Waterbug Blues
by rsbakker
So I was ‘spammified’ again. By spammified, I mean someone on some blog has marked some comment of mine as spam rather than simply trash the thing. This means I once again have to send another message to the Akismet folks asking to be removed from their master spammer list to be able to post comments. There’s no way of knowing who did it, but I suspect it was another continentalist, same as before.
It seems preposterous, in hindsight, the length of time it took me to realize that the critical thinking mantra so often espoused in the humanities was little more than a shill. People. Hate. Questions. They only pretend to welcome them. I do my best to welcome them here, but I still suffer the tweak of irritation, still catch myself thinking, ‘Not another one, fuck,’ particularly when the question is a routine objection I feel I’ve answered multiple times before. I regularly reprimand myself for my hypocrisy—too often to be healthy, I’m sure.
Nobody likes a contrarian, unless they happen to be that contrarian.
It seems downright preposterous, in hindsight, the length of time it took me to realize that the content of a claim is not nearly as important as the social status of the claimant. People, as a rule, are far more interested in who you are than in what you have to say. When abstraction, complexity, and ambiguity, insulate them from the possibility of socially decisive contradiction, people primarily argue to advance their social standing. This is probably why they hate genuinely critical questions: their desire to discover what’s actually going on is little more than a political gloss. The internet is a great place to see this little nugget of human nature in action as well. The Great Ignorium. On the net, the questions can be vetted in advance—any exercise in ‘critical thinking’ can be groomed into an infomercial. Ignore someone ‘big,’ and there could be consequences. Small inquisitors are easily brushed under the rug.
Before coming to these two realizations I was regularly dismayed by the hostility—active or passive—that my questioning generally provoked. Life has become much easier since. In a sense, it’s a hard row I find myself hoeing. TPB really is an interstice between ‘incompatible empires,’ a place where fantasy meets cognitive science meets continental philosophy meets analytic philosophy. TPB is one place on the web where the ingroup is the enemy. Since fantasy is where I possess the most institutional credibility, I speak of and to it the least. I spend almost all my blog time, rather, tripping outgroup alarms within the latter three communities. I’m not an idiot: I know that I roll far more eyes than I catch. I recognize that I’m not an institutional expert in any of the fields I comment on—this is why I welcome corrections, critique. Nowadays, the only way to become an expert is to enter the mines, to lose sight of the landscape, and to become thoroughly invested in some ingroup—something which I seem incapable of doing.
So I play the waterbug.
Should I not play the waterbug? I know the kinds of questions I ask here are show stoppers because I’ve asked them in person, in venues where prestige demands they be blunted or papered over. Otherwise, I feel I’ve been ahead of the curve in a number of respects. Heuristics and metacognition are exploding as research fronts, as is groupishness. I think the scientific evidence backing Blind Brain Theory becomes more conclusive every month, let alone every year. It even seems like some of my metaphors are becoming common currency—think of Graziano’s recent New York Times piece.
Meanwhile, the consequences of the Semantic Apocalypse pretty clearly seem to be piling up. Just consider the tremendous bind that the technological occlusion of our collective future imposes on political theory, for instance. How does one motivate radical political change once ‘for a better future’ becomes an out and out religious claim—which is to say, a claim that has no hope of commanding consensus? I’m convinced, in other words, that the suite of concerns motivating TPB are the concerns, the dilemmas that humanity will confront no matter how hard they wish upon this or that humanistic star.
But more generally, amateurism is often exactly what problem-solving requires. A 2006 study of the scientific problems solved via InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing website, revealed that outgroup problem-solvers had actually outperformed ingroup problem-solvers. Apparently, the same holds true of Kaggle (which is dedicated to problems of statistical analysis). And this just makes sense: Longstanding problems often require ‘fresh perspectives.’ Since ingroups are defined by the conformity of perspectives, we should expect outsiders to have a ‘freshness’ advantage. The problem, of course, is that ingroups become so inured to their own stink that ‘fresh’ tends to smell ‘fishy’ to them.
All this gives me confidence in my incompetence! So I weigh in with observations and questions here and there, on a wide variety of sites and venues. I strive to be polite, but to make my questions as direct as possible—I don’t want to waste my time, let alone anyone else’s. Sometimes I have great exchanges, sometimes I don’t make it past moderation, or if I do, I’m roundly ignored. Sometimes I’m greeted with ad hominem vitriol, to which I respond by restating my question. And sometimes, twice now, anyway, I’m spammified.
This is a thumbnail of my meagre internet life. I don’t lie awake at night grinding my teeth over not getting any respect. I don’t silently shout, ‘The fools!’ in the privacy of my thoughts. I understand full well that this is how it works, that this is simply the human game. And most importantly, I try to remind myself that I’m just another idiot when all is said and done. I very well could be deluded by all this—after all, I’ve been argued out of every position I’ve held prior to my present one! The difference now is that I find myself tethered to what the science has to say.
So why the waterbug blues? Being spammified, after all, is pretty clear evidence that I’m on the right track, the fact that the continental emperor has no clothes. Part of it I’m sure has to do with being burned by Ray Brassier earlier this year: after delaying Through the Brain Darkly for months dodging emails, he finally bailed on his original agreement to write the Forward. Apparently I’m too much of a waterbug!
So maybe this most recent act of petty e-larceny has caught me exhausted in some way I wasn’t aware of. Maybe I’ve simply ‘got the hint’ at some somatic level…
The problem, of course, is the more they tell me I’m not welcome at the party, the more convinced I become that I’m offering something genuinely critical, the very thing they pretend to be. I’m wrapping up the rewrites on The Aspect-Emperor now and will be sending out the manuscript in January. If all goes well, perhaps I’ll be a bit more difficult to brush under the rug in the near future. As an intellectual masochist, all this love I’m not getting just makes me more horny.
Three Pound Brain 
Was expecting something elsewhere yesterday, so I made these.
Jussayin’. 😉
Huh?
The gleam on the one button in ‘the hunt’ is what does it for me. 🙂
Funny! I’ve been beaten over the head with the sock enough as it is.
I would just like to say, personally, that Bakker went on my blog and posted stuff about how to enlarge your penis and get great deals on prescription meds
Yer too real, homie.
Hope the holidays have been good to the clan. Knife of Many Hands: Part 1 Thursday!
Thanks for the reminder! Er, for the story, not the holidays. I’ve been inundated over here.
Merry Christmas Mike.
Hello. Thanks for the update on Aspect-Emperor.
Hello back, Danny. De nada.
As a fan of R. Scott Bakker who doesn’t give a damn what the universe thinks about his work, i offer this gif of Alison Brie, courtesy of Francis Buck of TSA:
“We have fun”
I feel a little Admiral Ackbar-ish, since she’s hawwwt, but this is place is like ‘stern gaze at the male gaze’ central.
so much gazing
T’is the season!
Ah, news of something akin to progress.
btw, The Warrior Prophet appears to have a similar Chinese cover, and it might be my favorite of all.
On that note, after many hours of careful deliberation, I’ve noticed disturbing discrepancies in the original TDTCB dust jacket cover artwork and the artwork subsequently printed within the pages of every TDTCB. Might you be able to shed some light on the subject? Which piece is more true to the original intent of the “piece”? Given, from what I understand, that a cipher does actually exist (probably buried in the same coffers as that map, hmm?), which rendition of the art/quasi-language-script would actually yield the original text?
Also, congratulation of nearly 600 TPB email subscribers. I believe it was just 2 or 3 years ago that you had your first 100. Moving up the chain of the internet.
Thanks, Wilshire. TPB does continue to grow, against all reason, that is, despite being a madman’s notebook!
The only text I can vouch for is that appearing on the original penguin edition way back when. Why do you say ‘disturbing descrepancies’?
Disturbing might be overkill for your average, intact reader. But some few have become obsessed with detail.
If one was to, say, contact Mr. Rankine and convince him to relinquish the cipher (I have tried, btw. Not a dead-end, but a difficult path to say the least), or obtain it by some other means, then one could go about translating it back into English.
“Disturbing” because the different renditions may, or may not, yield entirely different translations, or be entirely indecipherable.
‘Disturbing’ because if someone were to do something crazy… like spending over a year trying to make a replica of the original TDTCB dust jacket, out of grey leather binding and silver-foil lettering (removing the English title overlay and just having the Kûniüric lettering) … then having what amounts to spelling errors forever imprinted on the cover might be considered egregious.
Brassier bailed. Fuck, man, I was waiting for that too. I think it’s a shame brassier got mired in normocentrism and a renewed representational turn. The angle he was mining through Laruelle, the aesthetics of noise, cognitivism, and anterior posteriority was just so unlike anything I had seen before. Radical realism has to bite the bullet of real finitude and understand that understanding doesnt mirror, it intervenes or interfaces. Some of the things he used to argue earlier just seemed so fresh to me. the practicotheoretical effectuation of a thinking according to the real, adequation without correspondence or representation, Vision-in-One as seeing without seeing as. Laruelle has an interesting point in his paper about the transcendental computer, the Stranger Subject is always one time each time, not once and for all. But the logocentric structuralism of brassier, wolfendale, and sacilotto, is a return to the synchronics of the once and for all. But the turn to representation is the turn to idealism. I just dont know what or who they think could perform the functionally integrative metaconceptual functions of the hegelian subject of Reason that is once and for all. Science is today the biggest reason to doubt that there is any such subject.
I was too. I was hoping for something critical. But they really don’t have any answer to the question of what warrants normative metaphysics, aside from the quasi-Wittgensteinian argument that causal reasoning cannot play the functional role of normative reasoning – an argument that simply falls apart once you look at the problem through a heuristic lens (see this). All they have is verbiage that feels right. And as always, I invite anyone to explain to me what it is I’m missing.
Do you know what Bechtel’s argument for functionalism is? Reza mentioned it to me but didnt have the time to elaborate when I mentioned some of your criticisms.
I’m not sure how Bechtel’s position helps the cause of ‘pragmatic functionalism’ – or whatever he’s calling it now. When I pressed Bechtel on representational functionalism in person he basically fell back on: It had better be true! He’s no fan of my worst-case scenario. Since he takes descriptions of actual scientific practice as his starting point, he’s primarily interested in the ways scientists themselves jump between levels of explanation. For him, the ability to stack regularities at various grains of analysis is what makes mechanistic explanation so powerful. This is what I would call ‘big whup’ functionalism: the way we scale up and scale down mechanistic explanations. Bechtel wants to police levels, however, to confine the causal transactions detailed to a given grain of analysis. This allows him to pragmatically fudge the kinds of ‘spooky functions’ he and intentionalists more generally are interested in. As I remember it, the great irony of Mental Mechanisms is that he never gives any mechanistic account of the mental: ultimately we’re just told it’s a different level of description. So ultimately, he’s just another garden variety representational functionalist, just one that eschews the traditional terms of the debate.
[…] could have been, for example, a rival author who disrupted Bakker’s ability to sell his products. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t/wasn’t involvement of our public and private […]
So they basically tried to censor you – ie, they felt they could decide for others whether other people can hear you?
Do other continentalists condone this as something they do, or condemn it? If they condemn, does the person who did it really think they have a place amongst other continentalists? Do they really think other continentalists don’t find them repugnant? Or do they not care – they’re just a big rat that’s gnawed its way into a hive.
Do they really want to display their vulnerability?
Well, I lost a few subscribers since posting this. I’m sure most would condemn spammifying. I’m sure most would condemn killing critical comments in moderation (as Leiter does, for instance). I remember what it was like being a continentalist in a split department: everyone suffered an analytic inferiority complex of some description. The question ‘How do you know?’ is just too basic to explain away via positing ‘ontological presuppositions’ without some odour of bad faith. Pretty much everyone socialized according to their tribe, and poo-pooed accordingly.
“The difference now is that I find myself tethered to what the science has to say.”
Me, on the other hand, I’m tethered to what might be called the Lovecraftian position: the more horrifying and degrading a hypothesis is to human dignity, the more likely it is to be true. (Unless it violates a more general principle, like parsimony or falsifiability.)
BBT is pretty loathsome, is actually more parsimonious than representational or emergent monist theories since its borderline eliminitavist, and I think it’s falsifiable in principle (although I think you should sit down and write down a series of hypothetical experiments that would falsify BBT to make this more clear to your detractors).
If some version of BBT is true, we should be able to do the following:
Using neurosurgery…
1. …we should be able to make a person believe that they are no longer conscious, despite plainly being fully cogent (similar to induced Cotard’s except the person no longer reports phenomenal consciousness or believes they are a p-zombie). A feeling of “being conscious” should not be tied to any particular structure (say, oh I don’t know, autaptic neurons of the retinoic system) but rather be the result of highly distributed processing (much as envisioned in Tononi’s conception)
2. …we should be able to extend “qualia space” arbitrarily for any sense, feeling, or perception (since in BBT qualia are not privileged ontologically) . It should also be possible to synesthestically link any two qualia spaces.
3. … we should be able to subvert a person’s will and make them do things contrary to their stated desires. The person would probably then confabulate an explanation as to why they have done what they have done. (Depending on interpretation of existing experiments, BBT has already survived this falsifiability experiment)
4. …we should eventually be able to rewire short-term, episodic, and procedural memory of any task, concept or event. Entire identities should be rewritable and reprogrammable. 2+2=5? Not a problem comrade! (Have you read Ancillary Justice by the way? That book is SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK)
Obviously, many of these experiments will have to wait until a mechanistic, biological understanding of (a lot) more of the mammalian brain is elucidated. Another (very important) issue is that the results of all of these experiments necessitate the report of subjective mental states. Still, if you run enough trials with enough people, it would be very strong evidence for BBT if its predictions match the results. I really experiment number 2, since by necessity you need to run it on test subjects who understand what is meant by qualia.
The pessimistic induction is a biggie for me as well. Once you see past the apriori necessity of some happy story, then its as much a numbers game as any else. There’s far, far more ways for the story to be ugly than apologetic. I actually have been brainstorming the way you can test for neglect in experimental contexts. But in a sense, the bulk of cognitive science evidences the pervasiveness of neglect and neglect effects in human cognition. BBT is like evolution in the sense that it’s explanatory scope complicates its relationship to the micro-contexts of scientific experimentation. Even so, the picture of metacognition it supposes is the picture of metacognition that is being filled in. And as you say, given expanding technical capacity, more specific predictions can be made. The only problem with 1-4 I could potentially see is that they wouldn’t so much confirm BBT as be consistent with it.
Am ordering Ancillary Justice now…
Ancillary Justice was one of the best sci fi novels I’ve read in years. I hope you enjoy it. I have the sequel on my To Read list.
i find it interesting how the scope of BBT has some what changed or how its terms have changed. earlier you focused on showing how phenomenality or various structural features of the appearance of sufficiency effects in consciousness came about now the terms have shifted from the more infrastructural picture of the conditioning effects of lack of information regarding the limit of encapsulation within encapsulation to the more broader “neglect” / “heuristics” account. What really occasioned the shift here, or do you see as basically different angles on the same fundamental phenomenon. I think its definitely good to mine different perspectival angles on the same basic principles to shore up the inferential stabilities. But without an explicit link between these two dimensions you will continue to see criticisms like Craig’s where he accuses you of just changing terms arbitrarily.
Very perceptive. I actually have a piece in limbo on this very topic. The whole trick is one of coming up with a conceptual framework that allows us to move from first person to third person and back again. This is the abductive foundation of representationalism. My account uses neglect/heuristics to mediate this divide instead, to walk either side. Information horizons, all the early formulations from “The Last Magic Show,” amount to ways to work from inside out, to account for certain apparently ‘irreducible’ staples of experience in terms amenable to cognitive neuroscience. Basically it amounts to a new way of solving the apparent paradoxicality of experience. It was in the course of working this stuff through that I realized I was also talking about heuristics, which turned out to be key to resolving the problem-solving conundrums of intentionality. Basically, intentionality as it seems, versus intentionality as it solves.
Otherwise, this remains a work in progress. I’m sure things will change even more as a try to hone my tool-kit into something ever more parsimonious and effective. But it all fits, as far as I know. Since the question, ‘What does encapsulation have to do with neglect?’ is so easily asked here, I guess I just assumed there wasn’t much confusion…
But thank you for this. It strikes me as an important point to cover in the Introduction to TTBD.
Thanks, I ordered Ancillary Justice after I saw your comment yesterday and have finished it in one sitting! Amazing read, and totally deserves all the awards.
Gunna quibble – is #3 subverting, or simply overwriting? I think it’s the category error that is the most dangerous thing there.
What’s so horrible about BBT?
It is, basically, just saying that 1) all our cognition is a product of neurobiology (duuuh) 2) general cognition does not exist (this is a naughty one) and 3) most of our weird cognitive phenomena like sense of self, qualia, and that weird “intentionality” thingie are just product of implementation glitches in our neurobiology, like silly lighting and weird projectile trajectory calculations in old (think Doom 1) 3d games?
Is that supposed to terrify ?
Okay, there might be implication that “true state of affairs of mind” is unknowable, but that would make BBT unfalsifiable and slightly circular, so let’s not touch that (with a ten foot pole)
It’s as terrifying as having any fundamental belief system torn away, only without the consolation of any (intuitive) replacement.
And?
It’s quite apparent that if a human is pretty much a biological machine, then a “belief system” is ontologically about as “privileged” as computer software is, that is, not ontologically privileged at all (and thus not “fundamental” in any “absolute” sense).
You don’t need the full BBT to reach this conclusion, admitting the absence of “magickal bits and pieces” in a human is sufficient (BBT just brings this observation to the front-and-center, so to say)
I distinctly fail to be terrified by this observation.
Yes, belief systems are models, and usually rather ill-designed ones at that.
So, am I missing something?
Why am I not scared?
You’re not alone. It’s probably the Q I get the most. My guess is that it’s dispositional. Some people find it easy to divorce abstractions from affects – I wish I were one!
So, in pointy-haired-boss terms, you find it emotionally necessary to have an ontologically privileged system of “beliefs” ?
So we can expect to get an excerpt from the book in the near future?
Yes. 😉
Awesome!
I take it you’re referring to the rest of that Ishuäl chapter that was released on the SA forum, right? Because if it’s correct that Madness tried to convince you not to release that chapter then I hope you didn’t listen to him.
Validated on my end. Of course, I didn’t do anything so foolish as to suggest no excerpt but how Bakker might casually drop the rest of that specific chapter boggles my comprehension.
I remember… revelation!
but how Bakker might casually drop the rest of that specific chapter boggles my comprehension.
The same way he dropped the Inverse Fire revelation?
And besides, TSA discussions have been kinda dead for some time now on both SA forum and Westeros. Only a chapter like that could renew interest in the series and pique anticipation for TUC/AE.
Hopefully Bakker is already sending the chapter to Pat as we speak!
“Soon”. Its been a couple years, so if your prone to pessimism, soon might be another year.
As for the rest of the chapter (and/or another excerpt in its place), I chose to believe it is still forthcoming, soon.
hey where’s my copy of this manuscript?
ps you may get some love @ http://www.sciphijournal.com/
as an academic myself, i recommend http://www.universalrejection.org/
Awesome!
I’m uncomfortable with love… chafing, don’t you know.
sciphijournal promises to be a cool venue. Someday. I only have, like, a billion short story ideas in cold storage! I was recently invited to contribute to an upcoming issue of Midwest Studies in Philosophy on philosophy and science fiction, so that’s my next mini project.
I just need to finish the intro – which I was delaying pending Ray’s piece. Then it’s all yours!
danke
Some intuitions can seem so convincing that we can’t conceive of challenges to them as being meant seriously. Some beliefs come to be held so deeply that challenges to them are seen as acts of war against our personhoods. I think you’re up against much more than in-group careerism.
You’re almost certainly right. The roots of hypocrisy go down as far as far… It’s our foundation.
To be fair, maybe they ascribe you as acting the same way you ascribe them as acting ‘The point is to pretend to be indifferent, to be interested in only what is the case, to display passion only regarding socially legitimated (typically political) targets. The point is to appear to stand above the fray, to only get ironic fingers dirty.’
Who’d want to let their emotions (and it’s an emotional subject, surely as Mcihael says?) be touched by someone like that? To be touched by someone you can’t touch back?
Scott, I like you work a lot, and you are a genuinely swell person (as far as I can tell with an actual ocean between me-here and you-there 😉 ) but don’t you think that drawing institution scale conclusions based on some rather superfluous and vague internet incident is a little bit… too much?
there is a distinct possibility this is a mistake, misclick, or software error.
Also, in the past, you have upset people way “smaller” and pettier than any academic philosopher could aspire to be, and I assure you that the pettiest people are the least forgetful.
I sorta understand your annoyance with the academia, but the particular line of reasoning that allows one to jump from a petulant grievance over the internet and an entire swath of (rather underwhelming) philosophers seems rather unwarranted and bordering on paranoid.
Anyway, wish you a happy new year, good luck, good health and… MORE. DAMN. FANTASY. BOOK. RELEASES 🙂
It’s entirely possible it’s a mistake, sure, but it doesn’t seem to be something that happens to many people. Otherwise, I’m someone who hasn’t made it past moderation many times, and always on continental sites. I could go on. Unfortunately, there is a clear pattern. Maybe it’s all a coincidence, but the likelihood strikes me as very low. I come out of continental philosophy: all the fears I attribute to them were once my own.
I wonder whether your impression of the piece isn’t coloured by the fact that it contains personal content. I always hesitate putting up posts like this because a big part of the game is to never acknowledge how it all makes you feel. This is regularly interpreted as weakness, narcissistic excess, amateurism, what have you. The point is to pretend to be indifferent, to be interested in only what is the case, to display passion only regarding socially legitimated (typically political) targets. The point is to appear to stand above the fray, to only get ironic fingers dirty.
Ah, sorry, I thought it was a drive-by spam report a-la what happens on youtube.
So, basically, an owner / admin at one of the blogs you comment at reported you?
Then it looks way more plausible that an upset philosopher lashing out at you. I withdraw my comment regarding the implausibility of “spammification” by continentalists.
I think that the reason they do so is because they treat their little blawgs as their “turf”, a kind of place that is “by continental thinkers, for continental thinkers”.
About the same way second-wave feminists (whom I am currently… interlocuting with as part of a little “evidence fishing” expedition) treat their blawgs as some kind of special-snowflake “women’sconversations” (this gem of unadulterated reason is an actual quote, spelling preserved)
.
You “invade” the special-snowflake continental e-sanctuaries with your models, neurons and whatnot. Of course the residents are upset, but there’s no way for them to return the favor symmetrically (since their theories are pretty old and riddled with age-old holes, they would have an even harder time standing their argumentative ground at this place).
And there are only so many ways to hurt (or at least annoy) you over TCP/IP, of which spam reporting is apparently one.
I wonder whether your impression of the piece isn’t coloured by the fact that it contains personal content.
Yes, yes it is.
Acknowledging it has upset you, and doing so publicly, serves nothing but confirm the effectiveness of this approach to your malefactor.
And yes, demonstrating an “above the fray” affect makes you a more formidable opponent and leads your opponents to believe that their shenanigans were ineffectual, which would infuriate them further (which is good)
I hope you don’t mind if I steal the ‘special snowflake’ metaphor 03! Priceless.
I agree with you entirely. Blogs are backyard decks with BBQ’s. Who in their right mind would want me scaring away their guests, shooting out their patio lanterns…
If their blog is their nest – that’d make you the cuckoo, Scott!
Doesn’t it make sense they don’t want their babies kicked out by an interloper?
Sans any quarantine system where new ideas are kept in isolation (for observation) from current ideas, it’s a matter of their eggs or yours.
But people don’t seem to quarantine, generally – they either believe or don’t believe, no in between space (what one might expect from a miserly cognitive process, eh?). Do continentialists get any training in quarantining (heck, does anyone?)?
If not I guess they maybe think they are open minded as a kind of echo of when they were younger and open minded by mechanical default, before someone else got to them first.
I’d like to pimp the idea of quarantine in general – anyone want to take that egg in their nest? Anyone? Anyone? …Dang… …
I like the metaphor… though for too many reasons… 😉
Sorry for the off-topic, but I need to ask this question, which I have asked before, hopefully the answer would be different.
Scott, is your contact form on your website a way for your readers to communicate with you in e-mail format? Since I’d like to establish such a communication and the blog is a tad too public for this purpose.
Thanks for the answer!
Yes it is, my cryptic friend.
Hey, cryptic? What gives? 🙂
I shall write a long overdue e-mail sometime soon then.
Happy holidays!
I have heard stories of success, but have no personal (positive) anecdotal evidence of it. Good luck!
I’ve read over more of your work, and picked up a lot more vocabulary. Read over the SciSal debate too. Sorry to hear about the spammification…I suppose it’s better than philosophical mummification.
I still feel like I’m missing something, but it’s not the same something that most of your interlocutors are missing, since I have no personal commitment to philosophy academic or otherwise.
Most recently I’m stuck on this form that pops up in your work, “intentionality can’t be explained intentionally,” “philosophy can’t be explained philosophically,” “normativity can’t be explained normatively.” Makes perfect sense, but is there any reason to assume that these sort of circular explanations are really what is going on in philosophy? To steal your form here, what evidence is there for your claim that there is no evidence that “philosophical cognition” “intentional cognition” “normative cognition” solve real problems?
Don’t they solve social problems for philosophers? How is philosophy *not* social cognition? If philosophers were misapplying social heuristics to the wrong problem ecology, then they wouldn’t be getting any social rewards (status, money, power, reproductive success, whatever) from the business, they’d be all languishing in some low-cost housing complaining about their failure in society. But it seems to me that your recent experiences demonstrate that they know very well when someone is encroaching on their territory. This seems to me like a demonstration of philosophy’s effectiveness as a social tool. And of course the ironic, impersonal “truth” posture is all part of that.
You’re right, some do solve the paycheque problem. And securing such certainly counts as a form of social cognition. But they don’t seem to solve any of the problems they claim to be attempting to solve. Thus the perennial charge of hypocrisy. One reason they can’t solve any of their defining problems, I’m suggesting, is that they are systematically misapplying our suite of specialized sociocognitive and metacognitive heuristics to problem-ecologies they simply have no hope of solving – they are explaining intentionality in intentional terms. Insofar as they argue that this is only way these problems can be solved, they themselves provide the “reason to assume that these sort of circular explanations are really what is going on in philosophy.” Otherwise, which big picture problems involving intentionality have they solved? On the one hand, it’s their burden to justify their claims, not ours. On the other hand, endless interpretative controversy, theoretical underdetermination, owns the whole.
Any effectiveness that traditional philosophy possesses policing its boundaries I’d be inclined to see as more an artifact of their human rather than philosophical cunning. They can’t hold a candle to religion!
I think I’m starting to understand…maybe the difference is I never took what philosophers say at face value to begin with, which may be a mistake, for better or for worse I’m pretty cynical. As an amateur neuropsychologist, I’ve been stuck for years on my own idea that philosophy is really a specialized type of social cognition. But it’s also certainly true that religion works better. Perhaps something about the neurology or social environment of philosophers makes them unable to go at it that way. Either way, fascinating blog, this will give me a lot to think about. And Happy New Year!
ahem “hey where’s my copy of this manuscript?” … did it work? 😛
Hi Scott and Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year To You! As I said last year, may all of the memes of the season instantiate the proper heuristics which break the norms of everyday human interaction. Just wondering what blog spammified you?
Great link to Michael Graziano’s article and speaking of blogging there is that little tag team we did on Dan Weiskopf’s article where he agrees that the mind’s model building encounters a problem when it models itself http://philosophyofbrains.com/2014/10/25/modeling-and-the-autonomy-of-psychology.aspx#more-2930
Looking forward to more of your articles.
All The Best in the New Year!
Thanks VicP! I think this debate is a perfect example of the waterbug advantage – and disadvantage! Weiskopf is attempting to reformulate the problem in heuristic terms, but his pre-existing commitments to mental realism is blocking his ability to explicitly embrace it as such.
I still think that analogy you gave is better than any I’ve been able to come up with.
This is definitely something I’ll be writing about in the near future.
Scott, Here’s a couple of light hearted TED Talks. Both speakers are actually talking about heuristics, especially how Clio explains their connections to our sex drives, “If you ask a man to do something……just ask him a half hour later….”
Scott, something similar happened to me maybe a year ago on the well-known new atheist and biologist Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution is True. He has a rabid and very large fan base of commenters. I agree with his criticisms of religion, but I disagree with much of his secular humanism and with the antiphilosophy prejudice you find all over his blog.
I joined one of the discussions, made some polite criticisms, and then the discussion got more heated, I think I used the word “clueless” in reference to Coyne’s attitude towards philosophy, and he stepped in and banned me, comparing me to a puppy who wet his floor and had to be sent away for a time out. As I recall, it came down solely to my use of that word “clueless.” Or maybe that was just an excuse to kick out someone asking unpopular questions in that forum.
This really is an ingroup-outgroup problem which the internet exacerbates. It’s not just the pompous, decadent continental philosophers who condescend to outsiders even though their emperor has no clothes. I see the same problem with new atheists and liberal secular humanists who aren’t sufficiently Nietzschean, Lovecraftian, or apocalyptic about the implications of naturalism.
But were the outgroups of radical naturalists, existentialist critics of consumer culture, and the artists, omegas, and misfits who look askance at other popular delusions to suddenly acquire power and prestige, they would be corrupted too. The paradigmatic case of this is orthodox Christianity’s rise to power in the fourth C. Christians, of course, were the quintessential outsiders who became insiders when their creeds were adopted as the Roman Empire’s law of the land. Needless to say, the result was absurd from a Jesus-centered point of view.
On another matter, I wonder whether you got my email in which I sent you an article that might be right for TPB. I’m not sure whether I have your current address.
One of the many possible subsets of Online Disinhibition Effect, I’d imagine. Maybe a blanket nuance where social psychological effects are exacerbated generally as per ODE?
Hope work on God Decays continues, Ben ;).
Mike, I did begin writing the sequel, but I’ve had to put it aside for awhile because of my new day job. I do intend to get back to it when I have time, though. I identify the young character Douglas with my nephew, so I certainly want to complete his story.
I don’t think the issue is quite ODE. I think it’s the added control that technology gives us. If Coyne et al were arguing in person and I said something that offended them, they could only turn their backs or try to get me to leave. Maybe they’d succeed or maybe my words would still get through. With the internet, though, you can remove a participant merely by clicking a button. (The person could make up a fake account and rejoin the conversation, but still…) There’s something about high tech that reveals our true nature, by fulfilling our wildest dreams.
And yeah, the anonymity of the whole thing is a factor. It’s not just that we’re disinhibited. It’s like we’re just playing a game when all we see is text on the same computer screen that shows us movies and actual computer games. More than that, though, it’s tribalism. The internet divides us into smaller and more tight-knit groups, because Google is such an amazing device for searching for exactly what we want to find. So the internet unleashes the primal instinct to prevent the profane world from desecrating your sacred space.
Interesting thoughts, as always, Ben.
Good to see you back, Ben! I got your email, but I haven’t had a chance to read the piece attached. I was leaving it for when school starts again – this is a hard time of year to do any deep reading!
It definitely is universal (I highly recommend Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes), I just find, as someone who engages a wide variety of people from a wide variety of groups, that continentalists seem to be the most prickly.
no doubt partly because (at least in English speaking countries) they have been so marginalized and usually in the name of the scientific aspirations of analytic philo, and now of course this is magnified by the push by folks in the hard sciences to give all philosophers (and theologians) the boot.
All too true. One of the things I always to show them is how outlandish their posits sound to all the ears that matter. There’s many exceptions, of course – like Zahavi. But this is the way, generally. Hutto and Myin, my favourite enactivists, spend their latest paper undermining representationalism just to posit normativism and phenomenology as their natural alternative without so much as considering the way the same critiques cut even more sharply against them. Underdetermination is a hand-grenade, not a rifle.
Ben wrote:
“I see the same problem with new atheists and liberal secular humanists who aren’t sufficiently Nietzschean, Lovecraftian, or apocalyptic about the implications of naturalism. ”
I think there is a PR problem there. These people see themselves as public advocates for science. It’s very hard to sell people on “science is awesome!” if you then go and acknowledge the deeper philosophical implications. Indeed, some people on the other side of the fence (the religious and spiritual crowd) are *keenly* aware of exactly what it is that naturalism implies and they use it as ammunition.
Therefore, it is pragmatically impossible for someone like Coyne or Dawkins to agree with you publicly even if they might privately or in a different setting.
Shhh! I don’t want my students to hear this!
Jorge, I entirely agree. You often hear Dawkins speak about what’s “tactically” prudent for new atheists to say or not to say in public, now that New Atheism has become a movement. One of the best books I read on this subject is Drury’s The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, where she interprets Strauss as condemning modernists for effectively giving up on the imperative to be strategically wise. That is, a modernist like Machiavelli or Hobbes differs from someone like Spinoza in so far as he openly declares that the natural facts are horrible. Spinoza hid his teachings with the ambiguity of his system, so that he could pretend to be a theist. And of course, this goes back to the lesson of Socrates who was executed for corrupting the youth with his doubts about the popular myths of his day.
Now, I don’t think the stakes are nearly the same for contemporary atheist bigwigs like Dawkins or Coyne. True, they want to make American politics and education less embarrassing, by popularizing atheism. They want to make their countries safe for atheists and they do this by sugarcoating naturalism. Indeed, they do face Christian objections that morality, for example, is impossible, given naturalism. Coyne is more honest since he’s a determinist. But it’s possible there’s a gap between what they publicly say about naturalism and what they privately fear, even though they needn’t fear old school persecution.
Still, I doubt this goes to the heart of the matter. I think the new atheist leaders identify with the cultures that empower them and so they’re forced to act as apologists. Coyne ridicules the doom and gloom atheists and Dawkins wrote a whole book on the question whether science unweaves rainbows, as the romantics put it. He argues that science makes the world a more wonderful place, by raising new questions and mysteries, etc. But these guys hardly face up to the force of the theist’s objection (e.g. Dostoevsky’s point about whether everything is permitted, given atheism).
Needless to say, theism has no leg to stand on, since the theist merely displaces the factual horrors of nature with anachronistic delusions about gods and miracles. But it does seem that business shouldn’t continue as usual, given naturalism; that is, when business does continue, this can only be because of modern myths that substitute for premodern ones. This was Nietzsche’s main message, as I understand it.
By the way, some time ago I wrote on my blog about this question of sugarcoating naturalism:
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2011/11/lovecraftian-horror-and-pragmatism.html
What philosophical implications, exactly?
That humans are just machines made of a certain set of polymers, as opposed to other machines made of different kind of polymers (or perhaps some other materials. I am a corpse spook, not an engineer) ?
Isn’t that, like, old news ?
I mean, I know people (a lot of people) still believe they have magical things inside them that make them oh so special, and even that they will get to be reborn as, I dunno, owls (because everyone is fond of owls!), but that just means that a lot of people are really slow on the uptake and/or delusional, nothing more, nothing less.
HAPPY NEW YEAR BAKKER FANS! MAY YOUR ENEMIES FALL BEFORE YOU IN 2015!!! https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+35%3A+1-9&version=KJV
And Happy 2015 to you, my biblical friend!
“I think the scientific evidence backing Blind Brain Theory becomes more conclusive every month, let alone every year. It even seems like some of my metaphors are becoming common currency—think of Graziano’s recent New York Times piece.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
@Bakker
The common currency includes not only your metaphors but also the reactions people have to them. Letters to the editor regarding Graziano’s piece should sound all too familiar. Behold the foot stomping and hand waving on The Opinion Pages.
I always wonder how much I’m strawmaning when I read those – I mean the brain clearly has electrical activity going on. If we call that ‘conciousness’, then that’s legit, right? So maybe that’s what they mean, or something else like that that’s fairly plausible.
So I can never tell how much they’ve gone down the rabbit hole or how much I’m attributing them as having gone down the rabbit hole.
Otherwise it’s like a cross between confirmation bias and asognosia. They reach in with introspection such as they have, find no evidence that disconfirms their theory – therefore it’s confirmed by their lights. It’s like they have a numb arm, reaching into a box to test whether what they claim is true – when they feel nothing, they take it their claim is not disconfirmed, so bang, must be true.
I’m wondering how much of the world population, whether by DNA or cultural dint, have disconfirmation inclinations. Also it’d be interesting to find their relative societal positioning, for bonus points.
I’ve exchanged a couple of emails with Graziano, and as far as I can tell, he’s stumped by all the love his theory isn’t getting. I don’t think he realizes how old his particular take on the issue is, and how well-rehearsed the responses are to it. Everything new he writes does seem to be more philosophically savvy though.
Funny post. I don’t know if its simply the increasing familiarity of BBT but it is starting to seem like the penultimate prophecy of skepticism, a revelation in the truest sense. That’s how it struck me when I first started reading and discussing it, and now looking back it is that same zealous conviction that gives me pause.
I also wanted to ask if anyone knows why I can’t register on the second apocalypse forum? Tried changing everything including the browser itself, but I always get sent to a page telling me “An Error Has Occurred! You are not allowed to access this section.” I wanted to throw around some ideas about the Cishaurim for a piece I’ve been mulling over for a while and finally have the time for. Any info would be cool, can’t post at all without registering and there doesn’t seem to be an administrator that guests can contact.
Looking forward with deadly seriousness to that third book. I caught the PoN series right after the publication of the Warrior Prophet, so its been a real long time coming.
Sorry you couldn’t register, we’ll look into it. Due to some spam issues we changed a few things, and I guess something broke.
Not that its any help, but I was able to make an account at 2:30pm EST (GMT -5). Feel free to keep trying
Sorry to hear, james. I’m the admin at SA – let me know if you’re still having issues. If worse comes to worse, I can create an account for you.
Okay, this thread contains numerous references to how BBT is “Lovecraftian” and how it is “degrading … to human dignity”.
I might not be particularly attentive (I’m not a philosopher, lol), but I can’t find anything particularly scary or offensive about it (which may or may not indicate that I should interrupt my live-in with 01, lol)
The scariest part might be the possibility of unknowable unknowns, but that quirk is not BBT specific (and is inherent to any theory that does not claim that human mind is made of eldrithch magickations that are so powerful that they are immune to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems).
What else is scary/offensive/degrading/lovecraftian about the BBT?
Could someone please make a bullet-pointed laundry list of all the ways BBT is scary or offensive?
it pulls the ontological weight of metaphysical humanism off the thin rug of the moral or ethical and allows it to get shredded into the winds of the biosystematic.
Why would I regard biosystematic as something negative?
I am a biological machine.
So are you.
Problem?
also, Being-as-Flicker-Fusion. but with more seriously, i think you could forestalling registration of BBT’s effects but insisting on remaining with relationality (machines, polymers, glitches, etc), when BBT actually does it’s work with non-relation. glitch is a paradigmatically relational concept, and its a cryptofunctional concept, but BBT is not a species of functionalism.
Okay, it would be interesting if you and/or Scott went into some more details as to non-relational aspects of BBT, as well as to how BBT is non-functionalist.
Specifically, in the context of “neglect”, which is a concept widely employed in many (all?) BBT publications to date and which, as a concept, is about as cryptofunctional (cryptofunctionalistic? 🙂 ) as “glitch”, and also, as a concept, implies some degree of relationality.
This list does not pretend to be inclusive.
BBT implies there is no free will as generally understood. This is offensive because many people believe they have free will. This is scary because it implies that the legal system built around the idea of free will have to be rebuilt around some other idea.
BBT implies that human beings do not have ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ or other supernatural essences that make men to be the image of God. This is scary/offensive to the usual suspects for the obvious reasons.
BBT implies that ‘philosophy of mind’ or intentional philosophy since at least Plato has been a waste of time and effort. This is offensive to anyone who has put time and effort into intentional philosophy.
BBT implies that human beings will eventually gain the same kind of engineering access to the human mind that we have to the rest of the natural world. This is scary because the power will certainly be misused in ways that increase social and economic inequality.
BBT implies that our claims to moral virtue are self-delusions, that human beings are fundamentally amoral and what we think of as morality is merely cowardice. This is scary because it implies that the moral illusion could break down and plunge us into the war of all against all that Thomas Hobbes described in Leviathan.
BBT implies that living things are not different in principle from non-living things. This is Lovecraftian because it implies the Great Old Ones could rise up at any time.
BBT implies that human beings are merely a kind of animal. This is offensive to all human beings who think themselves better than animals.
BBT implies that humans and other animals are merely a kind of machine. This is offensive to people who think living beings are better than automata.
In general BBT tends to erase the distinctions between human and animal and between animal and machine. If those distinctions don’t matter to you then BBT does not pose a problem. I suspect they matter more to the sort of people who don’t read Three Pound Brain that to those who do.
But again, these are weakly terrifying. This is what is so hard about 03’s question. There’s a book on cybernetics from a conference in 1960 where ulrich neisser looks at competing ideas about technology and machines and he devotes considerable thought to why the idea that humans are machines is dehumanising or alienating. This isnt a new hat, and I think that’s why 03 can diffuse or dismiss BBTs force if it merely reasserts these old thesis about machines or automata. I would caution against putting too much weight onto those inpretations. Automata already supposes certain notions about rules, and programmabiltiy, software hard ware distinctions and notions which themselves have considerable ontological confusions about them. Pay attention that scott actually addresses this in places. Machine isnt what people think it is in terms of the old debate between freedom and mechanism or whatever. Automaticity doesnt suppose any thick notions about computations, or about the kind of automata discussed by Wolfram and Von Neumann.
But real problem posed by BBT isn’t determinism: the problem on the personal level is systematic metacognitive delusion, and on the social level systemic heuristic inapplicability. We’re hardwired to search for reasons, to rationalize. We cannot but rely on these heuristic tools, the same way we can’t help but rely on moral heuristics in our social transactions. Some people can get along quite comfortably with mass self and social deception, live happily without purpose or freedom or responsibility. But this is definitely not the case for the vast majority of us.
‘How scary’ debates, I’ve come to learn, are really no different than ‘how tasty’ debates. There’s no set of claims that logically compel fear. Not buying the evaluative consequences of BBT is a dispositional matter.
I’m hoping to work up a book review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes, where all these issues play salient roles.
Scott, maybe I am a dumb undereducated corpse, but as far as I see. most non-supernatural theories of mind at least imply at some degree of metacognitive delusion.
I mean, under strictly non-supernatural assumptions regarding processes underlying our minds, it would be pretty hard not to suggest that our knowledge about our own intellectual capabilities, as well as nature and extent of intellectual capabilities of others is at least somewhat imprecise.
BBT is special in just how far it takes this assumption, trying to explain away particularly tangly and annoying constructs. It is an interesting approach, but as far as I can tell, what separates it from the “rest” of the field is difference of degree, and not that of kind.
And “freedom” and “responsibility”, at least “strongly” defined (I suspect you use term “responsibility” in the strong sense of “Alex is responsible for numerous crimes” and not in the “weak” sense of “adrenaline is responsible for mediating a large array of stress reactions in mammals”) make very little sense under absolutely any non-supernatural theory of mind (as far as I can tell) and were dead in the water for many decades. Actually, they don’t make any sense and never did, IMHO.
Recognizing that a “crime” is merely a biomachine malfunction (and the criminal is about as “responsible” as my phone is when it locks up and requires a hard reboot) would only do good for society, since we will be able to finally transcend the silly notions of “fair punishment” and “retaliation” and use strictly evidence-based approaches aimed at returning the criminal to optimal functioning as a taxpayer (which some EU states already do, and which humorously enough results in a much more humane and successful penitentiary system)
The notion of “purpose” is slightly more problematic because it is in no way specific to humans, and at least seemse to be necessary for forming any goal-oriented behavior (which is something we see a lot in systems we can plausibly “cash out” as pure component-interacting descriptions, including simple roundworms and robots), but if anything, explaining away purpose in general (and not just romantic “purpose of life” bullcrap that never made any sense anyway) would be fun not terrifying because it could open a way more efficient perspective on how so-called “goal oriented” systems can be engineered.
“purpose” and “establishing contexts” remain an annoying, tangly problem for AI research, so if it turns out that there’s just no such damn thing and that humans (and other biological systems with apparent goal-oriented behaviors) don’t really implement anything special in this regard, progress in the field might actually speed up.
Perhaps I’m just ignorantly missing precisely what “evaluative consequences” of BBT (beyond attempting to “explainin away” intentionality) are ?
“The illusion is irresistible. Behind every face there is a self. We see the signal of consciousness in a gleaming eye and imagine some ethereal space beneath the vault of the skull, lit by shifting patterns of feeling and thought, charged with intention. An essence. But what do we find in that space behind the face, when we look? The brute fact is there is nothing but material substance: flesh and blood and bone and brain. . . You look down into an open head, watching the brain pulsate, watching the surgeon tug and probe, and you understand with absolute conviction that there is nothing more to it. There’s no one there.” — Slavoj Zizek
And BBT does not say humans are amoral, it says morality is amoral according the conception of the sufficieny of the moral whereby we imagine the moral as an enclave cut off from the merely natural or discontinuous with the social heuristics employed by other mere animals. It says that morality is an aspect of biosystematicity. Humans are forced into using moral heuristics, and those have considerable effectiviness. Here is the example. There are two men who were convicted of murder. One murdered in the circumstances of someone was attacking his wife and he had to defende her, the other murdered as a way to get out of paying back a debt which was entered into via a legally binding contract. Which of those men other things being equal is evil. If you cant answer that questions you will have objective difficulties in solving problems dealing with human beings. Moral heuristics are lubrications of the gears of the social. Morality is real. BBT does not claim otherwise. It just short circuits the wires of gratuitous idealist self interpretations of morality which attempt to rend the moral as an autonomous supplement or something which is supranatural
03, it comes down to how BBT proliferates nested spheres of darkness and asymetric informatic cuts. this directly applies to, and indeed fuels things such as crime, but also much more banal aspects of human interaction. BBT shgarpens the teeth of informatic asymetry.