Derrida as Neurophenomenologist
by rsbakker
For the longest time I thought that unravelling the paradoxical nature of the now, understanding how it could be at once the same now and yet a different now entirely, was the key to resolving the problem of meaning and experience. The reason for this turned on my early philosophical love affair with Jacques Derrida, the famed French post-structuralist philosopher, who was very fond of writing passages such this tidbit from “Differance”:
An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization). And it is this constitution of the present, as an ‘originary’ and irreducibly nonsimple (and therefore, stricto sensu nonoriginary) synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protentions (to reproduce analogically and provisionally a phenomenological and transcendental language that soon will reveal itself to be inadequate), that I propose to call archi-writing, archi-traces, or differance. Which (is) (simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization. Margins of Philosophy, 13
One of the big problems faced by phenomenology has to do with time. The problem in a nutshell is that any phenomena attended to is a present phenomena, and as such dependent upon absent enormities—namely the past and the future. The phenomenologist suffers from what is sometimes referred to as a ‘keyhole problem,’ the question of whether the information available—‘experience’—warrants the kinds of claims phenomenologists are prone to make about the truth of experience. Does the so-called ‘phenomenological attitude’ possess the access phenomenology needs to ground its analyses? How could they given so slight a keyhole as the present? Phenomenologists typically respond to the problem by invoking horizons, the idea that nonpresent contextual enormities nevertheless remain experientially accessible—present—as implicit features of the phenomenon at issue. You could argue that horizons scaffold the whole of reportable experience, insofar as so little, if anything, is available to us in our entirety at any given moment. We see and experience coffee cups, not perspectival slices of coffee cups. So in Husserl’s analysis of ‘time-consciousness,’ for instance, the past and future become intrinsic components of our experience of temporality as ‘retention’ and ‘protention.’ Even though absent, they nevertheless decisively structure phenomena. As such, they constitute important domains of phenomenological investigation in their own right.
From the standpoint of the keyhole problem, however, this answer simply doubles down on the initial question. Our experience of coffee cups is one thing, after all, and our experience of ourselves is quite another. How do we know we possess the information required to credibly theorize—make explicit—our implicit experience of the past as retention, say? After-all, as Derrida says, retention is always present retention. There are, as he famously argues, two pasts, the one experienced, and the one outrunning the very possibility of experience (as its condition of possibility). Our experience of the present does not arise ‘from nowhere,’ nor does it arise in our present experience of the past, since that experience is also present. Thus what he calls the ‘trace,’ which might be understood as a ‘meta-horizon,’ or a ‘super-implicit,’ the absent enormity responsible for horizons that seem to shape content. The apparently sufficient, unitary structure of present experience contains a structurally occluded origin, a difference making difference, that can in no way appear within experience.
One way to put Derrida’s point is that there is always some occluded context, always some integral part of the background, driving phenomenology. From an Anglo-American, pragmatic viewpoint, his point is obvious, yet abstrusely and extravagantly made: Nothing is given, least of all meaning and experience. What Derrida is doing, however, is making this point within the phenomenological idiom, ‘reproducing’ it, as he says in the quote. The phenomenology itself reveals its discursive impossibility. His argument is ontological, not epistemic, and so requires speculative commitments regarding what is, rather than critical commitments regarding what can be known. Derrida is providing what might be called a ‘hyper-phenomenology,’ or even better, what David Roden terms dark phenomenology, showing how the apparently originary, self-sustaining, character of experience is a product of its derivative nature. The keyhole of the phenomenological attitude only appears theoretically decisive, discursively sufficient, because experience possesses horizons without a far side, meta-horizons—limits that cannot appear as such, and so appears otherwise, as something unlimited. Apodictic.
But since Derrida, like the phenomenologist, has only the self-same keyhole, he does what humans always do in conditions of radical low-dimensionality: he confuses the extent of his ignorance for a new and special kind of principle. Even worse, his theory of meaning is a semantic one: as an intentionalist philosopher, he works with all the unexplained explainers, all the classic theoretical posits, handed down by the philosophical tradition. And like most intentionalists, he doesn’t think there’s anyway to escape those posits save by going through them. The deflecting, deferring, displacing outside, for Derrida, cannot appear inside as something ‘outer.’ Representation continually seals us in, relegating evidence of ‘differance’ to indirect observations of the kinds of semantic deformations that only it seems to explain, to the actual work of theoretical interpretation.
Now I’m sure this sounds like hokum to most souls reading this post, something artifactual. It should. Despite all my years as a Derridean, I now think of it as a discursive blight, something far more often used to avoid asking hard questions of the tradition than to pose them. But there is a kernel of neurophenomenological truth in his position. As I’ve argued in greater detail elsewhere, Derrida and deconstruction can be seen as an attempt to theorize the significance of source neglect in philosophical reflection generally, and phenomenology more specifically.
So far as ‘horizons’ belong to experience, they presuppose the availability of information required to behave in a manner sensitive to the recent past. So far as experience is ecological, we can suppose the information rendered will be geared to the solution of ancestral problem ecologies. We can suppose, in other words, that horizons are ecological, that the information rendered will be adequate to the problem-solving needs of our evolutionary ancestors. Now consider the mass-industrial character of the cognitive sciences, the sheer amount of resources, toil, and ingenuity dedicated to solving our own nature. This should convey a sense of the technical challenges any CNS faces attempting to cognize its own nature, and the reason why our keyhole has to be radically heuristic, a fractionate bundle of glimpses, each peering off in different directions to different purposes. The myriad problems this fact poses can be distilled into a single question: How much of the information rendered should we presume warrants theoretical generalizations regarding the nature of meaning and experience? This is the question upon which the whole of traditional philosophy presently teeters.
What renders the situation so dire is the inevitability of keyhole neglect, systematic insensitivity to the radically heuristic nature of the systems employed by philosophical reflection. Think of darkness, which like pastness, lays out the limits of experience in experience as a ‘horizon.’ To say we suffer keyhole neglect is to say our experience of cognition lacks horizons, that we are doomed to confuse what little we see for everything there is. In the absence of darkness (or any other experiential marker of loss or impediment), unrestricted visibility is the automatic assumption. Short sensitivity to information cuing insufficiency, sufficiency is the default. What Heidegger and the continental tradition calls the ‘Metaphysics of Presence’ can be seen as an attempt to tackle the problems posed by sufficiency in intentional terms. And likewise, Derrida’s purported oblique curative to the apparent inevitability of running afoul the Metaphysics of Presence can be seen as a way of understanding the ‘sufficiency effects’ plaguing philosophical reflection in intentional terms.
The human brain suffers medial neglect, the congenital inability to track its own high-dimensional (material) processes. This means the human brain is insensitive to its own irreflexive materiality as such, and so presumes no such irreflexive materiality underwrites its own operations—even though, as anyone who has spent a great deal of time in stroke recovery wards can tell you, everything turns upon them. What we call ‘philosophical reflection’ is simply an artifact of this ecological limitation, a brain attempting to solve its nature with tools adapted to solve absent any information regarding that nature. Differance, trace, spacing: these are the ways Derrida theorizes the inevitability of irreflexive contingency from the far side of default sufficiency. I read Derrida as tracking the material shadow of thought via semantic terms. By occluding all antecedents, source neglect dooms reflection to the illusion of sufficiency when no such sufficiency exists. In this sense, positions like Derrida’s theory of meaning can be seen as impressionistic interpretations of what is a real biomechanical feature of consciousness. Attend to the metacognitive impression and meaning abides, and representation seems inescapable. The neuromechanical is occluded, so sourceless differentiation is all we seem to have, the magic of a now that is forever changing, yet miraculously abides.
I think your last paragraph sums up the problem that you are encountering, but not so much because that last paragraph is actually indicating some true thing of consciousness or the human brain; I think what you seem to be missing if that is indeed the case your expression of some sort of lack I suppose, it’s probably more properly found in a kind of over determination of discursive meaning. The keyhole problem without having to necessarily identify it was some sort of again essential classification of being, such as phenomenology, is that what is being missed is indeed found in the act of the identity searching to find its identity in another identity. This is what I call redundancy. No so far is I think that this problem is a problem I’m going to continue to fall into the void, I will continue to perpetually think that I’m finding something the end of which I find that I’ve missed it. The solution to the problem is to see that reality or some concept that I might have that equates reality with truth with all sorts of these kind of positive claimants of mind brain etc. is it self eighth functioning feature of consciousness, yet so far as I see this feature this function as indicating the totality of the functionality of the brain and/or consciousness I have therefore left that whole I haven’t countered and will always encounter some sort of gap in meaning. I would say that this is because real estimations are based in identity. It doesn’t mean that this is wrong or incorrect it merely means that that’s what it is that’s what it does, but further but that’s not all it does, and yet so far as I continue to rely upon this fundamental identity searching for identity of itself in another identity I will always find the same paradox. The reliance upon this method or this route that encapsulates everything that is possible within its state, and disregards or calls everything outside of such a state nothingness or contradiction or fallacy, is what I call Faith. So long as we proceed our analysis of the truth of reality within the state of faith that relies upon certain conditions of discourse with you sensually segregate the individual thinker from the rest of existence, we will always find some true optic out there in contradiction with the thinking subject the intersection of which finds a void or the phenomenologists keyhole problem.
The more effective way to understand the situation and not have a keyhole problem is to not over determine the meaning of terms that are informing one’s existence. Again this does not do gate some real analysis and in fact it is very similar to the non-philosophical idea of a unilateral duality.
And I might add so far is I promote this real method that falls into nothingness I am in acting what Sartre calls bad faith. And insomuch is a take the meaning of this bad faith as a necessary an inescapable condition of my being in existence there by have I and acted my bad faith as indeed faith which is to say a religious position.
Derrida was in the attempt to somehow reconcile or reduce this unilateral do Audi to some sort of fundamental one truth, and that is why the postmodern is really announced the end of philosophy and when we could call the end of history, it’s because despite themselves they could not bring themselves to admit that they were functioning within a theological paradigm called modernism.
Welcome to TPB. Since anything can be argued at these levels of generality, landzek, I take the primary advantage of my position to be abductive. I’m offering a way to naturalistically understand deconstruction–a natural explanation, one taking empirical positions across the board. Since non-naturalistic theories have never been able to command any decisive consensus, the question has to be why anyone should bother with them, especially now when humanity seems to running out of time. Rather than solve anything, they seem to do little more than add to the sum of disputation.
What is your theory of meaning, and how does it promise some escape from the perennial controversies of traditional intentional speculation?
Thanks I like your site I like the stuff you post.
One of the things I like to point out about a certain line of philosophical reasoning is that it tends to .2 as you say like the keyhole or a gap or contradiction or nihilism or nothingness; The idea is that from the observable facts extrapolated into some sort of rational thought upon the matter, that the situation itself is based on nothing or and leads to contradiction or and like is this Zizek might say evidences a kind of gap.
Now it seems to me that the what is observed arguing themselves, so to speak, into nothingness or an otherwise unassailable gap or distance between knowledge and the object in itself, had some sort of faulty premise within it. For Shirley I have this phone in front of me and the knowledge of this phone is not unavailable to me.
So the question for me is within these two argumentative paradigms, how is it possible that they are reconciled? And this is to say that am I arguing some sort of metaphysical truth of all reality? And in what way is this metaphysical truth that I’ve arrived at through a certain route of arguing actually true? For it seems to contradict what’s right in front of me.
The discrepancy involved here for me does not argue toward some ultimate truth that I can find through my faculty of reason. And the answer to this or what I’m really saying answers your question of why would anyone care about this particular reasoning type that I’ve given you. If there is some fundamental truth involved in the extremities of my ability to reason along a certain line such that I find that what is apparent in front of me is just an illusion then I must’ve thought to the fact that that line of reasoning is false, that the line of reasoning are used to come to that truth that metaphysical truth that’s supposed a truth that lay underneath my apparent reality.
The question is got to be why would someone continue to believe in something that is based on nothing? Or found to be nothing through a particular line of reasoning?
This seems to fly in the face of the very philosophy that supposedly has Led to this end. For then we have to ask can something arise from nothing?
The answer to your question then, of why would anyone want it or need it, is really the question upon why would someone continue to believe a line of reasoning that shows that the reasoning is based on nothing? Or at least a line of reasoning that shows a hole in its line of reason?
Analogous to math, it’s as if we’re doing a mechanical analysis of function, for which the output is always null, always empty set, meaning that the output of the function was nothing. Yet apparently the function was based on some sort of mechanical occurrence for which something is being produced. In are philosophical case we might see that the product that we are calling nothing is really not nothing.
So I say that the whole situation that you’re talking about is really based in faith. It answers the question of why would anyone care, because the reason why they wouldn’t care is because they are invested in their faith.
Argue with any born a grand Christian evangelist the various reasons why Christianity or Jesus or anything like that may not be true or even some sort of atheist position of why God might not exist. I can probably guarantee you that you will not convince them.
So it is with what I’m saying in the first comment to your blog: no one cares because they’re not able to care, they are only invested in the truth that they already believe in. They are not concerned with truth they are only concerned with faith.
Whew .. sorry so lengthy. 😝
I appreciate all this, but so long as claims remain unequal, one must persist. The fact remains that time is running short, and all the old ways of making sense devolve into intractable controversy and confusion. Thus do I plod into trackless lands, welcoming any who dare accompany me… [cue orchestra] 😉
Why is timw running short?
The collapse of the cognitive ecologies necessary for the reliable application of intentional cognition. The death of meaning.
Whoa. Thats cool. While I appreciate this sentiment and concern and actually probably tend to agree with what I think you mean, I would set this within a real Religious teleology. Because the idea itself relies upon a kind of linear history of which we are allowed to have access to. Such cognitive ecology’s depend upon this teleological extension but as well relies upon the idea of a giventype of ecology that somehow avoids its own designation as merely another ecology , One thatdiverges from religious appropriation of meaning.
Intentional cognition sure I could say that the theory of intentionality of phenomenalist intentionality is incorrect in it’s view, but I don’t think this equates to the death of meaning. I think it equates to the death of a particular way of meaning, what i call a ‘route’ of meaning.
So far is the incorrect part of intentionality is in as much as there is a Central human thinker. But I do not think that any type of manner of human thinking will this be able to dismiss itself from the fact that it is thinking. I call this real. Regardless of what definitions people want to place upon terms, human being will still be a human being that place itself at the central part of the operation of thought regardless of what definitional structures it wants to place upon that orientation in the world.
Derrudas Analysis such as you have on this post speaks to this situation.
Just because I may argue myself is ultimately determined by the objects of my appropriation does not mean that I do not operate as a human being or that my mind does not operate in a particular human fashion. The terms by which we identify ourseves in reality are fairly incidental, and only allow us to make particular commitments to real situations, but say nothing of some sort of actual truth of the universe except as we want to bracket these particular terms to be indicating true things over universe.
It concerns one orientation upon objects.
It’s no more religious than asserting environmental catastrophe. Cognition, like all other elements of life, requires that certain environments obtain. One of the reasons why I think I have successfully naturalized cognition is that it allows us to see how ecology and cognition fit together–as well as fall apart.
That sounds wonderfully cosmological. I am eager to understand it.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy your blog
… can you briefly explain how meaning will end or what the results of meaning dying will mean? Or do you have some posts of that you could refer me to?
Check out this.
Thanks Yes. I agree with that. But I feel the phenomenal intentional subject has not been revealed in its fullest truth. I feel it is still relying upon a bracketed secret. So while I see myself agreeing with your position and in general what it says, my project concerns illuminating those last corners of effect of consciousness that remain concealed for the purposes of supplying a new.
I figured as such with your blog and that’s why I think it was interesting to me and I’ve even reposted a couple of your past blogs essays as cases in points.
But as with everyone when I have a direct exchange there is a certain vetting process that has to occur to see if people really understand the issue at hand.
…oh. I agree with you with the caveat that such newnesses, such progress takes place in reality. 😝
… yes again. But I do not think this is a unified movement. I think it’s much like the movie the matrix. It’s kind of like brave New World. Asmovs foundation.
Humans will not become a Tom at times like robots. Human beings have to have freedom whether not we caught the idea of freedom or the believe of freedom or with the whatever of freedom human beings function within a contingency. It’s not going to be like metropolis. Reality will just be reality. We could say right now that were being controlled by whatever sort of mechanisms and scientific determinations of what the human being is. Every sort of theory is capable of arguing some sort of religious freedom and then on the other hand are you some sort of scientific determination. All of it is real so what what am I trying to do by saying that somehow there’s going to be some loss of intention or some loss of phenomena? All that means is that I’ve classified certain things within a different situation of terms. I’ve defined things differently. And the only way this has any meaning is to is to understand everything that you’re saying you’re kind of argument against by which something new and revolutionary is going to come about. Basically you have to agree that discourse is all there is or that discourse is reality or determines reality and some essential sense in order to say that now or sometime soon we’re going to come across some revolutionary way of being human. It’s this I disagree with.
I’m saying that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. The only way that you can disagree with a past situation philosophical or theoretical is to agree with it first and then come up with another closet all bracketing to there by cause something new.
What I’m saying is that if indeed there are new things being developed through this understanding that is capable of essentially dissecting or bisecting essential truths from other essential truths, then it does so upon the very framework that it is arguing against. And that this method that I’m describing to you right now is what reality is constututed. It doesn’t change. Has something changed in so much that I have to eat food to live? What exactly is mattering if I say that I need to circulate bebop we buy glutlery szhitzibger dfhdfg? The only thing that’s changing is the Thoery as the theory argues itself. It has little to do with that I have to come out and pick weeds, or I have to get the insects off the plants if I want to have enough vegetables to eat. The only way that there’s gonna be some revolutionary way of being human is purely in the extent that the theoreticians assert their dominance over the rest of humanity as if it’s some new revolutionary world. But this is what happens every moment we hear about it all the time. To say that oh now you know 10,000 years has gone by being human and so suddenly now we have come to the truth of being human and so now we have actually realized with Nietzsche saying, we’ve reached our E pitta me of human illusion such that now we can overcome what is human– that is just more theoretical Gobley goo of self-aggrandizement. But I again I say this happens all the time and this is what reality does.
Of course everyone is trying to make a living somehow have to justify themselves in reality whether they do it argumentatively or whether they do it by digging physical trenches, and so is group of people come together with their intuitive selves that have this great revolutionary idea that’s been inspired by some sort of manner of objectively coming across the universe of which they are part, and they get together and they are you there position against another argumentative position. It’s not exactly what you’re saying that you’re not doing? Isn’t that exactly what you’re saying that you’re trying to avoid?
And if you read my post you will see that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m saying that it’ll happen anyways, regardless of the argumentative postures.
To me this is the irony involved in the science.
So I don’t think that some revolution upon all humanity is going to come about. If you think about the way things are technologically robotically, One should realize that mechanics will only come together in a particular manner. We aren’t being geniuses or more intelligent or more educated or more understanding of our universe, I would say it’s better understood is that we are merely complying with what the universe is determining.
So I say there are two routes.
One that is ultimately scientific so far as it concerns philosophy and the being of human.
And there is the other route the regular real route where people argue and situate this and proclaim that have revolutions over this and die over this and exalt over that, have identities and attempt to a certain justify their identities over other identities.
I say in order for there to be a science we have to deal with facts and dismiss ourselves from his perpetual for nominalist argumentative situation. I say we have to stop justifying ourselves against this particular type of ontology that is a real ontology. For so long as we continue to justify ourselves against these argumentative positions we do nothing better than create The phenomenal reality.
In order for there to be a science as the type you were talking about I say there has to be a partition. There has to be actual science that allows the human being to be the object of science. It doesn’t matter whether I say it’s a revolutionary way or some new way because as soon as I say that I’ve pretty much told everyone else that it’s not new and then it’s not revolutionary except, and I emphasize, people have faith in the power of words to reveal transcendental revolutionary truth.
Science is not about that in my opinion
No, I fear I don’t buy into transcendental arguments in general, let alone when pitted against empirical possibilities. You do realize how brutal the track record is… Even those who believe in them can’t agree on their formulation!
The human need not be recognizable to the tradition–in fact, we should expect it will be anything but. Freedom could just be a button we use to distract each other from the important buttons. To assume otherwise on the basis of intuition is the near universal tendency, the conservative norm, that TPB is dedicated to overthrowing.
I disagree. I suppose what we are really arguing over is whether or not the terms identify some essentially true object or not. I think that’s why you’re saying don’t use phenomenology too seriously. I’m saying take it for what it’s really saying , do take it seriously and in fact that is what occurs regardless of what terms we want to use to describe the situation, the human being is a central thinker, even if we don’t call it human or thinking still be a fact is the same to argue over terms is just arguing over terms and suggesting that one person has a better ability to grasp true things then another person . Just because we might be thinking differently upon something are using different terms by which to think doesn’t change the fact that it’s the thinker that’s applying the thinking upon the rest of the world. Even if I have some sort of comprehension that it’s really the things out there that are determining my thoughts about them still we go back to what Der is talking about.
I would say a rose under any name is still a rose. I think you’re sticking with the postmodern tradition and saying that the terms are designating what that particular object is for anytime. I’m saying that this latter idea is real. And if there is any essential thing underneath the terms that ride over it and that Mark time or that Mark temporal movement then it is something that is not real it is something that an orientation upon real objects cannot appropriate.
Either traditional speculation on the human has some kind of special purchase on the human, or it will be swept away the way all other prescientfic discourses are swept away. Even I didn’t think the latter was the more likely answer, I would still pursue it simply because so very few in the humanities have. The fact is landzek, you need to offer me some compelling reason to take your idiom seriously, let alone the particular ways you’re inclined to use it. I’m a genuine meaning skeptic. I have no interest in tu quoques or reductios (because they inevitably beg the question). So you need to offer me something else…
I agree with you. Thats what i offer initially. But then to get any further it takes a certain common understanding; The way I have put it in another post, actually in the introduction to my book, is that the first order of business is that we have to see that indeed there is agreement. I’m not concerned about ontology because so long as we argue over ontological questions we will never get to the science of being human, because will be perpetually fending off arguments of what we mean by being and what we mean by human. In essence things will proceed as they always have individuals will make propositions people argue against them and people will continue to argue their positions, which is to say no one will ever agree what we mean by being let alone human.
I’m just saying that the phenomenological reduction is a fact. What Derrida is saying is a fact. deluze. Hiedegger .. whoever you want to say I see that they’re all quibbling over terms, but really talking about the same thing.
I say if we’re going to get to a science we need to stop bickering over ontological righteousness.
Science doesn’t argue it’s ontological basis, it takes facts and analyzes facts, does experiments with facts.
I agree with with probably everything you’re saying except inasmuch as it wants to argue some sort of ontological basis for the science that you are saying is true. I’m saying just as much but what I’m saying is the ontological argument has been made; just like you said about subjects. It’s already and has been and is made. The basis of human ontology is given it’s there the arguments have been made the facts are laid out before us let’s stop arguing over what they are let’s agree that those are the facts and then let’s get onto the science.
.. ‘traditional speculation’ is very loose term. But I would say that inasmuch as Heidegger Dasien shows a particular manner of coming upon and appropriating world, albeit into quite Hegalian Zizekian , that we should be careful of recourse and default into this type of being, One which somehow has a view that’s inclusive to its analysis upon world. We merely repeat modernity over and over by doing this; but indeed it is the real method, it the real way.
So I may of been hasty and saying that I agree with you insomuch as I’m not even sure what might be called for in such a science, and perhaps though I may agree with you with all the promises that you seem to put forth on your blogs, we may not be a green the direction or from which science gains in stature.
I will read more of your stuff and see.
… sorry I meant to disagree with you on the freedom thing mostly. Because even while I may argue or even somehow inside myself think that I am not free or that I’m determined by some external circumstances or that there some sort of eminent circumstance that is ultimately me behaving and occurring in the only way that is possible, still I function within a frame of freedom in any sort of deconstructionist analysis of what freedom might or might not be it still is that I have this ability to move and think about myself and whatever you want to call it such that I am a human being. Basically the terms that I use are not ‘me’they are my real identity, but ironically it is this me that is placing things or otherwise asserting my identity at every moment. It is more the identity that is appropriated within a context of freedom that can be challenged but that does not mean that it contains or otherwise is addressing everything that is true. It means that reality is a religious construct a theological promotion.
By the way I appreciate your openness to interact with me however limited you want to make it. My only purpose is to be proven wrong, and so every chance I get for someone to prove me wrong I jump at. Lol.
… hey but reading this statement again I can’t help but wonder if you feel there’s little time because we should be doing something so this death does not occur? Or maybe there’s a just a little time because you need to hurry up and make meaning as quickly as possible because The ability to make meaning in this way is going to stop soon?
Anyways… the point i am making sounds errily similar to the point of ur sentiment here. I ask into the point of contension, where most just take it as a given upon which to investigate.
I’m having trouble understanding the problem, let alone Derrida’s proposed solution. Compared to other enormous puzzles in the philosophy of mind, the “now” of the private subject seems trivial. As an extremely rough analogy- a TV, computer or brain can have varying content across time, but the object playing back, executing or experiencing (respectively) the content remains the same.
If I might give my two cents: for Derrida, to use an expression from ‘of grammatology’: there is no preface. Once we understand really what Spivak and Derrida is saying In this simple phrase, all the rest begins to fall in place. In a manner of speaking it is the difference between say having a present moment and having the thought that there is some sort of present moment but then also the added aggravation of attempting to bring the thought into the present moment. With D, he attempts to describe this situation through his ‘trace and erase’.
But the question with D really concerns how one might be able to remove themselves sufficiently enough from this real contingency of past and present so to be able to have an analysis such as the one he puts forth. D is not only describing the situation at hand but he is also at the same time arguing how he is able to have such a purchase on the situation; any fact he is describing the situation of a sort of eternal presentism while at the same time describing how that situation itself requires a kind of duel presence.
In the phenomenological tradition, the idea is that the now is the foundation of (a redefined) subjectivity, that we are fundamentally ‘here-now’ before anything else. It provides a way to theorize the first person not as a thing but as a frame within which things happen. This allows them to jump the human nature ship and analyze (they think) subjectivity itself.
But then the “now” becomes an issue because it’s a difficult thing to metacognize, given that the metacognition always takes place after the fact?
You would think that would tip them off they took a wrong turn somewhere.
Well, I bought into it big time! The thing you have to remember is that the ‘appearance as it appears’ bit seems to grant them metacognitive immunity: so long as you buy the claim that ‘lived life’ comes first, studiously overlook the distinction between that lived life and the philosophical description of it, then the keyhole doesn’t matter, since the question only pertains to what can be seen in the keyhole, and this lies at the ontological root of any other form of inquiry. David’s tack with ‘dark phenomenology’ exploits the possibility of experience beyond the keyhole edges of what can be conceptualized and therefore figure in a phenomenological account. My account falls out of a broader theory of heuristic cognition, one that counsels against taking the word ‘phenomenology’ too seriously, simply because the keyhole is already at work.
that sounds like philosophy justifying it self through a transcendental clause, I hate to say.
To say that lived life is living within the keyhole and not right not reflecting upon its own situation merely justifies a particular teleological philosophical theory of humanity. It basically did not raise the subject is trying to treat. It says that for example in as much as I am saying something to you right now you are basically just denying that I have any sort of intellectual capacity that’s equal to your own. As if I haven’t thought through these issues that you have thought through or somehow I’m thinking of them incorrectly and you have the correct way of thinking about them. I guarantee that I could address every point that you bring up and I could fully agree with it even while showing is fallacy and how it is totally incorrect. Hence if you read the post I just replied to you the need for a partition and two routes. Philosophically speaking you have never left any tradition you’re staying in the western colonialist Trista dish in of progress of manifest destiny as if God is speaking to you only and knows what’s best for the rest of humanity. I mean don’t get me wrong but you sound like a priest on a pulpit preaching religion over the entirety of the universe and God’s plan for it.
I mean I’m sorry but of course everyone of faith argues from what is apparent to them and just because there’s a bunch of people together that are agreeing what is apparent to them does not make it any more true than the people that are saying that Jesus is going to arrive next month and hear all the signs of Armageddon.
I think your analysis is gone three quarters of the way but I feel you were unwilling to really entertain the last quarter mile of the track.
given that the metacognition always takes place after the fact?
A fair bit of science has a ‘test it for yourself at home’ element to it – it can be tested by the layman.
So how does the layman test your scientific claim there, Jorge?
Don’t underestimate how non trivial the appearance of a now-frame is from a neurobiological standpoint. As Thomas Metzinger notes
“For physical individuals, absolute instantaneousness,
unfortunately, presents an impossibility. Of course, all physically realized processes
of information conduction and processing take time. For this reason, the information available
in the nervous system in a certain, very radical sense never is actual information: the
simple fact alone that the trans- and conduction velocities of different sensory modules
differ leads to the necessity of the system defining elementary ordering thresholds and
“windows of simultaneity” for itself. Within such windows of simultaneity it can, for
instance, integrate visual and haptic c information into a multimodal object representation—
an object that we can consciously see and feel at the same time.10 This simple insight is
the first one that possesses a genuinely philosophical flavor; the “sameness” and the temporality
in an expression like “at the same time” already refer to a phenomenal “now,” to
the way in which things appear to us. The “nowness” of the book in your hands is itself
an internally constructed kind of representational content; it is not actuality simpliciter,
but actuality as represented. Many empirical data show that our consciously experienced
present, in a specific and unambiguous sense, is a remembered present (I return to this
point at length in section 3.2.2).11 The phenomenal now is itself a representational construct,
a virtual presence. After one has discovered this point, one can for the first time
start to grasp the fact of what it means to say that phenomenal space is a virtual space; its
content is a possible reality.12
For me, this just sketches how hopeless the representational project is when it comes to these matters, a hopelessness that Metzinger keenly senses when it comes to the issue of subjective time in BNO. This constantly strands him with the task of tying together two different orders of being (first and third person, phenomenal and natural, etc.), an insoluble task. On my way of approaching there is only one order of being, nature, and multiple modes of processing that being, some of which are responsible for the kinds of things representationalists and phenomenologists say, as well as the deep intuition that we are stranded with two different orders of being.
It’s very parsimonious, and has the happy effect of cutting consciousness as it appears into something far less miraculous.
Reblogged this on synthetic zero.
bakker baiting
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2016/10/tim-crane-the-unity-of-unconsciousness/
Now is a good time for conducting fresh neurophenomenological experiments. If one has the liberty…
Food for thought…
http://realitysandwich.com/320716/what-neuroimaging-of-the-psychedelic-state-tells-us-about-the-mind-body-problem/
Interesting… I’ve never been in a drug induced trance, but I wonder about the ‘bandwidth’ requirements for a hallucination versus the those needed to manage normal waking life. Just as video recording of natural life requires more data than video of a cartoon, it’s possible that real life requires more neurological resources than hallucinations and therefore a hallucination that withdraws attention from reality causes a decrease in overall brain activity. To put it another way, the study relies on subject self-reports regarding the vividness of the drug experiences. I don’t see any reason why such self-reported vividness should reliably correlate with the neurological resources needed to support the hallucination. If this is an argument against physicalism it assumes that hallucinations require more neurological resources than reality. The fact that live action full motion video requires more network and computer resources than animation video suggests the opposite.
It’s kind of hard to say where reality ends and the hallucination begins on psilocybin. Something interesting is happening up there.
http://www.livescience.com/48502-magic-mushrooms-change-brain-networks.html
That smells absolutely blue to me. Thanks for the linkage Steve!
Your welcome Sir.
I expect it’s worse. We kind of have corrolary reasons to believe that negative affectivity accompanies chronic physiological stress loads. I am pretty sure stress hormones are generally higher in psychotics vs non psychotics. Psychotics are constantly being surprised by ‘oddballs’ being throw up by their own sensory motor activity. Catatonia might actually ameans of dialing down this constant state of surprise by dialing down the changes in sensory input which psychotic beliefs are an attempt to account for. I’d expect hallucination, especially chronic is an energetically inefficient regiion of the organism to be within.
Mind-blowing stuff
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/cosmic-clowning-stephen-hawkings-new-theory-of-everything-is-the-same-old-crap/
Dreaming the dream…
https://www.academia.edu/18427840/Denying_the_Global_Observer
This is very fascinating, even for a layman.
A bit of a conundrum to think about with a cup of tea.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/27/james-gleick-time-travel/
Happy pickings 🙂
Advice to heed.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-would-ai-cover-an-ai-conference/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-would-ai-cover-an-ai-conference/
Magic Time
“The deflecting, deferring, displacing outside, for Derrida, cannot appear inside as something ‘outer.’ Representation continually seals us in, relegating evidence of ‘differance’ to indirect observations of the kinds of semantic deformations that only it seems to explain, to the actual work of theoretical interpretation.”
So how is Derrida’s outside like Kellhus’s outside? There is a darkness that comes before and a darkness that comes after the keyhole, but we can’t see the darkness as darkness so we think of it as a special kind of light, apparently. One of the things I like about God as a philosophical posit is that God can be both outside and inside, so God bridges the gaps. God is eternal, so for God every instant is now. God is infinite, so for God everywhere is here. I could add examples but my point is that God solves all these philosophical problems, or more properly, condenses them into one problem, namely what is the nature of God. Of course it declares that problem unsolvable, but maybe it’s a fair trade.
So how is Derrida’s outside like Kellhus’s outside? Apparently neurology is the other outside. Our brains make our minds possible, but our minds can’t directly perceive the operation of our brains, so the brain is the mind’s outside. The operation of the brain is the darkness that comes before the mind. Neuroscience is the darkness that comes before philosophy.
So God and/or neuroscience is the darkness that comes before… which brings us to artificial intelligence as an attempt to unify neuroscience and God, and so make our darkness light.
That last bit came out more poetic than I intended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh%C3%B4ra
The one thing God cannot be, apparently, is finite, as ignorant and abject as those who cry out to him. Thus the genius of Jesus, who allows God to be forsaken by God.
In terms of Earwa, the closest analogue to Derrida’s outside that cannot appear as outside is the No-God… but nuff said.
The story of my bloody life! God is nothing but, as you note above, the MASTER BLACK BOX, whereas neuroscience represents the ‘glassing’ of that box via reverse-engineering, as opposed to AI, which attempts to glass the cognitive box via engineering.
When you put it that way, it really does start to feel like we’re living near the end of history.
ERROR: “human.intntnlty.NullPointerException: null”
What do you do after that? And we’re back to Nietzsche… funny how that happens.
I’m probably understanding words in different contexts…
I use a definition of “god” that is incompatible with the possibility of being “inside”. I define god as a kind of Laplace’s demon, and the necessary requirement for this concept is that it must stay outside the system the god refers to. If Laplace’s demon is included within the system it describes, the description doesn’t work anymore.
There is the idea, like Jesus, of God sealing itself within creation. But this works on the basis ALL limits apply. Jesus might represent God, but is a human being. He cannot breach the “fourth wall”.
I agree with the whole thing of darkness preceding conscious mind, representing the pattern of brain making the mind possible. As well as representing it with the idea of an description from outside opposing one from inside (we discussed this on the other blog(s) about downward causation recently).
…But why god?
In the books the example works because the god clearly represents a human concept and superstition, but in the context of the theory of the mind god is not present.
The master black box should be reality itself, not the brain.
Metzinger again waxing almost Derridean:
“Phenomenality is a property of a certain class of mental representata. Among other features,
this class of representata is characterized by the fact that it is being activated within
a certain time window (see, e.g., Metzinger 1995b, the references given there and section
3.2.2 of chapter 3). This time window always is larger than that of the underlying neuronal
processes, which, for instance, leads to the activation of a coherent phenomenal
object (e.g., the perceived book in your hands). In this elementary process of object formation,
as many empirical data show, a large portion of the fundamental processuality on
the physical level is being, as it were, “swallowed up” by the system. In other words, what
you subjectively experience as an integrated object possessing a transtemporal identity
(e.g., the book you are holding in your hand) is being constituted by an ongoing process,
which constitutes a stable, coherent content and, in doing so, systematically deletes its
own temporality. The illusion of substantiality arises only from the first-person perspective.
It is the persistent activity of an object emulator, which leads to the phenomenal experience
of a robust object. More about this later (for further details and references, see
Metzinger 1995b; Singer 2000).”
I remember shouting aloud when I first read this passage years ago!
Layman translation?
Does it mean the brain process takes a long time to create the experience of a single “frame”/window, and so this longer process is condensed into an undifferentiated whole that has no perception of how it came to be?
But I really cannot understand where the revelation or the original problem is. The brain works as a process, of course. Experience ALSO works as a process. The perception of time ALSO is a process, since time flows.
Where the hell is the problem that needs an explanation? Time itself is flowing, experience flows too, the brain is a process. So what? Where’s the contradiction?
If you drive a car with headlights on you see what’s ahead. The space you can see moves at the same speed of the car, so this flows too. Yet it’s still “stable” in the sense the illuminated area comes along with you. That area being defined by information that enter this perimeter set by the light. Information you then use.
I don’t understand the difference between Metzinger’s accurate description and the common description of experience as it feels.
Is my model too simplistic? The “past” is merely information that either passed under the spotlight or that we missed entirely (since reality at large transforms as time passes). The future is information is going to be in our spotlight, or that we’re going to miss. The present is what I’m currently paying attention to (and everything else I’m missing at any given time).
Yeah, it seems kind of like the thrill of learning an RPG system, turning ambiguities into concrete vectors and numbers. Particularly that ‘deletes its own temporarily’ bit. And is about as applicable to the situation as an RPG system is applicable to physics.
Regarding
“There is the idea, like Jesus, of God sealing itself within creation. But this works on the basis ALL limits apply. Jesus might represent God, but is a human being. He cannot breach the “fourth wall””.
As I’m sure you know, tens of thousands have been slain with the sword to settle the issue of whether the Son is of one substance with the Father or merely of like substance with the Father (insert smiley face here). We will have to come up with a clever name for your heresy… Laplacian, perhaps?
It seems to me that your conception of Jesus is more Muhammad. In fairness, Islam is conceptually simpler than Christianity in that God is Unitary. A triune divinity introduces theological complexities of the kind you describe. For that matter all that Mary Ever-Virgin stuff can seem a bit much. (Although in fairness Christianity had to make it clear that this was not just the usual Zeus raping a mortal woman and fathering a demigod kind of thing.)
A few posts ago we talked at some length about Whale mothers and what sorts of violations of mundane reality are acceptable in different fantasy and science fiction contexts. I think religions are like that too. I suspect that the kinds of things that make fantasy and science fiction tropes more or less popular are the same kinds of things that make religions more or less persuasive. For example every science fiction reader grants every science fiction author faster than light travel. One of the reasons for this is tradition. Another is that FTL is necessary to make it possible to tell certain kinds of stories at certain scales. A third is that most of us don’t understand relativity well enough to understand why FTL isn’t possible. (I don’t.) In the same way, most of us don’t have any sense of the philosophical quandaries that arise for a God who is both outside and inside the universe, and a God who is both outside and inside is necessary for the stories we want to tell using religion.
But this is not a theological debate, it’s scientific or philosophical.
So I’m less interested in religious accuracy and more about setting precise definitions so that we know how to properly frame the examples (religious ones in this case) we use in our own discourse.
Jesus is a contradictory example, that’s why I tried to impose more precise limits, even if not accurate. The aspect I was thinking is that he can perform miracles and that’s quite a big “fourth wall” breach. But the figure instead works only when human limits are imposed.
If Jesus is a human being born with very strong faith, then what separates Jesus from any other possible human being is that Jesus’ faith is *supernaturally* strong.
Yet as Scott said, he forsakes god. And that happens because in this case the fourth wall wasn’t breached: he was only human and didn’t have access to superhuman knowledge to maintain his faith.
I’m not interested in this whole frame of reference where god can be inside and outside because it’s purely metaphysics. It means this god has the power of interference with his creation, and so that the world isn’t purely deterministic or a closed system. So it’s just pure magic. There are no rules because it’s all arbitrary.
WHEREAS a construction like the one proposed in Kabbalah is A LOT more interesting and useful. Because it hypothesizes an external god that sets the closed system of reality into motion. After this system is jump-started the god loses all power of interference, he can only observe passively. This means this particular structure is COMPATIBLE with science (and compatible with hypothesis where reality is just a simulation), so it’s an useful tool to observe certain problems. This god is entirely external, and that’s the prerequisite for having the system closed and determined. But even in this case the god is present within the creation as well. Human beings are “fragments” of the god (Adam Kadmon), united in an idea of one substance with all of creation.
But again, this is an useful tool: the moment the god is trapped within the system he created, he ALSO is subject to all the system limits and occluded horizon. A piece of this god that becomes a human being (self-aware) is a human being with all the limits we know. So precisely coherent with scientific and naturalistic descriptions we give.
In this case Scott “fictional” or poetic elaboration has a certain sense: because we interpret a scientific system by giving it a certain interpretation. The “god” isn’t a metaphysical power, but truly represents the real concept of the third person perspective. THE OUTSIDE.
The outside = the foundational level of description of this reality (not just brains, but the basic description of what’s fundamental, whether it is particles, fields or whatever). The outside = the god = the unitary representation of whatever is foundational and that human beings cannot reach, since human beings are trapped in the first person perspective.
I sometimes use “insert smiley face here” to indicate that I’m joking. I have to do so because I prefer jokes that are not actually funny. My first remark to Scott (“How is Derrida’s outside…”) was more literary than philosophical or scientific, but literature, philosophy, theology and science are all story telling media to varying extents. I agree with your point that a God who is both inside and outside creation is logically incoherent. Interestingly, I think that it’s the same sort of logical incoherence that infects phenomenology. The claim that I can use my mind to perceive the operation of the brain that gives rise to my mind is analogous to the claim that God can be both immanent and transcendent. This suggests, at least to me, that Mary The Color Scientist Sitting In Her Chinese Room Imagining What It’s Like To Be A Bat stories are religious in nature. If we have to choose from two sets of logically incoherent stories I choose the set that produces the best music. (Insert smiley face here.)
Same as the discussion on Sean Carroll blog about downward causation, we CAN use different semantic levels.
What’s important is to not use them at the SAME time.
We just have to remember to use things contextually.
For example, god can be both inside and outside the system, but not at the same time, or at least not under the same rules (so if god is inside the god-like properties are lost).
If god is inside the system, then he’s subject to the system’s rules, if he’s outside then different rules apply (otherwise it’s just magic).
The same when we deal with first person and third person semantics. Both have their use, but not at the same time (hence the phenomenological perspective is also valid within its context).
(which is the foundation of why I say determinism is compatible with Free Will, but that’s another discussion)
‘Levels of explanation’ are bunk, on my view, a way to explain away incompatibilities between cognitive modes without explaining anything. Why is it that intentional cognition works in such-and-such contexts, but not others? If a theory can only answer this by appealing to ‘levels’ or ‘uses’ then it actually explains nothing. An adequate theory of knowledge has to be able to explain how and why the scope of effective applicability varies between cognitive modes, otherwise we’re stuck throwing darts in lightless rooms the same as always, using ‘levels’ and ‘uses’ to simply aim us in different directions of blindness.
http://www.academia.edu/28751381/dh_Surfing_Uncertainty_AJP_Sept_2016.pdf
Great review. Hutto is the man. He seems to suggest that he’s more anti-representationalist than Clark, but I’m not sure this is the case. Clark is more rhetorically committed to bridging the enactivist/representationalist divide than Hutto is, but his position on representation is pretty damn close to the one sketched by Hutto and Myin in RE.
yeah, we’ll have to see what Dan’s coming book includes:
“Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not.”
Bakker, After all this source and medial neglect do you think it is still possible, with the tools available innately in humans, to divine ‘best’, or an approximation of best use of our minds?
If I’m right then ‘best-talk’ simply has no universal application. It’s a low-grain, practical tool, largely dependent on prior agreement.
pragmatism…
I’m not sure I understand, I guess what I was wondering was, while we can’t know what exactly it is that our minds are doing because of medial neglect does that mean we can’t approximate a better/more preferable use of our minds with our natural available tools. I guess what I am saying can trial an error find good strategies for use of our minds, or are we really waiting for some external method to divine it for us. I knew the word ‘best’ was a poor choice it is why i put it in quotes, I wasn’t trying to imply there is a fixed ideal, I was just wondering if you believe if we can approximate preferable uses of our minds with medial neglect (maybe we can’t answer certain questions about our mind through reflection alone). It just seems like to me that kind of heuristic use of our mind is still possible and resembles a ‘horizon’.
Sorry. I misunderstood. We have evolved to optimize as best we can given the capacities and resources available–so in a sense we never stop attempting to do what you say. But that optimization process, no matter how dearly we want to drag it into intentional problem ecologies, lies outside reflection. Even when we meditate, use reflection to gradually attenuate brain function, the larger process lays outside ‘our power’ primarily because ‘we’ constitute the exercise of that power. Everyone is bound to have their own view on their own peculiar optimization process, likely favourable. But there’s certainly room for debate on relative merits.
Otherwise, I think mental language can be enormously useful, so long as we resist the temptation to string it into any kind of general theory of ‘mind.’
It could just feed into the always-already intensifying “audit-creep”. Think my heuristic appraisal is unfair? Call my medial neglect diagnosticitian… google emily pronin, I think her stuff comes to bear on what you are asking (in a way)
Absurdist,
I think you might want to look into the “You’re not so smart” books that Scott has linked a few times.
It’s even down there in the blogroll.
Bakker,I didn’t realize your sense of the neglect was so strong as to suggest we shouldn’t have a theory of mind (perhaps at least not yet?). I probably should know this, I’m just a distracted follower of your blog. I did though read your paper on time, and it was really brilliant, thanks. I have a lot more faith in meditation, though I do think there is a limit to it because of the ‘neglects’ we have.
Thanks Albieno I liked the blog it looks up my alley.
There’s no such thing as ‘mind,’ so what we need is a theory of ‘mind talk,’ which is what my position provides in spades. For what it’s worth, I’ve been told by several Buddhist meditators, at least, that this dovetails nicely with their understanding.
thomas metzginer speculates that what is evil is what more strongly violates an expectation held by an organism. this doesnt absolve the relativity problem since there is variance to neurobiological tolerances of negatively inflected :surprises: (i think this is kind of where bakker was coming from with changing the background frames in his story… how the surprisals of horror were morphed into that of laughter, which is another way of solving the problem!)
What I understand, and I don’t well; I really think what you say does dovetail with my understanding of Buddhism/meditation too. I guess I’m trying to get a sense what you think. I don’t know, I guess I find it strange that you don’t tie it in with meditation more often. Maybe I think too highly of it. I don’t know. Thanks for the clarification before, I really like what you have to say especially when you put it colloquially.
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