A Way to Solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness
The hard problem, of course, is how to reconcile subjective experience with an objective world of causal
processes. Do we reduce the former to the latter, as Dennett attempts? Or study the richness of inner experience as a new and separate empirical category alongside natural phenomena, much like gravity and other physical forces have been effectively researched without as yet fully integrating them in a grand synthesis?
Here's a third option. Take a look at the development of theories of affect/emotion in relation to cognition and you will find that the progress in understanding the subject-object relation is intimately tied to that of the thought-feeling binary.
There has been in recent years a new interest in affect in the social sciences and philosophy. Areas like embodied, enactive and extended cognition reject the older cognitive psychology model, derived from Descartes, of affect as peripheral to, and offers disruptive of. cognition, to one in which affective processes are fundamental to and inextricable from the core of what it means to think, perceive and conceptualize.
In reaching this new understanding, these approaches have had to reject the logical and epistemological formalisms, so prevalent on this forum, that undergirded first generation cognitivism ( brain in a vat) and are still to be found in Nagel. Searle and a host of analytic theorists.
The most radical implication of the new affective turn is that what has been considered unique to conscious subjects, the feeling of what it is like to be, the qualatiatice experience e of the world, is implied in all of what we call physical processes, not as one thing added on, but intrinsic to them. This is because in creating the abstractions that are so useful in the physical sciences, we don't recognize that qualitative transformation is intrinsic to, implied by all existents.
Affect is something not just in living beings, it is built into the movement of living and non-living process as the fundamentally self-transformative basis of objective reality.
It's not that physics hasn't made progress in this regard.
The billiard ball universe is long gone. replaced by one of radical interdependencies between physical 'objects'.
But these mathematically described relations still rest on fundamentally static presuppositions, such that physicists like Lee Smolen are trying to stir up a small revolution.
He recognizes time, evolution, transformation as fundamental to understanding physical and cosmological processes , and sees thes as having been left of out physical theories till now leading to a current stagnation on the metatheoretical level. This is the beginning of a move, if it is continued , of physics away from its dualistic origin and toward a reconciliation with evolutionary biology and cultural-psychological development via the overarching framework of self-organizing systems.
processes. Do we reduce the former to the latter, as Dennett attempts? Or study the richness of inner experience as a new and separate empirical category alongside natural phenomena, much like gravity and other physical forces have been effectively researched without as yet fully integrating them in a grand synthesis?
Here's a third option. Take a look at the development of theories of affect/emotion in relation to cognition and you will find that the progress in understanding the subject-object relation is intimately tied to that of the thought-feeling binary.
There has been in recent years a new interest in affect in the social sciences and philosophy. Areas like embodied, enactive and extended cognition reject the older cognitive psychology model, derived from Descartes, of affect as peripheral to, and offers disruptive of. cognition, to one in which affective processes are fundamental to and inextricable from the core of what it means to think, perceive and conceptualize.
In reaching this new understanding, these approaches have had to reject the logical and epistemological formalisms, so prevalent on this forum, that undergirded first generation cognitivism ( brain in a vat) and are still to be found in Nagel. Searle and a host of analytic theorists.
The most radical implication of the new affective turn is that what has been considered unique to conscious subjects, the feeling of what it is like to be, the qualatiatice experience e of the world, is implied in all of what we call physical processes, not as one thing added on, but intrinsic to them. This is because in creating the abstractions that are so useful in the physical sciences, we don't recognize that qualitative transformation is intrinsic to, implied by all existents.
Affect is something not just in living beings, it is built into the movement of living and non-living process as the fundamentally self-transformative basis of objective reality.
It's not that physics hasn't made progress in this regard.
The billiard ball universe is long gone. replaced by one of radical interdependencies between physical 'objects'.
But these mathematically described relations still rest on fundamentally static presuppositions, such that physicists like Lee Smolen are trying to stir up a small revolution.
He recognizes time, evolution, transformation as fundamental to understanding physical and cosmological processes , and sees thes as having been left of out physical theories till now leading to a current stagnation on the metatheoretical level. This is the beginning of a move, if it is continued , of physics away from its dualistic origin and toward a reconciliation with evolutionary biology and cultural-psychological development via the overarching framework of self-organizing systems.
Comments (90)
Or there's another option:
"Mind" or "Consciousness" separate from and different from the body, that your academic philosophers are so confused about, is in their own minds, a faith-based Spiritualist belief of theirs.
Humans are animals. The animal is unitary, no separate body and "Consciousness".
Animals, including humans, are purposefully-responsive devices, not different in principle from mousetraps, refrigerator lightswitches or thermostats. (..but differing from then in complexity, and natural-selection origin).
A purposefully-responsive device's "Consciousness" is is property of being a purposefully-responsive device.
A purposefully-responsive device's experience is its observed surroundings and events, in the context of its purposes as a purposefully-responsive device.
Michael Ossipoff
The central lesson of 4EA thinking is that how consciousness comes into being matters: you can't separate affective valences from the kinds of bodies that undergo them, nor from the specific environments or ecologies ('worlds') in which they take place among. To simply impute qualitative experience to all physical processes - irrespective of the particular kinds or specificities of the physical processes in question - is to vitiate this insight and fall back into the abstraction that makes of consciousness some kind of free floating ephemera that's just kind of 'everywhere' and in 'everything'.
So while I think it's entirely correct to say that, say, most analytic approaches to consciousness are utterly vacuous, swinging the pendulum in the other direction to simply say that all all physical processes have an experience-of-what-it-is-like is to make the same mistake from the opposite side of things - it amounts to another instance of explaining away. It evacuates all the focus on specificity that marks a central pillar of the 4EA approach. It's also a warmed over panpsychism, but that's neither here nor there.
Quoting Joshs
Implied? Do you think there is an equation that might describe that, such that, given the equation, and the requisite starting parameters, an output could be generated that would equal 'a feeling'? Whenever anything is interpreted, then you're already outside the domain of the strictly physical. Interpretive processes always entail qualitative judgements, and they're different in kind to quantitative analysis. Or so I would have thought.
Incorrect - Missed a qualifier there.
Humans are angels in animal bodies ???
Sounds great, what would it be for?
How many qualia can dance on the end of a cigar?
It seems to me that all you need to interpret anything is information (the relationship between cause and effect) and a goal, both of which computers have and they interpret data.
On the one hand, there is an objective world of causal processes, and on the other there is a subjective world of experience. This called indirect realism. All experience is subjective, and therefore the experiencer has no direct access to the objective world. Yet, by realist hypothesis, the experiencer is part of the objective world that he has no access to.
Subjectivity is undeniable, and therefore objective. But we have no access to the objective. Therefore we have no access to the subjective.
But we do have access to the subjective, and therefore we have access to the objective. Direct realism does not have this hard problem, because the world is what I partly experience and what I am part of.
The claim is that we have no access to the parts of the objective world that aren't our own subjectivity, so there is no contradiction.
Quoting Michael
Well if you don't see a problem with the notion that subjectivity is the only thing that is objective, then I wish you good luck with the hard problem.
Where's that come from?
The issue here is that they is no objective, because the universe is in continuous flux. We use c approximations for practical applications. However, it is real and everyone is involved in the shaping and sharing of it. I agree we (consciousness) are embedded in it.
You mean I didn't say what kind of animals we are?
Regardless of what kind of animals we are, we're animals.
Michael Ossipoff
As I see it the argument goes along these lines:
We see the sun rising and setting, but this is an illusion, because really the earth is turning.
Whereas I want to say:
The sun really rises and sets just as we see it, because the earth is turning.
Experience is of the world, and the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is unsustainable.
This I agree with.
I also agree there is a "sun" add some sort of waveform, which we are interpreting as some inner image. I have no idea where the image in my name mind it's the same as the one other people have, much less other life forms. But the image is relatively constant and agreement between humans (and possibly other life forms) is possible. We affect that image in various ways, such as creating pollution waveforms that interfere with that image as smog. The interaction between waveforms and images is continuous. This, no possible objectivity.
I should add the "inner images" are also embedded in the universe as a waveform.
There is a metaphysical view called Russellian monism according to which physics and mathematics only describe relations (including causal relations) but relations cannot exist without "things" that stand in those relations. The "things" are not relations or structures of relations and therefore they are also non-mathematical and indescribable. Their indescribability is due to the fact that every description is based on relations - for example, if you want to describe a car, you can do so by referring to its properties or to its parts, that is, by presenting the car in relations to other things than the car itself (various properties or parts); but the car itself is a thing, not its relations to other things. The "essence" of the car is indescribable, just as the "essence" of (the experience of) red color is indescribable even though you can describe red by referring to tomatoes, blood, a specific range of fequencies of electromagnetic radiation and whatnot.
This view solves the hard problem of consciousness by killing two birds with one stone: it shows why there are indescribable (ineffable) things such as qualia in addition to mathematically or verbally describable relations, and why these indescribable things are related to other things, like qualia are related to neural processes (neural correlates of consciousness).
However, if you want to regard all indescribable things as qualia (consciousness) you should at least differentiate the level or intensity of consciousness, because some things are apparently more conscious than others (humans are more conscious than flowers or rocks).
There's a one-word answer, which is specifically relevant to philosophy.
Quoting Marchesk
Re the 'head of a pin' myth - basically it was a debate about whether two angelic beings can occupy the same physical space. Reminds me of Everett and other aspects of [url=http://a.co/g1F4Fl0]fairytale physics.
Quoting litewave
Materialism adds that it's only its measurable attributes that ought to be considered real.
But you're not going to say what it is?
"There is a metaphysical view called Russellian monism according to which physics and mathematics only describe relations (including causal relations) but relations cannot exist without "things" that stand in those relations. The "things" are not relations or structures of relations and therefore they are also non-mathematical and indescribable." — litewave
Yes, and the words "brute-fact" and "unverifiable, unfalsifiable proposition" suggest themselves.
Litewave, you'd been posting some of the things that I later said, before I posted them, Especially of interest was what you said about the relation between "real" and "self-consistent" I've been saying that our life-experience possibility-stories have to be consistent, because there are no mutually inconsistent or contradictory facts.
“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.” — Bertrand Russell
He's expressing an unverifiable belief in indectable unknown entities in the physical world.
Of course not all of Reality is knowable, describable, discussable, But it isn't necessary to posit the unknowability and indeterminacy at the metaphysical and physical levels.
Of course it might be that physics will remain an open-ended endless series of explanations of explanations.
Michael Ossipoff
Quoting StreetlightX
The "affective turn" is hardly revolutionary in the history of psychology and neurology. But yes, the mainstream ontology of our culture is mechanistic, and so an organic conception of things continues to struggle to break through.
At the heart of the embodied/affective approach is the recognition that selfhood is itself a functional construct. It is a necessary part of the business of constructing "the world". We have to see the world from a point of view. So that is why there is "something it feels like what it is to be like". The brain is not merely modelling the world, it is modelling a self in its world. It is modelling a self for which a world exists - and exists in contrast to its desires, expectations, and possibilities.
So it is an "easy problem", and not a hard one, to see why consciousness is imbued with a subjective sense of self. That is a functional information processing necessity. The modelling must include the weaving of the "persona" for whom the world is a point of view. Talk of affect is simply talk about a functional sense of self that is buried deep in the neurobiological design of the brain's evolved archictecture.
As SX correctly says, there is no warrant from there to turn around and treat qualia as material properties - the panpsychic tendency.
Instead, what it should rightfully do is call into question our belief that we know either the world, or this "self", in any direct and unmediated fashion.
We have - for good functional reasons - constructed a model of reality that speaks dualistically to a concrete and objective physical world and an immaterial and subjective world-experiencing mind. And recognising that is the basic trick going on, it should call into question our deeply held convictions about both.
So rather than simply conflating the two - arguing that mind must pervade all matter ... as if we actually know truly what either of those two things are - we need to step back to a further level of ontology that deals with the modelling relation itself.
Instead of pan-psychism, that would be pan-semiosis. If we want to extend the neurocognitive revolution to physics in general, it would be the very thing of the subjective vs objective dichotomy that we would want to deconstruct in terms of sign relations.
And physics has been doing just that anyway with its own information theoretic turn. The Cosmos is self-organising not because it is perfused by vague feeling but because it is structured by a dissipative purpose coupled to informational limits.
I was hoping it would come to you, but it is the Greek definition of man as the rational animal. And in this case, it is a difference that really makes a difference.
The problem is that only relations are describable, but if there are relations then there must also be objects between which those relations are. Those objects can't be nothing because relations between nothings would be absurd.
But even if those objects are indescribable that doesn't necessarily mean they are unknowable. It appears that we can know some of those objects directly simply by being them - they are the stuff we are made of. And others we may know at least to some extent indirectly, by interacting with them and thus mapping some of their properties via causal relations into ourselves, that is, creating representations of them in ourselves, and then knowing these representations.
So some people say. But lots of things are said by some people somewhere.
To re-quote:
Quoting litewave
True, but a problem only for Materialism.
Why? There are abstract if-then facts. Who says there has to be concrete, objectively-existent objects and "stuff" for them to be about?
[/quote]
I didn't say there are objects that are nothing. i said that there needn't be the concretely objectively existent objects that are the subject of the abstract if-then facts.
The whole thing woudln't be "real"? I didn't say it was. in fact "real" is metaphysically undefined anyway.
I've been saying that a complex system of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypotheticals needn't be real, existent and meaningful in any context other than its own inter-referring context, and doesn't need any medium in which to be.
The relations can be described as abstract if-then facts. They don't need an explanation or an origin.
No brute facts. No assumptions.
That suggestion was evidently first made in the West by Michael Faraday, in 1844.
Let me repeat an example that I've been using here:
If all Slitheytoves are (or were) brillig, and all Jaberwockeys are (or were) Slitheytoves, then all Jaberwockeys are (or would be) brillig.
That if-then fact about hypotheticals is true, even if there aren't any Slitheyitoves or Jaberwockeys.
It's obvious that abstract if-thens can be true without saying anythiing about the "existence" of the hypothetical subjects of the hypothetical premise and conclusion of the if-then fact.
Michael Ossipoff
No one denies that the various animals differ from eachother, and have their own talents, skills, niches.
Yes, humans are very different from the other animals, who also differ greatly from eachother, in various other ways.
Michael Ossipoff
I said that we're very different from the other animals (and that they, too, differ greatly from eachother)
Quoting Wayfarer
Well I recognize the salience of the irrationality of chauvinism.
Do you really think rationality characterizes our species?
Michael Ossipoff
.
It seems simply obvious to me - rationality, language, story-telling, meaning-seeking, technology and science are the salient attributes of h. Sapiens. (For that matter, ‘sapience’ has a definition; it is different to ‘scientia’.)
Anyway, humans are not only animals, or not simply animals, but animals who have either attained or been thrust into the ability to wonder about the meaning of existence. Actually the old philosophers believed that, were the liberation sought by wisdom not available, then man would surely be the most miserable of creatures. All of which is quite beside the point of this thread, so I will shut up.
I'm not saying this hypothesis is wrong, but it is unsatisfying to some who think that it doesnt do justice to the richness of the structure of phenomenal experience.
For me the larger problem with this account is that I think there is a more satisfying account available for the explanation of the origin of purpose and intention, which comes out of an alternative to Dawkins'
idea of evolutionary adaptation Stephen Rose is a biologist who is among those who argue that adaptation is not simply gene-driven, but argue for a kind of neo-Lamarkianism. The organism alters its internal and external environment through its functioning and in this way shapes its own adaptive transfomation. Rather than viewing purpose as emergent out of non-purpose, this account views adaptation as involving purposiveness via the self-reflexive , self-organizing tendencies of all living things. Piaget was one of the first to model biological change in this way.
So what are the if-then facts about? About "hypothetical" objects rather than about "objectively-existent" objects? If so, what is the difference between "hypothetical" and "objectively-existent"?
Unless the objects you have named "Slitheytoves", "brillig" etc. are inconsistently defined they exist. They exist in the most general sense of "exist", which means "be consistent".
All animals behave rationally. The fact is that you aren't privy to all the reasons some animal does some thing, so it can appear as if some animal is behaving irrationally (even a human) when you don't understand it's motives or reasoning for doing it. Animals are able to distinguish between food, predator, and mate and behave accordingly when encountering these things in their environment.
It's not that we are more rational. The difference is that we have an imagination.
I dont know what a scientific approach is, in general terms. I do know what a scientific approach is if you give me a concrete example of the work of a self-described scientist. Of course, I'd also accept the narrative of scientific approach provided by a community of scientists, in a given field, in a given era, as valid for that group.
Just so I dont appear to nit-picky, I'd even go so far as to accept as representative of a historical period(Enlightenment science, modern and neo-Kantian science, postmodern science) the writings of philosophers of science.
What I'm getting at is 2 points:
1) This reminds me of the attempt to nail down 'objectively' the difference between masculine and feminine behavior. I find nothing in the history of what we today call science that limits how it approaches its subject matter in relation to philosophy(or vice versa) in absolute terms, such that we could claim, for instance, that science asks what but not how, or that it does not answer ethical question, or that it only deals with the objective. Yes, such claims would be true for certain ears, but not as blanket statement about science in general.
2)If we agree that the understanding of terms like objective, subjective and quantitative have undergone constant redefinition in the history of philosophy, then they have gone comparable redefinition in the history of science. Look up Shaun Gallagher in Wiki or academia dot com, He has written about hermeneutics, phenomenology, postmodern philosophy and Kant. He is also a cognitive researcher. The community of scientists he works with would take issue with the old understanding of scientific objectivity, as well as the idea that science isnt an inherently valuative enterprise..
"Whenever anything is interpreted, then you're already outside the domain of the strictly physical. Interpretive processes always entail qualitative judgements, and they're different in kind to quantitative analysis. Or so I would have thought."
When something is interpreted, you're outside of the domain of a certain presuppositoin of what the physical consists of. You can always change that supposition(I promise I wont tell anybody). DItheyan hermeneutics assumed that only human sciences were an interpretive enterprise, whereas Gadamer recognized that the natural sciences were also to some extent hermeneutic, at least in terms of the design of experiments. I would arge that as some point physics could be refigured as a qualitative science without losing its ability to do the things for us that we expect of it. Its a strange notion, that a qualitatve physical account could be more precise than a quantitative one, but thats another discussion.
Lets say you want to build a machine that feels, that is , makes qualitative judgements. Up till now, the best we've been able to do is give it the capacity for a limited randomness.
Francisco Varela created the beginnings of a neurophenomenological model of brain functioning
that limits quantitative description in favor of a holistic dynamic.
Eventually we will arrive at wetware machines whose subpersonal architecture uses an overwhelmingly qualtiative language.
What it does is kill any chance at understanding the origin of the problem, which is separating the world into relations and non-relations. Once you do that you end up with ridiculous concepts like Qualia.
Try this: Imagine that what youve always thought of as an object, a thing that self-persists , is self-identical and is assigned attributes, is an illusion. Imagine that there is no such thing, anywhere, as an object understood in this way. Instead, there are interaction of interactions, changes that change other changes, a world of dynamic self-organizing process, with no stasis, no 'things' that are not already ahead of themselves. There's your qualia, not some 'thing' , like a photon, in a consciousness, but the very fact of the world that nothing persists as simply 'itself' moment to moment. You have to learn to translate your notion of a thing into a process of change before you can see the fundamental basis of experienced reality as already 'affective'
I didnt mean to imply (although that's what I wrote) that the 'feeling of what it is like to be', is something that is intrinsic to the world, I agree that makes it sound like consciousness is to be found in quarks. What I did mean was that the qualitative is intrinsic to all experience and thus underlies all physical models.
i agree with Derrida on this. When he talks about the mark, the trace, iterability, he is referring not just to language but to the possibility of the experience of any entity. Watch what he does here and see how he inserts qualitatativeness into the very basis of an entity, in the form of otherness.
Derrida writes, "...an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces"(P29). He adds:
The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53).
Through the possibility of repeating every mark as the same, [iterability] makes way for an idealization that seems to deliver the full presence of ideal objects..., but this repeatability itself ensures that the full presence of a singularity thus repeated comports in itself the reference to something else, thus rending the full presence that it nevertheless announces"(LI29)).
...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)." "The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition(p.53)."
This is what I mean when I say that the qualitative is inherent in any entitiy, that it is impossible to envision any sort of thing in the world without the idea of qualitiativness being 'built into' our thinking of it. Again, keep in mind Derrida is not simply talking about language, representing a world that could be conceived under any circumstances outside of the economy of the mark. This otherness is far from a consciousness, a mind, a qualia, a substance of any kind. But it is the origin of concepts like affectivity.
IT leaves you with the ability to determine the basis of varied physical process using whatever forms of descriptions are pragmatically useful, but challenges you if you want to insist that there could be an occasion to justify a form of physical description ontologically via idealized presences(that includes a particle or force with assigned mathematical properties).
Now, although I agree with him,Derrida may be a bit too out there for most. But let me ask you this. Would you agree that there is already an overarching ontology of sorts in place uniting at least the physical sciences, and that this is a different ontology from what one would have found in the thinking of the West 800 years ago?
Would you also agree that the metaphysical presuppositions guiding current natural scientific models will change eventually? Could you entertain the possiblity that something like Derrida's differance , that is, an ontology that places qualitative otherness squarely at the heart of entities, may be on the horizon?
Why would it be a problem? If there are two things with certain properties then there are certain relations between those things based on those properties. Seems perfectly natural to me.
Quoting Joshs
No problem. A process is a thing extended in time. This thing consists of shorter processes and ultimately of things that are not extended in time at all (it is a sequence of these things).
As far as your comments on panpsychism and qualia, see my response to Streetlight. I misspoke in making it sound that I wanted to build a tiny consciousness into the things of the world. Far from it.
You may not agree with their arguments, but at least you'd get a sense of what they are objecting to.
For instance, if you extend a thing in time, you are not producing a qualitative transformation, just a quantitative one. Qualitaitive has to do with what a thing means intrinsically. Think of the notion of an object and a series of attributes associated with it. If we qualitatively change the meaning of the object, the associated attributes no longer apply . Notice that the kind of thinking that defines objects and their attributes is an atomistic one, starting from the parts and then to the whole, but there is another kind of thinking that begins always from the whole and the parts emerge from it. Not something you'll find in physics models, but you will in newer pschological accounts, and increasingly in biological ones too.
Yes, it is what the thing is in itself, rather than its relations to other things.
Quoting Joshs
If you can coherently describe what it means that a whole "emerges" from parts or parts "emerge" from a whole, I have no problem with either of these descriptions.
Not sure I understand this. A thing that is not extended in time is a different thing than a thing that is extended in time and that consists of things that are not extended in time. Different things have a different intrinsic identity (quality).
You're speaking to an almost dyed-in-the-wool Derridian, so yes, I can totally entertain the possibility. My issue with Derridian analysis, insofar as I have one, is that it remains ultimately too formalist. Yes, the trace pervades everything, yes all presence is riven with différance which displaces it from within, etc, etc, and yes, this means that 'qualitativeness' is similarly 'intrinsic' to things, but one must be careful not to make the all-too-quick assimilation of differance to a feeling or 'consciousness' of what-it-is-like (not forgetting that 'consciousness' in Derrida is among the foremost names of Presence in the history of philosophy).
Insofar as there is something like 'feeling' or 'consciousness', I think it'd be more accurate to understand it as a qualified quality, a quality that, at a rough and minimal approximation, is recognized as a quality of itself in a self-reflexive way, and correlatively, what is not 'itself' (a minimal self-other distinction in other words). Regardless of how to think the specific qualification of quality that consciousness or feeling is however, what Derrida does not provide - in my opinion - is any way to think these kinds of second-order quality. He doesn't, in the words of John Protevi, provide any way to conduct any material analysis of forces which specify the kinds of 'quality' at work in any one system. Derrida always remains at the level of a formal 'there is quality' ('il y a quality', if you will): this going hand in hand with Derrida's strange ahistoricism (there is 'historicity' in Derrida, but not, ironically, history; this also being the crux of his (non-)debate with Foucault regarding the cogito).
Granted, Derrida had a hard time getting people to recognize even the basic operation of différance (it's still barely acknowledged!), but the issue isn't that Derrida is 'too out there' - it's that he's not out there enough. There still remains alot to be learned from him, but there is no less a need to attend to what cannot be found in Derrida (hence why I'm more drawn to those who I would consider post-Derridian thinkers like Deleuze, Agamben, or Catherine Malabou)
Ultimately, it will be very hard to get away from this. Even the deadest of matter, still had a "spark" or impulse within it that creates changed (e.g. decay), until there is nothing left except the fundamental fabric from which belongs. It is like a wave dying and becoming at one with the all encompassing ocean. Science recognizes this phenomenon by inventing the all pervasive "Laws of Nature" as a place holder. Some sort of "panpsychism" exists in all philosophies, even it is hidden within some nomenclature, though, given what happens to anyone who dares take this stand in academia, I said not surprised that placeholder phrases are invented as substitutions.
Once one recognizes qualia (the ability to create and interpret waveforms and vibrations), there is no way to separate the big from the small in quality.
I didn't say we aren't different from the other animals. Language is one such difference.
As for "rationality", I don't think it's present as much as you do. It's the exception with humans. Overall, as a species, there's nothing rational about "H. Sapiens".
That very name is a pompous chauvinistic vanity.
Humans do think that they're rational, but that isn't quite the same thing. In fact it just worsens things.
Humanity is a quagmire, for itself, and really bad news for the other life on the planet.
Yes, storytelling is encountered whenever the "news" comes on. But humans didn't invent lying. Chimpanzees in the wild have been observed lying to eachother.
You mean like the endless blather of academic philosophers?
Rational on the part of the scientists, but then disastrously irrationally misused by the population &/or their herders.
Things got bad in a hurry as soon as agriculture started.
Did your cat tell you that it doesn't wonder about the meaning of existence?
I don't think we know much about what the other animals are thinking, because they don't talk.
I never denied that humans are different from all the other animals. But you seem to be implying more than that, You seem be be implying that, as a species, humans are somehow better than the other animals. There are lots of humans who aren't nearly as good as a dog, cat, deer, rabbit, etc.
I suggest that other animal species have an incomparably higher percentage of good individuals than the human species does.
I don't think we really disagree. It's just a matter of how it's said.
I think there can be something good about being human. It offers unique potential.
If there's reincarnation (and there probably is), then I want to be a human again, in the remainder of my subsequent lives. So I'm not disparaging human-ness. I'm just disparaging most humans.
Well, among those who speak of reincarnation, there seems to be a consensus that humans reincarnate as humans (though some suggest that extraordinary barbarity and abuse can result otherwise).
Our human world is "The Land of the Lost", and there's no point trying to defend it.
Michael Ossipoff
From waht I've read, he believes in a Pinker-like evolutionary psychology supporting a cognitive-behavioral framework. Biochemically mediated reflexes and socially imposed patterns organize
intentional consciousness for Protevi. I don’t go along with Protevi’s account of the behavior of the Columbine killers in terms of biologically and socially conditioned reflexes. He misses the more holistic role of intentional MEANING , however socially and biologically
mediated or produced, in directing personal actions. Protevi reads Deluze/Guattari in semi-
conditioning terms, speaking of human motivation in terms of jolts, thrills and rushes, of
desensitizations and disinhibitions, of emotion as physiological arousal, of reward and
punishment systems in the brain, and relying on ethological constructs like “fight-flight’ and
“dominance-submission”, (even though he is opposed to genetic reductionism). He approvingly
cites Damasio, Panksepp and LeDoux, but is his account of affectivity as inter-relational as
Damasio’s?
Protevi says his ‘body politic’ notion, using the idea of self-organizing material systems to
explain and originate subjectivizing practices of bodies, is
“a third-person account, a genealogy of subjectivity, rather than the mutual constraints proposed
by Francisco Varela’s “neurophenomenology”. It doesn’t attempt to reduce subjectivity in the
sense of accounting for its contents in a third person explanatory framework, but it does try to
understand subjectivity as originating in a body shaped by political practice: a “body politic”.
This approach is both post-structuralist and post-phenomenological in that it focuses on the
historical formation of bodies rather than on universal unconscious structures as well as focusing
on the gaps and shortfalls of consciousness.” (Columbine paper).
But what about Merleau-Ponty’s reading of phenomenology and affectivity via a chiasmatic touching-touched?
And what about the central import of language in understanding intersubjective origins of
subjectivity? Could one claim that Ken Gergen, Merleau-Ponty , Heidegger and Derrida all recognize this more effectively than Protevi? Protevi says he supports the idea of a ‘rage module’ in the brain,
although he does not go so far as to believe in modules for all kinds of higher-order behaviors in
the way that Dawkins is tempted to do. Protevi says that his account of social neuroscience is
closely compatible with that of John Cacioppo, which is a revealing remark, given that Cacioppo
is a cognitive neuroscientist in the classic information processing tradition of computational
representationalism, who approvingly cites authors like Osgood, Shiffrin, Miller,etc. In sum, it
appears that Protevi is a cognitive-behaviorist who falls short of the radicality of
Varela, Gallagher, Gergen, Merleau-Ponty, Heiegger, Derrida and perhaps Husserl.
It is essential to get beyond the idea of affect as modules in the brain, as reward centers and arousal mechanisms, and see it instead in terms of the meaning-making attempts of a person always already situated concernfully in a world. As Matthew Ratcliffe(2002) puts it, “moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical”(p.290). In affecting reason, feeling affects itself.
I've focused on Protevi here because I see Deleuze's work on affect as consonant with Protevi's.
I dont know that Derrida's ideas(or at least my reading of him) can be understood effectively starting from Deleuze and Protevi, without first effectively submitting them to critical transformation via Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, as well as those within the cognitive science community who have embraced aspects of phenomenological thought, such as Shaun Gallagher and Matthew Ratcliffe. I'd include in this list Eugene Gendlin and George Kelly. There is a radical integrity to meaning-making that is missed in Deleuze's( or at least and Protevi's) account.
I would say that there has been no real change, even though an unfolding of a process in nominal time has occurred. I say this because the conclusions of the computer are being cranked out from initial premises. The results are pre-figured by the premises, so the only real qualitative meaning is in the premises. The unfolding deterministic history is itself lifeless and meaningless. Real qualitative meaning is always contingent, contextual and unreproducible as exactly itself . This is what William James meant by the stream of consciousness. Experienced meaning never doubles back on itself.
I think what is true for consciousness is also true for what we refer to as the physical world.
This is what thinkers like Ilya Prigogine and Lee Smolen are aiming for when they want to bring unidirectional time to the core of physics metatheory, and along with it a shift from deterministic to probabilistic description.
Well, there is a difference between being conscious of premises and being conscious of their implications. The former consciousness seems relatively general and vague while the latter more specific. Similarly, a deterministic unfolding of a universe may be a substantive change. But anyway, our world is not completely deterministic; there is also quantum-mechanical indeterminism that precludes exact derivation of future events from the past.
You said:
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You know they do. …in the physical story.
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I don’ t know. Doesn’t it seem as if the first reproducing organism, and its natural-selection-designed offsprings, could be considered an abrupt new thing?
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But afterwards, the subsequent development was gradual of course.
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In the physical story, sure. …except that I’d say “purpose” instead of “illusion of purpose”. The purposefulness of purposefully-responsive devices is genuine.
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I think we’re purposeful, not just allegedly purposeful.
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Of course. They’re right.
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It’s the physical story, and it’s valid as far as it goes, but it certainly isn’t the whole truth. That’s the difference between me and a Materialist. Dawkins is a Materialist; I’m not. Materialists believe the Material world is what’s fundamentally-existent, and that it has objective existence. I don’t. I’m a Subjective Idealist.
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Yes. I say that you’re in a life because you’re the protagonist of one of the infinitely-many hypothetical life-experience possibility-stories. …complex systems of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypotheticals.
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That’s where your purpose and intentions started.
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What I call “the physical story” is the self-consistent system of logical relations constituting the possibility-world that is the setting for your life-experience possibility-story.
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I, too, have read that Lamarkianism has been vindicated.
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Then the old Darwinian evolutionary scenario isn’t complete, and evolution happened/happens differently.
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But I say that Materialism is wrong, and our origin isn’t physical (except in the physical-story). Ultimately, first there was (timelessly is) the infinity of life-experience possibility-stories. You and the life-experience possibility-story of which you’re the protagonist are metaphysically prior to the physical world.
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Michael Ossipoff
Yes.
Good question. I guess "objectively-existent" is something made-up by the Materialist. He'd have to be the one to say what he means by it. After all, he's the one who's claiming that "hypothetical" isn't enough, and that the physical world is something more than that.
Maybe one meaning for "objectively-existent" is "somehow more than hypothetical."
Whatever "objectively-existent" means, I'm saying that there's no need to say it.
Physical reality and metaphysical reality can be explained by a system of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypotheticals. The hypothetical premises and conclusions of the if-then facts are about hypothetical objects.
The if-then facts are true, and there's no need for their premises or conclusions to be true, or be about something with meaning or "existence" other than hypothetical.
You're the last person here with whom I expected to disagree about Eliminative Ontic Structural Subjective Idealism vs Materialism, because I thought we agreed on that matter, in conversations around the time when I first joined this forum.
Michael Ossipoff
True. I just meant that it isn't necessary for anyone to actually find and hold up a Slitheytove or Jaberwockey, in order for the if-then fact to be true.
...and, by that meaning of "exist", which I have no disagreement with, what objection is there to the Eliminative Ontic Structural Subjective Idealism that I've been proposing?
Michael Ossipoff
But the objects (hypothetical or whatever) are not relations, at least not all of them. That's why I'm saying that in addition to relations there must also be "stuff" (non-relation) that stands in those relations.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
We share the liberal metaphysical view that all possibilities constitute reality, which goes far beyond not only materialism but also religions. But since I've been in this forum I have always claimed that these possibilities include not only relations but also objects that are not relations.
Affectivity arises with form. There is no formless matter, and with form comes affect; both quantitative and qualitative. This realization is inherent in Peirce's understanding of the primordiality of the sign-relation, and its culmination in the idea of pan-semiosis. A similar idea is found in Whitehead, with the understanding that entities in-fect the environment, and the correlative idea of pan-experientialism. Neither of these ideas are to be understood, I believe, as supporting any metaphysical thesis of pervasive mind in the sense of consciousness, as panpsychist theories commonly tend to.
Of course, but those objects, that stuff needn't be other than hypothetical. ...nothing more than part of the if-then fact, whose "objects" needn't "be", in any sense other than the non-contradiction sense that you referred to.
What I was emphasizing about the if-then facts was that the "objects" that they're about needn't have any existence other than the non-contradiction that you referred to.
All that the true if-then fact is saying about the existence of Jaberwokeys is "if there were Jaberwockeys, and if all Jaberwockeys were Slitheytoves..."
So I'm not positing "objects" anything like the physical things that Materialism believes in.
Sometimes "religion" just refers to Literalist allegories. I don't agree with the Literalist allegories, but most likely many of the people who accept them also have meta-metaphysical feelings too.
I don't believe that all of Reality is discussable, describable or arguable. Metaphysics is the limit of what's discussable, describable and arguable.
I'm not saying that meta-metaphysics, what's not discussable, describable or arguable, has to be called religion. I'm just saying that some of what's called religion is meta-metaphysical feeling or impression.
Sure, but those objects needn't be claimed to exist, other than in the sense of not being contradictorily or inconsistently defined.
The truth of the if-then facts doesn't depend on what they're about existing other than in that sense.
Michael Ossipoff
I want to emphasize that I claim that metaphysics doesn't cover, describe, explain or govern all of Reality. Metaphysics is the limit of what's discussable, describable and arguable, and not all of Reality is discussable, describable or arguable.
There's physical reality, and metaphysical reality. ...and there's Reality which physics and metaphysics don't cover, describe or explain.
Michael Ossipoff
I don't require more than non-contradiction for existence. (But it is not as simple as it may seem, because since there can be no inconsistency in reality, every existing object must be defined consistently with all other objects.)
Sure, within a particular logical system, I don't think we disagree on anything.
Michael Ossipoff
I recently had an argument in another thread about ontological relevance of paraconsistent logic. Paraconsistent logic admits contradictory objects - objects that are not what they are, or that don't have the properties they have - but that's just language games to me and even such language games must be played on some consistent basis, otherwise they would invalidate all claims they make.
One hard question that someone asked me was, "And why is your life-experience possibility-story self-consistent? What keeps it self-consistent?"
I'd been a bit troubled about that too. But I think that can be answered by saying that a person's life-experience possibility-story consists of a system of abstract if-then facts, and there's no such thing as mutually inconsistent or contradictory facts.
Michael Ossipoff
Yes, inconsistent facts don't exist.
Well my view is shaped by having being deeply concerned with the research into the question 30 years ago. So yes, there was a cogsci representationalism that was the mainstream at the time. And I was interested in the counter history of the more embodied and affective approaches.
There were plenty around, I found. For instance the Soviet work on orienting responses that followed on from Pavlovian conditioning was very influential on me. But also, it would be fair to characterise it as fringe through the 1980s. And personally I was a little annoyed when a second rate hack like Damasio came along at the right moment to catch the eventual mainstream backlash against good old fashioned symbolic AI. :)
But that aside, I’m finding your OP - especially given its contentious title and liberal name dropping - rather confused. If you have some particular thesis, it is lost on me.
Perhaps you can have a go at clarifying how a physicalist conception of qualities says something about a physicalist conception of qualia. I fear that there is only some sleight of tongue at work here.
You see, in my view, qualities are the general essences that science would name - the basic categories of substantial being like gravity, time, energy, entropy, work, etc. And then what makes that naming of entities actually scientific is they are able to be quantified in terms of measurements. We can relate time and energy as physical qualities because we also know how to measure them in terms of seconds and joules.
So the dichotomy (or binary) of quality~quantity is about the general vs the particular, the general theoretical essence and the particular measurement framework which deals with its extension in a world (of time and spatial dimensionality).
But qualia, from philosophy of mind, is something else. It is the atomisation of experience that just wants to reduce that general quality - experience - to a named variety of particular kinds or forms of experience. It builds in a Cartesian dualism by design. It is a way of talking meant to forever frustrate a deflationary neurocognitive approach to “the mind”.
So really, it is a bit of a fraud. A cunning ruse. If you get folk talking seriously about qualia, they have already lost the battle against dualism. The whole Chalmerian enterprise was a rhetorical trick that derailed philosophy of mind in the mid 1990s (in my view).
The better answer was the embodied cognition movement that then followed. But as I say, for me personally, that had already happened. Even early cog sci had an enactivist flavour with folk like Ulric Neisser. And you couldn’t get more mainstream than the “father of cog sci”. ;)
Anyway, again you seem to be making some play on the notion of qualities and qualia. To me, this is where a general physicalist monism and a lingering Cartesian dualism are in fact in direct opposition to each other, and so not a point at which they could be joined. Perhaps you can clarify your thesis in this light.
Again, I don't say any of this because I 'disagree' with Derrida or whatever, but because I want to acknowledge that limits of that approach, which, taken on it's own terms, is perfectly valid. The relevance is that this becomes especially clear when one tries to approach consciousness or a-feel-for-what-it-is-like in terms of différance, where you get a a leveling-out where it becomes impossible to isolate the specificity of consciousness from 'quality' more generally.
My central interest in philosophical and psychological theory from the time I was in university has been the relationship between affect and cognition. I had formulated my own approach to this issue and found most accounts of the period lacking(James-Lange, Schacter and Singer, Eysenck, Lazarus, Plutchik, Izard, Solomon). I recognized that
any attempt to theorize about affective phenomena was implicitly a stance on the nature of cognition. I found fascinating the way that the history of cognitive science paralleled developments in philosophy, from its New-Kantian origins in Chomsky, Fodor, Shannon, and Wiener( unfortunately ignoring Bruner and Dewey), to its current guise as a Darwinian-Nietzschean creature.
Has the Cartesian dualism inhering in the earlier generation of cognitivism, with its sharp dichotomizing of affect and cognition, been overcome by what you have called the general physicalist monism of the newer approaches(and some not so new ones)?
Well, Cartesianism takes different forms. But it may be helpful at this point to explain my motivation here. It's not about choosing one ism or another for the sport of it. For me what is crucially at stake is the ethical-psychotherapeutic possibilities opened up by a way of thinking. First generation cognitivism implied a way of understanding others that I considered particularly uninsightful, hypostatizing meaning-making processes and missing the underlying contextual interactivity and temporal integrity of experiencing.
Theorists like Andy Clark, Metzinger and Bermudez are an improvement, to be sure, but while they recognize affective and cognitive processes to be inseparable, they still treat them as different types of entities. It is not coincidental that they also do not embrace postmodern or phenomenological ideas.
It seems to me that today one set of cognitivists gather on the conservative, that is , Nietzschean-Darwinian, side of a philosophical divide, while a much smaller group(Shaun Gallagher, Varela, Jan Slaby, Matthew Ratcliffe) attempts to incorporate into their thinking phenomenologists like Husserl, Merleau-Pony and Heidegger , and poststructuralists like Foucault and Lyotard. The affective-cognitive dualism still operating within the models of the Nietzschean-Darwinian embodied cognitivists is seen clearly when their approaches are laid against the latter's.
I'm sure you're aware that this latter group of philosophers is responsible for the ongoing assault on the presuppositions of physicalist science.
We are accustomed to dealing with this from humanities and cultural studies departments, but a gentler version of it is now being put forth by those calling themselves cognitive scientists.
I haven't gotten to qualitative vs qualia in physical science because it now seems to me that I will end up having to summarize a postructuralist or phenomenological perspective to have any chance of making it coherent.
I think a better starting point is showing how it changes the way we can understand psychological phenomena such as affecticity, cognition and action, and rethink the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. Then you can decide for yourself what the implications are for the understanding of empirical descriptions of the physical world.
I'll just add this: You said
qualities are the general theoretical essences that science would name, and quantity is their particular relational measurement framework.
Would you agree that the philosophical understanding of concepts like quality, quantity and essence have undergone continual shift over the past centuries, and those changes in understanding make their way subtly into the empirical descriptions of scientists?
If so , then I would expect that the notion of quality as a 'general theoretical essence', which is about as Cartesian a definition as I can imagine, has room for updating.
I find it difficult to tease out the substantive arguments of many philosophers, especially those who write in a an evocative style( Deleuze, Lyotard, Lacan, Heidegger) without finding a way to translate their ideas into a form that I can then match up with more, let us say, ' empirical' or pragmatic fields. In particular, for me the core significance of any philosophical work is how it helps us in ethical and psychotherapeutic contexts. Specifically, if I put two approaches side by side, I want to know how one way of thinking reveals my behavior and those of other people in ways that are more enlightening and insightful than the other.
Take Protevi, for instance. I wasnt able to pin down his philosophical approach until I came across his writings on affectivity. He's quite clear on these topics , and it becomes easy to locate his thinking within a specific context of psychological work on emotion. Maybe he's not Pinker, but he's not far from him. You'd never confuse him for a fully development embodied enactivist, or at least not the sort that I think gets it when it comes how affect and thought are integrated. There an awful lot at stake in practical terms here, regarding understanding of psycho pathologies, depression , anti-social behavior, and day to day interpersonal conflict.
Lyotard is another example. I poured over his work trying to place his ideas in relation to phenomenology, deconstruction, existentialism, Marxism and psychoanalysis, among other things. Then I found his essay 'The Inhuman', in which he lays out a cognitive science account that clarified many things for me.
I accept the interpretations of the relation between affect and cognition that psychological theorists like Matthew Ratcliffe are ascribing to Heidegger. This direction that runs through Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger is for me a much more satisfying one than where I believe Deleuze is at. While Derrida never subjected Deleuze to a deconstruction, I see Deleuze and Agamben as a significant distance from Derrida's starting point, which follows upon and rethinks Heidegger(with Nietzsche and Husserl as other crucial influences)
"when one tries to approach consciousness or a-feel-for-what-it-is-like in terms of différance, where you get a a leveling-out where it becomes impossible to isolate the specificity of consciousness from 'quality' more generally."
Let's take any claim by an account of consciousness or world to locate entities, patterns , structures in here or out here.
The point where Derrida steps in is before you get to start with your structures and then show how they relate to each other. He breaks apart the ability to claim that there is a structure of any kind ( or force, energy, power, quality) in the first place that isn't already divided within itself prior to its claim to be an itself.
The practical significance of this is not only to unravel the presuppositions of psychoanalytic models , not only to problematize Foucaultian or social constructionist notions of a socially created subjectivity determined and redetemined by cultural interchange( and Deleuze's approach I think belongs to this zone), not only recognizes the site of culture within the so-called subject even before expose to a social-linguistic community, but
situates the place of this decentering even before a single mark or fold can claim to be an entity , an itself.
Am I saying this is where he locates the origin of quality? I' m saying that the origin of both quality and quantity, form and content , feeling and thought, same and different, stasis and movement, immanence and transcendence, are in this bivalent hinge.
The history of philosophy is the story of finding a place to locate the quality-quantity binary. Derrida sees within what others pass over as irreducible and divides more radically.
When I used Nagel's phrase 'feeling of what it is like' ,
I should have added that this phrase would need to be deconstructed. Fundamentally, all we could ever know or 'feel', all that difference 'contains' is the slightest, barest sense of novelty, otherness, difference. But always, at the same time , in the same gesture, it is the slightest 'feel' of same, identity. Quality is not opposed by Derrida to quantity.
If we as persons have a self-aware 'feel' then so do the empirical objects that we invent. Why? Because self-feeling implies a self-referring, a turning back to oneself, the registering of a change, novelty,
transformation, difference. A feeling that consists solely of a repeated self-identicality is nothing but a formal concept. Objective, so-called third person experiencing pre-supposes the theoretical repeatability of self-identical forms, in the guise of empirical objects.
But according to Derrida,the possibility of interability exposes any identity to contextual contamination. Thus the objects of our physical sciences are inherently determined equally by quantitative novelty in their very subsisting In themselves moment to moment.
Think patterns or organizations or collections that are united not in spite of but via their internal differences.
You can built any kind of world you want out of this, but when you presuppose irreducible structures, objects or forces as the basis for your ontology, they become subject to their own deconstruction.
Is this an ahistorical thinking? Derrida argues that it is a deconstruction of historicism. Any attempt to spool out a history of anything that doesn't take into account the motivated basis of that history ( as Foucault did) , and the self-displacing of that unfolding, ends up with teleology rather than a genealogy.
Is this formalism? Well, it's quasi-transcendentalism, which to many amounts to the same thing. They prefer Aristotle to Plato.
32m
I absolutely appreciate this, and in truth I think this is one of the most important tasks for anyone engaging with continental philosophy today (my own interest in this respect is in questions of morphogenesis, but I'm relatively familiar with the cog-sci approach that you're partial too as well. David Morris, who does some great work on Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology and the sciences among other things, is a favorite of mine). On the other hand, I'm alot more skeptical about the utility of Derrida in pursuing this task. I mean, yeah, look, I get it, there is no structure that isn't always already riven with otherness etc etc, but the solution - easier said than done, I acknowledge - is to rethink structure and force in a new way. Contrary to Derrida's rather self-serving claims that any attempt to step out of the circle of metaphysics is to mire oneself all the more in it, I think the point is simply to accept Derrida's claims and move on. He's identified an issue. Great, let's work though it and get to the other side.
I think Catherine Malabou's work on trying to rehabilitate Form in the wake of Derrida (particularly her Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing) is the project most explicit about this, but I similarly think that Deleuze and Agamben also provide a post-Derridian metaphysics that isn't mired in all the writhing over ontotheology and Presence and so on. Jeffrey's Bell's book, Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos is among the best documents on how the Deleuzian enterprise quite nicely steps over all the Derridian problematics, providing a far more positively articulated way forward that doesn't continually play the stale and monotonous game of hunting down différance wherever it may be (Kevin Attell does analogous work for Agamben in his Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction). If nothing else, it's my respect for the rigor of Derrida's thought that has long put me on the hunt for those who can both appreciate and move beyond it (Protevi's own book on the Deleuze/Derrida relation, Political Physics, is, unfortunately, not very good).
All of which is to say that I don't think you're justified in dismissing notions of structure or force a priori without looking at the specific ways in which those notions are articulated in concreto. So yeah, again, sure, any binary is always articulated through the always-already purloined out-of-centre ultra-transcendental work of Writing and so on, but there are ways to think about the speicificties of those articulations that don't just licence the unthinking reflex-response of 'it's just différance at work' (I'm not saying this is your reflex, but it's an issue I find with Derridian scholarship in general, and it subterraneiously crops us even in the most unlikely of places). There ought to be, and is, more than can be done in philosophy than that.
Incidentally, you might be interested in Protevi's own specific engagement with embodied cognition approaches - and Deleuze's place in those approaches - here.
Fair enough. I am biased because I particularly sought out those who I felt took a properly integrated view of the issue.
So yes, the Platonic tripartide model of humans - reason as the charioteer trying to control a chariot pulled by the two horses of the higher passions and the baser instincts - still has a lot of cultural pull. And a computational turn in psychology really did foster a brain in a vat view.
Quoting Joshs
Heh. So now this is yet another direction. I'm not sure what you have in mind exactly.
Quoting Joshs
Well, I wouldn't be on the side of the PoMo johnny-come-latelies. Another personal bias. I am with the structuralists rather than the post-structuralists. :)
But also my views are based rather directly on the science. So I am dealing with concrete neurobiological models and empirical evidence. SX is probably more into the philosophical politics here.
Quoting Joshs
So you are saying that the PoMos are attacking the physicalists and the Darwinian conservatives are attacking the PoMos?
It seems what you would be saying, but it reads a little hazy.
Quoting Joshs
Again, I'm unclear about your point.
But what I'm thinking is that science - to be quantitative - has to in the end just operationalise the metaphysical qualities it seeks to explain. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. It seems an honest thing.
So science invents these terms like energy or entropy that are essentially pretty meaningless. They sound like science is speaking of some material substance, but really the terms just become place-holders for something that is a constant factor or a conserved quantity. It seems like there is some stuff. And thinking that way allows for a system of measurement which speaks about quantitive variations in that stuff - differences in its location, form, amount, etc. Yet the scientists don't really believe the stuff has the substantial being that giving it a solid-sounding name implies.
This has become really obvious now with the information theoretic turn in physics. Now science just shrugs its shoulders and say we can count primal bits. We can throw away all the materialist presumptions and treat the purest quantification - a 0 and a 1 - as the quality, the conserved stuff, that we know how to measure.
To me, that's pretty sophisticated. Especially in contrast to the qualia talk that kind of does the exact opposite for philosophy of mind. It doubles down on materialism by adding a mental stuff to the physical stuff.
So I see the information theoretic turn as a paradigm shift that can get science out of a material monism without then falling into a Cartesian dualism.
But I doubt that was the angle you had in mind.
So again, is there a question here? Perhaps the PoMo take on a phenomenological alternative to mainstream neuroscience's Darwinian naturalism concerning embodied cognition offers important psychotherapeutic results. That might connect the dots. However if that is the line of thought, I'd need more details to have a view.
I found the same problem with Heidegger interpreters. In the U.S. Heidegger scholarship is dominated by writers who want to turn him into a Kierkegaardian existentialist(David Krell, Bert Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall, John Sallis, John Haugeland). This is probably because most Continental philosophers in this country , at least until recently, aligned with either theological, Marxist or psychoanalytic orientations, and tended to turn every poststructuralist or phenomenologist they touched into an amalgam of Kierkegaard , Marx and Lacan( see Judith Butler's reading of Foucault).
I don't remember if I read the Protevi piece you linked to before but it's an interesting summary of his views.
You'll notice that for Protevi and Deleuze not only feeling but what would be called conceptual meaning is submitted to radical social exposure. A subject doesnt first exist unto itself and then encounter a world. Subjectivities and bodies, and thus valuations and emotional responses, are formed and reformed via the political space of culture and language. We see this idea of identity not as the accomplishment of a self-subsisting mind but as a product of social interchange, in a variety of writers. Perhaps first in George Herbert Mead and Gregory Bateson( we would need to give Wittgenstein credit here also). Also Vygotsky and Bakhtin. More recently social constructionists like Ken Gergen and John Shotter. And of course, this understanding of subjectivity is central to Foucault's genealogical method.
All of this scholarship acts as an important and necessary corrective to behaviorism, Freudianism and
first generation cognitivism with their reified ahistorical assumptions.
Having said that, this is what I think is missing from these accounts:
They dont go far enough in , if you'll pardon the expression, deconstructing the autonomous subject.
The site of otherness and sociality, of the political , is more intimate and intricate than that of introjected language. Exposure to radical difference begins already the moment I experience myself, in perception as well as reflection. The paradoxical result of situating otherness at a more fundamental origin than constituted social interchange is that personal meaning becomes at the same time more thoroughly and constantly exposed to an outside , and takes on a peculiar implicative continuity.
That sense of intricate continuity, the Heideggerian befindlichkeit, out of which emerges for us a world of personally meaningful concerns. is missing from Deleuze and these other thinkers. There is no sense of implicative continuity, of anticipative intending, in their accounts of personal experience moment to moment , which lends to their approaches a certain violence and arbitrariness. The subjectivity that is formed for them has only the loosest self-concistency. The way that I am exposed to otherness via sociality is as an assault, an imposition, a conditioning. It is more interesting and complex than this.
Derrida is one of a small number of philosophers and psychologists who show us how to locate the origin of otherness in a more intimate site that where and how it is determined by the social constructionists.
Anger, guilt , joy , despair and anxiety cannot be effectively understood without seeing them as emerging from an integral cognate-feeling sensing of ones environment as a whole, as a disposition emerging out of this enframing background and carrying that sensing forward in a particular way( This is a phenomenological, not Derridean, vocabulary, but the intimate gesture of meaning's decentering unfolding out of unfolding, even before it is exposed to the Deleuzian or Foucaultian social other, is also in Derrida).
a.k.a. ‘the unconscious?’
But this is simply not true for the targets you're trying to pin this on. Insofar as, for a Deleuzian anyway, all identity is emergent from difference (and specifically, difference-in-itself), it simply wouldn't make sense to say that otherness constitutes anything like an assault or imposition of a conditioning. It's true that Deleuze and many in his wake sometimes employ the language of conditioning, but it's important to remember that Deleuze's 'conditions' are of a radically reformulated type from Kantian conditions of possibility (Kant's infamous 'transcendental') and instead bear upon conditions of actuality: conditions which are immanent to what they condition, co-extensive with them, and in no way an 'imposition' upon them. This becomes all the more clear when you study the actual 'drama of individuation' that Deleuze theorizes, which, following Simondon, eschews any notion of conditioning that would impose from any kind of outside.
In fact in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze goes so far as to oppose 'conditioning' to 'genesis', coming down on the side of the latter and rejecting the former as wholly inadequate. Moreover, there's an interesting and productive point of comparison to be made with Derrida's own refashioning of the transcendental, in which conditions of possibility are recognised to be always-already at the same time, conditions of impossibility. It's the theorisation of this vacillation, this double-bind between conditions of possibility and conditions of impossibility that marks Derrida's entire philosophical operation (something that Gasché brings out very nicely). As ingenious as this is, the problem is that this whole discourse is itself bound to picking apart oppositional differences, of sounding out, as you put it, the articulatory hinge between distinctions like identity and difference, subject and object, form and content. Derrida's whole enterprise, in other words, is geared toward grasping the double-bind which makes pairs like this both possible and impossible.
Yet as Jeffrey Bell nicely points out, this whole issue is simply bypassed in Deleuze because the latter is simply not working with oppositional differences (either/or): the whole point of the philosophy of difference is to articulate a point 'prior' to the either/or split that deconstruction interminably circles around, a point composed instead of 'inclusive disjunctions', of both/and. If it can be put this way: whereas for Derrida différance always marks something like a symptom, a trace of this double-bind from the point of view of oppositional differences, Deleuze directly theorizes the differential field itself, difference-in-itself out of which the distinctions beloved of deconstructive thought are produced. This is why it doesn't make much sense to me to say that otherness in Deleuze is somehow an assault or imposition: identity is in and of itself differential from the get-go, such that the very distinctions between self and other are themselves produced in the ontogenetic individuation of being/s.
And the reason that Derrida can't do this, why he doesn't have the intellectual tools available, is because his refiguring of the transcendental remains, ultimately, at the level of possibility, even if, taking a step beyond Kant, he couples it inextricably with the impossible. For Deleuze by contrast (and following Bergson + Simondon on this matter), the whole modality of the possible is itself suspect, a retroactive back-projection that, as he puts it, 'traces the transcendental from the empirical', a kind of ontological reverse engineering that explains individuation by a vicious and circular reference to the thing so individuated (see here [PDF] for more detail). This is what motivates Protevi's comment that Derrida can only 'prepare the way' for a Deleuzian materialism, insofar as it simply 'rests content' with 'the deconstruction of idealist philosophy and the consequent shaking of those political structures still reliant on identity', without, for all that, actually being able to conduct any analysis at the level of the actually existing, historically-situated systems and events.
It is true that Derrida is problematizing the metaphysical presuppositions behind the thinking of conceptual opposition, but not just as they are manifested in dialectical accounts and more classical formulations. His analysis can puts into question poststructralist accounts like Foucault's and Lyotard's.
"Deleuze articulates a point 'prior' to the either/or split that deconstruction interminably circles around, a point composed instead of 'inclusive disjunctions', of both/and. "
The hinge I'm referring to is of course not between concepts but WITHIN what would be a concept. The mark, trace or differance for Derrida is not a yet an entity or material. And it is not an internal opposition, like a thing that is opposed to itself, but a 'both at once'.
A key feature of Derrida's difference is the model of temporality he borrows from Husserl and transforms with the help of Heidegger.
An edge, a mark, is both an ending and a beginning, the passing of a previous present and the new present that only is what it is , only has its meaning, its identity, its supposed unity, by reference to, and thus INCLUDING within itself that effaced former present as co-determining what it means to Be a present. So any unity is a binary. The 'both at once' is what it means to be a unity. This takes place before any opposition. Present isn't opposed to past in this binary that is the 'now', a now that is therefore never simply present to itself. The entwinement of the other in the same is the condition of the same itself. You can also think of the effaced pole of the present as the formal pole, and the present pole and the content or empirical pole, or the binary of possibility-impossibility. So any simple edge or mark , in being inseparably, undecidably, both a passing of a past present and a presenting of a now, is both formal and empirical, both of form and content indissociably, not one opposed to the other, but originally both.
Is this a a profoundly different situating of the origin of difference than what we find in Deleuze?
I don t think so. I think Derrida and Deleuze are in relatively close proximity. So in order to clarify what I think are remaining important differences, I'd like to go carefully through Protevi's ( I'd prefer Deleuze, but I don't think I'd find the degree of material specificity there) analysis of real life behavioral-affective contexts, contrast his commentary with an account I think would be more consonant with that of Derrida, and let you decide.
I'll do that in a later post.
I agree that this is where both meet, but also depart from one another (both/and?). A point of refraction or bifurcation, if you will. Again, the point is that Derrida never gets beyond diagnosis, he never pushes beyond symptomology to theorise difference-in-itself. As Catherine Malabou points out, of the two valences of différance that Derrida constantly refers to, to defer and to differ, the most obvious one, the one that relates most obviously to difference, that of change and variation, is altogether absent*. Derrida always begins with the static to get to the dynamic, and while he does get there, he cannot rid himself of the reference to the static. He even goes so far as declare this impossible, which, again, is less a limit to theorization than it is a limit of Derrida himself.
Which is why to all you write I simply say - yes, yes, of course, that's all right, but there's just so much more to be considered, so much more that doesn't simply involve constantly repeating the fact that différance inheres in all things, that the trace haunts all systems, that arche-writing distends any self-present Voice, and that death contaminates all life. Being uncharitable, almost the entirety of Derrida's oeuvre is a matter of repeating this same point, ad nauseum, in different contexts, for different objects of analysis (friendship, democracy, law, ethics, politics, animality, metaphysics, etc, etc). If you've read Derrida once, you've read everything he's written always-already. But the question for me is: once you accept this, what then? Once you agree, wholeheartedly with this, then what? Derrida here provides no way forward.
*From Malabou: "It is surprising to see that in his article “Différance” Derrida does not recognise an essential, even if banal, meaning of the word “difference,” namely “change,” “variation,” or “variant.” ... The meaning of transformation, of becoming other, through metamorphosis, for example, remains in the shadows. ... Hence for Derrida ... the exceeding of metaphysics is not, and cannot be, literally speaking, a metamorphosis. ... The specific mobility of difference, as reinterpreted by Heidegger and those following him, is essentially reduced to the journey, the transfer, the change of place in general." (Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing).
We're not understanding Derrida in relation to Deleuze until we compare how they guide our understanding of pragmatic behavioral contexts.
I have selected what I think are pertiment passages from Protevi's 'AFFECT, AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY:THE ACT OF KILLING IN THE AGE OF CYBORGS' to demonstrate how difference operates via assemblages for him, and I'll contrast it with a Heideggerian phenomenological interpretation via Eugene Gendlin. In doing so I am assuming Derrida's thinking is in proximity to this.
"The vast majority of soldiers cannot kill in cold blood and need to kill in a desubjectified state, e.g., in reflexes, rages and panics."
"Zahavi (2005) and Gallagher (2005), among others, distinguish agency and ownership of bodily actions. Ownership is the sense that my body is doing the action, while agency is the sense that I am in control of the action, that the action is willed. Both are aspects of subjectivity, though they may well be a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness rather than full-fledged
objectifying self-consciousness. But alongside subjectivity we need also to notice emergent
assemblages that skip subjectivity and directly conjoin larger groups and the somatic. To follow this line of thought, let us accept that, in addition to non-subjective body control by reflexes, we can treat basic emotions as modular “affect programs” (Griffiths 1997) that run the body’s hardware in the absence of conscious control.3 As with reflexes, ownership and agency are only retrospectively felt, at least in severe cases of rage in which the person “wakes up” to see the results of the destruction committed while he or she was in the grips of the rage. In this way we see two elements we need to take into account besides the notion of subjective agency: (1) that there is another sense of “agent” as non-subjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases the military unit and non-subjective reflexes and basic emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers’ subjectivity qua controlled intentional action. In these cases the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual person or subject, but the emergent assemblage of military unit and non-subjective reflex or equally non-subjective “affect program.”
A little more detail on the notion of a “rage agent” might be helpful at this point. Extreme cases of rage produce a modular agent or “affect program” that replaces the subject. Affect programs are emotional responses that are “complex, coordinated, and automated … unfold[ing] in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction” (Griffiths 1997: 77). They are more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place (though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program). Griffiths makes
the case that affect programs should be seen in light of Fodor’s notion of modularity, which calls for a module to be “mandatory … opaque [we are aware of outputs but not the processes producing them] … and informationally encapsulated [the information in a module cannot access that in other modules]” (93; my comments in brackets). Perhaps second only to the question of adaptationism for the amount of controversy it has evoked, the use of the concept of modularity in evolutionary psychology is bitterly contested. I feel relatively safe proposing a very-widely
distributed rage module or rage agent, since its adaptive value is widely attested to by its presence in other mammals, and since Panksepp 1998 is able to cite studies of direct electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) and neurochemical manipulation as identifying homologous rage circuits in humans and other mammalian species (190)."
Compare with Gendlin's 'A Phenomenology of Anger" https://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2095.html, in which he acknowledges the shaping role of cultural norms and evolutionary bodily patterns, but maintains a holistic intentional integrity to anger processes radically intertwining the bodlily, reflexive, endocrine, envirnomental and cognitive.
Protevi says:
"In the berserker rage, the subject is overwhelmed by a chemical flood that triggers an evolutionarily
primitive module which functions as an agent which runs the body’s hardware in its place.'
Protevi here isnt integrating a rage module with situational intentionality, except as the 'reflex' rage
is switched on by a cognitive trigger, after which it proceeeds independently of intention(He says "a sense of agency is absent during the rage-induced or reflex-controlled act of killing", but doesnt seem to recognize that the lack of a conscious sense of agency does not mean that it isnt implicit.). He splits the former off from the latter. They may be loosely integrated within the larger ecology of thought, body , social realm, but nevertheless can be talked about in 'modular' terms. That kind of splitting off of assemblages from each other as modularities is missing from Gendlin's account.
Conditioning( not Kantian but Skinnerian, or do these amount to the same thing?) is central to this relation between the cognitive trigger of a reflex rage assemblage
and its appearance. "Soldiers are acculturated to dehumanize the enemy by a series of racial slurs. This acculturation is especially powerful when accomplished through rhythmic chanting while running, for such entrainment weakens personal identity to produce a group subject". This is another example of conditioning."Desensitization is merely an enabling factor for the role of classical and operant conditioning in modern training." I had earlier mentioned Protevi's account of meaning relations as violent in relation to Derrida.. Why violent? It is violent in the extent that it presupposes the notion of conditioning, which is built upon an inherent arbitrariness between conditioner and conditioned and thus operates as an impingment from a foreign outside.
A psychological ecology, understood rigorously phenomenologically, can never be simply conditioned in the way that Protevi proposes it.
Protevi's account is dripping with this arbitrary conditioning, both of affect and cognition: Protevi's favorite phrase seems to be 'more than reflex', but these impingments of world and physiology on person act barely more than reflexivly.
"In addition to the affective aspect of heightened desensitization, simulation training
constitutes a new cognitive group subject. The instant decision of “shoot / no shoot” is solicited
by the presence or absence of key traits in the gestalt of the situation. Such instant decisions are more than reflexes, but operate at the very edge of the conscious awareness of the soldiers and involve complex subpersonal processes of threat perception (Correll et al 2006). In addition to this attenuation of individual agency, cutting-edge communication technology now allows soldiers to network together in real time. With this networking we see an extended / distributed
cognition culminating in “topsight” for a commander who often doesn’t “command” in the sense of micro-manage but who observes and intervenes at critical points (Arquilla and Rondfeldt 2000: 22). In other words, contemporary team-building applications through real-time networking are a cybernetic application of video games that goes above the level of the subject (Fletcher 1999). In affective entrainment, instant decision-making, and cognitive “topsight” the
soldiers produced by rhythmic chanting and intensive simulation training are nodes within a cybernetic organism, the fighting group, which maintains its functional integrity and tactical effectiveness by real-time communication technology. It’s the emergent group with the distributed decisions of the soldiers that is the cyborg here, operating at the thresholds of the
individual subjectivities of the soldiers."
Whats missing throughout all of this is the notion that any of the treatrments the soldiers are subject to
are differently assimilated by each, such that the very meaning of the 'group' varies from individual to individual and thus there is no Supra personal vantage from which the sense of a group gestalt can be defined. The concept of distributed group cognition and the idea of a reflex rage module reify to an extent both subjective and objective components of assemblages.
Do you consider Protevi's account roughly consonsant with the aims of Deleuze's project, and more importantly, do you consider it a useful analysis of how affect and cognitive response can be triggered?
BTW, the expression 'impossibily' does not mean for Derrida that something is literally impossible. On the contrary, its simply his way of referring to the empirical gesture of novelty, absolute otherness, that operates equivocally within any mark of differance alongside the gesture of the possible(which just refers to the formal, the link to the past, to history. What is possible is what is foreseen, predictable, already schematized). So all intentional contexts are both possible and impossible , because any intention at the same time makes reference to past and the absolutely new and unforeseen.
The meaning of transformation doesn't remain in the shadows, it is revealed as 'change of form' . Do we first have forms(morphos) before we have change, before we become other? To be a form or gestalt is to be a structured thematic centered on a meaning, the basis of any structuralism. Derrida shows that within the notion of form difference is already at work, so fundamentally an identity doesn't exist first and 'become' other, it begins as already ahead of itself. Derrida is constantly analyzing transformations within culture, but not via Malabou's Hegelian psychoanalytic dialectic reasoning, which always begins too late.
"The specific mobility of difference, as reinterpreted by Heidegger and those following him, is essentially reduced to the journey, the transfer, the change of place in general."
Not in general, in utter, local, specificity of movement. Derrida refuses the Hegelian gesture Malabou longs for of totalizing transformation as dialectical movement.
I know, you'll argue that Deleuze's rhizomatic machinic assemblages begin from difference, but if Protevi is any judge, we've seen how a gestalt can act for him via something like 'distributed cognition' as a structural whole whose meaning can be determined beyond particular cogntitions of its participants.
If difference really precedes identity, then a gestalt can never encompass its particulars via distributed cognition, but rather each particular is already its own gestalt. This is how the social field functions in relation to the individual for Heidegger and Derrida.
Three things. First, I don't understand why you think an account like Protevi's in any way prohibits such a theoretical extension. To the degree that any such differential assimilation is relevant, the latter wouldn't so much be a corrective than a deepening. Second, given that the unit of analysis here is military training - that is, group training - it's not clear that any such extension is relevant. Perhaps it could be made relevant by shifting the accent of analysis upon, say, PTSD and the psychological aftereffects of killing for the individual, but that's expressly not what the paper is about.
Third, and I think most importantly, your own desconsturctive impulses ought to disabuse you of your implicit privileging of the individual over the group, as if - to reverse your own charge - one ought to begin with the clearly-demarcated individual soldier before moving out centrifugally to the supra-individual (of course, neither pole ought to be considered as fixed or clearly-demarcated). To the degree that, as you put it, every particular is already its own gestalt*, what matters is a concrete analysis of the actually existing mechanisms by which any particular phenomenon is constituted. [*A better way to put it might be: every particular is already its own gestalt by virtue of which it becomes a particular.]
If Protevi speaks of a group subject, of distributed cognition presided over by a 'topsight' commandant, that's because that's how the actual real life military assemblage under consideration functions. The description involved is not a 'metaphysical' one, he's not providing some kind of timeless account of all military action ever, he's saying that this, in concreto is a mechanic assemblage that works through this kind of conditioning. Does this mean that it cannot 'malfunction'? Not at all. A Derridian supplement might be of relevance when trying to explain say, a deviation - perhaps, to take pop-culture reference, Finn's horror at killing civilians during the opening scene of The Force Awakens. The Derridian operation would involve trying to account for this possibility, of how, despite the well-oiled engine of military training, not everything can go according to plan (an account which can actually be given wholly on the grounds of a theory of assemblages, but I won't go into that).
This is what I mean when I say that Derrida can only ever gesture towards possibility, opening, otherness, without, for all that, providing any means to show how otherness is, as it were, instantiated in any actual system. It's a kind of residual, minimal idealism or formalism - perhaps the most minimal idealism imaginable, but an idealism nonetheless - that I think demands overcoming.
Supplementing may be a better word than overcoming.
I agree that Heidegger and Derrida show us in the most general terms how to put their ideas to work in worldly domains like the biological or the social, but dont go there with us. But that's in the nature of their sort of philosophy(which has a history going back to Plato). Their task is the show the conditions of possibility for acting in the world. Characterizing this move as formalism, idealism , metaphysics, Platonism I think risks reducing it unfairly, by implying that any such globalizing style in philosophy is inherently totallizing(This was Rorty's argument and I disagree with it, believing instead that he was just incapable of reading Heidegger and Derrida well. In his ideas, Rorty ends up stumbling into the same pitfalls that he thought avoiding 'idealism' would protect him from). This particular style of philosophizing may not be your preference, but if Heidegger or Derrida can be shown to be harboring hidden metaphysical presuppositions, I dont think embracing an imminent approach like Deleuze's protects such an approach necessarily from the same possibllity of totalization. To me the issue in the case of choosing between the Platonic vs Aristotetelian, Lockean vs Kantian, Nietzschean vs Freudian, Husserlian vs Cognitive psychological or Derridean vs Deleuzean gesture is which content one finds more useful and clarifying. To me it doesnt matter a whiff whether I start with a 'conditions of possiblity' philosophical discourse or one that leads me by the hand through every imaginable worldy domain. What I need to know is HOW its leading me through, via which presuppositions?
I think Deleuze offers a satisfying unfolding of the implications of a post-Hegelian,post-Freudian, post-Husserlian worldview in all domains except for that of the psychological, (for this is where the differences between Deleuze and Derrida show up most keenly).
For this domain we already have better practical accounts , following a Heideggerian-Derridean trajectory(Gendlin, Kelly, Ratcliffe,etc.).
"I don't understand why you think an account like Protevi's in any way prohibits such a theoretical extension. To the degree that any such differential assimilation is relevant, the latter wouldn't so much be a corrective than a deepening. "
You dont understand, I'm not saying Protevi's account prohibits a theoretical extension, But if this is a deepening, it's a move into deepening overdetermined muck, because I want to prohibit legitimizing the notion of a rage module or distributed cognition in the first place. That is to say, I am trying to show how such a thinking is, in Heidegger's terms, fallen or inauthentic, and in need of deconstructing in Derrida's terms. Hell, never mind Derrida and Heiddeger, I could just as easily summon the immanent pragmatic accounts of Kelly, Ratcliffe or Gendlin to do the job. Classical and operant conditioning are not notions to be supplemented, unless you accept cognitive-behavioral presuppositions to begin with.
They are notions to be dismantled, shown as internally incoherent, inoperative from the get-go, ignorant as to their real basis. When a pigeon is 'reinforced' for a particular behavior, what the experimenter thinks the pigeon is attending to in the situation and how the pigeon is actually organizing it are two very different things.
"Your own desconstructive impulses ought to disabuse you of your implicit privileging of the individual over the group, as if - to reverse your own charge - one ought to begin with the clearly-demarcated individual soldier before moving out centrifugally to the supra-individual (of course, neither pole ought to be considered as fixed or clearly-demarcated). "
Yes! Good. This is precisely the crux of the issue. How on earth can I make the claims I make on behalf of a deconstructive account and yet, for all the world, make it seem as if I'm retreating from the full bio-poitical sociality of experiencing a world into the solipsism of individual vs outside.
Allow me to plagiarize myself with selections from papers.
"Is this resistance of my thinking to would-be interpersonal norms a retreat from a model of full social embeddedness into a person-centered solipsistic essentialism of rule-based mental modules? On the contrary, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner, producing every moment a global reshaping of my sense of myself and others outpacing the transformative impetus realized via a narrative conception of socialization. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located intersubjectively as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I’ or interpersonal ‘we’, there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective-objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies or between-person conditionings. Interactivity is not only prior to the perception of objects by a subject, it is prior to any notion of a pre-existingly-patterned object-in-itself, whether on the scale of the physical,
"There is no pure, monological tone, sense, feel, form, entity. We could not even say that sense is unformed, incomplete, or vague before its participation in discourse. There simply is no such thing as a meaning, sense, tone, which is not already mobile, ahead of itself, simultaneously a relation of similarity to my previous experience and an absolute departure from my history. Each moment is both an imminence and a transcendence, a reference to something familiar and previous, and the admittance of an exceeding. As such it is double, a split unity. I can only speak of such a thing as another person because my world is already ordered as a referential transit, but now `person' loses its prior meaning as monovocal participant."
"Representative constructionist articulations of between-person relationality rest on abstractions masking a more primary locus of sociality. Sensate experience is already radically relational before and beyond any notion of sociality as between-person voices-gestures, generating more intimate and mobile possibilities of interpersonal understanding than is offered via discursive readings of terms like sociality, language and embodiment. Sociality can be understood as originating at a more concrete, intricate site than that of languaged or gestured utterance, allowing each participant in conversation to maintain an ongoing thread of non-agential, anticipative consistency and immediacy missing from constructionist accounts. neural, psychological or cultural. Derrida has analyzed this under the rubric of `iterability', and Gendlin (1991),(1992) has articulated it as `experiential intricacy'.
Gendlin writes ""Individuals are inherently social, but that doesn't mean everything must come from society, and be imposed on us. Rather, it means that what is individual is also social. In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand...) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.(p.393)"
Is this an " implicit privileging of the individual over the group, as if - to reverse your own charge - one ought to begin with the clearly-demarcated individual soldier before moving out centrifugally"?
"The patterning which constrains our meaning-making is not the order of a context-independent agency, but a relational process which only really exists within the contingency of local interchange. Constructionist orders like genres, practices, conventions are not static but dynamically stable coherences, re-enforced and re-fashioned in each local social encounter. This is precisely how we need to think of the implicate order of perception, the key difference being that, instead of the dialogic space consisting of a responsive conversation between monovocal participants, it exists first and foremost as a conversation between a meaning, sense, utterance, gesture and itself. This strange idea of the instant of awareness, perception, meaning as simultaneously both itself and beyond itself turns a single moment of verbal exchange between two people into a plurality of conversations. In the instant a constructionist account would locate a single interchange of responsive language forms, I would trace a multiplicity of intertwined aspectival variations continually altering my sense of the situation, of myself and the other person. By the time a series of discursive interactions had taken place, allowing the constructionist to place them as tactics or performances within a cultural genre, that `genre' supposedly constraining the interchange would have already been subtly made and remade a number of times over in different ways for each participant.
Am I claiming to be able to take away from an interpersonal encounter only those aspects that I preemptively announce as `resonant with our own implicative order', thus retreating from the full contingency of responsive being into a kind of teleological self-actualizing process. It is crucial that this implicate order not be confused with a schematic or narrative agency. I agree with Gergen(1994) when he says people "do not consult an internal script, cognitive structure, or apperceptive mass for information or guidance; they do not interpret or "read the world" through narrative lenses; they do not author their own lives. He rightly points out that such a system can never get beyond its own biases in order to truly be affected by a world outside of its own schemes.
The discursive other who surprises me as a polarization, intervention, destabilization of my history is presumed to come at me from a substantial distance. But the sensate other who intervenes in my solipsism doesn't come AT me, doesn't interrogate me. The other as variation, implication, anticipated elaboration is impossibly close to me. Far from choosing a reified notion of the individual over more relational thinking, my account of meaning as embodied perception is more radically open to history and culture. Culture is already to be found, shaped and reshaped, in each moment of this transformative process, allowing relationality and culture to intervene more aggressively, more immediately, more intimately in my ongoing history of experience than is seen in monovocal constructionist accounts.
How my claim that an ongoing thread of continuity underlies my participation in interpersonal relations could possibly allow a more penetrating understanding of the Other, than a discursive account which makes no such claim? Haven't I made people into `bounded entities?
Rather than being constrained by between-person social role, as implicatory being always intending-beyond-itself I stand partially ahead of the culture it presumably represents. My social role is not simply pushed and pulled via the validation of others; if I determine that my conversational partner reinterprets my argument via a predicable, too-narrow perspective, I not only will not be little affected by their critique, but in anticipating such a response will consider it an affirmation of sorts. On the other hand, my `solitary' self-conversation can lead to devastating invalidation and reformulation of my identity.
Rather than a single game, interpersonal relationality is at least two intertwining games, or, more precisely, texts, from my vantage; it is both my integrally variating senses of the other's interpretation of our encounter, and my awareness of the dynamic stability of the difference between his and my outlook. (In fact, as we have seen, it is a multiplicity of modes. For in the situation, both our perspectives will wander into many subregions and modalities, just as when I am alone.) While I am with my friend, I can move back and forth between styles of my self-conversation and the interpersonal interchange, noting an ongoing difference in the relative thematic coherence of these two threads. In attempting to share my ideas with them, I can be aware of the overlap in our understanding at the same time that I recognize incommensurabilities between our perspectives.
But my perspective and that of another are not to be understood as independent, private regions. The interpersonal relation directly remakes my sense of what my `own' perspective is, as well as what I assume to be the other's integral position. It is always a new sense of `me' and `other' that emerge in conversation, but as an intertwining iterative movement among threads of implication. When I get inside the other's head, it is simultaneously they getting inside my head, even if that other is a text I am reading or a painting I gaze at. But again, this process is no different in kind than that of `solitary' perceptive experience, in which my various activities lead me into distinct zones or situations characterized by a certain aesthetic integrity of unfolding perspectival variations. Listening to music, enjoying lunch, following my own train of thought, or conversing with others, are all modalities of experiencing having their own distinct, temporary integrities even as they blend into and carry forward previous modes. My sense of my own identity is relentlessly, but subtly, formed and reformed in moving through and between myriad modalities of experience, including my moments of self-conversation, my immersion in subjects-objects of touch, sight, as well as within interpersonal interchange.
Sorry for the excessive verbiage. So my gambit is to explain the paradox of claiming a most radical basis of sociality and difference before that of the subject. before that of the object, before that of the discursive intersubjective relation, even that so brilliantly articulated by Deleuze. What of course make my claim paradoxical is that I insist that the more effectively one digs beneath ossifiying , idealizing presuppositons that both formalisms and empricisms share, the closer one gets to the idea of a radical thread of anticipative continuity that makes any notion of conditioning, or a distributed socially determined cognition, or the being subject to reflexive affective modules, incoherent, It does this not be
protecting any kind of subject or identity or self, but, on the contrary, by deconstructing the force of any entity that would intervene
And while you might object that any such developmental account would simply lapse back into the constructivist paradigm which you're trying to avoid, I think this is manifestly not the case. One can reject the thesis of intersubjectivity as the source of otherness/sociality while still being able to provide a developmental account of the the genesis of otherness. How? In recognising, first of all, that the ego's relation to the self does not differ in kind to the ego's relation to others. That in fact, the very distinction between self and other is itself emergent from a more primordial sensorial field, James's 'blooming, buzzing, confusion' of the infant, Freud's 'oceanic feeling', or what child psychologist Daniel Stern referred to as the field of 'vitality affects', or 'life-feelings', "elusive qualities ... better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging’, ‘fading away’, ‘fleeting’, ‘explosive’, crescendo’, ‘decrescendo’, ‘bursting’, ‘drawn out’, and so on."
Importantly for Stern, at this level, there is no self-other distinction: "infants experience these qualities both “from within” and “in the behaviour of other persons” such that "the originary temporal structures of experience are cardinal in nature; vitality affects — surgings, fadings, and all such qualitative features of experience — are primary with respect to our experiences of ourselves and our experiences of others" (my italics). It is only subsequently that these vitality affects become differentiated into self and other by processes of symmetry breaking, as it were. The infant learns to be a 'self' - or rather learns to 'locate' these (trans-personal) affects within a self - by means of coming to grips with the regularities of bodily coordination which break the symmetry between self and other. These coordination processes are those of if/then relationships: if 'I' move this shape like so, then such and such follows. Nothing happens if I try and move the shape over there, however. Ipso: this shape is 'mine'.
For the phenomenologist, Alphonso Lingis, the key here is movement: "movement .... mediates this identification [of my sensibility reflexively recognizing itself in sensuous opaquness]. For if I recognize this hand I see, these eyes I touch, as alive, it is because I perceive ripples of movement in them. I perceive there movements of the same types as those I feel within, by kinesthetic sensation, movement taking form in that sensation-field which is my body-zone felt from within - movements that are spontaneous, ego-originating, and teleologically structured, goal-orientated. ... Movement is the common term that permits perceiving as synthetically one a sensitive zone and a sensible substance perceived externally, because I have a double experience of body movement". Importantly, movement is no less the index of the other: "The consciousness that recognises itself in its own sensible form can recognise conscious life in the sensible form of another. The right hand that recognises touch in the left hand in touches can also, by the same sort of perception, recognise touch in the hand of another… the other’s conscious life is perceivable in the form of movements of his sensible body" (Lingis, "The Perception of Others", in Phenomenological Explnations).
In keeping with this accent on movement, for the Deleuzian Brian Massumi, it is ultimately speed which distinguishes self and other, subject and object: "What the body lends in the first instance is its slowness, not its presumptive unity. The unity appears "Out there," in the greater-varying accompaniments to habit, as recognizably patterned by habit in such a way to reduce its complexity by a factor. The "out there" becomes an "outside" of things. The produced unity then feeds back "in." The oneness of the body is back-flow, a back-formation (as always, at a lag). The body's relative slowness returns to it, after a habitual detour, as its own objectifiable unity. Thus back-formed, the body may now appear to itself as a bounded object among others. Spatial distinctions like inside and outside and relative size and distance are derivatives of a greater "out there" that is not in the first instance defined spatially but rather dynamically, in terms of movement and variation" (Massumi, "Chaos in the 'Total Field' of Vision", in Parables For the Virtual).
These are the kinds of developmental - but still phenomenological - accounts needed that don't simply reify différance into a mystical ahistorical, free-floating, anstoß that lodges itself here, there, everywhere, with no attention paid as to how in this or that concrete assemblage, it makes itself felt. Demanding attention to specificity does not mean having to choose one side of the false-choice between otherness as intersubjectively prompted or simply always-already at work, abstractly and unaccountably. There is no possible coherent reading that would locate someone like Deleuze as coming down on the side of intersubjectivity. For these readings, self and other, subject and object, are always a product of a differentiation, a process of mutual distinction, such that différance must be 'played out' in some manner or another, is always materially incarnate, as it were, and not simply a formal-logico principle that transcendentally structures things from some Platonic beyond.
My central concern in the discussion was my dissatisfaction with philosophical and psychological accounts of affective-cognitive relationality.
In making the mistake of bringing Derrida's quasi-transcendental approach into the picture, I opened up the 'transcendental' can of worms.
I have always been a big fan of philosophers who start their investigation by locating that about which one can say 'at least this much is true, always,everywhere' , the irreducible conditions of possibility for any thing to appear in the world.
You and I arent going to agree on the validity or usefulness of this move. From my perspective, you are among the majority of philosophically minded people( especially those from Anglo cultures) who view that sort of attempt to ground ontology in such a fashion as wrong headed from the get go. Or perhaps you see the value or legitimacy of that move in earlier thinkers like Descartes, Kant and perhaps Hegel, but don't think that Heidegger and Derrida have managed to pull it off( or perhaps that they have failed precisely because they have, in spite of their claims, stayed within the metaphysical umbrella at a time when more talented philosophers like Deleuze, knew it was time to free thinking from its stranglehold).
"I still find your own account lacking on account of the fact that it doesn't actually provide an account of this pre-social sociality. It just kind of posits it as a kind of brute factum without in fact, providing any kind of developmental account of its genesis."
What s the genesis of empirical accounts of physical science? That is to say, what is the origin of presuppositions concerning the idea of the empirical object? Most scientists would take umbrage at the suggestion that an unexamined set of metaphysical presumptions ( not a brute factum but a brute pre-empirical grounding) allowed the physical to make sense to them in the way that it did, in different ways, over the past 500 years. What is the genesis of living organisms? We have a powerful empirical account in Darwin's 'Origin of Species', but what is the genesis of Darwin's developmental account? Are there 'brute' metaphysical presuppositions lying hidden beneath his empirical genesis that aren't themselves beholden to a genetic account?
My stated objections to Protevi's treatment of affective and cognitive relationalities, ( that it conceives of relations as external to the entities that they interrelate)
can be argued from such a pre-empirical 'general conditions of possibility' vantage. But so as not to have us distracted from what I see as the main issue for me,
I can keep the discussion fully at the ontic empirical level.
I know of one account that attempts to do what you are asking for from a post-Heideggeian perspective. Eugene Gendlin's 'A Process Model' takes us from the biological to the human developmental. I'll see what passages I can locate in it that may illuminate the differences with some of your references.
As to your comments on an infant experience that is prior to any distinction between self or other, what you're talking about is the awareness of a constituted self and a constituted other.
Yes, those are derivative concepts, abstracted developmentally from an earlier situation in which perceptual experience is relatively undifferentiated. Massumi's description sounds consonant with that of Varela in 'Ethical Know-how'. Piaget also showed the genesis of self concept and self-other differentiation as an internalization of sensori-motor interactions with the environment, and the gradual transformation of childhood egocentrism toward a decentered reciprocical schematism.
I dont really know what an'ego' is. I know what people seem to think it is, but it doesnt play any role in my understanding of meaning relations. I dont have any use for the notion of constituted 'I', 'subject, 'object' or 'self' either. I understand them only as culturally contingent constructs that are not necessary or intrinsic to what goes on at any level of development.
Let's say that we humans never developed out of the pre-'ego-other' stage of cognitive functioning( of course then language would be out of the question. Not that language in a society that had moved beyond the construct of the ego-other binary would be denied).
There would remain the question of how to understand the organization of James' stream of consciousness.
For Deleuze it is externally cobbled relations between moments of experience. For Heidegger, Derrida, Gendlin, it is internally related. What comes is born out of, belongs to, what it relates to and differs from. not just arbitrarily juxtaposed , cobbled. This belongingness requires no constituted self, ego, 'I'. It is prior to such abstractions.
"what child psychologist Daniel Stern referred to as the field of 'vitality affects', or 'life-feelings', "elusive qualities ... better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging’, ‘fading away’, ‘fleeting’, ‘explosive’, crescendo’, ‘decrescendo’, ‘bursting’, ‘drawn out’, and so on."
These adjectives would be fine if they referred to the infant's stream of awareness as a dynamic in which the flowing of one feeling-sensation-perception out of the previous manifested a belongness of each to the prior and following. But I can guarantee you that a psychoanalyst is not going to be understanding experience in this way.
Is this mysticism? If Being and Time is mysticism then I guess so. Inexplicable? Well, I sure as hell haven't managed to explain it to you.
Let me see what I can dig up from Gendlin on child development.
Massumi actually opens his book by drawing attention to exactly this: "When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time, It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other? If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative difference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling ... Qualitative difference: immediately the issue is change." (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual).
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone specifies further: "Any movement has a certain felt tensional quality, linear quality, amplitudinal quality, and projectional quality. In a very general sense, the felt tensional quality has to do with our sense of effort; the linear quality with both the felt linear contour of our moving body and the linear paths we sense ourselves describing in the process of moving; the amplitudinal quality with both the felt expansiveness or contractiveness of our moving body and the spatial extensiveness or constrictedness of our movement; the felt projectional quality with the way in which we release force or energy.
Linear and amplitudinal qualities obviously describe spatial aspects of movement; tensional and projectional qualities obviously describe temporal aspects of movement, what we recognize as the felt intensity of our moving bodily energies and the felt manner in which we project those bodily energies — in a sustained manner, for example, in an explosive manner, in a punctuated manner, in a ballistic manner, and so on. Temporal aspects of movement are the result of the way in which tensional and projectional qualities combine; that is, the temporal quality of any movement derives from the manner in which any particular intensity (or combined intensities) is kinetically expressed.
On the way to spelling out the nature of these qualities more precisely, I should call specific attention to the fact that movement creates the qualities that it embodies and that we experience; thus it is erroneous to think that movement simply takes place in space, for example. On the contrary, we formally create space in the process of moving; we qualitatively create a certain spatial character by the very nature of our movement — a large, open space, or a tight, resistant space, for example." (Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement).
I quote all of this to emphasize that these things cannot be neatly parceled out: movement, physiology, development, affectivity. The philosophical reason why this is important is that these all imply a primacy of relation: all these terms only make sense as factors of relationality: they constitute a pre-personal or pre-individual relational/differential field out of which 'persons', 'individuals' or particulars attain stability (or even 'metastability', to appropriate Simondon's systems inspired vocabulary). Which is, all again to say that to attribute to this view one of 'externally cobbled relations between moments of experience' is simply wrong; and so too would it be wrong to speak of 'internally related moments of experience' insofar as both 'internal' and 'external' are themselves developmental derivatives of the preindividual field out of which these terms are born.
A quick note on this, as it is somewhat tangential although still interesting and important: I'm all for metaphysics in the grand, classical sense, but I think it demands an incredible reworking of what we understand metaphysics can be. I also think Heidegger and Derrida are indispensable guides for what can and cannot be done, and I situate them not so differently to how I situate Kant: Kant marks a caesura such that one speaks of a philosophy before Kant and a philosophy after Kant, the latter being irreducible to the former; just as there is philosophy both before Heidegger and after Heidegger - so too Derrida. To be unfamiliar with their projects and what they entail would be a vast handicap in the development of any metaphysical project.
And crucially, metaphysics cannot be the same in their wake; any possible metaphysics after them would not be another in a long line of metaphysical 'systems', but would, or ought to, transform the very meaning and scope of metaphysics itself. Arguably, every grand metaphysican has done exactly this, but now more than ever do we need to be self-aware of the legacy of those transformations, and how to work with - and in some cases - against them.
Your quotes sound lovely, and when I began reading Deleuze I was similarly impressed. Quality and difference, affectivity all holding hands and singing Kumbaya. I'm with all of that. But get you and me and those authors in a room with someone trying to make sense of their world, trying to cope with guilt, anger, grief, blame , and I want to hear how each of us is able to insert ourselves into that person's story in such a way as to move through their world effectively with them, so that they can tell us that we are understanding their sense of their world, their predicament. Let us see how each of us , via our own philosophical account. Is able to anticipate along with that person. There are specific implications in the ideas of each of these authors you mentioned for how to deal with others at that level, and that's what I want to investigate.
I have a pretty good idea of how Protevi would fare, based not only on his piece on the military, but also what he wrote about the Columbine killers.
I don't feel like I'm really hearing philosophy, philosophy that clearly differentiates itself from alternative positions , that really commits itself meaningfully, rather than just acting as a livelihood for career academics, until I can envision it in action in this way, in direct comparison and confrontation with alternative accounts at the feeling, questioning , concernful engagement of friends, lovers, enemies and acquaintances.
Hearing Protevi on conditioning, rage modules and distributed social cognition was a good start. I want to hear similar stories from these others. Is affect ever a reflex? Is it a cognitive attribution? Can an affect be triggered by a shot of adrenaline? By mimicking another's facial expression? Are any of the psychoanalytically oriented accounts of affect useful any more? What about mechanisms of repression?
Of course now you say something like 'hah, see, sociality is only ever an imposition, a infracton from the outside'. Well no, just in this particular case, especially when discussing the columbine killers and military units, which are surely among the limit cases of human experience. And in any case an attention to différance ought to disable any easy demarcation between the normal and the pathological here. Among the attractions of Deleuze's account of thought or cognition for me is precisely this undermining of this simple division, wherein all genuine thought - that which is most internal to us - is impelled precisely by an infraction from the 'outside', an encounter which calls fourth a moment of genuine creative response. There is a topology of affect. Again, it seems to me that you keep eliding the specificity of Protevi's account in trying to make it a metonym of an account of affect 'in general', whereas it's mean to account for a particular assemblage of it.
And speaking of which, I don't understand how you see S-J, Lingis or Stern (only the latter of which really professes any allegience to psychoanalytic thought) developing 'affective dynamics at the level of social interactions': Neither the quotes by stern or S-J do anything of the sort, and the whole idea behind Lingis (who is barely a 'psychoanalytic thinker', and instead one far more indebted to Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Nietzsche) is that movement is an index of that which is prior to any division between the social (the 'other') and the self, or even, in your preferred terminology, the 'interpersonal we' - a reworking, anyway, of Heidegger's being-with? (and what's so wrong with psychoanalysis anyway? There've been some great work done on affect and psychoanalysis - I'm thinking Adrian Johnson and Colette Soler in particular...)
And lastly, because the 'rage module' seems to be a bit a sticking point with you, I can only say I'm not very bothered by it because (a) Protevi's whole point is that it works differentially on account of entrainment across thresholds so it's hardly a matter of 'pre-programming' or determinism or whatever you'd like to call it (b) it's hardly mandated by a Deleuzian POV and is only present in Protevi's account, I suspect, as a way to more deeply integrate biology into the account, and (c) I don't think much of the account which be that much changed if we dropped the reference to the 'rage module' altogether - although perhaps it would have to be compensated for by some other kind of phylogenetically accounted for neuroplastic mechanism that not as simplistic and straightforward.
The second problem is also linguistic, that is, how do we describe these states or the mental phenomena behind the "I?" - behind the self. This of course brings us back to an epistemological world view that can limit how we describe what's happening. If our world view is strictly viewed from a naturalistic or physical point of view, then how we describe consciousness (the linguistic descriptions) will be limited by this view; and anything that describes consciousness outside this purview will be viewed suspiciously, and even viewed as irrational.
So science can actually limited what can be said, because it limits the language of descriptions to the field of science, which again is only one way of attaining knowledge. It's not a necessary limitation, but a contingent one based on a particular world view, i.e., science can be expanded, and is expanding beyond the natural or the physical. In a way, the science of quantum physics forces the metaphysical upon us, so it reduces everything to what's metaphysical. Even mathematics is a metaphysical endeavor produced by consciousness.
Once we understand that knowledge isn't limited to science, then we can expand our knowledge base, and expand our understanding of consciousness. However, there just may be limits to what can be said about the metaphysical, i.e., language itself may impose limits on what can be said, but it's difficult to know where those limits are, and why there are limits (if there are limits).
Of course. How could it not?
Metaphysics is the limit of what can be discussed, described, argued.
I think we all agree that metaphysics, discussion, description and argument don't cover or apply to all of Reality.
Sure, it's difficult to say what's unknowable, undiscussable, un-describable. But it's not difficult to point to and discuss things that are discussable.
Though little can be said about what's past metaphysics, we're familiar, from our discussions, with what metaphysics covers.
Michael Ossipoff
I didn't say "Metaphysics is the limit of what can be discussed...," I said, "...there are limits to what can be said about the metaphysical." Wittgenstein thought that the boundary between what can be sensibly talked about is the boundary between "the world," and the metaphysical. I do disagree with Wittgenstein on this point. It sounds like you agree with him, if I understand your point.
You make it sound so obvious, as though I'm pointing out a truism. There is much disagreement about these points.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I'm glad you think we all agree, but you must not be paying much attention to what people write.
And I agreed. If metaphysics is what can be said about what is, then it's reasonable to say that there are limits to what can be said about metaphysics. That's obvious.
I don't agree with what you quoted him, above, as saying (but I don't know what he meant by "the metaphysical" and "the world")..
But let me guess:
"The world": This physical world.
"The metaphysical": Metaphysics, and what it can discuss. (...by which I mean what can be said about what is).
With those two meanings, your Wittgenstein quote sounds to me like the opposite of the truth. if he's saying that metaphysics is where un-discussability starts.
Maybe he just means something different by "the metaphysical". But if he means that metaphysics is un-discussable, then it's most odd that there has always been so much metaphysical discussion. :D
I don't think it's productive to try to figure out what Wittgenstein, or any other classic philosopher meant. People here often have an inclination to let the classic literary philosophers, and current and recent acacemic philosophers, set the terms and the topics. That's called being led by the nose.
I suggest that a lot of time and effort is wasted by faithfully pursuing and endlessly trying to interpret those Philosophical Scriptures.
Forgive me for not saying that you were wrong.
If you assert that you were wrong, can you support that assertion?
That's a safe bet.
It's wonderful that you're glad.
So then you believe that metaphysics, discussion, description and argument cover and apply to all of Reality.
Forgive me for misrepresenting your position.
Michael Ossipoff
I kind of feel like starting to throw ad hominems around after reading that, but then again the inclusion of humans confuses my insultedness. I guess I'm fine with the conclusion and the reasons based on which you believe what you believe about animals, but I'm still insulted by the way you draw the simplicity of humans from the simplicity of animals.
I quite enjoyed it, It mirrors Gendlin's writing on affect, emotion, language and the body in so many ways. In fact, one only gets to Gendlin from Massumi via a slight change in terminology, but that subtle difference I think is key to understanding where I think Massumi's(and Deleuze's) thinking could be coaxed a bit further than it ventures . Af far as it goes its brilliant. What Massumi and Gendlin share:both talk about the linearity of conventional language(signification as a conventional system of distinctive difference) as masking a richer underlying(and overflowing) process of affective meaning-making. Both recognize that the body and the mind are inseparable at all levels of process.
Massumi: "volition, cognition, and presumably other “higher” functions usually presumed to be in the mind, figured as a mysterious container of mental entities that is is
somehow separate from body and brain, are present and active in that now not-so “raw” domain."
Massumi: "Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic
remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing,
from narration, as it is from vital function. It is narratively de-localized, spreading over the
generalized body surface, like a lateral backwash from the function-meaning interloops traveling the vertical path between head and heart.
When on the other hand language doubles a sequence of movements in order to add
something to it in the way of meaningful progression – in this case a sense of futurity, expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression – then it runs counter to and dampens the intensity. "
For Gendlin no aspect of bodily functioning is outside of the implicatory whole that the body-environmental interaction is. Language as strictly linear, schematic expectation must be distinguished from a much wider sort of anticipatory, expectant, implicatory dynamic belongs to all bodily process
.
Massumi: "Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future."
Non-linearity and feedback work to relate disparate contents.
"Every event takes place on both levels – and between both levels, as they resonate together to form a larger system composed of two interacting subsystems following entirely different rules of formation.
Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation
point, or singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is “selected.” “Phase space” could be seen as a diagrammatic rendering of the dimension of the virtual. The organization of multiple levels that have different logics and temporal organizations but are locked in resonance with each other and recapitulate the same event in divergent ways, recalls the fractal ontology and nonlinear causality underlying theories of complexity. "
Gendlin says " If one assumes separate events, processes, or systems, one must then add their co-ordinations as one finds them, as if unexpectedly...“Inter-affecting" and "coordination" are words that bring the old assumption of a simple multiplicity, things that exist as themselves and are only then also related. So we need a phrase that does not make sense in that old way. Let us call the pattern we have been formulating "original inter-affecting. In such a crossing, each functions as already cross-affected by the other. Each is determined by, and also determines the other(p.555)”. "They" inter-affect each other before they are a they(p.22). What is the same cannot be divided from what is different.
While Gendlin recognized the incorporation of complexity theory into psychological models as a step away from Cartesianism, he believed it couldnt think ' different logics and temporal organizations' within a more intergral process.
Massumi: "For structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules."
So far so good. This sound very Gendlin-like.
Massumi: "Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox. a tinge of the unexpected, the lateral, the unmotivated, to lines of action and reaction. A change in the rules. The expression-event is the system of the inexplicable..."
Uh oh.When we talk about breaking free of rule-bound invariance of narrative conceptual schematism, how does this this realm of the new, the other, function? Massumi uses adjectives like paradox, the unexpected, the unmotivated, the inexplicable, the unassimilable.
Gendlin uses terms like implicatory unity, felt intricacy, explication, carrying forward to point to this more-than-conceptual order.
He writes of explication :" ‘The continuity of time cannot first be made by things next to each other, because such a continuity is passive; each bit IS alone, and must depend on some other continuity to relate it to what is next to it...”(p.71). For instance, fresh intentional experience does not simply sit alongside a prior context; it explicates the immediate past ( Gendlin characterizes this past as an an implicatory whole):
...explication is not a representation of what “was” implicit; rather explication carries the implying with it and carries it forward. An explication does not replace what it explicates. If one divided them, one could try to divide between what is new and what is from before. Then one part of the explication would be representational, and the other part would be arbitrary. An occurring that carries forward is an explicating. It is neither the same nor just different." (One might point out that Derrida uses words like 'the impossible, the surprising, the foreign, the absolute other, etc, to refer to that which shakes thinking free of the tyrannical stagnation of the self-enclosed schema, which would seem to place him closer to Massumi than Gendlin. But Derrida makes this gesture equivocal with profound gentleness and proximity. There is never a breaking-away that is not at the same time a preserving, a remaining-with .)
Massumi: "In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism."
Is an asignifying philosophy of affect possible or necessary? Or does Massumi mean a conventionally signifying philosophy unquestioning pairing signifier with signified?
Massumi: "Intensity and experience accompany one another, like two mutually presupposing dimensions, or like two sides of a coin. Intensity is immanent to matter and to events, to mind and to body and to every level of bifurcation composing them and which they compose. Thus it also cannot but be experienced, in effect – in the proliferations of levels of organization it ceaselessly gives rise to, generates and regenerates, at every suspended moment. Deleuze’s philosophy is the point at which transcendental philosophy flips over into a radical immanentism, and empiricism into ethical experimentation."
This is a wonderful paragraph.
Did you read the intro to Massumi's article, about the snowman study?
What do you think the kids would have said if the experimenters had asked them about how they reacted to the different presentations of the snowman? I wonder if , had they been attentive in their questioning, they might have surprised the researchers with their ability to convey nuance in shade and intent of meaningful reaction to switch from image alone to factual narrative and to emotive narrative. My point is that for Gendlin and for me the most interesting dynamics of affectivity are right on the surface of awareness. That doesnt mean that a child or adult can verbalize or even clearly identify what is being felt. But becasue affect , as felt exeriencing, is an integral bodily process that doesnt just accompany thought but IS thought in its vissitudes, it is never suspended or simply hidden, even if inarticulate. Gendlin : "The puzzle about the body knowing our decisions before we consciously know them might make us miss the fact that there is an inwardly experienced body, and that the reflective and bodily-sentient person is much wider than conscious control.There can be no division between awareness and events that could supposely happen without it”
More on Massumi later.
Quoting BlueBanana
I'm not saying anything about a simplicity-comparison between humans and other animals. I recognize that humans are different from the other animals in some ways (but maybe not as different as they think they are--For instance, the name "Homo Sapiens" sounds to me like a pompous vanity.)
Yes we're different from the other animals, and other purposefully-responsive devices, in some ways, But I'm talking about "in principle".
And please don't throw the ad-hominem label "Scientificist" "Science-Worshipper", "Materialist", "Eliminative Physicalist" or "Atheist" at me. I'm not any of those (...even if I sound like one on this subject.)
Our individual subjective life-experience-stories are hypothetical stories, complex systems of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypothetifcals. Those stories are about the experience of a natural-selection-generated purposefully-responsive device called an "animal". ...of the human variety, in our case.
Though that story structurally consists of abstract if-then facts, it can also be said that the primary, central, metaphyscally-prior aspect of it us us, the experiencer. ...because, since the story is about our individual subjective experience...about each of us, we're its central, primary, essential component..
In answer to the objection about whether abstract facts are "real", or "exist", I don't claim that they're real or exist.
In answer to the question about how a hypothetical story consisting of a complex system of inter-referring abstract if-then facts could make or be a real existent world, I don't claim anything about anything being real or existent.
But, for the purpose of this discussion, of course this physical world is "actual", in the indexical sense of "in, of, or consisting of the world in which the speaker resides."
So I'm not any of those labels that I listed above. My metaphysics is an Eliminative Ontic Structural Subjective Idealism.
Michael Ossipoff
Constructivisms of various sorts see affectivity as the counter to the tendency of conceptual language to seal off experience from context and alterity. Affects of surprise, anxiety, anger, etc, intervene within narratives to disturb their solipsistic tranquility. I suppose we could distinguish, then , between two types of thinking about how the disturbance of affect relates to that which it shakes out of its complacency. There would be you referred to as a 'care'-orientation when you posed the question 'What if they have no 'world', or occupy a 'world' in fragments?' According to this thinking, the world is always there for us in such a way that things and people appear to us as already determined as what they are in relation to our ongoing concerns. We dont just apprehend things as present in themselves, but things as of relevance to us. Without pregiven structuration, a lens, if you will, there is no world at all. Regardless of whether we experience our circumstances in terms of confident assimilation or abject chaos, our joyful or confused encounters are joyful or confused in relation to a background of our pre-existing concerns. That is the meaning of our confusion. Nonsense has its relevance only as a commentary on my previous sense or valuation. It is always MY nonsense, MY pathology or psychosis(Gallagher has done interesting research on the distinction between agency and ownership in schizophtrenic auditory hallucination. The voices are recognized as coming from one's body but not from ones agential self), not an anonymous other but a difference that emerges out of my understanding.
Given evidence of Deleuze's constructivist leanings, I'm not sure that he would reject this idea in toto. It just might be that he positions himself at a certain point along a spectrum of enframing
that includes Merelau-Ponty, Heidegger, Derrida , Protevi and Nietzsche. Foucault would be at one extreme, offering very little a subjectivity can use to resist flows of oppressive power emanating from social formations. at the other end would be Derrida, seeing social formations as themselves endlessly internally divided and multiple,
"What's so wrong with psychoanalysis anyway? There've been some great work done on affect and psychoanalysis."
If we want to consider psychoanalytic accounts of affect, we might need to first clarity what may make them incompatible with constructivist ones, at least from the perspective of those who have specifically critiqued psychoanalysis(Derrida, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Kelly, Gendlin, Deleuze).
The French post-structuralists were initially deeply influenced by Freud but then gradually moved away from him. Deleuze and Guattari began with a limited critique, in Anti=Oedipus, but later expanded it.
"Until now psychoanalysis has been spared: psychiatry was attacked, along with the psychiatric hospital. Psychoanalysis seemed untouchable and uncompromised. But we want to show that psychoanalysis is worse than the hospital, precisely because it operates in the pores of capitalist society and not in the special places of confinement. And that it's profoundly reactionary in theory and practice, not just ideologically. Psychoanalysis fulfils precise functions in this society. Even when it invokes notions of difference or the different, psychoanalysis uses the partial object in a negative way to weld desire to a fundamental lack. This is our critique: psychoanalysis has this pious conception of itself; through lack and castration, it makes itself out to be a kind of negative theology which entails calling on infinite resignation (the Law, the impossible, etc.). This is what we oppose.
And in its place we propose a positive conception of desire: a desire that produces, not a desire that is lacking. Psychoanalysts are too self-righteous. Oedipus and castration work like a charm. But we want to know what are their effects: they work but at what price? It is certain that psychoanalysis pacifies and mollifies, that it teaches us resignation we can live with. But we're saying it has usurped its reputation for promoting, or even participating in, any effective liberation. It has smashed the phenomena of desire onto a familial stage, and crunched the whole economic and political dimension of libido into a conformist code. As soon as the "mental patient" starts talking politics, goes into a political delirium, just look at what psychoanalysis does with it. It's what Freud did to Schreber.
We feel that the semiotic chains, the descriptions of Freudian theory, and psychiatry are relatively inadequate to explain what is really going on in mental illness. We noticed this as soon as a new kind of listening to mental illness became possible.We began with the feeling, and I do mean a feeling, and the knowledge, that something was not right with psychoanalysis. It has become interminable, spinning its wheels and going nowhere. Just look at the psychoanalytic cure. Well, the cure has become an endless process in which both the patient and the doctor chase each other round and round, and this circle, whatever modifications are applied, remains Oedipal. It's like "OK, talk!" But it's always about the same thing: mommy and daddy. The reference turns on an Oedipal axis.
They can insist all they want that it's not about a real mother and father, that it's about some higher structure, whatever you like, some symbolic order, and that it shouldn't be interpreted as imaginary, but the discourse remains the same: the patient is there to talk about mommy and daddy, and the analyst listens in terms of mommy and daddy. There are problems that troubled Freud toward the end of his life: something is not right with psychoanalysis, something is stuck. Freud thought that it was becoming endless, the cure looked interminable, it was going nowhere. And Lacan was the fist to indicate how far things had to be revamped. He believed the problem could be resolved in a profound return to Freud. We on the other hand began with the feeling that psychoanalysis was going round and round in a circle, a familial circle, so to speak, represented by Oedipus. And today a rather worrisome situation has developed. Although psychoanalysis has changed its methods, it has nonetheless come into line with the most classical psychiatry
.Guattari is thus able to reproach psychoanalysis for the way in which it systematically crushes the socio-political contents of the unconscious, though they in reality determine the objects of desire. Psychoanalysis, says Guattari, starts from a kind of absolute narcissism {Das Ding) and aims at an ideal social adaptation which it calls a cure; this procedure, however, always obscures a singular social constellation which in fact must be brought to light, rather than sacrificed to the invention of an abstract, symbolic unconscious."