Gathering Momentum without Expending Wind
by rsbakker
It’s been a busy week, enough to make me pine for a cabin on the Arctic Circle with only the whine of a billion mosquitos to keep me company. The reader reviews on Amazon continue to be over the top, but I’ve been worried by the lack of any institutional reviews (outside Blogcritics). A couple people have told me this is due to the release date being split, and that we might have to wait until after September 29th before things begin to heat up.
Even still, this week’s media roundup is a long one…
Rob and Phil interview me over at the Grim Tidings. This is my first ever Skype interview and it shows! The guys managed to make it a great time, however.
Richard Marcus gives his views on The Great Ordeal over at Blogcritics.
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist picks The Great Ordeal as one of the Provisional Speculative Fiction Top Five of 2016.
Philosopher David Roden ruminates on “Crash Space,” Neuropath, and great deal more in a wonderful piece of theory-fiction called “Letter from the Ocean Terminus” in Dis Magazine. What happens when our most fundamental landmarks begin to walk? How will we find our way? With lines like “Philosophy is a benign histamine response, a dermographism allowing us to shimmer helplessly in the dark,” you simply cannot go wrong!
Clarkesworld has published “Fish Dance,” a fantastic, Eganesque short story by another philosopher friend of mine, Eric Schwitzgebel. I’ve proofed several of Eric’s stories now, and all I can say is watch out. “Fish Dance” makes me jealous. I can admit it.
The Grimdark Magazine kickstarter campaign for the Evil is a Matter of Perspective anthology has reached its goal. And in short order, too! When I’m not working on The Unholy Consult rewrite, I’m working on the anthology’s Foreword, “On the Goodness of Evil,” and a short story featuring Uster Scraul. Congratulations to Adrian and the GdM team.
Three Pound Brain 
It looks like Richard Markus doesn’t know how to spell ‘nonmen’ and ‘Kellhus’.
Ugh. Both are mistakes I’ve made in the past! Someone should drop him a line.
I will. I hope your book comes out soon in the Netherlands.
In the hardcover that just came out there is what appears a minor error. one of the chapter titles on the top right page actually says Chapter Title. no i havent read it. was just thumbing through it (love the epigraphs concerning the Game, though)
Bakker, would you have the time to discuss a criticism I have? I’m rereading the books right now, I haven’t gotton to the passage I don’t like yet but it’s what would most likely be a feminist criticism from a guys perspective. I missed the line when I read the books the first time, but someone mentioned it; I should be able to find the passage. I hate to mention it now but I’ve been thinking over your series more because I’m excited to see how you deal with the mysteries.
I actually can’t find the passage my friend mentioned and would feel remiss going into it without at least double checking it again. I’ve thought a lot about the passage just haven’t checked it over after thinking it through.
Scott, if you don’t mind answering, someone on Westeros pointed out something that blew my mind – that Mimara is an anagram for Mariam, Mary’s name in Arabic and Aramaic (and so what she would have been called in life).
Intentional or pure coincidence?
I’m honestly not sure, it’s been so long. All I know for sure is that I spent far, far too much time agonizing over the names of the original cast.
Time well-spent, since they’re some of my favorite names in fantasy. Great at evoking the cultures their nations are parallel to without being blatant cribbing.
Great interview, I linked it at reddit/rpg, where roleplay cred should get it pretty far (better than a cold sell). But I don’t agree about the writing advice – not the idea of always doing it – that makes sense like doing weights every day makes sense for building and keeping muscle. But the assumption peeps know how to keep writing doesn’t – with weights you just do the same thing over and over, easy enough, theory wise. With writing, writing ‘I am a fish’ two hundred times doesn’t cut it (does it? Red Dwarf reference there, btw!). So the question is how to do our weights every day when seemingly doing them the same way twice is a no no?
http://figureground.org/interview-with-jon-cogburn/
As you know, speculative realism has recently come under fire by phenomenologist Dan Zahavi. In a brief but popular piece entitled, “The End of What? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism,” Zahavi reacted to Tom Sparrow’s book, The End of Phenomenology, claiming that Sparrow’s critique of phenomenology is fundamentally flawed, and that the positive contributions of speculative realism at large suffer from a number of inconsistencies, ultimately failing to deliver on the promises it made concerning a rehabilitation of the real. What do you make of Zahavi’s article?
I found Zahavi’s piece to itself be “superficial, simplistic, and lacking in novelty.” I think that any fair-minded reader of what I’ve said above about speculative realism and object-oriented ontology will agree.
I really enjoyed Sparrow’s own response to Zahavi in your interview with him (http://figureground.org/interview-with-tom-sparrow/ ). I’m still thinking through it and don’t have much to say other than that what he says makes sense to me. Harman has shared a few preliminary thoughts on Zahavi’s piece on his blog. He really is the most generous interlocutor I know. The most disappointing (and frankly astounding) thing vis a vis Harman’s work is how Zahavi simply skipped over Harman’s central claim with respect to Husserl! He would have done much better to just review Sparrow’s book and not try to turn the thing into a polemic.
There are a lot of things I could pick at in the piece, but I want to try to communicate my respect for the tradition Zahavi works in as well as his contributions to that tradition. I’ve published a few pieces in the philosophy of mind and John Protevi and I ran a philosophy of mind reading group for a number of years at LSU. The intersection of phenomenology and philosophy of mind is important. People like Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Michael Wheeler, Francisco Varela, and Zahavi are at the forefront of saving us from some very destructive ways of thinking about ourselves. What more do the rest of us want?
Nonetheless we need to be very careful about what’s meant by “phenomenology” in addressing “the speculative realist critique of phenomenology.” Different writers mean radically different things by the term. Some of this slippage results in equivocation when Zahavi is criticizing Sparrow. And, independent of Zahavi’s polemic, to get at what is really at stake we cannot pretend that “phenomenology” is what analytic philosophers used to call a “natural kind term,” something that deictically picks out an essence that carves nature at the joints. It’s not!
Dermot Moran’s fantastic Introduction to Phenomenology and the wonderful co-edited (with Timothy Mooney) Phenomenology Reader treat “phenomenology” as a tradition nearly co-extensive with what English speakers mean by “continental philosophy.” Many dedicated Husserlians and Merleau-Ponty scholars treat it much more narrowly, as something that is centrally of service to philosophy of mind and empirical psychology. People like Steven Crowell tends to treat it as transcendental epistemology. But if you follow Moran’s story and love Heidegger, you can get yourself in a place where both transcendental epistemology and naturalized phenomenology seem like horrible bastardizations of real phenomenology. Some of the French phenomenologists I know are extraordinarily passionate about this. Read Janicaud and try and fail to connect his account of what phenomenologists should be doing with what those of us who publish in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science are doing. Then, finally, American Levinasians tend to push an almost negative theological view about the nature of phenomenology. We can’t say what phenomenology is because phenomenology is about questioning all presuppositions and being radically open to the kinds of big e Events that shatter our reigning conceptions.
It’s not the case that there are as many “phenomenologies” as there are phenomenologists, but it sometimes feels that way.
My own thinking about the relationship between speculative realism and phenomenology has really come from listening to Steven Crowell as he participates in conferences. He and David Chalmers both have this weird property where you’ll later realize that the most philosophy you learned during the conference was from their questions. And the questions aren’t the kind of bloviations to which most of us subject speakers. They’re always charitable and on point. Whoever did their Jedi training was very, very good.
Anyhow, I think there are two main issues here. First, can philosophy aspire to be anything other than transcendental epistemology? The question here isn’t whether or not phenomenology is true, but whether phenomenology (understood as transcendental epistemology) is all there is. And the only thing in common to all speculative realists is the conviction that transcendental epistemology is not all there is in philosophy. This is not a new realization. It finds its genesis in early critics of Kant, and the critique was picked up by Schelling and Hegel (everyone should read Frederic Beiser’s work on this). What speculative realists have done is once again march with Hegel’s radical critique of critique, albeit in a different direction.
Second, assuming that phenomenology does not prohibit metaphysics, what is the relationship between the two? This is something that speculative realists disagree about. One side, let’s call them right wing speculative realists (in the sense of right wing Sellarsians), pushes the German Idealist deconstruction of phenomenology as total philosophy much further into a critique of the epistemic pretensions of phenomenology. These philosophers tend to be scientistic. The other side, let’s call them left wing speculative realists, agree with the Viennese view that phenomenology is an essential precursor to metaphysics. This can get articulated in all sorts of ways, perhaps the most radical of which is Harman’s Schellingian move of developing a metaphysics by taking key theses made about human beings in the phenomenological tradition as not merely concerning human beings.
I’m clearly a left wing speculative realist and I think that Harman has inaugurated the era of guerrilla phenomenology. We’ll see.”
I don’t get what it is he sees. My suspicion is that it has to do with inserting a very specific understanding of ‘correlation’ into these contexts, but I read through the whole interview searching for some formulation of his particular theory of meaning. I’ve tried to pin Jon down on this issue before, but he’s always demurred.
One thing that always amazed me when I was in grad school was the way realism/anti-realism conceptually parallels bi-stable images like Necker Cubes in visual cognition, the way philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger can be read as realists as easily as they can be read as idealists. I always found it difficult to believe that no one making these kinds of gestalt inversion arguments ever bothered to ask why this might be the case, let alone ask whether it might have something to do with their perennial inability to make any such interpretations stick.
BBT provides a pretty nifty explanation, I think.
yes, i thought (via yer running critique of phenomenology/zahavi and all) you might find an in here to begin a critique/conversation, maybe roden would lend a hand.
Well, Brassier/ Laruelle somewhat went into this, and in its own way second order cybertnetics deals with it. I think it was the basis of Brassier’s attack on Deleuze and Guattari in Alien Theory, but he kept the whole thing in a transcendental idiom. I don’t think they pushed for a methodological understanding of this. This is where I think your neurophenomenology is a truly novel development. I just can’t believe no one else in phenomenology is really willing to let themselves sink into it without kneejerking and defaulting to scanning for performative condtradictions involving intentional terms. They never allow themselves to see how the terms in your discourse function so they never really articulate a critique of the BBT itself.
It’s a gestalt, like any systematic view. They have to inhabit it to understand. The only way to convince anyone to invest the effort required to genuinely grasp a new theoretical gestalt is for them to actually feel threatened by it, which they don’t, largely because I’m pretty easy to dismiss by identification! If anything, the Anglo-American philosophical community will be the first to give it a hard look, and then the Continentals, with perceived social capital on the line, will scramble accordingly. The thing is, I think it’s much easier to grasp coming from a continental background given the inadvertent training it gives you in thinking neglect.
But for a phenomenological positivist, one inclined to make theoretical phenomenological posits, it has to be anathema.
RSB, while it’s true that breakdowns/break-ins are the most common spurs to change it’s also true that some people come to be taken with (enchanted by) new metaphors/assemblages.
The podcast was great :).
As was Fish Dance, wow.
I gather there are still reviews incoming, following Canadian release on the 26th and UK release in September. Only the hardcore fans, who also happen to discuss your books online (making them an increasingly small subset of your overall reader population), have the book in hand already.
Thanks for lying about the podcast! 😉
Nothing in the Canadian media so far…
Lol – well, they have to be on shelves first, unfortunately. I was quite upset for some moments yesterday when I thought maybe there wasn’t going to a Canadian physical release.
We Canadians have to wait a couple days for physical copies of TGO to ship :(. Currently in Ontario Chapters, Coles, and Indigo stores “this item is online only and is not available in any store.” I had to call Chapters and find out if they were going to have physical copies at all…
Some link roundup:
http://gizmodo.com/most-americans-are-still-fearful-of-a-transhumanist-bra-1784278230
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5967896/us-spy-agency-predicts-a-very-transhuman-future-by-2030
OF Blog Review:
http://ofblog.blogspot.ca/2016/07/r-scott-bakker-great-ordeal.html
say goodbye to research science…
https://www.sigmaxi.org/news/keyed-in/post/keyed-in/2016/07/26/em-vox-em-on-the-7-biggest-problems-facing-science
Those are things we could collectively work to change for increased dividends, no?
Love this one: 7. “Life as a young academic is incredibly stressful.”
My response was predictably, “no shit.”
“Those are things we could collectively work to change for increased dividends” could you unpack that a bit pls?
Lol – I can try, dmf, but I always feel a little outclassed by the Great Names ’round these parts (yourself included ;)):
I just see a list like that and feel like we too quickly, collectively, succumb to some kind of implied inertia; can’t do anything so don’t try (same with many arguments here, for that matter, though I’m willing to acknowledge the starting conditions that BBT implies and work myself within those implied constraints).
But really…
Why can’t we sort out alternative funding and distribution methods? (And really, I’ve been in on standing room at many, many different little conferences/presentations that do try and co-op science to pay the bills, in addition to/rather than rely/ing on traditional institutional funding).
Why can’t scientists – scientists, ffs – figure out how to review, replicate, and disseminate differently than the complex system that they’re locked into right now, in order to give present/future humanity a better foundation to work from – supposed that forwarding knowledge for the sake of forwarding knowledge is the actual goal of science.
Some mash-ups of complexity science I’ve been exposed to in the past would say institutional academia and its relationship to the other institutions (religion, government, the commons) are locked into both poverty and rigidity traps – but both are contexts from which the system can work to change and amend how it’s structured and how it expedites.
Ranty McRantyson over here…
thanks mh no class here, i don’t dismiss these matters quickly in the sense that i have spent decades working on issues of organization/management/etc (especially around lab work and engineering) and it’s nearly impossible to scale up (as my father who did research in modeling complex systems often notes scaling up in never linear) quality (especially reflexivity) and without big-bucks (ie govt) funding basic science isn’t likely to make much progress these daze (needs relatively sophisticated/costly infrastructures)and we have reached the limits of big govt to manage the complexities and scales that come with our levels of technology, so round and round the toilet bowl we go…
on a related front:
https://soundcloud.com/secondhomeldn/morozov-multi-1-mixdown-1
I will have to give that a listen later, dmf.
it’s nearly impossible to scale up (as my father who did research in modeling complex systems often notes scaling up in never linear)
I would very much liked to have chatted with your old man. Nearly impossible is a little dramatic but you’re right we have various issues modelling non-linearity so far (it doesn’t help that modelling complex systems requires more interdisciplinary context than we currently facilitate on an institutional scale.
we have reached the limits of big govt to manage the complexities and scales that come with our levels of technology, so round and round the toilet bowl we go…
Well, we’re certainly not going to solve it exclusively in the comments at TPB (and probably especially not on this particular medium given the underlying themes which tie together much discussion here).
There is a balance somewhere between “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “new is always better.” I certainly think that if the institutional organization has hit the ceiling on forwarding knowledge for the sake of forwarding knowledge – especially knowledge which might pervasively improve the quality of life and our ability to live in harmony with what’s left of nature – than we should probably find ways to trigger release of resources (in Panarchy parlance, if you’re at all familiar from your padre, dmf: http://www.sustainablescale.org/ConceptualFramework/UnderstandingScale/MeasuringScale/Panarchy.aspx ).
Which aside reminds me, Bakker, I have a somewhat “well read” copy of Panarchy to get your hands :).
hey MH, thanks will check out the link,modeling aside
I’d welcome any from the field case-studies to the contrary but until them I’m sticking with my characterization, the issues of staffing, training, standardization, etc are prohibitive even in relatively localized matters like engineering firms or tech-startups.
cheers
https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/2289964
Thanks for that link.
Love me some modelling papers.
but until them I’m sticking with my characterization, the issues of staffing, training, standardization, etc are prohibitive even in relatively localized matters like engineering firms or tech-startups.
That’s fair. As you can probably tell, the ease with which people succumb to arguments to do nothing, to effect no change, bothers me a great deal ;).
Despite not being a Great Name and despite having just received a severe electronic tongue-lashing from our friend Callan about airy philosophizing I can’t help but notice two things. First:
“forwarding knowledge for the sake of forwarding knowledge is the actual goal of science”
I don’t know that science is the sort of thing that can have goals, unless the goal of science is somehow the vector sum of the goals of the individuals (and even that ignores the question of whether individuals can have the intentionality needed to have goals) involved in science.
Second:
Someone in a previous comment provided this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_system
If the legacy systems science uses for funding, peer review, experiment duplication etc. are to be replaced all the questions that Wikipedia article discusses have to be addressed. I would guess that in general the older and more entrenched a legacy system is and the more complicated it is the more likely attempts to replace it wholesale are to end in disaster. That’s not to say it’s not worth trying sometimes, but is the current state of science so unhealthy as to justify the risk?
hey MM, hope this lands in the proper thread, indeed “science” is driven by the varied (often often changing) interests of the people involved I would guess the emphasis there is against the trends in politics/economics to defund basic research, don’t see any reason to think that the infrastructures of research science are going to be repaired when our very roads and the rest are crumbling under us, the truth is big science (not hacking little bits into sell-able apps like they do in silicon valley) requires something of the scale-resources that modern states once afforded, part of all the apocalyptic AI stories and all remain in the realm of scifi and why real world news stories like how we can’t manage to fund research to counter superbugs and the like are the real doom machines.
Lol – sorry to have gone so far off-topic.
MM, Great Names, as per my arbitrary distinction, are either long-term or prolific posters. You qualify from this perspective ;).
“forwarding knowledge for the sake of forwarding knowledge is the actual goal of science”
I don’t know that science is the sort of thing that can have goals, unless the goal of science is somehow the vector sum of the goals of the individuals (and even that ignores the question of whether individuals can have the intentionality needed to have goals) involved in science.
Well, I’m pretty vapid, all things considered.
But my statement there was as close as I could think to describe what the scientific method does and the – sometimes – positive dividends that it yields, insofar as “science [isn’t] the sort of thing that can have goals.”
Likely someone else can better generalize what I’m trying to elucidate :).
If the legacy systems science uses for funding, peer review, experiment duplication etc. are to be replaced all the questions that Wikipedia article discusses have to be addressed. I would guess that in general the older and more entrenched a legacy system is and the more complicated it is the more likely attempts to replace it wholesale are to end in disaster. That’s not to say it’s not worth trying sometimes, but is the current state of science so unhealthy as to justify the risk?
My answer is yes. And, under the purview of complex systems research I highlighted above to dmf, these would count as constituting, in part, the “starting conditions” you need to address when you as a researching agent start interacting with the system you’re studying, however you choose distinguish and isolate its parts, while acknowledging its changing place within a “panarchy.”
dmf:
the truth is big science (not hacking little bits into sell-able apps like they do in silicon valley) requires something of the scale-resources that modern states once afforded, part of all the apocalyptic AI stories and all remain in the realm of scifi and why real world news stories like how we can’t manage to fund research to counter superbugs and the like are the real doom machines.
As I said, I’m not good with arguments that imply inaction as a choice we should make collectively. We’re in the game already, too late to opt out.
But if true, then we’re doomed another Darker Dark Ages (and really, at this point in our story, I think this would just suggest that knowledge stratification becomes even more disparate than it is now and some elite would always still engage with these issues, albeit with none of the hand-wringing regarding ethics during the Darker Dark Age).
Anyhow, just thoughts for the pyre, not terribly attached ;).
hey MH, I’m not so interested in arguments along these lines as analysis of what’s going on or not, if folks have viable alternatives to current trends I’m a fan of tinkering just think the proof is in the doing or not.
The mayor of my city fell in love with public-private partnerships when he first took office, but has backed off them because the private corporations were receiving most of the benefits. How have such partnerships worked in basic science. I’ve heard that they work well between (for example) universities and pharmaceutical companies for little bits hacked into sellable apps. Is there any history with public-private partnerships in basic science and if so how have they worked out?
MM, the big pharma crowd (and their ilk) aren’t very interested/invested in basic research, sadly lots of very bad private/public interactions on the records not unlike what your govt found including massive frauds.
Is this what you see?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2096542-evolutionary-forces-are-causing-a-boom-in-bad-science/
nah, not a fan of that sort of analysis, there are certainly market factors at work in terms of perverse incentives/disincentives at work, too many academic positions/schools, too much publish or perish pressure, too little money for research at the same time as much more pressure to acquire funding, and so on, plus the whole academic publishing world is off the rails, more to it than that but that’s the basics.
http://douglaslain.net/zero-squared-77-quitting-bizarre-writing/
Still no fart gag. Disappointed! 😉
A fabulous review from Markus – will do all I can to spread it around the mediascape. I can’t wait to take up the road to Golgotterath sometime later this year when the tome is published in the UK.
Thanks also for the shout for “Ocean Terminus”. I’m hoping to throw out another horrible miniature along these lines with a view to presenting it in Toronto this November. So may see you there 😉
Oh, I think SMBC has graph plotted the devils chirp http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/history-books
Hey Scott, I thought this was right up your alley.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-hackers-could-get-inside-your-head-with-brain-malware
good bmovie scifi plot but as for the engineering…
So I just finished the book, and I had to mention how awesome it was. I have to remember not to read these books publicly both because people catching snippets of it over my shoulder seem to get upset and because I often find myself cursing loudly in public and crying (I cry pretty easily though, so much so I no longer go to movie theaters).
I’m begging for the apocalypse over here. I need to know how this all ends.
Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis – Ray Brassier
“we’re not told what conditions these regulative ideals could be secured against empirical refutation”
you don’t say!