The Myth of the Nonexistent Variable
by rsbakker
Noocentrism is the intuitive presumption of ‘hanging efficacy,’ the kind of acausal constraint metacognition attributes to aboutness or willing or rule-following or purposiveness.
Metacognitive neglect means that we ‘float’ through our environments blind to the causal systems that actually constrain us and–crucially–blind to this blindness as well. We are thus forced to rely on the various heuristic systems we’ve evolved to manage our environments absent this information, systems that metacognition, in its present acculturated form, tracks as aboutness, willing, rule-following, and purposiveness. Since metacognition cannot track these heuristic systems for the specialized ecomechanisms they in fact are, it assumes a singular cognitive and metacognitive capacity possessing universal scope. Thus the dogmatists and the early modern faith in the adequacy of metacognition. The history of philosophy is the history of throwing ourselves into the metacognitive breach time and again, groping our way forward primarily by our failure to agree. In the Western philosophical tradition, Hume was the first to definitively isolate the constructed nature of experience, and thus the first to make explicit the implicit performative dimension of the first-person. Kant was the first to raise a whole Weltanschaung about it, and an extravagant one at that. Because this is so obviously ‘the way it is’ in philosophy, the tendency is to be blind to what is a truly extraordinary fact: that untutored metacognition is blind to the implicit performative dimension of all thought and experience. What was an inert blank found itself populated by performative blurs. And now, thanks to the sciences of the brain, those blurs are coming into sharper and sharper focus at last.
The third variable problem is the problem of hidden mechanisms. Given the systematicy of our environments, correlations abound. Given the complexity or our environments, the chances of mistaking correlation for causation are high. You fuel gauge indicates empty and your car coughs to a stop and so you assume you’ve run out of gas not knowing that your fuel pump has died. Researchers note a correlation between violent behaviour in youth and broken homes and so assume broken homes primarily cause violent behaviour, not knowing that association with other violent youth is the primary cause. The crazy thing to note here is how the problem of metacognitive neglect is also a problem of hidden mechanisms. In a very real sense, what is presently coming into focus are all the third variables of experience, all the mechanisms actually constraining our thought and behaviour.
In this sense, noocentrism is the myth of the nonexistent variable. The innumerable third variable processes that traverse the whole of conscious experience simply do not exist for conscious experience. Since metacognition is blind to these mechanisms, it can only posit constraints orthogonal to this activity, those belonging, as we saw above, to aboutness, willing, rule-following, and purposiveness. Since metacognition is blind to this orthogonality, the fact that it is positing constraints in the absence of any information regarding what is actually constraining thought and behaviour, the constraints posited suffer a profound version of the Only-game-in-town Effect. Given the mechanical systematicity of the brain, correlations abound in thought and behaviour: conscious experience appears to possess its own orthogonal, noocentric systematicity. Given neglect of the brain’s mechanical systematicity, those correlations appear to be the only game in town, to at once ‘autonomous,’ and the only way the systematicity of thought and behaviour can possibly be cognized. Historically, the bulk of philosophy has been given over to the task of properly describing that orthogonal noocentric systematicity using only the dregs of metacognitive intuition–or ‘reflection.’
Only now, thanks to the fount of information provided by the cognitive sciences, can we see the hopelessness of such a project. Decisions can be tracked prior to a subject’s ability to report them. The feeling of willing can be readily duped and is therefore interpretative. Memory turns out to be fractionate and nonveridical. Moral argumentation is self-promotional rather than truth-seeking. Attitudes appear to be introspectively inaccessible. The feeling of certainty has a dubious connection to rational warrant. The more we learn, the more faulty our traditional intuitions become. It’s as if our metacognitive portrait had been painted across a canvas concealing myriad, intricate folds, and whose kinks and dimensions can only now be teased into visibility. Only now are we discovering just how many of our traditional verities turn on ignorance. The myth of the nonexistent variable can no longer be sustained.
We must learn to intellectually condition our metacognitive sense of ourselves, to dim the bright intuitions of sufficiency and efficacy, and to think thought for what it is, a low-dimensional inkling bound to the back of far more high-dimensional processes. We must appreciate how all thought and behaviour is shot through with hidden variables, how this very exercise pitches within some tidal unknown. And we must see noocentrism as the latest of the great illusions to be overturned by the scientific discovery of the unseen machinery of things.
Three Pound Brain 
Forgive me for having an inordinate amount of internet time (exams and such).
Do you ever feel a little like Martin Luther? Just so casually tacking the Reformation to the Cathedral doors ;).
Classic summation blog, by the way. More fodder for TTBD? Also, any news on that front?
Luther was a fecophiliac, you know that!
Dan has already started digging into the ms. and has reported that he regularly receives emails asking when he thinks it’ll come out…
Now he knows what it feels like!
Lol’d. Fecophiliac, indeed.
Well, I wish Mellamphy luck.
Any ideas on which will come first, TUC or TTDB? Or are you going to shock us all and toss something new into the mix?
Given neglect of the brain’s mechanical systematicity, those correlations appear to be the only game in town, to at once ‘autonomous,’
Minor error(?)
Yup. Thanks Callan.
This reads like a summary of BBT, or at least a statement of its upshot, and it’s a fine one.
I wonder whether there’s a demarcation issue here. You say there are the real, hidden variables (the mechanisms) and the illusions or fake variables that arise from ignorance of the real ones. But a comprehensive view of the self would include both: we’re the creatures that are ignorant of our neural mechanisms but that then–unlike the other species–do two things: (1) we posit idealized or fantastic selves, acting as if they were real and perhaps even helping to make them so by adapting to our social environments, thus rewiring our brain to be civilized, and (2) we do science to discover the reality of the underlying mechanisms.
You seem to accept this expanded view of the self, but you prioritize the neural mechanisms. Is that because you think illusions have no causal power? Surely this isn’t so. Creatures that evolve to mistake illusions for reality will behave as though there were no such difference between them. A crazy person who hallucinates his being Napoleon Bonaparte will act as if he’s that person (he’ll wear the hat and give people orders and so on). He’ll be wrong, but the delusion will nevertheless have an impact on the real world.
In fact, even as cognitive science is discovering the truth of how the brain works, we’re the sort of creatures–in the expansive sense–that will disregard that knowledge and continue to personalize ourselves, for all sorts of reasons. Animals don’t do that; they don’t transcend or tinker much with their programming. A person, then, is an animal that makes itself something else in a bumbling and stumbling manner, using ignorance and illusions to sustain its disbelief about its underlying mechanical nature, to add something to that bedrock, namely the personal and social patterns of behaviour which again are anomalous in the animal world.
So the demarcation issue is whether we should define the self in the narrow or reductive, cognitive science way or in the expansive one, where the latter includes our tendency to build on illusions.
Yeah, but when Bonaparte decides he will personally execute you for treason, what happens then – assuming you can’t knock his ass out, are you not going to try and reason with him? Are you not going to move to undo his delusion? So what happens where our delusions grate against each other? What resolves that? The human classic of organised mass murder/war?
‘Illusions’ on BBT, as you know, are consequences of the system ‘grinding its gears’ for the lack or information (or resources appropriate to the information given). But as every magician knows, this ‘gear grinding’ can become a component for different kinds of non-epistemic systems which may prove to be even more adaptive. I think this has to be case with the human capacity for theoretical cognition: we couldn’t have evolved theoretical cognition to ‘get unobservables right,’ so it must have proven its worth along different axes of efficacy (social solidarity, ‘mind forming,’ and what not). And this is key to your ‘creative gear-grinding’ as we’ve discussed before.
The thing to remember though is that although you’re prone to rhetorically spin mechanistic cognition as ‘narrow’ or ‘reductive’ the fact of the matter is that this is the highest dimensional form of cognition we got, the least ‘narrow’ and the least ‘reductive.’ So if we’re interested in what is the case, as I am, it seems to be the only game in town. So I would actually turn your question on its head, Ben: ‘Should we define the self according to what it is, or according to ways that make us feel better, more sociable, etc?’
Since I think the latter is inevitable, I take the former to be primary concern.
Right, Scott, but I think here we’re pushing back the problem of demarcation, since now the question is about what’s epistemically relevant. I agree science is the best form of cognition when we’re dealing with knowledge of objects/facts, but when it comes to self-knowledge, complications arise since when we objectify ourselves, science itself goes bye-bye. Science as it’s commonly understood, at least, presupposes the existence of persons, just as I think the high vs low-dimensional cognition distinction presupposes the semantic distinction between truth and error.
You’ll say there’s no such presuppositions, and science would keep on chugging even if we stopped oversimplifying its methods using intuitive notions of personhood. Maybe, but even if we confine ourselves to speaking of science as some sort of natural process, that process could end as a matter of causality if people stopped believing they’re persons. (Society would unravel and thus scientists would lose their financial backing, etc.)
Now, the question for me is whether this dependence of science on the intuition of personhood is *epistemically* relevant. As I’ve said before, I think it is if we think of epistemology in pragmatic terms.
Yeah, I don’t buy the presupposition move you’re talking about – even in it’s deflationary Sellarsian guise. It’s certainly not a move that can be made without justification. How is science ‘dependent on the intuition of persons’? Because scientists rely on intentional heuristics the same as everyone else? But that just means they’re dependent on certain mechanisms, nothing more or less.
And how does the distinction between high and low dimensional information availability presuppose – as opposed to explain! – the semantic distinction between truth and error? Again, you seem to be confusing the deployment of certain heuristics with commitment to the way metacognition reifies those heuristics…
Science as commonly understood depends on the assumptions that scientists are people in at least two ways. First, without that assumption science would stop as a matter of cause and effect. Without the belief in personhood–which might well be just a delusion, for argument’s sake–people would stop being scientists or else society at large would cease to function and so institutional science would come to a crashing halt. At least, this is a plausible scenario. Is this scenario relevant to epistemology, though? Not so much, unless we’re dealing with a postmodern, social constructionist account of knowledge.
But there’s a second kind of dependence. Science posits hypotheses, theories, symbols, knowledge, justifications, aesthetic standards (simplicity, fruitfulness, etc), and so on. As commonly understood, these all appeal to the concept of personhood (to semantics, normativity, teleology, etc).
Now, as we’ve discussed before, this begs the question against BBT, since BBT leaves open the possibility that there’s an unconventional way of understanding science, that the mechanism of science operates just fine without the concept of personhood and that that concept merely comes along for the ride. Indeed, the mechanism of science might continue to operate even with people’s loss of faith in personhood, precisely because of that independence. I agree that this is possible, but without the mechanistic account of the nature of science, we’re at an impasse.
Regarding high and low-dimensional info as an explanation of something’s being true, I note that in your more recent article you think of information in the very minimal terms of “systematic differences making differences.” I take it, then, the high vs low dimension difference would be mapped onto the difference between more or less systematicity, and systematicity is a kind of complexity. If that’s right, I don’t see how truth amounts to high-dimensional information. This naturalistic explanation seems to imply that wherever there’s some kind of great complexity whereas there might have been less of it, there’s truth rather than falsity. So truth (otherwise known as a statement’s agreement with a fact) winds up being virtually everywhere. Can you help me out here?
‘Appeals to normativity’ is just another second-order characterization of what’s going on, one that I’m saying can replaced with ‘resorts to social heuristics.’ To make your criticism stick, you have to explain why the former trumps the latter, and I just can’t see how that can be done short of foot-stomping. The contrary case, on the other hand… I have a big piece I’ve been picking away at for months that really dives into this question, but I would certainly appreciate any holes/problems you perceive, Ben.
‘Truth’ doesn’t amount to high-dimensional information: it’s a (radically procrustean) heuristic we use fix mechanical reliabilities in communicative contexts (BBT actually gives deflationary accounts of truth a weird twist). The dimensionality of the information available is what allows us to assay those reliabilities – which is why science works as well as it does.
OK, I’ll keep an eye out for your big article on normativity. I think you might consider writing an article that explains science itself, given BBT (if you haven’t already written it). The article would have to be self-referential at points, since it would be engaged in an explanation while telling us what explanations really are, and would account for science’s superiority to other heuristics, such as astrology or religion, without resorting to normative concepts.
I was hoping you would take a crack at it at least, Ben! Again, I don’t see what the problem is using social heuristics (as expressed in the form ‘normative concepts’ or what have you) once you have a principled, empirically tractable way of explaining away our metacognitive conceits regarding them – such as, the assumption that employing these heuristics commits you ascribing reality to… ? I’m not even sure what the intentionalist’s position amounts to anymore. Once you have a workable, mechanical account of normativity then all the old moves are moot – at least that’s the way it’s starting to look to me. We know for a fact that the machinery of the brain is implicit to what we do! So what does it mean to say that ‘normativity’ is implicit? On what basis does your occult ‘implicit’ trump my factual one?
Here’s a way to put it:
Maybe let me know which article you’re talking about, Scott, when you post it. Note that some of your comment here seems to have been left out at the end.
As far as I can tell, the idea of “a workable, mechanical account” is an oxymoron, since an account is something that’s made up of meaningful symbols; otherwise, what is it? You should be alright with that, because you’re speaking off the cuff, using first-order terms which the actual mechanical X (where X is naively called an account, theory, explanation, etc) “explains” away the first-order way of talking about explanations without itself being such an explanation.
So here’s my concern, stated as bluntly as possible: without a non-naive “explanation” of what a scientific explanation is, given the mechanistic ontology which allows only for causal relations, including heuristics (where a heuristic is some kind of non-teleological algorithm, that being close to another oxymoron, in my view), I have no idea what you’re talking about when you’re talking about explaining away occult assumptions and so forth. What *is* science, given your ontology? If you haven’t already written that sort of self-referential article, I’d be interested in reading your thoughts on that question.
And here we are again! 😉 But this is good, because I need to find the kinds of expressions that block these intuitions of yours. The first, I think, is simply to press you on answering my questions: viz., So what does it mean to say that ‘normativity’ is implicit? On what basis does your occult ‘implicit’ trump my factual one? Because I’m saying I don’t know what you mean when you say I have to be begging your metacognitive interpretations of meaning! And I’m not convinced you do either…
What I’m trying to show you is the degree to which the burden is actually yours. If ‘normativity’ or ‘meaning’ isn’t a mechanical function of the brain, then what is it?
I’m not sure what happened to the end of my comment – I can’t even remember what it was! Talk about neglect.
What does it mean to say that normativity is implicit in some talk of mechanisms or that an occult implication trumps a mechanistic one? Well, an implication is a relation between reasons, not causes, and the giving of reasons is done with certain ideals of rationality in mind, including the ideals that guide scientific practice. If there are no reasons, symbols, or values, what is a mechanistic implication? It would have to be a matter of potentiality. So rain is implicit in storm clouds. But as Hume said, this kind of causal necessity is an occult property, deriving from the imagination rather than from the senses. Properly speaking, creatures like us merely fall into the habit of speaking quasi-teleologically of an effect’s potentiality, as though effects were somehow glued to their causes.
If there are only non-occult mechanisms (regularities in the relations between chunks of matter), nothing is objectively implicit in anything else. Moreover, nothing symbolizes anything else, so there are no scientific theories, in which case we’re as deluded about science as we are about ourselves. There is no scientific truth, nor any Blind Brain Theory, nor are your philosophical writings true or false.
Assuming you’re not merely redescribing the folk ways of speaking when you talk instead of information, heuristics, and mechanisms, you’re replacing meaning, truth, and value with entirely different, non-equivalent things. So contrary to your off-the-cuff remarks, there is no mechanical “account” of anything, nor are neural mechanisms “implicit” (potentially) in everything we do. I’d say that those would be misleading ways of speaking, except that there would be no going right or wrong, on the mechanistic view of things.
I take it you’d pseduo-explain science by saying science is a heuristic that solves certain problems more efficiently than do other heuristics, such as philosophy. This instrumentalism assumes there are goals. A goal is the positing of an imaginary end point which the goal helps to bring into reality, by driving the creature with the goal to achieve it. I don’t see the talk of meaning, truth, or values as having to be any more occult than that. These are products of the imagination that drive us to change things.
If the mechanistic philosopher means to eliminate talk of preferred possibilities (goals, purposes, etc), I see no explanation of science on the horizon, in which case the mechanistic philosophy undoes itself. This incoherence wouldn’t matter if we were assuming that a set of markings isn’t more or less useful (for solving problems, achieving goals, etc), depending on whether the markings are consistent. But without consistency, we’d have a license for nonsense and obviously that’s not what science is about. So you’re stuck with some occult posits too, I think, and I should be able to borrow those toys for theoretical purposes.
You’re critical points are taken, Ben, and I will respond to them, but you actually haven’t answered my question yet!
Oh, I might not have been clear about the questions. Are you asking me to say what logical implication is, without resorting to mechanistic concepts? I suppose implication is an emergent, largely imaginary relation between ideas. So normativity would be implicit in a mechanistic theory of personhood if the theory logically presupposed a concept in its explanandum, in which case the theory would amount to a circular argument. If you want to say that logic is also a mechanism, I’d begin to worry that you’re using “mechanism” as a weasel word.
We’ve already talked about my reservations with “mechanism,” since the word has plenty of teleological connotations. I talk of nature’s impersonality in metaphorical terms of undead decay, since a zombie nicely symbolizes the monstrous sort of change in question. But if we’re talking about mechanisms, surely our intuitions go to intelligently designed contraptions and the like. You can use the word in a technical way, of course, but in this context I’m going to be suspicious of that word. My guard will be up.
Your other question is about how an occult implication could be better than a factual one. I think I came closer to answering this one already. But I’m also not sure I understand the point you’re trying to make. Can you clarify the second question? It’s a little cryptic. “Trumps” in what context? And by “factual implication,” do you mean that mechanisms are always at work whenever we think it’s really a person who’s acting? So your question would be about the best direction of explanation, as it were, up to the so-called emergent properties or down to the base, neurological ones. A quick answer would be the pragmatic one: we pick the direction that’s most useful under the circumstances. And I’ve left it open whether the mechanistic one might one day be altogether more useful than the folk one. Still, we’d need a mechanistic “account” of usefulness, to close the circle…
You’re accusing me of begging normativity in my formulations, and I’m simply asking what you mean by that. I want to know what it means to ‘implicitly presuppose’ intentionality or any of its subspecies, like teleology, and so on. ‘Logically presuppose’ simply adds another layer of mystery. If, as you say, “implication is an emergent, largely imaginary relation between ideas” then I’m just more baffled! Hard to think of what could be more ‘weasally’ than invoking ’emergent, imaginary relations’ to defease claims…
Regarding mechanism and logic, do you think it’s a coincidence that so much ‘logic’ can be captured in a simple register program? If you think that logic is ‘apriori’ or ‘transcendental,’ could you tell me just what these are, and why any naturalist should take them seriously.
But logic isn’t mysterious, is it, Scott? We understand logic as a set of rules for regulating arguments just as we understand society’s laws as being similarly regulated. I said those rules are “largely imaginary,” because they derive from us and we also tell all sorts of fantastic stories to make sense of prescriptions in nature, including theistic or Platonic stories.
Logic may be mysterious if we’re confining ourselves to a very narrow ontology. But how narrow is your mechanistic ontology? To answer that, we’d have to know what you mean by “mechanism,” but you’ve declined to define your fundamental terms, right? If a mechanism is just a complicated set of causal relations, then logic can be perfectly mechanistic and thus non-mysterious. A rule in logic would be a reified desire to be rational in a particular way, and the desire causes the person to be more rational, for example, by avoiding a particular fallacy. We reify the desire’s content and treat logical relations as things existing everywhere, mistaking the map for the territory.
Are emergent properties mysterious and occult? Well, if a mechanism is just a set of causal relations, I don’t see why a mechanism couldn’t have emergent properties. For example, a computer is a mechanism, but that whole isn’t the sum of its parts. Each of its parts is physically light, while the whole computer has the property of being heavy. Quantitatively, the weights add up to the whole computer’s weight, but the whole mechanism has qualities which the components lack. You’d hurt your toe if you dropped a heavy computer on it, whereas none of the individual parts is so dangerous. So aspects of heaviness emerge from the components of the mechanism.
I’ve heard you speak of a “register program” before, but I’m not sure what you mean by it. I think of logic as being an exapted use of our social instinct. It’s a matter of regulating a domain of activity. So any coincidence here wouldn’t be mysterious; our capacity for logic came along with our capacity to live in large groups by imagining the difference between good and bad. And once we had normative desires, properties emerged from the mechanical operations of those desires.
Again, I agree that the personal self, as such, doesn’t exist, because most people are confused about the sort of entity that could naturally emerge. But as long as we’re open-minded about what counts as a mechanism, I think we can mechanize the folk conception of the self, as it were, without entirely eliminating something that approximates that self. You grant the reality of that approximation, too, right? You call it the illusion.
You ask why a naturalist should take the a priori talk of logic seriously. But surely a mechanist should be more careful about dissing Platonism. Mechanisms are posited by scientists and scientists rely on math. A great many mathematicians and physicists are in fact platonists.
You ask where transcendental logic would be. Isn’t that like asking where any natural law is? As you obviously know, there’s the map and then there’s the territory, but we often reify the former, imagining a second, more ethereal territory, as in Plato’s realm of Forms. Mechanistic scientists are just as prone to doing this.
So take any causal relation. Is the relation just what Hume said it is or is there some necessity involved? Where would the necessity be? Hume said the necessity is occult unless we explain it away in terms of habits of thought. But most physicists and mathematicians are utterly opposed to that trivialization of their work, to put the point in postmodern terms. They think there is necessity in nature, but where is it? The necessity is as invisible as goodness or meaning or purpose. That’s because Kant was more or less right: these are partly but not entirely imaginary properties we add to the world when we try to understand it.
Don’t you find it curious, the difficulty of the question, because you actually haven’t answered it yet.
Mechanisms allow for the ’emergence’ of all kinds of functions – that’s what makes it such a powerful explanatory paradigm. We can talk cars or pistons, organisms or organelles. It’s the form of understanding that allows us to get reliably get behind phenomena and manipulate our environments. BBT says it’s also the form of understanding that let’s us get behind the phenomena we call ‘rules’ and so on. I’m saying that this, the high dimensional mechanical reality that neuroscience is revealing, is what we express when we speak, but that our metacognitive blindness makes it appear otherwise. I’m asking you to tell me why I have to be expressing anything other than this – because this is indeed what you’re claiming. Am I presupposing Platonism? Begging Sellarsian inferentialism? Wittgensteinian contextualism? Well then, why one and not the other? Since none of these have any hope of empirical adjudication, why should I bother planting my flag in any? Why should you? Meanwhile, I have this way of explaining why it seems we have to resort to these that will find some kind of empirical resolution, eventually. But it entails realizing that ‘entail,’ despite metacognitive appearances to the contrary, is in fact mechanical, not normative or intentional more generally. What compels me to affirm that normativity is anything more than mechanical?
I actually don’t care all that much about the metaphysics of causality. I’m just not sure what it’s supposed to accomplish. So long as you agree that causal reasoning is a cornerstone of the natural sciences, and that outside the natural sciences humans have a horrible track record at theoretical cognition we’re on the same page.
Now I think there’s a strawman going on, because I am not claiming that you absolutely must be presupposing normativity or teleology or whatever. I’m saying that I’m suspicious of eliminativism in this case, in the absense of a mechanistic “explanation” of science, explanation, truth, mechanism, and the like. Again, I’ve left it open that the purely mechanistic way of speaking will entirely replace the folk one.
I take it, though, you’re interpreting me as insisting on the transcendental here, because you’d then take this as evidence of the blindness that you explain. I do have the intuition that the personal self is fundamental and irreducible, and you have enlightened me by pointing out that this intuition could be the result of blindness. In this particular case, though, there’s something else going on, namely the incompleteness of your eliminative explanation of the personal.
As for your last paragraph there, we are indeed certainly on that same page. It’s a big page, though. And I think you might have to care about the metaphysics of causality, at some point, to explain what you mean by “mechanism” and thus to prevent the transcendental objection of BBT. Otherwise, you’ll just have to live with the uncertainty. I know you’ll push the inductive argument in favour of elimination, but without the fundamental definitions and the closing of your “explanatory” circle, you’ll have to agree that BBT might be incoherent (you might be pretending to eliminate what your theoretical statements actually rely on).
As for this stubborn question that just doesn’t want to be answered, I think you supply the ingredients of a mechanistic answer that you could live with. What would it mean to presuppose normativity in a mechanistic explanation of the mind? It would amount to providing a limited model which caricatures the phenomenon in question. In science, limited models are just fine. In fact, all models are limited and when we summarize a model we get a ceteris paribus generalization which explicitly leaves out factors that are irrelevant for the theorist’s purposes. BBT leaves out normativity, but you’d go too far with your eliminative conclusion. That would be an error, because you’d have confused your model’s or map’s limitation with some metaphysical absence of a certain emergent pattern.
So far, we’ve got the normative matter of the theorist’s purpose and the semantic issue of truth and error. I’d explain those in terms of desires (see above) and symbols bearing similarly imaginary relations to things. Meaning and semantic correspondence are partly mythical entities or illusions, but I think they ironically bootstrap themselves into reality. BBT helps explain how this happens, since our blindness is instrumental in keeping us functional despite the threat of existential horror owing to the mechanistic, impersonal view of the self. In other words, I think the mythical aspect of normativity and symbolic meaning has a mechanistic role to play; they’re like blueprints which instruct us to build something, namely more personalized inner and outer worlds. So I’m interested in the illusion’s causal power, in this case.
BBT says we invent personal notions to rationalize the fact that we’re blind to our inner mechanisms. I agree we do this, but I add that this blindness is instrumental in actually personalizing both the self and the outer world. You’ve identified a mechanism of the personal self’s emergence. The blindness trains us to rewire the brain and to be more personal in our behaviour, which call for the positing of symbolic meaning, normativity, etc.
No strawman. I’m just not sure what you (or anyone else) means by the charge of intentional presupposition anymore. My point here has been to show just how THIN our metacognitive understanding is when it comes to these things. ‘Transcendental,’ or ‘a priori,’ or ‘implicit norms’ are pretty occult notions. I’ve been arguing that the claim that using normative concepts presupposes nothing more than the application of neurobiological heuristics adapted to social problem-solving is far and away more perspicuous.
I’ve actually written quite a bit about mechanical ways of understanding a great number of concepts and phenomena that are traditionally interpreted in intentional terms, and I’ve given you links and thumbnails before when you’ve pressed me, so I guess I’ve been assuming that we’d moved past that stage. But otherwise, the project is just getting off the ground – post-intentional thought stands upon largely unexplored, and certainly untested ground. The thing is, few in the community will take any constructive project seriously unless I develop critical tools capable of rattling their traditional commitments – and I fear I’ve been using you to run crash tests, Ben! We’re both the dummies here 😉
I agree that neglect is effective: it wouldn’t have been selected otherwise! I’m just not convinced that has or can be effective in the ways you suggest. I think it provides the conditions that make the theoretical interpretation of ‘personal selves’ intuitive, but I don’t think ‘personal selves’ are all that old historically speaking, let alone the best or only interpretation one can apply to the metacognitive neglect structure of the human brain.
Just a quick response. I am, of course, aware of your mechanistic explanations of a number of folk concepts. The new challenge I’m suggesting you take up is to set your sights on science itself (explanation, mechanism, truth), since science is certainly something any naturalist presupposes. Like I said, you may have already addressed this before, but I’d like to see the mechanistic description of science that would replace the folk one.
Not in any systematic way. The low-res picture I do have fits quite nicely with the facts on the ground, I think. Once you start thinking the human in terms of componency, as being embedded within numerous environmental systems, then the sciences, and their success, can be seen as a complex of heuristic prostheses that allow us to become a component of our distal environments (via technique, instrumentation, etc.) in a manner that facilitates the ‘componentialization’ our environments. All the semantic characteristics we are wont to impute to this process need to be interpreted as artifacts of the kinds of neglect metacognition necessarily faces as an embedded component within these larger systems.
Yes, you see, this is the kind of talk I like to hear. It seems compatible, too, with what I want to say about the difference between the natural and the artificial outer environments (re-enchantment of nature by fulfilling certain mythopoeic fantasies). I may have an article soon for you on something related to this (the differences between scientific and nonscientific kinds of enlightenment).
http://darkecologies.com/2013/12/05/r-scott-bakker-the-last-magic-show/
Awesome! Thanks for this, dmfant. I hope everyone checks this out.
Me and my brother used to pride ourselves on being able to follow the symantic gymnastics of Humphrey Appleby in the series “Yes, minister”. I don’t know who’s able to track the gymnastics in these posts? I mean, as far as seem to understand the idea I’m not disagreeing, but it almost seems an academics thing to treat meaning as if it just exists, then bounce that hot potato (their hot potato) all around by themselves. How does it actually hook into stuff people care about, to back up the actual currency exchanges it gets into? Granted I have trouble writing myself for not being able to hunt down what others get into, to hook into that – so it’s better to write up your own hot potato than do nothing but grasp around. But it still begs ‘who are you engaging with?’
Callan,
The delusion of being a particular person who already lived and died is obviously counterproductive, but maybe not all delusions are so. When a powerful brain believes it’s a person, maybe that delusion acts like a Wish List that indirectly brings the person into being by training us to be civilized, rewiring the brain to be moral, motivating us to carry on despite the suspicion that our inner nature is horribly mechanical and impersonal, which in turn gives us more time to develop compelling cultures that reinforce our civility training.
Also, whereas one delusion might differ from everyone else’s, there’s also such a thing as a collective delusion. When one person’s delusion is unique, we say he’s deluded while everyone else is normal. But when everyone has the same delusion, that delusion becomes the norm, especially, as I say, if the delusion isn’t as counterproductive as the belief that you’re a particular person who died many years ago.
if the delusion isn’t as counterproductive as the belief that you’re a particular person who died many years ago.
Commas are important! ‘person who’ or ‘person, who’?
Just guessing, Ben, but you sound like you’ve got that ‘already rendered universe’ attitude. Ie, everything was rendered already, its set in stone. I’ve run into this idea before. Yet at the same time you can’t know the future of a universe until you’ve done the act of rendering it (to run a simulation that is entirely acurate would be to simply render a second universe, but slightly in advance of the first!). The universe is both set in stone and yet a completely unknown unfolding that is happening right at this very moment (well not exactly this moment, because our grasp of this is pretty piss weak. But it’s kinda like this. And now I sound like the hitchhikers guide…or I wish I do, anyway). Somewhat like Shrodingers cat, either perception is entirely valid.
Or are you on a different subject and I’ve rambled? Scott’s had his line of refering to ones childhood and saying never mind that kid, they are dead. Are you just refering to that? I don’t buy into it particularly, except I guess when sometimes the inner rings of a tree, so to speak, are all rotted out.
So, I’m not sure what you mean, Ben? Your ‘When a powerful brain believes it’s a person’ seems an exploding view – the perspective explodes outward, until it’s that dude over there who is having their delusion thing. A perspective that sits outside, like a player of the sims video game. Not from a sim. I have reasons to doubt perspectives that have fled (and so made themselves invisible).
Also are you bordering on giving spoilers to your book? You bad author! 😉 Nah, you good! 🙂
If you’re talking about what I said in the other forum, that does border on being a spoiler, but it’s not much of one.
Regarding my above comment, I meant to respond to your point that the delusion of being Napoleon is bad, so maybe the delusion of being a person is equally bad. I have two responses. First, some delusions may be more counterproductive than others. The delusion of being a person might act as a sort of Wish List, inspiring us to turn ourselves into persons in reality, whereas the delusion of being a dead guy won’t turn you into that particular person. Second, the delusion of being a person would be an innate and collective one (just about everyone in the world suffers from this delusion), so it becomes the norm rather than an illness that needs to be cured.
Ah! I don’t think I’ve used ‘bad’, so much as someone claiming to be collectively supported in an action they might take (ie, executing you for treason). I mean, the game of chess is made up, right – it’s all made up – so shouldn’t it be fine to say you have two queens on your side?
Well, it’s not all made up – it’s grounded in the emperical and no, you don’t get two queens.
This is more powerful than it might appear to be.
I don’t think it’s about whether the delusion is normalised. It’s whether anyone else can deal with it in the same way you can deal with the two queens situation.
That lets the other person decide if your delusion is counter productive, rather than us saying that X is counter productive but Y is productive.
I don’t support the idea of delusions so good that they need not have any method of accountability (it doesn’t matter if they are ‘so good they don’t need to be accountable’)
I agree there might be a fallacious appeal to popularity here. Just because something is normal (common) doesn’t mean it’s normative (good). Still, there is that difference between unique or idiosyncratic and collective delusions.
Why?
If one were to hypothesize field testing, that might be a start.
But otherwise why is there any difference? Birds of a feather?
Why is there a difference between individual and collective delusions? Foucault would have a lot to say about this. It’s like the difference between cults and religions. A religion is a cult that beats competitors to settle into a comfortable position in the culture, gaining wide acceptance. People want myths and delusions, not just scientific truth. Why is that? Because people are pompous, scurrying mammals, as I recently wrote elsewhere. To admit that we rely on myths, in spite of our pretending to be sophisticated, postmodern cynics, nihilists, or empiricists would spoil the fun and ruin the defense mechanism which sustains us by warding off existential horror. So we uphold the distinction between normality and strangeness or mental illness. It’s a cultural defense mechanism
What, it’s so much so a defence and requirement that whatever this mechanism is that determines what cult is adopted, you will allow it to determine your moral compass – if woman beating is back in tomorrow as the cultures approved thang, you’re totally into that? If slavery is back in tomorrow, well heck, it must have beat its competitors, so okey dokie, you just adopt that? I mean, what’s this ‘people want’? Are you speaking for yourself, or again throwing yourself over to whatever this mechanism is that determines what the culture of the year is? So much so you refer to your own position and what people want, interchangeably?
I think it’s too late man, you can’t get back into the matrix (atleast that matrix). You’re ‘what people want’ is, in terms of yourself, merely what was.
Or are you still gunna roll with the determiner mechanism, as if you are as much flowing with the school of fish as the other fish?
For sure, if there’s any remnant of just going with the other fishes, talking with me will most likely, eventually, snuff it out like a stubbed cigar. If so, no doubt the conversation will go cold, like many others I’ve had do.
But to continue that stubbing exercise, sorry, ‘beats the competitors’? What the hell does that matter to you, Ben? Despite zombie fiction being a cult of the moment, you write zombie fiction – how the hell does ‘beats the competitors’ in any way just cut it with you? Or is it like my discussion on money in the SA forum – people recognise it’s nothing, but because others aren’t gunna give up on it, they aren’t gunna give up on money? Same here – you’re gunna say it’s not about you, it’s that others go with these cults, and so you’re just rolling with them?
Callan,
No, I’m not saying that if something is popular it’s good. I think we’re forgetting the context here. My point to RSB was that illusions are real in that they have causal power and they might even ironically bring into external reality what at first is merely subjective (hallucinatory). This is so even with the worst sort of illusion, such as the crazy belief that you’re Napoleon. However, the difference between this sort of belief and the collective belief that we’re people rather than just mechanisms is that the latter belief has a greater chance of inspiring us to fine tune our mechanisms and make us more personal.
So my position on the collective belief about our personhood is a middle one. I say it has its delusory aspect, but I think it might be hasty to explain away the delusion, since the delusion might be part of an interesting mechanism. RSB wants to do away, at least, with the philosophical level of inquiring into that collective delusion, since he thinks that that philosophy is bound to be confused and thus not worthwhile. But to me there’s irony here. The very confusions might be the whole point, mechanistically speaking! The confusions may ward off existential horror and despair, thus allowing our mechanisms to keep on chugging. Philosophy may have its own role to play, as I’ve laid out in my discussions with RSB. I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too, you see. We’re deluded about ourselves, yes, but we’re not all equally deluded, and the delusions may be instrumental in objectively making us more personal. That is, the delusions may be self-undermining.
but we’re not all equally deluded, and the delusions may be instrumental in objectively making us more personal.
Without stating a metric by which this is determined, and with your previous reference to cults that beat the competition, I’m still left thinking that is your metric (as you supply no other metric). And that metric is indeed (from the personal perspective) ‘if something is popular, it’s good’.
I see faith and hope in what you’re saying.
Is that all?
since the delusion might be part of an interesting mechanism.
Sounds like Scott’s ‘Morality: Knowledge that only ignorance makes possible.’
RSB wants to do away, at least, with the philosophical level of inquiring into that collective delusion, since he thinks that that philosophy is bound to be confused and thus not worthwhile.
It’s curious, given his rants against transhumanism – when essentially that confusion IS us. And to get rid of it wholesale is exactly the same deal the transhumanists want.
Yeah, I see some connection between BBT and both Buddhism and transhumanism.
But do you really think I advocate the fallacious appeal to popularity? A great many of my articles celebrate originality at the expense of fitting in. I condemn certain social conventions as delusions and cliches and I say we should renounce them. When it comes to happiness as an ideal of mental health, I explicitly distinguish between normality and normativity, and I say that just because most people want to be happy doesn’t mean they ought to want that. I’m not so interested in popularity.
Maybe you don’t, Ben. But in that case I still don’t know what you mean by ‘Still, there is that difference between unique or idiosyncratic and collective delusions.’
Thing is, I think when you say ‘It’s like the difference between cults and religions. A religion is a cult that beats competitors to settle into a comfortable position in the culture, gaining wide acceptance.’ you think it’s an observation. Me, I see it as an advocation. Your seeing it in that particular way is part of the mechanism of those cults being installed into a grander office.
It’s like if someone describes the voting process for miss universe. Just describing it as ‘how it is’ is not an observation, it’s an advocation. Because clearly it’s not part of the physics of the universe. It’s something someone could do, but it doesn’t have to be (the same as chess). But to describe ‘how it is’ when it doesn’t have to be is to advocate for it, not to observe it.
Otherwise I still don’t know what you meant when you said ‘Still, there is that difference between unique or idiosyncratic and collective delusions.’
I agree we should be suspicious when someone says they’re only neutrally describing something, since there are often presupposed evaluations in the description. Maybe it’s impossible to be absolutely neutral.
In any case, if anything, I defend the idiosyncratic delusion, not the collective one. This is why I say we should be more creative. I aesthetically admire originality. Normality becomes a cliche and then artists have to come along and inspire a new way of thinking or living, and then that eventually becomes the new cliche.
Remember, though, my point about delusions was just that they have causal power, that they’re not entirely unreal. To understand this, you need something like the distinction between content and vehicle. The content is reified whereas there’s nothing really at the other end of it (at least, not until the delusion acts as a sort of Wish List, as I’ve explained), but the vehicle (the mental representation that exists as a cluster of neurons or marks on a page) is mechanistically real.
Ben, the question I raise is ‘Who’s wishlist?’
Good question! If the collective delusion of our personhood were universal and thus innate, its prescriptive force would have to derive from the undead god (mindless nature), in which case by being inspired by that delusion to fulfill it by artificial means (e.g. by personalizing our outer environment and thus training us to be more civilized), we’d be immersed in some global natural process. We could tell a just-so story to explain this in evolutionary terms, but there might be more going on.
I thought my post could be interpreted in a number of ways rather than the one I was trying to deliver.
Roll with me the idea of a number of towers, stalking the landscape. In this view, we have not gone so far as to treat it all as hapstance chemical reactions. Nay, these towers, with their own continued existance as the (or atleast as a) pinion of the notion of ‘information’, process information.
Which tower’s wishlist?
I don’t think it’s coming from nowhere. Indulging in the endless hapstance chemcal reactions level might evoke the wishlist coming from nowhere. But if we cease just trying to look hardcore and actually deal in the towers….who’s wishlist?
I’m not sure what you mean by the towers. Are you making the design argument for God?
The point about the Wish List is just that our mental states could set up feedback loops. We think of our desires as ideals and they guide (inspire, motivate) our behaviour. For example, we build things to look like how we imagine they should look. And if we have an ideal of personhood, which begins as a delusion that doesn’t correspond to anything since our behaviour is mostly mechanistic, that ideal could still inspire us to civilize and personalize ourselves. Delusions have causal power, and ironically (and indirectly) they can make themselves into approximations of reality rather than pure delusions. So after centuries of training to be civilized people rather than just animals, the delusions become the ceteris paribus approximations of folk psychology.
Whose ideals are they in the beginning? Well, they weren’t anyone’s then, since there were no people around. They were just part of some adapted mechanism or maybe they were spandrels that became exapted as we accidentally found a use for those parts of our mind.
Were having terminology problems here where one minute where talking about no people, then the other were talking about people again. It’s leaving a blindspot in the discussion.
The towers are us.
I’m taking it at a level that you don’t just treat everything as chemical hapstance. Instead ‘these towers, with their own continued existance as the (or atleast as a) pinion of the notion of ‘information’, process information.’
I guess you don’t have to take it at a level above chemical hapstance – but then having a conversation seems quite a silly thing to do, at that point. Why converse if it’s all by chance chemical reactions? Why even have the notion of conversing if one is so convinced to only take it all as just chemical reactions?
I’m not making a design argument for god. I’m asking whether you’ll atleast think and discuss based on the towers level of engagement? It’d be silly to tell someone that ‘it’s all chemicals, man!’ when…what is the point of telling anyone that if it’s all just chemicals, man?
Unless you’re going to give up and just talk chemical reactions, then no, towers were around and these produced such wishlists (even if it’s an enaction of something from the distant past repeating in the tower).
And so it really becomes a question of which towers wishlist?
Saying ‘there were no people around’ just leaves a blindspot in the conversation. We seem to rock between ‘it’s all chemical reactions’ and ‘people’ with no middle ground included in our disucusion?
Ah, sorry, I forgot about this thread. You seem to be going through the disagreement RSB and I have had. Yes, there’s this presupposition problem: how to talk in a consistent way if you subscribe to the mechanistic ontology, when talking then becomes absurd or at least something that’s much less understood. Chemicals and mechanisms are interchangeable in this context. So naturalists assume that fundamental reality is impersonal (filled with chemicals or mechanisms or whatever). The question is whether personhood emerges as a real part of the world or is it just illusory. In one of my recent articles on this, I argue that the distinction between reality and illusion doesn’t make much of a difference in this case (link below). Realists about consciousness, meaning, and normativity can live with calling these things illusions, because illusions are natural too and they can make themselves real via their causal power. That’s the point about the wish list and about animals training to be people in an artificial environment, and so on.
I’m still not clear on the point you’re making with the towers, but I think you’re talking about a middle ground between absolute impersonality and personhood. You’re asking whether there’s a missing link here between chemicals or mechanisms and minds. Of course there are lots of missing links, such as Dennett’s Tower of learning techniques (Darwinian, Popperian, Gregorian creatures, etc). Another missing link for me is the childlike mythopoeic cognition in which all objects are experienced as mixed up with subjective qualities. In any case, we were once just mammals and primates rather than the more anomalous offshoot that we currently are. So yes, there’s a middle ground here. The transformations are natural rather than miraculous, so they’re bound to happen in a bumbling, stumbling way, and that takes time and intermediation.
If you’re asking at which stage the wish list, or the inspiration to become people, shows up, I’m not sure. This is an empirical question, but I’m especially interested in the prehistoric and early Neolithic periods when you seem to get this promissory note of mythopoeic thought. This looks to me like the seed of personhood, but it’s complicated since two sorts of people emerge from that womblike mind: you get the decadent ego after the fragmenting of the enchanted worldview, thanks to civilizational progress, and you get the alienated, objective outsider, or proto-modernists and actual modernists. The former winds up with an exoteric, more delusory viewpoint, while the latter has the esoteric one. And the former tends to recapture the mythopoeic, as in the case of the infantilized postmodern consumer.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/11/personalizing-ourselves-science.html