Real Systems
by rsbakker
THE ORDER WHICH IS THERE
Now I’ve never had any mentors; my path has been too idiosyncratic, for the better, since I think it’s the lack of institutional constraints that has allowed me to experiment the way I have. But if I were pressed to name any spiritual mentor, Daniel Dennett would be the first name to cross my lips—without the least hesitation. Nevertheless, I see the theoretical jewel of his project, the intentional stance, as the last gasp of what will one day, I think, count as one of humanity’s great confusions… and perhaps the final one to succumb to science.
A great many disagree, of course, and because I’ve been told so many times to go back to “Real Patterns” to discover the error of my ways, I’ve decided I would use it to make my critical case.
Defenders of Dennett (including Dennett himself) are so quick to cite “Real Patterns,” I think, because it represents his most sustained attempt to situate his position relative to his fellow philosophical travelers. At issue is the reality of ‘intentional states,’ and how the traditional insistence on some clear cut binary answer to this question—real/unreal—radically underestimates the ontological complexity charactering both everyday life and the sciences. What he proposes is “an intermediate doctrine” (29), a way of understanding intentional states as real patterns.
I have claimed that beliefs are best considered to be abstract objects rather like centers of gravity. Smith considers centers of gravity to be useful fictions while Dretske considers them to be useful (and hence?) real abstractions, and each takes his view to constitute a criticism of my position. The optimistic assessment of these opposite criticisms is that they cancel each other out; my analogy must have hit the nail on the head. The pessimistic assessment is that more needs to be said to convince philosophers that a mild and intermediate sort of realism is a positively attractive position, and not just the desperate dodge of ontological responsibility it has sometimes been taken to be. I have just such a case to present, a generalization and extension of my earlier attempts, via the concept of a pattern. My aim on this occasion is not so much to prove that my intermediate doctrine about the reality of psychologcal states is right, but just that it is quite possibly right, because a parallel doctrine is demonstrably right about some simpler cases. 29
So what does he mean by ‘real patterns’? Dennett begins by considering a diagram with six rows of five black boxes each characterized by varying degrees of noise, so extreme in some cases as completely obscure the boxes. He then, following the grain of his characteristic genius, provides a battery of different ways these series might find themselves used.
This crass way of putting things-in terms of betting and getting rich-is simply a vivid way of drawing attention to a real, and far from crass, trade-off that is ubiquitous in nature, and hence in folk psychology. Would we prefer an extremely compact pattern description with a high noise ratio or a less compact pattern description with a lower noise ratio? Our decision may depend on how swiftly and reliably we can discern the simple pattern, how dangerous errors are, how much of our resources we can afford to allocate to detection and calculation. These “design decisions” are typically not left to us to make by individual and deliberate choices; they are incorporated into the design of our sense organs by genetic evolution, and into our culture by cultural evolution. The product of this design evolution process is what Wilfrid Sellars calls our manifest image, and it is composed of folk physics, folk psychology, and the other pattern-making perspectives we have on the buzzing blooming confusion that bombards us with data. The ontology generated by the manifest image has thus a deeply pragmatic source. 36
The moral is straightforward: the kinds of patterns that data sets yield are both perspectival and pragmatic. In each case, the pattern recognized is quite real, but bound upon some potentially idiosyncratic perspective possessing some potentially idiosyncratic needs.
He then takes this moral to Conway’s Game of Life, a computer program where cells in a grid are switched on or off in successive turns depending on the number of adjacent cells switched on. The marvelous thing about this program lies in the kinds of dynamic complexities arising from this simple template and single rule, subsystems persisting from turn to turn, encountering other subsystems with predictable results. Despite the determinism of this system, patterns emerge that only the design stance seems to adequately capture, a level possessing “it’s own language, a transparent foreshortening of the tedious descriptions one could give at the physical level” (39).
For Dennett, the fact that one can successfully predict via the design stance clearly demonstrates that it’s picking out real patterns somehow. He asks us to imagine transforming the Game into a supersystem played out on a screen miles wide and using the patterns picked out to design a Turing Machine playing chess against itself. Here, Dennett argues, the determinacy of the microphysical picture is either intractable or impracticable, yet we need only take up a chess stance or a computational stance to make, from a naive perspective, stunning predictions as to what will happen next.
And this is of course as true of life life as it is the Game of Life: “Predicting that someone will duck if you throw a brick at him is easy from the folk-psychological stance; it is and will always be intractable if you have to trace the photons from brick to eyeball, the neurotransmitters from optic nerve to motor nerve, and so forth” (42). His supersized Game of Life, in other words, makes plain the power and the limitations of heuristic cognition.
This brings him to his stated aim of clarifying his position vis a vis his confreres and Fodor. As he points out, everyone agrees there’s some kind of underlying “order which is there,” as Anscombe puts it in Intention. The million dollar question, of course, is what this order amounts to:
Fodor and others have claimed that an interior language of thought is the best explanation of the hard edges visible in “propositional attitude psychology.” Churchland and I have offered an alternative explanation of these edges… The process that produces the data of folk psychology, we claim, is one in which the multidimensional complexities of the underlying processes are projected through linguistic behavior, which creates an appearance of definiteness and precision, thanks to the discreteness of words. 44-45
So for traditional realists, like Fodor, the structure beliefs evince in reflection and discourse expresses the structure beliefs must possess in the head. For Dennett, on the other hand, the structure beliefs evince in reflection and discourse expresses, among other things, the structure of reflection and discourse. How could it be otherwise, he asks, given the ‘stupendous scale of compression’ (42) involved?
As Haugeland points out in “Pattern and Being,” this saddles Dennett’s account of patterns with a pretty significant ambiguity: if the patterns characteristic of intentional states express the structure of reflection and discourse, then the ‘order which is there’ must be here as well. Of course, this much is implicit in Dennett’s preamble: the salience of certain patterns depends on the perspective we possess on them. But even though this implicit ‘here-there holism’ becomes all but explicit when Dennett turns to Radical Translation and the distinction between his and Davidson’s views, his emphasis nevertheless remains on the order out there. As he writes:
Davidson and I both like Churchland’s alternative idea of propositional-attitude statements as indirect “measurements” of a reality diffused in the behavioral dispositions of the brain (and body). We think beliefs are quite real enough to call real just so long as belief talk measures these complex behavior-disposing organs as predictively as it does. 45-46
Rhetorically (even diagrammatically if one takes Dennett’s illustrations into account), the emphasis is on the order there, while here is merely implied as a kind of enabling condition. Call this the ‘epistemic-ontological ambiguity’ (EOA). On the one hand, it seems to make eminent sense to speak of patterns visible only from certain perspectives and to construe them as something there, independent of any perspective we might take on them. But on the other hand, it seems to make jolly good sense to speak of patterns visible only from certain perspectives and to construe them as around here, as something entirely dependent on the perspective we find ourselves taking. Because of this, it seems pretty fair to ask Dennett which kind of pattern he has in mind here. To speak of beliefs as dispositions diffused in the brain seems to pretty clearly imply the first. To speak of beliefs as low dimensional, communicative projections, on the other hand, seems to clearly imply the latter.
Why this ambiguity? Do the patterns underwriting belief obtain in individual believers, dispositionally diffused as he says, or do they obtain in the communicative conjunction of witnesses and believers? Dennett promised to give us ‘parallel examples’ warranting his ‘intermediate realism,’ but by simply asking the whereabouts of the patterns, whether we will find them primarily out there as opposed to around here, we quickly realize his examples merely recapitulate the issue they were supposed to resolve.
THE ORDER AROUND HERE
Welcome to crash space. If I’m right then you presently find yourself strolling through a cognitive illusion generated by the application of heuristic capacities outside their effective problem ecology.
Think of how curious the EOA is. The familiarity of it should be nothing short of gobsmacking: here, once again we find ourselves stymied by the same old dichotomies: here versus there, inside versus outside, knowing versus known. Here, once again we find ourselves trapped in the orbit of the great blindspot that still, after thousands of years, stumps the wise of the world.
What the hell could be going on?
Think of the challenge facing our ancestors attempting cognize their environmental relationships for the purposes of communication and deliberate problem-solving. The industrial scale of our ongoing attempt to understand as much demonstrates the intractability of that relationship. Apart from our brute causal interactions, our ability to cognize our cognitive relationships is source insensitive through and through. When a brick is thrown at us, “the photons from brick to eyeball, the neurotransmitters from optic nerve to motor nerve, and so forth” (42) all go without saying. In other words, the whole system enabling cognition of the brick throwing is neglected, and only information relevant to ancestral problem-solving—in this case, brick throwing—finds its way to conscious broadcast.
In ancestral cognitive ecologies, our high-dimensional (physical) continuity with nature mattered as much as it matters now, but it quite simply did not exist for them. They belonged to any number of natural circuits across any number of scales, and all they had to go on was the information that mattered (disposed them to repeat and optimize behaviours) given the resources they possessed. Just as Dennett argues, human cognition is heuristic through and through. We have no way of cognizing our position within any number of the superordinate systems science has revealed in nature, so we have to make do with hacks, subsystems allowing us to communicate and troubleshoot our relation to the environment while remaining almost entirely blind to it. About talk belongs to just such a subsystem, a kluge communicating and troubleshooting our relation to our environments absent cognition of our position in larger systems. As I like to say, we’re natural in such a way as to be incapable of cognizing ourselves as natural.
About talk facilitates cognition and communication of our worldly relation absent any access to the physical details of that relation. And as it turns out, we are that occluded relation’s most complicated component—we are the primary thing neglected in applications of about talk. As the thing most neglected, we are the thing most presumed, the invariant background guaranteeing the reliability of about talk (this is why homuncular arguments are so empty). This combination of cognitive insensitivity to and functional dependence upon the machinations of cognition (what I sometimes refer to as medial neglect) suggests that about talk would be ideally suited to communicating and troubleshooting functionally independent systems, processes generally insensitive to our attempts to cognize them. This is because the details of cognition make no difference to the details cognized: the automatic distinction about talk poses between cognizing system and the system cognized poses no impediment to understanding functionally independent systems. As a result, we should expect about talk to be relatively unproblematic when it comes to communicating and troubleshooting things ‘out there.’
Conversely, we should expect about talk to generate problems when it comes to communicating and troubleshooting functionally dependent systems, processes somehow sensitive to our attempts to cognize them. Consider ‘observer effects,’ the problem researchers themselves pose when their presence or their tools/techniques interfere with the process they are attempting to study. Given medial neglect, the researchers themselves always constitute a black box. In the case of systems functionally sensitive to the activity of cognition, as is often the case in psychology and particle physics, understanding the system requires we somehow obviate our impact on the system. As the interactive, behavioural components of cognition show, we are in fact quite good (though far from perfect) at inserting and subtracting our interventions in processes. But since we remain a black box, since our position in the superordinate systems formed by our investigations remains occluded, our inability to extricate ourselves, to gerrymander functional independence, say, undermines cognition.
Even if we necessarily neglect our positions in superordinate systems, we need some way of managing the resulting vulnerabilities, to appreciate that patterns may be artifacts of our position. This suggests one reason, at least, for the affinity of mechanical cognition and ‘reality.’ The more our black box functions impact the system to be cognized, the less cognizable that system becomes in source sensitive terms. We become an inescapable source of noise. Thus our intuitive appreciation of the need for ‘perspective,’ to ‘rise above the fray’: The degree to which a cognitive mode preserves (via gerrymandering if not outright passivity) the functional independence of a system is the degree to which that cognitive mode enables reliable source sensitive cognition is the degree to which about talk can be effectively applied.
The deeper our entanglements, on the other hand, the more we need to rely on source insensitive modes of cognition to cognize target systems. Even if our impact renders the isolation of source signals impossible, our entanglement remains nonetheless systematic, meaning that any number of cues correlated in any number of ways to the target system can be isolated (which is really all ‘radical translation’ amounts to). Given that metacognition is functionally entangled by definition, it becomes easy to see why the theoretical question of cognition causes about talk to crash the spectacular ways it does: our ability to neglect the machinations of cognition (the ‘order which is here’) is a boundary condition for the effective application of ‘orders which are there’—or seeing things as real. Systems adapted to work around the intractability of our cognitive nature find themselves compulsively applied to the problem of our cognitive nature. We end up creating a bestiary of sourceless things, things that, thanks to the misapplication of the aboutness heuristic, have to belong to some ‘order out there,’ and yet cannot be sourced like anything else out there… as if they were unreal.
The question of reality cues the application of about talk, our source insensitive means of communicating and troubleshooting our cognitive relation to the world. For our ancient ancestors, who lacked the means to distinguish between source sensitive and source insensitive modes of cognition, asking, ‘Are beliefs real?’ would have sounded insane. HNT, in fact, provides a straightforward explanation for what might be called our ‘default dogmatism,’ our reflex for naive realism: not only do we lack any sensitivity to the mechanics of cognition, we lack any sensitivity to this insensitivity. This generates the persistent illusion of sufficiency, the assumption (regularly observed in different psychological phenomena) that the information provided is all the information there is.
Cognition of cognitive insufficiency always requires more resources, more information. Sufficiency is the default. This is what makes the novel application of some potentially ‘good trick,’ as Dennett would say, such tricky business. Consider philosophy. At some point, human culture acquired the trick of recruiting existing metacognitive capacities to explain the visible in terms of the invisible in unprecedented (theoretical) ways. Since those metacognitive capacities are radically heuristic, specialized consumers of select information, we can suppose retasking those capacities to solve novel problems—as philosophers do when they, for instance, ‘ponder the nature of knowledge’—would run afoul some pretty profound problems. Even if those specialized metacognitive consumers possessed the capacity to signal cognitive insufficiency, we can be certain the insufficiency flagged would be relative to some adaptive problem-ecology. Blind to the heuristic structure of cognition, the first philosophers took the sufficiency of their applications for granted, much as very many do now, despite the millennia of prior failure.
Philosophy inherited our cognitive innocence and transformed it, I would argue, into a morass of competing cognitive fantasies. But if it failed to grasp the heuristic nature of much cognition, it did allow, as if by delayed exposure, a wide variety of distinctions to blacken the photographic plate of philosophical reflection—that between is and ought, fact and value, among them. The question, ‘Are beliefs real?’ became more a bona fide challenge than a declaration of insanity. Given insensitivity to the source insensitive nature of belief talk, however, the nature of the problem entirely escaped them. Since the question of reality cues the application of about talk, source insensitive modes of cognition struck them as the only game in town. Merely posing the question springs the trap (for as Dennett says, selecting cues is “typically not left to us to make by individual and deliberate choices” (36)). And so they found themselves attempting to solve the hidden nature of cognition via the application of devices adapted to ignore hidden natures.
Dennett runs into the epistemic-ontological ambiguity because the question of the reality of intentional states cues the about heuristic out of school, cedes the debate to systems dedicated to gerrymandering solutions absent high-dimensional information regarding our cognitive predicament—our position within superordinate systems. Either beliefs are out there, real, or they’re in here, merely, an enabling figment of some kind. And as it turns out, IST is entirely amenable to this misapplication, in that ‘taking the intentional stance’ involves cuing the about heuristic, thus neglecting our high-dimensional cognitive predicament. On Dennett’s view, recall, an intentional system is any system that can be predicted/explained/manipulated via the intentional stance. Though the hidden patterns can only be recognized from the proper perspective, they are there nonetheless, enough, Dennett thinks, to concede them reality as intentional systems.
Heuristic Neglect Theory allows us to see how this amounts to mistaking a CPU for a PC. On HNT, the trick is to never let the superordinate systems enabling and necessitating intentional cognition out of view. Recall the example of the gaze heuristic from my prior post, how fielders essentially insert—functionally entangle—themselves into the pop fly system to let the ball itself guide them in. The same applies to beliefs. When your tech repairs your computer, you have no access to her personal history, the way thousands of hours have knapped her trouble-shooting capacities, and even less access to her evolutionary history, the way continual exposure to problematic environments has sculpted her biological problem-solving capacities. You have no access, in other words, to the vast systems of quite natural relata enabling her repair. The source sensitive story is unavailable, so you call her ‘knowledgeable’ instead; you presume she possesses something—a fetish, in effect—possessing the sourceless efficacy explaining her almost miraculous ability to make your PC run: a mass of true beliefs (representations), regarding personal computer repair. You opt for a source insensitive means that correlates with her capacities well enough to neglect the high-dimensional facts—the natural and personal histories—underwriting her ability.
So then where does the ‘real pattern’ gainsaying the reality of belief lie? The realist would say in the tech herself. This is certainly what our (heuristic) intuitions tell us in the first instance. But as we saw above, squaring sourceless entities in a world where most everything has a source is no easy task. The instrumentalist would say in your practices. This certainly lets us explain away some of the peculiarities crashing our realist intuitions, but at the cost of other, equally perplexing problems (this is crash space, after all). As one might expect, substituting the use heuristic for the about heuristic merely passes the hot potato of source insensitivity. ‘Pragmatic functions’ are no less difficult to square with the high-dimensional than beliefs.
But it should be clear by now that the simple act of pairing beliefs with patterns amounts to jumping the same ancient shark. The question, ‘Are beliefs real?’ was a no-brainer for our preliterate ancestors simply because they lived in a seamless shallow information cognitive ecology. Outside their local physics, the sources of things eluded them altogether. ‘Of course beliefs are real!’ The question was a challenge for our philosophical ancestors because they lived in a fractured shallow information ecology. They could see enough between the cracks to appreciate the potential extent and troubling implications of mechanical cognition, it’s penchant to crash our shallow (ancestral) intuitions. ‘It has to be real!’
With Dennett, entire expanses of our shallow information ecology have been laid low and we get, ‘It’s as real as it needs to be.’ He understands the power of the about heuristic, how ‘order out there’ thinking effects any number of communicative solutions—thus his rebuttal of Rorty. He understands, likewise, the power of the use heuristic, how ‘order around here’ thinking effects any number of communicative solutions—thus his rebuttal of Fodor. And most importantly, he understands the error of assuming the universal applicability of either. And so he concludes:
Now, once again, is the view I am defending here a sort of instrumentalism or a sort of realism? I think that the view itself is clearer than either of the labels, so I shall leave that question to anyone who stills find [sic] illumination in them. 51
What he doesn’t understand is how it all fits together—and how could he, when IST strands him with an intentional theorization of intentional cognition, a homuncular or black box understanding of our contemporary cognitive predicament? This is why “Real Patterns” both begins and ends with EOA, why we are no closer to understanding why such ambiguity obtains at all. How are we supposed to understand how his position falls between the ‘ontological dichotomy’ of realism and instrumentalism when we have no account of this dichotomy in the first place? Why the peculiar ‘bi-stable’ structure? Why the incompatibility between them? How can the same subject matter evince both? Why does each seem to inferentially beg the other?
THE ORDER
The fact is, Dennett was entirely right to eschew outright realism or outright instrumentalism. This hunch of his, like so many others, was downright prescient. But the intentional stance only allows him to swap between perspectives. As a one-time adherent I know first-hand the theoretical versatility IST provides, but the problem is that explanation is what is required here.
HNT argues that simply interrogating the high-dimensional reality of belief, the degree to which it exists out there, covers over the very real system—the cognitive ecology—explaining the nature of belief talk. Once again, our ancestors needed some way of communicating their cognitive relations absent source-sensitive information regarding those relations. The homunculus is a black box precisely because it cannot source its own functions, merely track their consequences. The peculiar ‘here dim’ versus ‘there bright’ character of naive ontological or dogmatic cognition is a function of medial neglect, our gross insensitivity to the structure and dynamics of our cognitive capacities. Epistemic or instrumental cognition comes with learning from the untoward consequences of naive ontological cognition—the inevitable breakdowns. Emerging from our ancestral, shallow information ecologies, the world was an ‘order there’ world simply because humanity lacked the ability to discriminate the impact of ‘around here.’ The discrimination of cognitive complexity begets intuitions of cognitive activity, undermines our default ‘out there’ intuitions. But since ‘order there’ is the default and ‘around here’ the cognitive achievement, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of apparently presuming ‘order there’ when making ‘around here’ claims. Since ‘order there’ intuitions remain effective when applied in their adaptive problem-ecologies, we find speculation splitting along ‘realist’ versus ‘anti-realist’ lines. Because no one has any inkling of any of this, we find ourselves flipping back and forth between these poles, taking versions of the same obvious steps to trod the same ancient circles. Every application is occluded, and so ‘transparent,’ as well as an activity possessing consequences.
Thus EOA… as well as an endless parade of philosophical chimera.
Isn’t this the real mystery of “Real Patterns,” the question of how and why philosophers find themselves trapped on this rickety old teeter-totter? “It is amusing to note,” Dennett writes, “that my analogizing beliefs to centers of gravity has been attacked from both sides of the ontological dichotomy, by philosophers who think it is simply obvious that centers of gravity are useful fictions, and by philosophers who think it is simply obvious that centers of gravity are perfectly real” (27). Well, perhaps not so amusing: Short of solving this mystery, Dennett has no way of finding the magic middle he seeks in this article—the middle of what? IST merely provides him with the means to recapitulate EOA and gesture to the possibility of some middle, a way to conceive all these issues that doesn’t deliver us to more of the same. His instincts, I think, were on the money, but his theoretical resources could not take him where he wanted to go, which is why, from the standpoint of his critics, he just seems to want to have it both ways.
On HNT we can see, quite clearly, I think, the problem with the question, ‘Are beliefs real?’ absent an adequate account of the relevant cognitive ecology. The bitter pill lies in understanding that the application conditions of ‘real’ have real limits. Dennett provides examples where those application conditions pretty clearly seem to obtain, then suggests more than argues that these examples are ‘parallel’ in all the structurally relevant respects to the situation with belief. But to distinguish his brand from Fodor’s ‘industrial strength’ realism, he has no choice but to ‘go instrumental’ in some respect, thus exposing the ambiguity falling out of IST.
It’s safe to say belief talk is real. It seems safe to say that beliefs are ‘real enough’ for the purposes of practical problem-solving—that is, for shallow (or source insensitive) cognitive ecologies. But it also seems safe to say that beliefs are not real at all when it comes to solving high-dimensional cognitive ecologies. The degree to which scientific inquiry is committed to finding the deepest (as opposed to the most expedient) account, should be the degree to which it views belief talk as components of real systems and views ‘belief’ as a source insensitive posit, a way to communicate and troubleshoot both oneself and one’s fellows.
This is crash space, so I appreciate the kinds of counter-intuitiveness involved in this view I’m advancing. But since tramping intuitive tracks has hitherto only served to entrench our controversies and confusions, we have good reason to choose explanatory power over intuitive appeal. We should expect synthesis in the cognitive sciences will prove every bit as alienating to traditional presumption as it was in biology. There’s more than a little conceit involved in thinking we had any special inside track on our own nature. In fact, it would be a miracle if humanity had not found itself in some version of this very dilemma. Given only source insensitive means to troubleshoot cognition, to understand ourselves and each other, we were all but doomed to be stumped by the flood of source sensitive cognition unleashed by science. (In fact, given some degree of interstellar evolutionary convergence, I think one can wager that extraterrestrial intelligences will have suffered their own source insensitive versus source sensitive cognitive crash spaces. See my, “On Alien Philosophy,” The Journal of Consciousness Studies, (forthcoming))
IST brings us to the deflationary limit of intentional philosophy. HNT offers a way to ratchet ourselves beyond, a form of critical eliminativism that can actually explain, as opposed to simply dispute, the traditional claims of intentionality. Dennett, of course, reserves his final criticism for eliminativism, perhaps because so many critics see it as the upshot of his interpretivism. He acknowledges the possibility that “that neuroscience will eventually-perhaps even soon-discover a pattern that is so clearly superior to the noisy pattern of folk psychology that everyone will readily abandon the former for the latter (50),” but he thinks it unlikely:
For it is not enough for Churchland to suppose that in principle, neuroscientific levels of description will explain more of the variance, predict more of the “noise” that bedevils higher levels. This is, of course, bound to be true in the limit-if we descend all the way to the neurophysiological “bit map.” But as we have seen, the trade-off between ease of use and immunity from error for such a cumbersome system may make it profoundly unattractive. If the “pattern” is scarcely an improvement over the bit map, talk of eliminative materialism will fall on deaf ears-just as it does when radical eliminativists urge us to abandon our ontological commitments to tables and chairs. A truly general-purpose, robust system of pattern description more valuable than the intentional stance is not an impossibility, but anyone who wants to bet on it might care to talk to me about the odds they will take. 51
The elimination of theoretical intentional idiom requires, Dennett correctly points out, some other kind of idiom. Given the operationalization of intentional idioms across a wide variety of research contexts, they are not about to be abandoned anytime soon, and not at all if the eliminativist has nothing to offer in their stead. The challenge faced by the eliminativist, Dennett recognizes, is primarily abductive. If you want to race at psychological tracks, you either enter intentional horses or something that can run as fast or faster. He thinks this unlikely because he thinks no causally consilient (source sensitive) theory can hope to rival the combination of power and generality provided by the intentional stance. Why might this be? Here he alludes to ‘levels,’ suggest that any causally consilient account would remain trapped at the microphysical level, and so remain hopelessly cumbersome. But elsewhere, as in his discussion of ‘creeping depersonalization’ in “Mechanism and Responsibility,” he readily acknowledges our ability to treat with one another as machines.
And again, we see how the limited resources of IST have backed him into a philosophical corner—and a traditional one at that. On HNT, his claim amounts to saying that no source sensitive theory can hope to supplant the bundle of source insensitive modes comprising intentional cognition. On HNT, in other words, we already find ourselves on the ‘level’ of intentional explanation, already find ourselves with a theory possessing the combination of power and generality required to eliminate a particle of intentional theorization: namely, the intentional stance. A way to depersonalize cognitive science.
Because IST primarily provides a versatile way to deploy and manage intentionality in theoretical contexts rather than any understanding of its nature, the disanalogy between ‘center of gravity’ and ‘beliefs’ remains invisible. In each case you seem to have an entity that resists any clear relation to the order which is there, and yet finds itself regularly and usefully employed in legitimate scientific contexts. Our brains are basically short-cut machines, so it should come as no surprise that we find heuristics everywhere, in perception as much as cognition (insofar as they are distinct). It also should come as no surprise that they comprise a bestiary, as with most all things biological. Dennett is comparing heuristic apples and oranges, here. Centers of gravity are easily anchored to the order which is there because they economize otherwise available information. They can be sourced. Such is not the case with beliefs, belonging as they do to a system gerrymandering for the want of information.
So what is the ultimate picture offered here? What could reality amount to outside our heuristic regimes? Hard to think, as it damn well should be. Our species’ history posed no evolutionary challenges requiring the ability to intuitively grasp the facts of our cognitive predicament. It gave us a lot of idiosyncratic tools to solve high impact practical problems, and as a result, Homo sapiens fell through the sieve in such a way as to be dumbfounded when it began experimenting in earnest with its interrogative capacities. We stumbled across a good number of tools along the way, to be certain, but we remain just as profoundly stumped about ourselves. On HNT, the ‘big picture view’ is crash space, in ways perhaps similar to the subatomic, a domain where our biologically parochial capacities actually interfere with our ability to understand. But it offers a way of understanding the structure and dynamics of intentional cognition in source sensitive terms, and in so doing, explains why crashing our ancestral cognitive modes was inevitable. Just consider the way ‘outside heuristic regimes’ suggests something ‘noumenal,’ some uber-reality lost at the instant of transcendental application. The degree to which this answer strikes you as natural or ‘obvious’ is the degree you have been conditioned to apply that very regime out of school. With HNT we can demand those who want to stuff us into this or that intellectual Klein bottles define their application conditions, convince us this isn’t just more crash space mischief.
It’s trivial to say some information isn’t available, so why not leave well enough alone? Perhaps the time has come to abandon the old, granular dichotomies and speak in terms of dimensions of information available and cognitive capacities possessed. Imagine that…
Moving on.
Three Pound Brain 
There’s a lot to chew on here.
I think this bit really nails it though-
“Centers of gravity are easily anchored to the order which is there because they economize otherwise available information. They can be sourced. Such is not the case with beliefs, belonging as they do to a system gerrymandering for the want of information.”
The important point to understand is that they *could* (by some unfathomably large and more complex system) in principle be sourced. Just not by a human brain.
Anyhow, I’m feeling a bit bombastic, so I’m going to comment on this bit too-
“What could reality amount to outside our heuristic regimes? Hard to think, as it damn well should be.”
It’s messed up, that’s what it is. Think about ancient Greeks throwing mathematicians into the ocean for proclaiming pi irrational, or Kronecker ostracizing Cantor for daring to suggest a hierarchy of infinities. Turing showed that there are non-computable real numbers (seriously, think about that for a minute and try not to vomit) and we got 20th century information technology as a goddamn *side-effect*.
Or, alternatively, consider deep time and how science has radically altered how we think of our place and time in an unspeakably vast void totally hostile to our evolved aspirations.
Humanity is waking up, and we are finding ourselves stranded orphans in Lovecraft country.
You really homed in on the two lines I think the most crucial, if not to the post, then to the position (HNT, or, what BBT-implies-for-cognition-more-generally), where it needs to go build a more complicated sketch of cognition. My hope is that doing so will actually leverage a more detailed picture of the very dilemma you (bombastically) refer to afterward. I think there’s real power in the theoretical machinery as I’ve developed it thus far, but I have this sense of grinding gears that makes me think theirs a more elegant formulation to be had still…
A beautiful way of understanding how deeply fucked we are!
I work with fruit flies. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if all these human philosophical speculations are the equivalent of the fruit fly bumping up against the edges of its vial and thinking the Drosophila equivalent of “why can’t I go further?”
You can’t go further little bug, because you’re going to be used as the control group for my next experiment. Now, settle down, here comes the gas.
Sounds like clerics working out their cosmological dogma; it’s like modern scholasticism.
And really makes me wonder if there was really any thing different going on between right now and say your blog right here are your post, and the efforts that the scholastics figured they were involved in as they also figured they were the most progressed and correct version the spearhead of God’s evolution.
I’ve often wondered at what point in the circular route that goes from brain to thought to evolution and back to brain — where in that loop does information get suspended and left out in order that the loop can say true things about its own existing or truth?
Do you ever question your ability to make statements upon the truth of the functioning of your brain or the history of its evolution?
Modern scholasticism? I think that pertains to traditional intentional speculation a sight more than the post-intentional speculation offered here! Everything I’m saying, I think anyway, is consilient with the great beast presently fundamentally rewriting our world: science. There’s even a number of empirical predictions my position makes, such as, that human metacognition will be shown to be radically heuristic, that the proliferation of AI will generate breakdowns in intentional cognition, even more fine-grained stuff such as suggesting whole new classes of cognitive illusions, or that we should expect to be unconsciously aware of perspectival distortions that entirely escape conscious cognition. ‘Scholasticism,’ to me, connotes a philosophy disconnected, as opposed to functionally embedded in the machinery of things.
“Do you ever question your ability to make statements upon the truth of the functioning of your brain or the history of its evolution?”
All the time, simply because the science of the brain and evolution is always complicating, but I don’t make the mistake of thinking ‘truth’ isn’t part of a heuristic system, that it somehow exists ‘out there’… To do this, would be to climb back onto the speculative hamster wheel!
I guess the issue then is if such science wil reamain phenomenological enterprise, or if this “new” science will be able to hear from multiple areas. Because it appears to me that you are putting forth a kind of science advocating a certain kind of science but yet you completely deny what I’ve got to say about science. At least what I’ve gathered from our limited interaction of comments and stuff.
It seems to me that while I agree with you you refuse to agree with me. It seems to me that you were caught in another mythological loop of phenomenological centricity.
For we are trying to break out of the phenomenological mode that poses science at something that’s not phenomenological. What I’m proposing is that phenomenology is itself a fact. It’s not argued away as if it was incorrect; it is a central fact that becomes an object of scientific investigation.
Indeed it appears to me that this is what you’re doing, but it seems like you’re unable to see or unable to admit that I am able to see this of you.
If indeed we are on to some sort of science that hasn’t been able to come up before, it would seem that this inability to see and that’s to communicate would be hindering the science that you propose at least.
I’m not sure what you mean, landzek, primarily because I don’t recall, I’m guessing.
“For we are trying to break out of the phenomenological mode that poses science at something that’s not phenomenological. What I’m proposing is that phenomenology is itself a fact. It’s not argued away as if it was incorrect; it is a central fact that becomes an object of scientific investigation.”
What do you mean by ‘phenomenology’? I think it’s fair to say ‘experience is a fact,’ but any determination of experience beyond it’s bare existence (consciousness?), raises the question of information access and cognitive capacity. We have the vision we do because we possess the access and capacity we do, and we now find ourselves in a position to say a great deal about what information is consumed and how that information is processed when accounting for vision. Since the philosophical tradition has, quite literally, nothing credible to say about access/capacity vis a vis experience (phenomenology), I find it hard to credit a great many theoretical claims that get made: the vast majority, in fact. Traditional phenomenology, I think, pretty clearly amounts to crash space. I might be wrong in presuming you understand phenomenology in the traditional, intentional sense. But if you do, you need to explain why anyone should think the theoretical application of intentional cognition could do anything other than continually run afoul its own fractionate, heuristic limitations. Have you ever checked out my Zahavi on Dennett piece?
I read your post on the crash space and actually I linked to it and made a comment on my blog where I like what you say and I agreed with it.
The problem that I’m in countering is that I tend to agree with you but it seems that you don’t want to make any effort to find out what I’m saying.
It seems to me most obvious what you’re doing even when you discount or fail to investigate what I’m saying: it makes total sense to me and I can describe to you what you’re doing. The fact that I’m able to describe what you’re doing allows me a science that is more complete than it seems that yours is because you aren’t even taking into any account what I might be doing because you’re assuming that you already know how some sort of stratified calm and human being behaves in the stratified common universe.
And I’m saying where ever we stratify and lump things into this common real zone, we are acting within a religious posture.
Science did not come about because people were arguing that this in this object might be true or arguing some sort of epistemological or arguing some sort of ontological truth that everyone was just proven to buy the magic of this type of logic of various people.
Science came about because the mode of science was obvious to people that were already doing that Type of activity.
Those who did not agree with it we’re stuck to the outside like the astrologers like the palm readers. Science in the way we understand it now occurs because it obviously the case; there is no argument to be made we can’t argue ourselves into a new science. Where ever you’re trying to argue or prove that some sort of science can be made there you are acting as a centrist phenomenological subject thinker. There is no argument that you can make that denies that you are behaving as a centrist phenomenological thinker except so far as your bracket phenomenology as under certain headings. But thereby are you constituted by the series of brackets. If this is the case then you are not able to see how someone might not also be constituted in that very same way that you are. Where you exist as a series of bracketing for the purpose of asserting what your identity maybe you are unable to see how someone might exist beyond that bracketing. That is called a religious situation.
A science does not arise through complex argument and proving to other people it’s veracity; A science arises through the most simple comprehension of the most facts. It seems to me that you purposely exclude facts for the purpose of establishing what you’re calling or arguing for is a science.
It seems to me that you’re being like the astrologer not the astronomer.
I just don’t understand your position, landzek–thus the battery of questions! If you do understand my position, as you say, then you should be able to explain why phrases like “you are acting as a centrist phenomenological subject thinker” make me so itchy. If you understood why they make me so itchy, then you would explain why you think they apply, in spite of everything HNT has to say, but you haven’t which leads me to believe you can’t see why they would make me so itchy.
So I’m inclined to think we’re both at cross-purposes here. But I’m perfectly willing to admit I’m wrong if you can explain to me why HNT makes hash of “phenomenological subjects.”
What kinds of empirical predictions does your position make? This is the only sure-fire way I know of distinguishing between astrology and astronomy.
I suppose that it makes you itchy, if I’m reading you right, because you don’t see yourself as the phenomenological centrist subject. And so for me to say that you are bothers you because you disagree.
And so I simply say that you disagree because you don’t understand The issue at hand.
But there is no describing to a person the situation at hand sufficiently enough so they understand what it is.
Or rather one could describe it sufficiently enough but then the person would understand the situation as if it’s a piece of information or a datum to acquire and would completely missed the meaning of the situation at hand.
So perhaps we are at an impasse right now.
I am simply saying that one does not erect a science upon argument. That to do so Miral he makes a cosmological argument, establishes a dogmatic rhetoric for religious position, and there by merely repeats and reestablishes the centrist thinker, The phenomenal subject.
It doesn’t matter what I mean by those things because you already know what those mean; what is making you itchy is you don’t want to admit that what you know you mean by those is actually constituting you and your identity as a place from which to make your proposals about the truth of the nature of reality.
… it appears to me that you were almost saying as much but using different terms; but it seems to me that you get caught up in those terms as if they’re referring to actual physical universal essential things out there that are separated from your thought from them such that there is a nonKantian universe possible where the thought actually does reach the object in itself. It appears to me that you’re saying something very similar to what I’m saying but you’re using different terms while getting caught up on those terms, as if that particular arrangement of terms, that particular semantic scaffolding and the lies that designate how such terms may be ordered paired and situated with one another, are actually referring to is true state of reality.
I’m saying that the terms are variables. You are using one set of variables to describe the same situation that I’m using but I’m using a different set of variables.
Anyways… maybe we can take this up at another time.
It seems to me you’re pretty clearly running afoul the EOA here, almost precisely in the terms I lay out at the end, actually, dividing thought from being–for me no less!
My position is a difficult one to think precisely because it forces us to think outside subjects and objects, epistemology and ontology. There’s a good reason those dichotomies have such a hold on us!
I would agree in a general sense; I would say such dichotomies are real but not true.
I like that way of phrasing it. The key in any such instance of binary schematization is to ask what information is missing and why it’s missing.
I think our. Threads might be getting a little bit confusing. 😜. But I would say that the reason why information is missing is exactly because there is a partition by which two Irreconcilable routes arise.
.. and i would say that discourse only affects reality, but that discourse is not a stratified ubiquitous element, it does not occur over a universal state. Not every human being has access to discourse automatically and education is not an automatic pass for access, and neither is intelligence, nor close readings or historical traditional tracings.
… for I think the arguments don’t really make a science. Decartes didn’t argue for his mode, he merely said hey there’s this situation of duality and I’m going to treat it like this. He didn’t really make any argument that convinced anyone but this was the case. It was the case because he said he’s going to treat it like this and then a bunch other people said wow that’s so simple and obvious. If he were to make an argument such that people need to be convinced then he would be just proposing another religious dogma; The fact was his view was already being manifest and he didn’t shut off someone else who is doing another experiment along the same mode because they use different terms than he did. He excepted that there were certain people that were working along this particular orientation this particular mode. But this is precisely because he wasn’t making an argument to prove anything to anyone; he was already operating in that particular mode as where others.
So what I’m saying is that agreemeant doesn’t come from talking a certain way and have everyone else talk a certain way and then have agreement because we all believe in these proofs that we take to make further arguments on a particular type of logical fantasy.
Agreement comes because there’s a bunch of people that are already doing it and then they looked over there and they go wow that guy is doing the same thing even if they’re using different terms.
So if another person can’t see this as obviously as the people who are working on new scientific type en Deavors say in the early Renaissance, then they aren’t really developing a science, there actually just developing more metaphysical philosophy.
So I say I see it of you but do you see it of me that is key to developing a science that you think that you’ve come upon.
I remember once buying into something like this. So what does the epistemic difference consist in? Why is it some people agreeing over here generates computers, A-bombs, global warming, etc., not to mention boggling consensus on a boggling number of details, whereas people agreeing over their generates claims that generally lead nowhere? In other words, what distinguishes astronomy from astrology?
Landzek, are you taking the post to be more didactic than speculative?
Are you perhaps treating it as didactic as a way of dismissing it?
No, i would not say that. Innoway I’m just reaffirming what the post already admits. I tend to go further then to rely upon her ubiquitous reality and a common humanity. Innoway I’m suggesting is that if there has been a complete D construction of reality, then presently certain people are trying to reconstruct it by formulating certain connections, reestablishing logical routes under different terms various sorts of object of appropriations, again under the maximum that argumentative methodology can convey true meaning or meanings of true things.
If philosophy has crumbled what was once a stable foundation, then it is attempting to reformulate a stable foundation.
I’m really suggest that such a reformulation is always a religious posture. And that the way out of this pot string occurs the only way that it can, which is to say that what is obvious becomes formulated in such a way that it is itself or otherwise becomes true: The basis upon which we have reality.
Why is it always a religious posture? Does it seem devoid of discussion of how it pertains to continued survival (or reduction of stresses and/or pains)?
And really I have a similar concern when you say ‘What I’m proposing is that phenomenology is itself a fact.’. I think you take it that phenomenology is fact rather like gravity or the freezing temp of water is a fact. As if phenomenology were some kind of physics itself. And to me that appears a religious posture.
Water behaves a certain way regardless of what we say about it. Human beings also behave a certain way regardless of what we want to say about it.
Phenomenology describes a certain situation where knowledge reduces upon itself in a logical manner; when one approaches reality in a particular way one cannot but end up in a phenomenological situation such as H describes, and Heidegger elaborates upon.
Insomuch as one might argue that phenomenology is but one way to argue to certain conclusions thereby has the human being not realized what the human being does, but is rather invested in with the human being is doing, using what is given as a given as an invisible point as something that cannot be analyzed.
It is the stalemate involved in such an approach: The view that sees phenomenology as bracketed or categorized in a certain or particular way, with certain attributes of authorship etc., that is incapable of seeing a manifestation of being human as something that involves a non-communicability. This is to say, where the bracketing of reality within a situation called human knowledge is taken as a ubiquitous and Omni present situation of this thing that we call human being as a general category of commonality, there do we have a human being that cannot admit a viewing upon what human beings do, but is rather always oriented upon objects that human beings act upon. If thereby does not find the fact of the human being but more so finds mythological structures that function for him as real and true aspects of the world.
But this is not to say that reality does not function in itself to grant is true and false thingsthings that are real, it is merely to say that discussions that want to pose a ubiquitous an Omni present reality that encompasses all that may exist are involved in a religious proposal, because they are proposing upon a united cosmology, hey scaffolding of definitions based within for their scaffolding of definitions as if this is the actual true real and only situation that can possibly exist forever and ever even as we might call this just a momentary presence.
The reason why I say this or can talk about it in this way is because as I propose in my work, there are two irreconcilable routes upon objects. Two modes of meaning that did not reduce to one another and cannot be argued into the others domain, but rather in this condition describes the situation of being human in any world.
Water behaves a certain way regardless of what we say about it. Human beings also behave a certain way regardless of what we want to say about it.
To me, when I imagine your position from what I’ve gathered of it, I imagine the human phenomenology landscape as a number of orbs or stones laid out, each an element of that phenomenology – and that you take it that like the physics of water can’t be broken down any further, nor can the stones of this landscape of human phenomenology.
But, from historical and scientific anecdotes of various types of brain damage, I think the stones can be broken. I mean, you already know the book ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat’. To me, it shows the stones can be cracked. Which means the stones of human phenomenology can, as much as they can be broken, can be broken down into smaller parts.
And I speculate if we break them down enough, we’d find atoms. Regardless of what we want to say about it. So far, in the past, a person would die before they were broken down this far – and so spared us the knowledge.
And I know, you take the stones as being the foundation of human behavior like you take physics to be the foundation of water behavior. Ie, no more reducible than physics.
the reply box is not working
I am not sure I am following what you mean.
Water freezes. It just does. How or why it freezes does not change this aspect of water. I call this a fact about water. We can use this fact in particular ways that knowledge of other things about water is not useful for. There are other facts about water. Due to acknowledgment of these facts, we may proceed a certain way that we generally call science.
But if I cannot admit that water freezes, then a totally different landscape arises.
Now, I am not using this as a direct analogy, Im only using it to a certain extent, in a certain manner.
also, I use the term ‘phenomenology’ admittedly in a general sense. I use it in the same sense that I see the whole tradition of western philosophy (also in general), specifically since Kant. ( there seems to be a consensus about that something significant happened around the time of the enlightenment and the Renaissance).
This is not the space to go into what I am taking books to lay out. Nevertheless:
I say that philosophy can be classified and categorized along a certain methodology, and that this method evidences a certain limit that itself does not, or more precisely, is incapable of realizing. And because of this denied limit, functions for a certain purpose, what I call ‘tele-ontology’. This tele-ontology is Reality.
What is real has to do with the central human thinker. A problem with this centrality, as much as it is relied upon as a ubiquitous feature of all humans, is that is is incapable of seeing or understanding anything that may lay beyond its centrality. Where many like the term of Miellassoux, ‘correlationalism’, I think it stops short of the issue; I refer to this limit as ‘orientation’.
People who are invested in this kind a philosophy that posit as it relies upon the central human thinker in general, are like a person who will not admit that water freezes. As a further analogy; such philosophers (real human beings in general) rely upon their centrality to thereby suggest that the freezing of water is an aspect of the human ability or character, and not a ‘fact’ of water in-itself.
This kind of thinking, this centrality, is phenomenological.
Thus I am talking about Facts of being human, and not suggesting that somehow I can get beyond them or that they don’t apply to me.
But if I cannot admit that water freezes, then a totally different landscape arises.
Yes – I think Scott calls it the semantic apocalypse.
Are you interested in exploring that landscape? Or does it seem to you kind of like exploring the theoretical landscape of a climate change denier – ie, an entirely missplaced speculation or belief about how things will turn out?
Just wondering what puts you off exploring that landscape (apart from it being ‘wrong’)?
I am interested in many things. I haven’t heard of a semantic apocalypse, but it sounds interesting in that I think a significant issue is meaning itself.
But also I think insomuch as there might be a semantic apocalypse, that it is such apocalypse that really brings about not only the need but indeed the ability for science of human being to arise.
Because we aren’t really talking so much about psychology or psychiatry or neuroscience because those things are based within real appropriations.
I know I’m bringing up an issue that I’m not really dressing right here so far is the question around if science is real, but the issue is not these broad general questions, I would say the issue that I’m dealing with is exactly what a human being does. And not so much about psychologies or fantasies or neuroses or anything like that, because those very ideas are also real objects those are real things that’s a part of the mythology of reality.
So like those people who don’t want to admit that water freezes, or those postmodern theorists that want to say that “water freezing” is based in a hegemonic discourse and we can unpack the power relationships in such a statement, I tend to say that they are living in a theoretical fantasy world of real dimensions, and I’m not sure that that is really much more interesting than reading say the hobbit or Asvovs foundation series. They’re interesting but how Finley am I supposed to spread my interest across all the plane of existence. Sometimes questions just lead to interesting answers but actually not very significant in the scheme of things.
I am interested; but my work concerns the developing of a science that is so far hidden due to the over determination of modern philosophical appropriations.
So like those people who don’t want to admit that water freezes, or those postmodern theorists that want to say that “water freezing” is based in a hegemonic discourse and we can unpack the power relationships in such a statement, I tend to say that they are living in a theoretical fantasy world of real dimensions, and I’m not sure that that is really much more interesting than reading say the hobbit or Asvovs foundation series. They’re interesting but how Finley am I supposed to spread my interest across all the plane of existence.
Fair point – how finely indeed? But you seem to be trying to argue something with Scott. I mean, if Scott were arguing the earth is hollow and full of man sized ants ready to go to war on the surface (to give an example of something you might want to ad hoc dismiss), you can’t say you wont spread yourself thin on this sort of speculation but also that you’re arguing it properly. It’s like you’re reading just six pages of the hobbit then critiquing the whole thing as if you know it fully.
Even if you think Scott’s story has no merit, you should be able to describe his story enough that he will say ‘Yup, that’s my story!’ before you try to argue it with him. That or don’t engage it – put the book back on the shelf, because you’re right, you don’t have to spread your interest over all books.
Yes. You are right. I am not familiar with Scott, and i was just going off the title.
I do agree that we are dealing with meaning, though. If he is saying some thing about the ramifications of that, fir sure i am interested more.
I was still kinda filling out why i said this post sounded like a drafting of a religious cosmology.
More in a bit …
The lecture looks interesting. Ill read the rest later today. 👍🏽
Ok..
The BBT (blind brain theory)
I have encountered this before at Three-Pound-Brain. It is intriguing. And ultimately a real theory.
If you don’t mind, I am going to start my end of the discussion by proposing situations that I might elaborate upon if our discussion continues in certain ways. We will see.
It is interesting that He says that he came upon ‘the Argument’ when he was 14 years old because it was probably around that age that I realized somethings too. I cant help but wonder how old he is because I get the feeling he must be around late 30’s-40’s, but that is just a guess. And because my ego-centrism would have it then that I came up with the BBT before he did.
With that, I have a rebuttal to his argument that he can only set aside by relying upon an invisible given: The flat ubiquitous actual-real-material-traditional world that informs ‘one’ of the ‘multiple’.
Let us suppose that he and I are exactly the same age, and that we came across this idea at the same time. What does it say that he is putting it forth, or that here we are referring to him and his lecture instead of me? Or you. We would have to ask why this is the case.
Now; lets see if I understand his brief synopsis (his lecture) correctly: the brain only can appropriate a portion of any (potential) set of knowledge, and this portion for any moment is what amounts to or otherwise informs consciousness to what it is as well as what it does.
I will wait for a response, because I want to be sure that I got a pretty good understanding of the BBT. so we can find the same page between us by which to discuss.
Ah. Ima dork. Bbt is only one component. Im too quick to jump to conclusions; just my nature.
More ina bit…
yeah..Ima dork…
So, in attempting to read that very long thing at Speculative Heresy, I just gave up.
about half way through. BBT is not to difficult to poke holes in, but…
To me, even the SR’s have missed to boat. Or, they have just walked to a different part of the ship.
anyways…
SR and the spec Heresy blog 9but maybe that is too much of a conflation) to me is hardly heresy. But thats just my kind of fkt upness.
I see philosophy as culminating with nothing. this nothing thus is taken by most as meaning the route must be back into real things, as if despite the blurry cognitions, now ‘nothing’ is actually indicating an essential true thing of human existence, by which we can now find a ‘more true’ way back to real things. It seems to me that what has occurred is philosophy (as a generalization, or code for SR or even the misconstrual of Nonphilosophy) has just usurped the One route into the continuing of the One route as if there is no other route. Its like a disease of myopia that refuse to understand someone describing a larger world. The ‘In-itself’ thing that they suppose must be real is really just another metaphysical description of the kind that their misunderstood hero, Kant, is trying to account for. This is to say that they not only misconstrue Kant, but then use this mistake to write a whole history of staying away from the in-itself object, only to say they are going to take another turn, but end up merely speaking about metaphysical ‘speculative’ Reality as if they now moved beyond Kant. Is like a bad punk rock show where everyone is too cool.
And you can’t really (if I can over generalize) say much to them about their metaphysical religious posture because they merely use their faith as an obvious ground to counter what one would want to say is actually more Real than the metaphysical speculations.
Its like trying to prove to a Christian that God does not exist. You cannot argue that they are hardly talking about anything Real in the same way that a Christian is incapable of negating their own faith. I find such metaphysical arguments kind of like playing shutes and ladders.
Oddly enough, like the essay seemed to imply: its like everyone is using the postmodern trope for their imaginary and creative playground.
S0. Im sorry Im such a party pooper.
I guess Im just actually insane instead of theoretically insane.
;))
I think wordpress has kind of butchered the comment structure – not sure how fun this is for anyone else to read right now!
I’m not sure why you find it easy to poke holes in BBT, Landzek? It could be summarised in that a computer (ie, a brain) cannot monitor it’s own calculations as it makes those calculations. Even if you add another computer to do the monitoring of the first, the second computer cannot monitor it’s monitoring as it does it. Some part to the processing is always invisible. There’s always a blindness. This is a physical, mechanical effect – I’m not sure why it’d be easy to poke holes through it?
On getting half way through, fair enough! I know the feeling! You think philosophy culminates in nothing – perhaps this is the formatting issue Scott faces. As I understand it, his main concerns are neuroscientific brain modification and capitalistic brain manipulation (through media). These are really physical issues – they are enacted through physical means. It’s not philosophy for it’s own sake (which to me does seem to culminate in nothing, indeed!). The traditional format of philosophy basically avoids getting its hands dirty in the trenches that is the physical world (one might even argue such an escape is what is being pursued). So the description of BBT, which even calls it self a theory rather than any physically applicable blueprint for action, might seem to culminate in nothing.
Meta: I’m thinking of starting a new, fresh comment in regards to this conversation, in case anyone else wants to read. Currently the wordpress formatting is abhorent.
I was making my way through the essay… Sometimes one has to reapproach; I think it took a few times with Z’s parallax view before I could see his view, and I know it took about 15 years from when I first picked up H Being and Time before it made any sense. And it had nothing to do with any academic learning I was doing because I did none. Lol. It was purely the moment and coincidence.
I don’t know, maybe I’ll Blogpost this comment and we can continue the thread over there ??
If I may skip around from the line of our conversation ….
I reject that there is any overcoming or otherwise getting beyond the correlationalist limit. That talk was like 6 years ago and they were all excited about these ‘new’ limits to overcome, making career moves and such…
Any assertion or manipulation of discourse in the attempt to get or explain how to get out the correlational cycle is itself a contradiction in terms.
The problem with Laruelle is that he “marks without knowing” the end of a particular universal (ethical) paradigm that we can loosely cal the Enlightenment.
Due to this ‘last-Instance’, which is the last possible benefit of doubt that can in good faith be given to philosophy, and the SR and such Realists that came out of this ‘end’, we can now describe what philosophy actually does and thus what human beings actually do. Before this mark, we still had the reasonable assurance that discourse could communicate through limits; the PM’s still hung onto this mode even while they were describing how it cannot be the case. Laruelle and Badiou described thus in thier ways the solution involved with the futility of solution, and the SRs decided they would just still pretend with an earnest face.
We can now use Harman, Brassier, Miellassoux etc as subjects, as examples of what philosophy before them was doing under an unberella of ignorance. Now it is just plain denial.
Nothing indicates a ‘something’ of meaning. To use ‘nothing’ to denote a vectorielle (Laruelle) misses the issue. Nothing is Always Something. Hence the mark of Laruelle.
Feel free to make a blog post and leave a link here for it to follow. I’m not sure I’m really keeping up with your post here, though. But the subject of nothing interests me. For instance, people say outer space has lots of nothing there, lots of empty. But to me, it reminds me of a computer screen vs where you run out of screen. There’s a significant difference to having a blank screen Vs where you have no screen at all. And even in empty space, you have a space for emptyness – as opposed to not even having a space for emptyness at all. There are degrees of nothing.
The only way this works is if there is a constant universe that functions outside of the field of view. But if there is something outside the field of view, what is it?
… and when it comes right down to it, i’m really concerned with truth, and not so much the negotiation of reality. Reality occurs in real ways that I deal with all the time every day at work at play with family with friends with politics with climate change all that stuff is real; it occurs through negotiation of terms. Real humanity exists in this way.
But truth is of a different matter; and so we are developing or attempting to develop or exploring the possibilities of developing what is true about the human being in the world. One of the things that is true is that it establishes reality through negotiation, but it sees the terms by which a negotiate reality as indicating true things, that are again not really true but only real, which is to say negotiated.
… Ah. – but likewise I am not saying that somehow I’ve identified phenomenology as something that is false. Conventional philosophy would have it that now that I’ve identified phenomenology to some sort of limit that now we can overcome the limit through some meaningful discursive move. It is here that I bring in correlationalism because that idea itself marks the ridiculousness of conventional philosophy, The denial that it is involved with. Because regular conventional real philosophy would have it that oh now that we’ve identified phenomenology to its limit that now we can go past it and we can come up with other sorts of realities. I think that’s just plain identity politics. That is plain ideological powermongering. And because this is the case, because indeed this is what occurs and indeed I’m not saying that it is somehow an incorrect appraisal or that somehow it should be any different than it is: I am just stating facts. One of the facts is that this is what human beings do, and because this is what human beings do we can thereby begin to talk about this arena of power, this area in which power is an acted in a certain manner to justify itself over our ubiquitous an Omni present plane of existence, we can speak of such idea logical postures as religious postures. As mythological formations.
… and all this really is Preliminary, it is nothing beyond postmodernism. But here we are some 2030 years later still functioning within a postmodernist state. Of course there are those who would say that somehow are moving beyond postmodernism, but I would argue that the only way that they can say that they’ve moved beyond postmodernism is to rely on postmodernist tactics and strategies. I just have identified a real human arena: it is modern and postmodernism is an apology for what is modern. And we have not stepped away nor out of nor beyond what is modern, and likewise I would say we will never step outside of reality, human beings will always stick tight to reality and justify and negotiate their place in it.
But also due to this situation, an alternate manner of intelligence arises that we can only say is not real but true. And this begins by admitting that I am nothing more than a central thinker, that despite what discursive meanings I want to place upon the objects of my view I am still behaving as a thinker that is central to the universe. It doesn’t matter if I want to come up with other concepts of my placement within it because the very act of me conceiving that I might have a different place within the universe is itself a centralized assertion of placement.
Philosophy and particularly postmodern philosophy would have it that somehow we get the progress through attaching ourselves so to speak to the terms that we create: identity. But the only way to get past the post modern analysis is to a certain another type of modernism, another type of essential identity that needs no justification. The only get way to get past the post modern reduction is to deny that the postmodern analysis has any credibility beyond our ability to apply it as a further manner of analyzing, which is to say to suppose pre-pose and assert another essential given: The modernism that post modernism supposes to take apart. This is the essence of correlational is them and due to this fact any subsequent analysis and merely falls into in a Storico determination that we may begin to notice and record.
… i’m not saying or categorizing it as a religious proposal in a bad way, rather I’m proposing it in a factual away.
…if someone is a Christian, say, cannot the person who is not a Christian describe Christianity as a religion, yet as well cannot the Christian itself describe its own situation as religious? And in either of these cases be insulting or also just stating a fact of the matter?
It is not a relativity to say that Christianity is a religion. But at the same time the Christian can be said to hold onto religious dogma that aren’t true but are indeed real.
I call these facts. I’m not really involved in the relativity and subjectivity of what these various things might mean to various people. Reality itself there by behaves as a minute the logical construct in its ability to be effective as a reality. This situation described thus is true and once we might begin to be able to have an orientation upon things in this manner then we will begin to talk about humanity in a factual away instead of just a cultural relative way.
This link:
http://phys.org/news/2016-12-brain-machine-learning-spontaneously-aspects-human.html
that DMF provided for the previous post, suggests that the knowledge that enables human facial recognition, and perhaps other human knowledge, might be built into the structure and dynamics of the brain. If so, then knowledge used in its intentional sense might be a simplification that allows us to ignore features of a phenomenon that are not relevant to the purpose we are currently trying to achieve while capturing the relevant features. In this sense knowledge might be like center of mass. The link also suspects that if Dennett lives long enough he might wind up paying off on his bet:
“A truly general-purpose, robust system of pattern description more valuable than the intentional stance is not an impossibility, but anyone who wants to bet on it might care to talk to me about the odds they will take.”
In general my sense of the process is that people who don’t have prior philosophical or theological training don’t see any problem with the idea that mentation is something brains do in the same way that digestion is something stomachs do and respiration is something lungs do. Other than force of habit I just don’t see the appeal of supernatural posits.
That was an awesome link, to be sure (certainly apropos this), definitely worth reposting. My whole argument is basically that HNT amounts to him losing that bet, insofar as it demonstrates the way source sensitive idiom can generalize to the intentional ‘level,’ and do it better, theoretically speaking.
“In general my sense of the process is that people who don’t have prior philosophical or theological training don’t see any problem with the idea that mentation is something brains do in the same way that digestion is something stomachs do and respiration is something lungs do. Other than force of habit I just don’t see the appeal of supernatural posits.”
This is something I’ve wondered about a great deal. What was it like before we had a folk-psychological vocabulary? It is mandatory, in some respects, just as fetishization and essentialization seem to be. But to what degree can we substitute source sensitive heuristics for all the magical ones? To what degree can we make our ancestral, shallow information cognitive landscape consilient with the depths revealed by science? Can we imagine an everyday existence absent the term ‘belief’?
Sounds like a job for a SF author…
http://www.wnyc.org/story/undoing-project-michael-lewis/
Gravity, the most important phenomenological sense for any advanced organism. What did man do with his two free arms and advanced language that re-adapted his sensorimotor system that controls 666 voluntary muscles evolved for upright walking?
Godspeed John Glenn
just found this chap
Click to access InstrumentalProgress.pdf
I always like the new revision of your ongoing book, it’s like testing out new vocabularies to re-tweak the prism of Crash Space heuristics. Keeps reminding me of that Big Book I use as a door stop on The Universe in Ten Easy Lessons. A Book ten thousand pages long… like the Obama Care book that no one – and, I mean no one in Congress or the Senate ever read, much less understood….
Your keep trying different tacit ploys to tweak the truth of our ignorance out in ways that leave us all depleted and reassured in our errors, and separate and singular ‘crash spaces’. The void beckons… well at least your void is much more interesting as always. 🙂
Brilliant as always, Dirk. My reply turned into a book report.
looking forward to reading it thanks, i’ll keep scanning the horizon for signs of emerging bits and pieces.
https://backchannel.com/put-away-your-machine-learning-hammer-criminality-is-not-a-nail-1309c84bb899?imm_mid=0eb8e0#.k7y5j7z9m
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/minority-report
This is an awesome piece, a definitely something I’ll be citing in the future. It perfectly illustrates the dependency of RNNs and training sets, the heritability of heuristic biases, and so many other things.
This is an amazingly provoking reflection, Scott. Sorry I came so to the party so late. What follows is an attempt at summary, I hope.
I wonder if the issue here is less the ontological one of whether intentional patterns are real than their appropriate characterisation. We can concede that metacognition wouldn’t work if there were nothing in the environment for it to exploit. The issue is whether our best crack at describing this exploitation is through intentional or normative idioms.
The Dennett-style interpretivist has a theory of exploitation which is circular or incomplete. Either intentionality or some analog belong to the explicit theory of the exploitation process or we have a concept of *interpretation* that remains unexplicated. A certain kind of transcendental philosophy stops the regress by proposing that the circularity expresses an invariant fact about how an appropriate “we” must think. The problem being that this is question begging: how do we know that we have properly delineated the “we” or the space of interpretation it defines?
Heuristic Neglect Theory implies – if I get you right – that the intentionalist might have radically mischaracterised what it is that intentional systems do – and is similarly clueless about the “we”. Crash Space sheers into view because changes in the “superordinate” systems may alter the environment in which our inherited tools for exploiting real patterns may be becoming increasingly ill-adapted, in ways that the transcendental position may be entirely blind to.
I think the notion of Crash Space offers a brilliant provocation here – for the progressive degeneration of intentional systems theory would be symptomatic of its radical incompleteness.
I’m glad you enjoyed! Usually I do a bit more to get the word out with posts like these, but I’ve just been so incredibly busy. This is a great summary you give: the critical kernel of HNT is simply that emphasis on cognitive ecology (function within neglected superordinate systems) allows us to set aside the kind of intentional theoretical apparatus we get with IST. We only need theoretical homuncularisms like ‘stances’ to the extent our understanding of the systems to be solved neglects understanding of that understanding (or as you put it, ‘interpretation’ remains an unexplained explainer). In a sense, though, it packs even more of an abductive punch because as an extension of BBT it actually offers ways to explain our transcendental intuitions, as opposed to simply pointing out application errors, places where they (inevitably, by my lights) trip into crash space.
I’m pulling together a piece on Eric Schwitzgebel’s JCS debate with Keith Frankish which I think makes things somewhat more clear. You know Keith, right?
Yeah, I know Keith well – an excellent philosopher! We used to be colleagues at the OU. Would love to see any collaboration there.
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