SubscribeSeptember 2nd, 2011
the problem with asking questions
Someone asked the question “What is consciousness?”
What’s the problem with the question? For me the problems begin with the verb “is”. It’s usage in the sentence implies that there is an (one) answer, and that the answer when found will be a necessary and sufficient attribute of the noun “consciousness.” The sentence predisposes one to look for an object that is consciousness and to do so by finding its attributes.
There are so many answers to the question but what if we were to ask the question “What does consciousness do?” Would that change the set of answers? Almost certainly don’t you think?
Which seems to me to say what we are really addressing is not consciousness so much as the structure of the sentence. And this is not the point of asking the question.
If we were to see “consciousness” as just a word we use to speak to a rather fluid set of skills and abilities as those skills and abilities manifest in specific situations, then what would be the questions we would ask? What would be the fundamental assumptions? I suspect this last question is rather important having something to do with how language assumes itself to be to only means of communication open to human beings. I mean even Carl Jung assumed that the unconscious was a symbolic storehouse – that is the experiences we have are stored and activated as symbols – and symbols are very much linguistic artifacts.
Interesting to think about how many varied sets of questions and answers can be generated all around that single word “consciousness”. And if not a linguistically or symbolically structured set of events/actions/predispositions what then is that storehouse we think of as our consciousness and unconscious?
September 1st, 2011
the way conversations like this go
It seems to me that when a bunch of people who don’t know each other get together to talk philosophy there are two possible results (well if you discount mass murder). Let me use the metaphor of a garden with a garden hose. The first conversation is like a bunch of people playing with the hose. Occasionally a plant or two might get watered but that is not the intent of the exercise—and there is always at least one idiot who wants to spray people in the crotch or catch them in the ass. The second conversation is a bunch of people taking turns watering the plants. That idiot is there in type 2 but usually someone just threatens him or her with the not-yet-fully-rotted manure/compost and he or she either leaves the garden altogether or points the hose, with a clear pout, at the plants.
I’m one who doesn’t much enjoy the first type of conversation. In type 2, even though not all the plants get watered, at least there is some semblance of purpose – apart from crotch splashing that is.
The conversation tonight was a type 1 event. The idiot was a re-incarnated atheist – that is, he is an atheist that also believes in the supernatural. Jesus wept.
September 1st, 2011
pieces / sacred as a “vacant lot”
I’m starting to pull together some half-formed ideas about a number of terms. One of them is “sacred.”
All of this stuff – these pieces – have to do with poetry, or at least with the creative edge, with the limits of intelligibility, with that place where meaning and meaninglessness meet. I suppose with magic.
This “piece” comes from something Robin Blaser—the phrase “sacred vacant lot”.
What appears to be happening to this (onetime) Catholic boy is that he is trying to find a way to hold the sacred in a way that doesn’t require the supernatural other to actually exist. (Compare Jung’s imaginary god in The Red Book.) I have no idea whether Blaser ever let go his belief in a literal god or not. Don’t really care. What I like is the idea of the sacred as a vacant lot and I want to explore what that might mean in a material world.
I have more to learn about this (if I can find a book about Blaser’s poetics that doesn’t piss me off so badly that I refuse to read it) but at the moment it appears as if this “vacant lot” has to do with the existence of the Other and its aspects that can only ever remain unknowable.
That gap (chaisma) between what is known, experienced, perceived (self) and what can not be known (Other) is that vacant lot. In “polar thinking” the vacant lot is held open and takes on the sacred. It is the place where self and non-self can meet and constitute each other.
From this it is clear that how that dynamic of self-other gets created (and held narratively) is fundamental to how the system works out, and just as fundamental to the narrative content held within the term “sacred.”
August 24th, 2011
when people believe the ridiculous
Here where I live there are these events called the “Philosopher’s cafe”. I’ve been to a few over the years and for the most part have found them painful. What happens is that there is a moderator (a person with some critical thinking experience) who sets up a series of topics to discuss at a preset venue. Then random citizens show up to talk about the topic.
Always, there are a range of intellects and a whole raft of rapidly shifting belief structures and wild and crazy notions about what it is to be human on the planet. For the most part “wild and crazy” means incoherent. Of course the holder of the belief doesn’t see that it is incoherent and that makes for an interesting time.
I tend to have a short temper when it comes to such things and although I try really hard to be polite, I’m afraid that my questions get a bit pointed as time goes along. For example, tonight there was a man who argued for an independent inner “self” that attaches meaning to experiences the (other?) self actually has. Two selves: one to experience; one to attach meaning. It’s essentially the homunculus argument with the infinite regression problem. He didn’t see that this would get him into difficulties: It’s elephants all the way down, ma’am. You can’t trick me with that one. Once that was clear, I left it at that. Just didn’t interact again. What would have been the point?
Then there was a woman who makes her living creating conspiracy DVDs. Self admitted. No irony intended. Gads. Anyway she has this idea that where binary code creates information streams in digital video, our DNA is a four-bit code and creates a video that we call life. There is no material reality, for example, just an image. I wanted to ask so what is DNA then? And image? So what coding mechanism created the DNA image, that creates our image? Infinite regression again, not to mention bat-shit crazy.
But to be fair, both are interesting narratives. And really that’s what they are for, to be interesting. All they really have to do is create an interesting spin on a personal interest (in her case the video’s she creates and sells). Those narratives have to seem to give meaning to her life, and do that by connecting various bits of her life, without actually having to have any real density, veracity or deeply connective capacity. Chimera. A thin skin over an endless chasm.
Luckily for all of us, she didn’t speak until the very end so I just sat there with my mouth open in astonishment and didn’t get mad enough to start asking her questions about how that DNA/image thing would work.
The thing is would there have been a point in asking? There might, although I rather think she has too much to lose to start thinking critically at this point in her economic life. For me, the question of whether to face off with things like this is really the question of whether the emotional upset I am about to cause is balanced by some potential intellectual gain (mine. Her mind is her business.). It’s also the question of whether I care enough to bother.
There are emotional reasons people choose to paper over the world with thin stories like the homunculus or the DNA-code. I am told, for example, that the comfort a belief in a post-death “life” provides is enough of a reason to leave silly stories alone – to not put a foot through the papered over chasm. Perhaps. But by that argument, we should not point out that the comfort provided by heroin does more damage than good in the long term because during the high it does provide a temporary respite from our awareness of mortality and pain.
Still, I am not going to go running around badgering all the conspiracy theorists I meet, or all the JWs, the Mormons who come up to me in their suits to “talk”. Although, last time, when approached I said “How about we agree that if you won’t talk to me about your god, I won’t talk to you about your delusions?” and that put an end to our “meeting”. I did say it with a genuine smile on my face, and not a sneer of derision.
I suppose I do expect more reasonable thinking at something called a philosopher’s cafe, but that’s mostly because I think philosophy is something one carefully thinks about, that one applies to more than just one’s personal interests and involves discarding ideas that don’t hold up to examination. One doesn’t discard the examined because it doesn’t fit the desired story. In other words, belief is secondary to evidence and not the other way round. But apparently I’m in the minority here. Like the fact that most people think of “theory” as something akin to a wild guess or simply a personal opinion based on nothing more than a personal desire, most people seem to think philosophy is just the unreflective personal narrative that all of us possess , and most importantly, that there is no way to assess these various personal narratives (philosophies) for truth value. Everyone’s opinions have equal gravity?
When it comes to people who believe the ridiculous, for the most part, when I can, I make sure I understand what they are saying as best I can and if it turns out to be right out of the Ministry of Silly Walks I vanish. It’s only when the silliness is posing as something logical (like philosophy) that it pisses me off and I start to lose my temper. But at least I don’t do an O’Reilly and scream and spit. I just ask pointed questions and then, as politely as I can, ignore their existence.
What do you do in the face of the ridiculous?
August 17th, 2011
just because it is funny
August 12th, 2011
Wittgenstein, the photographer
Wittgenstein’s Camera is a “research feature” over at the University of Cambridge’s website.
To mark the 60th anniversary of his death, an exhibition exploring Wittgenstein’s experiments in photography, and how they relate to his philosophy, can be seen at the University’s Photographic and Illustration Services…
Like his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton was fascinated by genetic traits, particularly the commonality of certain physical characteristics which for him represented the potential, higher or lower, of a person’s moral integrity. Galton used the process of composite photography to try and illustrate his argument by overlapping photographs of faces, in the hope of revealing the physical elements that ran through the groups of people he selected.
Wittgenstein had little interest in genetics, but he did have a love of photography, and employed the same technique some 50 years later, with a very different purpose. “Galton was aiming for enhanced sharpness and clarity,” explains Michael Nedo, Keeper of the Wittgenstein Archives. “Something which you could not see in an individual picture, but if you superimposed a number of pictures then it would become clear. Wittgenstein was aiming for different clarity expressed by the photography of fuzziness.”…
The exhibition ‘Wittgenstein and photography’ runs at the Photographic and Illustration Service on the New Museums site until the 15th August.
I cannot tell you how much I wish I could pop over there to see this. Bugger poverty.
August 11th, 2011
just because it’s pretty
Rather nice video background to Alan Watts speaking about the Buddhist concept of nothingness.
via Wimp
August 11th, 2011
pain, pleasure, belief, Charles Taylor and Brian Brett
Shortly after I wake in the mornings I’ve taken to walking the dog. I wait until at least civil twilight is far advanced because I want to avoid dog-skunk interactions, but once the striped ones are gone to bed, the dog and I start moving around outside. The dog loves it of course and early in the day, for a city that never quiets, there are at least a few quieter moments where I can at least imagine silence, so I love it too.
On our rounds today we met a new cat that is probably less than a year old. Pretty, ginger. She was wary (tail tip twitching, shoulders tensed) as my (rather big) dog came bounding up to say hi. The cat didn’t run though and I have to say I have mixed feelings about that. There are some dogs that do not like cats, even if mine does.
I got thinking about the cat’s behaviour. Is the cat brave? Stupid? Probably something else of course, but what does one say about a creature that remains sitting against an oncoming potential danger?
When we made it home I went to my computer to find a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson at a Beyond Belief conference. It’s the one where he talks about the 15% of scientists that still believe in a god and deGrass Tyson’s thinking about that. He uses Newton as an example: here is a super-duper smart dude, who (in his lunch break) created differential calculus so he could answer a question posed by another. But faced with a question he can’t (or doesn’t want to) face—it’s a Mystery. Essentially deGrass Tyson seems to think that, for some people, there is a place where they are willing to use any convenient answer – and often a god does the trick, but once we have the answer to the question, we push the god-frontier back. So there are far more atheist scientists than believer scientists, but those 15% exist and the chances of that number diminishing to 0% is probably remote.
Might be so. I hear a lot about the need for comfort, the need for a belief in a god to stave off the night terrors. I don’t deny the need for comfort. I love extremely high fat pasta dishes when I’m getting irritated or overwhelmed, for example — I totally get the need for comfort. It’s just that some comforts do more damage than good and one can learn to trade in one comforting activity for another. We are not stuck with the ones we’ve always used.
One thing I find interesting is that some of us also seem to need pain as much as comfort. My continual voluntary exposure to thinkers like Charles Taylor is an example. My occasional attendance at my local Philosopher’s Cafe, is another. I go in knowing I’m at risk, and that nice friendly dog is going to come wagging its tail, but the teeth, dripping with doggy slobber, are going to arrive first. I’m not sure which is worse the gross-out facts of intellectual slobber or the (admittedly small) risk of an actual argument for the importance of continued religious belief in human society.
I suppose I do it because despite the slobber Taylor, like all brilliant thinkers, offers gifts. It is unfortunate that to get the insights, you have to go through the risk of being drenched in slime. So, like the cat, I await the dog’s arrival, but since I’m human I carry with me a metaphorical soapy wash cloth to clean up afterwards.
Today that is Brian Brett. I feel totally slimed (but no teeth) by The Malaise of Modernity, so I’m going to read Trauma Farm today. Here’s the opening sentence:
A farm is both theory and worms.
Hah! Wonderful. I bought it, and based on just that sentence, I have no regrets. I feel cleaner already.
August 9th, 2011
more on Charles Taylor / the golden past
So I did run out and pick up a copy of Charles Taylor’s Malaise of Modernity from the library. I’m reading it now but I just wanted to share with you a single paragraph from the book and my response to it.
He’s been outlining the modern sources of worry. The first is individualism. He says that “people used to see themselves as part of a larger order. In some cases, this was a cosmic order, a “great chain of Being,” in which humans figured in their proper place along with angels, heavenly bodies, and our fellow earthly creatures.” This sense of being has been replaced by a sense of individual freedom “to be ourselves.” The “worry” part is related to a Taylor’s sense of loss of purpose that goes along with the loss of our place in the chain of Being. (My worry would have been around the definition of “our proper place.”)
The second issue is the “primacy of instrumental reason.” Here is the paragraph in question:
No doubt sweeping away the old orders has immensely widened the scope of instrumental reason. Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness and wellbeing of individuals as our goal. The yardstick that henceforth applies is that of instrumental reason. Similarly, once the creatures that surround us lose the significance that accrued to their place in the chain of being, they are open to being treated as raw materials or instruments for our projects.
There is just so much wrong with this but really all of it stems from the golden-age fallacy. That last sentence, for example. The laws surrounding the protection of animals are present in this instrumental modernity. In Taylor’s golden past they didn’t exist; bear baiting was considered a fun entertainment. How many morally based vegetarians existed in Taylor’s golden West? How many today in this instrumental world? Come on dude.
This secular rise Taylor is so worried about goes along with the rise in things like social safety nets. Public education, public health clinics, childhood inoculations, unemployment programs, welfare provisions: just look at what used to happen to unwed mothers in Catholic countries if you want an education in how well this “order of things” functioned for those on its margins. And those human things like guilt, shame and desperation that kept the order intact? And slavery—enabled in some places because that order of things decided that those people of a different color had no souls (like other animals) and so could be treated as owned objects. I would have thought this the very definition of instrumental reason and so I think there is great doubt about the rise of instrumental reason in modernity.
Anyway, if the whole thesis of Taylor’s malaise is going to be based on this faulty assumption then his argument is going to drown in the Slough of Ridiculous.
July 20th, 2011
cognition, poetry, metaphor and meaning
I got a copy of Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. I can’t remember where I heard about it first but it may well have been one of Shawna Lemay’s sites. I both love it and am irritated by it.
What I love is her deep insight into the workings of poetry. What I hate is the way she conceives of the mind. When she speaks to the importance of rhetoric, narrative, image and music in the creation of poetry (whether when a poem is being written or read), her authority rings simply yet strongly. When she speaks to the workings of the mind, especially in the section on images, I feel like I am in a bag of metaphors, roughly tossed, and not yet settled to the ground.
Then my (borrowed) copy of Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. arrived. It’s called The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. In the introduction he addresses the horror of “figurative” thought – those old lessons about not mixing one’s metaphors; instead presenting information simply and literally and how misplaced this reaction is – how worn out the underlying objectivist assumptions. So I had to think a bit more about my reaction to Hirshfield.
I suppose part of it is that old gripe about Humanities’ use of scientific things as one uses a tin of paint. The context that gave that empirical insight birth is lost, and only the gloss remains. Not that I am accusing Hirshfield of this. I’m not. What I am saying is that this tendency to utilize a shiny bauble out of context prepares me for irritation when I run across these shiny metaphors that rain feeling down on one without even a drizzle of sensible context. Listen:
Image is taken up by the reaching mind, but also within the welcoming ears, the tongue’s four recognitions, the muscle’s familiar surge of kinship.
You can tell Hirshfield is a poet no? You can feel that sentence. It has sensuality, a movement through the body, a suggestion of meaning if one reads ears, tongues and muscles as metonyms. But what does that sentence actually say? How can one ground that in the mind that actually functions inside the skull, through the hands?
There’s a bunch more like this but it doesn’t outweigh the usefulness of Hirshfield’s deep knowledge of the workings of poetry. So I’ve decided to read a chapter of Hirshfield followed by a chapter of Gibbs to even out the approaches and give my self time to work through my irritation to some (hopeful) understanding.
What I am going to have to do is think about the consequences to the claim (well founded) that human thought is fundamentally metaphorical. I accept this, since the evidence is there. At what point, though, does something become so metaphorical that it loses touch with content communication? Is it that old shiver when one mixes metaphor? Does this known bad thing point to a place where communication breaks down? Is it that once a metaphor loses touch with its bodily/living origin is also loses its ability to feed back to the mind that living creates? Is that the problem with mixing metaphors – that the link between body and image is lost and one trips lightly across some airy-fairy imaginative realm, skipping from puffy cloud to cloud without even touching down to where the feet remain planted?
I suspect something of the sort. Imagistic thought will always evoke feeling, and that is enough to suggest there should or could be communication or idea present as well, but I don’t think it is necessarily so. One can swim in a sea of feeling – of lions that evoke suns, that evoke roses, that evoke golden rain – without out actually communicating anything attached to the mundane reality of a body moving through its day. At some point there has to be a person to which this all applies, because although we are hardly at the center of the universe, our minds are constructed so that we can be nothing other than at the center of meaning.
As irritating as that is, it appears to be the case. The humanities are going to have to catch up because we simply cannot do without them.