Archive Fire

Goldman Sachs is a Financial Terrorist Organization

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:29:00 +0000

Goldman Sachs is an organization of financial terrorists who have co-opted the American government. They have extorted the U.S congress, emptied the treasury coffers and financed the exploitation of people and markets all over this planet. They contribute nothing but fraud and destruction to the project of civilization. Why are Americans still putting up with this company?

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment banking and securities firm that engages in global investment banking, securities, investment management, and other financial services primarily with institutional clients. Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 and is headquartered at 200 West Street in the Lower Manhattan area of New York City, with additional offices in international financial centres.

Former employees include Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, as well as Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada since 2008, Mario Draghi, governor of the European Central Bank, Mario Monti, the Italian Prime Minister, and former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson is the current chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, despite President Barack Obama's campaign promise that he would limit the influence of lobbyists in his administration.[source]

In February 2011, the Washington Examiner reported that Goldman Sachs was "the company from which Obama raised the most money in 2008" and that its "CEO Lloyd Blankfein has visited the White House 10 times."[source]

During the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, Goldman was able to profit from the collapse in subprime mortgage bonds in the summer of 2007 by short-selling subprime mortgage-backed securities. Two Goldman traders, Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum, are credited with bearing responsibility for the firm's large profits during America's sub-prime mortgage crisis.[source] The pair, members of Goldman's structured products group in New York, made a profit of $4 billion by "betting" on a collapse in the sub-prime market, and shorting mortgage-related securities. [source]

Here is Former Attorney General of New York Elliot Spitzer breaking it down on CNN:

And Max Keiser on French TV giving his take:

The trailer for the documentary INSIDE JOB:

Speculation and Confronting the Real

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:32:00 +0000

"It is no longer thought that determines the object, whether through representation or intuition, but rather the object that seizes thought and forces it to think it, or better, according to it. As we have seen, this objective determination takes the form of a unilateral duality whereby the object thinks through the subject." — Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, p 149

Sometimes we protest too much. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is essential for me because he wrote about the primacy of perception (prior to conception), and how the immediacy of the world underlies our conceptions of it. There is a pre-reflective tangibility to Being that opens up meaning as consequence. The Real is that which remains after we shut the fuck up. Perception prior to conception. Whatever story we want to tell is so much less than the primacy of this tangible reality.

“So long as the 'me' is the observer, the one who gathers experience, strengthens himself through experience, there can be no radical change, no creative release. That creative release comes only when the thinker is the thought, but the gap cannot be bridged by any effort. When the mind realizes that any speculation, any verbalization, any form of thought only gives strength to the 'me', when it sees that as long as the thinker exists apart from thought there must be limitation, the conflict of duality, when the mind realizes that, then it is watchful, everlastingly aware of how it is separating itself from experience, asserting itself, seeking power. In that awareness, if the mind pursues it ever more deeply and extensively without seeking an end, a goal, there comes a state in which the thinker and the thought are one. In that state there is no effort, there is no becoming, there is no desire to change; in that state the 'me' is not, for there is a transformation which is not of the mind.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom, p.140.

#postmetaphysics

UPDATE barely on topic:

David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, on the embodied mind:

"As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical... We have discovered that the large majority of the brain's activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part – the "me" that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed." [source]

And Raymond Tallis, scholar and former professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester University, in response:

"Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at "the neural substrate of which we are composed". This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn." [source]

I think both of these fellas are correct. Intellectual capacity is a biological phenomenon founded in large part on unconscious functions and processes, while at the same time its higher-order cognitive operations are contextual enactments of distributed properties associated with and expressed through complex networks and communicative activities. A non-reductive materialist framework takes both irreducible capacities and physical embodiment into account when trying to understand mental action. There is no contradition in this regard. Confronting the Real entails thinking matter as matter and not being afraid to limit your speculations accordingly.

ht/dmf

The Himalayas

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:50:00 +0000

One of my mentors during my time in academia was a brilliant teacher, anthropologist and Hindu religion scholar who often dazzled us with stories of his diverse travels in Asia. He is an interesting and deeply knowledgeable man. Of his many tales none were more amazing than those dealing with his experiences traveling in and through the Himalayan mountains in Tibet.

Below is a BBC documentary looking at the flora and fauna of the most stunning mountain range in the world, the Himalayas. This 2000 mile mountain range is home to snow leopards, Himalayan wolves, Tibetan bears, and some of the most fascinating life-forms on this planet.

Erin Manning on Relation, Counterpoint and the Nonhuman

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Fri, 04 May 2012 06:05:00 +0000

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada where she is a professor of philosophy and dance. Her publications include Relationscapes (2009), Politics of Touch (2006) and Ephemeral Territories (2003).

Today Manning delivered a lively and thought provoking plenary titled 'Another Regard' at the Nonhuman Turn Conference currently taking place at that University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. I absolutely loved this talk, and I plan on returning to it often this week to ensure I absorb as many of her amazing insights as possible. I hope to post some of the notes I have taken and will be taking if I get a chance. For now I present both the abstract and video of Manning's talk below. Enjoy:

Abstract:

In a recent piece entitled “The Silence Between,” Dawn Prince writes of an encounter with a Bonobo Chimpanzee. Known for her earlier work on gorillas, especially Songs of a Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, Prince already felt a deep connection to gorillas, who, she writes, “regarded her.” In “The Silence Between,” Prince returns to this “regard,” recounting an experience of playing with the Bonobo Kanzi by running along the fence on all fours: “Naturally, I fell into the gorilla language I knew, a language of body, mind, and spirit. Kanzi and I played chase up and down the fence line, both of us on all fours, smiling in a sea of fun and deep breaths.” Then something uncanny occurred: “He stopped suddenly and grabbed his word board off the ground. He pointed to a symbol and then pointed to me and made a hand gesture with his eyebrows raised. It was clear that he was asking me a question. He repeated this series of words and movements over and over, until I said, out loud, "I'm sorry, I can't understand, Kanzi. Let me get Sue and maybe she can help me." At first, she was at a loss. Then after asking him to point to the word again, she realized he was pointing to the word "gorilla" on his board and making the American Sign Language sign for question after pointing to me. It was clear he was asking me if I was a gorilla.”

This paper takes this occasion as a starting point to rethink the question of regard in terms of Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of concern. Where regard often extrapolates the terms of the encounter from their eventness -- setting the human/animal relation as primary to the event and creating expectations based on the presumed differences between their species -- concern does not take the relation as pre-composed. As Whitehead writes: “The occasion as subject has a ‘concern’ for the object” (1976: 176). This concern “for the object” is not about the already formed but about the affective tonality, the edgings into experience of an occasion’s coming-into-itself. This concern for the event in its concrescence is a regard for what cannot pre-exist it: an affective tonality which will always be singularly tied to this or that occasion. “Concernedness is of the essence of perception” (Whitehead 1967: 180). Concern is never added on to a perception -- it is the very how of perception: “It must be distinctly understood that no prehension even of bare sensa, can be divested of its affective tone, that is to say, of its character of a 'concern'” (Whitehead 1967: 180).

This notion of concern has deep implications for the rethinking of a field of relations such as that generated in the example above. Rather than departing from a narrative of identity politics (which takes the “human” and the “animal” as given), I will explore how this singular example’s concern for the event in its eventness provokes a emergent fielding (a motif, as von Uexküll would call it) that creates an excess of species (what I call a speciation) that ties in with Whitehead’ work on nature.

#c21nonhuman

Nanobots Replacing Neurons?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:11:00 +0000

On the topic of potent materials and nonhumans, the following CG animation visualizes one of the possible future applications and uses of nanotechnology. The video depicts a nanorobot at work replacing human nerve cells with artificial nerve cells:

source: CG4TV

When we finally get around to developing a nuanced materialist understanding of the cosmos who knows what might be possible?

Potent Materials, Whitehead and Onto-Specificity

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:46:00 +0000

Continuing our conversation on A.N Whitehead and materialism (here) Matt Segall writes:

“Part of why I find Whitehead’s “panprehensionism” to be such an important contribution to metaphysics is that I have not found any way of explaining the “emergence” of feeling, or sentience, or mind out of otherwise dead, insensate stuff.”

I think that is exactly the problem with most arguments against materialist philosophies. What contemporary materialist would argue that matter-energy is “dead, insensate stuff”?

For example, Levi Bryant (see here and here) and I share the view that all objects and all materials are active systems. In fact, for many of us ‘to be’ is precisely ‘to act’, or to be active, alive and expressive. An ‘object’ is characterized by what it can do, its capacities or powers. Even the most basic materials are assemblages of energetic, moving, vibrating systems (cf. string theory). This is what I refer to when I use the term potency. All materials are complex assemblages of potency. Matter is in no way “dead”.

The interesting issue here is that potent materials can take on emergent properties as they become more complex (through catalytic reactions, complementary powers as combining in such a way as to enhance or emphasize each other's qualities, amplifications of capacity, etc). In this view it is not difficult to image how micro potencies could be organized into macro complexes of sensitive operation. Like Whitehead I share the idea that the cosmos is inherently sensate or potent. But ‘experience’ and sentience are emergent features of compounded and complexified potencies arranged and evolved in particular ways, and not present from the start.

This could lead me to talk about Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh as describing the elemental sensuality and tangibility of reality, but I’ll leave that for now. (see here)

Matt continues:

"As Deacon put it himself, not only do we not have a theory for how sentience might emerge from dead matter, we don’t even have an understanding of what such a theory might involve. His work in Incomplete Nature is an attempt to explain the emergence of form, not so much feeling or consciousness.”

At the very least I think it will entail giving up the notion that matter is “dead”. In fact nothing in this cosmos is dead. Compositions come and they go, and matter and energy are arranged, implicated and evolve then decomposed and re-implicated. But nowhere do we find completely impotent materials. I believe understanding how this is so is the fundamental insight necessary for enacting truly ecological thoughts and action.

Matt writes:

"Whitehead doesn’t think we can explain feeling by offering some theory about it, since feeling (like value) is simply a fundamental fact about the way things are. The reality of feeling is the condition of the possibility of explanation and so cannot itself be explained.”

I disagree. I think you are right to imply that the condition for the possibility of explanation is that feeling exists, but this in no way means that we cannot (or should not) explain historically and in detail how rudimentary sensitivities evolved into the capacity for cognition , speech or explanation. The fact that we live in a cosmos of active influence and causal potency should not necessary lead us to conclude that those primal vibrancies should be characterized as anything like “experience” or sentience or feeling in the original sense of these terms. Sentience and experience are emergent capacities and we should not assume their existence prior to their advent, in the same way a bird’s emergent ability to sing shouldn’t lead us to argue that atoms or individual molecules have an inherent capacity for song.

Matt writes:

"Whitehead’s panprehensionism is a direct consequence of his process ontology. There are no bits of dead material existing at an instant in his cosmos. There are durations, aka actual occasions, which, since they exist as temporally thick moments (remembering the past as they anticipate the future) are necessarily experiential. Experience is not the same as “mind,” for Whitehead, but rather the most basic form of temporal existence.”

Again, I think one of my main issues with Whitehead is his terminology. I can’t get past the way he anthropomorphizes the cosmos. Even if his ontology is in many respects close to the kind of story I want to tell about reality (e.g., occasions of emergent forms of potency), his discourse seems very misguided. I can’t imagine why we would argue that a hydrogen atom “remembers” or “anticipates”? There has got to be a better, non-mentalistic way to describe the interactions between non-sentient complexes?

Whitehead seems to build in the role of consciousness from the start as a way to explain its latter elaboration in humans without, in my limited opinion, taking care to address the particularities (onto-specificities) of its emergence. “Mind” emerged from primordial processes not the other way around. And saying that experience is everywhere seems to me the same as saying experience is nowhere. It just doesn’t explain. Whereas, for me, the term “experience” refers to a particular kind of operation and not a general property and so must be reserved for entities with the capacity for recursion and some kind of memory. I find the term potency is better suited to constructing a more nuanced narrative since it signals a primal property rather than a specific operation.

Disclaimer: To be sure, my understanding of Whitehead's whole system is less than adequate to the task of critique in any meaningful way. Many of my issues with his work have to do with what I perceive to be his most general claims as well as his terminology. At this point I guess I could simply say that his philosophy just doesn't seem to resonate with me. Oh well.

Bruno Latour - Reenacting Science

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:51:00 +0000

Bruno Latour gave a lecture titled 'Reenacting Science' at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland on February 20th 2012:

h/t Adam Robbert

Bruno Latour - From Critique to Composition

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:38:00 +0000

From DCU:

Bruno Latour visited Dublin City University on Friday, February 17th for a special seminar on interdisciplinarity, the arts and the sciences, entitled 'From Critique to Composition'. Prof Latour is a leading figure in contemporary anthropology and science studies, but the reach of his influence is truly interdisciplinary.

In a provocative discussion with academics and students from many disciplines, Prof Latour signalled that the old certainties of science that have existed since the 17th century are under threat, both as a work of knowledge and an institution. By referencing how current environmental crises are placed under categories of study such as 'Gaia theory' and 'the anthropocene era', Prof Latour asked that the concept of 'nature out there' with its 'matters of fact' no longer be the only goal of ' the sciences' but rather to address our common world by identifying 'matters of concern'. Prof Latour continued his Irish visit with a public lecture in the Science Gallery on Monday 20th.

The seminar, and Prof Latour's trip to Ireland, was organised with the combined efforts of the Celsius interdisciplinary research group at DCU, the French Embassy and the Science Gallery, with special thanks also to Trispace, DCU.

Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at the London School of Economics and in the History of Science department of Harvard University. He is now professor at Sciences Po Paris where he is also the Vice President for Research. After field studies in Africa and California, Prof Latour specialised in the sociological analysis of scientists and engineers at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated on many studies on science policy and research management, influencing the fields of Science and Technology Studies and political ecology. His books include Laboratory Life, Science in Action, The Pasteurization of France, Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies and Politics of Nature.

h/t Adam Robbert.

Evolving Eternity

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:26:00 +0000

“Art is Lies that tell the Truth” — Pablo Picasso

One of my favorite things about blogging is getting the chance to communicate and exchange ideas with so many intelligent, aware and educated people. As a non-academic I don’t believe there would be any other way to exchange the thoughts, information and research I do here. I am so grateful for this opportunity.

I was reminded just how true this is last week in debate with Adam, Matt and Jason about eternal objects, form, universals, philosophical concepts generally and the nature of ‘mind’. To be sure, there are many notions and positions each of us defend which overlap and/or complement each other, but there seem to be some important divergences as well. I am fairly certain that we all share a naturalistic understanding of consciousness and human life, but our points of reference and discursive aims tend to act as barriers (at least for me) to commensurability and agreement about some of the key issues at play. No doubt we will continue to work through these issues as we go along our individual ways, but I truly appreciate all the comments and enjoy the time they afford me to reflect.

A great example is Matt Segall's recent response to my previous post on matter and contingency (here). Matt's response continues our discussion (started here) about Whitehead, eternal forms and materialism with a beautiful post (here) about the “becoming of being” and the eternal. Matt’s words overflow this post with the kind of wisdom that becomes possible only when genuine inquiry and mythopoetic intelligence meet.

Fortunately Matt's post also reminded me of a special piece of wisdom I hope I never forget: that every story we tell about the world and how it works remains simply a story. Some stories are crafted to tell us a whole lot about natural facts and scientific objects, while others are created to help us interpret those facts, and move us beyond our meager and technical perceptions into expanses of imagination unencumbered by the contingencies of physical existence. And so the story I want to tell will ultimately leave out much of what someone else’s story is capable of telling.

So what differences exists between the stories I want to tell and those Matt wants to tell? Quite a lot as it turns out, but not in a way that should disparage what either one of us are up to. Overly simplified, I would characterize our interests as moving in opposite theoretical directions while seeking to end up covering the same cosmological grounds. That is to say it seems to me that Matt wants to think the Absolute (unity), with an eye towards cultivating the existential implications which flow from an acquaintance therein, while I want to think the Possible (multiplicity), with a wonky fish eye towards negation and the positive mutations that come from reigning in our animal speculations. (I wonder if a Tibetan Buddhism vs. Zen Buddhism analogy might be apt here?) Both orientations are positive and inherently worthy of exploration, and both projects seek to understand the cosmos as a living, evolving and mysterious process. Our differences, then, can only serve to amplify a broad curiosity shared by both, while also animating our discussions and debates with many critical considerations. And for that I can only be thankful.

Matt writes:

My process philosophy is rheological, like Michael’s; but it is not just that, not just a scientific study of the flow of matter in the world. It is also a love of the way of wisdom in the world. Philosophy–at least as it was known when the word, and the way of life, was brought forth and developed in the pre- and post-Socratic philosophers–is concerned not only with contingent flows but with the “becoming of being,” the way of eternity, the living unity of the temporal universe.

I would like to think my philosophy is not "just" a minor riff on scientific studies of the flow of matter, but also a speculative pragmatism working with the raw empirical conditions of the cosmos to generate alternative modes of being, knowing and doing – at least on a personal level. The task I have given myself is to try to understand as much and as deeply as possible about the world we come from. For me this task entails a fierce refusal of the myths and lies that surround us, until such time as those myths and lies reveal ‘truths’ that can no longer be refused. My interests also deal squarely with the “becoming of being” but in a way that allows being’s becoming to intervene on the conceptions I am willing to make of it-them. So, in this spirit, to decide too strongly on the character of that which intervenes of-itself prior to the interventions themselves is to allow a symphony of accumulated human concerns to drown out the possibility inherent in the world itself.

Of course it would take a lot for me to cash such statements out in strictly philosophical terms, but I do believe such values require some sort of theoretical minimalism governed as much by the darker implications of the ecological sciences (method) as by speculative probings of interpretive innovation (theory). Moreover, the stories we want to tell about matter, energy, stars, planets, creatures, etc., need to embody a radical appreciation for all those humbling, visceral, morbid and raw facts and realities of material existence at their foundation. To think the cosmos and the planet as responsible earthly creatures we must think earthly and creaturely thoughts. We must not only think and talk about ‘matter’, but rather start from our perceptions and realizations of the reality that we are thinking-matter. In this context, anything less than a critical, yet careful and rigorous, reevaluation of all existing myths, poetics and discourses seems to me un-thinkable.

Matt writes:

Natural science itself already assumes the unity of the universe, that it is cosmos despite its chaos, even where it seems to methodologically require that intelligent freedom be kept distinct from a contingent and purposeless reality (i.e., that some mixture of mentality not be assumed to exist already in all materiality). This seeming methodological requirement of a modest witness to objectify neutral matter cannot be metaphysically justified. Philosophy, if it is to be anything more than an apology for nominalistic materialism, is the attempt to think the complex unity of intelligence and nature, to participate in the One Life organizing the whole.

I certainly agree there is no reason to assume we could ever deploy a completely objective perspective in the world, but I also do not believe it is reasonable to assume that subjectivity already exists in “all materiality”. It seems to me that both positions deal in extremes and are equally ruinous to creaturely thinking (or what we might call wilderness thinking) because both assume far too much. The objectifiers assume neutrality and the subjectifiers (panpsychists?) project experientiality; the former fails to recognize the potency or vibrancy or inherent activity of matter and energy, whereas the latter fails to circumscribe their own functional capacities and attributes.

As for philosophy, some would argue it has a propensity for apologizing for whomever wields its intellectual authority, or for whomever creates the most fashionable set of arguments. Philosophy is whatever we make of it. In an academic setting it can be a set of commentaries on a canon. In a personal context it can be a value-system and guide for living. On the streets it can be a means of survival or style of communication. In a stratified class-culture it can be a weapon or a means of oppression. There are no solid boundaries with philosophical thought. The genre is thinking as such, and the actions are always decidedly human. “Alchemical hermeneutics” and “anarchic re-engagement” indeed.

Matt writes:

Eternity’s participation in time does not imply the erasure of contingencies or the permanence of physical laws. Laws are cosmic habits. They could have been otherwise. What couldn’t have been otherwise is that cosmic memory (i.e., intelligence as it acts in time) would form habits of some kind.

Eternity evolves and surprises itself in creative acts of novelty; our thought and our deeds are no exception. I don’t know if it could be otherwise and I don’t think we can assume. I only try to know what is. And we can only speculate about what could be by intimating ourselves as much as possible with what already is. We are expressions of a world as primordially potent as it is complex. Figuring out how this is so, what can be learned from it, and how best to live in/as it is the real challenge and opportunity before us.

Dorothea Tanning - Family Portrait (1954)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Dorothea Tanning passed away on January 31, 2012 in New York City. She was 101 years old. This painting says so much about the American family circa 1950s:

Dorothea Tanning, Family Portrait (1954)

Matter, Contingency, Chaos and Math

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:53:00 +0000

Matt Segall provides some interesting comments in relation to our debate about formal and material causes: here.

Let me first say that I find it extremely difficult having to grapple with Whitehead’s system at the same time as attempting to remain open to possible points of engagement with Matt’s unique perspective. Right now I cannot detect where Matt’s reading of Whitehead ends and his own thoughts on these issues begins.

To be quite honest (although not intended maliciously), I’m not overly interested in getting too involved in what Whitehead thinks on these matters because, from what I can determine so far, I would have to willfully become entangled in all sorts of categorical disagreements and questionable debates to even begin translating Whitehead’s metaphysics into something I can work with. Not that WH’s system is completely useless, unworthy of exploration, or that it is just plain silliness, because obviously that would be an absurd claim to say the least, but rather that I, personally, find little philosophical use in repurposing concepts and discourses that seem to me to be based on dubious frames of reference (e.g., ancient Greek categories) and faulty premises (e.g., panpsychism).

Now I know such statements might come off as extremely arrogant (which is undoubtedly a fair assessment), but I would suggest that my position is motivated more by important strategic and practical impulses. For example, let us assume that Western philosophy is indeed a series of “footnotes to Plato”. By that logic are we not simply locked into patterns of thought and reference that remain overdetermined by what a single person (or school of people) has imagined? I find the idea that this might be the case extremely terrifying. Do we really want to assume that the limits and heights of human imagination have already been mapped out by a long-dead pre-scientific Greek aristocrat? I’m not convinced. I respect the ‘giants’ we all stand upon but I also think we are at a point in cultural history where we can do much much better.

As an alternative to canonical reinvestment what I suggest is a radical rethinking of human experience, conception and activity via an anarchic re-engagement with contemporary ecologies of practice and knowledge. For me this starts with phenomenological inquiry and involves a rigorous methodological pluralism, but what else this might entail can be left for later discussion. For now I just want “anarchic re-engagement” to signal a disenchantment with institutional discourses and traditional categories that lies at the heart of my discomfort with trying to understand the cosmos in explicitly metaphysical terms.

However, this is not in any way intended as a criticism of Matt, as my impression of him has always been that he possesses a keen intellect and demonstrates an amazing degree of sensitivity. I simply offer the above statements as a prefatory note to let Matt and other readers know where I am coming from AND, more importantly, that my interest in this discussion is squarely on finding out what Matt thinks about these issues. Matt, I am more interested in finding out what you have decided about the nature of reality outside of (or at least beyond) what you have read about in some guy's book.

That said, let me shift gears and address some of Matt’s specific points:

Matt writes:

“Occasions decide which forms will ultimately come to characterize the actual world of their experience. Forms are not ‘imposed’ upon actual occasions from outside. Much of the character of experience, especially for lower grade occasions like electrons and photons, is decided unconsciously through conformal prehension of past decisions. Physical science concerns itself with the general habits of such low grade occasions. But higher grade occasions like ravens, coyotes, and primates, are not so determined by physical prehensions of past actualities, since they have a heightened experience, through conceptual prehension, of future possibilities. In human occasions of experience, this futural perception reaches its near apogee. In Process and Reality, Whitehead discusses our conceptual prehension of eternal objects in terms of consciousness’ capacity for negation–to see the facticity of not only of that grey rock there and to know it could have been otherwise, but to see the whole of the visible universe and know the same.”

Setting aside the assumptions about the supposed panpsychic character of such interactions (an assumption I vehemently reject), I'm happy to read Matt accepts that 'form' is generated through actual occasions, but from what is expressed above I still don’t understand ‘eternal objects’ as being anything more than the reification of possibility abstracted from actualities. I don’t have too big a problem with such abstractions, as they are generally helpful with generating innovative responses to complex situations, however reifying them as “eternal” makes no sense to me. We only have limited access to the contingencies of nature as they have unfolded so far and there is nothing that leads me to believe that the so-called “laws of nature” won’t change barring some future cosmic event. So what makes them "eternal"?

Maybe we can work in Meillassoux here a bit with regards to taking contingency to its ultimate conclusion. If there is truly no non-material, external or ‘eternal’ reason for cosmological “laws”, then maybe we should embrace immanent chaos as a positive truth about the world and attempt to build our knowledge from that? Unlike Meillassoux however, I believe that the experience and truth of finitude leads not to the Absolute, but to the resolute – as pragmatic coping flowing from a realist attitude.

Matt continues:

“The contingency of nature is not mere chance, but the result of will--will which leans toward more degrees of freedom as moves through the series of natural kingdoms, at first an unconscious flow of emotion, only later rising to the level of the symbolic and intellectual articulation of emotion.”

If Matt would permit me to translate “will” to mean the inherent potency of energy-matter as it has continued to evolve and become expressed as complexity, then I wouldn’t disagree with the claim above. I think the more complex assemblages of energy-matter become (the more depth they have) the more degrees of “freedom” (behavioral plasticity) can be achieved. The capacity for cognitive recursion and symbolic re-mediation of primal impulses in humans allow us to express a unique kind of potency (affectivity) in the wider field of activity (wilderness of being).

Matt writes:

“You argue that 'pure difference' is at the base of materiality, but I am uncertain what you mean. Wouldn't its supposed 'purity' already be a sign of contamination by identity? Its the old ("archaic"?) problem of the one and the many, of cosmos and chaos.”

By pure difference I mean the original asymmetry of spatiotemporal distance and elemental diversity inaugurated by the primordial expression of potency in our cosmos, otherwise known as the “big-bang”. I don’t think the issue of the one and the many is much a problem at all - beyond the limitations of hominid brains - but rather a basic fact about the unitas multiplex we all come from. (see also Badiou’s arguments for the “radical originality of the multiple”)

Matt then writes:

"The challenge Plato left for philosophy is how to think the in between. Contemporary physics, so far as I understand it, no longer studies nature as substance, but as interlocking processes of formation. This is not all that different from the Schellingian interpretation of Plato's Timaeus, as unpacked by Iain Hamilton Grant."

I would argue that “interlocking processes of formation” are substances. A substance is any composition capable of affecting or being affected in a manner that expresses a temporally consistent structure (what Bryant calls 'endo-structure'). Yet all substances remain intra-active at various scales and vulnerable becoming impinged upon or entangled with a wide range of other material assemblages. Materiality is simply what the cosmos is doing in its anarchistic expansion, diversification and complexification.

To be sure the way I think about “matter” has very little in common with how it may have been conceived in the past. From what I can determine material substances are active, open and implicated in a variety of complicated relationships which make any actual occasion or assemblage a temporal achievement readily vulnerable to destruction (annihilation) and/or further construction (emergence). This is, of course, leads directly to my thesis of precarious causality - as the dynamic flow and differentiation of energy-matter intrinsically capable of generating complex, wild and intra-affective ecologies. To think the "in between", then, is to think about relationaility of inter- and intra-affective substances, and the ways in which particular relationships afford spaces and occasions for possibility and novelty to arise.

One of the reasons why I think OOO is so compelling for a lot of people is because we intuitively sense the importance of thinking ‘the many’ (as substances or “objects”) at the same time as acknowledging ‘the one’ (as immanence or flat ontology). I’m not sure overemphasizing the objectal features (e.g. temporal consistency) of reality at the expense of process, as some versions of OOO seem to do, is the best way forward, but I certainly respect the notion of irreducibility and individuation at play in the work of certain authors.

Matt writes:

“In my prior post, I wasn't referring to sunsets as eternal possibilities, but to a particular shade of red realized in the sunset. "Red" certainly cannot be explained by reference to the physical bodies you've listed, though I would agree about its ecological origins. "Red" is what Whitehead called a subjective eternal object, capable of realization in any number of actual occasions though not reducible to any one in particular or to all in summation.”

And what exactly requires us to conceive of the occurrence of “red” as an object, much less an eternal object? To endorse such an interpretation is to sneak Platonism in the back door.

First of all the color red is not an object. Red is merely what happens when you get a particular set of material assemblages together in particular spatiotemporal configurations. When certain onto-specific entities (e.g. humans, suns, earths, hydrogen atoms, H2O molecules, etc) and certain amounts of light are assembled “red” occurs.

Of course this opens all sorts of questions about subjectivity, but I’ll short circuit that debate for now by suggesting that subjectivity itself is a unique activity matter is capable of expressing under certain circumstances. Capacities for imagination, apprehension and intellection are emergent features of complex assemblies of matter.

Matt writes:

“Qualities like redness, and quantities like the number 17, cannot be explained by reference to materiality, since materiality itself would be meaningless without reference to quality and to quantity (which for Whitehead, unlike Kant, are not categories of the human mind, but forms of definiteness characterizing prehension in general).”

I’m not sure I follow you here Matt, but I can only respond by saying that I believe the number 17 taken by itself is a mere abstraction – a utilitarian projection of possibility gleaned and tokenized from actual instances and embodied encounters of multiplicity.

In Where Mathematics Come From (2000), George Lakoff and the psychologist Rafael Nunez argue that our inborn ability to distinguish objects, to recognize very small numbers at a glance and to add and subtract numbers up to three, has allowed us to develop mathematics via an ever-growing collection of metaphors. From our common experiences of standing up straight, pushing and pulling objects, and moving about in the world we devise a whole host of abstract ideas and then internalize the associations among them. In this sense, maths are primarily human generated systems of abstraction and symbol manipulation, however useful and important. In fact, Lakoff and Nunez argue that we create and come to use most abstract concepts this way.

“Conceptual metaphor is a cognitive mechanism for allowing us to reason about one kind of thing as if it were another. …It is a grounded, inference preserving cross-domain mapping—a neural mechanism that allows us to use the inferential structure of one conceptual domain (say, geometry) to reason about another (say, arithmetic).” [Lakoff and Núñez 2000: 6]

As for "quality", well, again, I don't subscribe to the notion that all existing entities have experience, so that would lead us into a debate about what human consciousness entails and the how we might reject the quality/quantity distinction in favor of more precise ontological categories, and so I will leave that for another discussion.

Object-Oriented Art?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 08:12:00 +0000

I'd like to know more about WTF this guy is up to:

This Elemental Life

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:22:00 +0000

In response to my recent comments about embodiment and ontology Matt Segall writes:

“Forms can have no cause or effect independently of their realization in and through some actual occasion. But still, form cannot simply be reduced to its material instantiations, either. Forms, in Whitehead's terms, are possibilities of definiteness. They determine (or allow occasions to determine) how an occasion will be characterized. If we dispense with forms as ontologically basic, we have not at all sided with concrete reality over abstraction. On the contrary, without the participation of eternal objects (Whitehead's term for forms in his reformed Platonism), "matter" and "energy" can take on no definite quality. They remain vague abstractions lacking all particularity.”

Here I think Matt is presupposing the function of the term in dispute (i.e.‘form’) prior to explaining why “matter” is incapable of expressing structure of itself. Instead, I argue that ‘matter’ and energy express formal relations via the differential distribution of their primordial properties. That is, energetic-materiality is an expression of primordial activities (the pure difference at the origin of manifestation) which have unfolded temporally to generate a wide range of contingent and dynamic associations and intensive differences. And some of these activities and compositions have further coalesced into highly complex and emergent ‘occasions’.

I want emphasize the self-organizing properties or sufficiency of energy-matter rather than support archaic formulas that posit ‘form’ being imposed on ‘matter’ from without. Matter is a self-sufficient potency that becomes structured according to the primordial cosmological constraints and intensive differences inherent to particular temporal evolutions. The immanent possibilities of actual occasions, then, are expressions of the morphological capacities inherent to the life-trajectory of particular (cosmological and historical) material realities.

"Just as capacities of thought, of being, are made in lived bodies, in complex and delicately conjoined tissues and processes, and just as powers are inherent in all matter, materialism also requires that the capacities of activity, thought, sensation, and affect possible to each composition whether organic or not are shaped by what it is, what it connects to, and the dimensions of relationality around it." (Fuller 2005: 174)

At base, my conception of “matter” only signifies the structural efficacy (tangibility) of cosmo-historical occasions and assemblages as they continue to evolve. How “matter” actually operates and what it involves is still up for debate, but I would argue that it is without a doubt stranger, more active and self-organizing than has hitherto been assumed.

Matt continues:

“To be concrete means less to be material than it does to be some actual occasion with this or that particular shade of definiteness. These shades of definiteness, say the red hue characterizing the sky during yesterday's sunset, are eternal possibilities awaiting and only sometimes gaining temporal realization. In our cosmic neighborhood, matter-energy/space-time participates in specific forms of definiteness constraining what is possible; these can be symbolically expressed via mathematical notation (what Whitehead refers to as the objective species of eternal object).”

I have never seen evidence of any of that. Definiteness is not granted by God nor is it imposed by the eternal laws of nature, but is the result and expression of the inherent potency of matter contingently related. “Matter-energy/space-time” does not participate in forms, it is the very ground upon which participation is possible. Sunsets are not “eternal possibilities” but immanent actualities generated through the emergent activities and collaboration of photons, electrons, hydrogen, helium, oxygen, earth, etc., etc., as they are “stacked” into particular living ecologies. World-flesh is self-sufficient complexity.

UPDATE: Levi Bryant has a great post explaining why hylomorphism just doesn't work: here. Levi writes:

Matter is both structured and anarchic. Order does not descend from above, but is rather always a communistics or anarchistic result… Which is to say it is always the result of the collaborative interplay structured matters that are simultaneously passive and active. It’s hard to overcome our will to mastery (which is really, I think, what hylomorphism is libidinally about), but hylomorphism is metaphysically mistaken, epistemically mistaken, and politically and ethically dangerous. Bergson famously argued that there’s no such thing as disorder, but rather “disorder” is just the absence of order that we’d like to have for the sake of our own action or aims. Simondon and Deleuze make similar points, though in a far more refined way. These arguments continue to hold today, yet they still, I think, have not been heard. Ontology, politics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have still not become flat… Which is to say, anarchistic and communistic.

Hell yeah anarchistic and communistic... A veritable Wilderness of Being.

Embodiment, Information and Fundamental Ontology

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:46:00 +0000

In response to my recent post on a paper by Katherine Hayles (here) Adam Robbert has provided a fairly salient criticism of Hayles' characterization of Richard Dawkin’s self-gene theory, on the way to opening up some interesting questions about the relationship between the notion of embodiment and information theory.

To be sure, what I like most about both Hayles and Dawkins in this context is their shared notion that humans are compilations, or kludges: assembled actants organized via the often divergent agencies (potencies) of their parts, and defined by complex levels of operation - and thus never truly singular or completely withdrawn from their own influential parts nor the environment in which they subsist. Humans and non-humans are assemblages with distributed agencies expressed in the collaboration of parts and whole, and not individualities cut off from the depth and multiplicity of their inherent animating dynamics.

In relation to information theory, Adam writes:

"A quick thought on Kauffman. As far as I know, Kauffman is using mathematical principles to deepen our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms. I raise this point in connection to Hayles comment that 'we are first and foremost embodied,' a comment which I have no problem with in principle but begs the question: if Kaufmann is right then some how organizational patterns in the universe can be preserved and re-instantiated through the development of different self-organizing systems. In other words, the universe has an organization-preserving capacity (or “memory,” as Whitehead might say) and so we ought to consider what this means for embodied particularity (Whitehead attempts a solution to this, but that’s another story). So, I like where she draws attention to the dynamism between metaphor and constraint but I wonder if she doesn't privilege constraint (a la the British empiricists) when it seems that we do in fact inherent (always contextualized) patterns of information. I say this more as a point for further discussion than out right disagreement."

I’m not sure I follow here? No pattern exists independently from the actual material-energetic systems in which they are observed. “Organizational patterns” are abstractions from embodied systems not expressions of them. Mathematics is a patchwork system abstracted models and metaphor which represent physical systems but should never be confused for the actual systems themselves. That is to say, there are no actually existing trans-material organizing impulses or patterns “within” material-energetic systems. Let us not mistake map for territory here. To do so is to accept, however implicitly, a Platonic theory of ideas/essences.

Generally I find information theory to be unhelpful for ontography. The cosmos is not made of ones and zeros but of differential intensities and assemblages of energy and matter. Humans have reified naturally occurring extensive and intensive binary groupings and sets of relations through the use of numbers/symbols – but, again, operationalizing human representations of actual systems does not necessarily entail that the “patterns” we envision are anything other than observed tendencies inherent to onto-specific assemblies.

Moreover, I’m not sure what Adam means by a universal “memory” - unless we want to talk about something like Sheldrake’s morphogenetic resonances, in which case I am not at all convinced. (Can you explain a bit more Adam?)

Adam continues:

“In short, I’m interested in how speculation and empiricism meet in the world. The former generates the capacity for metaphor, hypotheses, mathematics, memory, and imagination; while the latter provides quantification, history, particularity, and embodiment. Of course the one has never existed without the other, and not it’s not even clear to me that the two can be distinguished in anything but an analytic way.”

I would argue no clear distinction can be made outside of talking about very specific methodologies (perceptual tools) and discursive practices. All human interpretation involves speculation because our conceptions are inherently limited, iterant and full of différance. That is, our epistemes are intrinsically withdrawn from the objects of our conception. Even “quantification” is abstraction in this sense.

The problem, as I have said many times before, is that humans become enamored and entangled in the partiality of our ‘maps’, to the extent that we tend to misunderstand our abilities and capacity for engaging possibilities inherent to our direct relations with the ‘territory’. The main issue as I see it is that we need to develop more adaptive and less dogmatic speculations within general ecologies of energy-matter, perception and practice in order to cultivate healthier sense-abilities and modes of being. And a fundamental move towards such creative re-groundings and action would be to recognize the fundamental structures of possibility – first through deep phenomenological investigation and then with pragmatic dialogical gestures.

In terms of what Hayles has to offer, embodiment, situatedness, constraint are realities that should never be willfully displaced based simply on the whims of speculative metaphysics but instead integrated into a speculative praxis grounded in perceptual attenuation and practical projects.

Elemental Flesh?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:43:00 +0000

Although I think Merleau-Ponty’s conception of “matter” in the passage below and elsewhere is somewhat archaic and anemic, I hold the truth of the world-flesh as self-evident. The tangibility and facticity of the world is the immanent location of action – the absolute ground of consequence, continuity, intimacy and causal precarity; and thus all meaning.

Prior to thought and “translation” there is the Real as potent possibility:

“The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings. Nor is the visible (the things as well as my own body) some "psychic" material that would be – God knows how - brought into being by the things factually existing and acting on my factual body. In general, it is not a fact or a sum of facts "material" or "spiritual." Nor is it a representation for a mind: a mind could not be captured by its own representations; it would rebel against this insertion into the visible which is essential to the seer. The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term "element," in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatiotemporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an "element" of Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now. Much more: the inauguration of the where and the when, the possibility and exigency for the fact; in a word: facticity, what makes the fact be a fact.” – Merleau-Ponty [source]

UPDATE: Access, Ontological Intimacy and Thickness

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty’s writes,

“[H]e who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at... It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication. It is for the same reason that I am at the heart of the visible and that I am far from it: because it has thickness and is thereby naturally destined to be seen by a body.” (p.134-135)

Hayles on Specificity, Constraint and Complex Agency

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:26:00 +0000

N. Katherine Hayles has long been one of the most cogent thinkers flowing from the nebulous half-world of literary criticism. Her razor sharp insights into the operating assumptions animating complexity theory, cultural productions of scientific discourse and philosophy can act as an immunization for intelligent readers from the pernicious contaminations of mutant philosophic metaphors and underconcretized speculation. Hayles criticizes and enriches a wide range of socially relevant discourse formations, from the folk-metaphysics of information theory to the self-effacing fantasies of contemporary posthumanism.

In the paper linked below Hayles compares and explores the rhetorical structure and key assumptions embedded in the work of Richard Dawkins, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gauttari. Along the way, Hayles demonstrates the importance of taking embodiment, constraint and onto-specificity seriously when investigating real-world systems. And humans, as Halyes later demonstrated in her amazing book, How We Became Posthuman (1999), are no exception: we are first and foremost embodied, and that embodiment - and the actions deriving thereof - are located and specific.

Here is a key passage from the text:

“Juxtaposed, these two versions of the posthuman indicate that a principal area of contestation is the struggle to envision what will come after the fracturing of consciousness. Is the goal to develop new forms of consciousness, either through displacement into other entities or through emergent behaviors achieved in and through artificial life forms? Or is the goal to experience an unimaginably vast range of behaviors that are literally unthinkable as long as consciousness reigns as the arbiter of identity? In different ways, both of these alternatives decontextualize our relations to each other and to the non-human world. Both deny that distributed cognition implies distributed agency—Dawkins by giving all the agency to the genes and none to conscious human subjects, Deleuze and Guattari by giving agency to the desire that alone drives the endless mutations and transformations.

I prefer a third alternative, in which constraints act in dynamic conjunction with metaphoric language to articulate the rich possibilities of distributed cognitive systems that include human and nonhuman actors. Neither completely constrained nor entirely free, we act within these systems with partial agency amid local specificities that help to determine our behavior, even as our behavior also helps to configure the system. We are never only conscious subjects, for distributed cognition take place throughout the body as well as without; we are never only texts, for we exist as embodied entities in physical contexts too complex to be reduced to semiotic codes; and we never act with complete agency, just as we are never completely without agency.” (Hayles 2001:158)

Read More Here: Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari (2001), by N. Katherine Hayles

The Most Astounding Fact

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 06:25:00 +0000

We at home in the universe. We are connected, interrelated, vulnerable and active participants in a world with no real gaps, and no truly untouchable realms. The things we encounter are made from the same potent materials as that with which we encounter them - and the tragedy of human conception is that we are able to convince ourselves otherwise when everything we feel, touch, smell, taste or become intimate with should persuade us that this is true. We are at home in the universe, not as strangers nor aliens but as cosmic brethren with all that is human and nonhuman, bursting forth as creative exuberance. Starting from this astounding fact, everything then becomes possible:

How Matter Becomes Imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 20:01:00 +0000

As preface to future posts on embodied imagination, sentience, sapience and human phantasy I want to share a little bit of Gerald Edelman's groundbreaking work on human consciousness and neural dynamics. Edelman has been a major influence on my thinking ever since my undergrad courses in cognitive science and animal behaviour.

Edelman's work convincingly demonstrates how human perception is not identical with conceptual categorization ('thought') - renouncing both property dualism and reductionism. Edelman argues that 'conscious experience' is biological but not causal. He was also an early advocate of the theory of epigenesis and what Dawkins has called "the extended phenotype".

In addition, Edelman's theory of neuronal group selection, also known as 'Neural Darwinism', goes a long way towards explaining brain plasticity and cumulative complexity over a person's life-span. Edelman was one of the first researchers to argue that "neurons that wire together fire together", and the first researcher to point out the pervasiveness of "degeneracy" in biological systems and the fundamental role it plays in facilitating evolution.

From Wikipedia:

Gerald Edelman is an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and in philosophy of mind....

Edelman is noted for his theory of consciousness, which he has documented in a trilogy of technical books, and in several subsequent books written for a general audience including Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), A Universe of Consciousness (2001, with Giulio Tononi), Wider than the Sky (2004) and Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (2007).

In Second Nature Edelman defines human consciousness as being:
"... what you lose on entering a dreamless deep sleep ... deep anesthesia or coma ... what you regain after emerging from these states. [The] experience of a unitary scene composed variably of sensory responses ... memories ... situatedness ... "
He rejects dualism and also dismisses newer hypotheses such as the so-called 'computational' model of consciousness, which liken the brain's functions to the operations of a computer. Edelman argues that the mind and consciousness are wholly material and purely biological phenomena, arising from highly complex cellular processes within the brain, and that the development of consciousness and intelligence can be satisfactorily explained by Darwinian theory.

In Edelman's view, human consciousness depends on and arises from the uniquely complex physiology of the human brain:

the vast number of neurons and associated cells in the brain
the almost infinitely complex physiological variations in neurons (even of the same general type) and in their connections with other cells
the massive multiple parallel reentrant connections between individual cells, and between larger neuronal groups, and so on, up to entire functional regions and beyond.

Edelman's theory is strongly anti-reductionist and seeks to explain consciousness by reference to the extraordinarily rich and complex morphology of the brain.

Below Edelman delivers the Jacob Marschak Memorial Lecture at UCLA:

From Brain Dynamics to Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
by Gerald Edelman

We Are Legion | The Story of Anonymous

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:26:00 +0000

From WeAreLegionThe Documentary.Com:

We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists is a documentary that takes us inside the world of Anonymous, the radical "hacktivist" collective that has redefined civil disobedience for the digital age. The film explores the historical roots of early hacktivist groups like Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater and then follows Anonymous from 4chan to a full-blown movement with a global reach, one of the most transformative of our time.

EXPECT US

Susan Oyama On Development and Evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:33:00 +0000

Susan Oyama is a psychologist and philosopher of science, and currently professor emerita at the John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her 1985 book The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution is regarded as a foundational text in developmental systems theory.

From the eSMCs Summer School 2011, San Sebastián, Spain, 5-9 September, 2011:

Development and Evolution in a World Without Labels
by Susan Oyama

Accounts of development and evolution typically involve complementary notions of prespecification–organismic and environmental ‘labeling,’ if you will. In the case of development these can take the form of genetic programs or instructions and the like, while descriptions of evolution often invoke preexisting environmental demands or problems that organisms must meet.

The traditions of thought informing The Embodied Mind and Developmental Systems Theory (DST) both challenge such ways of conceiving life processes. Yet these traditions sprang from different grounds, and they bring distinctive sensibilities to their overlapping projects. I describe the systemic contingencies of self-organizing systems in DST, pointing out the importance of alternative pathways, both in biological processes and the theorizing they inspire.

Shaun Gallagher on Enacted Intentionality

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 09:37:00 +0000

Shaun Gallagher is the Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at The University of Memphis, and one of the leading researchers in the field of embodied and extended cognition.

From the eSMCs Summer School 2011, San Sebastián, Spain, 5-9 September, 2011:

Enactively Extended Intentionality
by Shaun Gallagher

I argue that the extended mind hypothesis requires an enactive, neo-pragmatic concept of intentionality if it is to develop proper responses to a variety of objections. This enactive concept of intentionality is based on the phenomenological concept of a bodily (or motor or operative) intentionality outlined by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I explore the connections between this concept and recent embodied approaches to social cognition.

"We are always constrained by the path we have laid down, but there is no ultimate ground to prescribe the steps that we take ... This groundlessness of laying down a path in walking is the key philosophical issue that remains to be addressed".

- Varela, Thompson, Rosch (1991), The Embodied Mind.

Experience Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:59:00 +0000

From InfinityList.com:

Exploding Star

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 03:14:00 +0000

This image comes from a very deep Chandra observation of the Tycho supernova
remnant. Low-energy X-rays (red) in the image show expanding debris from the
supernova explosion and high energy X-rays (blue) show the blast wave, a shell
of extremely energetic electrons. These high-energy X-rays show a pattern of X-ray
"stripes" never previously seen in a supernova remnant.

Description from Space.Com:

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory spacecraft detected a suprisingly regular pattern of X-rays in a well-known supernova remnant called Tycho. The new observations provide the first direct evidence that a cosmic event can rocket particles to energies 100 times higher than those achieved by Earth's most powerful accelerators, researchers said. The discovery of X-ray "stripes" in the remains of an exploded star may help astronomers learn how some of the highest-energy particles in our galaxy reach their incredible speeds, a new study suggests. The find may also help scientists figure out how some of those super-speedy particles — which are known as cosmic rays, and constantly bombard Earth— are produced, they added. "We’ve seen lots of intriguing structures in supernova remnants, but we’ve never seen stripes before," said study leader Kristoffer Eriksen of Rutgers University in a statement. "This made us think very hard about what’s happening in the blast wave of this powerful explosion."

Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali: On History

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:41:00 +0000

In the video below filmmaker Oliver Stone and prominent intellectual and activist Tariq Ali engage in a fascinating discussion on U.S history, culture and foreign affairs in front of an audience at the New York Public Library on January 1, 2012.

From the New York Pubic Library:

ON HISTORY - Pakistani writer and filmmaker TARIQ ALI and film director OLIVER STONE will continue their ongoing discourse about "forgotten--or deliberately buried--episodes" from American history from the US intervention against the Russian Revolution to the ongoing interference of the United States in Pakistani political affairs. In their recent public dialogue, On History, Oliver Stone asks, according to Jon Wiener, "smart questions about the rise and fall of the United States and its empire in the 20th century." In this conversation, the tables are turned as we ask Tariq Ali to kick off with some questions for Oliver Stone, leading into a conversation between them on politics, film, and the untold history of the nation.

Enaction, Episteme and Ecology

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:36:00 +0000

Adam Robbert has a new post up (here) responding to Levi Bryant’s recent comments (here) on the differences between Bryant’s onticology and Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy.

I urge those interested to go read Bryant’s post as he outlines several key questions that get right at the heart of what a realist metaphysics needs to address, while offering explicit statements about where he and Harman diverge. I believe Levi throws down the gauntlet in this regard, and would appreciate any type of response from Harman, if only to further our understanding of what might be at stake in such considerations. With Bryant’s most recent comments it seems obvious that he continues to move closer to a synthesis of the insights embedded within both process philosophy and object-orientations.

Here I only want to briefly address a few of the issues Adam raises to see if I can clarify in my own thoughts and see where we disagree.

Now I definitely agree with both Adam and Levi on the role of 'enaction' in the genesis of events and objects, but would shy away from relying solely on speculative metaphysics (Whitehead) to describe the operations of any such actually existing instances of enaction. Although I’m not as familiar as I would like to be with Whitehead’s ontology, I see no compelling reason why we should graft such a speculative ontology on to what can be easily understood through empirical investigation of the materials and dynamics involved. I argue that enaction can only be explained with reference to the materiality and expressivity (actual properties) of whatever specifc entities are involved.

For example, the enaction of a football game can be described as the interplay and contingently structured conjunctions of atoms, organisms, leather, nylon, metal, grass, oxygen – each with their own properties – such that a particular state of football affairs, composition, assemblage, or “regime of attraction” emerges. Likewise with, say, neo-liberal ideology; which relies on the confluence and circulation of textbooks, discourses, humans, learned schema, guns, the university of Chicago, vast networks of affiliation between elites, exploitable governance systems in “the third world”, etc. The historicity and particular character of enactions is generated through the activities and relations of specific substances and properties.

Yet Adam writes:

“[K]nowledge (or epistemes in this case) are embodied in specific media (e.g., brains, books, and bytes), are not “other than” those media and, in this way, also share the same ontological qualities as ‘physical’ interactions between, say, tornados and barn doors.” [source]

Although I share Adam’s view that epistemic activities are generated within distributed networks (ecologies) of media and materials, I am still left wondering what justifies the claim that such activities “share the same ontological qualities” as rocks? Epistemic events are enactions involving very different substances and relations than, say, a fireplace ‘event’, as an assemblage of rocks. The properties and qualities which go into these two events, and the emergent conditions they each enact are very different in kind and effect in ways that make all the difference.

I think the problem of understanding the difference between epistemic relations and causal relations is crucial here. ‘Causal’ in this context is meant to refer to structural integrities and material-energetic influences (affect generally) whereas ‘epistemic’ is meant to signal animal imagination and symbolic representations. In this sense, imagining or visualizing or hallucinating punching someone in the face is ontologically different than punching someone in the face. Both the imagining and the punching are Real, but they are deployments of very different capacities.

Put another way, epistemic imagination is qualitatively different than radioactive waste, for example. There is an abstract totemic (projective and imaginal) quality to symbolic apprehension that is not shared by rocks or radioactive waste. Therefore simply equating the properties and capacities of thought with pre-imaginal properties and capacities based on some refication of ontological tendencies does nothing to add to our understanding of the Real. Erasing the differences which obtain here through a type of will to speculation only serves to confound.

My problem with “withdrawal” is based on this distinction. Objects are absolutely withdrawn from our conceptions of them (as Wittgenstein and Derrida both claimed), but are only partially withdrawn from our embodied capacities for directly affecting or intervening in their substantial configurations.

Adam continues:

"Object-oriented philosophy’s account of withdrawal holds true for both ontological and epistemological domains, where the ontic and the epistemic can be distinguished analytically to perform certain philosophical tasks, but are ultimately integrated in the embodiment of beings such that epistemic and cognitive ecosystems are ontologically real in the same way that other ecosystems are." [source]

I’m not sure I follow the logic here? Cognitive ecosystems can be considered Real in the same sense as “other ecosystems”, but not in the same “way”. In fact, I would reframe all of this by suggesting, rather, that epistemic activities are features of the very same ecosystems as other entities and assemblages but they embody very distinct properties. Thus animal cognition is generated out of the same ecological circumstances as photosynthesis but the enaction of human cognitive events includes the emergence of imaginal representation in addition to physical processes. Epistemic relations and activities (as emergent capacities) are as Real as other purely physical relations and activities, but not in the same way because each set of activities have intrinsic onto-specific organizations, associations and properties.

To be clear, I don’t oppose epistemology and ontology because how we know is a function of what there is. Epistemic relations are in fact one type of ontological relation - only with distinct properties and operations.