Zizek, Hollywood, and the Disenchantment of Continental Philosophy
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: At least a flamingo has a leg to stand on.
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Back in the 1990’s whenever I mentioned Dennett and the significance of neuroscience to my Continental buddies I would usually get some version of ‘Why do you bother reading that shite?’ I would be told something about the ontological priority of the lifeworld or the practical priority of the normative: more than once I was referred to Hegel’s critique of phrenology in the Phenomenology.
The upshot was that the intentional has to be irreducible. Of course this ‘has to be’ ostensibly turned on some longwinded argument (picked out of the great mountain of longwinded arguments), but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that the intentional had to be irreducible because the intentional had to come first, and the intentional had to come first because ‘intentional cognition’ was the philosopher’s stock and trade–and oh-my, how we adore coming first.
Back then I chalked up this resistance to a strategic failure of imagination. A stupendous amount of work goes into building an academic philosophy career; given our predisposition to rationalize even our most petty acts, the chances of seeing our way past our life’s work are pretty damn slim! One of the things that makes science so powerful is the way it takes that particular task out of the institutional participant’s hands–enough to revolutionize the world at least. Not so in philosophy, as any gas station attendant can tell you.
I certainly understood the sheer intuitive force of what I was arguing against. I quite regularly find the things I argue here almost impossible to believe. I don’t so much believe as fear that the Blind Brain Theory is true. What I do believe is that some kind of radical overturning of noocentrism is not only possible, but probable, and that the 99% of philosophers who have closed ranks against this possibility will likely find themselves in the ignominious position of those philosophers who once defended geocentrism and biocentrism.
What I’ve recently come to appreciate, however, is that I am literally, as opposed to figuratively, arguing against a form of anosognosia, that I’m pushing brains places they cannot go–short of imagination. Visual illusions are one thing. Spike a signal this way or that, trip up the predictive processing, and you have a little visual aporia, an isolated area of optic nonsense in an otherwise visually ‘rational’ world. The kinds of neglect-driven illusions I’m referring to, however, outrun us, as they have to, insofar as we are them in some strange sense.
So here we are in 2013, and there’s more than enough neuroscientific writing on the wall to have captured even the most insensate Continental philosopher’s attention. People are picking through the great mountain of longwinded arguments once again, tinkering, retooling, now that the extent of the threat has become clear. Things are getting serious; the akratic social consequences I depicted in Neuropath are everywhere becoming more evident. The interval between knowledge and experience is beginning to gape. Ignoring the problem now smacks more of negligence than insouciant conviction. The soul, many are now convinced, must be philosophically defended. Thought, whatever it is, must be mobilized against its dissolution.
The question is how.
My own position might be summarized as a kind of ‘Good-Luck-Chuck’ argument. Either you posit an occult brand of reality special to you and go join the Christians in their churches, or you own up to the inevitable. The fate of the transcendental lies in empirical hands now. There is no way, short of begging the question against science, of securing the transcendental against the empirical. Imagine you come up with, say, Argument A, which concludes on non-empirical Ground X that intentionality cannot be a ‘cognitive illusion.’ The problem, obviously, is that Argument A can only take it on faith that no future neuroscience will revise or eliminate its interpretation of Ground X. And that faith, like most faith, only comes easy in the absence of alternatives–of imagination.
The notion of using transcendental speculation to foreclose on possible empirical findings is hopeless. Speculation is too unreliable and nature is too fraught with surprises. One of the things that makes the Blind Brain Theory so important, I think, is the way its mere existence reveals this new thetic landscape. By deriving the signature characteristics of the first-personal out of the mechanical, it provides a kind of ‘proof of concept,’ a demonstration that post-intentional theory is not only possible, but potentially powerful. As a viable alternative to intentional thought (of which transcendental philosophy is a subset), it has the effect of dispelling the ‘only game in town illusion,’ the sense of necessity that accompanies every failure of philosophical imagination. It forces ‘has to be’ down to the level of ‘might be’…
You could say the mere possibility that the Blind Brain Theory might be empirically verified drags the whole of Continental philosophy into the purview of science. The most the Continental philosopher can do is match their intentional hopes against my mechanistic fears. Put simply, the grand old philosophical question of what we are no longer belongs to them: It has fallen to science.
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For better and for worse, Metzinger’s Being No One has become the textual locus of the ‘neuroscientific threat’ in Continental circles. His thesis alone would have brought him to attention, I’m sure. That aside, the care, scholarship, and insight he brings to the topic provide the Continental reader with a quite extraordinary (and perhaps too flattering) introduction to cognitive science and Anglo-American philosophy of mind as it stood a decade or so ago.
The problem with Being No One, however, is precisely what renders it so attractive to Continentalists, particularly those invested in the so-called ‘materialist turn’: rather than consider the problem of meaning tout court, it considers the far more topical problem of the self or subject. In this sense, it is thematically continuous with the concerns of much Continental philosophy, particularly in its post-structuralist and psychoanalytic incarnations. It allows the Continentalist, in other words, to handle the ‘neuroscientific threat’ in a diminished and domesticated form, which is to say, as the hoary old problem of the subject. Several people have told me now that the questions raised by the sciences of the brain are ‘nothing new,’ that they simply bear out what this or that philosophical/psychoanalytic figure has said long ago–that the radicality of neuroscience is not all that ‘radical’ at all. Typically, I take the opportunity to ask questions they cannot answer.
Zizek’s reading of Metzinger in The Parallax View, for instance, clearly demonstrates the way some Continentalists regard the sciences of the brain as an empirical mirror wherein they can admire their transcendental hair. For someone like Zizek, who has made a career out of avoiding combs and brushes, Being No One proves to be one the few texts able to focus and hold his rampant attention, the one point where his concern seems to outrun his often brutish zest for ironic and paradoxical formulations. In his reading, Zizek immediately homes in on those aspects of Metzinger’s theory that most closely parallel my view (the very passages that inspired me to contact Thomas years ago, in fact) where Metzinger discusses the relationship between the transparency of the Phenomenal Self-Model (PSM) and the occlusion of the neurofunctionality that renders it. The self, on Metzinger’s account, is a model that cannot conceive itself as a model; it suffers from what he calls ‘autoepistemic closure,’ a constitutive lack of information access (BNO, 338). And its apparent transparency accordingly becomes “a special form of darkness” (BNO, 169).
This is where Metzinger’s account almost completely dovetails with Zizek’s own notion of the subject, and so holds the most glister for him. But he defers pressing this argument and turns to the conclusion of Being No One, where Metzinger, in an attempt to redeem the Enlightenment ethos, characterizes the loss of self as a gain in autonomy, insofar as scientific knowledge allows us to “grow up,” and escape the ‘tutelary nature’ of our own brain. Zizek only returns to the lessons he finds in Metzinger after a reading of Damasio’s rather hamfisted treatment of consciousness in Descartes’ Error, as well as a desultory and idiosyncratic (which, as my daughter would put it, is a fancy way of saying ‘mistaken’) reading of Dennett’s critique of the Cartesian Theater. Part of the problem he faces is that Metzinger’s PSM, as structurally amenable as it is to his thesis, remains too topical for his argument. The self simply does not exhaust consciousness (even though Metzinger himself often conflates the two in Being No One). Saying there is no such thing as selves is not the same as saying there is no such thing as consciousness. And as his preoccupation with the explanatory gap and cognitive closure makes clear, nothing less than the ontological redefinition of consciousness itself is Zizek’s primary target. Damasio and Dennett provide the material (as well as the textual distance) he requires to expand the structure he isolates in Metzinger. As he writes:
Are we free only insofar as we misrecognize the causes which determine us? The mistake of the identification of (self-)consciousness with misrecognition, with an epistemological obstacle, is that it stealthily (re)introduces the standard, premodern, “cosmological” notion of reality as a positive order of being: in such a fully constituted positive “chain of being” there is, of course, no place for the subject, so the dimension of subjectivity can be conceived of only as something which is strictly co-dependent with the epistemological misrecognition of the positive order of being. Consequently, the only way effectively to account for the status of (self-)consciousness is to assert the ontological incompleteness of “reality” itself: there is “reality” only insofar as there is an ontological gap, a crack, in its very heart, that is to say, a traumatic excess, a foreign body which cannot be integrated into it. This brings us back to the notion of the “Night of the World”: in this momentary suspension of the positive order of reality, we confront the ontological gap on account of which “reality” is never a complete, self-enclosed, positive order of being. It is only this experience of psychotic withdrawal from reality, of absolute self-contraction, which accounts for the mysterious “fact” of transcendental freedom: for a (self-)consciousness which is in effect “spontaneous,” whose spontaneity is not an effect of misrecognition of some “objective” process. 241-242
For those with a background in Continental philosophy, this ‘aporetic’ discursive mode is more than familiar. What I find so interesting about this particular passage is the way it actually attempts to distill the magic of autonomy, to identify where and how the impossibility of freedom becomes its necessity. To identify consciousness as an illusion, he claims, is to presuppose that the real is positive, hierarchical, and whole. Since the mental does not ‘fit’ with this whole, and the whole, by definition, is all there is, it must then be some kind of misrecognition of that whole–‘mind’ becomes the brain’s misrecognition of itself as a brain. Brain blindness. The alternative, Zizek argues, is to assume that the whole has a hole, that reality is radically incomplete, and so transform what was epistemological misrecognition into ontological incompleteness. Consciousness can then be seen as a kind of void (as opposed to blindness), thus allowing for the reflexive spontaneity so crucial to the normative.
In keeping with his loose usage of concepts from the philosophy of mind, Zizek wants to relocate the explanatory gap between mind and brain into the former, to argue that the epistemological problem of understanding consciousness is in fact ontologically constitutive of consciousness. What is consciousness? The subjective hole in the material whole.
[T]here is, of course, no substantial signified content which guarantees the unity of the I; at this level, the subject is multiple, dispersed, and so forth—its unity is guaranteed only by the self-referential symbolic act, that is,”I” is a purely performative entity, it is the one who says “I.” This is the mystery of the subject’s “self-positing,” explored by Fichte: of course, when I say “I,” I do not create any new content, I merely designate myself, the person who is uttering the phrase. This self-designation nonetheless gives rise to (“posits”) an X which is not the “real” flesh-and-blood person uttering it, but, precisely and merely, the pure Void of self-referential designation (the Lacanian “subject of the enunciation”): “I” am not directly my body, or even the content of my mind; “I” am, rather, that X which has all these features as its properties. 244-245
Now I’m no Zizek scholar, and I welcome corrections on this interpretation from those better read than I. At the same time I shudder to think what a stolid, hotdog-eating philosopher-of-mind would make of this ontologization of the explanatory gap. Personally, I lack Zizek’s faith in theory: the fact of human theoretical incompetence inclines me to bet on the epistemological over the ontological most every time. Zizek can’t have it both ways. He can’t say consciousness is ‘the inexplicable’ without explaining it as such.
Either way, this clearly amounts to yet another attempt to espouse a kind of naturalism without transcendental tears. Like Brassier in “The View from Nowhere,” Zizek is offering an account of subjectivity without self. Unlike Brassier, however, he seems to be oblivious to what I have previously called the Intentional Dissociation Problem: he never considers how the very issues that lead Metzinger to label the self hallucinatory also pertain to intentionality more generally. Certainly, the whole of The Parallax View is putatively given over to the problem of meaning as the problem of the relationship between thought/meaning and being/truth, or the problem of the ‘gap’ as Zizek puts it. And yet, throughout the text, the efficacy (and therefore the reality) of meaning–or thought–is never once doubted, nor is the possibility of the post-intentional considered. Much of his discussion of Dennett, for instance, turns on Dennett’s intentional apologetics, his attempt to avoid, among other things, the propositional-attitudinal eliminativism of Paul Churchland (to whom Zizek mistakenly attributes Dennett’s qualia eliminativism (PV, 177)). But where Dennett clearly sees the peril, the threat of nihilism, Zizek only sees an intellectual challenge. For Zizek, the question, Is meaning real? is ultimately a rhetorical one, and the dire challenge emerging out of the sciences of the brain amount to little more than a theoretical occasion.
So in the passage quoted above, the person (subject) is plucked from the subpersonal legion via “the self-referential symbolic act.” The problems and questions that threaten to explode this formulation are numerous, to say the least. The attraction, however, is obvious: It apparently allows Zizek, much like Kant, to isolate a moment within mechanism that nevertheless stands outside of mechanism short of entailing some secondary order of being–an untenable dualism. In this way it provides ‘freedom’ without any incipient supernaturalism, and thus grounds the possibility of meaning.
But like other forms of deflationary transcendentalism, this picture simply begs the question. The cognitive scientist need only ask, What is this ‘self-referential symbolic act’? and the circular penury of Zizek’s position is revealed: How can an act of meaning ground the possibility of meaningful acts? The vicious circularity is so obvious that one might wonder how a thinker as subtle as Zizek could run afoul it. But then, you must first realize (as, say, Dennett realizes) the way intentionality as a whole, and not simply the ‘person,’ is threatened by the mechanistic paradigm of the life sciences. So for instance, Zizek repeatedly invokes the old Derridean trope of bricolage. But there’s ‘bricolage’ and then there’s bricolage: there’s fragments that form happy fragmentary wholes that readily lend themselves to the formation of new functional assemblages, ‘deconstructive ethics,’ say, and then there’s fragments that are irredeemably fragmentary, whose dimensions of fragmentation are such that they can only be misconceived as wholes. Zizek seizes on Metzinger’s account of the self in Being No One precisely because it lends itself to the former, ‘happy’ bricolage, one where we need only fear for the self and not the intentionality that constitutes it.
The Blind Brain Theory, however, paints a far different portrait of ‘selfhood’ than Metzinger’s PSM, one that not only makes hash of Zizek’s thesis, but actually explains the cognitive errors that motivate it. On Metzinger’s account, ‘auto-epistemic closure’ (or the ‘darkness of transparency’) is the primary structural principle that undermines the ‘reality’ of the PSM and the PSM only. The Blind Brain Theory, on the other hand, casts the net wider. Constraints on the information broadcast or integrated are crucial, to be sure, but BBT also considers the way these constraints impact the fractionate cognitive systems that ‘solve’ them. On my view, there is no ‘phenomenal self-model,’ only congeries of heuristic cognitive systems primarily adapted to environmental cognition (including social environmental cognition) cobbling together what they can given what little information they receive. For Metzinger, who remains bound to the ‘Accomplishment Assumption’ that characterizes the sciences of the brain more generally, the cognitive error is one of mistaking a low-dimensional simulation for a reality. The phenomenal self-model, for him, really is something like ‘a flight-simulator that contains its own exits.’
On BBT, however, there is no one error, nor even one coherent system of errors; instead there are any number of information shortfalls and cognitive misapplications leading to this or that form of reflective, acculturated forms of ‘selfness,’ be it ancient Greek, Cartesian, post-structural, or what have you. Selfness, in other words, is the product of compound misapprehensions, both at the assumptive and the theoretical levels (or better put, across the spectrum of deliberative metacognition, from the cursory/pragmatic to the systematic/theoretical).
BBT uses these misconstruals, myopias, and blindnesses to explain the ways intentionality and phenomenality confound the ‘third-person’ mechanistic paradigm of the life sciences. It can explain, in other words, many of the ‘structural’ peculiarities that make the first-person so refractory to naturalization. It does this by interpreting those peculiarities as artifacts of ‘lost dimensions’ of information, particularly with reference to medial neglect. So for instance, our intuition of aboutness derives from the brain’s inability to model its modelling, neglecting, as it must, the neurofunctionality responsible for modelling its distal environments. Thus the peculiar ‘bottomlessness’ of conscious cognition and experience, the way each subsequent moment somehow becomes ground of the moment previous (and all the foundational paradoxes that have arisen from this structure). Thus the metacognitive transformation of asymptotic covariance into ‘aboutness,’ a relation absent the relation.
And so it continues: Our intuition of conscious unity arises from the way cognition confuses aggregates for individuals in the absence of differentiating information. Our intuition of personal identity (and nowness more generally) arises from metacognitive neglect of second-order temporalization, our brain’s blindness to the self-differentiating time of timing. For whatever reason, consciousness is integrative: oscillating sounds and lights ‘fuse’ or appear continuous beyond certain frequency thresholds because information that doesn’t reach consciousness makes no conscious difference. Thus the eerie first-person that neglect hacks from a much higher dimensional third can be said to be inevitable. One need only apply the logic of flicker-fusion to consciousness as a whole, ask why, for instance, facets of conscious experience such as unity or presence require specialized ‘unification devices’ or ‘now mechanisms’ to accomplish what can be explained as perceptual/cognitive errors in conditions of informatic privation. Certainly it isn’t merely a coincidence that all the concepts and phenomena incompatible with mechanism involve drastic reductions in dimensionality.
In explaining away intentionality, personal identity, and presence, BBT inadvertently explains why we intuit the subject we think we do. It sets the basic neurofunctional ‘boundary conditions’ within which Sellars’ manifest image is culturally elaborated–the boundary conditions of intentional philosophy, in effect. In doing so, it provides a means of doing what the Continental tradition, even in its most recent, quasi-materialist incarnations, has regarded as impossible: naturalizing the transcendental, whether in its florid, traditional forms or in its contemporary deflationary guises–including Zizek’s supposedly ineliminable remainder, his subject as ‘gap.’
And this is just to say that BBT, in explaining away the first-person, also explains away Continental philosophy.
Few would argue that many of the ‘conditions of possibility’ that comprise the ‘thick transcendental’ account of Kant, for instance, amount to speculative interpretations of occluded brain functions insofar as they amount to interpretations of anything at all. After all, this is a primary motive for the retreat into ‘materialism’ (a position, as we shall see, that BBT endorses no more than ‘idealism’). But what remains difficult, even apparently impossible, to square with the natural is the question of the transcendental simpliciter. Sure, one might argue, Kant may have been wrong about the transcendental, but surely his great insight was to glimpse the transcendental as such. But this is precisely what BBT and medial neglect allows us to explain: the way the informatic and heuristic constraints on metacognition produce the asymptotic–acausal or ‘bottomless’–structure of conscious experience. The ‘transcendental’ on this view is a kind of ‘perspectival illusion,’ a hallucinatory artifact of the way information pertaining to the limits of any momentary conscious experience can only be integrated in subsequent moments of conscious experience.
Kant’s genius, his discovery, or at least what enabled his account to appeal to the metacognitive intuitions of so many across the ages, lay in making-explicit the occluded medial axis of consciousness, the fact that some kind of orthogonal functionality (neural, we now know) haunts empirical experience. Of course Hume had already guessed as much, but lacking the systematic, dogmatic impulse of his Prussian successor, he had glimpsed only murk and confusion, and a self that could only be chased into the oblivion of the ‘merely verbal’ by honest self-reflection.
Brassier, as we have seen, opts for the epistemic humility of the Humean route, and seeks to retrieve the rational via the ‘merely verbal.’ Zizek, though he makes gestures in this direction, ultimately seizes on a radical deflation of the Kantian route. Where Hume declines the temptation of hanging his ‘merely verbal’ across any ontological guesses, Zizek positions his ‘self-referential symbolic act’ within the ‘Void of pure designation,’ which is to say, the ‘void’ of itself, thus literally construing the subject as some kind of ‘self-interpreting rule’–or better, ‘self-constituting form’–the point where spontaneity and freedom become at least possible.
But again, there’s ‘void,’ the one that somehow magically anchors meaning, an then there’s, well, void. According to BBT, Zizek’s formulation is but one of many ways deliberative metacognition, relying on woefully depleted and truncated information and (mis)applying cognitive tools adapted to distal social and natural environments, can make sense of its own asymptotic limits: by transforming itself into the condition of itself. As should be apparent, the genius of Zizek’s account is entirely strategic. The bootstrapping conceit of subjectivity is preserved in a manner that allows Zizek to affirm the tyranny of the material (being, truth) without apparent contradiction. The minimization of overt ontological commitments, meanwhile, lends a kind of theoretical immunity to traditional critique.
There is no ‘void of pure designation’ because there is no ‘void’ any more than there is ‘pure designation.’ The information broadcast or integrated in conscious experience is finite, thus generating the plurality of asymptotic horizons that carve the hallucinatory architecture of the first-person from the astronomical complexities of our brain-environment. These broadcast or integration limits are a real empirical phenomenon that simply follow from the finite nature of conscious experience. Of BBT’s many empirical claims, these ‘information horizons’ are almost certain to be scientifically vindicated. Given these limits, the question of how they are expressed in conscious experience becomes unavoidable. The interpretations I’ve so far offered are no doubt little more than an initial assay into what will prove a massive undertaking. Once they are taken into account, however, it becomes difficult not to see Zizek’s ‘deflationary transcendental’ as simply one way for a fractionate metacognition to make sense of these limits: unitary because the absence of information is the absence of differentiation, reflexive because the lack of medial temporal information generates the metacognitive illusion of medial timelessness, and referential because the lack of medial functional information generates the metacognitive illusion of afunctional relationality, or intentional ‘aboutness.’
Thus we might speak of the ‘Zizek Fallacy,’ the faux affirmation of a materialism that nevertheless spares just enough of the transcendental to anchor the intentional…
A thread from which to dangle the prescientific tradition.
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So does this mean that BBT offers the only ‘true’ route from intentionality to materialism. Not at all.
BBT takes the third-person brain as the ‘rule’ of the first-person mind simply because, thus far at least, science provides the only reliable form of theoretical cognition we know. Thus it would seem to be ‘materialist,’ insofar as it makes the body the measure of the soul. But what BBT shows–or better, hypothesizes–is that this dualism between mind and brain, ideal and real, is itself a heuristic artifact. Given medial neglect, the brain can only model its relation to its environment absent any informatic access to that relation. In other words, the ‘problem’ of its relation to distal environments is one that it can only solve absent tremendous amounts of information. The very structure of the brain, in other words, the fact that the machinery of predictive modelling cannot itself be modelled, prevents it, at a certain level at least, from being a universal problem solver. The brain is itself a heuristic cognitive tool, a system adapted to the solution of particular ‘problems.’ Given neglect, however, it has no way of cognizing its limits, and so regularly takes itself to be omni-applicable.
The heuristic structure of the brain and the cognitive limits this entails are nowhere more evident than in its attempts to cognize itself. So long as the medial mechanisms that underwrite the predictive modelling of distal environments in no way interfere with the environmental systems modelled–or put differently, so long as the systems modelled remain functionally independent of the modelling functions–then medial neglect need not generate problems. When the systems modelled are functionally entangled with medial modelling functions, however, one should expect any number of ‘interference effects’ culminating in the abject inability to predictively model those systems. We find this problem of functional entanglement distally where the systems to be modelled are so delicate that our instrumentation causes ‘observation effects’ that render predictive modelling impossible, and proximally where the systems to be modelled belong to the brain that is modelling. And indeed, as I’ve argued in a number of previous posts, many of the problems confronting the philosophy of mind can be diagnosed in terms of this fundamental misapplication of the ‘Aboutness Heuristic.’
This is where post-intentionalism reveals an entirely new dimension of radicality, one that allows us to identify the metaphysical categories of the ‘material’ and the ‘formal’ (yes, I said, formal) for the heuristic cartoons they are. BBT allows us to finally see what we ‘see’ as subreptive artifacts of our inability to see, as low-dimensional shreds of abyssal complexities. It provides a view where not only can the tradition be diagnosed and explained away, but where the fundamental dichotomies and categories, hitherto assumed inescapable, dissolve into the higher dimensional models that only brains collectively organized into superordinate heuristic mechanisms via the institutional practices of science can realize. Mind? Matter? These are simply waystations on an informatic continuum, ‘concepts’ according to the low-dimensional distortions of the first-person and mechanisms according to the third: concrete, irreflexive, high-dimensional processes that integrate our organism–and therefore us–as componential moments of the incomprehensibly vast mechanism of the universe. Where the tradition attempts, in vain, to explain our perplexing role in this natural picture via a series of extraordinary additions, everything from the immortal soul to happy emergence to Zizek’s fortuitous ‘void,’ BBT merely proposes a network of mundane privations, arguing that the self-congratulatory consciousness we have tasked science with explaining simply does not exist…
That the ‘Hard Problem’ is really one of preserving our last and most cherished set of self-aggrandizing conceits.
It is against this greater canvas that we can clearly see the parochialism of Zizek’s approach, how he remains (despite his ‘merely verbal’ commitment to ‘materialism’) firmly trapped within the hallucinatory ‘parallax’ of intentionality, and so essentializes the (apparently not so) ‘blind spot’ that plays such an important role in the system of conceptual fetishes he sets in motion. It has become fashion in certain circles to impugn ‘correlation’ in an attempt to think being in a manner that surpasses the relation between thought and being. This gives voice to an old hankering in Continental philosophy, the genuinely shrewd suspicion that something is wrong with the traditional, understanding of human cognition. But rather than answer the skepticism that falls out of Hume’s account of human nature or Wittgenstein’s consideration of human normativity, the absurd assumption has been that one can simply think their way beyond the constraints of thought, simply reach out and somehow snatch ‘knowledge at a spooky distance.’ The poverty of this assumption lies in the most honest of all questions: ‘How do you know?’ given that (as Hume taught us) you are a human and so cursed with human cognitive frailties, given that (as Wittgenstein taught us) you are a language-user and so belong to normative communities.
‘Correlation’ is little more than a gimmick, the residue of a magical thinking that assumes naming a thing gives one power over it. It is meant to obscure far more than enlighten, to covertly conserve the Continental tradition of placing the subject on the altar of career-friendly critique, lest the actual problem–intentionality–stir from its slumber and devour twenty-five centuries of prescientific conceit and myopia. The call to think being precritically, which is to say, without thinking the relation of thought and being, amounts to little more than an conceptually atavistic stunt so long as Hume and Wittgenstein’s questions remain unanswered.
The post-intentional philosophy that follows from BBT, however, belongs to the self-same skeptical tradition of disclosing the contextual contingencies that constrain thought’s attempt to cognize being. As opposed to the brute desperation of simply ignoring subjectivity or normativity, it seizes upon them. Intentional concepts and phenomena, it argues, exhibit precisely the acausal ‘bottomlessness’ that medial neglect, a structural inevitability given a mechanistic understanding of the brain, forces on metacognition. A great number of powerful and profound illusions result, illusions that you confuse for yourself. You think you are more a system of levers rather than a tangle of wiretaps. You think that understanding is yours. The low-dimensional cartoon of you standing within and apart from an object world is just that, a low-dimensional cartoon, a surrogate, facile and deceptive, for the high-dimensional facts of the brain-environment.
Thus is the problem of so-called ‘correlation’ solved, not by naming, shaming, and ersatz declaration, but rather by passing through the problematic, by understanding that the ‘subjective’ and the ‘normative’ are themselves natural and therefore amenable to scientific investigation. BBT explains the artifactual nature of the apparently inescapable correlation of thought and being, how medial neglect strands metacognition with an inexplicable covariance that it must conceive otherwise–in supra-natural terms. And it allows one to set aside the intentional conundrums of philosophy for what they are: arguments regarding interpretations of cognitive illusions.
Why assume the ‘design stance,’ given that it turns on informatic neglect? Why not regularly regard others in subpersonal terms, as mechanisms, when it strikes ‘you’ as advantageous? Or, more troubling still, is this simply coming to terms with what you have been doing all along? The ‘pragmatism’ once monopolized by ‘taking the intentional stance’ no longer obtains. For all we know, we could be more a confabulatory interface than anything, an informatic symbiont or parasite–our ‘consciousness’ a kind of tapeworm in the gut of the holy neural host. It could be this bad–worse. Corporate advertisers are beginning to think as much. And as I mentioned above, this is where the full inferential virulence of BBT stands revealed: it merely has to be plausible to demonstrate that anything could be the case.
And the happy possibilities are drastically outnumbered.
As for the question, ‘How do you know?’ BBT cheerfully admits that it does not, that it is every bit as speculative as any of its competitors. It holds forth its parsimonious explanatory reach, the way it can systematically resolve numerous ancient perplexities using only a handful of insights, as evidence of its advantage, as well as the fact that it is ultimately empirical, and so awaits scientific arbitration. BBT, unlike ‘OOO’ for instance, will stand or fall on the findings of cognitive science, rather than fade as all such transcendental positions fade on the tide of academic fashion.
And, perhaps most importantly, it is timely. As the brain becomes ever more tractable to science, the more antiquated and absurd prescientific discourses of the soul will become. It is folly to think that one’s own discourse is ‘special,’ that it will be the first prescientific discourse in history to be redeemed rather than relegated or replaced by the findings of science. What cognitive science discovers over the next century will almost certainly ruin or revolutionize fairly everything that has been assumed regarding the soul. BBT is mere speculation, yes, but mere speculation that turns on the most recent science and remains answerable to the science that will come. And given that science is the transformative engine of what is without any doubt the most transformative epoch in human history, BBT provides a means to diagnose and to prognosticate what is happening to us now–even going so far as to warn that intentionality will not constrain the posthuman.
What it does not provide is any redeeming means to assess or to guide. The post-intentional holds no consolation. When rules become regularities, nothing pretty can come of life. It is an ugly, even horrifying, conclusion, suggesting, as it does, that what we hold the most sacred and profound is little more than a subreptive by-product of evolutionary indifference. And even in this, the relentless manner in which it explodes and eviscerates our conceptual conceits, it distinguishes itself from its soft-bellied competitors. It simply follows the track of its machinations, the algorithmic grub of ‘reason.’ It has no truck with flattering assumptions.
And this is simply to say is that the Blind Brain Theory offers us a genuine way out, out of the old dichotomies, the old problems. It bids us to moult, to slough off transcendental philosophy like a dead serpentine skin. It could very well achieve the dream of all philosophy–only at the cost of everything that matters.
And really. What else did you fucking expect? A happy ending? That life really would turn out to be ‘what we make it’?
Whatever the conclusion is, it ain’t going to be Hollywood.
Is that a Bugs Bunny reference at the end??
Wouldn’t it have to be ‘Poughkeepsie’? I remember being so thrilled visiting it for the first time, the ‘ends of the earth’ for New Yorkers…
Scott wrote:
“Kant’s genius, his discovery, or at least what enabled his account to appeal to the metacognitive intuitions of so many across the ages, lay in making-explicit the occluded medial axis of consciousness, the fact that some kind of orthogonal functionality (neural, we now know) haunts empirical experience.”
It’s OK to use the word ‘discovery’ here. We might be theoretically incompetent, but Kant hit a goldmine with his concept of the noumenon. It jives (currently) with what science says too, and is (kind of) being used even in AI research, where the program has its input and then its interpretation of the input.
I mean, if the world is math (or whatever) then clearly our phenomenal experiences are derivative, not immediate.
Scott wrote:
“The information broadcast or integrated in conscious experience is finite, thus generating the plurality of asymptotic horizons that carve the hallucinatory architecture of the first-person from the astronomical complexities of our brain-environment. These broadcast or integration limits are a real empirical phenomenon that simply follow from the finite nature of conscious experience. Of BBT’s many empirical claims, these ‘information horizons’ are almost certain to be scientifically vindicated.”
Almost certainly, since you based this prediction on the pathology of anosognosia. This much was clear from “The Last Magic Show.” There were even hints of it in Neuropath.
Scott wrote:
“The very structure of the brain, in other words, the fact that the machinery of predictive modelling cannot itself be modelled, prevents it, at a certain level at least, from being a universal problem solver.”
This has obvious parallels to the Turing/Church “solution” of the Entscheidungsproblem.
Scott wrote:
“For all we know, we could be more a confabulatory interface than anything, an informatic symbiont or parasite–our ‘consciousness’ a kind of tapeworm in the gut of the holy neural host.”
If you go back to the record player / Tobacco-Mosaic virus chapter of GEB, you’ll find that Hofstadter hinted at something similar. I mean, it works. If memetic systems truly are analogues of genetic systems, then there have to be retroelements. It is not coincidence that Selfish Gene and GEB were written around the same time period. What Hofstadter lacked was knowledge of anosognosia, so he got stuck thinking that recursion was something semi-magical or quasi-spiritual.
Scott wrote:
“And really. What else did you fucking expect? A happy ending?”
I don’t know. It might be “happier” than we expect. Once everything is amenable to the same forces that have optimized the rest of the industrialized world, who knows where it will take us? Even the word ‘happiness’ will lose its ‘meaning’. Think of the hyper-rational Spock or R. Daneel Olivah. Neither is “happy” in the traditional sense, but they understand their position in the world.
I’m not stepping into a teleportation pod though. Fuck that shit.
The in-itself is far older than Kant: he simply gave it its first transcendental architecture. The point here is that the in-itself is itself a cartoon, of course, a useful way to pin down a certain point on a certain informatic continuum. On the BBT view, it’s just more information. Entscheidungsproblem speaks to the mechanical heart of BBT: We happen to be biomechanical, and in the course of innovating mechanisms, we happen to discover that the very epitome of the ‘abstract’ can be ‘implemented’ in its entirety via mechanism. BBT asks, What are the odds?
I have a similar reading of Hoftstadter: what he couldn’t get past was reflexivity, and so he could only ponder and bedevil the link between computational recursion (an irreflexive physical process) and self-consciousness, without showing how the former can be seen as a low-dimensional projection of the latter.
However the picture turns out, you can be guaranteed that the minions of hope will begin greedily gaming this or that ambiguity to come up with this or that shred of redemption. ‘Rescuing the intentional’ is about to big business, intellectually speaking. And of course, no one will agree…
Scott wrote in “The Introspective Peep Show”:
“Perhaps because of the informatic bandwidth of vision, visual anosognosia, or ‘Anton’s Syndrome,’ is generallyregarded as the most dramatic instance of the malady. Prigatano (2010) enumerates the essential features of the syndrome as following:
‘First, the patient is completely blind secondary to cortical damage in the occipital regions
of the brain. Second, these lesions are bilateral. Third, the patient is not only unaware of
her blindness; she rejects any objective evidence of her blindness. Fourth, the patient
offers plausible, but at times confabulatory responses to explain away any possible
evidence of her failure to see (e.g., “The room is dark,” or “I don’t have my glasses,
therefore how can I see?”). Fifth, the patient has an apparent lack of concern (or
anosodiaphoria) over her neurological condition. (456)’
These symptoms are almost tailor-made for FIG. Obviously, the blindness stems from the occlusion of raw visual information.”
But of course to the patient with anosognosia, the room is or is not dark, but the ROOM is still the ROOM or “Just Whose Room Is It Anyway?”. Sometimes it takes a moment of intellectual surrender like BBT to realize the mind which is so good at reductive explanation excels at the “outductive” or creates the most unintentional objects of objects or my room which is so good at being my room is also Scott’s room and your room and Plato’s room and…Its so good at making the room out there that it places itself in the room (along with the body its in); that when it trys to explain itself it can’t get the room out of it or can’t get itself out of the room.
I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I wrote that passage, it was so uncanny! And, yes, that is precisely the dilemma, VicP: being trapped with cognitive tools that we cannot but misapply.
I think it warrants some explanation of why we don’t think we can see when our eyes are closed?
What does an Anton syndrome patient see when their eyes are closed? An illusion of nothing? Rather than the actual nothing they see?
Ugh. Is there a comic-book version of the BBT? Can it be explained simply, independent of all the references to what has gone before (heh) and that which it is not? Not being cute – just need things distilled a bit.
I realize that hoping for something jargon/wonk-free/lite may be too much to hope for…
I tried my best here:
http://secondapocalypse.forumer.com/philosophy-101-t1239708.html
I’m probably going to poorly apply a cartoony extended metaphor on an already cartoony theory, but what the hell. Here’s a stab.
Think of a camera. What are they good at doing? Capturing images of the environment. What are they terrible at doing? Capturing image of themselves. No matter how far this camera pans and pans, the only image of itself it can capture is an out of focus black line from the hand strap that dangles across the lens. Now, we would have a terrible time trying to infer how cameras work from just this incomplete and distorted partial image of the whole camera, but since this is the only image of itself that can ever be captured when a camera looks about for itself, it will seem ‘natural’ from the camera’s perspective that this is an accurate image of itself. Furthermore, since the camera cannot see past the black blur no matter how the lens is panned and zoomed, the blur ironically always appears as a sufficiently complete image. Consequently, philosophical questions of the ‘camera self’ amount to trying to answer “how does the black blur perform image capture?”, “from where does this ‘camera nature’ arise?”, and “what is so special about the blur that nothing else in the environment looks remotely like it?”
Now the image recorded by a camera trained on another camera, as just another object in the environment, is much more accurate than the camera trying to record itself. Recording the environment is what they’re good at, after all. Special peripheries and filters for scientific observation would even allow cameras to capture high resolution images, close zooms, or EM emissions beyond normally recordable spectrums. As such peripheries improve, the quality of images improves. The scientific trend towards more and more accurate and detailed images of the camera self is powerfully clear. However, ‘intuitively,’ none of this looks anything remotely like the black blur every camera ‘clearly’ sees as itself. The philosopher’s wager since the beginning of cameras, then, has been the endless doubling down on the bet that that just by more vigorous efforts in panning and zooming with the default lens, by repeatedly capturing the black blur from every angle (which is actually tragically few but seem endless due to the wide array of blur image positions that can be produced), a clearer self image of camera nature can one day be produced. BBT would overturn all of this by suggesting the philosopher’s wager is doomed since it arises from a fundamental and unavoidable misapprehension of the self. A cameras cannot produce accurate images of itself as a camera precisely because of they way it’s built as a camera. Just as there is no such thing as the blur, there is no such thing as the self. Consciousness is a pinprick peek into a vastly more complicated system and a sub-component of that system, connected to the whole in ways that lie outside its scope and are thus so totally invisible that the very possibility there is more cannot even be seen.
Or something like that.
Hmm… okay. Between this and Jorge’s post on the 2nd apocalypse forum I think I get it in a fuzzy way.
Now, (again, I ask this without being cute) why is this important? What are the implications of this? How do things for the man-on-the-street (me for instance) change in light of this?
For philosophers and culture theorist academics (as Scott was once) this absolutely matters. If your whole career is based on theories of consciousness that turn out to be broken at their most fundamental level in a way that can be verifiably disproven through science, then unless you stop doubling down on your faulty premises and become scientifically literate, you risk your entire discipline being supplanted wholesale. There’s a reason why we teach chemistry these days instead of alchemy, and no hemming and hawing about how the four elements behave according to hermetic principles is going to change that.
On the other hand, for me the pessimistic answer to the ‘man-on-the-street’ is that unless you can exert great influence when the moments come, it probably doesn’t matter what you think. Ignore the near future for a minute and think about now. Laws about freedom and responsibility, governing principles of individuality and moral behaviour, commercial interests that want ever more effective ways to tinker with your brain, how many average joes do you personally know right now are able to make history defining waves in any of those areas? The fallout from this debate will probably change us, and because of that its important, but I doubt it will be changed by that many of us.
Thanks for the responses.
“The fallout from this debate will probably change us”… where the debate concerns a theoretical framework underlining pathways to manipulation for those sufficiently cynical in their natures and motives? A struggle between two forces: those cautioning/lamenting the consequences of perceptual inadequacies, and those using those shortcomings (regardless of the moral caliber of their intentions) to achieve their own ends?
Am I getting the apocalyptic aspect of this right? Ignorance of self vs. the blind-side of cynical manipulation? Is that where the theory crosses over into real life? Or maybe I’m just missing it altogether…
Yes! An analogy just like this is exactly what I need. Well done.
@dmaarten
Commodified intelligence and willpower upgrades. Love on demand. Doubt Away® just take two a day. Entire communities forming around alterations to baseline behaviours that would be madness by any other name. The consequences of minds become wholly malleable to our current (self-flattering, uncritical, myopic) desires, and the offspring of those desires, might make all of that seem trivial by comparison.
As rare as they are, academics in the humanities can speak truth to power even to the point of influencing government policy and commercial interests. The very much self inflicted problem is just how rare they have become. What should be some of the most qualified voices of caution and critical thought have instead stuck their heads in the sand and yielded the floor to the desire driven engines of progress. The fear I have is that when we go careening towards the death of meaning-as-we-know-it, the debaters who should have spoken up long ago will still have their heads stuck in the sand.
@scott
Analogy! Wow. The whole time I was writing that initial response I was searching for that word. Stupid brain.
The very much self inflicted problem is just how rare they have become. What should be some of the most qualified voices of caution and critical thought have instead stuck their heads in the sand and yielded the floor to the desire driven engines of progress.
First they researched free will,
And I didn’t speak out because I knew better.
Then they researched emotion,
And I didn’t speak out because I knew better.
Then they researched the soul,
And I didn’t speak out because I knew better.
Then they came for me.
And there was no world left to speak for me.
I’ve been pondering this, dmaarten. The problem, I’ve come to realize, is that the brain is technical and I am taking an original view. Even still, I desperately need to hone my definitions and to find intuitive analogies. I’ll try working something up.
Wait… Your daughter can talk now? Holy crap! How old is she? Fuck. What year is it? Who’s president? Where did I put my pills…
She’s three and she won’t bloody shut up! She saw me putting deodorant the other day, stopped in her tracks, pointed at me like I was a criminal, and said, “Hey! Does that tickle?”
Won’t bloody shut up!…..Inherited the philosopher gene.
Early theory of mind development and interest too, not surprisingly. And learnt their language in four days… 😉
So, it turns out that the cognitive limitation you imagine befalling the immortal Nonmen is actually a thing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/science/older-brain-is-willing-but-too-full-for-new-memories.html?_r=2&
Lazily without reading and on reflex thought, I wonder if that’s partially actually the heuristic nature of memory – the close enough factor. Eventually there’s already a close enough in memory, so the heuristic gives up. Is there any comparison in the article against those with photographic memory, ala Disciple Manning? Yeah, I should read, but those articles are like shifting worlds and I’m too lazy to shift gears right now (but I am honest, there’s mah plus! 😉 lol)
Hey, just finished reading “Escape from Spiderhead” from George Saunder’s new book. Reminded me a lot of what you did with Neuropath, influencing behavior via fucking with brain chemistry. So, thought I’d let you know. Also, I think “wanking” could use some company for blog post analogies. Ever thought of calling them “eating my own farts”? I don’t know something else body-related, disgusting, shameful, self-referential. Eating poo might be cliched. Oh well. And–check out the Onion’s new encyclopedia (the book thing, it’s not on their site). I think the entries on Academics and Art will chuckle you. In the future they will put BBT pamphlets in Happy Meals. So the kids can know.
Eat shit and fly?
dorothea olkowski on intentionality, love, brain sciences, and neurophenomenology
[…] conceptually incommensurable. This has been part of the problem all along. And yet Bartulis (like Zizek, only less dramatically) has convinced himself that this problem is itself the […]
“the intentional had to come first”: the phenomenon comes first because, as what initially gets disclosed, it’s what first gives you access to the object. Phenomenology is the study of appearances AS appearances, without reference to whether the appearance is a mere illusion (a cartoon, as you put it) or an actual object. If the self wasn’t a phenomenon to begin with you couldn’t say anything about it, not even “it’s just a low-dimensional cartoon.” There is no such thing as a pure object that is there for nobody. What is never there for anybody — if there were no God and if no such thing as a self ever existed, say — is something that remains forever in oblivion, in utter darkness, regardless of how much light there is. Something that is never there for anybody has as much meaning and significance as a rock has for itself. So to the extent that you even REFER to something you have to posit a self that the object, given it has any significance or meaning at all, is there FOR. Once you do that, then you’re talking intentionality: the object is there for someone, and if it is there in any way it is a phenomenon. What never appears is never a phenomenon and never gains existence, as it forever remains in oblivion. If I understood you correctly, you believe the soul or “first person” is just an epiphenomenon of the mechanical universe, an illusion of the blind brain. You write, “A great number of powerful and profound illusions result, illusions that you confuse for yourself…The low-dimensional cartoon of you standing within and apart from an object world is just that, a low-dimensional cartoon, a surrogate, facile and deceptive, for the high-dimensional facts of the brain-environment.” But even if the self is just an illusion, it is an illusion OF and TO itself! I would say this illusion of the self is more real to the self than atoms or molecules. And rather than “explaining it away,” the illusion still stands there every bit as much as sunrises and sunsets remain realities even though we know that the sun “really” doesn’t rise or set. Even if it is an illusion, the self is a rich and wonderful illusion that philosophy can delve into for its own sake and, in the case of phenomenology, without any reference to the brain since phenomenology focuses strictly on the appearance. And what better branch of learning than phenomenology, being the study of appearances, to study what you term an illusion? Finally you conclude, “It is an ugly, even horrifying, conclusion, suggesting, as it does, that what we hold the most sacred and profound is little more than a subreptive by-product of evolutionary indifference.” Yes, that does seem to be where the BBT would lead, and I truly feel sorry for anybody who winds up there. But I also find you to be an extremely good writer and a very intelligent human being. It was a pleasure to read.
I’m glad you liked. The problem with illusions, especially when they are rich and compelling, is that they tend to render those who run afoul them easy to exploit (as the growing, multibillion dollar neuromarketing industry is beginning to discover). What I’m describing is essentially the divorce of experience and knowledge, a process that is playing itself out in many troubling ways across the social dimension. Knowledge is power over, unfortunately. Check out this for a more social take.
I can see a phenomenology for phenomenology’s sake, like you describe. I actually tried to develop something like this many moons ago to save my dissertation! But if neuroscience does end up vindicating something like BBT then it will have to wrap itself around some pretty deep problems, not the least of which is a radical revision of ‘appearance’: the traditional phenomenological strategy of taking refuge in the REALITY of appearances becomes hard to warrant, I think. The fact is, every prescientific domain that science colonizes science revolutionizes. I’m not sure why we should expect any different with respect to the soul.
[…] turn away from ‘experience.’ This is how I read Zizek’s The Parallax View several weeks back, and this is how I propose to read Martin Hagglund’s project in his recent (and quite wonderfully […]
I’m curious what you make of IIT, given all this. I’ve yet to read through your paper on BBT in detail, but at the outset I have to ask: aren’t you conflating intentionality with identity? Using Zizek as a piñata in this to show his own confusion on the issue is all well and good, but it’s hardly fair to sit the class in the corner for the actions of the dunce. Chalmers’ HP doesn’t necessitate a grand *self* in all this, just that, as Henry pointed out, there’s at least some subject for every object of thought- otherwise there’s no thinking going on at all.
Actually browsing through my posts over the past several months you’ll see that mainstream consciousness research and Anglophone philosophy of mind are what I primarily engage. I certainly don’t agree that Zizek is a ‘dunce.’ If anything, I think his biggest shortcoming is the same as my own: too hasty, too eager to get the next thought out, too loathe to dwell. I always catch a whiff of my own neurotic incapacities when I read him. I’m actually a fan of Tononi’s IITC – though I have it on good authority that he thinks I’m a crank! As he should, insofar as I’m in the process of working all this through, thinking aloud. (Blogging, I’ve come to realize, is a great place to let thought be honest to the messy conditions of its inception). All I know for sure about BBT is that it’s original and it has some serious interpretive wheels. Otherwise, if by ‘thinking’ you mean what the tradition has meant and what metacognitive intuition seems to suggest, then yes, there is no thinking going on at all. I’m not asking anyone to believe BBT when it claims such things (I can scarcely believe it myself). What I am asking is that people realize that it is entirely possible that the cognitive self-conception we evolved is, like so many other adaptations, subreptive through and through. Given this empirical possibility, I’m simply asking people to entertain BBT as a kind of worse case scenario of what we’ll look like after the sciences of the brain are through. No subjects, no objects (which BBT sees as cognitive heuristics with fairly robust but ultimately limited scopes of application) just systems piling onto systems.
[…] anyone who takes umbrage, or just anyone merely sympathetic to Bryant’s (or Hagglund’s or Zizek’s) account, to show me the short-circuit in my thinking. As I’ve said before, I’m just a tourist. […]
[…] Bryant in The Ptolemaic Restoration, Martin Hagglund in Reactionary Atheism, and Slavoj Zizek in Zizek Hollywood, each of which has received thousands of views. With Meillasoux I focussed on his isolation of […]
When you say: “Our intuition of conscious unity arises from the way cognition confuses aggregates for individuals in the absence of differentiating information. Our intuition of personal identity (and nowness more generally) arises from metacognitive neglect of second-order temporalization, our brain’s blindness to the self-differentiating time of timing.”
This notion of aggregates got me to thinking again on Hume whose associationist notions is based on just this concept of aggregates. For some reason, even though he had no apprehension of brain sciences etc. he was on the right track… I still think he, more than any of the others was moving toward some interesting aspects of this notion of BBT. I need to follow this up. I have issues with his affective psychology, but now I need to rethink his notions again… any thoughts? Obviously I’m working through the prehistory of a post-intentional shift … I think we have to clear the muck out first then proceed with the work at hand.
More… In his treatise on human nature Section VI Personal Identity:
” After what manner, therefore, do they belong to self; and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic’d reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me.”
The first eliminativist … the notion he asks is that if we subtract (“remove”) all perceptions what is left? His answer: “a perfect non-entity”. He comes to that same point as Metzinger. I have a feeling that if he’d seen the neurosciences of our day he’d have agreed with you.
The Buddha said pretty much the same thing thousands of years earlier. So, no, not the first eliminativist.
The Buddha was no eliminativist. Just a shirker.
To each his own Buddha.
No, like all libertines, Buddha realized pleasure ultimately turned into pain and inferred from this that all life was sorrow… and, created a therapy out of a malformed bias.
I think he would too! It’s definitely an interpretivist account he offers in the Treatise – I’m not sure anyone could have wrapped their head around eliminativism in the 18th century. But Hume was really the first to take a hardass skeptical attitude to metacognition, and so much of his work consists of exercises like this, where he looks for self or for efficacy finds nothing, and so postulates deflationary answers – custom, primarily. Kant’s project is one of filling all of those holes in via ‘transcendental deductions.’ Hume would have thought this hilarious, particularly to the appellation ‘critical’ that Kant gives it. Here he goes through all this effort to show everybody the “weakness and narrow limits” of human metacognition (reason and understanding), and Kant raises this transcendental vacation resort in its place.
Interesting comparison…
5.633 Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is
exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye.
And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that an eye sees it.
What Zizek and others are doing pretty clearly seems to be an theoretically opportunistic ontologization of an obvious cognitive incapacity – the very one we should suspect, given what we’re learning about the brain.
Yea, Zizek is a stand up comic. He’s always telling you that he’s not here to give you answers, but only more questions… He should have had a carne come through his town as a kid, instead someone gave him a skull and like Hamlet he saw in it the mystery of his own non-existent self: the black hole of the void… maybe he should have entered it and like the coyote and the road runner zipped himself up. Otherwise he’s still entertaining…
As for Hume, his following of Descartes into an epistemic skepticism rather than Pyrrohonism crosses over into your own territory: it was about knowledge claims, rather than opposing beliefs. He just felt that most philosophers didn’t push their reasonings far enough, for if they had they’d all realized that reason has its limits. And, as you say, it just doesn’t have enough information to ever give an accurate answer. But alas philosophers being human fall into bias and accept fictions for truth, and then dogmatize these into perfectly logical mythologies of reason than reason itself.
Hume was a Pyrrhonian. It was all about opposed beliefs with him — specifically, the opposition between the beliefs of ‘philosophy’ and those of ‘common life.’ He attempted to adjudicate the dispute between these two opposed sources of authority.
I’ll not argue the point. He was both. In the case I presented it is valid, in his moral writings the case you state is correct. He used both at different times for different reasons, and in the end this was one of the problems he was unable to overcome in his own philosophy. Which obviously in his biography came out in much of his mental anguish.
Obviously a blog comment-thread is no place to have an informed, intelligent debate about Hume’s philosophy. So I won’t argue the point either. I will, however, simply state (for the record, as it were) that I’m entirely convinced that, philosophically, Hume was a Pyrrhonian through and through. (In fact, he was far more of a Pyrrhonian in his theoretical philosophy than in his moral philosophy, where he let his ‘natural propensity’ toward dogmatism much, much freer rein!) Hume never ‘followed Descartes into epistemic skepticism’ — though he certainly was concerned to show that to follow Descartes was to land oneself in an inescapable epistemological bind.
🙂
I see we can agree to disagree in gentlemanly fashion!
Anyway, Delvagus, thanks for your input… yea, no reason to go further. You’re convinced on your side, I on mine. So we’re at a stalemate, which is fine 🙂
Any reasoning from here would take us into the fine points of a great deal of citations to support our reasonings… and, yes, I’m not up to that at the moment. Maybe at a future time. 🙂
Ok, you’ve got me going now:
David Hume, complained in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding mainly from readings in Sextus,
“A Pyrrhonian cannot expect that his philosophy will have any influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles to universally and steadily prevail. All discourses, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, un- satisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.”
In this passage Hume levels two well-known and often-repeated objections against the skeptical lifestyle described by Sextus. First, in charging that without beliefs the Pyrrhonist will be unable to participate in intellectual discourse, Hume suggests that the very argumentative practice on which the Pyrrhonian lifestyle depends is inconsistent with the belieflessness Sextus describes as characteristic of that lifestyle. Second, and more generally, Hume charges that without the practical direction beliefs provide, the
Pyrrhonist would be reduced to a state of paralysis and would remain unable to perform the simplest life-sustaining activities.
Just to warn you — Pyrrhonism is my area of specialization, so of course I’m going to have nuanced and complicated views of the matter…
It is widely agreed that Hume at least misunderstood — or (a) appropriated views current in his own time, or (b) even purposely misrepresented — the Pyrrhonian position, particularly vis-a-vis the Academic skeptics. Yes, he does level a common charge against skeptics — namely, the apraxia or impracticability charge — but it is becoming increasingly accepted (and rightly so!) that Sextus was entirely correct in claiming that this objection does nothing but betray a misunderstanding of Pyrrhonism.
As for Hume, it’s quite clear to those familiar with ancient skepticism that what he describes as ‘Academic skepticism’ (the skepticism he endorses!) is actually much more like Pyrrhonism, while what he describes as ‘Pyrrhonian skepticism’ is much more like (some permutations of) Academic skepticism (or at least, that it’s much more like how Sextus himself viewed Academic skepticism).
In short — don’t make the common, under-informed mistake of taking Hume’s word for it when he says his views are opposed to Pyrrhonism.
Obviously not.. Hume only had access to a very narrow range of ancient writings, and as you point out our understanding is different in that we have the full panoply of that information. So ergo we can argue the case that Hume misappropriated and misunderstood the material. Obviously I’m not the naïve reader you assume me to be… and point out that you are an expert in the field seems to be an almost affront, as if you consider yourself a part of the academic elite, as separate from the riff-raff of independent thinkers… why else you point that fact out?
Oh come now! In pointing out that I specialize in Pyrrhonism, I’m not ‘separating myself off’ from ‘the riff raff of independent thinkers’; rather, I’m separating myself off (quite obviously, I should think!) from those who do not specialize in Pyrrhonism, whether ‘elite’ or ‘independent’ (terms I don’t like or endorse, by the way). It’s a point I often make to students: always beware, in dealing with professors (and this applies more widely, of course), when you stumble upon their area of specialization. They’re bound to have complicated — and sometimes ludicrously convoluted — views on those particular matters.
Well, I’m not your student, and in my opinion that is exactly what it sounded like: the truth of an academic baring his qualifications as if this made some ultimate difference…
Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the e-bed this morning! I have not spoken at all about my ‘qualifications.’ All I’ve done is state that I’ve spent a long time working on this particular subject. If we were talking about, say, Schopenhauer, then I would find it useful information to know that you’ve spent years studying Schopenhauer. I would not be offended or affronted by your pointing this out. Thus, I don’t understand your reaction to my perfectly harmless remark.
So in the sense I quoted above, at least, Hume, was in disagreement; yet, his moral philosophy was based on the Pyrrhonist notion of ‘how to live one’s life’. That much is agreed.
But again, his moral philosophy is much less skeptical than his theoretical philosophy is! If having an interest in ‘how to live one’s life’ means that one is ‘Pyrrhonian’ in any sense whatsoever, then every philosopher to discuss ethics is a Pyrrhonian — which is clearly ridiculous.
At the end of Book I of the Treatise, Hume even warns us (in a passage strikingly familiar to a passage at the opening of Sextus’s Outlines) that though he may stray into making claims that sound dogmatic (and he most certainly does in the rest of Treatise!), we should understand that such claims “imply no dogmatic spirit, nor conceited idea of my own judgment, which are sentiments that I am sensible become no body, and a sceptic still less than any other.” A truly Pyrrhonian declaration!
Again your arguing from present knowledge, and obviously I simplified the argument for the sake of the shortness of the post. This isn’t some academic paper I’m writing. And your pointing out the notion of knowledge claims is my point: this is epistemic skepticism pure and simple. It is not claims about belief, but about knowledge and that is the crux.
I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread of our discussion, both literally and figuratively. But I’ll point out that it’s bizarre on its face to distinguish Pyrrhonian from ‘epistemic skepticism’ if by the latter you mean ‘skepticism concerned with knowledge.’ Pyrrhonism most certainly was concerned with knowledge: the focus on belief follows from this, for the idea (common to all the Hellenistic schools) is that we should only ‘believe’ (in the modern sense) that which we know to be true.
Far be it for me to teach you the difference between claims of belief and claims of knowledge…
I don’t understand why you’re being so hostile — and, dare I say it, childish. (In no way did my remark suggest a failure to understand the difference between claism of belief and of knowledge.)
Sorry, Scott, for clogging up your discussion thread with this… I’m out.
Trying to undercut me and put me into the category of “childish” is like saying to one’s child, you’re just being emotional… when emotion has nothing to do with it. I always love how people escape through the discussions by blaming the other as emotional, hostile, and childish to obviate their own supposed impersonal reflections which hide specific emotional agendas.
If there were a beer between you two instead of thousand of miles of invisible cables this never would have happened. Blame it on the medium.
True… we’d be drinking and laughing about it! 🙂
That reminds me… my grab bag email: greyowl7@hotmail.com if you ever want to drop new reading lists or other nonesuch information my way 🙂
My main point is that Hume is idiosyncratic and cannot be locked down to either one or the other of Pyrrhonism or epistemic skepticism. It’s more complicated than that. What he does is to assess the value of doubt generally both with respect to doxastic and epistemological criteria. The oddity of this way of proceeding is that hyperbolic doubt comes to be assessed by doxastic criteria, which of course it fails to satisfy. There are plenty of citations that could be drawn to support this conclusion, and I’ll need to do a post at some point on my own site. (Don’t want to take up Scott’s blog with posts on Hume)
Whether or not Hume can be ‘locked down’ to Pyrrhonism depends on how you view Pyrrhonism: to say it’s ‘more complicated than that’ simply begs the question. The short version of my reply is that Pyrrhonism ought to be viewed as a living tradition, an ‘impulse’ that runs through the history of philosophy, not as an artifact fossilized in the texts of Sextus Empiricus, who was after all only one of many ancient Pyrrhonians. This is in line with Nussbaum’s astute observation that Hellenistic philosophical therapies are context-dependent, meaning that they must be viewed as being employed by particular philosophers in specific historico-cultural circumstances, which will entail differences in the application of the therapy both in terms of method and in terms of telos.
I’m not arguing one way or another about his investment in Pyrrhonism, in fact I agree that he used both… I’ve said that repeatedly. You seem to be arguing against the wind trying to prove something that doesn’t need proving….
Um… But you wrote: “Second, and more generally, Hume charges that without the practical direction beliefs provide, the Pyrrhonist would be reduced to a state of paralysis and would remain unable to perform the simplest life-sustaining activities.” How is this not an argument against Hume being ‘invested in Pyrrhonism’? And what I’m arguing is that Hume is a Pyrrhonian. If that claim ‘doesn’t need proving,’ then it’s news to me! (Sure, many people have claimed as much, but it’s very controversial: arguing the point is most certainly not ‘arguing against the wind.’)
Hume’s central theory focuses on facts and experiences, mitigated skepticism that brings us to “so salutary a determination, nothing can be more serviceable than to be once thoroughly convinced of the force of the Pyrrhonian doubt and of the impossibility that anything but the strong power of natural instinct could free us from it.” I think, Hume is right that his mitigated skepticism is an improvement over the excessive skepticism of philosophers like Descartes because as Hume says previously that: “The existence of any being can only be proved by arguments from its cause or its effect and these arguments are founded entirely on experience.” And this statement is against the method of rationalism on which Descartes emphasizes as the best method over senses and impressions which Descartes thinks can put him into dreams and imaginations – the subjects that Hume are taking to be his central objects to prove for the existence of natural things.
This mitigated skepticism, in my view, simply is (Hume’s version of) Pyrrhonism.
See, here we are… the debate continues 🙂 hahah! I’ll have to give it up: thanks for the great discussion. We do agree to disagree and can be gentleman about it.
thanks!
I agree. His is a true ‘Critique’ of theoretical reason. Has anyone written a book on this Roger? Where would you shoehorn Montaigne?
Nobody has written the book on this to my satisfaction! (I would like to do so one day.) A very interesting take is Donald Livingston’s Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, specifically the first couple chapters. As for bringing in Montaigne: that’s easy, esp. with Livingston on the table, since his colleague at Emory, Ann Hartle, wrote a very good (though problematic, of course!) book on Montaigne, called Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher, which explicitly builds its interpretation of Montaigne on the model of Livingston’s interpretation of Hume. Both of these books are extremely suggestive. Hartle argues that her ‘dialectical’ interpretation of Montaigne entails that he is not a skeptic, let alone a Pyrrhonian; but I think rather that her interpretation shows us how to begin a proper explanation of just how Pyrrhonian Montaigne was! (Tellingly, Hartle’s interpretation of Pyrrhonism draws exclusively from Zeller — as though nothing had been written on the subject since the late nineteenth century!)
In the very next passage he presents the very first Blind Brain Theory:
“But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.”
Right here: “Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions.” And, that last sentence: “… nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.” i.e., “metacognitive neglect”.
Your notion in different words is much the same as Hume’s : “Our intuition of personal identity (and nowness more generally) arises from metacognitive neglect of second-order temporalization, our brain’s blindness to the self-differentiating time of timing. For whatever reason, consciousness is integrative: oscillating sounds and lights ‘fuse’ or appear continuous beyond certain frequency thresholds because information that doesn’t reach consciousness makes no conscious difference.”
[…] I find Wolfendale’s approach far—far—more promising than that of, say, Adrian Johnston or Slavoj Zizek, it still commits basic errors that the nascent Continental Philosophy of Mind, fleeing the […]
I don’t really have the time to go through your whole blog (although I read some of your other posts, of course), so I’m just gonna give you my two cents here, hoping you could perhaps make things clearer for me. I’m not necessarily saying you are, but you definitely appear to be missing the point Zizek and Badiou have built their careers around making. I’m all for calling the self a mistake, but a mistake which not only behaves as a One (having erased its multiple-ground in the process of representation), but for all intents and purposes appears to have its own agenda, which, perhaps you would agree, if it is real, would in fact make it a One. If the self is only an illusion, which is a byproduct of the brain’s carrying out its particular limited functions (which you have defined as ‘environment cognition’), the direction we seem to be heading into is one of some kind of determinism. What is the ‘holy neural host’ you mention, if not the ultimate referent or ground of all our ‘mistakes’? Zizek’s position is that what is a mistake at the level of interpreting itself as original ground, is in some sense justified in its understanding (its understanding of itself as One), because in understanding itself as One, it accordingly acts as One. And being a One means being able to account for the whole spectrum of activities we undertake, which from the point of view of a Whole, of which the supposed One is actually a part in a functional sense, can be explained only as pointless. As I see it, you would need to resort to one of two options in order to account for intentionality as an illusion: either our intentions are mere appearance because they are only the byproduct of a more fundamental agenda (the selfish gene explanation is an obvious example of this stance), or agendas as such are impossible by default, everything is contingent, and our being as we are has been decided in advance by a chance throw of the dice, preemptively making it impossible for us to take decisions which would alter the situation we are in (which does not rule out change occurring via a new throw). Again, the mention of a ‘holy neural ghost’ as something, the being of which is at least possible, makes me read your thesis as closer to the first of the approaches summarized above. So, if there is a fundamental agenda, to which we are oblivious by nature because of the manner in which it defines our very nature, and what’s more, this agenda is biological/evolutionary, why all the acts we are capable of, which, from an evolutionary point of view, appear pointless? Does injecting heroin into one’s veins serve a higher purpose or not? Zizek, with his reading of the subject as a multiple which, in counting itself as One, is caught in a practically endless operation of attempting to verify its Oneness, leaves plenty of room (after all, all is void) for anything and everything we do to take place. I can’t help but read your position as one dealing with a global One encompassing a multiple of parts, each mistaking itself for One, a position which does not leave room for much. If you can clarify things for me, I’d definitely be grateful.
“Zizek’s position is that what is a mistake at the level of interpreting itself as original ground, is in some sense justified in its understanding (its understanding of itself as One), because in understanding itself as One, it accordingly acts as One. And being a One means being able to account for the whole spectrum of activities we undertake, which from the point of view of a Whole, of which the supposed One is actually a part in a functional sense, can be explained only as pointless”
Does it act as one? Or is ‘one’ the simplest way for us to understand ourselves post hoc – a heuristic? The more the research piles up, the more the latter is becoming the obvious answer. Agency is simply the way the system we happen to be solves a narrow set of problem ecologies: there need be nothing ‘intentional’ about it the traditional philosophical sense. We use intentional idioms all the time, certainly, but the question is whether that idiom is capable of solving itself, the way the philosophical tradition – and Zizek – supposes. Once we understand 1) the way intentional idioms have to be radically heuristic, 2) the way such heuristics possess distinct problem-ecologies, and 3) how the general question of the human (in terms of nature or ‘condition’) almost certainly lies outside those problem-ecologies, then the reasons for the perpetually underdetermined nature of theses like Zizek’s becomes clear.
I just don’t see how the issue you raise alleviates Zizek’s theoretical straits. Any time anything so complex as us is reduced to ‘one’ heuristic neglect is almost certainly involved. To go on and insist this one provides a distinct ontological frame is to neglect heuristic neglect, to see a special purpose tool as something universal. ‘Meanings’ abound in our retail troubleshooting of any number of first order problems. But is their any such thing as ‘meaning’ in a big picture sense? Probably not at all.
Just trying to ascertain whether what you’re doing is reducing a whole spectrum of phenomena, which actually take place all of the time, to second-order events possible only as a by-product of some first-order capacity aimed at a very limited set of operations. Guess we’re clear on that one.
It’s the worst case scenario. It’s empirically possible. My position either will or will not be borne out by cognitive science. Science, meanwhile, has a long history of debunking our traditional theoretical assumptions. Why should we assume anything philosophically happy will come of cognitive science?
Do you really think a priori argumentation and the deliverances of philosophical reflection can rescue Zizek? For me, I’m not so interested in convincing people I’m right so much as showing them just one possible way they could be wrong. The sciences of the human are moving so fast, and the revolution promises to be as fundamental in this domain as in any other. Are you certain that ‘reductionism’ is anything more than shibboleth?
Meanwhile, I’m not saying that intentional idioms will be replaced, only that all the philosophy heaped upon them is very likely bunk. You tell me what warrants Zizek’s extraordinary (from a natural scientific perspective) claims. The phenomena as they appear to reason and reflection?
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