R. Scott Bakker's Blog, page 11

As proud and self-absorbed as most of us are, you’d expect we’d be obsessed with reading history to discover more and more of our past and how we got where we are. But modern historical narratives concentrate on the mere facts of who did what to whom and exactly when and where such dramas played out. What actually happened in our recent and distant past doesn’t seem grandiose enough for us, and so we prefer myths that situate our endeavours in a cosmic or supernatural background. Those myths can be religious, of course, but also secular as in films, novels, and the other arts. We’re so fixated on ourselves and on our cultural assumptions that we must imagine we’re engaged in more than just humdrum family life, business, political chicanery, and wars. We’re heroes in a universal tale of good and evil, gods and monsters. We thereby resort to the imagination, overlooking the existential importance of our actual evolutionary transformation. When animals became people, the universe turned in its grave.

Awakening from Animal Servitude unto Alienation

The so-called wise way of life, that of our species, originates from the birth of an anomalous form of consciousness. That origin has been widely mythologized to protect us from the vertigo of feeling how fine the line is between us and animals. Thus, personal consciousness has been interpreted as an immaterial spirit or as a spark left behind by the intrusion of a higher-dimensional realm into fallen nature, as in Gnosticism, or as an illusion to maintain the play of the slumbering God Brahman, as in some versions of Hinduism, and so on and so forth. But the consciousness that separates people from animals is merely the particular higher-order thought—that is, a thought about thoughts—that you (your lower-order thoughts) are free in the sense of being autonomous, that you’re largely liberated from naturally-selected, animal processes such as hunting for food or seeking mates in the preprogrammed ways. That thought eventually comes to lie in the background of the flurry of mental activity sustained by our oversized brains, along with the frisson of fear that accompanies the revelation that as long as we can think we’re free from nature, we’re actually so. This is because such a higher-order thought, removed as it is from the older, animal parts of our brain, is just what allows us to independently direct our body’s activities. The freedom opened up by human sentience is typically experienced as a falling away from a more secure position. In fact, our collective origin is very likely encapsulated in each child’s development of personhood, fraught as that is with anxiety and sadness as well as with wonder. Children cry and sulk when they don’t get their way, which is when they learn that they stand apart from the world as egos who must strive to live up to otherworldly social standards.

Animals become people by using thought to lever themselves into a black hole-like viewpoint subsisting outside of nature as such. The results are alienation and the existential crisis which are at the root of all our actions. Organic processes are already anomalous and thus virtually miraculous. Personhood represents not progress, since the values that would define such an advance are themselves alien and unnatural by being anthropocentric, but a maximal state of separation from the world, the exclusion of some primates from the environments that would test their genetic mettle. Personal consciousness is the carving of godlike beings from the raw materials of animal slaves, by the realization that thoughts—memories, emotions, imaginings, rational modeling for the sake of problem-solving—comprise an inner world whose contents need not be dictated by stimuli. The cost of personhood, that is, of virtual godhood in the otherwise mostly inanimate universe, is the suffering from alienation that marks our so-called maturity, our fall from childhood innocence whereupon we land in the adult’s clownish struggles with hubris. Our independence empowers us to change ourselves and the world around us, and so we assume we’re the stars of the cosmic show or at least of the narrative of our private life. But because the business of our acting like grownups is witnessed by hardly any audience at all—except in the special case of celebrities who are ironically infantilized by their fame, because the wildly inhuman cosmos is indifferent to our successes and failures—we typically develop into existential mediocrities, not heroes. We overcompensate for the anguish we feel because our thoughts sever us from everything outside our skull, becoming proud of our adult independence; we’re like children begging their parents to admire their finger paintings. The natural world responds with randomness and indiscriminateness, with luck and indifference, humiliating us with a sense of the ultimate futility of our efforts. Our oldest solution is to retreat to the anthropocentric social world in which we can honour our presumed greatness, justly rewarding or punishing each other for our deeds as we feel we deserve.

Hypersocialization and the Existential Crisis of Consciousness

The alienation of higher consciousness is followed, then, by intensive socialization. Animals socialize for natural purposes, whereas we do so in the wake of the miracle of personhood. Our relatively autonomous selves are miraculous not just because they’re so rare (count up the rocks and the minds in the universe, for example, and the former will so outnumber the latter that minds will seem to have spontaneously popped into existence without any general cause), but because whereas animals adapt to nature, conforming to genetic and environmental regularities, people negate those regularities, abandoning their genetic upbringing and reshaping the global landscape. The earliest people channeled their resentment against the world they discovered they’re not wholly at home in, by inventing tools to help them best nature and its animal slaves, but also by forming tribes defined by more and more elaborate social conventions. The more arbitrary the implicit and explicit laws that regulate a society, the more frenzied its members’ dread of being embedded in a greater, uncaring wilderness. Again, human societies are animalistic in so far as they rely on the structure of dominance hierarchies, but whereas alpha males in animal groups overpower their inferiors for the natural reason of maintaining group cohesion to protect the alphas whose superior genes are the species’ best hope for future generations, human leaders adopt the pathologies of the God complex. Indeed, all people would act like gods if only they could sustain the farce. Alas, just as every winning lottery ticket necessitates multitudes of losers, every full-blown personal deity depends on an army of worshippers. Personhood makes us all metaphysically godlike with respect to our autonomy and our liberation from some natural, impersonal systems, but only a lucky minority can live like mythical gods on Earth.

We socialize, then, to flatter our potential for godhood, by elevating some of our members to a social position in which they can tantalize us with their extravagant lifestyles and superhuman responsibilities. We form sheltered communities in which we can hide from nature’s alien glare. Our elders, tyrants, kings, and emperors lord it over us and we thank them for it, since their appallingly decadent lives nevertheless prove that personhood can be completed, that an absolute fall from the grace of animal innocence isn’t asymptotic, that our evolution has a finite end in transhumanity. Our psychopathic rulers are living proofs that nature isn’t omnipresent, that escape is possible in the form of insanity sustained by mass hallucination. We daydream the differences between right and wrong, honour and dishonour, meaning and meaninglessness. We fill the air with subtle noises and imagine that those symbols are meant to lay bare the final truth. We thus mitigate the removal of our mind from the world, with a myth of reconciliation between thoughts and facts. But language was likely conceived of in the first place as a magical instrument, that is, as an extension of mentality into nature which was everywhere anthropomorphized. Human tribes were assumed to be mere inner circles within a vast society of gods, monsters, and other living forces. We socialized, then, not just to escape to friendly domains to preserve our dignity as unnatural wonders, but to pretend that we hadn’t emerged just by a satanic/promethean act of cognitive defiance, with the ego-making thought that severs us from natural reality. We childishly presumed that the whole universe is a stage populated by puppets and actors; thus, no existential retreat might have been deemed necessary, because nature’s alienness was blotted out in our mythopoeic imagination. As in Genesis, God created by speaking the world into being, just as shamans and magicians were believed to cast magical spells that bent reality to their will.

But every theistic posit was part of an unconscious strategy to avoid facing the obvious fact that since all gods are people, we’re evidently the only gods. Nevertheless, having conceived of theistic fictions, we drew up models to standardize the behaviour of actual gods. Thus, the Pharaoh had to be as remote and majestic as Osiris, while the Roman Emperor had to rule like Jupiter, the Raj had to adjudicate like Krishna, the Pope had to appear Christ-like, and the U.S. President has to seem to govern like your favourite Hollywood hero. The double standard that exempts the upper classes from the laws that oppress the lowly masses is supposed to prevent an outbreak of consciousness-induced angst. Social exceptions for the upper class work with mass personifications and enchantments of nature, and those propagandistic myths are then made plausible by the fact that superhuman power elites actually exist. Ironically, such class divisions and their concomitant theologies exacerbate the existential predicament by placing those exquisite symbols of our transcendence (the power elites) before public consciousness, reminding us that just as the gods are prior to and thus independent of nature, so too we who are the only potential or actual gods don’t belong within that latter world.

Scientific Objectivity and Artificialization

Hypersocialization isn’t our only existential stratagem; there’s also artificialization as a defense against full consciousness of our unnatural self-control. Whereas the socializer tries to act like a god by climbing social ladders, bullying his underlings, spending unseemly wealth in generational projects of self-aggrandizement, and creating and destroying societal frameworks, the artificializer wants to replace all of nature with artifacts. That way, what began as the imaginary negation of nature’s inhuman indifference to life, in the mythopoeic childhood of our species, can be fulfilled when that indifference is literally undone by our re-engineering of natural processes.

To do that, the artificializer needs to think, not just to act, like a god. That required forming cognitive programs that don’t depend on the innate, naturally-selected ones. Cognitive scientists maintain that the brain’s ability to process sensations, for example, evolved not to present us with the absolute truth but to ensure our fitness to our environment, by helping us survive long enough to sexually reproduce. Animal neural pathways differ from personal ones in that the former serve the species, not the individual, and so the animal is fundamentally a puppet acting out its life cycle as directed by its genetic programming and by certain environmental constraints. Animals can learn to adapt their behaviour to their environment and so their behaviour isn’t always robotic, but unless they can apply their learning towards unnatural ends, such as by developing birth control techniques that systematically thwart the pseudo goals of natural selection, they’ll think as animals, not as gods. Animals as such are entirely natural creatures, meaning that in so far as their behaviour is mediated by an independent control center, their thinking nevertheless is dedicated to furthering the end of natural selection, which is just that of transmitting genes to future generations. By contrast, gods don’t merely survive or even thrive. Insects and bacteria thrive, as did the dinosaurs for millions of years, but none were godlike because none were existentially transformed by conscious enlightenment, by a cognitive black hole into which an animal can fall, creating the world of inner space.

People, too, have animal programming, such as the autonomic programs for processing sensory information. Social behaviour is likewise often purely animalistic, as in the cases of sex and the power struggle for some advantage in a dominance hierarchy. Rational thinking is less so and thus less natural, meaning more anti-natural in that it serves rational ideals rather than just lower-order aims. To be sure, Machiavellian reasoning is animalistic, but reason has also taken on an unnatural function. Whereas writing was first used for the utilitarian purpose of record keeping, reason in the Western tradition was initially not so practical. The Presocratics argued about metaphysical substances and other philosophical matters, indicating that they’d been largely liberated from animal concerns of day-to-day survival and were exploring cognitive territory that’s useful only from the internal, personal perspective. Who am I really? What is the world, ultimately speaking? Is there a worthy difference between right and wrong? Such philosophical questions are impossible without rational ideals of skepticism, intellectual integrity, and love of knowledge even if that knowledge should be subversive—as it proved to be in Socrates’ classic case.

While the biblical Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son for the sake of hypersocializing with an imaginary deity, Socrates died for the antisocial quest of pursuing objective knowledge that inevitably threatens the natural order along with the animal social structures that entrench that order, such as the Athenian government of his day. Socrates cared not about face-saving opinions, but about epistemic principles that arm us with rationally-justified beliefs about how the world might be in reality. Much later, in the Scientific Revolution, rationalists (which is to say philosophers) in Europe would revive the ancient pagan ideal of reasoning regardless of the impact on faith-based dogmas. Scientists like Isaac Newton developed cognitive methods that were counterintuitive in that they went against the grain of more natural human thinking that’s prone to fallacies and survival-based biases. In addition, he served rational institutions, namely the Royal Society and Cambridge, which rivaled the genes for control over the enlightened individual’s loyalty. Moreover, the findings of those cognitive methods were symbolized using artificial languages such as mathematics and formal logic, which enabled liberated minds to communicate their discoveries without the genetic tragicomedies of territorialism, fight-or-flight responses, hero worship, demagoguery, and the like that are liable to be triggered by rhetoric and metaphors expressed in natural languages.

But what is objective knowledge? Are scientists and other so-called enlightened rationalists as neutral as the indifferent world they study? No, rationalists in this broad sense are partly liberated from animal life but they’re not lost in a limbo; rather, they participate in another, unnatural process which I’m calling artificialization. Objectivity isn’t a purely mechanical, impersonal capacity; indeed, natural processes themselves have aesthetically interpretable ends and effective means, so there are no such capacities. In any case, the search for objective knowledge builds on human animalism and on our so-called enlightenment, on our having transcended our animal past and instincts. We were once wholly slaves to nature and we often behave as if we were still playthings of natural forces. But consciousness and hypersocialization provided escapes, albeit into fantasy worlds that nevertheless empowered us. We saw ourselves as being special because we became aware of the increasing independence of our mental models from the modeled territory, owing to the formers’ ultra-complexity. The inner world of the mind emerged and detached from the natural order—not just metaphysically or abstractly, but psychologically and historically. That liberation was traumatic and so we fled to the fictitious world of our imagination, to a world we could control, and we pretended the outer world was likewise held captive to our mental projections. The rational enterprise is fundamentally another form of escape, a means of living with the burden of hyper-awareness. Instead of settling for cheap, flimsy mental constructions such as our gods, boogeymen, and the panoply of delusions to which we’re prone, and instead of hording divinity in the upper social classes that exercise their superpowers in petty or sadistic projects of self-aggrandizement, we saw that we could usurp God’s ability to create real worlds, as it were. We could democratize divinity, replacing impersonal nature with artificial constructs that would actually exist outside our minds as opposed to being mere projections of imagination and existential longing.

The pragmatic aspect of objectivity is apparent from the familiar historical connections between science, European imperialism, and modern industries. But it’s apparent also from the analytical structure of scientific explanations itself. The existential point of scientific objectivity was paradoxically to achieve a total divorce from our animal side by de-personalizing ourselves, by restraining our desire for instant gratification, scolding our inner child and its playpen, the imagination, and identifying with rational methods. Whereas an animal relies on its hardwired programs or on learned rules-of-thumb for interpreting its environment, an enlightened person codifies and reifies such rules, suspending disbelief and siding with idealized or instrumental formulations of these rules so that the person can occupy a higher cognitive plane. Once removed from natural processes by this identification with rational procedures and institutions, with teleological algorithms, artificial symbols and the like, the animal has become a person with a godlike view from outside of nature—albeit not an overview of what the universe really is, but an engineer’s perspective of how the universe works mechanically from the ground up.

To see what I mean, consider the Hindu parable of the blind men who try to ascertain the nature of an elephant by touching its different body parts. One of the men feels a tusk and infers that the elephant is like a pipe. Another touches the leg and thinks the whole animal is like a tree trunk. Another touches the belly and believes the animal is like a wall. Another touches the tail and says the elephant is like a rope. Finally, another one touches the ear and thinks the elephant is like a hand fan. One of the traditional lessons of this parable is that we can fallaciously overgeneralize and mistake the part for the whole, but this isn’t my point about science. Still, there is a difference between what the universe is in reality, which is what it is in its entirety in so far as all of its parts form a cohesive order, and how inquisitive primates choose to understand the universe with their divisive concepts and models. Scientists can’t possibly understand everything in nature all at once; the word “universe” is a mere placeholder with no content adequate to the task of representing everything that’s out there interacting to produce what we think of as distinct events. We have no name for the universe which gives us power over it by identifying its essence, as it were. So scientists analyze the whole, observing how parts of the world work in isolation, ideally in a laboratory. They then generalize their findings, positing a natural regularity or nomic relation between those fragments, as pictured by their model or theory. It’s as if scientists were the blind men who lack the brainpower to cognize the whole of natural reality, and so they study each part, perhaps hoping that if they cooperate they can combine their partial understandings and arrive at some inkling of what the natural universe in general is. Unfortunately, the deeper we look into nature, the more complexity we find in its parts and so the more futile becomes any such plan for total comprehension. Scientists can barely keep up with advances in their subfields; the notion that anyone could master all the sciences as they currently stand is ludicrous, and there’s still much in the world that isn’t scientifically understood by anyone.

So whatever the scientist’s aspiration might be, the effect of science isn’t the achievement of complete, final understanding of everything in the universe or of the whole of nature. Instead, science allows us to rebuild the whole based on partial, analytical knowledge of how the world works. Suppose scientists discover an extraterrestrial artifact and they have no clue as to the artifact’s function, which is to say they have no understanding of what the object is in reality. Still, they can reverse-engineer the artifact, taking it apart, identifying the materials used to assemble it and certain patterns in how the parts interact with each other. With that limited knowledge of the artifact’s mechanical aspect, scientists might be able to build a replica or else they could apply that knowledge to create something more useful to them, that is, something that works in similar ways to the original but which works towards an end supplied by the scientists’ interests, not the alien’s. There would be no point in replicating the alien technology, since the artifact would be useless without knowledge of what it’s for or without even a shared interest in pursuing that alien goal. Replace the alien artifact with the natural universe and you have some measure of the Baconian position of human science. Of course, nature has no designer; nevertheless, we experience natural processes as having ends and so we’re faced with the choice of whether to apply our piecemeal knowledge of natural mechanisms to the task of reinforcing those ends or to that of adjusting or even reversing them. The choice is to act as stewards of God’s garden, as it were, or as promethean rebels who seek to be divine creators. There are still enclaves of native tribes living as retro-human animals and preserving nature rather than demolishing the wilderness and establishing in its place a technological wonderland built with knowledge of natural mechanisms. But the billions of participants in the science-driven, global monoculture have evidently chosen the promethean, quasi-satanic path.

Existentialism and our Hidden History

History is a narrative that often informs us indirectly about the present state of human affairs, by representing part of our past. Ancient historical narratives were more mythical than fact-based. The New Testament, for example, uses historical details to form an exoteric shell around the Gnostic, transhumanist suspicion that human nature is “fallen” to the extent that we surrender our capacity to transcend the animal life cycle; we must “die” to our natural bodies and be reborn in a glorious, unnatural or “spiritual” form. At any rate, like poetry, the mythical language of such ancient historical narratives is open to endless interpretations, which is to say that such stories are obscure. Josephus’s ancient histories of the Jewish people, written for a Roman audience, aren’t so mythologized but they’re no less propagandistic. By contrast, modern historians strive to avoid the pitfalls of writing highly subjective or biased narratives, and so they seek to analyze and interpret just the facts dug up by archeologists and textual critics. Modern histories are thus influenced by the exoteric presumption about science, which is that science isn’t primarily in the business of artificializing everything that’s wild in the sense of being out of our control, but is just a mode of inquiry for arriving at the objective truth (come what may).

Left out of this development of the telling of history is the existential significance of our evolutionary transition from being animals, which were at one with nature, to being people who are implicitly if not consciously at war with everything nonhuman. What I’ve sketched above is part of our secret history; it’s the story of what it means to be human, which underlies all our endeavours. The significance of our standing between animalism and godhood is hidden and largely unknown or forgotten, because at the root of this purpose that drives us is the trauma of godlike consciousness which we’d rather not relive. We each have our fill of that trauma in our passage from childhood innocence, which approximates the animal state of unknowing, to adult independence. Teen angst, which cultures combat with initiation rituals to distract the teenager with sanctioned, typically delusional pastimes, is the tip of the iceberg of pain that awaits anyone who recognizes the plight entailed by our very form of existence.

In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm argued that citizens of modern democracies are in danger of preferring the comfort of a totalitarian system, to escape the ennui and dehumanization generated by modern societies. In particular, capitalistic exploitation of the worker class and the need to assimilate to an environment run more and more by automated, inhuman machines are supposed to drive civilized persons to savage, authoritarian regimes. At least, this was Fromm’s explanation of the Nazis’ rise to power. A similar analysis could apply to the present degeneration of the Republican Party in the U.S. and to the militant jihadist movement in the Middle East. But Fromm’s analysis is limited. To be sure, capitalism and technology have their drawbacks and these may even contribute to totalitarianism’s appeal, as Fromm shows. But this overlooks what liberal, science-driven societies and savage, totalitarian societies have in common. Both are flights from existential reckoning, as I’ve explained: the one revolves around artificialization (Enlightenment, rationalist values of individual autonomy, which deteriorate until we’re left with the fraud of consumerism), the other around hypersocialization (cult of personality, restoring the sadomasochistic interplay between mythical gods and their worshippers). Fromm ignores the existential effect of the rational enlightenment that brought on modern science, democracy, and capitalism in the first place, the effect being our deification. By deifying ourselves, we prevent our treasured religions from being fiascos and we spare ourselves the horror of living in an inhuman wilderness from which we’re alienated by our hyper-awareness.

We created the modern world to accelerate the rate at which nature is removed from our presence. Contrary to optimists like Steven Pinker, modernity hasn’t fulfilled its promise of democratizing divinity, as I’d put it. Robber barons and more parasitic oligarchs do indeed resort to the older departure of hypersocialization, acting like decadent gods in relation to human slaves instead of focusing their divine creativity on our common enemy, the monstrous wilderness. The internet that trivializes everything it touches and the omnipresence of our high-tech gadgets do infantilize us, turning us into cattle-like consumers instead of unleashing our creativity and training us to be the indomitable warriors that alone could endure the promethean mission. This is because we, being the only gods that exist, are woefully unprepared for our responsibility, having retained our animal heritage in the form of our bodies which infect most of our decisions with natural fears and prejudices. At any rate, the deeper story of the animal that becomes a godlike person to obliterate the source of alienation that’s the curse of any flawed, lonely godling helps explain why we now settle more often for the minor anxieties of living in modern civilization, to avoid the major angst of recognizing the existential importance of what we are.

As proud and self-absorbed as most of us are, you’d expect we’d be obsessed with reading history to discover more and more of our past and how we got where we are. But modern historical narratives concentrate on the mere facts of who did what to whom and exactly when and where such dramas played out. What actually happened in our recent and distant past doesn’t seem grandiose enough for us, and so we prefer myths that situate our endeavours in a cosmic or supernatural background. Those myths can be religious, of course, but also secular as in films, novels, and the other arts. We’re so fixated on ourselves and on our cultural assumptions that we must imagine we’re engaged in more than just humdrum family life, business, political chicanery, and wars. We’re heroes in a universal tale of good and evil, gods and monsters. We thereby resort to the imagination, overlooking the existential importance of our actual evolutionary transformation. When animals became people, the universe turned in its grave.

Awakening from Animal Servitude unto Alienation

The so-called wise way of life, that of our species, originates from the birth of an anomalous form of consciousness. That origin has been widely mythologized to protect us from the vertigo of feeling how fine the line is between us and animals. Thus, personal consciousness has been interpreted as an immaterial spirit or as a spark left behind by the intrusion of a higher-dimensional realm into fallen nature, as in Gnosticism, or as an illusion to maintain the play of the slumbering God Brahman, as in some versions of Hinduism, and so on and so forth. But the consciousness that separates people from animals is merely the particular higher-order thought—that is, a thought about thoughts—that you (your lower-order thoughts) are free in the sense of being autonomous, that you’re largely liberated from naturally-selected, animal processes such as hunting for food or seeking mates in the preprogrammed ways. That thought eventually comes to lie in the background of the flurry of mental activity sustained by our oversized brains, along with the frisson of fear that accompanies the revelation that as long as we can think we’re free from nature, we’re actually so. This is because such a higher-order thought, removed as it is from the older, animal parts of our brain, is just what allows us to independently direct our body’s activities. The freedom opened up by human sentience is typically experienced as a falling away from a more secure position. In fact, our collective origin is very likely encapsulated in each child’s development of personhood, fraught as that is with anxiety and sadness as well as with wonder. Children cry and sulk when they don’t get their way, which is when they learn that they stand apart from the world as egos who must strive to live up to otherworldly social standards.

Animals become people by using thought to lever themselves into a black hole-like viewpoint subsisting outside of nature as such. The results are alienation and the existential crisis which are at the root of all our actions. Organic processes are already anomalous and thus virtually miraculous. Personhood represents not progress, since the values that would define such an advance are themselves alien and unnatural by being anthropocentric, but a maximal state of separation from the world, the exclusion of some primates from the environments that would test their genetic mettle. Personal consciousness is the carving of godlike beings from the raw materials of animal slaves, by the realization that thoughts—memories, emotions, imaginings, rational modeling for the sake of problem-solving—comprise an inner world whose contents need not be dictated by stimuli. The cost of personhood, that is, of virtual godhood in the otherwise mostly inanimate universe, is the suffering from alienation that marks our so-called maturity, our fall from childhood innocence whereupon we land in the adult’s clownish struggles with hubris. Our independence empowers us to change ourselves and the world around us, and so we assume we’re the stars of the cosmic show or at least of the narrative of our private life. But because the business of our acting like grownups is witnessed by hardly any audience at all—except in the special case of celebrities who are ironically infantilized by their fame, because the wildly inhuman cosmos is indifferent to our successes and failures—we typically develop into existential mediocrities, not heroes. We overcompensate for the anguish we feel because our thoughts sever us from everything outside our skull, becoming proud of our adult independence; we’re like children begging their parents to admire their finger paintings. The natural world responds with randomness and indiscriminateness, with luck and indifference, humiliating us with a sense of the ultimate futility of our efforts. Our oldest solution is to retreat to the anthropocentric social world in which we can honour our presumed greatness, justly rewarding or punishing each other for our deeds as we feel we deserve.

Hypersocialization and the Existential Crisis of Consciousness

The alienation of higher consciousness is followed, then, by intensive socialization. Animals socialize for natural purposes, whereas we do so in the wake of the miracle of personhood. Our relatively autonomous selves are miraculous not just because they’re so rare (count up the rocks and the minds in the universe, for example, and the former will so outnumber the latter that minds will seem to have spontaneously popped into existence without any general cause), but because whereas animals adapt to nature, conforming to genetic and environmental regularities, people negate those regularities, abandoning their genetic upbringing and reshaping the global landscape. The earliest people channeled their resentment against the world they discovered they’re not wholly at home in, by inventing tools to help them best nature and its animal slaves, but also by forming tribes defined by more and more elaborate social conventions. The more arbitrary the implicit and explicit laws that regulate a society, the more frenzied its members’ dread of being embedded in a greater, uncaring wilderness. Again, human societies are animalistic in so far as they rely on the structure of dominance hierarchies, but whereas alpha males in animal groups overpower their inferiors for the natural reason of maintaining group cohesion to protect the alphas whose superior genes are the species’ best hope for future generations, human leaders adopt the pathologies of the God complex. Indeed, all people would act like gods if only they could sustain the farce. Alas, just as every winning lottery ticket necessitates multitudes of losers, every full-blown personal deity depends on an army of worshippers. Personhood makes us all metaphysically godlike with respect to our autonomy and our liberation from some natural, impersonal systems, but only a lucky minority can live like mythical gods on Earth.

We socialize, then, to flatter our potential for godhood, by elevating some of our members to a social position in which they can tantalize us with their extravagant lifestyles and superhuman responsibilities. We form sheltered communities in which we can hide from nature’s alien glare. Our elders, tyrants, kings, and emperors lord it over us and we thank them for it, since their appallingly decadent lives nevertheless prove that personhood can be completed, that an absolute fall from the grace of animal innocence isn’t asymptotic, that our evolution has a finite end in transhumanity. Our psychopathic rulers are living proofs that nature isn’t omnipresent, that escape is possible in the form of insanity sustained by mass hallucination. We daydream the differences between right and wrong, honour and dishonour, meaning and meaninglessness. We fill the air with subtle noises and imagine that those symbols are meant to lay bare the final truth. We thus mitigate the removal of our mind from the world, with a myth of reconciliation between thoughts and facts. But language was likely conceived of in the first place as a magical instrument, that is, as an extension of mentality into nature which was everywhere anthropomorphized. Human tribes were assumed to be mere inner circles within a vast society of gods, monsters, and other living forces. We socialized, then, not just to escape to friendly domains to preserve our dignity as unnatural wonders, but to pretend that we hadn’t emerged just by a satanic/promethean act of cognitive defiance, with the ego-making thought that severs us from natural reality. We childishly presumed that the whole universe is a stage populated by puppets and actors; thus, no existential retreat might have been deemed necessary, because nature’s alienness was blotted out in our mythopoeic imagination. As in Genesis, God created by speaking the world into being, just as shamans and magicians were believed to cast magical spells that bent reality to their will.

But every theistic posit was part of an unconscious strategy to avoid facing the obvious fact that since all gods are people, we’re evidently the only gods. Nevertheless, having conceived of theistic fictions, we drew up models to standardize the behaviour of actual gods. Thus, the Pharaoh had to be as remote and majestic as Osiris, while the Roman Emperor had to rule like Jupiter, the Raj had to adjudicate like Krishna, the Pope had to appear Christ-like, and the U.S. President has to seem to govern like your favourite Hollywood hero. The double standard that exempts the upper classes from the laws that oppress the lowly masses is supposed to prevent an outbreak of consciousness-induced angst. Social exceptions for the upper class work with mass personifications and enchantments of nature, and those propagandistic myths are then made plausible by the fact that superhuman power elites actually exist. Ironically, such class divisions and their concomitant theologies exacerbate the existential predicament by placing those exquisite symbols of our transcendence (the power elites) before public consciousness, reminding us that just as the gods are prior to and thus independent of nature, so too we who are the only potential or actual gods don’t belong within that latter world.

Scientific Objectivity and Artificialization

Hypersocialization isn’t our only existential stratagem; there’s also artificialization as a defense against full consciousness of our unnatural self-control. Whereas the socializer tries to act like a god by climbing social ladders, bullying his underlings, spending unseemly wealth in generational projects of self-aggrandizement, and creating and destroying societal frameworks, the artificializer wants to replace all of nature with artifacts. That way, what began as the imaginary negation of nature’s inhuman indifference to life, in the mythopoeic childhood of our species, can be fulfilled when that indifference is literally undone by our re-engineering of natural processes.

To do that, the artificializer needs to think, not just to act, like a god. That required forming cognitive programs that don’t depend on the innate, naturally-selected ones. Cognitive scientists maintain that the brain’s ability to process sensations, for example, evolved not to present us with the absolute truth but to ensure our fitness to our environment, by helping us survive long enough to sexually reproduce. Animal neural pathways differ from personal ones in that the former serve the species, not the individual, and so the animal is fundamentally a puppet acting out its life cycle as directed by its genetic programming and by certain environmental constraints. Animals can learn to adapt their behaviour to their environment and so their behaviour isn’t always robotic, but unless they can apply their learning towards unnatural ends, such as by developing birth control techniques that systematically thwart the pseudo goals of natural selection, they’ll think as animals, not as gods. Animals as such are entirely natural creatures, meaning that in so far as their behaviour is mediated by an independent control center, their thinking nevertheless is dedicated to furthering the end of natural selection, which is just that of transmitting genes to future generations. By contrast, gods don’t merely survive or even thrive. Insects and bacteria thrive, as did the dinosaurs for millions of years, but none were godlike because none were existentially transformed by conscious enlightenment, by a cognitive black hole into which an animal can fall, creating the world of inner space.

People, too, have animal programming, such as the autonomic programs for processing sensory information. Social behaviour is likewise often purely animalistic, as in the cases of sex and the power struggle for some advantage in a dominance hierarchy. Rational thinking is less so and thus less natural, meaning more anti-natural in that it serves rational ideals rather than just lower-order aims. To be sure, Machiavellian reasoning is animalistic, but reason has also taken on an unnatural function. Whereas writing was first used for the utilitarian purpose of record keeping, reason in the Western tradition was initially not so practical. The Presocratics argued about metaphysical substances and other philosophical matters, indicating that they’d been largely liberated from animal concerns of day-to-day survival and were exploring cognitive territory that’s useful only from the internal, personal perspective. Who am I really? What is the world, ultimately speaking? Is there a worthy difference between right and wrong? Such philosophical questions are impossible without rational ideals of skepticism, intellectual integrity, and love of knowledge even if that knowledge should be subversive—as it proved to be in Socrates’ classic case.

While the biblical Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son for the sake of hypersocializing with an imaginary deity, Socrates died for the antisocial quest of pursuing objective knowledge that inevitably threatens the natural order along with the animal social structures that entrench that order, such as the Athenian government of his day. Socrates cared not about face-saving opinions, but about epistemic principles that arm us with rationally-justified beliefs about how the world might be in reality. Much later, in the Scientific Revolution, rationalists (which is to say philosophers) in Europe would revive the ancient pagan ideal of reasoning regardless of the impact on faith-based dogmas. Scientists like Isaac Newton developed cognitive methods that were counterintuitive in that they went against the grain of more natural human thinking that’s prone to fallacies and survival-based biases. In addition, he served rational institutions, namely the Royal Society and Cambridge, which rivaled the genes for control over the enlightened individual’s loyalty. Moreover, the findings of those cognitive methods were symbolized using artificial languages such as mathematics and formal logic, which enabled liberated minds to communicate their discoveries without the genetic tragicomedies of territorialism, fight-or-flight responses, hero worship, demagoguery, and the like that are liable to be triggered by rhetoric and metaphors expressed in natural languages.

But what is objective knowledge? Are scientists and other so-called enlightened rationalists as neutral as the indifferent world they study? No, rationalists in this broad sense are partly liberated from animal life but they’re not lost in a limbo; rather, they participate in another, unnatural process which I’m calling artificialization. Objectivity isn’t a purely mechanical, impersonal capacity; indeed, natural processes themselves have aesthetically interpretable ends and effective means, so there are no such capacities. In any case, the search for objective knowledge builds on human animalism and on our so-called enlightenment, on our having transcended our animal past and instincts. We were once wholly slaves to nature and we often behave as if we were still playthings of natural forces. But consciousness and hypersocialization provided escapes, albeit into fantasy worlds that nevertheless empowered us. We saw ourselves as being special because we became aware of the increasing independence of our mental models from the modeled territory, owing to the formers’ ultra-complexity. The inner world of the mind emerged and detached from the natural order—not just metaphysically or abstractly, but psychologically and historically. That liberation was traumatic and so we fled to the fictitious world of our imagination, to a world we could control, and we pretended the outer world was likewise held captive to our mental projections. The rational enterprise is fundamentally another form of escape, a means of living with the burden of hyper-awareness. Instead of settling for cheap, flimsy mental constructions such as our gods, boogeymen, and the panoply of delusions to which we’re prone, and instead of hording divinity in the upper social classes that exercise their superpowers in petty or sadistic projects of self-aggrandizement, we saw that we could usurp God’s ability to create real worlds, as it were. We could democratize divinity, replacing impersonal nature with artificial constructs that would actually exist outside our minds as opposed to being mere projections of imagination and existential longing.

The pragmatic aspect of objectivity is apparent from the familiar historical connections between science, European imperialism, and modern industries. But it’s apparent also from the analytical structure of scientific explanations itself. The existential point of scientific objectivity was paradoxically to achieve a total divorce from our animal side by de-personalizing ourselves, by restraining our desire for instant gratification, scolding our inner child and its playpen, the imagination, and identifying with rational methods. Whereas an animal relies on its hardwired programs or on learned rules-of-thumb for interpreting its environment, an enlightened person codifies and reifies such rules, suspending disbelief and siding with idealized or instrumental formulations of these rules so that the person can occupy a higher cognitive plane. Once removed from natural processes by this identification with rational procedures and institutions, with teleological algorithms, artificial symbols and the like, the animal has become a person with a godlike view from outside of nature—albeit not an overview of what the universe really is, but an engineer’s perspective of how the universe works mechanically from the ground up.

To see what I mean, consider the Hindu parable of the blind men who try to ascertain the nature of an elephant by touching its different body parts. One of the men feels a tusk and infers that the elephant is like a pipe. Another touches the leg and thinks the whole animal is like a tree trunk. Another touches the belly and believes the animal is like a wall. Another touches the tail and says the elephant is like a rope. Finally, another one touches the ear and thinks the elephant is like a hand fan. One of the traditional lessons of this parable is that we can fallaciously overgeneralize and mistake the part for the whole, but this isn’t my point about science. Still, there is a difference between what the universe is in reality, which is what it is in its entirety in so far as all of its parts form a cohesive order, and how inquisitive primates choose to understand the universe with their divisive concepts and models. Scientists can’t possibly understand everything in nature all at once; the word “universe” is a mere placeholder with no content adequate to the task of representing everything that’s out there interacting to produce what we think of as distinct events. We have no name for the universe which gives us power over it by identifying its essence, as it were. So scientists analyze the whole, observing how parts of the world work in isolation, ideally in a laboratory. They then generalize their findings, positing a natural regularity or nomic relation between those fragments, as pictured by their model or theory. It’s as if scientists were the blind men who lack the brainpower to cognize the whole of natural reality, and so they study each part, perhaps hoping that if they cooperate they can combine their partial understandings and arrive at some inkling of what the natural universe in general is. Unfortunately, the deeper we look into nature, the more complexity we find in its parts and so the more futile becomes any such plan for total comprehension. Scientists can barely keep up with advances in their subfields; the notion that anyone could master all the sciences as they currently stand is ludicrous, and there’s still much in the world that isn’t scientifically understood by anyone.

So whatever the scientist’s aspiration might be, the effect of science isn’t the achievement of complete, final understanding of everything in the universe or of the whole of nature. Instead, science allows us to rebuild the whole based on partial, analytical knowledge of how the world works. Suppose scientists discover an extraterrestrial artifact and they have no clue as to the artifact’s function, which is to say they have no understanding of what the object is in reality. Still, they can reverse-engineer the artifact, taking it apart, identifying the materials used to assemble it and certain patterns in how the parts interact with each other. With that limited knowledge of the artifact’s mechanical aspect, scientists might be able to build a replica or else they could apply that knowledge to create something more useful to them, that is, something that works in similar ways to the original but which works towards an end supplied by the scientists’ interests, not the alien’s. There would be no point in replicating the alien technology, since the artifact would be useless without knowledge of what it’s for or without even a shared interest in pursuing that alien goal. Replace the alien artifact with the natural universe and you have some measure of the Baconian position of human science. Of course, nature has no designer; nevertheless, we experience natural processes as having ends and so we’re faced with the choice of whether to apply our piecemeal knowledge of natural mechanisms to the task of reinforcing those ends or to that of adjusting or even reversing them. The choice is to act as stewards of God’s garden, as it were, or as promethean rebels who seek to be divine creators. There are still enclaves of native tribes living as retro-human animals and preserving nature rather than demolishing the wilderness and establishing in its place a technological wonderland built with knowledge of natural mechanisms. But the billions of participants in the science-driven, global monoculture have evidently chosen the promethean, quasi-satanic path.

Existentialism and our Hidden History

History is a narrative that often informs us indirectly about the present state of human affairs, by representing part of our past. Ancient historical narratives were more mythical than fact-based. The New Testament, for example, uses historical details to form an exoteric shell around the Gnostic, transhumanist suspicion that human nature is “fallen” to the extent that we surrender our capacity to transcend the animal life cycle; we must “die” to our natural bodies and be reborn in a glorious, unnatural or “spiritual” form. At any rate, like poetry, the mythical language of such ancient historical narratives is open to endless interpretations, which is to say that such stories are obscure. Josephus’s ancient histories of the Jewish people, written for a Roman audience, aren’t so mythologized but they’re no less propagandistic. By contrast, modern historians strive to avoid the pitfalls of writing highly subjective or biased narratives, and so they seek to analyze and interpret just the facts dug up by archeologists and textual critics. Modern histories are thus influenced by the exoteric presumption about science, which is that science isn’t primarily in the business of artificializing everything that’s wild in the sense of being out of our control, but is just a mode of inquiry for arriving at the objective truth (come what may).

Left out of this development of the telling of history is the existential significance of our evolutionary transition from being animals, which were at one with nature, to being people who are implicitly if not consciously at war with everything nonhuman. What I’ve sketched above is part of our secret history; it’s the story of what it means to be human, which underlies all our endeavours. The significance of our standing between animalism and godhood is hidden and largely unknown or forgotten, because at the root of this purpose that drives us is the trauma of godlike consciousness which we’d rather not relive. We each have our fill of that trauma in our passage from childhood innocence, which approximates the animal state of unknowing, to adult independence. Teen angst, which cultures combat with initiation rituals to distract the teenager with sanctioned, typically delusional pastimes, is the tip of the iceberg of pain that awaits anyone who recognizes the plight entailed by our very form of existence.

In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm argued that citizens of modern democracies are in danger of preferring the comfort of a totalitarian system, to escape the ennui and dehumanization generated by modern societies. In particular, capitalistic exploitation of the worker class and the need to assimilate to an environment run more and more by automated, inhuman machines are supposed to drive civilized persons to savage, authoritarian regimes. At least, this was Fromm’s explanation of the Nazis’ rise to power. A similar analysis could apply to the present degeneration of the Republican Party in the U.S. and to the militant jihadist movement in the Middle East. But Fromm’s analysis is limited. To be sure, capitalism and technology have their drawbacks and these may even contribute to totalitarianism’s appeal, as Fromm shows. But this overlooks what liberal, science-driven societies and savage, totalitarian societies have in common. Both are flights from existential reckoning, as I’ve explained: the one revolves around artificialization (Enlightenment, rationalist values of individual autonomy, which deteriorate until we’re left with the fraud of consumerism), the other around hypersocialization (cult of personality, restoring the sadomasochistic interplay between mythical gods and their worshippers). Fromm ignores the existential effect of the rational enlightenment that brought on modern science, democracy, and capitalism in the first place, the effect being our deification. By deifying ourselves, we prevent our treasured religions from being fiascos and we spare ourselves the horror of living in an inhuman wilderness from which we’re alienated by our hyper-awareness.

We created the modern world to accelerate the rate at which nature is removed from our presence. Contrary to optimists like Steven Pinker, modernity hasn’t fulfilled its promise of democratizing divinity, as I’d put it. Robber barons and more parasitic oligarchs do indeed resort to the older departure of hypersocialization, acting like decadent gods in relation to human slaves instead of focusing their divine creativity on our common enemy, the monstrous wilderness. The internet that trivializes everything it touches and the omnipresence of our high-tech gadgets do infantilize us, turning us into cattle-like consumers instead of unleashing our creativity and training us to be the indomitable warriors that alone could endure the promethean mission. This is because we, being the only gods that exist, are woefully unprepared for our responsibility, having retained our animal heritage in the form of our bodies which infect most of our decisions with natural fears and prejudices. At any rate, the deeper story of the animal that becomes a godlike person to obliterate the source of alienation that’s the curse of any flawed, lonely godling helps explain why we now settle more often for the minor anxieties of living in modern civilization, to avoid the major angst of recognizing the existential importance of what we are.

By way of continuing the excellent conversation started in Lingering: The problem is that we evolved to be targeted, shallow information consumers in unified, deep information environments. As targeted, shallow information consumers we require two things: 1) certain kinds of information hygiene, and 2) certain kinds of background invariance. (1) is already in a state of free-fall, I think, and (2) is on the technological cusp. I don’t see any plausible way of reversing the degradation of either ecological condition, so I see the prospects for traditional philosophical discourses only diminishing. The only way forward that I can see is just being honest to the preposterous enormity of the problem. The thought that rebranding old tools that never delivered back when (1) and (2) were only beginning to erode will suffice now that they are beginning to collapse strikes me as implausible.

The ‘Death of Philosophy’ is something that circulates through arterial underbelly of culture with quite some regularity, a theme periodically goosed whenever high-profile scientific figures bother to express their attitudes on the subject. Scholars in the humanities react the same way stakeholders in any institution react when their authority and privilege are called into question: they muster rationalizations, counterarguments, and pejoratives. They rally troops with whooping war-cries of “positivism” or “scientism,” list all the fields of inquiry where science holds no sway, and within short order the whole question of whether philosophy is dead begins to look very philosophical, and the debate itself becomes evidence that philosophy is alive and well—in some respects at least.

The problem with this pattern, of course, is that the terms like ‘philosophy’ or ‘science’ are so overdetermined that no one ends up talking about the same thing. For physicists like Stephen Hawking or Lawrence Krauss or Neil deGrasse Tyson, the death of philosophy is obvious insofar as the institution has become almost entirely irrelevant to their debates. There are other debates, they understand, debates where scientists are the hapless ones, but they see the process of science as an inexorable, and yes, imperialistic one. More and more debates fall within its purview as the technical capacities of science improve. They presume the institution of philosophy will become irrelevant to more and more debates as this process continues. For them, philosophy has always been something to chase away. Since the presence of philosophers in a given domain of inquiry reliably indicates scientific ignorance to important features of that domain, the relevance of philosophers is directly related to the maturity of a science.

They have history on their side.

There will always be speculation—science is our only reliable provender of theoretical cognition, after all. The question of the death of philosophy cannot be the question of the death of theoretical speculation. The death of philosophy as I see it is the death of a particular institution, a discourse anchored in the tradition of using intentional idioms and metacognitive deliverances to provide theoretical solutions. I think science is killing that philosophy as we speak.

The argument is surprisingly direct, and, I think, fatal to intentionalism, but as always, I would love to hear dissenting opinions.

1) Human cognition only has access to the effects of the systems cognized.

2) The mechanical structure of our environments is largely inaccessible.

3) Cognition exploits systematic correlations—‘cues’—between those effects that can be accessed and the systems engaged to solve for those systems.

4) Cognition is heuristic.

5) Metacognition is a form of cognition.

6) Metacognition also exploits systematic correlations—‘cues’—between those effects that can be accessed and the systems engaged to solve for those systems.

7) Metacognition is also heuristic.

8) Metacognition is the product of adventitious adaptations exploiting onboard information in various reproductively decisive ways.

9) The applicability of that ancestral information to second order questions regarding the nature of experience is highly unlikely.

10) The inability of intentionalism to agree on formulations, let alone resolve issues, evidences as much.

11) Intentional cognition is a form of cognition.

12) Intentional cognition also exploits systematic correlations—‘cues’—between those effects that can be accessed and the systems engaged to solve for those systems.

13) Intentional cognition is also heuristic.

14) Intentional cognition is the product of adventitious adaptations exploiting available onboard information in various reproductively decisive ways.

15) The applicability of that ancestral information to second order questions regarding the nature of meaning is highly unlikely.

16) The inability of intentionalism to agree on formulations, let alone resolve issues, evidences as much.

The problem is basically that the machinery of the brain has no way of tracking its own astronomical dimensionality; it can at best track problem-specific correlational activity, various heuristic hacks. We lack not only the metacognitive bandwidth, but the metacognitive access required to formulate the explananda of neuroscientific investigation.

A curious consequence of the neuroscientific explananda problem is the glaring way it reveals our blindness to ourselves, our medial neglect. The mystery has always been one of understanding constraints, the question of what comes before we do. Plans? Divinity? Nature? Desires? Conditions of possibility? Fate? Mind? We’ve always been grasping for ourselves, I sometimes think, such was the strategic value of metacognitive capacity in linguistic social ecologies. The thing to realize is that grasping, the process of developing the capacity to report on our experience, was bootstapped out of nothing and so comprised the sum of all there was to the ‘experience of experience’ at any given stage of our evolution. Our ancestors had to be both implicitly obvious, and explicitly impenetrable to themselves past various degrees of questioning.

We’re just the next step.

What is it we think we want as our neuroscientific explananda? The various functions of cognition. What are the various functions of cognition? Nobody can seem to agree, thanks to medial neglect, our cognitive insensitivity to our cognizing.

Here’s what I think is a productive way to interpret this conundrum.

Generally what we want is a translation between the manipulative and the communicative. It is the circuit between these two general cognitive modes that forms the cornerstone of what we call scientific knowledge. A finding that cannot be communicated is not a finding at all. The thing is, this—knowledge itself—all functions in the dark. We are effectively black boxes to ourselves. In all math and science—all of it—the understanding communicated is a black box understanding, one lacking any natural understanding of that understanding.

Crazy but true.

What neuroscience is after, of course, is a natural understanding of understanding, to peer into the black box. They want manipulations they can communicate, actionable explanations of explanation. The problem is that they have only heuristic, low-dimensional, cognitive access to themselves: they quite simply lack the metacognitive access required to resolve interpretive disputes, and so remain incapable of formulating the explananda of neuroscience in any consensus commanding way. In fact, a great many remain convinced, on intuitive grounds, that the explananda sought, even if they could be canonically formulated, would necessarily remain beyond the pale of neuroscientific explanation. Heady stuff, given the historical track record of the institutions involved.

People need to understand that the fact of a neuroscientific explananda problem is the fact of our outright ignorance of ourselves. We quite simply lack the information required to decide what it is we’re explaining. What we call ‘philosophy of mind’ is a kind of metacognitive ‘crash space,’ a point where our various tools seem to function, but nothing ever comes of it.

The low-dimensionality of the information begets underdetermination, underdetermination begets philosophy, philosophy begets overdetermination. The idioms involved become ever more plastic, more difficult to sort and arbitrate. Crash space bloats. In a sense, intentional philosophy simply is the neuroscientific explananda problem, the florid consequence of our black box souls.

The thing that can purge philosophy is the thing that can tell you what it is.

[Consolidated, with pretty pictures]

The highest species concept may be that of a terrestrial rational being; however, we shall not be able to name its character because we have no knowledge of non-terrestrial rational beings that would enable us to indicate their characteristic property and so to characterize this terrestrial being among rational beings in general. It seems, therefore, that the problem of indicating the character of the human species is absolutely insoluble, because the solution would have to be made through experience by means of the comparison of two species of rational being, but experience does not offer us this. (Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 225)

Are there alien philosophers orbiting some faraway star, opining in bursts of symbolically articulated smells, or parsing distinctions-without-differences via the clasp of neural genitalia? What would an alien philosophy look like? Do we have any reason to think we might find some of them recognizable? Do the Greys have their own version of Plato? Is there a little green Nietzsche describing little green armies of little green metaphors?

I: The Story Thus Far

A couple years back, I published a piece in Scientia Salon, “Back to Square One: Toward a Post-intentional Future,” that challenged the intentional realist to warrant their theoretical interpretations of the human. What is the nature of the data that drives their intentional accounts? What kind of metacognitive capacity can they bring to bear?

I asked these questions precisely because they cannot be answered. The intentionalist has next to no clue as to the nature, let alone the provenance, of their data, and even less inkling as to the metacognitive resources at their disposal. They have theories, of course, but it is the proliferation of theories that is precisely the problem. Make no mistake: the failure of their project, their consistent inability to formulate their explananda, let alone provide any decisive explanations, is the primary reason why cognitive science devolves so quickly into philosophy.

But if chronic theoretical underdetermination is the embarrassment of intentionalism, then theoretical silence has to be the embarrassment of eliminativism. If meaning realism offers too much in the way of theory—endless, interminable speculation—then meaning skepticism offers too little. Absent plausible alternatives, intentionalists naturally assume intrinsic intentionality is the only game in town. As a result, eliminativists who use intentional idioms are regularly accused of incoherence, of relying upon the very intentionality they’re claiming to eliminate. Of course eliminativists will be quick to point out the question-begging nature of this criticism: They need not posit an alternate theory of their own to dispute intentional theories of the human. But they find themselves in a dialectical quandary, nonetheless. In the absence of any real theory of meaning, they have no substantive way of actually contributing to the domain of the meaningful. And this is the real charge against the eliminativist, the complaint that any account of the human that cannot explain the experience of being human is barely worth the name. [1] Something has to explain intentional idioms and phenomena, their apparent power and peculiarity; If not intrinsic or original intentionality, then what?

My own project, however, pursues a very different brand of eliminativism. I started my philosophical career as an avowed intentionalist, a one-time Heideggerean and Wittgensteinian. For decades I genuinely thought philosophy had somehow stumbled into ‘Square Two.’ No matter what doubts I entertained regarding this or that intentional account, I was nevertheless certain that some intentional account had to be right. I was invested, and even though the ruthless elegance of eliminativism made me anxious, I took comfort in the standard shibboleths and rationalizations. Scientism! Positivism! All theoretical cognition presupposes lived life! Quality before quantity! Intentional domains require intentional yardsticks!

Then, in the course of writing a dissertation on fundamental ontology, I stumbled across a new, privative way of understanding the purported plenum of the first-person, a way of interpreting intentional idioms and phenomena that required no original meaning, no spooky functions or enigmatic emergences—nor any intentional stances for that matter. Blind Brain Theory begins with the assumption that theoretically motivated reflection upon experience co-opts neurobiological resources adapted to far different kinds of problems. As a co-option, we have no reason to assume that ‘experience’ (whatever it amounts to) yields what philosophical reflection requires to determine the nature of experience. Since the systems are adapted to discharge far different tasks, reflection has no means of determining scarcity and so generally presumes sufficiency. It cannot source the efficacy of rules so rules become the source. It cannot source temporal awareness so the now becomes the standing now. It cannot source decisions so decisions (the result of astronomically complicated winner-take-all processes) become ‘choices.’ The list goes on. From a small set of empirically modest claims, Blind Brain Theory provides what I think is the first comprehensive, systematic way to both eliminate and explain intentionality.

In other words, my reasons for becoming an eliminativist were abductive to begin with. I abandoned intentionalism, not because of its perpetual theoretical disarray (though this had always concerned me), but because I became convinced that eliminativism could actually do a better job explaining the domain of meaning. Where old school, ‘dogmatic eliminativists’ argue that meaning must be natural somehow, my own ‘critical eliminativism’ shows how. I remain horrified by this how, but then I also feel like a fool for ever thinking the issue would end any other way. If one takes mediocrity seriously, then we should expect that science will explode, rather than canonize our prescientific conceits, no matter how near or dear.

But how to show others? What could be more familiar, more entrenched than the intentional philosophical tradition? And what could be more disparate than eliminativism? To quote Dewey from Experience and Nature, “The greater the gap, the disparity, between what has become a familiar possession and the traits presented in new subject-matter, the greater is the burden imposed upon reflection” (Experience and Nature, ix). Since the use of exotic subject matters to shed light on familiar problems is as powerful a tool for philosophy as for my chosen profession, speculative fiction, I propose to consider the question of alien philosophy, or ‘xenophilosophy,’ as a way to ease the burden. What I want to show is how, reasoning from robust biological assumptions, one can plausibly claim that aliens—call them ‘Thespians’—would also suffer their own versions of our own (hitherto intractable) ‘problem of meaning.’ The degree to which this story is plausible, I will contend, is the degree to which critical eliminativism deserves serious consideration. It’s the parsimony of eliminativism that makes it so attractive. If one could combine this parsimony with a comprehensive explanation of intentionality, then eliminativism would very quickly cease to be a fringe opinion.

II: Aliens and Philosophy

Of course, the plausibility of humanoid aliens possessing any kind of philosophy requires the plausibility of humanoid aliens. In popular media, aliens are almost always exotic versions of ourselves, possessing their own exotic versions of the capacities and institutions we happen to have. This is no accident. Science fiction is always about the here and now—about recontextualizations of what we know. As a result, the aliens you tend to meet tend to seem suspiciously humanoid, psychologically if not physically. Spock always has some ‘mind’ with which to ‘meld’. To ask the question of alien philosophy, one might complain, is to buy into this conceit, which although flattering, is almost certainly not true.

And yet the environmental filtration of mutations on earth has produced innumerable examples of convergent evolution, different species evolving similar morphologies and functions, the same solutions to the same problems, using entirely different DNA. As you might imagine, however, the notion of interstellar convergence is a controversial one. [2] Supposing the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is one thing—cognition is almost certainly integral to complex life elsewhere in the universe—but we know nothing about the kinds of possible biological intelligences nature permits. Short of actual contact with intelligent aliens, we have no way of gauging how far we can extrapolate from our case. [3] All too often, ignorance of alternatives dupes us into making ‘only game in town assumptions,’ so confusing mere possibility with necessity. But this debate need not worry us here. Perhaps the cluster of characteristics we identify with ‘humanoid’ expresses a high-probability recipe for evolving intelligence—perhaps not. Either way, our existence proves that our particular recipe is on file, that aliens we might describe as ‘humanoid’ are entirely possible.

So we have our humanoid aliens, at least as far as we need them here. But the question of what alien philosophy looks like also presupposes we know what human philosophy looks like. In “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” Wilfred Sellars defines the aim of philosophy as comprehending “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (1). Philosophy famously attempts to comprehend the ‘big picture.’ The problem with this definition is that it overlooks the relationship between philosophy and ignorance, and so fails to distinguish philosophical inquiry from scientific or religious inquiry. Philosophy is invested in a specific kind of ‘big picture,’ one that acknowledges the theoretical/speculative nature of its claims, while remaining beyond the pale of scientific arbitration. Philosophy is better defined, then, as the attempt to comprehend how things in general hang together in general absent conclusive information.

All too often philosophy is understood in positive terms, either as an archive of theoretical claims, or as a capacity to ‘see beyond’ or ‘peer into.’ On this definition, however, philosophy characterizes a certain relationship to the unknown, one where inquiry eschews supernatural authority, and yet lacks the methodological, technical, and institutional resources of science. Philosophy is the attempt to theoretically explain in the absence of decisive warrant, to argue general claims that cannot, for whatever reason, be presently arbitrated. This is why questions serve as the basic organizing principles of the institution, the shared boughs from which various approaches branch and twig in endless disputation. Philosophy is where we ponder the general questions we cannot decisively answer, grapple with ignorances we cannot readily overcome.

III: Evolution and Ecology

A: Thespian Nature

It might seem innocuous enough defining philosophy in privative terms as the attempt to cognize in conditions of information scarcity, but it turns out to be crucial to our ability to make guesses regarding potential alien analogues. This is because it transforms the question of alien philosophy into a question of alien ignorance. If we can guess at the kinds of ignorance a biological intelligence would suffer, then we can guess at the kinds of questions they would ask, as well as the kinds of answers that might occur to them. And this, as it turns out, is perhaps not so difficult as one might suppose.

The reason is evolution. Thanks to evolution, we know that alien cognition would be bounded cognition, that it would consist of ‘good enough’ capacities adapted to multifarious environmental, reproductive impediments. Taking this ecological view of cognition, it turns out, allows us to make a good number of educated guesses. (And recall, plausibility is all that we’re aiming for here).

So for instance, we can assume tight symmetries between the sensory information accessed, the behavioural resources developed, and the impediments overcome. If gamma rays made no difference to their survival, they would not perceive them. Gamma rays, for Thespians, would be unknown unknowns, at least pending the development of alien science. The same can be said for evolution, planetary physics—pretty much any instance of theoretical cognition you can adduce. Evolution assures that cognitive expenditures, the ability to intuit this or that, will always be bound in some manner to some set of ancestral environments. Evolution means that information that makes no reproductive difference makes no biological difference.

An ecological view, in other words, allows us to naturalistically motivate something we might have been tempted to assume outright: original naivete. The possession of sensory and cognitive apparatuses comparable to our own means Thespians will possess a humanoid neglect structure, a pattern of ignorances they cannot even begin to question, that is, pending the development of philosophy. The Thespians would not simply be ignorant of the microscopic and macroscopic constituents and machinations explaining their environments, they would be oblivious to them. Like our own ancestors, they wouldn’t even know they didn’t know.

Theoretical knowledge is a cultural achievement. Our Thespians would have to learn the big picture details underwriting their immediate environments, undergo their own revolutions and paradigm shifts as they accumulate data and refine interpretations. We can expect them to possess an implicit grasp of local physics, for instance, but no explicit, theoretical understanding of physics in general. So Thespians, it seems safe to say, would have their own version of natural philosophy, a history of attempts to answer big picture questions about the nature of Nature in the absence of decisive data.

Not only can we say their nascent, natural theories will be underdetermined, we can also say something about the kinds of problems Thespians will face, and so something of the shape of their natural philosophy. For instance, needing only the capacity to cognize movement within inertial frames, we can suppose that planetary physics would escape them. Quite simply, without direct information regarding the movement of the ground, the Thespians would have no sense of the ground changing position. They would assume that their sky was moving, not their world. Their cosmological musings, in other words, would begin supposing ‘default geocentrism,’ an assumption that would only require rationalization once others, pondering the movement of the skies, began posing alternatives.

One need only read On the Heavens to appreciate how the availability of information can constrain a theoretical debate. Given the imprecision of the observational information at his disposal, for instance, Aristotle’s stellar parallax argument becomes well-nigh devastating. If the earth revolves around the sun, then surely such a drastic change in position would impact our observations of the stars, the same way driving into a city via two different routes changes our view of downtown. But Aristotle, of course, had no decisive way of fathoming the preposterous distances involved—nor did anyone, until Galileo turned his Dutch Spyglass to the sky. [4]

Aristotle, in other words, was victimized not so much by poor reasoning as by various perspectival illusions following from a neglect structure we can presume our Thespians share. And this warrants further guesses. Consider Aristotle’s claim that the heavens and the earth comprise two distinct ontological orders. Of course purity and circles rule the celestial, and of course grit and lines rule the terrestrial—that is, given the evidence of the naked eye from the surface of the earth. The farther away something is, the less information observation yields, the fewer distinctions we’re capable of making, the more uniform and unitary it is bound to seem—which is to say, the less earthly. An inability to map intuitive physical assumptions onto the movements of the firmament, meanwhile, simply makes those movements appear all the more exceptional. In terms of the information available, it seems safe to suppose our Thespians would at least face the temptation of Aristotle’s long-lived ontological distinction.

I say ‘temptation,’ because certainly any number of caveats can be raised here. Heliocentrism, for instance, is far more obvious in our polar latitudes (where the earth’s rotation is as plain as the summer sun in the sky), so there are observational variables that could have drastically impacted the debate even in our own case. Who knows? If it weren’t for the consistent failure of ancient heliocentric models to make correct predictions (the models assumed circular orbits), things could have gone differently in our own history. The problem of where the earth resides in the whole might have been short-lived.

But it would have been a problem all the same, simply because the motionlessness of the earth and the relative proximity of the heavens would have been our (erroneous) default assumptions. Bound cognition suggests our Thespians would find themselves in much the same situation. Their world would feel motionless. Their heavens would seem to consist of simpler stuff following different laws. Any Thespian arguing heliocentrism would have to explain these observations away, argue how they could be moving while standing still, how the physics of the ground belongs to the physics of the sky.

We can say this because, thanks to an ecological view, we can make plausible empirical guesses as to the kinds of information and capacities Thespians would have available. Not only can we predict what would have remained unknown unknowns for them, we can also predict what might be called ‘unknown half-knowns.’ Where unknown unknowns refer to things we can’t even question, unknown half-knowns refer to theoretical errors we cannot perceive simply because the information required to do so remains—you guessed it—unknown unknown.

Think of Plato’s allegory of the cave. The chained prisoners confuse the shadows for everything because, unable to move their heads from side to side, they just don’t ‘know any different.’ This is something we understand so intuitively we scarce ever pause to ponder it: the absence of information or cognitive capacity has positive cognitive consequences. Absent certain difference making differences, the ground will be cognized as motionless rather than moving, and celestial objects will be cognized as simples rather than complex entities in their own right. The ground might as well be motionless and the sky might as well be simple as far as evolution is concerned. Once again, distinctions that make no reproductive difference make no biological difference. Our lack of radio telescope eyes is no genetic or environmental fluke: such information simply wasn’t relevant to our survival.

This means that a propensity to theorize ‘ground/sky dualism’ is built into our biology. This is quite an incredible claim, if you think about it, but each step in our path has been fairly conservative, given that mere plausibility is our aim. We should expect Thespian cognition to be bounded cognition. We should expect them to assume the ground motionless, and the constituents of the sky simple. We can suppose this because we can suppose them to be ignorant of their ignorances, just as we were (and remain). Cognizing the ontological continuity of heaven and earth requires the proper data for the proper interpretation. Given a roughly convergent sensory predicament, it seems safe to say that aliens would be prone as we were to mistake differences in signal with differences in being and so have to discover the universality of nature the same as we did.

But if we can assume our Thespians—or at least some of them—would be prone to misinterpret their environments the way we did, what about themselves? For centuries now humanity has been revising and sharpening its understanding of the cosmos, to the point of drafting plausible theories regarding the first second of creation, and yet we remain every bit as stumped regarding ourselves as Aristotle. Is it fair to say that our Thespians would suffer the same millennial myopia?

Would they have their own version of our interminable philosophy of the soul?

B: Thespian Souls

Given a convergent environmental and biological predicament, we can suppose our Thespians would have at least flirted with something resembling Aristotle’s dualism of heaven and earth. But as I hope to show, the ecological approach pays even bigger theoretical dividends when one considers what has to be the primary domain of human philosophical speculation: ourselves.

With evolutionary convergence, we can presume our Thespians would be eusocial, [5] displaying the same degree of highly flexible interdependence as us. This observation, as we shall see, possesses some startling consequences. Cognitive science is awash in ‘big questions’ (philosophy), among them the problem of what is typically called ‘mindreading,’ our capacity to explain/predict/manipulate one another on the basis of behavioural data alone. How do humans regularly predict the output of something so preposterously complicated as human brains on the basis of so little information?

The question is equally applicable to our Thespians, who would, like humans, possess formidable socio-cognitive capacities. As potent as those capacities were, however, we can also suppose they would be bounded, and—here’s the thing—radically so. When one Thespian attempts to cognize another, they, like us, will possess no access whatsoever to the biological systems actually driving behaviour. This means that Thespians, like us, would need to rely on so-called ‘fast and frugal heuristics’ to solve each other. [6] That is to say they would possess systems geared to the detection of specific information structures, behavioural precursors that reliably correlate, as opposed to cause, various behavioural outcomes. In other words, we can assume that Thespians will possess a suite of powerful, special purpose tools adapted to solving systems in the absence of causal information.

Evolutionary convergence means Thespians would understand one another (as well as other complex life) in terms that systematically neglect their high-dimensional, biological nature. As suggestive as this is, things get really interesting when we consider the way Thespians pose the same basic problem of computational intractability (the so-called ‘curse of dimensionality’) to themselves as they do to their fellows. The constraints pertaining to Thespian social cognition, in other words, also apply to Thespian metacognition, particularly with respect to complexity. Each Thespian, after all, is just another Thespian, and so poses the same basic challenge to metacognition as they pose to social cognition. By sheer dint of complexity, we can expect the Thespian brain would remain opaque to itself as such. This means something that will turn out to be quite important: namely that Thespian self-understanding, much like ours, would systematically neglect their high-dimensional, biological nature. [7]

This suggests that life, and intelligent life in particular, would increasingly stand out as a remarkable exception as the Thespians cobbled together a mechanical understanding of nature. Why so? Because it seems a stretch to suppose they would possess a capacity so extravagant as accurate ‘meta-metacognition.’ Lacking such a capacity would strand them with disparate families of behaviours and entities, each correlated with different intuitions, which would have to be recognized as such before any taxonomy could be made. Some entities and behaviours could be understood in terms of mechanical conditions, while others could not. So as extraordinary as it sounds, it seems plausible to think that our Thespians, in the course of their intellectual development, would stumble across some version of their own ‘fact-value distinction.’ All we need do is posit a handful of ecological constraints.

But of course things aren’t nearly so simple. Metacognition may solve for Thespians the same ‘fast and frugal’ manner as social cognition, but it entertains a far different relationship to its putative target. Unlike social cognition, which tracks functionally distinct systems (others) via the senses, metacognition is literally hardwired to the systems it tracks. So even though metacognition faces the same computational challenge as social cognition—cognizing a Thespian—it requires a radically different set of tools to do so. [8]

It serves to recall that evolved intelligence is environmentally oriented intelligence. Designs thrive or vanish depending on their ability to secure the resources required to successfully reproduce. Because of this, we can expect that all intelligent aliens, not just Thespians, would possess high–dimensional cognitive relations with their environments. Consider our own array of sensory modalities, how the environmental here and now ‘hogs bandwidth.’ The degree to which your environment dominates your experience is the degree to which you’re filtered to solve your environments. We live in the world simply because we’re distilled from it, the result of billions of years of environmental tuning. We can presume our aliens would be thoroughly ‘in the world’ as well, that the bulk of their cognitive capacities would be tasked with the behavioural management of their immediate environments for similar evolutionary reasons.

Since all cognitive capacities are environmentally selected, we can expect whatever basic metacognitive capacity the Thespians possess will also be geared to the solution of environmental problems. Thespian metacognition will be an evolutionary artifact of getting certain practical matters right in certain high-impact environments, plain and simple. Add to this the problem of computational intractability (which metacognition shares with social cognition) and it becomes almost certain that Thespian metacognition would consist of multiple fast and frugal heuristics (because solving on the basis of scarce data requires less, not more, parameters geared to particular information structures to be effective). [9] We have very good reason to suspect the Thespian brain would access and process its own structure and dynamics in ways that would cut far more corners than joints. As is the case with social cognition, it would belong to Thespian nature to neglect Thespian nature—to cognize the cognizer as something other, something geared to practical contexts.

Thespians would cognize themselves and their fellows via correlational, as opposed to causal, heuristic cognition. The curse of dimensionality necessitates it. It’s hard, I think, to overstate the impact this would have on an alien species attempting to cognize their nature. What it means is that the Thespians would possess a way to engineer systematically efficacious comportments to themselves, each other, even their environments, without being able to reverse engineer those relationships. What it means, in other words, is that a great deal of their knowledge would be impenetrable—tacit, implicit, automatic, or what have you. Thespians, like humans, would be able to solve a great many problems regarding their relations to themselves, their fellows, and their world without possessing the foggiest idea of how. The ignorance here is structural ignorance, as opposed to the ignorance, say, belonging to original naivete. One would expect the Thespians would be ignorant of their nature absent the cultural scaffolding required to unravel the mad complexity of their brains. But the problem isn’t simply that Thespians would be blind to their inner nature; they would also be blind to this blindness. Since their metacognitive capacities consistently yield the information required to solve in practical, ancestral contexts, the application of those capacities to the theoretical question of their nature would be doomed from the outset. Our Thespians would consistently get themselves wrong.

Is it fair to say they would be amazed by their incapacity, the way our ancestors were? [10] Maybe—who knows. But we could say, given the ecological considerations adduced here, that they would attempt to solve themselves assuming, at least initially, that they could be solved, despite the woefully inadequate resources at their disposal.

In other words, our Thespians would very likely suffer what might be called theoretical anosognosia. In clinical contexts, anosognosia applies to patients who, due to some kind of pathology, exhibit unawareness of sensory or cognitive deficits. Perhaps the most famous example is Anton-Babinski Syndrome, where physiologically blind patients persistently claim they can in fact see. This is precisely what we could expect from our Thespians vis a vis their ‘inner eye.’ The function of metacognitive systems is to engineer environmental solutions via the strategic uptake of limited amounts of information, not to reverse engineer the nature of the brain it belongs to. Repurposing these systems means repurposing systems that generally take the adequacy of their resources for granted. When we catch our tongue at Christmas dinner, we just do; we ‘implicitly assume’ the reliability our metacognitive capacity to filter our speech. It seems wildly implausible to suppose that theoretically repurposing these systems would magically engender a new biological capacity to automatically assess the theoretical viability of the resources available. It stands to reason, rather, that we would assume sufficiency the same as before, only to find ourselves confounded after the fact.

Of course, saying that our Thespians suffer theoretical anosognosia amounts to saying they would suffer chronic, theoretical hallucinations. And once again, ecological considerations provide a way to guess at the kinds of hallucinations they might suffer.

Dualism is perhaps the most obvious. Aristotle, recall, drew his conclusions assuming the sufficiency of the information available. Contrasting the circular, ageless, repeating motion of the stars and planets to the linear riot of his immediate surroundings, he concluded that the celestial and the terrestrial comprised two distinct ontological orders governed by different natural laws, a dichotomy that prevailed some 1800 years. The moral is quite clear: Where and how we find ourselves within a system determines what kind of information we can access regarding that system, including information pertaining to the sufficiency of that information. Lacking instrumentation, Aristotle simply found himself in a position where the ontological distinction between heaven and earth appeared obvious. Unable to cognize the limits imposed by his position within the observed systems, he had no idea that he was simply cognizing one unified system from two radically different perspectives, one too near, the other too far.

Trapped in a similar structural bind vis a vis themselves, our navel-gazing Thespians would almost certainly mistake properties pertaining to neglect with properties pertaining to what is, distortions in signal, for facts of being. Once again, since the posits possessing those properties belong to correlative cognitive systems, they would resist causal cognition. No matter how hard Thespian philosophers tried, they would find themselves unable to square their apparent functions with the machinations of nature more generally. Correlative functions would appear autonomous, as somehow operating outside the laws of nature. Embedded in their environment in a manner that structurally precludes accurately intuiting that embedment, our alien philosophers would conceive themselves as something apart, ontologically distinct. Thespian philosophy would have its own versions of ‘souls’ or ‘minds’ or ‘Dasein’ or ‘a priori’ or what have you—a disparate order somehow ‘accounting’ for various correlative cognitive modes, by anchoring the bare cognition of constraint in posits (inherited or not) rationalized on the back of Thespian fashion.

Dualisms, however, require that manifest continuities be explained, or explained away. Lacking any ability to intuit the actual machinations binding them to their environments, Thespians would be forced to rely on the correlative deliverances of metacognition to cognize their relation to their world—doing so, moreover, without the least inkling of as much. Given theoretical anosognosia (the inability to intuit metacognitive incapacity), it stands to reason that they would advance any number of acausal versions of this relationship, something similar to ‘aboutness,’ and so reap similar bewilderment. Like us, they would find themselves perpetually unable to decisively characterize ‘knowledge of the world.’ One could easily imagine the perpetually underdetermined nature of these accounts convincing some Thespian philosophers that the deliverances of metacognition comprised the whole of existence (engendering Thespian idealism), or were at least the most certain, most proximate thing, and therefore required the most thorough and painstaking examination (engendering a Thespian phenomenology)…

Could this be right?

This story is pretty complex, so it serves to review the modesty of our working assumptions. The presumption of interstellar evolutionary convergence warranted assuming that Thespian cognition, like human cognition, would be bounded, a complex bundle of ‘kluges,’ heuristic solutions to a wide variety of ecological problems. The fact that Thespians would have to navigate both brute and intricate causal environments, troubleshoot both inorganic and organic contexts, licenses the claim that Thespian cognition would be bifurcated between causal systems and a suite of correlational systems, largely consisting of ‘fast and frugal heuristics,’ given the complexity and/or the inaccessibility of the systems involved. This warranted claiming that both Thespian social cognition and metacognition would be correlational, heuristic systems adapted to solve very complicated ecologies on the basis of scarce data. This posed the inevitable problem of neglect, the fact that Thespians would have no intuitive way of assessing the adequacy of their metacognitive deliverances once they applied them to theoretical questions. This let us suppose theoretical anosognosia, the probability that Thespian philosophers would assume the sufficiency of radically inadequate resources—systematically confuse artifacts of heuristic neglect for natural properties belonging to extraordinary kinds. And this let us suggest they would have their own controversies regarding mind-body dualism, intentionality, even knowledge of the external world.

As with Thespian natural philosophy, any number of caveats can be raised at any number of junctures, I’m sure. What if, for instance, Thespians were simply more pragmatic, less inclined to suffer speculation in the absence of decisive application? Such a dispositional difference could easily tilt the balance in favour of skepticism, relegating the philosopher to the ghettos of Thespian intellectual life. Or what if Thespians were more impressed by authority, to the point where reflection could only be interrogated refracted through the lens of purported revelation? There can be no doubt that my account neglects countless relevant details. Questions like these chip away at the intuition that the Thespians, or something like them, might be real…

Luckily, however, this doesn’t matter. The point of posing the problem of xenophilosophy wasn’t so much to argue that Thespians are out there, as it was, strangely enough, to recognize them in here…

After all, this exercise in engineering alien philosophy is at once an exercise in reverse-engineering our own. Blind Brain Theory only needs Thespians to be plausible to demonstrate its abductive scope, the fact that it can potentially explain a great many perplexing things on nature’s dime alone.

So then what have we found? That traditional philosophy something best understood as… what?

A kind of cognitive pathology?

A disease?

IV: Conclusion

It’s worth, I think, spilling a few words on the subject of that damnable word, ‘experience.’ Dogmatic eliminativism is a religion without gods or ceremony, a relentlessly contrarian creed. And this has placed it in the untenable dialectical position of apparently denying what is most obvious. After all, what could be more obvious than experience?

What do I mean by ‘experience’? Well, the first thing I generally think of is Holocaust, and the palpable power of the Survivor.

Blind Brain Theory paints a theoretical portrait wherein experience remains the most obvious thing in practical, correlational ecologies, while becoming a deeply deceptive, largely chimerical artifact in high-dimensional, causal ones. We have no inkling of tripping across ecological boundaries when we propose to theoretically examine the character of experience. What was given to deliberative metacognition in some practical context (ruminating upon a social gaffe, say) is now simply given to deliberative metacognition in an artificial one—‘philosophical reflection.’ The difference between applications is nothing if not extreme, and yet conclusions are drawn assuming sufficiency, again and again and again—for millennia.

Think of the difference between your experience and your environment, say, in terms of the difference between concentrating on a mental image of your house and actually observing it. Think of how few questions the mental image can answer compared to the visual image. Where’s the grass the thickest? Is there birdshit on the lane? Which branch comes closest to the ground? These questions just don’t make sense in the context of mental imagery.

Experience, like mental imagery, is something that only answers certain questions. Of course, the great, even cosmic irony is that this is the answer that has been staring us in the fucking face all along. Why else would experience remain an enduring part of philosophy, the institution that asks how things in the most general sense hang together in the most general sense without any rational hope of answer?

Experience is obvious—it can be nothing but obvious. The palpable power of the Holocaust Survivor is, I think, as profound a testament to the humanity of experience as there is. Their experience is automatically our own. Even philosophers shut up! It correlates us in a manner as ancient as our species, allows us to engineer the new. At the same time, it cannot but dupe and radically underdetermine our ancient, Sisyphean ambition to peer into the soul through the glass of the soul. As soon as we turn our rational eye to experience in general, let alone the conditions of possibility of experience, we run afoul illusions, impossible images that, in our diseased state, we insist are real.

This is what our creaking bookshelves shout in sum. The narratives, they proclaim experience in all its obvious glory, while treatise after philosophical treatise mutters upon the boundary of where our competence quite clearly comes to an end. Where we bicker.

Christ.

At least we have reason to believe that philosophers are not alone in the universe.

Notes

[1] The eliminativism at issue here is meaning eliminativism, and not, as Stich, Churchland, and many others have advocated, psychological eliminativism. But where meaning eliminativism clearly entails psychological eliminativism, it is not at all obvious the psychological eliminativism entails meaning eliminativism. This was why Stich found himself so perplexed by the implications of reference (see his, Deconstructing the Mind, especially Chapter 1). To assume that folk psychology is a mistaken theory is to assume that folk psychology is representational, something that is true or false of the world. The critical eliminativism espoused here suffers no such difficulty, but at the added cost of needing to explain meaning in general, and not simply commonsense human psychology.

[2] See Kathryn Denning’s excellent, “Social Evolution in Cosmic Context,” http://www.nss.org/resources/library/spacepolicy/Cosmos_and_Culture_NASA_SP4802.pdf

[3] Nicolas Rescher, for instance, makes hash of the time-honoured assumption that aliens would possess a science comparable to our own by cataloguing the myriad contingencies of the human institution. See Finitude, 28, or Unknowability, “Problems of Alien Cognition,” 21-39.

[4] Stellar parallax, on this planet at least, was not measured until 1838.

[5] In the broad sense proposed by Wilson in The Social Conquest of the Earth.

[6] This amounts to taking a position in the mindreading debate that some theorists would find problematic, particularly those skeptical of modularity and/or with representationalist sympathies. Since the present account provides a parsimonious means of explaining away the intuitions informing both positions, it would be premature to engage the debate regarding either at this juncture. The point is to demonstrate what heuristic neglect, as a theoretical interpretative tool, allows us to do.

[7] The representationalist would cry foul at this point, claim the existence of some coherent ‘functional level’ accessible to deliberative metacognition (the mind) allows for accurate and exhaustive description. But once again, since heuristic neglect explains why we’re so prone to develop intuitions along these lines, we can sidestep this debate as well. Nobody knows what the mind is, or whatever it is they take themselves to be describing. The more interesting question is one of whether a heuristic neglect account can be squared with the research pertaining directly to this field. I suspect so, but for the interim I leave this to individuals more skilled and more serious than myself to investigate.

[8] In the literature, accounts that claim metacognitive functions for mindreading are typically called ‘symmetrical theories.’ Substantial research supports the claim that metacognitive reporting involves social cognition. See Carruthers, “How we know our own minds: the relationship between mindreading and metacognition,” for an outstanding review.

[9] Gerd Gigerenzer and the Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition Research Group have demonstrated that simple heuristics are often far more effective than even optimization methods possessing far greater resources. “As the amount of data available to make predictions in an environment shrinks, the advantage of simple heuristics over complex algorithms grows” (Hertwig and Hoffrage, “The Research Agenda,” Simple Heuristics in a Social World, 23).

[10] “Quid est enim tempus? Quis hoc facile breuiterque explicauerit? Quis hoc ad uerbum de illo proferendum uel cogitatione comprehenderit? Quid autem familiarius et notius in loquendo commemoramus quam tempus? Et intellegimus utique cum id loquimur, intellegimus etiam cum alio loquente id audimus. Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quærat, scio; si quærenti explicare uelim, nescio.”

Perhaps it’s an ex-smoker thing, the fact that I was a continentalist myself for so many years. Either way, I generally find continental philosophical forays into scientific environs little more than exercises in conceptual vanity (see “Reactionary Atheism: Hagglund, Derrida, and Nooconservatism“, “Zizek, Hollywood, and the Disenchantment of Continental Philosophy,” or “Life as Perpetual Motion Machine: Adrian Johnston and the Continental Credibility Crisis“). This is particularly true of Catherine Malabou, who, as far as I can tell, is primarily concerned with cherry-picking those findings that metaphorically resonate with certain canonical continental philosophical themes. For me, her accounts merely demonstrate the deepening conceptual poverty of the continental tradition, a poverty dressed up in increasingly hollow declarations of priority. This is true of “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance,” but with a crucial twist.

In this piece, she takes continentalism (or ‘philosophy,’ as she humbly terms it) as her target, charging it with a pervasive conceptual prejudice. She wants to show how recent developments in epigenetics and cloning reveal what she terms the “antibiological bias of philosophy.” This bias is old news, of course (especially in these quarters), but Malabou’s acknowledgement is heartening nonetheless, at least to those, such as myself, who think the continental penchant for conceptual experimentation is precisely what contemporary cognitive science requires.

“Contemporary philosophy,” she claims, “bears the marks of a primacy of symbolic life over biological life that has not been criticized, nor deconstructed.” Her predicate is certainly true—continentalism is wholly invested in theoretical primacy of intentionality—but her subsequent modifier simply exemplifies the way we humans are generally incapable of hearing criticisms outside our own. After all, it’s the quasi-religious insistence on the priority of the intentional, the idea that armchair speculation on the nature of the intentional trumps empirical findings in this or that way, that has rendered continentalism a laughing-stock in the sciences.

But outgroup criticisms are rarely heard. Whatever ‘othering the other’ consists in, it clearly involves not only their deracination, but their derationalization, the denial of any real critical insight. This is arguably what makes the standard continental shibboleths of ‘scientism,’ ‘positivism,’ and the like so rhetorically effective. By identifying an interlocutor as an outgroup competitor, you assure your confederates will be incapable of engaging him or her rationally. Continentalists generally hear ideology instead of cogent criticism. The only reason Malabou can claim that the ‘primacy of the symbolic over the biological’ has been ‘neither criticized nor deconstructed’ is simply that so very few within her ingroup have been able to hear the outgroup chorus, as thunderous as it has been.

But Malabou is a party member, and to her credit, she has done anything but avert her eyes from the scientifically mediated revolution sweeping the ground from beneath all our feet. One cannot dwell in foreign climes without suffering some kind of transformation of perspective. And at long last she has found her way to the crucial question, the one which threatens to overthrow her own discursive institution, the problem of what she terms the “unquestioned splitting of the concept of life.”

She takes care, however, to serve up the problem with various appeals to continental vanity—to hide the poison in some candy, you might say.

It must be said, the biologists are of little help with this problem. Not one has deemed it necessary to respond to the philosophers or to efface the assimilation of biology to biologism. It seems inconceivable that they do not know Foucault, that they have never encountered the word biopolitical. Fixated on the two poles of ethics and evolutionism, they do not think through the way in which the science of the living being could—and from this point on should—unsettle the equation between biological determination and political normalization. The ethical shield with which biological discourse is surrounded today does not suffice to define the space of a theoretical disobedience to accusations of complicity among the science of the living being, capitalism, and the technological manipulation of life.

I can remember finding ignorances like these ‘inconceiveable,’ thinking that if only scientists would ‘open their eyes (read so and so) they would see (their conceptually derivative nature). But why should any biologist read Foucault, or any other continentalist for that matter? What distinguishes continental claims to the priority of their nebulous domain over the claims of say, astrology, particularly when the dialectical strategies deployed are identical? Consider what Manly P. Hall has to say in The Story of Astrology:

Materialism in the present century has perverted the application of knowledge from its legitimate ends, thus permitting so noble a science as astronomy to become a purely abstract and comparatively useless instrument which can contribute little more than tables of meaningless figures to a world bankrupt in spiritual, philosophical, and ethical values. The problem as to whether space is a straight or a curved extension may intrigue a small number of highly specialized minds, but the moral relationship between man and space and the place of the human soul in the harmony of the spheres is vastly more important to a world afflicted with every evil that the flesh is heir to. 8, Hall, Manly P. The Story of Astrology: The Belief in the Stars as a Factor in Human Progress. Cosimo, Inc., 2005.

Sound familiar? If you’ve read any amount of continental philosophy it should. One can dress up the relation between the domains differently, but the shape remains the same. Where astronomy is merely ontic or ideological or technical or what have you, astrology ministers to the intentional realities of lived life. The continentalist would cry foul, of course, but the question isn’t so much one of what they actually believe as one of how they appear. Insofar as they place various, chronically underdetermined speculative assertions before the institutional apparatuses of science, they sound like astrologers. Their claims of conceptual priority, not surprisingly, are met with incredulity and ridicule.

The fact that biologists neglect Foucault is no more inconceivable than the fact that astronomers neglect Hall. In science, credibility is earned. Everybody but everybody thinks they’ve won the Magical Belief Lottery. The world abounds with fatuous, theoretical claims. Some claims enable endless dispute (and, for a lucky few, tenure), while others enable things like smartphones, designer babies, and the detonation of thermonuclear weapons. Since there’s no counting the former, the scientific obsession with the latter is all but inevitable. Speculation is cheap. Asserting the primacy of the symbolic over the natural on speculative grounds is precisely the reason why scientists find continentalism so bizarre.

Akin to astrology.

Now historically, at least, continentalists have consistently externalized the problem, blaming their lack of outgroup credibility on speculative goats like the ‘metaphysics of presence,’ ‘identity thinking,’ or some other combination of ideology and ontology. Malabou, to her credit, wants ‘philosophy’ to partially own the problem, to see the parsing of the living into symbolic and biological as something that must itself be argued. She offers her quasi-deconstructive observations on recent developments in epigenetics and cloning as a demonstration of that need, as examples of the ways the new science is blurring the boundaries between the intentional and the natural, the symbolic and the biological, and therefore outrunning philosophical critiques that rely upon their clear distinction.

This blurring is important because Malabou, like most all continentalists, fears for the future of the political. Reverse engineering biology amounts to placing biology within the purview of engineering, of rendering all nature plastic to human whim, human scruple, human desire. ‘Philosophy’ may come first, but (for reasons continentalists are careful to never clarify) only science seems capable of doing any heavy lifting with their theories. One need only trudge the outskirts of the vast swamp of neuroethics, for instance, to get a sense of the myriad conundrums that await us on the horizon.

And this leads Malabou to her penultimate statement, the one which I sincerely hope ignites soul-searching and debate within continental philosophy, lest the grand old institution become indistinguishable from astrology altogether.

And how might the return of these possibilities offer a power of resistance? The resistance of biology to biopolitics? It would take the development of a new materialism to answer these questions, a new materialism asserting the coincidence of the symbolic and the biological. There is but one life, one life only.

I entirely agree, but I find myself wondering what Malabou actually means by ‘new materialism.’ If she means, for instance, that the symbolic must be reduced to the natural, then she is referring to nothing less than the long-standing holy grail of contemporary cognitive science. Until we can understand the symbolic in terms continuous with our understanding of the natural world, it’s doomed to remain a perpetually underdetermined speculative domain—which is to say, one void of theoretical knowledge.

But as her various references to the paradoxical ‘gap’ between the symbolic and the biological suggest, she takes the irreducibility of the symbolic as axiomatic. The new materialism she’s advocating is one that unifies the symbolic and the biological, while somehow respecting the irreducibility of the symbolic. She wants a kind of ‘type-B materialism,’ one that asserts the ontological continuity of the symbolic and the biological, while acknowledging their epistemic disparity or conceptual distinction. David Chalmers, who coined the term, characterizes the problem faced by such materialisms as follows:

I was attracted to type-B materialism for many years myself, until I came to the conclusion that it simply cannot work. The basic reason for this is simple. Physical theories are ultimately specified in terms of structure and dynamics: they are cast in terms of basic physical structures, and principles specifying how these structures change over time. Structure and dynamics at a low level can combine in all sort of interesting ways to explain the structure and function of high-level systems; but still, structure and function only ever adds up to more structure and function. In most domains, this is quite enough, as we have seen, as structure and function are all that need to be explained. But when it comes to consciousness, something other than structure and function needs to be accounted for. To get there, an explanation needs a further ingredient. “Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness.”

Substitute ‘symbolic’ for ‘consciousness’ in this passage, and Malabou’s challenge becomes clear: science, even in the cases of epigenetics and cloning, deals with structure and dynamics—mechanisms. As it stands we lack any consensus commanding way of explaining the symbolic in mechanistic terms. So long as the symbolic remains ‘irreducible,’ or mechanistically inexplicable, assertions of ontological continuity amount to no more than that, bald assertions. Short some plausible account of that epistemic difference in ontologically continuous terms, type-B materialisms amount to little more than wishing upon traditional stars.

It’s here where we can see Malabou’s institutional vanity most clearly. Her readings of epigenetics and cloning focus on the apparently symbolic features of the new biology—on the ways in which organisms resemble texts. “The living being does not simply perform a program,” she writes. “If the structure of the living being is an intersection between a given and a construction, it becomes difficult to establish a strict border between natural necessity and self-invention.”

Now the first, most obvious criticisms of her reading is that she is the proverbial woman with the hammer, pouring through the science, seeing symbolic nails at every turn. Are epigenetics and cloning intrinsically symbolic? Do they constitute a bona fide example of a science beyond structure and dynamics?

Certainly not. Science can reverse engineer our genetic nature precisely because our genetic nature is a feat of evolutionary engineering. This kind of theoretical cognition is so politically explosive precisely because it is mechanical, as opposed to ‘symbolic.’ Researchers now know how some of these little machines work, and as result they can manipulate conditions in ways that illuminate the function of other little machines. And the more they learn, the more mechanical interventions they can make, the more plastic (to crib one of Malabou’s favourite terms) human nature becomes. The reason these researchers hold so much of our political future in their hands is precisely because their domain (unlike Malabou’s) is mechanical.

For them, Malabou’s reading of their fields would be obviously metaphoric. Malabou’s assumption that she is seeing the truth of epigenetics and cloning, that they have to be textual in some way rather than lending themselves to certain textual (deconstructive) metaphors, would strike them as comically presumptuous. The blurring that she declares ontological, they would see as epistemic. To them, she’s just another humanities scholar scrounging for symbolic ammunition, for confirmation of her institution’s importance in a time of crisis. Malabou, like Manly P. Hall, can rationalize this dismissal in any number of ways–this goes without saying. Her problem, like Hall’s, is that only her confederates will agree with her. She has no real way of prosecuting her theoretical case across ingroup boundaries, and so no way of recouping any kind of transgroup cognitive legitimacy–no way of reversing the slow drift of ‘philosophy’ to the New Age section of the book.

The fact is Malabou begins by presuming the answer to the very question she claims to be tackling: What is the nature of the symbolic? To acknowledge that continental philosophy is a speculative enterprise is to acknowledge that continental philosophy has solved nothing. The nature of the symbolic, accordingly, remains an eminently open question (not to mention an increasingly empirical one). The ‘irreducibility’ of the symbolic order is no more axiomatic than the existence of God.

If the symbolic were, say, ecological, the product of evolved capacities, then we can safely presume that the symbolic is heuristic, part of some regime for solving problems on the cheap. If this were the case, then Malabou is doing nothing more than identifying the way different patterns in epigenetics and cloning readily cue a specialized form of symbolic cognition. The fact that symbolic cognition is cued does not mean that epigenetics and cloning are ‘intrinsically symbolic,’ only that they readily cue symbolic cognition. Given the vast amounts of information neglected by symbolic cognition, we can presume its parochialism, its dependence on countless ecological invariants, namely, the causal structure of the systems involved. Given that causal information is the very thing symbolic cognition has adapted to neglect, we can presume that its application to nature would prove problematic. This raises the likelihood that Malabou is simply anthropomorphizing epigenetics and cloning in an institutionally gratifying way.

So is the symbolic heuristic? It certainly appears to be. At every turn, cognition makes due with ‘black boxes,’ relying on differentially reliable cues to leverage solutions. We need ways to think outcomes without antecedents, to cognize consequences absent any causal factors, simply because the complexities of our environments (be they natural, social, or recursive) radically outrun our capacity to intuit. The bald fact is that the machinery of things is simply too complicated to cognize on the evolutionary cheap. Luckily, nature requires nothing as extravagant as mechanical knowledge of environmental systems to solve those systems in various, reproductively decisive ways. You don’t need to know the mechanical details of your environments to engineer them. So long as those details remain relatively fixed, you can predict/explain/manipulate them via those correlated systematicities you can access.

We genuinely need things like symbolic cognition, regimes of ecologically specific tools, for the same reason we need scientific enterprises like biology: because the machinery of most everything is either too obscure or too complex. The information we access provides us cues, and since we neglect all information pertaining to what those cues relate us to, we’re convinced that cues are all that is the case. And since causal cognition cannot duplicate the cognitive shorthand of the heuristics involved, they appear to comprise an autonomous order, to be something supernatural, or to use the prophylactic jargon of intentionalism, ‘irreducible.’ And since the complexities of biology render these heuristic systems indispensable to the understanding of biology, they appear to be necessary, to be ‘conditions of possibility’ of any cognition whatsoever. We are natural in such a way that we cannot cognize ourselves as natural, and so cognize ourselves otherwise. Since this cognitive incapacity extends to our second-order attempts to cognize our cognizing, we double down, metacognize this ‘otherwise’ in otherwise terms. Far from any fractionate assembly of specialized heuristic tools, symbolic cognition seems to stand not simply outside, but prior the natural order.

Thus the insoluble conundrums and interminable disputations of Malabou’s ‘philosophy.’

Heuristics and metacognitive neglect provide a way to conceive symbolic cognition in wholly natural terms. Blind Brain Theory, in other words, is precisely the ‘new materialism’ that Malabou seeks. The problem is that it seems to answer Malabou’s question regarding political in the negative, to suggest that even the concept of ‘resistance’ belongs to a bygone and benighted age. To understand the coincidence of the symbolic and biological, the intentional and the natural, one must understand the biology of philosophical reflection, and the way we were evolutionarily doomed to think ourselves something quite distinct from what we in fact are (see “Alien Philosophy,” part one and two). One must turn away from the old ways, the old ideas, and dare to look hard at the prospect of a post-intentional future. The horrific prospect.

Odds are we were wrong folks. The assumption that science, the great killer of traditional cognitive traditions, will make an exception for us, somehow redeem our traditional understanding of ourselves is becoming increasingly tendentious. We simply do not have the luxury of taking our cherished, traditional conceits for granted at least not anymore. The longer continental philosophy pretends to be somehow immune, or even worse, to somehow come first, the more it will come to resemble those traditional discourses that, like astrology, refuse to relinquish their ancient faith in abject speculation.

I’m always amazed at how alien words feel after taking a break from writing, almost as if they’ve used the time to talk amongst themselves, rehearse their grievances, then set about organizing various work-to-rule actions. Plant shut-downs never fail to unnerve me with the possibility that I’ll never get things back up and running.

But I need to get the plant back up and running, and quickly too, because… my UK publisher has finally come to terms on the fourth book.

I had intended on chronicling what’s been going on behind the scenes these past months, the ups and downs, the false starts, the miscommunications, but now I’m really not sure what purpose would be served outside prolonging the prolonging. The important thing is that The Great Ordeal will be published next year, and The Unholy Consult will be published the year following. The exact dates still need to be worked out between my US and UK publishers–I’ll pass those along as soon as I know them.

Why has the book been split? For the same reason The Prince of Nothing was split into a trilogy many moons ago: not because of greedy publishers or a greedy me, but because the story proved longer in the execution than in the planning, plain and simple.

In the meantime, “Crash Space” has just come out in the esteemed Midwest Studies in Philosophy, part of an entire issue dedicated to the relationship between philosophy and science fiction. I’ve yet to receive my gratis issue, but I already know from reading the contributions by Eric Schwitzgebel, Pete Mandik, and Helen de Cruz that it is well worth perusing. If you don’t happen to have a visit to the library in your near future, you can find the archived draft version of “Crash Space” here. Let me know what you think!

Along with Taylor Webb, Michael Graziano has published an updated version of what used to be his Attention Schema Theory of Consciousness, but is now called the Attention Schema Theory of Subjective Awareness. For me, it epitomizes the kinds of theoretical difficulties neuroscientists face in their attempts to define their explananda, why, as Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman note in their Preface to The Future of the Brain, “[a]t present, neuroscience is a collection of facts, still awaiting an overarching theory” (xi).

On Blind Brain Theory, the ‘neuroscientific explananda problem’ is at least twofold. For one, the behavioural nature of cognitive functions raises a panoply of interpretative issues. Ask any sociologist: finding consensus commanding descriptions of human behaviour is far more difficult than finding consensus commanding descriptions of, say, organ behaviour. For another, the low-dimensional nature of  conscious experience raises a myriad of interpretative conundrums in addition to the problems of interpretative underdetermination facing behaviour.  Ask any psychologist: finding consensus commanding descriptions of conscious phenomena has hitherto proven impossible. As William Uttal notes in The New Phrenology: “There is probably nothing that divides psychologists of all stripes, more than the inadequacies and ambiguities of our efforts to define mind, consciousness, and the enormous variety of mental events and phenomena” (90). At least with behaviour, publicity allows us to anchor our theoretical interpretations in revisable data; experience, however, famously affords us no such luxury. So where the problem of behavioural underdetermination seems potentially soluble given enough elbow grease (one can imagine continued research honing canonical categorizations of behavioural functions as more and more information is accumulated), the problem of experiential underdetermination out and out baffles. We scarce know where to begin. Some see conscious experience as a natural phenomena possessing properties that do not square with our present scientific understanding of nature. Others, like myself, see conscious experience as a natural phenomena that only seems to possess properties that do not square with our nature. Michael Graziano belongs to this camp also. The great virtue of belonging to this deflationary pole of the experiential explananda debate is that it spares you the task of explaining inexplicable entities, or the indignity of finding rhetorical ways to transform manifest theoretical vices (like analytic opacity) into virtues (like ‘irreducibility’). In other words, it lets you drastically simplify the explanatory landscape. Despite this, Graziano’s latest presentation of his theory of consciousness (coauthored with Taylor Webb), “The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness,” seems to be deeply–perhaps even fatally–mired in the neuroscientific explananda problem.

Very little in Webb and Graziano’s introduction to AST indicates the degree to which the theory has changed since the 2013 publication of Consciousness and The Social Brain. The core insight of Attention Schema Theory is presented in the same terms, the notion that subjective awareness, far from being a property perceived, is actually a neural construct, a tool the human brain uses to understand and manipulate both other brains and itself.  They write:

This view that the problem of subjective experience consists only in explaining why and how the brain concludes that it contains an apparently non-physical property, has been proposed before (Dennett, 1991). The attention schema theory goes beyond this idea in providing a specific functional use for the brain to compute that type of information. The heart of the attention schema theory is that there is an adaptive value for a brain to build the construct of awareness: it serves as a model of attention. 2

They provide the example of visual attention upon an apple, how the brain requires, as a means to conclude it was ‘subjectively aware’ of the apple, information regarding itself and its means of relating to the apple. This ‘means of relating’ happens to be the machinery of attention, resulting in the attention schema, a low-dimensional representation of the high-dimensional complexities comprising things like visual attention upon an apple. And this, Graziano maintains, is what ‘subjective awareness’ ultimately amounts to: “the brain’s internal model of the process of attention” (1).

And this is where the confusion begins, as much for Webb and Graziano as for myself. For one, ‘consciousness’ has vanished from the title of the theory, replaced by the equally overdetermined ‘subjective awareness.’ For another, the bald claims that consciousness is simply a delusion have all but vanished. As recently as last year, Graziano wrote:

How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information. “Are We Really Conscious,” The New York Times Sunday Review.

Here there simply is no such thing as subjective awareness: it’s a kind of cognitive illusion foisted on the brain by the low-dimensionality of the attention schema. Now, however, the status of subjective awareness is far less clear. Webb and Graziano provide the same blind brain explanation (down to the metaphors, no less) for the peculiar properties apparently characterizing subjective awareness: since the brain has no use for high-dimensional information, the “model would be more like a cartoon sketch that depicts the most important, and useful aspects of attention, without representing any of the mechanistic details that make attention actually happen” (2). As a result of this opportunistic simplification, it makes sense that a brain:

“would conclude that it possesses a phenomenon with all of the most salient aspects of attention – the ability to take mental possession of an object, focus one’s resources on it, and, ultimately, act on it – but without any of the mechanisms that make this process physically possible. It would conclude that it possesses a magical, non-physical essence, but one which can nevertheless act and exert causal control over behavior, a mysterious conclusion indeed.” 2

This is a passage that would strike any long time followers of TPB as a canonical expression of Blind Brain Theory, but there are some key distinctions dividing the two pictures, which I’ll turn to in a moment. For the nonce, it’s worth noting that it’s not so much subjective awareness (consciousness) that now stands charged with deception, as the kinds of impossible properties that attributed to it. Given that subjective awareness is the explicit explanandum, there’s a pretty important ambiguity here between subjective awareness as attention schema and subjective awareness as impossible construct. Even though the latter is clearly a cognitive illusion, the former is real insofar as the attention schema is real.

For its part, Blind Brain Theory is a theory, not of consciousness, but of the appearance of consciousness. It provides a principled way to detect, diagnose and even circumvent the kinds of cognitive illusions the limits of deliberative metacognition inflict upon reflection. It only explains why, given the kind of metacognitive resources our brains actually possess, the problem of consciousness constitutes a ‘crash space,’ a domain where we continually run afoul the heuristic limitations of our tools. So when I reflect upon my sensorium, for instance, even though I am unencumbered by supernatural characterizations of phenomenology—subjective awareness—something very mysterious remains to be explained, it’s just nowhere near so mysterious as someone like, Chalmers, for instance, is inclined to think.

Graziano, on the other hand, thinks he possesses a bona fide theory of consciousness. The attention schema, on his account, is awareness. So when he reflects upon his sensorium, he’s convinced he’s reflecting upon his ‘attention schema,’ that this is the root of what consciousness consists in—somehow.

I say ‘somehow,’ because in no way is it clear why the attention schema, out of all the innumerable schematisms the brain uses to overcome the ‘curse of dimensionality,’ should be the one possessing (the propensity to be duped by?) subjective awareness. In other words, AST basically suffers the same problem all neural identity theories suffer: explaining what makes one set of neural mechanisms ‘aware’ while others remain ‘dark.’ Our brains run afoul their cognitive limitations all the time, turn on countless heuristic schema: why is the attention schema prone to elicit sensoriums and the like?

Note that he has no way of answering, ‘Because that’s how attention is modelled,’ without begging the question. We want to know what makes modelling attention so special as to result in what, mistaken or not, we seem to be enjoying this very moment now. Even though he bills Attention Schema Theory as a ‘mechanistic account of subjective awareness,’ there’s a real sense in which consciousness, or ‘subjective awareness,’ is left entirely unexplained. Why should a neurobiologically instantiated schema of the mechanisms of attention result in this mad hall of mirrors we are sharing (or not) this very moment?

Graziano and Webb have no more clue than anyone. AST provides a limited way to understand the peculiarities of experience, but it really has no way whatsoever of explaining the fact of experience.

He had no such problem with the earlier versions of AST simply because he could write off consciousness as an illusion entirely, as a ‘squirrel in the head.’ Once he had dispatched with the peculiarities of experience, he could slap his pants and go home. But of course, this stranded him with the absurd position of denying the existence of conscious experience altogether.

Now he acknowledges that consciousness exists, going so far as to suggest that AST is consistent with and extends beyond global workspace and information integration accounts.

“The attention schema theory is consistent with these previous proposals, but also goes beyond them. In the attention schema theory, awareness does not arise just because the brain integrates information or settles into a network state, anymore than the perceptual model of color arises just because information in the visual system becomes integrated or settles into a state. Specific information about color must be constructed by the visual system and integrated with other visual information. Just so, in the case of awareness, the construct of awareness must be computed. Then it can be integrated with other information. Then the brain has sufficient information to conclude and report not only, “thing X is red,” or, “thing X is round,” but also, “I am aware of thing X.” 3

If this is the case, then subjective awareness has to be far more than the mere product of neural fiat, a verbal reporting system uttering the terms, “I am aware of X.” And it also has to be far more than simply paying attention to the model of attention. If AST extends beyond global workspace and information integration accounts, then the phenomenon of consciousness exceeds the explanatory scope of AST. Before subjective awareness was a metacognitive figment, the judgment, “I am aware of thing X” exhausted the phenomenology of experiencing X. Now subjective awareness is a matter of integrating the ‘construct of awareness’ (the attention schema) with ‘other information’ to produce the brain’s conclusion of phenomenology.

At the very least, the explanatory target of AST needs to be clarified. Just what is the explanandum of the Attention Schema Theory? And more importantly, how does the account amount to anything more than certain correlations between a vague model and the vague phenomena(lity) it purports to explain?

I actually think it’s quite clear that Graziano has conflated what are ultimately two incompatible insights into the nature of consciousness. The one is simply that consciousness and attention are intimately linked, and the other is that metacognition is necessarily heuristic. Given this conflation, he has confused the explanatory power of the latter as warrant for reducing subjective awareness to the attention schema. The explanatory power of the latter, of course, is simply the explanatory power of Blind Brain Theory, the way heuristic neglect allows us to understand a wide number of impossible properties typically attributed to intentional phenomena. Unlike the original formulation of AST, Blind Brain Theory has always been consilient with global workspace and information integration accounts simply because heuristic neglect says nothing about what consciousness consists in, only the kinds of straits the limits of the human brain impose upon the human brain’s capacity to cognize its own functions. It says a great deal about why we find ourselves still, after thousands of years of reflection and debate, completely stumped by our own nature. It depends on the integrative function of consciousness to be able to explain the kinds of ‘identity effects’ it uses to diagnose various metacognitive illusions, but beyond this, BBT remains agnostic on the nature of consciousness (even as it makes hash of the consciousness we like to think we have).

But even though BBT is consilient with global workspace and information integration accounts the same as AST, it is not consilient with AST. Unpacking the reasons for this incompatibility makes the nature of the conflation underwriting AST quite clear.

Graziano takes a great number of things for granted in his account, not the least of which is metacognition. Theory is all about taking things for granted, of course, but only the right things. AST, as it turns out, is not only a theory of subjective awareness, it’s also a theory of metacognition. Subjective awareness, on Graziano’s account, is a metacognitive tool. The primary function of the attention schema is to enable executive control of attentional mechanisms. As they write, “[i]n this perspective, awareness is an internal model of attention useful for the control of attention” (5). Consciousness is a metacognitive device, a heuristic the brain uses to direct and allocate attentional (cognitive) resources.

We know that it’s heuristic because, even though Webb and Graziano nowhere reference the research of fast and frugal heuristics, they cover the characteristics essential to them. The attention schema, we are told, provides only the information the brain requires to manage attention and nothing more. In other words, the attention schema possesses what Gerd Gigerenzer and his fellow researchers at the Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition Research Institute call a particular ‘problem ecology,’ one that determines what information gets neglected and what information gets used (see, Ecological Rationality). This heuristic neglect in turn explains why, on Webb and Graziano’s account, subjective awareness seems to possess the peculiar properties it does. When we attend to our attention, the neglect of natural (neurobiological) information cues the intuition that something not natural is going on. Heuristic misapplications, as Wimsatt has long argued, lead to systematic errors.

But of course the feasibility of solving any problem turns on the combination of the information available and the cognitive capacity possessed. Social cognition, for instance, allows us to predict, explain, and manipulate our fellows on the basis of so little information that ‘computational intractibility’ remains a cornerstone of mindreading debates.  In other words, the absence of neurobiological information in the attention schema only explains the apparently supernatural status of subjective awareness given certain metacognitive capacities. Graziano’s attention schema may be a metacognitive tool, a way to manage cognitive resources, but it is the ‘object’ of metacognition as well.

For me, this is where the whole theory simply falls apart—and obviously so. The problem is that the more cognitive neuroscience learns about metacognition, the more fractionate and specialized it appears to be. Each of these ‘kluges’ represents adaptations to certain high impact, environmental problems. The information subjective awareness provides leverages many different solutions to many different kinds of dilemmas, allowing us to bite our tongues at Thanksgiving dinner, ponder our feelings toward so-and-so, recognize our mistakes, compulsively ruminate upon relationships, and so on, while at the same time systematically confounding our attempts to deduce the nature of our souls. The fact is, the information selected, stabilized, and broadcast via consciousness, enables far, far more than simply the ability to manage attention.

But if subjective awareness provides solutions to a myriad of problems given the haphazard collection of metacognitive capacities we possess, then in what sense does it count as a ‘representation of’ the brain’s attentional processes? Is it the case that a heuristic (evolutionarily opportunistic) model of that machinery holds the solution to all problems? Prima facie, at least, the prospects of such a hypothesis seem dim. When trying to gauge our feelings about a romantic partner, is it a ‘representation’ of our brain’s attentional processes that we need, or is it metacognitive access to our affects?

Perhaps sensing this easy exit, Webb and Graziano raise some hasty barricades:

“According to the attention schema theory, the brain constructs a simplified model of the complex process of attention. If the theory is correct, then the attention schema, the construct of awareness, is relevant to any type of information to which the brain can pay attention. The relevant domain covers all vision, audition, touch, indeed any sense, as well as internal thoughts, emotions, and ideas. The brain can allocate attention to all of these types of information. Therefore awareness, the internal representation of attention, should apply to the same range of information.” 9

So even though a representation of the brain’s attentional resources is not what we need when we inspect our feelings regarding another, it remains ‘applicable’ to such an inspection. If we accept that awareness of our feelings is required to inspect our feelings, does this mean that awareness somehow arises on the basis of the ‘applicability’ of the attention schema, or does it mean that the attention schema somehow mediates all such metacognitive activities?

Awareness of our feelings is required to inspect our feelings. This means the attention schema underwrites our ability to inspect our feelings, as should come as no surprise, given that the attention schema underwrites all conscious metacognition. But if the attention schema underwrites all conscious metacognition, it also underwrites all conscious metacognitive functions. And if the attention schema underwrites all conscious metacognitive functions, then, certainly, it models far, far more than mere attention.

The dissociation between subjective awareness and the attention schema seems pretty clear. Consciousness is bigger than attention, and heuristic neglect applies to far more than our attempts to understand the ‘attention schema’—granted there is such a thing.

But what about the post facto ‘predictions’ that Webb and Graziano present as evidence for AST?

Given that consciousness is the attention schema and the primary function of the attention schema is the control of attention, we should expect divergences between attention and awareness, and we should expect convergences between awareness and attentional control. Webb and Graziano adduce experimental evidence of both, subsequently arguing that AST is the best explanation, even though the sheer generality of the theory makes it hard to see the explanatory gain. As it turns out, awareness correlates with attentional control because awareness is an attentional control mechanism, and awareness uncouples with attention because awareness, as a representation of attention, is something different than attention. If you ask me, this kind of ’empirical evidence’ only serves to underscore the problems with the account more generally.

Ultimately, I just really don’t see how AST amounts to a workable theory of consciousness. It could be applied, perhaps, as a workable theory for the appearance of consciousness, but then only as a local application of the far more comprehensive picture of heuristic neglect Blind Brain Theory provides. These limits become especially clear when one considers the social dimensions of AST, where Graziano sees it discharging some of the functions Dennett attributes to the ‘intentional stance.’ But since AST possesses no account of intentionality whatsoever (indeed, Graziano doesn’t seem to be aware of the problems posed by aboutness or content), it completely neglects the intentional dimensions of social cognition. Since social cognition is intentional cognition, it’s hard to understand how AST does much more than substitute a conceptually naïve notion of ‘attention’ for intentionality more broadly construed.

Just got back to find there’s been some developments! I’d resolved to say nothing anticipating anything–it just makes me feel foolish anymore. Until we have all the details hammered out, there’s not much I can say except that Overlook’s July 2016 date is tentative. I fear I can’t comment on their press release, either. Things seem to be close, though.

I know it’s been a preposterously long haul, folks, but hold on just a bit longer. The laws of physics are bound to kick in at some point, after which I can start delivering some more reliable predictions.