity, evolutionary caprice, and access invariance. The brain, unable to model itself as a brain, is forced to rely on what little metacognitive information its structure and evolutionary development afford.
This is where informatic neglect becomes a problem more generally, which is to say, over and above the problems posed by medial neglect in particular. We now know human cognition is fractionate, a collection of situation specific problem-solving devices, and yet we have no direct awareness of relying on anything save a singular, universal capacity for problem-solving. We regularly rely on dubious information, resort to the wrong device on the wrong occasion, entirely convinced of the justness of our cause, the truth of our theory, or what have you.
Mistakes like these and others reveal the profound and peculiar structural role informatic neglect plays in conscious experience. In the absence of information pertaining to our (medial) causal relation to our environment, we experience aboutness. In the absence of discriminations (in the absence of information) we experience wholes. In the absence of information regarding the insufficiency of information, we presume sufficiency.
But the most difficult-to-grasp structural quirk of informatic neglect has to be the ‘local nonlocality’ we encountered above, what I’ve been calling asymptosis, the fact that the various limits of cognitive and perceptual modalities cannot figure within those cognitive and perceptual modalities. As mechanical, no neural subsystem can model its modelling as it models. This is why, for instance, you cannot see the limits of your visual field–or why, in other words, the boundary of your visual field is asymptotic.
So in the diagrams above, you see a brain and none of the neural machinery responsible for that seeing primarily because of informatic neglect. It is you, a whole (and autonomous) person, seeing that brain and not a fractionate conglomerate of subpersonal cognitive mechanisms because of informatic neglect. Likewise, this metacognitive appraisal that it is ‘you’ looking at a brain is self-evident because of informatic neglect: you have no information to the contrary. And lastly, the ‘frame’ (the medial neurofunctionality) of what you see constitutively outruns what you see because, once again, of informatic neglect.
This is all just to say that the intentional, holistic, sufficient, and asymptotic structure of the first person simply follows from the fact that the brain is biomechanical.
This claim may seem innocuous, but it is big, I assure you, monstrously big. Why? Because, aside from at long last providing a parsimonious theoretical means of naturalizing consciousness and intentionality, it also argues that they (as intuitively conceived) are largely cognitive illusions, kinds of ‘natural anosognosias’ that we cannot but suffer given the constraints and confounds facing neural metacognition. It means that the very form of ‘subjectivity’ (and not merely the ‘self’) actually is a kind of dream.
Make no mistake, if the Blind Brain Theory (or something like it) turns out to be correct, it will be the last theory in the history of philosophy as traditionally conceived. Why? Because BBT is as much a translation manual as a theory, a potential way to transform the great intentional problems of philosophy into the mechanical subject matter of cognitive neuroscience.
Trust me, I know how out-and-out preposterous this sounds… But as I said above, the gates of the soul have been battered down.
Since the devil is in the details, it might pay to finesse this sketch with more information. So to return to what I termed the natural informatic field above, the sum of all the static and dynamic systematic differences that constitute you qua organism. How specifically does informatic neglect allow us to plug the phenomenal/intentional into the physical/mechanical?
From a life sciences perspective, the natural informatic field consists of externally-related structures and irreflexive processes. Our brain is that portion of the Field biologically adapted to model and interact with the rest of the Field (the environment) via information collected from the Field. The conscious subsystem of the brain is that portion of the Field biologically adapted to model and interact with the rest of the Field via information collected from the brain. All we need ask is what information is available to what cognitive resources as the conscious subsystem generates its model. In a sense, all we need do is subtract varieties and densities of information from the pot of overall information. I know the conceptual jargon makes this all seem dreadfully complicated, but it really is this simple.
So, what information can the conscious subsystem of the brain provide what cognitive resources in the course of generating its model? No causal information regarding its own neurofunctionality, as we have seen. The model, therefore, will have to be medially acausal. No temporal information regarding its own neurofunctionality either. The model, therefore, will have to be medially atemporal. Minimal information regarding its own structural complexity, given the constraints and confounds mentioned above. The model, therefore, will be structurally undifferentiated relative to environmental models. Minimal information regarding its own informatic and cognitive limitations, once again, given the aforementioned constraints and confounds. The model, therefore, will be both canonical (because of sufficiency) and intractable (because incompatible with existing, environmentally-oriented cognitive resources).
Now the key principle that seems to make this work is the way neglect leverages varieties of identity. BBT, in effect, interprets the appearance of consciousness as a kind of ‘flicker fusion writ large.’ In the absence of distinctions, the brain (for reasons that will fall out of any successful scientific theory of consciousness proper) conjures experiential continuities. Occlusion equals identity, according to BBT.
What makes the first person as it appears so peculiar from the standpoint of environmental cognition has to do with ‘informatic captivity’ or access invariance, our brain’s inability to vary its informatic relationship to itself the way it can its environments. So, on the BBT account, the ‘unity of consciousness’ that so impressed Descartes is simply of a piece with the way, in the absence of information, we confuse aggregates for individuals more generally, as when we confuse ants on the sidewalk with spilled paint, for instance. But where cognition can vary its access and so accumulate the information required to revise ‘spilled paint’ into ‘swarming ants’ in our environment, metacognition is trapped with the spilled paint of the ‘soul.’ The first person appears to be an internally-related ‘whole,’ in other words, simply because we lack the information to cognize it otherwise. The holistic consciousness we think we enjoy, in other words, is a kind of cartoon.
(This underscores the way the external-relationality characteristic of our environment is an informatic and cognitive achievement, something the human brain has evolved to model and exploit. On the BBT account, internal-relationality is generally a symptom of missing information, a structurally and developmentally imposed loss of dimensionality.)
But what makes the first person so intractable, a hitherto inexhaustible source of perplexity, only becomes apparent when we consider the diachronic dimension of this ‘fusion in occlusion,’ the way neglect winnows the implacable irreflexivity of the natural into the labile reflexivity of the mental. The conscious system’s inability to model its modelling as it models applies to temporal modelling as well. The temporal system can no more ‘time its timing’ than the visual system can ‘see its seeing.’ This means that metacognition has no way to intuit the ‘time of timing,’ leading, once again, to default identity and all the paradoxes belonging to the ‘now.’ The temporal field is ‘locally nonlocal’ or asymptotic, muddy and fleeting yet apparently monolithic and self-identical.
So, in a manner similar to the way information privation collapses external-relationality into apparent internal-relationality, it also collapses irreflexivity into apparent reflexivity. Conscious cognition can track environmental irreflexivity readily enough, but it cannot track this tracking and so intuits otherwise. The first person cartoon suffers the diachronic hallucination of fundamental continuity in time. Once again metacognition mistakes oblivion (or less dramatically, incapacity) for identity.
To get a sense of how radical this is one need only consider the very paradigm of atemporal reflexivity in philosophy, the a priori. On the BBT account, what we call the a priori is what algorithmic nature looks like from the inside. No matter how much content you hollow out of your formalisms, you are still talking about something magical, still begging what Eugene Wigner famously called ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,’ the question of why an externally-related, irreflexive nature should prove so amenable to an internally-related, reflexive mathematics. BBT answers: because mathematics is itself natural, it’s most systematically ‘viral’ expression. It collapses the disjunct, asserts continuity where the tradition perceives the inexplicable. Mathematics only seems ‘supra-natural’ because until recently it could only be explored performatively in the ‘laboratory’ of our own brains, and because of the way metacognition shears away its informatic dimensions. Given the illusion of sufficiency, the a priori cartoon strucks us as the efficacious source of a special, transcendental form of cognition. Only now, as computational complexities force mathematicians and physicists to rely more and more on machines, mechanical implementations that (by some cosmic coincidence) are entirely capable of performing ‘semantic’ operations without the least whiff of ‘understanding,’ are we in a position to entertain the possibility that ‘formal semantics’ are simply another ghost in the human machine.
And the list of radical reinterpretations goes on–after a year of manic exploration and elaboration I feel like I’ve scarcely scratched the surface. I could use some help, if anyone is so inclined!
So with that in ‘mind,’ I leave you with the following establishing shot: Consciousness as you conceive/perceive it this very moment now is the tissue of neglect, painted on the same informatic canvas with the same cognitive brushes as our environment, only blinkered and impressionistic in the extreme. Reflexivity, internal-relationality, sufficiency, and intentionality, can all be seen as hallucinatory artifacts of informatic closure and scarcity, the result of a brain forced to make the most with the least using only the resources it has at hand. This is a picture of the first person as an informatically intergrated series of scraps of access, forced by structural bottlenecks to profoundly misrecognize itself as something somehow hooked upon the transcendental, self-sufficient and whole….
To see you.
Happy Solar Rotation, TPB.
All the best to you and yours, Bakker. I have high hopes for 2013!
Mediating medial neglect imagining fractal pandas, buddy. Cheers. Otherwise, I’ve long advocated adopting different lifestyle “neuropractices,” which, theoretically, might stretch the aboutness sufficiency, the informatic horizons, perceptual thresholds of blind brain. But, seriously, usually your blogs simply leave me reeling as much for comprehension as revelation.
Seeing our way past heuristic anosognosias to the greater utility of suprastructural mathematics and language just isn’t within my frame of possible cogitatings yet ;).
The amalgamated mass of neuronal tissue that generates the heuristic of “me” agrees with Mike, while being simultaneously awed and horrified (both in the existential sense) by all the ground you’ve trod this year. And maybe this is just the training being relentless, but I keep wondering how we can turn this expanding field of self-knowledge to the general benefit of humans. I know, I know, At bottom, I’ll always have a sliver of science optimism fighting its way through all the life experience.
Anyway, may 2013 result in the unearthing of many more Old Ones on the TPB.
“The first person cartoon suffers the diachronic hallucination of fundamental continuity in time.”
This is about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more difficult to accept than the idea of apelike ancestors. You’re basically saying I’m in some sense “coming into being” and “dying” as a constant process and that the experience of me-ness in a very real sense doesn’t exist.
I don’t often say this about interesting theories, but now I really hope you are wrong! (I will say this: it provides immediate predictions about all sorts of philosophy of mind thought experiences, such as teleporting, brain cloning, etc.)
“This is about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more difficult to accept than the idea of apelike ancestors. You’re basically saying I’m in some sense “coming into being” and “dying” as a constant process and that the experience of me-ness in a very real sense doesn’t exist.”
I’m a Buddhist and this strikes me as very similar to the Buddhist concept of impermanence (anitya) which is one of the “Three Marks of Existence” – the characteristics shared by all sentient life; the other two are suffering (duḥkha) and the illusion of the self (anātman).
Impermanence (anitya) is the concept that everything, including the mind, is in a constant state of flux – continually coming into and passing out of being based on multiple causes and conditions (pratītyasamutpāda). Because things are constantly coming into and passing out of being, Madhyamika Buddhists (e.g. Nagarjuna) say they are empty (śūnya) of any inherent existence/essence (svabhāva*).
correction: in this context, a better translation for svabhāva would be substance, not essence.
Look at it this way, Jorge, even if “you” don’t really exist in any real sense, it’s not as if you can tell the difference any more than any of us can about our own existence! Feeling something is real doesn’t make it real, but if it’s all you know it might as well be for your purposes.
Regardless, if BBT or a similar alternative does turn out to be true, it’s going to be a long time before it’s widely accepted. If it ever is. After all, previous world-shattering theories all had one thing in common: while they might upend individual aspects of the self for individual people (geocentrism in religion being an excellent example, as Scott said), they never attacked the very entirety of the self. As you said, that’s orders of magnitude more difficult to even begin to come to grips with.
Since it seems on the table, I’d just add that neurotemporal mechanisms are the hardest things, I find, to square with BBT. I mean, I find the arguments of encapsulation and sufficiency pretty compelling. It’s the strength of the temporal analogies made in The Last Magic Show, here on TPB, and the logic Bakker uses in both that I would simply sharpen. I’ve no doubt that our temporal sufficiency and its informatic horizons apply to our phenomenal sense of experience.
Thinking aloud, we simply don’t experience time consensually. A single, simple “temporal asymptotic limit” (Last Magic Show, p14) as described, doesn’t reflect the way that time, despite the seeming unity of its temporal sufficiency (the Now), seems constructed of, let’s say, different phenomenal mechanisms of time, which lead to our describing our experiences of time differently, based on the particular innateness or predilection (in this case, a gradient between, say, the elderly and adrenaline addicts) we have for these different aspects of temporal sufficiency (these are things like biological process time or phenomenal timing mechanisms, the most famous seeming to be circadian rhythms, among others).
Again, I realize that encapsulation and sufficiency, medial neglect, as describing the relation between BB and GB still reflect apt distinctions. Bakker’s metaphors (p11) and the one quote he borrows from Metzinger (p12), while making intuitive sense, there really aren’t any psychological concepts or biases, reframed for the reader within BBT. Its these mechanisms, the information beyond the horizon, which allow for the particular illusion of temporal sufficiency, inducing our temporal biases that confound me.
Lol, not that I’m going turn these arguments on their head or anything and I realize perhaps the sense I’m looking for simply isn’t yet communicable.
Cheers.
The interesting aspect is that, if you romanticize that idea, you can come up with reflections of a number of current religions (where the soul flows back into some kind of whole).
Imagine the sum of information, understood in the deliberately vague sense of systematic differences making systematic differences, comprising you and your immediate environment. The holy grail of consciousness research is simply understanding how what you are experiencing this very moment fits into this ‘natural informatic field.’
Imho this frame of reference is flawed. It’s as if you set down some postulate on the idea of information. But this can’t be done. The reasoning may be correct, but the frame of reference can’t be.
You can’t start from the natural world, or natural informatic field. The origin is the brain. You can represent the natural informatic field within the brain as an idea, but can’t really fool yourself by thinking that a natural informatic field can be dealt with independently from a human being. You can’t put that as a postulate, however vague.
Even if it’s an interesting idea to build/explain consciousness from the outside (so that you progressively explain away the internal), it’s still a literary trick. Too magical.
[…] How to Build a First Peron (Using Only Natural Materials) we discover that the self is not what it seems, that it is quite different than it at first appears, […]
Great post, Scott! One of the things I always ponder is what is it that brings about a change in our thinking? How do we overcome the inertia of our habitual modes of thought to produce new thoughts, new forms of conceptual thinking? I see that you stick with the visual ‘seeing’ metaphor throughout your discourse, but what if it is the ability to hear rather than see that makes us uniquely a self? What if our ability to over-hear ourselves thinking, and then to be able to act on that thinking-through-hearing that allows us to form this sense of self and identity we have for so long acknowledge as our metacognitive right?
I’m going to ask all of you a question.
We could postulate that all characters in fiction live deterministic stories. There is a god who supposedly knows everything and creates every small bits that becomes material substance in that story. If it’s a book, then a writer writes every single word, then is then made into thought and then projected as a world.
Have these characters free will? Obviously not, as consequence of living in a deterministic world. But what makes a “good story” is the fact that the system is closed to the god. The rules are clear and not continuously violated. And that the characters are true to themselves and the world, as they are set up from the beginning.
But does it matter to us? Does it matter that we know those characters have no free will? Do we stop reading simply because we already know “who did it” (the writer)? Or maybe we still feel compelled to continue, because we are trapped in that first person, and that’s all that matters?
So, knowing the first person is an illusion, does empty it of all its value?
Agatha Christie wrote the same novel over and over, the repetition of a musical chair scenario, the chessboard algorithm perfected… but, on the other hand for some people its the very nature of this logic that is compulsive reading. Depends on who ‘us’ is?
The opposite tack was James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake creates a Gap between the beginning and the end that allows the reader to become the difference that makes a difference… a work based on pun, dream, and a perfect mythological structure that is totalistically determinate in structure, but indeterminate in meaning…. the meaning comes only with ones epistemic involvement: the reader is the determinate factor is this game, not the author; in fact, for Joyce, the great dream book was not written by him, but by that strange creature – Everybody!
From what I understand, Tolkien didn’t know who Strider was, when he introduced him into the story. Can you really know the ending for such a character? Atleast, at that point?
So, knowing the first person is an illusion, does empty it of all its value?
I think it’s perspectival as to why one went along with ‘values’ before – was it kind of mercenary? As in the values were like some kind of gold nuggets to pursue?
Or did you want the values to have value?
Of course the latter has it’s share of sheer bloody mindedness on the matter, rather than being mercenary. Just noting that.
From what I understand, Tolkien didn’t know who Strider was, when he introduced him into the story. Can you really know the ending for such a character? Atleast, at that point?
That’s not what I’m asking.
At some point Tolkien decided to write down the words. Sooner or later, it’s made into a deliberate act. The book is printed. The world is determined. What matters is that WHEN YOU READ that world is pre-determined.
I’m using a goddamn metaphor, you can’t nitpick it.
I’m simply saying that the perspective GENERATES meaningfulness. And so meaning in life, free will or determinism are results of relativity (of point of view). And not absolute points of view. Free will exists as long we’re trapped in one perspective, it ceases to exist if we can get out.
So free will exists AND doesn’t exist. At the same time, depending on who’s looking.
And that’s what may bring down Bakker’s theory in practical terms.
This is a version of the ‘separate but equal’ defense. What makes you certain they’re separate? Why should anyone suppose they’re equal? The fact that a stroke will radically transform the ‘free will perspective’ seems to clearly argue against both their separation and their equality, doesn’t it?
Could you scroll this page and give a look on that link to my blog? That’s where I perhaps I explain it better, then we can continue the discussion here.
I’m simply saying that on the matter of free well, the point of view decides. If you are out, looking in, then it doesn’t exist. If you are inside, it exists.
It’s like the theory of relativity with the most basic example. Someone in a train looking out, thinking that it’s the rest of the world moving.
Nits are all I ever get to pick, though!
But no, that’s the important thing – the moment of rendering! Yes, he has to write it down. But what distinguishes the moment when something is in the very process of being written/rendered, Vs when it was all written down a long time ago? Things have to be rendered at some point, that (seems) inescapable? So you can shift perspectives – you can think you are at the very point of rendering, where the future can only be known by the very process of it being rendered OR you can consider yourself a fixed element of something written out long ago, with a fixed end conclusion. Either perspective is valid! Shifting between them is valid!
Inside of that, perspective amongst individuals leads to ignorance, which lends a freedom like that upon the chess board. You don’t know what move the other person is going to make, nor they you. Thus a kind of freedom.
If you are actually at the cusp of the universes rendering, actually pulling back from the perspective still lends free will in as much as who knows what’s coming next? It hasn’t been rendered yet! And when we get to individuals predicting beyond the rendering of the very universe itself, it’s a kind of a comological version of BBT. How do you accurately figure out how a universe will render, without a universe to render it? The universe/someone within the universe has not the resources to see itself in advance (perfectly). Blind Universe Theory! 🙂
But in the confines of a prerendered universe, I’d say no, perspective doesn’t make free will ‘exist’. That’s like saying that when you watch the magician saw the woman in half, or when you get on the stage and see the mirrors, leaving the perspective changes it from ‘real magic’ to ‘illusion making’. No, not at all.
The PREMISE of the magic trick is that you can eventually be at BOTH points of view: you seeing the trick how it appears, and you seeing the trick how it is.
This means an objective truth EXISTS. Because you have access to both these positions. Or at least have someone who informs you of the other position.
In the case of the universe, the premise of a deterministic universe is that it is CLOSED. Deterministic = closed. It’s THIS condition that NEGATES what happens here above. You don’t have access to both positions.
There is no “illusion” because, as far as we are concerned, we can’t be in that position that would let us to deem it “illusion”. That requires being out of the system, the system being closed.
This closure FORBIDS that you are in two spots. You have one, are bound to one, and can’t, just can’t go to the other one (without killing yourself and hope on metaphysics).
Either you can feel the closure, and so you are not living and how of the material world. Or you can’t.
A human being is a machine with an eye attached to it. The machine does machine work, the eye does nothing but stare. There’s no free will, we know this. But the *notion* of the lack of free will is completely useless, because it applies to a point of view that doesn’t exist. Which means that to this machine, and the way its machinery operates, “free will” is simply a term that defines its automatic activities.
Automatic activities that, as far we are concerned, are indistinguishable from free will.
P.S.
This problem of closure is definitive. I have perhaps not put enough emphasis on this.
You can’t violate this closure neither in reality nor fiction.
You could hypothesize that an external entity tells you how really things are (this is not a fancy notion, since Bakker works on the premise that “science” has this role, the impartial god informing us of inhuman truths). This is NOT POSSIBLE.
A flow of information that reaches you, in here, in the system would break the closure of the system. The truth is that, even science, is contained in the system, and so a flow of information that from science comes to you already has NO EFFECT on free will, and does not allow one to have that secondary point of view.
It sounds like a redefinition? In that there isn’t anything better, therefore free will has to mean X instead.
Before we go there, I simply argue against an always closed universe. Do you agree the universe has to be rendered? And does rendering take it’s own time? I mean, how can you render the end of the universe at the exact same time you are rendering the start of the universe, when the end is dependent on the start!? The start has to come before the end, be rendered before the end, in order to render the end? Wouldn’t you agree? So this produce a point where the start is known but the end is unknown as well, wouldn’t you also agree?
Being agnostic, it’s quite pointless to theorize about the construction of the universe.
The idea of closure and possibility to be outside it are theoretical ideas, not concrete possibilities. Free will is connected to the closure of the universe, this is a fact. Science believes in this closure (or otherwise phenomena and rules would be variable and no “science” would be possible).
Science challenges the idea of free will by theorizing a closed universe. Only in this case free will stops to exist.
I’m simply saying that we’ll never be able to break this closure. NEVER. It’s not simply hard or improbable, it’s simply completely illogical and breaks the premise of the notion itself.
So I’m saying it’s irrelevant to *us*. Always irrelevant, no matter the technological advancement. Even whatever alien life is subject to it.
But all this I’m saying starts from the premise of a closed universe. If you don’t believe in a closed universe, and so if you don’t believe in science, then it’s irrelevant to what I’m saying, which is, again, solely related to a scientific stance.
Determinism = closed universe = science. If you don’t agree, then you’re open to all sort of gods and metaphysical forces.
I wasn’t rhetorical when I asked if you agree you can’t render the ending before you’ve rendered the start?
If thinking you can’t render the end before the start is to somehow not accept science, then I’m quite surprised? It’s a controversial statement? If you disagree with other stuff I bring up, okay. But I’d have thought we’d find agreement on this?
Or was the reference to agnoticism in reply to that? Uh, as far as I understand what the words refer to, I can’t accept someone talking about determinism, but then in regard to ‘can’t render the end before the start’ they say we can never know? As far as I understand the words, someone can’t take a firm line on determinism, but then all ‘we don’t know’ on the other matter. I’d rather think that either one has to accept determinism means you can’t render the ending before the start and if you don’t accept that you’re engaging in gods and metaphysical forces. Maybe the definition of determinism being used is one I don’t know of?
[…] Formal error. I think this is evident to Bakker already, but he may underestimate it. His intent with the Blind […]
I think BBT is has much that is valid, but in this post I think you’re overemphasizing the fragmentary nature of the brain/consciousness partly because you’re understating the “externalize ‘cognitive’ qualities” provided by the environment (see Louise Barrett’s “Beyond the Brain”).
I think of it a little bit like saccadic vision: our eyes go all over the field very quickly, the stabilized image we are aware of is an illusion, but the stability of the environment allows it to work. The illusion of stable brain processes is enabled by placing part of the “cognitive machinery” outside the brain.
So I’m really NOT more than the sum of my parts? It’s funny because I’m actually less. Yah know my life has been trying very hard to shove me towards this realization and I think I won’t be able to avoid it for all that much longer but I WANT to. Because it’s depressing. The delusion of the “I.” Me and all my charming little quiddities are nothing more than the interaction between a bunch of glands and various stimuli. And (if the theory is right) more importantly my inability to see it as such.
Do you think it’ll change much though? On a ground level I mean? People don’t seem to like the idea that they aren’t “transcendent” in some way. I’m pretty sure that’s why people came up with religion, a kinda security blanket against the idea that in the end we really don’t matter all that much. We NEED to be special. Even if you explain to them that this need is only because of our inability to actually, tangibly perceive ourselves (in very, very dumbed down way ofc, not a lot of people are going to get this as is, I’m not even sure I got it) the most open-minded will just nod politely and continue on their merry way. Actually I’m not really sure how this would enact change on the ground level except for causing a sharp increase in nihilism.
Anywhoo, I’m curious, did you start thinking about this before or after you started with your books? Or has it been a continuous process?
You actually got it upside down: ‘You’ are far, far more than you ever dreamed! It only seems like less because it outruns your ability to grasp in any immediate intuitive manner and reveals what you do grasp to be a tissue of deceptions. But you are right about people turning their backs on it. We have a native tendency to believe that which flatters. This is why culture will drift ever deeper into self-congratulatory fantasies, while the institutional powers that be ply us with this knowledge with ever greater effectiveness.
In answer to your last question, this has been a long, miserable process, the philosophical equivalent of poking a knitting needle in my eye, over and over and over and over.