The Metacritique of Reason
by rsbakker
Whether the treatment of such knowledge as lies within the province of reason does or does not follow the secure path of a science, is easily to be determined from the outcome. For if, after elaborate preparations, frequently renewed, it is brought to a stop immediately it nears its goal; if often it is compelled to retrace its steps and strike into some new line of approach; or again, if the various participants are unable to agree in any common plan of procedure, then we may rest assured that it is very far from having entered upon the secure path of a science, and is indeed a merely random groping. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 17.
The moral of the story, of course, is that this description of Dogmatism’s failure very quickly became an apt description of Critical Philosophy as well. As soon as others saw all the material inferential wiggle room in the interpretation of condition and conditioned, it was game over. Everything that damned Dogmatism in Kant’s eyes now characterizes his own philosophical inheritance.
Here’s a question you don’t come across everyday: Why did we need Kant? Why did philosophy have to discover the transcendental? Why did the constitutive activity of cognition elude every philosopher before the 18th Century? The fact we had to discover it means that it was somehow ‘always there,’ implicit in our experience and behaviour, but we just couldn’t see it. Not only could we not see it, we didn’t even realize it was missing, we had no inkling we needed to understand it to understand ourselves and how we make sense of the world. Another way to ask the question of the inscrutability of the ‘transcendental,’ then, is to ask why the passivity of cognition is our default assumption. Why do we assume that ‘what we see is all there is’ when we reflect on experience?
Why are we all ‘naive Dogmatists’ by default?
It’s important to note that no one but no one disputes that it had to be discovered. This is important because it means that no one disputes that our philosophical forebears once uniformly neglected the transcendental, that it remained for them an unknown unknown. In other words, both the Intentionalist and the Eliminativist agree on the centrality of neglect in at least this one regard. The transcendental (whatever it amounts to) is not something that metacognition can readily intuit—so much so that humans engaged in thousands of years of ‘philosophical reflection’ without the least notion that it even existed. The primary difference is that the Intentionalist thinks they can overcome neglect via intuition and intellection, that theoretical metacognition (philosophical reflection), once alerted to the existence of the transcendental, suddenly somehow possesses the resources to accurately describe its structure and function. The Eliminativist, on the other hand, asks, ‘What resources?’ Lay them out! Convince me! And more corrosively still, ‘How do you know you’re not still blinkered by neglect?’ Show me the precautions!
The Eliminativist, in other words, pulls a Kant on Kant and demands what amounts to a metacritique of reason.
The fact is, short of this accounting of metacognitive resources and precautions, the Intentionalist has no way of knowing whether or not they’re simply a ‘Stage-Two Dogmatist,’ whether their ‘clarity,’ like the specious clarity of the Dogmatist, isn’t simply the product of neglect—a kind of metacognitive illusion in effect. For the Eliminativist, the transcendental (whatever its guise) is a metacognitive artifact. For them, the obvious problems the Intentionalist faces—the supernaturalism of their posits, the underdetermination of their theories, the lack of decisive practical applications—are all symptomatic of inquiry gone wrong. Moreover, they find it difficult to understand why the Intentionalist would persist in the face of such problems given only a misplaced faith in their metacognitive intuitions—especially when the sciences of the brain are in the process of discovering the actual constitutive activity responsible! You want to know what’s really going on ‘implicitly,’ ask a cognitive neuroscientist. We’re just toying with our heuristics out of school otherwise.
We know that conscious cognition involves selective information uptake for broadcasting throughout the brain. We also know that no information regarding the astronomically complex activities constitutive of conscious cognition as such can be so selected and broadcast. So it should come as no surprise whatsoever that the constitutive activity responsible for experience and cognition eludes experience and cognition—that the ‘transcendental,’ so-called, had to be discovered. More importantly, it should come as no surprise that this constitutive activity, once discovered, would be systematically misinterpreted. Why? The philosopher ‘reflects’ on experience and cognition, attempts to ‘recollect’ them in subsequent moments of experience and cognition, in effect, and realizes (as Hume did regarding causality, say) that the information available cannot account for the sum of experience and cognition: the philosopher comes to believe (beginning most famously with Kant) that experience does not entirely beget experience, that the constitutive constraints on experience somehow lie orthogonal to experience. Since no information regarding the actual neural activity responsible is available, and since, moreover, no information regarding this lack is available, the philosopher presumes these orthogonal constraints must conform to their metacognitive intuitions. Since the resulting constraints are incompatible with causal cognition, they seem supernatural: transcendental, virtual, quasi-transcendental, aspectual, what have you. The ‘implicit’ becomes the repository of otherworldly constraining or constitutive activities.
Philosophy had to discover the transcendental because of metacognitive neglect—on this fact, both the Intentionalist and the Eliminativist agree. The Eliminativist simply takes the further step of holding neglect responsible for the ontologically problematic, theoretically underdetermined, and practically irrelevant character of Intentionalism. Far from what Kant supposed, Critical Philosophy—in all its incarnations, historical and contemporary–simply repeats, rather than solves, these sins of Dogmatism. The reason for this, the Eliminativist says, is that it overcomes one metacognitive illusion only to run afoul a cluster of others.
This is the sense in which Blind Brain Theory can be seen as completing as much as overthrowing the Kantian project. Though Kant took cognitive dogmatism, the assumption of cognitive simplicity and passivity, as his target, he nevertheless ran afoul metacognitive dogmatism, the assumption of metacognitive simplicity and passivity. He thought—as his intellectual heirs still think—that philosophical reflection possessed the capacity to apprehend the superordinate activity of cognition, that it could accurately theorize reason and understanding. We now possess ample empirical grounds to think this is simply not the case. There’s the mounting evidence comprising what Princeton psychologist Emily Pronin has termed the ‘Introspection Illusion,’ direct evidence of metacognitive incompetence, but the fact is, every nonconscious function experimentally isolated by cognitive science illuminates another constraining/constitutive cognitive activity utterly invisible to philosophical reflection, another ignorance that the Intentionalist believes has no bearing on their attempts to understand understanding.
One can visually schematize our metacognitive straits in the following way:
This diagram simply presumes what natural science presumes, that you are a complex organism biomechanically synchronized with your environments. Light hits your retina, sound hits your eardrum, neural networks communicate and behaviours are produced. Imagine your problem-solving power set on a swivel and swung 360 degrees across the field of all possible problems, which is to say problems involving lateral, or nonfunctionally entangled environmental systems, as well as problems involving medial, or functionally entangled enabling systems, such as those comprising your brain. This diagram, then, visualizes the loss and gain in ‘cognitive dimensionality’—the quantity and modalities of information available for problem solving—as one swings from the third-person lateral to the first-person medial. Dimensionality peaks with external cognition because of the power and ancient evolutionary pedigree of the systems involved. The dimensionality plunges for metacognition, on the other hand, because of medial neglect, the way structural complicity, astronomical complexity, and evolutionary youth effectively renders the brain unwittingly blind to itself.
This is why the blue line tracking our assumptive or ‘perceived’ medial capacity in the figure peaks where our actual medial capacity bottoms out: with the loss in dimensionality comes the loss in the ability to assess reliability. Crudely put, the greater the cognitive dimensionality, the greater the problem-solving capacity, the greater the error-signalling capacity. And conversely, the less the cognitive dimensionality, the less the problem-solving capacity, the less the error-signalling capacity. The absence of error-signalling means that cognitive consumption of ineffective information will be routine, impossible to distinguish from the consumption of effective information. This raises the spectre of ‘psychological anosognosia’ as distinct from the clinical, the notion that the very cognitive plasticity that allowed humans to develop ACH thinking has led to patterns of consumption (such as those underwriting ‘philosophical reflection’) that systematically run afoul medial neglect. Even though low dimensionality speaks to cognitive specialization, and thus to the likely ineffectiveness of cognitive repurposing, the lack of error-signalling means the information will be routinely consumed no matter what. Given this, one should expect ACH thinking–reason–to be plagued with the very kinds of problems that plague theoretical discourse outside the sciences now, the perpetual coming up short, the continual attempt to retrace steps taken, the interminable lack of any decisive consensus…
Or what Kant calls ‘random groping.’
The most immediate, radical consequence of this 360 degree view is that the opposition between the first-person and third-person disappears. Since all the apparently supernatural characteristics rendering the first-person naturalistically inscrutable can now be understood as artifacts of neglect—illusions of problem-solving sufficiency—all the ‘hard problems’ posed by intentional phenomena simply evaporate. The metacritique of reason, far from pointing a way to any ‘science of the transcendental,’ shows how the transcendental is itself a dogmatic illusion, how cryptic things like the ‘apriori’ are obvious expressions of medial neglect, sources of constraint ‘from nowhere’ that baldly demonstrate our metacognitive incapacity to recognize our metacognitive incapacity. For all the prodigious problem-solving power of logic and mathematics, a quick glance at the philosophy of either is enough to assure you that no one knows what they are. Blind Brain Theory explains this remarkable contrast of insight and ignorance, how we could possess tools so powerful without any decisive understanding of the tools themselves.
The metacritique of reason, then, leads to what might be called ‘pronaturalism,’ a naturalism that can be called ‘progressive’ insofar as it continues to eschew the systematic misapplication of intentional cognition to domains that it cannot hope to solve—that continues the process of exorcising ghosts from the machinery of nature. The philosophical canon swallowed Kant so effortlessly that people often forget he was attempting to put an end to philosophy, to found a science worthy of the name, one which grounded both the mechanical and the ghostly. By rendering the ghostly the formal condition of any cognition of the mechanical, however, he situated his discourse squarely in the perpetually underdetermined domain of philosophy. His failure was inevitable.
The metacritique of reason makes the very same attempt, only this time anchored in the only real credible source of theoretical cognition we possess: the sciences. It allows us to peer through the edifying fog of our intentional traditions and to see ourselves, at long last, as wholly continuous with crazy shit like this…
Three Pound Brain 
Just a quick passing remark: I think your historical claims are dubious here. Something like the ‘spontaneity’ of cognition can plausibly be found as far back as Sextus Empiricus and the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus, which enumerate all the ways in which our manner of taking up the world falsifies and distorts it as it is ‘by nature’ (or, in Kantian terms, ‘in itself’). The same argument was taken up, verbatim, by Montaigne in the Apology. It is likely, in fact, that *this* — i.e., the ancient skeptical tradition — was where Kant got the idea in the first place.
You skeptics, so like the Soviets, always claiming that you invented everything! 😉
I’ll bite the bullet on that qualification to a certain extent. I think the tropes form an excellent everyday description of the role neglect plays cognition, but I think it plain that the constraints considered are disabling, not enabling, which is the specific target here–the difference between a glass darkly and a video screen. As for the provenance, who knows? I’m partial to Kant’s famous letter to Marcus Herz 02/21/1772 and the famous Hume reference in the Prolegomena. So much of Kant reads as a direct response to Hume for me.
Of course I don’t mean to claim that the skeptics ever wanted to use ‘spontaneity’ to vindicate cognition, i.e., they did not make transcendental arguments, for they would think such arguments are second-order dogmatic (that is, Sextus would level basically the same critique against Kant that the original metacritics did, e.g., Maimon, Herder, Schulze — basically the same argument you seem to be refitting for the 21st century).
As for Kant’s indebtedness to Pyrrhonism, it really is irrefutable, given his Logic lectures. Indeed, I think that — read in conjunction with his remarks on Pyrrhonism in the Logic lectures — there’s a strong case to be made that Kant viewed Humean skepticism as just a variant of Pyrrhonian equipollence skepticism. Consider, in CPR, the section “The discipline of pure reason with regard to its polemical use,” specifically the sub-section (and the immediately preceding paragraph) “On the impossibility of a skeptical satisfaction of pure reason that is divided against itself.” In the subsection, he addresses Hume at length — yet the paragraph that introduces the subsection makes it abundantly clear (again, esp. when read in conjunction with the Logic lectures) that the ‘skepticism’ Kant has in mind is fundamentally Pyrrhonian.
I’ll take your word for it. It certainly resonates. I once attended a year long course on the origins of CPR back in the 90’s, read a tremendous amounts of background material (much of it over my head at the time), most of it involving Kant as a philosopher of science, and I don’t think anyone once mentioned Pyrrhonism! The primary thesis was that it was the Newtonian/Leibnizian debate on the nature of space and time that lead Kant to the aesthetic, which thence led him to the categories properly. My guess is that it all fed into the same funnel.
I’m not surprised. Only in the past five or ten years has Kant’s indebtedness to Pyrrhonism been acknowledged in the secondary literature — and even now, I don’t think anyone’s done the topic justice. (As you know, I think Sextus’s Outlines is the original Critique of Pure Reason!) Skepticism is such a dirty, disreputable business: why would we want to sully Kant with it — esp. when we can make him into a philosopher of science?
That said, the science stuff is obviously crucial. For Kant, philosophy (prior to Critique) ends in Pyrrhonism. But ‘everyday life’ (broadly construed as including mathematics and the natural sciences) goes on, for the most part, without a hitch. Why is this? How can we explain the success of science, in particular, in light of the abject failure of metaphysics? For Kant, the answer was the same as Descartes’s: We make skepticism into a virtue!
Kant, never once doubting the truth of science, attempted to reconfigure our philosophical understanding of its success. In doing so, of course, he turns the whole question upside down. That he was concerned to settle the Newtonian/Leibnizian debate is obvious, and that he thought there was a solution to it is also obvious. But that he arrived at the idea of the Copernican Revolution from the materials available in that debate strikes me as implausible. So while it seems right to say that the N/L debate led Kant to seek the solution he does in the Aesthetic, it doesn’t seem right to say that he was led to his solution because of that debate.
I Kant compute.
Kant can’t cant
Yeah.
sigmund fraud.
There’s a reason why philosophy and religion are right next to each other in the Library of Congress classification scheme.
Scott, you really should use a legend on that diagram instead of lumping all your labels along the axes like that. An analog sliding scale of problem ecologies going from “lateral environmental” to “actual capacity ‘internal'” to “‘external'” doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.
I’m not sure a sliding scale of subjective, perceived cognitive capacity successfully communicates your idea either. Even if what’s actually going on is far more nuanced and complex, uncertainty, like unconsciousness, seems closer to a binary state when experienced. Either I’m doubtful or I’m some form of not (blindly taking sufficiency for granted, actively assuming sufficiency, or actively assuming insufficiency). What does it even mean to be more or less doubtful?
If you want to challenge my intuitions, you have to address them first. A gradual rise and fall of “perceived capacity” does not match my intuitions, and thus I can’t even begin to engage with your challenge.
Actually, the decline on the right-most side of the chart does (kind of) make sense to me, since when you really start to think metacognitively about objects, you can sometimes become aware of your limitations (and hence end up with Plato’s Cave).
Scott, it *would* be nice if you could place some specific example of metacognition on that graph.
Philosophical reflection is the example I had in mind throughout, but it’s not meant as a graph, just as a way of visualizing the relations between the items listed – it’s not perfect but it certainly feels better than anything I’ve come up with so far!
I was actually expecting/hoping to receive a criticism like this. But how to do it otherwise? I’m open to suggestions!
It’s horribly schematic, but that’s a given. The point is all our problem-solving, insofar as it’s problem solving, obviously does lie on a continuum of capacity/efficacy, (and degrees of doubt are actually the norm in many contexts, not the exception). Some problems we can solve, kinda solve, and others confound us altogether, regardless of ‘internal/external.’ Ideally, the cognitive dimensionality line should be stepped according to all our varieties of specialized ways of trouble-shooting the medial, but the point here is to show how our intuitive sense of sufficiency bloats as the sufficiency of the information available flat lines. Where the schematism cuts most sharply against the complexity of what’s going on, I think, has to do with the degree to which we are prone to differentially doubt introspective access when it comes to certain metacognitive tasks in certain problem-solving contexts, say when we doubt memories and the like. The diagram has no way of depicting the power of these specialized systems when applied in their adaptive problem-ecologies.
I don’t know what it is with your diagrams, but everytime you’ve drawn one up it’s almost without fail been a lot harder for me to understand than your writing. Something about this being an abstraction too far, perhaps. I don’t have a solution for this. Maybe give a description of what you intend to show visually to someone who understands it clearly and see what happens when they draw it?
Well, I’m still not precisely clear what it is that’s hanging you up in this instance. I was thinking I could revamp it, replace the continuous line with something discontinuous. But it seems to me the problem you have turns on the inclusion of the medial axis on the lateral, that I’m running afoul some kind of discontinuity intuition by doing this…
You say “For the Eliminativist, the transcendental (whatever its guise) is a metacognitive artifact. For them, the obvious problems the Intentionalist faces—the supernaturalism of their posits, the underdetermination of their theories, the lack of decisive practical applications—are all symptomatic of inquiry gone wrong. Moreover, they find it difficult to understand why the Intentionalist would persist in the face of such problems given only a misplaced faith in their metacognitive intuitions…” The Bible says “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…” (Hebrews 11:1). You might come to understand more about Massimo Pigliucci, Uriah Kriegel and perhaps even Immanuel Kant by asking what roles their philosophical/religious beliefs play in their lives than by engaging the substance of their beliefs directly. Of course, some philosophers are, as Ben Cain does not quite say about Eckhart Tolle, charlatans. And some are more concerned to defend their place in the cultural hierarchy than in the pursuit of knowledge, however defined. But I think that for most intentionalists, both philosophical and commonplace, that belief fills the same kind of need that religious faith fills for some other people. What will happen when science opens the last closet in which God might have been hiding, and finds nothing? As the history of bloodthirsty quackery from Nazism to Communism to Scientology shows, people who need spirituality will go to pretty ugly lengths to find it.
Meh, unnecessary. Contemporary rationalism which hugely defends intentionalism runs the course of atheism and nihilism. They are almost running to well of intentional qua normative more vigorously than anyone else because they see it as a strategy which is capable of sidestepping the spiritual platitudes of other versions of sufficiency such as phenomenological Life. You don’t need to be religious to be intentionalist.
Perhaps my definition of religion is overly broad. I think that the essence of the religious sensibility is the urge to invent imaginary, unobservable-in-principle things to ‘explain’ real, observable-in-principle things that one does not understand or can’t explain in terms of other real, observable-in-principle things. That urge unites people whom we don’t traditionally think of as religious figures, for example Plato, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, with people who plainly were, or aspired to be religious figures, for example St. Paul, Heinrich Himmler and L. Ron Hubbard. God is only one example of an imaginary explanans, and religions as I understand them need not include gods or a God.
A previous post discussed the belief that:
“… introspection turns out to be as trustworthy as our sense of smell, that is, as reliable and as potent as a normal adult human’s olfactory system. Then Introspective minimalism would be vindicated. Normally, when we have an olfactory experience as of raspberries, it is more likely that there are raspberries in our immediate environment (than if we do not have such an experience). Conversely, when there are raspberries in our immediate environment, it is more likely that we would have an olfactory experience as of raspberries (than if there are none). So the ‘equireliability’ of olfaction and introspection would support introspective minimalism. Such equireliability is highly plausible.”
What makes olfaction reliable is the mechanical relationship by which chemicals from the raspberries are conveyed through the air to receptors in your nose and the receptors in your nose send raspberry signals to your brain for olfactory and other processing. To claim that introspection is as reliable as olfaction is to claim that the machinery that conveys information about the neurological activity of your brain to your mind’s introspection system is as reliable as the machinery that conveys information about the chemical content of the nearby atmosphere to your brain’s olfactory system. Of course no such machinery exists, so attempts to use it as an explanation are religious as I have used the term above. I believe that in the absence of a mechanism whereby introspection can gain information about the neurological activity of the brain all claims of knowledge about the mind gained via introspection are best thought of as religious claims.
Possibly. Rationalization is a given, of course, once commitments become public. Just what gets rationalized I tend to think is largely random, primarily governed by possessing certain dispositions in certain contexts, what people read or listen to or what have you at various junctures in their life. I think this is why I tend to be a know-it-all, contrarian prick, for instance! This was what was required to survive at my dinner table growing up.
Reactance, anyone?
At the moment, I would be more interesting in what science says about the transcendental, rather than what it says about our perceptions of it.
But what if this amounts to the same thing?
As far as I can tell you have been saying science tells us we know nothing, now is that all science knows, because it feel like you have been saying science actually can tell something besides what Socrates said all those years back.
I’m not sure I understand the Q, Absurdist…
I probably don’t understand what you are saying. I have only a introductory experience of philosophy in college, though I have read some works by Kant. That aside what I understand, or think I understand is that you are saying that science claims we are blind to what we are blind to. What I was asking is what does science teach us, what does it show us that we don’t know. Or is it saying as much as Socrates said all those years ago: I know that I know nothing.
This is just the tip of the iceberg!
🙂 ok
Those are the things I am interested, what does science predict. I don’t have the time to search for these answers. Read your blog, amongst other reasons, is what I do to figure out what it is that science is saying. I have to admit lately, you have been going way over my head; which I find strange given someone who so actively promotes genre. I find poetic essays more accessible and no less valid than philosophy, it’s why I am a poet….anyways, I mean no disrespect, I guess though, all I am doing is squeaking the wheel….
I am also interested I. Figuring out how they can be same.
Scott, I agree that BBT may well out-Kant Kant. Kant’s idea of knowledge was science-centered, as is clear even from the quotation you provide. Ideal cognition is scientific, according to Kant. But Kant engaged in philosophical speculation to end philosophy. That’s the mark of a more profound lack of self-knowledge. Kant thought we’re all machines, whereas we’re actually animals; he thought physics was more important than biology. In any case, science isn’t the only thing we do with our minds. For example, there’s art and worship. Philosophy stands between science and those less rational activities.
You ask how philosophical reflection could possibly possess “the resources to accurately describe its structure and function.” Couldn’t the same question be asked of the physicist’s attempt to describe the megaverse or subatomic interactions or anything else that lies way beyond what we were naturally selected to achieve? Those scientific overextensions are justified on holistic grounds: the megaverse theory coheres with more empirical theories. So you start with models of immediately familiar terrain, but you follow the logic and so those models take you to very distant places indeed. The same can be said about the folk model of the mind. The intuitions are trustworthy in our dealings with each other, so when we extend them to speculate on our inner nature, we’re loath to give up on them, for holistic, Quinean reasons.
You say our intuitions are hopelessly outmatched when it comes to modeling the mind, since that’s not what they were designed to do. Well, we weren’t designed for modern science. Reason evolved for the social purpose of deceiving each other in Machiavellian competitions. Modern science is like altruism: they’re peacock feathers allowing us to boast that we’re so fit that we can survive with these unnecessary burdens that threaten our genes. For example, science threatens to wipe us all out with WMDs. But it turns out that traits that are woeful burdens in evolutionary terms can have accidental advantages. Science does indeed give us a view of the big picture, but that happens in spite of natural selection. What evolution produces are our penchants for personification and theistic dogma, and the early scientists had to overcome that part of our inherited machinery to create an anomalous institution.
Why can’t something similar be said about folk psychology? Granted, we can’t intuit the nature of the brain, as such, but you haven’t shown there’s only that one correct way to speak about the mind. Different models can have different advantages.
You say intentionalism is “ontologically problematic, theoretically underdetermined, and practically irrelevant.” How are symbols or values any more ontologically problematic than quantum entanglement or the megaverse which actualizes all physical possibilities? Again, the current state of naturalism defangs this charge of supernaturalism. And how is folk psychology more underdetermined than string theory? Scientists aren’t robots that base all their beliefs on the available evidence. We’re animals and we overreach. Kant himself said this when he spoke of the Ideas of Pure Reason (God, freewill, etc) that “regulate” cognition (or however he put it; I haven’t read Kant in years).
Is our overreaching always useless? If so, we’d never have had modern science. Nor would we have had behavioural modernity and civilization (as I explain in the new article on my blog). Folk psychology isn’t just a model for tracking the facts; it’s also an ideal that inspires us to create the self in question, a cultural niche that trains us to be personal (rational, creative, social agents). That’s why intentionalism isn’t practically irrelevant. It may be irrelevant to science, but so what? Is it irrelevant to cognition and knowledge in general? Only if you define “cognition” in terms of the correspondence theory of truth, which theory BBT undermines. If cognition is about efficacy and power, folk psychology is cognitive because its speculations and myths had the power to civilize us in the first place, as a matter of ancient history.
One other curiosity: what is “ineffective information”? Are you talking part of a natural mechanism that has no impact on anything else, like Wittgenstein’s beetle in a box? Where in nature is there anything like that?
I’m not sure how the example you give of multiverse speculation in cosmology doesn’t simply illustrate my point, Ben.
“Why can’t something similar be said about folk psychology? Granted, we can’t intuit the nature of the brain, as such, but you haven’t shown there’s only that one correct way to speak about the mind. Different models can have different advantages.”
This is exactly my point. ‘Person/mind/soul-talk’ does possess specialized problem-solving power, but as it happens, the nature of the person/mind/soul is not among the problems it can solve.
“And how is folk psychology more underdetermined than string theory? Scientists aren’t robots that base all their beliefs on the available evidence. We’re animals and we overreach. Kant himself said this when he spoke of the Ideas of Pure Reason (God, freewill, etc) that “regulate” cognition (or however he put it; I haven’t read Kant in years).”
Intentionalist theories OF folk-psychology (unlike my own), unlike string theory, do not even admit disconfirmation or confirmation. This seems to be a pretty substantial liability. I agree that the heuristic machinery comprising social cognition has had a tremendous role to play in the development of culture. In fact, I can do you one better and tell you exactly how and why our progress, no matter how haphazard, constitutes a kind of ‘progress,’ how it is, given our neurobiology, we’ve been able to cobble a civilization together.
Regarding your more general point, which I’ve started to call your ‘Broken Clock Argument,’ I entirely agree that useful heuristic exaptations arise out of the noise. But this is a different topic from the one I consider here.
‘Ineffective information’ pertains to information that does not contribute to the systematic engagment of our natural environments.
Human beings observe the world using their physical senses, then form hypotheses about the world based on analysis of that sensory data, then test those hypotheses by motor activity and by gathering additional sensory data. Science is a more organized version of what all human beings do in the ordinary living of their lives. To some extent human beings were designed to do science. The Hubble space telescope is just a big eye that we can move to vantage points not accessible with our puny little bodies.
On the other hand, I think that when thoughts come into our conscious minds from other parts of our brains but seem to come from nowhere we wonder where those thoughts come from, so we invent the soul. We wonder where souls come from so we invent God. In other words the theological, personal God religions on which you heap so much scorn were invented as a result of applying the personhood/anthropomorphization heuristic to the problem of the nature of the mind, a problem to which it is not suited, a problem that Scott might say is outside its problem ecology. When you ask folk psychology questions to which it is not suited it gives you answers like Christianity and Islam.
Scott: “Why did philosophy have to discover the transcendental?”
Kant had come to a point where he had no way to explain – what you term, the Recursive System. So he set philosophy down the path of a blind goose chase of circular instrumental reasoning chasing its own tail into Alice’s wonderland.
The answer he developed was the ‘transcendental subject’:
Consciousness … because for Kant consciousness (RS) had to be immanent to a hypothetical construct – the transcendental subject; thereby he reintroduced an element of identity that is transcendent (that is, external) to the field itself, and reserved all power of synthesis (that is, identity-formation) in the field to the activity of the always already unified and transcendent subject.
You’ve got it – though regarding synthesis I would have referenced the role neglect likely played in convincing him it had be some kind of (transcendental) accomplishment.
Eerie, how powerful it is, given the parsimony.
haha… yea! strange ways we breed among our thoughts…
That reminds me just finished an essay on Luciano Floridi’s essay on the Self as multiagent… and, of course, with all the superb conceptual claptrack he still falls short of your conceptions of ‘medial neglect’ and the BBT theory. It’s like information theory thinks it has enough information to explain things without realizing its information is already lacking, minimal and doubtlessly cannot breach the gap to access the very thing that underpins its own systems: the brain itself and its processes. Not once does he bring up the neurosciences, etc. It’s as if even here where information should be king it fails to even notice the ball has moved….
Well the essay is still worth a gander…
It’s a great take (here, for those curious). Floridi is still trapped in a couple of big ways, I think. The most obvious ways lies in his semantic account of information, the need for information to be genuinely ‘about’ something to count as ‘informative.’ Thus the strange need for something to always be selfing in individuals: it’s not enough to simply be a brain possessing different socio-cognitive systems cued by various information environments, the brain always needs information somehow intrinsically about itself as a ‘self’ (corresponding to our metacognitive intuition of self) which can serve as the unifying, organizational substrate of behaviour – to be the ‘doer’ of those things we think selfs do. On BBT, of course, the ‘self’ of philosophical reflection is simply a theoretical interpretation of a cluster of metacognitive illusions, something that only ‘exists’ when you look at it – kind of post hoc judgment we make regarding ourselves from time to time on the basis metacognitive hints and neglect. This is why they tend to be so horribly convenient (why we can be the self we need to be in so many different circumstances) – namely because it consists in nothing more than packaging the same dispositional swamp for different kinds of downstream social consumption.
Floridi’s ‘3 C’s’ three levels of functional encapsulation, each effecting some kind of discontinuity between a system and its environments, is a clear cut attempt to render metacognitive incapacity (the way medial neglect forces the brain to cognize itself in discontinuous terms) into a kind of biological achievement. The self, instead of being a kind of toolbox to be rooted through as occasion (problem-ecology) demands, becomes a ‘virtual machine’ that somehow (because he completely elides the problem of meaning (in this paper at least)) constitutes all the (supernatural) hanging efficacies we assign to the first person.
On BBT, metacognitive encapsulation simply marks the boundary of information availability, and thus a way to track the role neglect plays in metacognition more generally. Our intuitions of personal identity (which so famously confound naturalistic explanation) are artifact of ‘asymptosis,’ the way the longitudinal dimension of the brain’s functioning utterly escapes metacognition and so does not exist for metacognition, leading to the paradoxical intuition of some timeless ‘I.’
Yea, added your comment as an addendum to the piece with link back. Hope that’s alright… your comment clarifies perfectly the issues.
Poifectly fine! Thank you, Craig.
Is it selfing or is it simply initiation of agenda – self simply extends from that agenda as an enation of the agenda. Ie, the problem solving of the agenda could not be solved without some kind of target to aim at. The problem solving ‘kicking in’ so ‘violently’ that it immediately surrounds the target with hypothesise (or at least build up over the early years of maturation of a human).
Recursively speaking this would also include the problem solving involved in reading this to have a ‘target’ of an agenda – the agenda perhaps being something like ‘keeping up moral structures and shit’.
Probably one of the big issues in readers understanding this in some general sense is trying to understand it in a general sense – without an idea of the agenda they bring to the target, the agenda could be any old thing AND completely hidden. Thus the agenda fails to be de-encrypted because who knows what de-encryption method is needed as the number of agenda’s is pretty damn high.
So the attempt to have a general understanding simply brings so many potential agenda’s that it solidly encrypts the target, which is to say, it encrypts the self. With maybe some poker playing nihilist getting lucky with the de-encryption attempt one time (okay, cheeky reference!)
I do try to second guess if I’m covering ground that’s already been done or not – so if I’m just covering already obvious ground, my mistake. I’ve skipped making a few posts thinking ‘Nah, that’ll be old hat’.
[…] Adding R. Scott Bakker’s response to Floridi’s conceptions of Self and the 3C’s (i.e., see comment section of The Metacritique of Reason): […]
Hey.
I was struck by this quote: “The most immediate, radical consequence of this 360 degree view is that the opposition between the first-person and third-person disappears.”
On that note, check this out:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24639542
I think this result is fascinating.
You might also find this interesting:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/06/heads.aspx
And this:
http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/d/5/e/d5efb64c9e44cff4/108-BSP-Graziano.mp3?c_id=7074974&expiration=1400114339&hwt=1c46e74ed960612ee017e8a4f86672f4
These are all based on or related to Graziano’s new book (which I have not read, I should note):
Here’s a blogger’s summary, selected at random from Google:
Cheers.
I read his book shortly after it came out, and fear I wasn’t all that impressed. His BBT-ish thesis, that the consciousness is an interpretation our brains are prone to make is as old as at least Dennett (and perhaps James), but he makes like he’s discovered something entirely new. Since he’s unfamiliar with interpretivism, he socks all the magic in intentionality, and ‘dispels’ the hard problem of consciousness by swapping it out with the hard problem of content. I’ll be sure to check out the vid.
I suppose what I find more useful about his take is that I understand it fairly readily, unlike much of the discussions here, given the reliance on jargon specific, I assume, to academic philosophy.
I don’t know whether Graziano is “unfamiliar with interpretivism”, but I know that I am unfamiliar with the term “interpretivism”, and I also don’t have a clear sense what “intentionality” is intended to mean. Likewise “eliminativism” and “transcendental” and “dogmatism”. I’m not the target audience for posts of this sort, of course. I find the distinctions between attention, awareness, and consciousness more concrete and more congenial, I guess.
What struck me as novel about Graziano’s take is the hypothesis that subjective awareness should share neural structures with social cognition (particularly monitoring the attentional focus of others), which I don’t recall having read before. In addition, they have developed a clever means to test it with transcranial magnetic stimulation (see the PNAS paper). It also hints at a program for investigating the neural basis of the non-neglected features of metacognition.
He’s also got some “bench cred” for his work revising the “homuncular” model of motor cortex, which I think is interesting, and whatever the scientific equivalent of “heretical” would be:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v12/n6/full/nn0609-667.html
By coincidence, our journal club on Tuesday showed a number of figures from his work, since it was focused on multisensory integration in the cortex.
The big problem is that he pitches his approach as a dramatic reconceptualization of the problem of consciousness without any real understanding of all the reconceptualizations floating around out there. He falls into a number of ‘only game in town’ type traps as a result. The notion of functional overlap between the way the brain tracks itself and the way it tracks others is as old as the hills. This BBS piece by Carruthers gives a good overview of one related debate.
None of this counts against his research, which I see as counting toward an old thesis. And the complication of the homuncular motor cortex I think is significant as well, particularly because of the way it robs representationalists of an old mainstay: the more behaviourally implicated apparent neuro-structural isomorphisms to some environmental feature are, the more difficult it becomes to think of them as representations in the intentional sense (as structures in the brain that ‘correspond’ to things in the world, versus structures in the brain behaviourally keyed to structures in the world).
But the book itself just struck me as more an example of naive philosophy rather than groundbreaking neuroscience. The big problem consciousness research faces is the problem of pinning down the explananda: consciousness as metacognized possesses innumerable incompatible interpretations. Which one should the neuroscientist seek to explain? Dehaene punts, goes with ‘conscious access’ as a way of isolating various apparent functions of consciousness, which he then hopes to bundle into his larger, functionalist theory. This route has the virtue of allowing the researcher to ignore the mire. Graziano, like many others (including myself), hypothesizes that consciousness as metacognized simply does not exist, that it’s a kind of ‘squirrel.’ Awareness, as he terms it, is something we’re wired to attribute to other systems – we take an ‘awareness stance’ regarding both others and ourselves (of course, since he doesn’t know any Dennett he doesn’t term it that way). So what about the awareness that’s doing the attributing? This leads him directly into the explananda thicket: I welcome anyone curious to try to parse his arguments on p. 130!
But his account has empirical problems as well, given the way it conflates consciousness with attention without explaining the numerous examples of nonsconscious attention researchers have found. I had been planning on reviewing the book, but I didn’t think it would last as an item of interest after the initial hoopla died down.
I was pinched for time, but I don’t understand the distinguishment between Lateral (eviromental) Axis and ‘external’/’object’? Does the left involve any processing? Then why assume there is a right side? If anything the right hand side could extend back out to the left (explaining why concepts can seem ‘real’ in the process), overlapping the left side. But that’s just from my particular reading which doesn’t particularly get what your image is saying to begin with.
I like how it looks like the lens of an eye when such is viewed side on.
Well, no offense to Bakker but the schematic is kind of a shitshow.
Tufte would not be pleased.
Sooo…guest article, och? 🙂
This is well worth a read, the cognitive dissonance could be kind of liberating.
realitysandwich.com/219190/quantum-physics-as-spiritual-path/
“This is well worth a read, the cognitive dissonance could be kind of liberating.
realitysandwich.com/219190/quantum-physics-as-spiritual-path/”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The first sentence in paragraph 61 sums up the entire article.
“Like a lamp that illumines itself, the self-luminous nature of consciousness, changeless in its essence,…”
Levy is a ventriloquist referring to a hand puppet of reflexivity and semantic self-reference. He uses language as vehicle for thought and thought as vehicle for language but there is no third party called the nature of consciousness to be found in the empty clothing of circularity. Light doesn’t illuminate itself any more than darkness conceals itself. Thought doesn’t think itself any more than a knife can cut itself.
I don’t find the idea that consciousness can operate on consciousness to be liberating. A mind that can act as its own container can put itself in prison or exile itself to outer darkness. It can become afraid of its own unwanted content or empty itself and crave what it thinks it doesn’t contain. Religion steps in and claims to save you from your – trapped or alienated or demon possessed or empty – reflexive self when it was all just the necker cube-like illusion of auto-ventriloquism.
One reason I read Bakker so much is that he takes being a reflexivity skeptic seriously.
“Oakwood-paneled meeting halls with deadly pamphlets advertising
“That” or “This” trip in their elegant language:
This dungeon of dark tunnels where millions are trapped
Comparing their entrapments as better than others”
“Oakwood-paneled meeting halls with deadly pamphlets advertising
“That” or “This” trip in their elegant language:
This dungeon of dark tunnels where millions are trapped
Comparing their entrapments as better than others”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’m not familiar with Chogyam Trungpa or his poetry. I take it he either explicitly taught a shentong/yogacharan view of suchness or at least borrowed some of the terminology for his Shambhala/Dzogchen. Either way, that kind of reflexive awareness/svasamvedana is an example of exactly what Bakker’s BBT attempts to explain away.
Perhaps some TPB readers might be interested in Evan Thompson’s essay “Memory and Reflexive Awareness” which I first encountered it in the collection Self, No Self: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological and Indian Traditions.
Click to access self-no-self.pdf
The nature of awareness does seem to be the crux here. The trendy nihilist in me finds BBT very brilliant and sexy, I just think there is a lot more going on in reality than can be that easily explained away. That poem is about the 16th Karmapa, an example of someone who embodied awareness and the possibilities of life and death beyond our normal rational understanding of how a mind operates. This is just my feeling of course and could be explained away as delusion. We all have our blind spots.
On another note I’m really looking forward to the Unholy Consult.
I think I’m with you, I believe, like the heavenly bodies there were people who guessed right.
“Perhaps some TPB readers might be interested in Evan Thompson’s essay “Memory and Reflexive Awareness” which I first encountered it in the collection Self, No Self: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological and Indian Traditions.”
Click to access self-no-self.pdf
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After reading Evan Thompson’s essay, I would suggest TPB’ers read Bakker’s “Paradox as Cognitive Illusion”, if they haven’t already.
“Paradox as Cognitive Illusion” was the article that first brought me to TPB after putting the term “illusion of reflexivity” into Google advanced search. It is disappointing that Tsongkhapa and Chandrakirti came so close to eliminating intentional ghosts like reflexivity and qualia, then let them in through the back door as an unconditioned something it is like to experience ultimate truth/reality/nibbana-dhatu. Rather than introspecting or reflecting, Bakker simply looked over the Buddha’s shoulder. Sadly, even Schwitzgebel still fetishizes qualia by defining consciousness as “whatever it is in virtue of which (in Nagel’s 1974 terminology) there is ‘something it is like’ to be you, or a bat, and (presumably) nothing it’s like to be a rock, or a toy robot.”
I’m no scholar, but I question the statement in the Evan Thompson article which says, “In other words, every intentional experience both presents (or re-presents) its intentional object and discloses itself, but this self-disclosure is intransitive.”
The question remains; does the disclosure of an intentional experience to itself involve presentation of its intentional object or re-presentation of its intentional object? I think this can’t be answered for the same reason presenting an object from your left hand to your right hand doesn’t represent an experience of self-disclosure. Did you give yourself something or did you represent giving yourself something?
Secondly, does an intentional experience disclose itself because it is intransitive or is it intransitive because the intentional experience discloses itself? If there is no answer, then why not just call such experiences of self-disclosure intransitivity instead of reflexivity?
Ayuh. It amounts to a bald assertion of magic, plain and simply, cognition absent cognizing, precisely the kind of illusion BBT says we should expect. It’s cool that you found BBT this way Clay: I personally think that it’s ability to explain away reflexivity in the spare manner it does is it’s most far-reaching theoretical consequence.
Eric actually has principled reasons for stopping where he does. I think he’s wrong, but dialectically, his position is very strong.
[…] medial neglect)? This is why dogmatism comes first in the order of philosophical complication, why Kant comes after Descartes. It takes time and no little ingenuity to frame plausible alternatives of this ‘elsewhere.’ And […]
[…] is the biology of metacognition. To put it into Kantian terms, the cognitive sciences amount to a metacritique of reason, a multibillion dollar colonization of Kant’s traditional domain. Like so much life, […]
[…] is the biology of metacognition. To put it into Kantian terms, the cognitive sciences amount to a metacritique of reason, a multibillion-dollar colonization of Kant’s traditional domain. Like so much life, […]