Reading From Bacteria to Bach and Back III: Beyond Stances
by rsbakker
The problem with his user-illusion model of consciousness, Dennett realizes, lies in its Cartesian theatricalization, the reflex to assume the reality of the illusion, and to thence argue that it is in fact this… the dumbfounding fact, the inexplicable explanandum. We acknowledge that consciousness is a ‘user-illusion,’ then insist this ‘manifest image’ is the very thing requiring explanation. Dennett’s de-theatricalization, in other words, immediately invites re-theatricalization, intuitions so powerful he feels compelled to devote an entire chapter to resisting the invitation, only to have otherwise generally sympathetic readers, like Tom Clark, to re-theatricalize everything once again. To deceive us at all, the illusion itself has to be something possessing, minimally it seems, the capacity to deceive. Faced with the question of what the illusion amounts to, he writes, “It is a representation of a red stripe in some neural system of representation” (358), allowing Clark and others to reply, ‘and so possesses content called qualia.’
One of the striking features of From Bacteria to Bach and Back is the degree to which his trademark Intentional Systems Theory (IST) fades into the background. Rather than speak of the physical stance, design stance, and intentional stance, he continually references Sellars tripartite nomenclature from “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” the ‘original image’ (which he only parenthetically mentions), the ‘manifest image,’ and the ‘scientific image.’ The manifest image in particular, far more than the intentional stance, becomes his primary theoretical term.
Why might this be?
Dennett has always seen himself threading a kind of theoretical needle, fending the scientifically preposterous claims of intentionalism on the one hand, and the psychologically bankrupt claims of eliminativism on the other. Where intentionalism strands us with impossible explanatory vocabularies, tools that cause more problems than they solve, eliminativism strands us with impoverished explanatory vocabularies, purging tools that do real work from our theoretical kits without replacing them. It’s not simply that Dennett wants, as so many of his critics accuse him, ‘to have it both ways’; it’s that he recognizes that having it both ways is itself the only way, theoretically speaking. What we want is to square the circle of intentionality and consciousness without running afoul either squircles or blank screens, which is to say, inexplicable intentionalisms or deaf-mute eliminativisms.
Seen in this light, Dennett’s apparent theoretical opportunism, rapping philosophical knuckles for some applications of intentional terms, shaking scientific hands for others, begins to look well motivated—at least from a distance. The global theoretical devil, of course, lies in the local details. Intentional Systems Theory constitutes Dennett’s attempt to render his ‘middle way’ (and so his entire project) a principled one. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back he explains it thus:
There are three different but closely related strategies or stances we can adopt when trying to understand, explain, and predict phenomena: the physical stance, the design stance, in the intentional stance. The physical stance is the least risky but also the most difficult; you treat the phenomenon in question as a physical phenomenon, obeying the laws of physics, and use your hard-won understanding of physics to predict what will happen next. The design stance works only for things that are designed, either artifacts or living things or their parts, and have functions or purposes. The intentional stance works primarily for things that are designed to use information to accomplish their functions. It works by treating the thing as a rational agent, attributing “beliefs” and “desires” and “rationality” to the thing, and predicting that it will act rationally. 37
The strategy is straightforward enough. There’s little doubt that the physical stance, design stance, and intentional stance assist solving certain classes of phenomena in certain circumstances, so when confronted by those kinds of phenomena in those kinds of circumstances, taking the requisite stance is a good bet. If we have the tools, then why not use them?
But as I’ve been arguing for years here at Three Pound Brain, the problems stack up pretty quick, problems which, I think, find glaring apotheosis in From Bacteria to Bach and Back. The first problem lies in the granularity of stances, the sense in which they don’t so much explain cognition as merely divvy it up into three families. This first problem arises from the second, their homuncularity, the fact that ‘stances’ amount to black-box cognitive comportments, ways to manipulate/explain/predict things that themselves resist understanding. The third, and (from the standpoint his thesis) most devastating problem, also turns on the second: the fact that stances are the very thing requiring explanation.
The reason the intentional stance, Dennett’s most famed explanatory tool, so rarely surfaces in From Bacteria to Bach and Back is actually quite simple: it’s his primary explanandum. The intentional stance cannot explain comprehension simply because it is, ultimately, what comprehension amounts to…
Well, almost. And it’s this ‘almost,’ the ways in which the intentional stance defects from our traditional (cognitivist) understanding of comprehension, which has ensnared Dennett’s imagination—or so I hope to show.
What does this defection consist in? As we saw, the retasking of metacognition to solve theoretical questions was doomed to run afoul sufficiency-effects secondary to frame and medial neglect. The easiest way to redress these illusions lies in interrogating the conditions and the constitution of cognition. What the intentional stance provides Dennett is a granular appreciation of the performative, and therefore the social, fractionate, constructive, and circumstantial nature of comprehension. Like Wittgenstein’s ‘language games,’ or Kuhn’s ‘paradigms,’ or Davidson’s ‘charity,’ Dennett’s stances allow him to capture something of the occluded external and internal complexities that have for so long worried the ‘clear and distinct’ intuition of the ambiguous human cylinder.
The intentional stance thus plays a supporting role, popping up here and there in From Bacteria to Bach and Back insofar as it complicates comprehension. At every turn, however, we’re left with the question of just what it amounts to. Intentional phenomena such as representations, beliefs, rules, and so on are perspectival artifacts, gears in what (according to Dennett) is the manifest ontology we use to predict/explain/manipulate one another using only the most superficial facts. Given the appropriate perspective, he assures us, they’re every bit as ‘real’ as you and I need. But what is a perspective, let alone a perspectival artifact? How does it—or they—function? What are the limits of application? What constitutes the ‘order’ it tracks, and why is it ‘there’ as opposed to, say, here?
Dennett—and he’s entirely aware of this—really doesn’t have much more than suggestions and directions when it comes to these and other questions. As recently as Intuition Pumps, he explicitly described his toolset as “good at nibbling, at roughly locating a few ‘fixed’ points that will help us see the general shape of the problem” (79). He knows the intentional stance cannot explain comprehension, but he also knows it can inflect it, nudge it closer to a biological register, even as it logically prevents the very kind of biological understanding Dennett—and naturalists more generally—take as the primary desideratum. As he writes (once again in 2013):
I propose we simply postpone the worrisome question of what really has a mind, about what the proper domain of the intentional stance is. Whatever the right answer to that question is—if it has a right answer—this will not jeopardize the plain fact that the intentional stance works remarkably well as a prediction method in these and other areas, almost as well as it works in our daily lives as folk-psychologists dealing with other people. This move of mine annoys and frustrates some philosophers, who want to blow the whistle and insist on properly settling the issue of what a mind, a belief, a desire is before taking another step. Define your terms, sir! No, I won’t. that would be premature. I want to explore first the power and the extent of application of this good trick, the intentional stance. Intuition Pumps, 79
But that was then and this is now. From Bacteria to Bach and Back explicitly attempts to make good on this promissory note—to naturalize comprehension, which is to say, to cease merely exploring the scope and power of the intentional stance, and to provide us with a genuine naturalistic explanation. To explain, in the high-dimensional terms of nature, what the hell it is. And the only way to do this is to move beyond the intentional stance, to cease wielding it as a tool, to hoist it on the work-bench, and to adduce the tools that will allows us to take it apart.
By Dennett’s own lights, then, he needs to reverse-engineer the intentional stance. Given his newfound appreciation for heuristic neglect, I understand why he feels the potential for doing this. A great deal of his argument for Cartesian gravity, as we’ve seen, turns on our implicit appreciation of the impact of ‘no information otherwise.’ But sensing the possibility of those tools, unfortunately, does not amount to grasping them. Short explicit thematizations of neglect and sufficiency, he was doomed to remain trapped on the wrong side of the Cartesian event horizon.
On Dennett’s view, intentional stances are homuncular penlights more than homuncular projectors. What they see, ‘reasons,’ lies in the ‘eye of the beholder’ only so far as natural and neural selection provisions the beholder with the specialized competencies required to light them up.
The reasons tracked by evolution I have called ‘free-floating rationales,’ a term that has apparent jangled the nerves of some few thinkers, who suspect I am conjuring up ghosts of some sort. Not at all. Free-floating rationales are no more ghostly or problematic than numbers or centers of gravity. Cubes had eight corners before people invented ways of articulating arithmetic, and asteroids had centers of gravity before there were physicists to dream up the idea and calculate with it. Reasons existed long before there were reasoners. 50
To be more precise, the patterns revealed by the intentional stance exist independent of the intentional stance. For Dennett, the problematic philosophical step—his version of the original philosophical sin of intentionalism—is to think the cognitive bi-stability of these patterns, the fact they appear to be radically different when spied with a first-person penlight versus scientific floodlights, turns on some fundamental ontological difference.
And so, Dennett holds that a wide variety of intentional phenomena are real, just not in the way we have traditionally understood them to be real. This includes reasons, beliefs, functions, desires, rules, choices, purposes, and—pivotally, given critiques like Tom Clark’s—representations. So far as this bestiary solves real world problems, they have to grab hold of the world somehow, don’t they? The suggestion that intentional posits are no more problematic than formal or empirical posits (like numbers and centers of gravity) is something of a Dennettian refrain—as we shall see, it presumes the heuristics involved in intentional cognition possess the same structure as heuristics in other domains, which is simply not the case. Otherwise, so long as intentional phenomena actually facilitate cognition, it seems hard to deny that they broker some kind high-dimensional relationship with the high-dimensional facts of our environment.
So what kind of relationship? Well, Dennett argues that it will be—has to be, given evolution—heuristic. So far as that relationship is heuristic, we can presume that it solves by taking the high-dimensional facts of the matter—what we might call the deep information environment—for granted. We can presume, in other words, that it will ignore the machinery, and focus on cues, available information systematically related to that machinery in ways that enable the prediction/explanation/manipulation of that machinery. In other words, rather than pick out the deep causal patterns responsible it will exploit those available patterns possessing some exploitable correlation to those patterns.
So then where, one might ask, do the real patterns pertaining to ‘representation’ lie in this? What part or parts of this machine-solving machinery gainsays the ‘reality’ of representations? Just where do we find the ‘real patterns’ underwriting the content responsible for individuating our reports? It can’t be the cue, the available information happily correlated to the system or systems requiring solution, simply because the cue is often little more than a special purpose trigger. The Heider-Simmel Illusion, for instance, provides a breathtaking example of just how little information it takes. So perhaps we need to look beyond the cue, to the adventitious correlations binding it to the neglected system or systems requiring solution. But if these are the ‘real patterns’ illuminated by the intentional stance, it’s hard to understand what makes them representational—more than hard in fact, since these relationships consist in regularities, which, as whole philosophical traditions have discovered, are thoroughly incompatible with the distinctively cognitive properties of representation. Well, then, how about the high-dimensional machinery indirectly targeted for solution? After all, representations provide us a heuristic way to understand otherwise complex cognitive relationships. This is where Dennett (and most everyone else, for that matter) seems to think the real patterns lie, the ‘order which is there,’ in the very machinery that heuristic systems are adapted—to avoid! Suddenly, we find ourselves stranded with regularities only indirectly correlated to the cues triggering different heuristic cognitive systems. How could the real patterns gainsaying the reality of representations be the very patterns our heuristic systems are adapted to ignore?
But if we give up on the high-dimensional systems targeted for solution, perhaps we should be looking at the heuristic systems cognizing—perhaps this is where the real patterns gainsaying the reality of representations lie, here, in our heads. But this is absurd, of course, since the whole point of saying representations are real (enough) is to say they’re out there (enough), independent of our determinations one way or another.
No matter how we play this discursive shell game, the structure of heuristic cognition guarantees that we’ll never discover the ‘real pattern pea,’ even with intentional phenomena so apparently manifest (because so useful in both everyday and scientific contexts) as representations. There’s real systems, to be sure, systems that make ‘identifying representations’ as easy as directing attention to the television screen. But those systems are as much here as they are there, making that television screen simply another component in a greater whole. Without the here, there is no there, which is to say, no ‘representation.’ Medial neglect assures the astronomical dimensionality of the here is flattened into near oblivion, stranding cognition with a powerful intuition of a representational there. Thanks to our ancestors, who discovered myriad ways to manipulate information to cue visual cognition out of school, to drape optical illusions across their cave walls, or to press them into lumps of clay, we’ve become so accustomed to imagery as to entirely forget the miraculousness of seeing absent things in things present. Those cues are more or less isomorphic to the actual systems comprising the ancestral problem ecologies visual cognition originally evolved to manage. This is why they work. They recapitulate certain real patterns of information in certain ways—as does your, retina, your optic nerve, and every stage of visual cognition culminating in visual experience. The only thing ‘special’ about the recapitulations belonging to your television screen is their availability, not simply to visual cognition, but to our attempts to cognize/troubleshoot such instances of visual cognition. The recapitulations on the screen, unlike, say, the recapitulations captured by our retinas, are the one thing we can readily troubleshoot should they begin miscuing visual cognition. Neglect ensures the intuition of sufficiency, the conviction that the screen is the basis, as opposed to simply another component in a superordinate whole. So, we fetishize it, attribute efficacies belonging to the system to what is in fact just another component. All its enabling entanglements vanish into the apparent miracle of unmediated semantic relationships to whatever else happens to be available. Look! we cry. Representation…
Figure 1: This image of the Martian surface taken by Viking 1 in 1976 caused a furor on earth, for obvious reasons.
Figure 2: Images such as this one taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal the former to be an example of facial pareidolia, an instance where information cues facial recognition where no faces are to be found. The “Face on Mars” seems be an obvious instance of projection—mere illusion—as opposed to discovery. Until, that is, one realizes that both of these images consist of pixels cuing your visual systems ‘out of school’! Both, in other words, constitute instances of pareidolia: the difference lies in what they enable.
Some apparent squircles, it turns out, are dreadfully useful. So long as the deception is systematic, it can be instrumentalized any which way. Environmental interaction is the basis of neural selection (learning), and neural selection is the basis of environmental domination. What artificial visual cuing—‘representation’—provides is environmental interaction on the cheap, ways to learn from experience without having to risk or endure experience. A ‘good trick’ indeed!
This brings us to a great fault-line running through the entirety of Dennett’s corpus. The more instrumental a posit, the more inclined he’s to say it’s ‘real.’ But when critics accuse him of instrumentalism, he adverts to the realities underwriting the instrumentalities, what enables them to work, to claim a certain (ambiguous, he admits) brand of realism. But as should now be clear, what he elides when he does this is nothing less than the structure of heuristic cognition, which blindly exploits the systematic correlations between information available and the systems involved to solve those systems as far as constraints on availability and capacity allow.
The reason he can elide the structure of heuristic cognition (and so find his real patterns argument convincing) lies, pretty clearly, I think, in the conflation of human intentional cognition (which is radically heuristic) with the intentional stance. In other words, he confuses what’s actually happening in instances of intentional cognition with what seems to be happening in instances of intentional cognition, given neglect. He runs afoul Cartesian gravity. “We tend to underestimate the strength of the forces that distort our imaginations,” he writes, “especially when confronted by irreconcilable insights that are ‘undeniable’” (22). Given medial neglect, the inability to cognize our contemporaneous cognizing, we are bound to intuit the order as ‘there’ (as ‘lateral’) even when we, like Dennett, should know better. Environmentalization is, as Hume observed, the persistent reflex, the sufficiency effect explaining our default tendency to report medial artifacts, features belonging to the signal, as genuine environmental phenomena, or features belonging to the source.
As a heuristic device, an assumption circumventing the brute fact of medial neglect, the environmentalization heuristic possesses an adaptive problem ecology—or as Dennett would put it, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ applications. The environmentalization heuristic, in other words, possesses adaptive application conditions. What Dennett would want to argue, I’m sure, is that ‘representations’ are no more or less heuristic than ‘centres of gravity,’ and that we are no more justified in impugning the reality of the one than the reality of the other. “I don’t see why my critics think their understanding about what really exists is superior to mine,” he complains at one point in From Bacteria to Bach and Back, “so I demure” (224). And he’s entirely right on this score: no one has a clue as to what attributing reality amounts to. As he writes regarding the reality of beliefs in “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. 29
Heuristic Neglect Theory, however, actually put us in a position to make a great deal of sense of ‘reality.’ We can see, rather plainly, I think, the disanalogy between ‘centres of gravity’ and ‘beliefs,’ the disanalogy that leaps out as soon as we consider how only the latter patterns require the intentional stance (or more accurately, intentional cognition) to become salient. Both are heuristic, certainly, but in quite different ways.
We can also see the environmentalization heuristic at work in the debate between whether ‘centres of gravity’ are real or merely instrumental, and Dennett’s claim that they lie somewhere in-between. Do ‘centres of gravity’ belong to the order which is there, or do we simply project them in useful ways? Are they discoveries, or impositions? Why do we find it so natural to assume either the one or the other, and so difficult to imagine Dennett’s in-between or ‘intermediate’ realism? Why is it so hard conceiving of something half-real, half-instrumental?
The fundamental answer lies in the combination of frame and medial neglect. Our blindness to the enabling dimension of cognition renders cognition, from the standpoint of metacognition, an all but ethereal exercise. ‘Transparency’ is but one way of thematizing the rank incapacity generally rendering environmentalization such a good trick. “Of course, centres of gravity lie out there!” We are more realists than instrumentalists. The more we focus on the machinery of cognition, however, the more dimensional the medial becomes, the more efficacious, and the more artifactual whatever we’re focusing on begins to seem. Given frame neglect, however, we fail to plug this higher-dimensional artifactuality into the superordinate systems encompassing all instances of cognition, thus transforming gears into tools, fetishizing those instances, in effect. “Of course, centres of gravity organize out there!” We become instrumentalists.
If these incompatible intuitions are all that the theoretician has to go on, then Dennett’s middle way can only seem tendentious, an attempt to have it both ways. What makes Dennett’s ‘mild or intermediate’ realism so difficult to imagine is nothing less than Cartesian gravity, which is to say, the compelling nature of the cognitive illusions driving our metacognitive intuitions either way. Squares viewed on this angle become circles viewed on that. There’s no in-between! This is why Dennett, like so many revolutionary philosophical thinkers before him, is always quick to reference the importance of imagination, of envisioning how things might be otherwise. He’s always bumping against the limits of our shackles, calling attention to the rattle in the dark. Implicitly, he understands the peril that neglect, by way of sufficiency, poses to our attempts to puzzle through these problems.
But only implicitly, and as it turns out (given tools so blunt and so complicit as the intentional stance), imperfectly. On Heuristic Neglect Theory, the practical question of what’s real versus what’s not is simply one of where and when the environmentalization heuristic applies, and the theoretical question of what’s ‘really real’ and what’s ‘merely instrumental’ is simply an invitation to trip into what is obviously (given the millennial accumulation of linguistic wreckage) metacognitive crash space. When it comes to ‘centres of gravity,’ environmentalization—or the modifier ‘real’—applies because of the way the posit economizes otherwise available, as opposed to unavailable, information. Heuristic posits centres of gravity might be, but ones entirely compatible with the scientific examination of deep information environments.
Such is famously not the case with posits like ‘belief’ or ‘representation’—or for that matter, ‘real’! The heuristic mechanisms underwriting environmentalization are entirely real, as is the fact that these heuristics do not simply economize otherwise available information, but rather compensate for structurally unavailable information. To this extent, saying something is ‘real’—acknowledging the applicability of the environmentalization heuristic—involves the order here as much as the order there, so far as it compensates for structural neglect, rather than mere ignorance or contingent unavailability. ‘Reality’ (like ‘truth’) communicates our way of selecting and so sorting environmental interactions while remaining almost entirely blind to the nature of those environmental interactions, which is to say, neglecting our profound continuity with those environments.
At least as traditionally (intentionally) conceived, reality does not belong to the real, though reality-talk is quite real, and very useful. It pays to communicate the applicability of environmentalization, if only to avoid the dizzying cognitive challenges posed by the medial, enabling dimensions of cognition. Given the human circuit, truth-talk can save lives. The apparent paradox of such declarations—such as saying, for instance, that it’s true that truth does not exist—can be seen as a direct consequence of frame and medial neglect, one that, when thought carefully through step by empirically tractable step, was pretty much inevitable. We find ourselves dumbfounding for good reason!
The unremarkable fact is that the heuristic systems we resort to when communicating and trouble-shooting cognition are just that: heuristic systems we resort to when communicating and trouble-shooting cognition. And what’s more, they possess no real theoretical power. Intentional idioms are all adapted to shallow information ecologies. They comprise the communicative fraction of compensatory heuristic systems adapted not simply to solve astronomically complicated systems on the cheap, but absent otherwise instrumental information belonging to our deep information environments. Applying those idioms to theoretical problems amounts to using shallow resources to solve the natural deeps. The history of philosophy screams underdetermination for good reason! There’s no ‘fundamental ontology’ beneath, no ‘transcendental functions’ above, and no ‘language-games’ or ‘intentional stances’ between, just the machinations of meat, which is why strokes and head injuries and drugs produce the boggling cognitive effects they do.
The point to always keep in mind is that every act of cognition amounts to a systematic meeting of at least two functionally distinct systems, the one cognized, the other cognizing. The cognitive facts of life entail that all cognition remains, in some fundamental respect, insensitive to the superordinate system explaining the whole let alone the structure and activity of cognition. This inability to cognize our position within superordinate systems (frame neglect) or to cognize our contemporaneous cognizing (medial neglect) is what renders the so-called first-person (intentional stance) homuncular, blind to its own structure and dynamics, which is to say, oblivious to the role here plays ordering ‘there.’ This is what cognitive science needs to internalize, the way our intentional and phenomenal idioms steer us blindly, absent any high-dimensional input, toward solutions that, when finally mapped, will bear scant resemblance to the metacognitive shadows parading across our cave walls. And this is what philosophy needs to internalize as well, the way their endless descriptions and explanations, all the impossible figures—squircles—comprising the great bestiary of traditional reflection upon the nature of the soul, are little more than illusory artifacts of their inability to see their inability to see. To say something is ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘factual’ or ‘represents,’ or what have you is to blindly cue blind orientations in your fellows, to lock them into real but otherwise occluded systems, practically and even experimentally efficacious circuits, not to invoke otherworldly functions or pick out obscure-but-real patterns like ‘qualia’ or ‘representations.’
The question of ‘reality’ is itself a heuristic question. As horribly counter-intuitive as all this must sound, we really have no way of cognizing the high-dimensional facts of our environmental orientation, and so no choice but to problem-solve those facts absent any inkling of them. The issue of ‘reality,’ for us, is a radically heuristic one. As with all heuristic matters, the question of application becomes paramount: where does externalization optimize, and where does it crash? It optimizes where the cues relied upon generalize, provide behavioural handles that can be reverse-engineered—‘reduced’—absent reverse-engineering us. It optimizes, in other words, wherever frame and medial neglect do not matter. It crashes, however, where the cues relied upon compensate, provide behavioural handles that can only be reverse-engineered by reverse-engineering ourselves.
And this explains the ‘gobsmacking fact’ with which we began, how we can source the universe all the way back to first second, and yet remain utterly confounded by our ability to do so. Short cognitive science, compensatory heuristics were all that we possessed when it came to question of ourselves. Only now do we find ourselves in a position to unravel the nature of the soul.
The crazy thing to understand, here, the point Dennett continually throws himself toward in From Bacteria to Bach and Back only to be drawn back out on the Cartesian tide, is that there is no first-person. There is no original or manifest or even scientific ‘image’: these all court ‘imaginative distortion’ because they, like the intentional stance, are shallow ecological artifacts posturing as deep information truths. It is not the case that, “[w]e won’t have a complete science of consciousness until we can align our manifest-image identifications of mental states by their contents with scientific-image identifications of the subpersonal information structures and events that are causally responsible for generating the details of the user-illusion we take ourselves to operate in” (367)—and how could it be, given our abject inability to even formulate ‘our manifest-image identifications,’ to agree on the merest ‘detail of our user-illusion’? There’s a reason Tom Clark emphasizes this particular passage in his defense of qualia! If it’s the case that Dennett believes a ‘complete science of consciousness’ requires the ‘alignment’ of metacognitive reports with subpersonal mechanisms then he is as much a closet mysterian as any other intentionalist. There’s simply too many ways to get lost in the metacognitive labyrinth, as the history of intentional philosophy amply shows.
Dennett needs only continue following the heuristic tracks he’s started down in From Bacteria to Bach and Back—and perhaps recall his own exhortation to imagine—to see as much. Imagine how it was as a child, living blissfully unaware of philosophers and scientists and their countless confounding theoretical distinctions and determinations. Imagine the naïveté, not of dwelling within this or that ‘image,’ but within an ancestral shallow information ecology, culturally conditioned to be sure, but absent the metacognitive capacity required to run afoul sufficiency effects. Imagine thinking without ‘having thoughts,’ knowing without ‘possessing knowledge,’ choosing without ‘exercising freedom.’ Imagine this orientation and how much blinkered metacognitive speculation and rationalization is required to transform it into something resembling our apparent ‘first-person perspective’—the one that commands scarcely any consensus beyond exceptionalist conceit.
Imagine how much blinkered metacognitive speculation and rationalization is required to transform it into the intentional stance.
So, what, then, is the intentional stance? An illusory artifact of intentional cognition, understood in the high-dimensional sense of actual biological mechanisms (both naturally and neurally selected), not the low-dimensional, contentious sense of an ‘attitude’ or ‘perspective.’ The intentional stance represents an attempt to use intentional cognition to fundamentally explain intentional cognition, and in this way, it is entirely consonant with the history of philosophy as a whole. It differs—perhaps radically so—in the manner it circumvents the metacognitive tendency to report intentional phenomena as intrinsic (self-sufficient), but it nevertheless remains a way to theorize cognition and experience via, as Dennett himself admits, resources adapted to their practical troubleshooting.
The ‘Cartesian wound’ is no more than theatrical paint, stage make-up, and so something to be wiped away, not healed. There is no explanatory gap because there is no first-person—there never has been, apart from the misapplication of radically heuristic, practical problem-solving systems to the theoretical question of the soul. Stripped of the first-person, consciousness becomes a natural phenomenon like any other, baffling only for its proximity, for overwriting the very page it attempts to read. Heuristic Neglect Theory, in other words, provides a way for us to grasp what we are, what we always have been: a high-dimensional physical system possessing selective sensitivities and capacities embedded in other high-dimensional physical systems. This is what you’re experiencing now, only so far as your sensitivities and capacities allow. This, in other words, is this… You are fundamentally inscrutable unto yourself outside practical problem-solving contexts. Everything else, everything apparently ‘intentional’ or ‘phenomenal’ is simply ‘seems upon reflection.’ There is no ‘manifest image,’ only a gallery of competing cognitive illusions, reflexes to report leading to the crash space we call intentional philosophy. The only ‘alignment’ required is that between our shallow information ecology and our deep information environments: the ways we do much with little, both with reference to each other and with ourselves. This is what you reference when describing a concert to your buddies. This is what you draw on when you confess your secrets, your feelings, your fears and aspirations. Not a ‘mind,’ not a ‘self-model,’ nor even a ‘user illusion,’ but the shallow cognitive ecology underwriting your brain’s capacity to solve and report itself and others.
There’s a positively vast research project buried in this outlook, and as much would become plain, I think, if enough souls could bring themselves see past the fact that it took an institutional outsider to discover. The resolutely post-intentional empirical investigation of the human has scarcely begun.
Three Pound Brain 
Does the method of trying to determine what consciousness isn’t make it harder to get the idea across? The reader is left merely with what isn’t – so there isn’t a first person and…big empty blank as to other options? It’s a kind of negative space argument, carving away at what is taken to ‘be there’, leaving something which is only defined by the absence of what was carved away. Perhaps it’s uncharitable of me, but I could imagine people simply turning away from the blank back to what they already know, drawn to its light.
To me the next steps into that blank are that the first person kinda exists, like the aerodynamic of a birds wing exists. There’s a mechanic principle there that facilitate continued survival. But like the bird doesn’t have a clue about aerodynamics, it just flies, we don’t have a clue as to the mechanical benefit of the thing we call the first person, we just do it. More exactly, we just are it. We are the wing – and the many physical interactions it involves – which for the time being the ecological niche the wing fits in is still there.
But I’m kind of on board with the idea to begin with (I think) – I’m not a dissenting audience. As such I have my own forays into the blank to work from to intersect with the idea of no first person. What of readers who have no forays to work from? To me it seems like you use a raw elimination method that doesn’t seem conducive to getting an idea across – it’s like trying to get an idea across by destroying another idea (again, relying on the negative space left by that destruction as the very idea/way of conveying an idea). It just seems too obscure? I think speculative forays, specifically and clearly marked as such to separate them from the empirical eliminations, would get the idea across. The whole problem with the academic lecture model (and posts made to fit the academic system of thinking) is that people are trained to follow along the guy talking behind the lectern – that’s the genre. But pure eliminating doesn’t lead them to anywhere. Maybe as a doubter you’re loathe to lead anywhere, but speculative forays, marked as such, aught to be a middle ground. Some kind of overlap on the Venn diagram/some kind of crossroads.
Anyway, I’ve critiqued a critique – what does the scouter say? “Callan’s wank level is over 9000!!!”
“And so, Dennett holds that a wide variety of intentional phenomena are real, just not in the way we have traditionally understood them to be real. This includes reasons, beliefs, functions, desires, rules, choices, purposes, and—pivotally, given critiques like Tom Clark’s—representations. So far as this bestiary solves real world problems, they have to grab hold of the world somehow, don’t they?”
There is a much simpler way for intentional phenomena to be real. Consider beliefs. Person X believes person Y is his wife. Person Y used to believe person X is her husband. Thanks to the slow destruction of her brain by Alzheimer’s she no longer believes this. It’s a familiar story, and the fact that this belief can be destroyed by a physical process suggests that the belief is a physical object, instantiated in the structure and dynamics of person Y’s brain. One can so argue about all ‘mental’ phenomena. They are merely physical phenomena we don’t yet understand. This is true of information generally, I think. I can’t think of any way information can exist if it is not somehow physically instantiated. Once I see information as physical I can see informational processes as merely physical processes. Changing the state of a human mind by saying something to that mind is no more mysterious in principle than changing the state of a computer by sending it a bit stream.
I understand that we can’t actually open skulls and alter brains directly. We can’t perform neurosurgery that provides the body housing a particular brain with the ability to fly an airplane, but if we agree that the knowledge needed to fly a plane is instantiated in the structure and dynamics of a brain and its associated body then we ought to agree that such a surgery is possible in principle. I’ve always thought the basic point of Three Pound Brain is that if you really want to understand the human mind you have to accept that minds are metaphors, ways brains think about other brains since they don’t have the knowledge or the access to examine other brains directly. Once you accept that notion you realize that if you really want to understand minds you have to understand brains, so you should stop doing philosophy and take up neuroscience.
Take ‘value’: put a dollar bill through the wash too many times, and you clearly destroy the ‘value’ of the bill, insofar as it ceases to cause people to give you ju-jubes at the corner store. ‘Beliefs’ aren’t real in the same way monetary value isn’t real: the brain component of the larger system that belief-talk functions is a necessary condition of that talk functioning the way it should, but it holds no ‘beliefs’ – no contents committing others to act according to norms of rationality given some desire. Like ‘value,’ beliefs allow us to replace super-complex sets of extrinsic relations with a simple intrinsic property, a fetish. ‘Mind’ is one way of referencing a system of such fetishes. There is no ‘mind’ to be understood, though mind-talk is a far, far different story, one ultimately requiring that we understand the brain.
“’Beliefs’ aren’t real in the same way monetary value isn’t real.”
The dollar bill, considered merely as a rectangular piece of paper, is still real. Similarly beliefs, considered merely as neurological structures/dynamics (the things that Alzheimer’s, or brain tumors, or shotgun blasts destroy) are real physical entities. A dollar clearly has both a physical existence as a piece of paper with ink on it and a social existence as a medium of exchange/store of value etc. The destruction of the dollar’s social existence does not cause the destruction of the dollar’s physical existence. That piece of paper is still a piece of paper even if other people will no longer give you ju-jubes or a ride out of town ahead of the Martians in exchange for it.
My point in saying this is that “the machinations of meat” have to incarnate intentional phenomena in order for those intentional phenomena to have the efficacy in the meat world they do. Seeing intentional phenomena as merely neurological frees Dennett from trying to have it both ways, because there is only one way, the physical way. That’s not to say thinking about intentionality in intentional ways is not a good idea when we don’t have the tools or the access to think about intentionality in physical ways, but if Dennett or anybody else is going to “naturalize comprehension, which is to say, to cease merely exploring the scope and power of the intentional stance, and to provide us with a genuine naturalistic explanation” he’ll have to renounce philosophy because it “logically prevents the very kind of biological understanding Dennett—and naturalists more generally—take as the primary desideratum.”
Renounce intentional theory, at least.
“Similarly beliefs, considered merely as neurological structures/dynamics (the things that Alzheimer’s, or brain tumors, or shotgun blasts destroy) are real physical entities.”
Beliefs aren’t in brains though: belief-talk belongs to a heuristic/ecological circuit, one that’s as much here as there. Beliefs are no more real than value, a shallow ecological way to make sense of brains the same way value is a shallow way to make sense of paper currency. This is why we can talk beliefs absent any knowledge of cognitive science whatsoever. And this is why no one has any luck localizing beliefs in the brain–why the list of belief related confounds just goes on. Attributing high-dimensional reality to intentional posits crashes something: these confounds either express the shape of the problem, or they pertain to heuristic misapplication. The latter hews to mediocrity, while the former makes us out to be something exceptional, in keeping with the traditional pattern. The real is so much a desert as to subvert the reality of real!
I kinda feel like Scott is saying dollars never existed, it’s only ever been paper. While you’re saying the dollar does have physical existence…by saying the paper is still paper. Does the dollar exist or does the paper exist? Before you say both, does the existence of the paper really prove both exist?
“’Beliefs’ aren’t real in the same way monetary value isn’t real.”
Scott’s point – at least for me – is that beliefs like our acceptance of ‘monetary value’ is a convention, a truth (fiction) we’ve all agreed upon, but that it has no actual reality outside that instrumental intentionality. Even in Lacan, Badiou, Zizek etc. the Real is this set of heuristic fictions we as cultural creatures accept as working products of exchange, but they have no reality – the Real being only the combined fantasy of our social agreement to get on with our work, etc. While reality resists every aspect of our reductions to the intentional stance or intentional cognition. Reality is that which has no representation, no intentions – and cannot be accessed directly but only indirectly through our failures of intentional cognition. I think that Dennett’s in-between is dynamic rather than static, and by that he oscillates in a disjunctive manner between the top-down and bottom-up never resting in either one, but using them like all heuristic devices to get on with his work rather than rest in some final truth or Real.
On HNT there’s no reason to think ‘reality’ fares any better as a theoretical posit than any other intentional term. We effortlessly slip into these usages, and they feel, no matter what the interrogative canon, but our inability to agree on any formulation is a good indication we’re running afoul some kind of misapplication. Reality talk, however, say with regard to ‘fake news’ and the like, remains every bit as important. The posits we reach for whenever we think these things ontologically or epistemologically are stone age tools mistaken for transcendental dispensations. When you know what real-talk actually amounts to, why bother with capital ‘R’ Real? Save ‘real’ for instances where it does real work.
Yea, I wasn’t defending the notion of Real as used by Lacan, Badiou, Zizek… actually just drawing a comparison to show just how far philosophers will go to save the appearances… 🙂 Our propensity for delusion and illusion is ever with us, in other words….
At least as I see it, if you argue that “beliefs aren’t in brains” you have the problem of explaining how Alzheimer’s caused person Y to forget her fifty-five years of marriage to person X. Memories are beliefs about the past. If those beliefs are not somehow instantiated in brain structure and function it becomes difficult to explain how neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s cause memory loss.
Regarding money, a dollar, considered merely as a rectangular piece of paper with ink on it, exists whether anyone will trade you ju-jubes for it or not. Beliefs aren’t real in the same way monetary value isn’t real, but beliefs are real in the same way rectangular pieces of paper with ink on them are real.
My wider point in this is that information of any kind must be physically instantiated in order to actually inform. There is no such thing as information in the abstract, so there is no such thing as a thing made of information. The efficacy of the design stance and the intentional stance are ultimately derivative from the efficacy of the physical stance. The reason mental objects can have efficacy in the physical world is because they are actually physical objects themselves.
Probably the whole issue is simply getting the order the other way around – beliefs aren’t memories instantiated in the brain, there are instantiations in the brain plus more instantiations which produce the claim of the subject of having ‘memories’. Further instantiations and corroboration from ‘memories’/the instantiations that come before ‘memories’ lead to a subject claiming beliefs. How much is a ‘belief’ in the brain when it’s a secondary or tertiary construct of prior instantiations? It has a less solid position in the brain as much as software you could uninstall the very next minute doesn’t have a solid position. Maybe Scott is too extreme with saying beliefs don’t exist, but trying to examine things as if the brain is there for the benefit of the beliefs is going to get things the wrong way around – the intentionalistic way around.
Also it’d be interesting to have to face a piece of painted paper blind as to whether it is merely an artwork someone made or the currency of a far flung country of the world. It is a piece of paper at that point, but is it a dollar? It may well not be a dollar at all. So the dollar would exist and would not exist at the same time?
Another way of putting it is taking beliefs to be real is like treating the shadows in Plato’s cave as real and what is behind the prisoners as what the shadows are ‘in’.
yes there are (we have) no minds, no beliefs, and no concepts!
all just figures of speech…
“All money is a matter of belief.” – Adam Smith
So person Y’s ‘first person’ has deteriorated to still live in this world but no longer holds person X’s ‘first person’ in relation to her first person. Person X (first person) FEELS the loss of Person Y.
Language’s primary function is social interaction and without a reinforced first person, no one can be held accountable. Just like for nation states, military might and alliances reinforce security and even respect for the value of currency.
Science reinvents and rearranges the brains language and social modules for different purpose. The ‘evil’ social outcast scientist who dissolves the first person is playing his own language game as they say.
Once they can clear the confusions of language the whole first person thing looks trivial.
Just replace ‘first person’ in your example with ‘shallow information ecology.’ What’s lost from an explanatory perspective?
Nothing. All information is shallow but only a matter of how the arrows are aimed, can cause all type of feelings from trivial to anger to deep guilt. In reality we are all shallow and thin skinned like the skin or outer layer of our global workspace/neocortex that whirls around our brain?
VP, yes tho ‘feelings’ are largely as a pre-dictive as other brain functions so not so reactive/caused as generally thought.
Sorry for the unfitting place, but today I saw some people on a certain infamous forum daring to criticize TUC so, I told them this
“To be fair, you have to have a very, very high IQ to understand Bakker’s books.The story is extremely subtle and without a solid grasp on philosophy and literature, most of the story will go over the typical reader’s head. There is also Bakker’s nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into the characterization and prose. The prose for example, drew heavily from Greek literature. The fans understand this stuff, they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of Bakker’s choice of words. To realize that it’s not just hard, it says something deep about LIFE. As a consequence, people who dislike Bakker’s books truly ARE idiots. Of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the MEANING in Kellhus’s existential cataphrase, “Truth Shines.” which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev’s Russian epic ” Fathers and Sons”. I am smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Bakker’s genius wit unfolds itself on their e readers or physical copies.What fools… How I pity them… And yes, by the way, I DO have a Bakker tattoo in certain private parts, and no, you can not see it unless you demonstrate your Bakker faith. Nothing personal.”
Give me a cookie.
Is it just me or do the Inchoroi seem a bit like GWAR?
Callan
Still, if you deny the physical reality of memories how do you explain how Alzheimer’s or brain tumors cause memory loss? If you deny the physical reality of beliefs how do you explain how physical processes can change beliefs? What is the difference between a living person and a dead one such that the living person can profess beliefs and the dead one can’t?
“instantiations in the brain plus more instantiations which produce the claim of the subject of having ‘memories’. Further instantiations and corroboration from ‘memories’/the instantiations that come before ‘memories’ lead to a subject claiming beliefs.”
All these instatiations and claimings are physical processes, which is why living beings can do them and dead beings can’t. To put it another way, whether you are a computer or a human it always takes energy to process information. Whatever you think about intentional stances, manifest images, paradigms, language games or what have you, surely you don’t deny that the brains stancing, imaging, paradigming and gaming are burning glucose in order to do so, do you?
If we accept that mental processes simply are physical processes which we don’t understand well enough to describe in physical terms we can stop trying to understand them in mental terms and start trying to understand them in physical terms. As I see BBT/HNT it is ultimately an argument that there are no objects other than physical objects and no processes other than physical processes. For anyone who, as I do, considers himself a materialist, the efficacy of stances, manifest images, paradigms and the like in the physical world is only possible because stances, manifest images, paradigms and the like are themselves physical objects undergoing physical processes.
” So the dollar would exist and would not exist at the same time?” As a materialist my advice would be to answer that question sticking to physics.
I almost laughed out loud when you said “As a materialist my advice would be to answer that question sticking to physics.” The problem with such an outdated physicalist materialist perspective is that modern quantum physics is the most abstract and concrete of sciences: it’s use of diagrams, models, simulations to invent hypothetical entities based of pure theoretic mathemes (top-down), which are then used to test “possibles” (i.e., the hypothetical Higg’s boson was an abstract theoretic matheme until it was indirectly observed through interactions with observables, etc.). The point is that old school materialism of which physicalism was a mainstay no longer exists in any viable fashion except in the die hard mind’s of intentional philosophers. The sciences could care less whether what their dealing with is reduced to mental or physical, what they are concerned with is the discernment of truth using their heuristic equations which if proven support more and more a wild universe that is far beyond our puny human mind’s to comprehend or believe. And, yet, we can use this thing that has no name: these forces we indirectly engage to solve problems for which there is no known solution only more questions. It’s like the old chicken or egg problem: which comes first – Mind or Matter? Or is Mind and Matter the human reduction and masks for something we have as yet no knowledge, and like Scott’s been saying repeatedly that we are enclosed in ‘medial or heuristic neglect” and surmise only our own echoes rather than the data that lies outside our brains filters?
I think I deny your summation that you call ‘beliefs’, Michael. If we were talking about a set of dominoes set upright, removing a number of dominoes from the middle stops any chain reaction from the start getting through to the end. Where as you call the last domino falling ‘belief’ and then refer to any removal of dominoes/brain matter as showing that belief exists. Think of the wife in terms of behaviouralism. With no brain damage, she behaves in Y way towards her husband. With damage she behaves in X way.
Instead of seeing the dominoes from the side, you see them from the very end at the last domino – her behavior, the last domino to fall. Behaviour X does NOT involve anything along the lines of ‘Yes, that is my husband’. This you attribute to ‘belief’, as you summerise a long, long series of dominoes (and the missing/damaged dominoes in between) as ‘belief’ for just seeing the last domino that falls. In a dead person the dominoes are rotted away.
I would say that ‘belief’ isn’t burning gluclose, the dominoes are burning gluclose.
“But why doesn’t this summation of belief suffice then?”
Because this summation is the result of your dominoes flipping over. This is in part a result of the processes of you, as you track another, not tracking your own attributions. It’s not just that her dominoes are falling over (or failing to when the middle dominoes are removed), it’s that your dominoes are falling as well.
The attribute of ‘belief’ is coming out of nowhere because you’re failing to track yourself and the source of your claim of belief as you’re tracking her. You see belief because that’s how your dominoes fall. Your track her because that’s how your dominoes fall. You don’t track where your own attribution of belief because of where you are tracking (because other dominoes). Belief doesn’t exist, it’s just a heuristic short cut reinforced by being distracted from ones own processes of attributing it by the arduous task of tracking another’s processes.
If it’s not convincing, imagine this – you have a pair of rose coloured glasses that, if you stop concentrating on the mechanism that holds them up, will come down over your eyes. If you see something very interesting, it’ll probably break your concentration for simply concentrating on it rather than on the glasses. Most interesting things will look rose coloured. But them being rose coloured does not exist (even as the glasses do indeed exist). It’s an attribution you did not shut down due to shifted/broken concentration.
” So the dollar would exist and would not exist at the same time?” As a materialist my advice would be to answer that question sticking to physics.
I think you have a category of whether something is a ‘dollar’ and you investigate that in a materialist way. But in terms of the actual category itself, you are not being a practicing materialist. You question whether something is a dollar, but you’re not questioning the idea of whether dollars exist to begin with – you’ll attribute this to A: there being the coloured paper as an existent thing. Then you’ll insist B: Dollars exist because you bought something with the paper. A and B do not appear a circular logic because we buy things with dollars every day.
But if you are handed the coloured paper, told it is from X country and you go there and you try to buy something but are as denied your desired purchase as the man trying to escape the martian invaders, you will be just as flummoxed as he.
I feel all this technical talk of mine might make me sound unsupportive or stand offish but I would like to assert I do want to be supportive and standing with. The subject of discussion does indeed abandons people, but as much as I can through text, I’d like to assert I am not abandoning anyone here and are standing with folk here. That is important! Even if what I find important is a belief…
S.C. Hickman
My “stick to physics” remark to Callan was about the specific question he asked within the specific context in which he asked it. I don’t think Callan needs quantum mechanics to determine whether the dollar we were discussing exists. Indeed, Callan almost seemed to be saying the dollar is in some superposition of existing and not existing and presenting it to the candy store clerk in hope of receiving a box of ju-jubes collapses its wave function. I’m not a physicist and I could be wrong, but I doubt that anyone uses quantum physics to determine if he has a dollar. In general invocations or relativity and quantum physics for problems that can be solved to the required degree of precision using classical methods generate more heat than light. My point to Callan was that the question whether the dollar, considered as a piece of paper with ink on it exists and the question whether the candy store clerk will give him a box of ju-jubes in exchange for that piece of paper with ink on it are separate questions best answered by separate processes.
Callan
Okay. I call certain neurological processes beliefs. You seem to be calling those same neurological processes dominoes. I’m fine with that. I’m not trying to bring back intentionality or semantics or any of that sort of thing. I’m trying to steal the terminology and co-opt it for neurological processes, but I’m fine with dominoes.
Regarding dollars, as I said above, the question whether the dollar, considered merely as a rectangular piece of paper exists and the question whether the clerk will accept it in exchange for a box of ju-jubes are separate questions best answered using separate methods. Given some rectangular piece of paper with ink on it, what makes that piece of paper a dollar? I would say what makes anything, whether a dollar bill or a gold coin or a cowrie shell money is the willingness of other people to accept it in exchange for things they value. That willingness comes from the belief that after trading something I value for money I will later be able to trade that money for something I value. That’s all economic common sense, but it’s intentional common sense, in that the functioning of money depends on belief. This means that one can ask “how do you naturalize money?” the way Scott asks “how do you naturalize meaning?”
As I said, half to three quarters jokingly to S.C.above, attempting to buy something using a piece of paper you think might be money collapses its wave function, so to speak. If a piece of paper is money by virtue of the willingness of other people to accept it in return for things you and they value, the way to determine whether a piece of paper is money is to try to buy something with it. All our dollars are Schroedinger dollars until we try to spend them.
Michael
I’m not trying to bring back intentionality or semantics or any of that sort of thing. I’m trying to steal the terminology and co-opt it for neurological processes
It is the same as trying to co-opt the terminology that is ‘soul’ and apply it to neurological processes. You will be supporting intentionality or semantics. Asking “how do you naturalize money?” is to ask “how do you naturalize ghosts?”. So is Scotts question about naturalizing meaning, but I’ll charitably assume he’s trying to cut to the heart of the question in asking how to naturalise a supernatural, instead letting money or belief trade of the ‘un collapsed wave form’ of meaning. Your insistence on separate methods is just another kind of dualism.
Though Scott will have to consider with his speculation of ‘rape’ modules in the brain whether they exist any more than your ‘belief’ modules can exist. Or is ‘belief’ an easy weakling to knock down and wont fight back, but the notion of ‘rape’ somehow gets to fight back against elimination? So nasty it has to be really real?
There is no collapsing wave form, you’re suffering the uncanny effects that come with intentional thinking (as opposed to causational thinking) when it comes into contact with a situation its heuristics do not match. My example was supposed to make you suspicious of your conviction about ‘money’ being supported by colored paper, but instead it generated a fictional landscape involving some kind of wave function that can collapse. You should decide whether you are going to use intentional thinking on this – that way at least you will have decided, rather than the rose coloured glasses just falling down over your eyes for lack of concentration and this unintended effect ironically deciding for you your position on intentionality.
Callan
The collapsing wave function thing was a joke. I merely meant it to poke gentle fun at S.C. Hickman’s overwrought (to my ears anyway) invocation of quantum mechanics to try to figure out whether you can buy a box of ju-jubes for a dollar (and to a lesser extent your question about dollars existing and not existing at the same time.)
Regarding ‘how do you naturalize ghosts?’
Regarding dual methods I don’t think it’s too Cartesian to think we can use physics to determine if our dollar exists then use economics to determine whether our dollar will fetch a box of ju-jubes.
In this one, Shaggy, Scooby and the gang not only naturalize a ghost but meet some money that exists and does not exist at the same time:
As Scott put it in the original post:
“The strategy is straightforward enough. There’s little doubt that the physical stance, design stance, and intentional stance assist solving certain classes of phenomena in certain circumstances, so when confronted by those kinds of phenomena in those kinds of circumstances, taking the requisite stance is a good bet. If we have the tools, then why not use them?”
Some phenomena are hybrid. Dollars are physical objects and ‘informational objects’ (which is why money can be digitized). So in dealing with different aspect of money different stances may be appropriate.
And as I said, if you don’t like using intentional language to describe neurological processes I’m fine with calling them dominoes.
Michael, I can’t figure out whether you are aware of what you are doing each time you say something like ‘Dollars are physical objects…’. I can’t figure out if you want that to be the case or if you think it is the case, or a mix of both as correlational and causational thinking struggle with each other in the same skull.
I suspect you want it to be the case and correlational thinking actually pulls out causational thinking every so often like a kind of shield to protect itself from the dispelling chorae, while your causational thinking doesn’t realise it is being used in this way. Every so often you dip into what appears to be empirical grasp of the issue, but just at roughly the time it’d be useful to parry someones readyness to dispell your ‘Dollars are real’ (insert link to ‘Scud is real!’ video) talk.
I think you’ve a wave form of your own here, with the only way to collapse it and stop correlational thinking being in conflict with causational is to largely let ‘dollars’ die! It’s magic at a magic show – you can believe in it during the show, but talking about magic like it’s real outside the show and trying to bring up an empirical grasp of the situation here and there to defend that talk – that’s your waveform that has yet to collapse. Put ‘dollar’s in a quarantine, in a sandbox, like the magic stays in the quarantine/sandbox that is the magic show. I don’t think you can bear to just kill your baby/kill ‘dollars’ – and that’s fair, I can relate to that myself. But it’s time for it to go into a zoo instead of roaming around like it’s the one in charge.
But of course, since it is roaming around as if it’s in charge, it’s not going to agree to going into quarantine/a zoo. And if causational thinking is insensate to this, then there will be no empirical uprising and things are not going to change.
In which case I indulge my sense of humour and end by saying, like god, Swayze is dead. Put baby in the corner.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2017/oct/27/why-cant-we-cure-the-common-cold-podcast
S.C. Hickman
As you put it in response to the first part of this review:
“I agree that qualia and experience are nothing but this hidden brain process of translation and indexing of reality in memory and consciousness: a dialectical oscillation and hide-an-go-seek ad infinitum charade, in which the brain holds all the cards and we as consciousness are lost among our own deluded dreams of thought.”
I like ‘dialectical oscillation.’ It’s like Callan’s dominoes getting knocked down then standing back up to prepare for the next gust of sensory input. As long as we agree that ‘intentional’ phenomena are ultimately neurological whatever terminology you want to use is fine by me.
Callan
Okay. There is no such thing as paper money. All the times I thought I was handling currency I was actually suffering a series of bizarre tactile hallucinations.
Oscillations. And dialectical, not tactile. Your fingers wouldn’t know ‘money’ from paper if your eyes were closed. It’d all just be…paper?
I’m trying to think back to if I ever had a moment when I realised ‘money’ doesn’t exist or whether I’ve always seen it as a utility illusion (or if I’m BSing myself I’ve always seen it that way?)? Certainly I think I’ve always recognized the appeal of the board game Monopoly evokes the exact same charm of ‘money’ as it hands out it’s slips of paper, even as I had a tantrum as a youngling from losing to my older brother for the third time! By agreement those slips of paper have leverage in the game of Monopoly – and the world currencies are just a much, much larger game of Monopoly. People have been cos playing monopoly for so long all over the globe, they think the agreements of the game are existent properties.
The agreements sink from a place visible to consciousness (and are clearly agreements as much as they are in monopoly to treat its slips of paper as having leverage) to an invisible place, out of sight of the conscious brain yet dictating its responses all the same, almost as if there was some sort of blind brain thing going on! At which point it appears to be existent properties. For someone to say money doesn’t exist is like someone running out of paper slips in Monopoly but not conceding defeat as agreed – it would appear a kind of tantrum.
I wonder what the game pieces for Bakker Monopoly would be? >:) I call dibs on the chorae!
Callan
Chorae, Heron Spear, Tusk, Decapitant, Certainty (Kellhus’ Sword), the device (I can’t remember it’s name.) that Neil uses to alter brains in Neuropath (which would be my piece), Wracu, Bashrag, Diurnal (The False Sun), Carapace (The No-God), Seswatha’s Heart, Amiolas.
As you put it:
“The agreements sink from a place visible to consciousness (and are clearly agreements as much as they are in monopoly to treat its slips of paper as having leverage) to an invisible place, out of sight of the conscious brain yet dictating its responses all the same…”
That’s what I was trying to convey previously. Those ‘agreements’ are money, not the pieces of paper, but the agreements need perceptible objects such as pieces of paper in order to function. Furthermore, the agreements need to be instantiated in your brain somehow, as your own language suggests. My wider point was simply that all such agreements require perceptible objects in order to function.
Michael,
And a ‘I’d rather be masturbating’ T-shirt game piece – quite apt for monopoly, come to think of it. I think the neuropath device was called ‘the screensaver’.
I would like to submit though that if you were trying to convey ‘money’ is actually about agreement, you’d have corrected me that no one has agreed to play the currency game. It’s forced on us. Even on Trump. That’s part of what makes ‘money’ seem existent, while Monopoly’s slips of paper seem more ephemeral in contrast. You’d have corrected me, shown that I was using the wrong word when I said ‘money’ was about ‘agreement’.
Damage to the brain can stop a signal from it passing down to the heart to make it beat. But we would not say that that is a belief or causes a belief to be removed by brain damage. The beating heart is a behaviouralism. The problem is when you say beliefs exist you do support intentionalism and semantics. What you are calling beliefs are not any different from the signal sent to the heart that trigger behaviours in the muscles.
That is a very stark way to look at a human – everything, including fingers typing on a keyboard, is just a variation on a meaty heartbeat. But you are trying to drag ‘belief’ into this level of talk. As if the heart ‘believes’.
I’m not sure if Scott reads these, but if we are talking cognitive pollution, neuro typical brains (which is to say properly functioning brains) might have automatic rejection methods – as I said, this talk is stark. Perhaps to the point of being poisonous and damaging to the brain – a normal, healthy brain might spit it out like someone would spit out sour milk reflexively or another toxin. Where as a brain already damaged might have nothing to lose (you can’t lose the same limb twice) or has had its rejection reflex damaged and just suffers more damage, endlessly.
What I’m describing is, I think, pretty toxic. I had a childhood where dinner talk from my doctor father described prescriptions more than it did people. Perhaps a limb lost early. But if you’re gunna do the Absinthe, you don’t get to cut it with belief cola – do it straight or you’re not doing it. Even Scott seems to say in regards to BBT (or whatever he acroynm is now) that he advertises it, but he can’t really believe it (I think that’s a fair attribution?). Swill the Absinthe around, then spit. The fumes will still go through your head though. I’ve often thought one of the problems is these arguments of Scott’s do not allow the reader any quarantine of the idea, even as Scott might use a quarantine himself, since he says he can’t really believe it.
Short version, it’s a stark, toxic way of thinking about people. I’d propose a healthy brain would reject it. Apart from the incoming corporate and political use and abuse of this level of talk, I’d say such a rejection is actually the most rational responce.
https://www.recode.net/2017/11/6/16610878/bridgewater-associates-ray-dalio-book-principles-life-work-decision-formula-kara-swisher-podcast
Off topic, but this is about the only place crazy enough to post it: I was thinking about the Sally Anne test and how young children with autism fail it – they are unable to attribute false beliefs to others. If they can see the ball has been moved from basket 1 to basket 2 then when character B (who put the ball in basket 1 originally) returns to the room, if asked which basket B will look in for the ball, they will say basket 2.
What if this can be extended – people can’t attribute false beliefs to themselves? In the example the child lacks the theory of mind to attribute a false belief to another. What if people can lack the theory of mind to attribute a false belief to themselves? What if a differing version of the Sally Anne test could be made to test if people cannot attribute false beliefs to themselves?
Context; I was arguing with a poster on reddit who was all for arguing against anything happening to a guy whose contract had been cancelled over a claim of sexual assault. The poster literally says all he sees is the guy being out of work. I say it’s possible by chance or planning a sexual assault can happen and there is no evidence beyond the claim of the victim – he literally asks for evidence of this right after. This is what got my motor spinning on the idea of a person who has an inability to attribute themselves running off a false belief. I know this just sounds like ‘people wont admit they are wrong’, but the Sally Anne test is used to detect Autism – an actual brain configuration/condition. What if it’s not just hubris that stops people from admitting they are wrong, but an actual condition? Just raw inability?
https://www.triplejunearthed.com/jukebox/play/track/6537421
It’s the cognitive pollution song!
https://www.thespec.com/news-story/7923857-wlu-censures-grad-student-for-lesson-that-used-tvo-clip/
All that comes of this is poverty and hardship
http://arrow-journal.org/buddhism-feminism/
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/11/beware-the-modern-day-heretic-hunters/
Back to back in time’s the way to go…
http://backreaction.blogspot.ca/2017/11/how-do-you-prove-that-earth-is-older.html?m=1
Worth a listen.
No matter the insanity, tomorrow always has a hand.
https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_tooby-coalitional-instincts
https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/in-a-perfect-world/episodes/2017-08-31T16_08_31-07_00
This made me smile.
http://realitysandwich.com/322312/elephant-teacher-of-the-buddhic-way/
I speak up for animals too.
http://quillette.com/2017/12/13/words-lose-meaning-wilfrid-laurier-university/
Scott has talked a bit about the medicalization of what had been failures of character I don’t think any human being can believe something and simultaneously believe that belief to be false, so I guess the question is whether people can come to believe that a belief they held in the past was false, in other words can they change their minds. My guess is that inability to change one’s beliefs in response to new information would be so dysfunctional that the gene pool boy would have cleaned it out by now. That having been said, as with many mental health issues, it might be helpful to think of a continuum, from changes his mind too easily (gullible) to changes his mind too hardly (stubborn, delusional).
Of course you then find yourself asking what constitutes ‘new information’ and dealing with threshold issues about what new information has to do to be mind changing.
My guess is that inability to change one’s beliefs in response to new information would be so dysfunctional that the gene pool boy would have cleaned it out by now.
But these beliefs burn someone else’s genes – the guy will only see the damage of someone’s contract being cancelled, he wont see someone being potentially sexually assaulted and him doing nothing about that damage. And that damage gets in the way of gene transfer more – or so I’d argue. Plus if he could he’d help his poor lost contract buddy out, so that’ll get in the way of gene transfer even less for that person. This guys gene transfers do not suffer for his beliefs, someone else’s gene transfers do.
So much like the Dunyain men letting the Dunyain women take the genetic fallout of their beliefs, in a way.
If we were talking about colour blindness, it’s pointless trying to berate such a person into ‘seeing correctly’ (though I’m sure it’s been attempted at some point in history), but at the same time they can do things about it, like work arounds – ie, it’s still a matter of character. It seems less the medicalisation of failures of character and instead a culture of ‘oh, you have a condition! Then you are freed of all responsibility!’. Whose backing this moral cowardice? Maybe the courts when they support yet another move to sue?
Back to the main point though, I don’t particularly see an issue in believing in something but also seeing it could be false. It seems more like an issue with what might be called binge believing. Just believing to an extreme, like binge drinking. And equally binge disbelieving, like something is absolutely false. Either absolutely believed or absolutely false, with no middle ground. Yes, someone can’t believe like this and think it false, but that comes from the extremism involved. ‘Believe in yourself’ = have yet another drink. Consume.
on the to do list:
Binge writing, Scott? 🙂
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/elucidations/2017/12/01/episode-102-josh-knobe-discusses-the-true-self/
It seems sny intent-less theory rests on the intuitive linear causal (A causes B causes C) account of the physical processes at play.
Acausal or causally non-separable processes (with indefinite causal order, don’t confuse with indeterministic ones) could blow up it’s foundations. The latter are even realizable in practice and have concrete computational advantages,
Requisite reading:
Click to access 1508.01704.pdf
Click to access 1506.03776.pdf
Click to access 1608.01528.pdf
Click to access 1603.00043.pdf
Click to access 1611.08535.pdf
Click to access 1711.04065.pdf
“mechanisms”, “causes”, etc. do you think the world at it’s most basic works like that? Seems awfully trivial..
[shoulder shrug] The point here is to jettison a particularly problematic family of unexplained explainers–the one perpetually holding cognitive science hostage to philosophy–not get rid of them altogether. This is why problematizations of causality aren’t really that interesting to me.
Welcome to the board, tho, Victor!
You are not interested in the possible implications of acausal phenomena in nature?
Suppose continental philosophy is right, or not quite wrong (let’s say not for human but for some alien hyperbrain). What phenomena do you think must be included/found in it in order to make it work?
I don’t know the entire list, but it seems to me acausality in some form is one of the prerequisites.
Check out my “From Scripture to Fantasy” piece on academia.edu, Victor. Your question falls right in its wheelhouse.
Been quiet here at TPB recently, but I came across this gem today-
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-easiest-way-to-dismiss-good-science-demand-sound-science/
One thing we like to echo around these parts is that doubt and skepticism are good. But sometimes, those very sentiments can be used as weapons against solid science.
I would say that’s doubt that does not doubt it’s self. Which is probably the definition of certainty – doubting potentially anything except itself.
I was really shocked as a kid when I read that science never concludes, it never says something is the case. It merely stacks repeatable evidences. Something that entirely counter to neuro typical human psychology. Science is an angel that avoids actual conclusions and only men go where this angel fears to tread. But all this time the general populace has probably treated science as absolute fact (even a great number of scientists in the media seem to do that). And this socio cultural binding force, should this quite obvious fact (given even mild research) actually get around, is probably set to unravel simply because people want cognitive closure so badly.
Storytelling:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/the-origins-of-storytelling/547502/
I think Bakker and Dennett are both storytellers at a high level, but it’s possible we as a society have reached the limit of what storytelling can do.
I think the channels of storytelling are gripped by something nobody would would tell a story about – no one makes epic economic fantasy stories. Fiscal dragons. Debt collecting Balrogs. And invisible as it is, it’s wrapped it’s claws around the throat of storytelling. Want to write a story, but it just wouldn’t be worth it because you’re tired from work and it’ll never get published anyway?…Feel the claws…the claws no one writes about.
hi Scott, An excellent three-parter, stuffed in a very Dennettian way with telling examples and metaphors. I wonder if DD has seen it or responded?
To my mind this is the core to your argument.
“The intentional stance represents an attempt to use intentional cognition to fundamentally explain intentional cognition, and in this way, it is entirely consonant with the history of philosophy as a whole”
You can’t say what the intentional stance is without running a deeper theory that explains what it is for something to be “interpretable as” or “taken as” intentional – e.g. in terms of how ideal interpreters might address them in the space of radical interpretation.
X is an intentional system if X is interpretable as such; but by what? If “another intentional system” is the best answer we can give, we haven’t even delineated the intentional as a region or domain – it is structurally irregional, as Derrida like to say. Ontology and thus the entire discourse on real is a artifact.
So we can’t know what the satisfaction conditions are for being an intentional system because only if to *interpret as intentional* is really something other than a matter of intentionality. Dennett’s done the cause of eliminativism a great favour by showing how we can treat intentionality as an artifact and thus as reflexively opaque.
And, as you imply, this has implications for philosophical method. For once philosophy becomes methodologically self-conscious it becomes impossible. Yet if we bracket the intentional it seems we are no longer philosophizing. Which obviously raises reflective problems of the kind of thing I’m doing here.
Best, David
Thanks David. Agreed: the ‘intentional stance’ provides a loosely regimented way to use homuncularity in theoretical contexts without running afoul homuncularism. Dennett, at his best, acknowledges the limits of this approach, as well as the possibility of something better down the road. At his worst, however, he treats it as an explanatory primitive, as the ‘best we can hope for.’ If I’m right, HNT provides a thoroughly mediocre way to move past stances altogether.
I’m not sure I’m clear on your last point, tho. I would say the problem of reflexive opacity applies to traditional philosophizing, which is to say, philosophy bent on theoretical applications of intentional idioms. One of the things I try to show how immense the undiscovered country of post-intentional philosophy can be.
[…] understanding of the distinction. It generates the problems it does (for example, in Brassier or Dennett) because it inherits the very cognitive limitations it purports to explain. At best, Sellars take […]
[…] understanding of the distinction. It generates the problems it does (for example, in Brassier or Dennett) because it inherits the very cognitive limitations it purports to explain. At best, Sellars take […]