R. Scott Bakker's Blog, page 41

Definition of the Day - Venture Capitalist: Someone who leases power to command invention and intellect.

Watched Freakonomics last night. Almost painfully weak. Apparently societies are too complicated for successful government intervention, but human behaviour all comes down to 'incentives.' What begins as an interesting foray into the utility of data mining turns into an embarrassingly weak bid to confirm a discredited ideology. Incentives are merely a fraction of the human picture.

Regarding some of your comments on my last post: the age of technological stasis–or even gradualism–is behind us, I'm afraid. Certain technologies (with profound social repercussions) will encounter technical, resource contingent barriers, certainly, but not at the same time. Meanwhile, our ability to circumvent predicted ceilings in surprising ways will continue to surprise us. So, while we may have reached the limits of traditional semiconductor based information processing, a whole bevy of options have suddenly popped into existence. Silicon stacking. Graphene. Nanowiring. Bioprocessing. Moore's Law may be dead as a metric, but it will likely hold as a principle.

Then there's the issue of applications, many, if not most, of which don't become apparent until after a field of research has reached economic maturity.

This is related to the issue of universality: the fact that so many of our innovations lack 'microwavishness,' which is to say, they refuse to find a functional niche and just stay there, like a good microwave.

Then there's innumerable consequences that will follow upon our reverse engineering of biology: our social relationships are so dependent upon our shared and hitherto largely immutable physiology, that rendering this one particular domain transparent to human instrumentalization literally constitutes a pandora's box of possibility.

Then there's nanotech. Yeesh.

One way, for instance, to understand the collapse of the Soviet Union, is in terms of the efflorescence of occupations. The trend in market economies is one of spontaneous, inexorable vocational complication. My wife, when she used to be a job counsellor for foreign professionals, often complained about the way the list of professional occupations just kept growing and growing and growing. Could you imagine a central planner thumbing through those lists trying to force feed all those occupations into their economy? The more technically complicated a society becomes, the more technically complicated a society becomes. Innovation becomes ever more distributed, difficult to predict and to control.

And to think that over half the human race is just climbing aboard the higher education, research train.

Everything is a 'knock-on effect' as it is, but as innovations proliferate and the knock-on effects branch and branch and branch, the continuity of the status quo becomes ever more unstable, to the point where predictability collapses altogether–this a rough and ready way to understand the 'singularity.'

Buckle up. And fret for your children.

Aphorism of the Day: Middle age is the point at which you realize that distance is simply a trick of forced perspective.

The Unholy Consult continues creeping forward. I wish I could say how far I've come, but since I don't write in a linear fashion I really have no metric. I have fifteen chapters started, zero completed.

In the meantime, my brain has decided to plague me with a number of inconsistencies and details that I overlooked in The White-Luck Warrior. It always does this after the final proofs have been sent out. Even though I know that 99.9% of the readers won't even notice them, they still drive me crazy – enough to resolve, like I always resolve, to never let this happen again, even though it inevitably will. I have this retirement fantasy where I have the time and inclination to rewrite the whole series a la Henry James.

For some reason I find myself cycling in and out of  that if-I-had-a million-dollars mood that I'm sure all of you are familiar with. I keep thinking about Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, and how there is at least a dozen companies just as big lurking in the near future. A number of technologies are set to begin scaling up–whole new industries that will lead to new dominant players and a bunch more shake-and-bake billionaires.

It's got me thinking about economics, and whether any model exists for the kind of transformative upheavals to come. It seems to me, that the continuous integration of transformative technologies into a given economy will actually do more to undermine equity than otherwise. If I had a million dollars, for instance, I would invest in all the viable startups in, say, the organ replacement domain, knowing full well that whatever losses I suffer on those firms the market weeds out will be more than compensated for by my stake in the inevitable winners to come. But since I don't have a million dollars, I can only watch from the bleachers–like most everyone else.

I'm wondering, in other words, if periods of rapid and profound technological change  inevitably generate ever greater economic  inequities, and if so, what it means when such change becomes continuous. Since I see capital as our primary way of distributing power, and since I think humans are hardwired to generally confuse their self-interest with the will of God, I'm wondering what the future holds as venture capitalists accumulate more and more power. Has anyone developed a theory of a Venture Economy?

It seems to me that ramping up the rate of technological transformation changes a crucial variable in our understanding of the way markets function. For instance, given that humans have only so much stomach for change (tolerances that were likely fixed in the stone age), could we be entering a period where the changes wrought by innovation will outrun our individual and collective ability to readily adapt. Will the new social divisions turn more and more on our ability to adapt, to embrace the new and dispose of the old? Will our strategies for self-identification (and glorification) evolve so far as to 'tribalize' early and late adopters, to turn marketing consumer categories into identifications that supercede things like religion and nationality, giving rise to a new feudalism, like that in Stephenson's The Diamond Age?

Whatever the material post-modern brings, I can guarantee you we won't be ready for it…

Definition of the Day - Blog: something you drop in the can every morning, only with a 'b' in front of it.

Got my ass kicked in hockey yesterday.

Yup. Good times.

I suppose the potty humour doesn't help much, credibility-wise.

Aphorism of the Day: Hockey before revolution: there's too many goaltenders in the world.

At first I was bitchin': of course snowmageddon had to hit the day of my birthday. I was bound to be depressed anyway, so why not throw in several tonnes of snow to shovel? As a kid growing up they had these ubiquitous commercials bent on convincing Canadian consumers to buy life insurance as an investment vehicle (!), and then retire early. "Freedom 55″ they called it. Today, on the grand and illustrious day known as "Groundhog Day," I turn 44, and I can't help but feel I've reached the junior version of 55 – without the freedom.

But then I realized it was a snow day…

So I called up my buddies, and sure enough, the schools and universities were all closed, and they were trapped at home with nothing but porno to entertain them. So now I'll be spending the day drinking and playing hockey on the PS3. There's a whiff of freedom in that I suppose. Enough to make 44 seem not so bad.

Nothing like getting trashed in the morning.

On the writing front, I've been communicating with Insomniac, a small Canadian press, about the possibility of publishing Light, Time, and Gravity this fall. I've been rereading the thing, shaking my head and laughing the whole time. Who the fuck do you think you are? has probably been the most consistent thought…

Which makes me think I must be onto something.

I've also agreed to teach a creative writing course at my local college this summer – which is the dreaded step in every midlist writer's career. I realize I'm luckier than most: who gets offered jobs out of the blue?  But when you manage to claw your way into the fiction midlist – an almost impossible feat as it is – the dream is that some miraculous conspiracy of accidents will propel you even higher. Even if you know the odds all along, as I did, you still have that little voice in the back of some lobe whispering, "Yeah, but you're, like, special, see…"

Getting a straight job is tantamount to tying that voice up and dumping it in the river.

I've written and sent out numerous articles on literary culture now and haven't received not so much as a single reply over the years. The fact that I've had some success with the few political articles I've sent leads me to believe that form can't be the issue: it has to do with either the content or the sender. I have my money on the latter, on what you might call the Who is this Fucking Guy? Effect.

Imagine, someone who writes epic fantasy with the temerity to lecture writers of literature… Jeez, Louise.

I know when I sit down with literary types, I seem to make an impact. I typically tell them how my wife, when she worked for Oxford University Press, received this Anthology called  Literature of the Working Class, and how when I looked through it, I found plenty of literature ABOUT the working class, and quite abit of literature BY former members of the working class, but nothing, absolutely nothing, FOR the working class – how it was an anthology about a social group who wouldn't be caught dead cracking it open.

And I ask, "Isn't this a problem?"

"Yeah… I guess…"

"So where might I find literature FOR the working class?"

"Um… Good question."

"Because these are the people you're primarily 'for,' aren't you? Every time I turn around I seem to bump into a literary writer declaring their support FOR the disenfranchised."

"Yeesh. I guess so."

"But you don't write for them."

And then I launch into my blah-blah-blah about genre and the way its audiences cut across socioeconomic boundaries, and the crazy-eclectic audience I've managed to cobble together over the years.

Even if it isn't true, I'm convinced my argument is good enough to deserve a hearing at the very least. And yet, nada.

And this really isn't any surprise. People raise all their projects and aspirations on what comes before, no matter how dysfunctional and polarizing that 'before' may be. Members of literary culture need their myths and rationalizations as much – maybe even more – than the members of any other institution. Slogans about 'change' or 'critical self-awareness' literally have to be empty, if established practices are to continue running down greased grooves. Literary culture, which has made these slogans its existential rationale, really has no choice but to ignore people like me.

Another zinger I use in conversations has to do with 'Interpretative Literacy.' I mention the way the scientific establishment typically rallies whenever a problem with scientific literacy becomes apparent: just look at the public battles fought against Creationism.

So I say, "But isn't Creationism really a problem with Interpretative literacy? Isn't the problem that literally millions of people think its possible to give univocal interpretations to opaque texts?"

"Huh… I never thought about it that way before."

"So," I say with a shrug. "I guess the literary community is all over the problem."

"I don't think so. Not so much, no… At least not that I've heard."

"But interpretation is their intellectual purview, isn't it? Their area of expertise?"

"Sure… But…"

"You guys are too busy talking to each other."

I've had dozens of conversations along these lines, and though I'm sure my brain is spinning things in my favour, I can't remember any that have been less decisive than these little recapitulations. But for whatever reason, they don't stick. I've bumped into a couple of people months, even years after these little debates, and none of them even remembers a fraction of what I argued. I'm just another clever kook they encountered at a party or book festival or what have you.

The picture I'm painting, that of a pious, ossified, hypocritical, and ultimately culturally destructive institution is one that simply cannot fit on their self-aggrandizing colour wheel. For them, the work of criticism, you see, has already been done. 

Which is why, at 44, I'm convinced I'll be 88 before I make the merest dent in their collective psyches. Until then, all I can do is keep keying their cars in the parking lot.

Aphorism of the Day: Beware those who prize absurdity over drama: they are the enlightened dead.

The Enlightened Dead, just so you know, is the title of the next Disciple novel.

I like to thank those who chimed in with their support, though I can't help but feel you are the vocal exception to the silent rule. As it stands, I've come to realize these uber-philosophical posts will be buried in due course anyway as the blog continues to grow. It's the balance that's important, I think. With this in mind, allow me one final elaboration of the previous entries.　

So when we normally think about time we tend to think in terms like this:

t1 > t2 > t3 > t4 >t5

which is to say, in terms of a linear succession of times. This happens, then that and that and that and so on. What we tend to forget is the moment that frames this succession in simultaneity – the Now, which might be depicted as:

T0 (t1 > t2 > t3 > t4 >t5)

I call this an instant of declusion, where you make the implicit perspectival frame of one moment explicit within the implicit perspectival frame of another, subsequent moment. (Linguistically, the work of declusion is performed by propositional attitudes, which suggest that it plays an important role in truth - but more on this below).

Given that the Now characterizes the structure of lived time, we can say (with Heidegger) that our first notation, as unassuming as it seems, does real representational violence to the passage of time as we actually experience it. (This is a nifty way of conceptualizing the metaphysics of presence, for you philosophy wonks out there.)

The lived structure of time, I would hazard, looks something more like this:

T0 (t5 (t4 (t3 (t2(t1)))))

where the stacking of parentheses represents the movement of declusion. In this notation, the latest moment, t5, decludes t4, which decludes t3, which decludes t2, which decludes t1. Looked at this way, lived time becomes a kind of meta-inclusionary tunnel, with each successive frame figured within the frame following. (Of course, the 'laws of temporal perspective' are far muddier than this analogy suggests: a kind of myopic tunnel would be better, where previous moments blur into mnemonic mush rather than receding in an ordered fashion toward any temporal vanishing point).

T0, of course, is 'superindexical,' a reference to this very moment now, to the frameless frame that you somehow are. It's a kind of 'token declusion,' a reference to the frame of referring – or what I sometimes call the 'occluded frame.' I would argue that you actually find versions of this structure throughout philosophy, only conceptualized in drastically different ways. You can use it as a conceptual heuristic to understand things as apparently disparate as Derrida's differance, Nietzsche's Will to Power, Heidegger's Being, and Kant's transcendence. Finding an 'adequate' conceptualization (rationally regimented declusion) of the occluded frame is the philosophical holy grail, at least in the continental tradition.

Just for example: if you emphasize the moment to moment nonidentity of the occluded frame, the fact that T0 is in fact t5, then declusion becomes exclusion, and every act of framing becomes an exercise in violence. No matter how hard we try to draw the world within our frame, we find ourselves deflected, deferred. Deconstruction is one of the implicatures that arise here.

If, however, you emphasize the identity of the occluded frame, the fact that T0 is the very condition of t5, declusion becomes inclusion, and we seem to become 'transparent,' a window onto the world as it appears, the very 'clearing of Being' as that fat old Nazi, Heidegger might say.

It would help, I think, to unpack the above notation a little.

T0 (t1)

T0 (t2(t1))

T0 (t3 (t2(t1)))

T0 (t4 (t3 (t2(t1))))

T0 (t5 (t4 (t3 (t2(t1)))))

This, I think, nicely represents the paradox of the Now, the way it frames difference in identity, an identity founded upon absence. (Consider Aristotle:"it is not easy to see whether the moment which appears to divide the past and the future always remains one and the same or is always distinct") If we had perfect recall, this is the way our lives would unfold, each moment engulfing the moment previous without loss. But we don't, so the orderly linear bracketing of moment within moment dissolves into soup.

(This also shows the difficulties time poses for language, which bundles things into discrete little packages. Thus the linguistic gymnastics you find in a thinker like Heidegger. This is why I think you need narrative to press home the stakes of this account – which is one of the reasons why I wrote Light, Time, and Gravity.)

So what could explain this structure? Is it the result of devoted T0 circuits within the brain? Temporal identity circuits?

Or is it, like the occluded boundary of our visual field, a positive structural feature arising from a brute neurophysiological incapacity?

T0, I'm suggesting, is a necessary result of the thalamocortical system's temporal information horizon, an artifact of the structural and developmental limits placed on the brain's ability to track itself. Since the frame of our temporal field cannot be immediately incorporated within our temporal field, we hang 'motionless.' Our brain is the occluded frame. The same way it has difficulty situating itself as itself in its environment (for the structural and developmental reasons I enumerated previously), it has difficulty tracking the time of its temporal tracking. In other words, reflexivity is the problem.

The severe constraints placed on neurophysiological reflexivity (or 'information integration,' as Tononi calls it) are the very things that leverage the illusion of reflexivity that is the foundation of lived experience. And this illusion, in turn, leverages so very much, a cornucopia of semantic phenomena, turning dedicated neural circuits that interact with their variable environments in reliable ways into ethereal, abiding things like concepts, numbers, generalizations, axioms, and so on. Since the brain lacks the resources to track its neural circuitry as neural circuitry it tracks them in different, cartoonish guises, ones shorn of history and happenstance. Encapsulation ensures that we confuse our two-dimensional kluges with all there is. So, for instance, our skin-deep experience of the connectionist morass of our brain's mathematical processing becomes the sum of mathematics, an apparently timeless realm of apparently internal relations, the basis of who knows how many Platonic pipedreams.

We are the two-dimensional ghost of the three-dimensional engine that is our brain. A hopelessly distorted cross-section.

Of course none of this addresses the Hard Problem, the question of why the brain should give rise to consciousness at all, but it does suggest novel ways of tackling that problem. What we want from a potential explanation of consciousness is a way to integrate it into our understanding of other natural phenomena. But like my daughter and her car seat, it simply refuses to be buckled in.

Part of the Hard Problem, I'm suggesting, turns on our illusory self-identity, the way the thalamocortical system's various information horizons continually 'throw' or 'strand' it beyond the circuit of what it can process. We continually find ourselves at the beginning of our lives for the same reason we think 'we' continually 'author' ourselves: because the neurophysiological antecedents of the thalamocortical system do not exist for it. Because it is an 'encapsulated' information economy, and so must scavenge pseudo-antecedents from within (so that thought seems to arise from thought, and so on).

We are our brains in such a way that we cannot recognize ourselves as our brains. Rather than a product of recursive information processing, perhaps consciousness simply is that processing, and only seems otherwise because of the way the limits of recursive processing baffle the systems involved.

In other words (and I would ask all the Buddhists out there to keep a wary eye on their confirmation bias here), there is no such thing as consciousness. The Hard Problem is not the problem of explaining how brains generate consciousness, but the dilemma of a brain wired to itself in thoroughly deceptive ways. We cannot explain what we are because we literally are not what we 'are.'

As bizarre as this all sounds, it's not only empirically possible, but (given that neural reflexivity is the basis of consciousness) it's empirically probable. The extraordinary, even preposterous, assumption, it seems to me, would be that our brains would evolve anything more than an environmentally and reproductively 'actionable' self-understanding.

I get this tingling feeling sometimes when I ponder this, a sense of contorted comprehension reaching out and out… I have this sense of falling flush with the cosmos, a kind of filamentary affirmation. And at the same time I see myself as an illusion, a multiplicity pinched into unitary selfhood by inability and absence. A small, silvery bubble–a pocket of breathlessness–rising through an incomprehensible deep.

Like I say, I think there is an eerie elegance and parsimony to this account, one with far-reaching interpretative possibilities. Not only do I think it provides a way to tether traditional continental philosophical concerns to contemporary cognitive neuroscience, I think it provides an entirely novel conceptual frame of reference for, well… pretty much everything.

For example: Why do propositional attitudes wreck compositionality? Because language evolved around the fact of our thalamocortical systems and their information horizons. Think of the 'view from nowhere': Is it a coincidence that truth is implicated in time and space? Is it a coincidence that the more we situate a claim within a 'context,' the more contingent that claim's truth-value intuitively seems? Could it be that language, in the course of its evolution, simply commandeered the illusion of consciousness as timeless and placeless to accommodate truth-value? This would explain why its 'truth function' breaks down whenever language 'frames frames,' which is to say, makes claims regarding the intentional states of others. Since your 'linguistic truth system' turns on the occlusion of your frame, linguistically embedding the frame of another would have the apparent result of cutting the truth-function of language in two, something that seems difficult to comprehend, given that truth is grounded in nowhere… How could there be two nowheres?

Another example: Why do paradoxes escape logical resolution? All paradoxes seem to involve mathematical or linguistic self-reference in some form. Could these breakdowns occur because there is no such thing as self-reference at the neural level, only the illusion that arises as a structural consequence of our blinkered brains? So what we might have are two cognitive systems–one largely unconscious, the other largely conscious–coming to loggerheads over the latter's inability to relinquish what the former simply cannot compute.

And the list goes on.

T-Zero… and counting.

Aphorism of the Day: There's a time to ponder and there's a time to communicate. So long as we don't ask the what of the first, and the who of the second, we can pretend that art is the sum of their confusion.

I toyed with the idea of actually using this blog as a platform to "publish" some of my philosophical writing. But the last three posts have reminded me just how tribal philosophy is.

I literally have dozens of essays, a MA thesis, one aborted dissertation, another well on the way to completion, on a whole variety of philosophical topics. When it came to papers critiquing various philosophers on various topics, I was urged by many of my instructors to publish (and thus prepare my CV for the dreaded Job Wars) but I could never bring myself to follow through. When it came to my original stuff, no one knew what the hell I was talking about. My success with the former convinced me that I wasn't simply crazy, that I was cutting a path that others could potentially follow and elaborate, but I had difficulty playing the game the way I was supposed to. As a couple of my professors told me, I needed to earn my bona fides practicing straight philosophy first – a sensible enough admonition. And yet I just couldn't bring myself to stand still. One year I'm a (quasi)Derridean, the next I'm an (quasi)Adornian, then I'm a (quasi)Wittgensteinian, then I'm … something nobody seems to quite recognize. And I continue to be – for some reason – thoroughly ashamed of all my philosophical output.

Ashamed of things I don't even believe… 

Which is probably why I bolted the way I did when the first offers for The Prince of Nothing came in. (A decision I may live to regret, given the creeping growth of illegal downloads).

So, if even professional philosophers, that most absurd and rarefied of all hothouse tribes, are squinting their eyes and shaking their heads, what about all the tribes of real people?

I mean, I still suffer the urge to shake my head in summary disdain and dismissal whenever I encounter something I can't readily understand and appreciate, even though I've forced my way past that instinct more times than I can count. I mean, I've read Difference and Repetition closely, for Christ's sake! I have no doubt whatsoever that these last three posts have convinced any number of potential readers to leave their 'Bakker itch' unscratched.

So I don't know what to do with my more 'technical' musings. Bury them, I suppose, like all things precious and problematic…

Or incriminating.

Aphorism of the Day: The mind is simply the dim shadow of what the brain sees peering through the glutinous fog of itself.

One last eye-crosser…

When Metzinger's Being No One came out, I snapped it up thinking that at last I had found a theoretically kindred spirit. Metzinger himself told me he thought the differences between my position and his were 'insignificant' after he had read Neuropath. But Metzinger is a representationalist (a very open-minded one), whereas I see 'representations,' the notion of 'things' standing in causal-cum-logical relationships to other 'things,' as being precisely the kind of conceptual confusion blind brains are apt to indulge in. Because we are trapped with the products as given, the tendency is to think of them as distinct from the processes that underwrite them–to think 'tree for me here' is linked to 'tree in itself out there.' The intuitive tendency, in other words, is to conceptualize all the intervening processes under the conceptual rubric of relations, something which possesses an implicature all its own–one which could very well be a blind alley. To risk running afoul a kind of product/process ambiguity.

Thanks to conceptual path dependency, the differences between me and Metzinger stack up from there. So Metzinger, for instance, likes to talk about models (such as the famous 'phenomenal self model'). Even though there is no such thing as a 'self,' in his account, there is a phenomenal self, which is to say, something illusory. In my account, I'm not even sure there's even this!

Do we experience selfhood? Certainly. So the pivotal question then becomes one of quiddity: Just what do we experience? A kind of simulation, Metzinger would say (one requiring NCC's). As crazy as this sounds common-sense-wise, it makes wonderful intuitive sense at a conceptual level. My position doesn't even enjoy this intuitive advantage (which is probably why no one seems to know what the hell I'm talking about–me included). Does it make sense to say that the 'trailing into absent oblivion' of our visual field is a kind of simulation? Not at all. And yet I'm suggesting that nothing less than self-identity is a version of this. Pile onto this a welter of other functions, some possessing NCC's, some not, and you arrive at the morass we 'experience' as selfhood. The self is neither real nor a simulation.

Then just what is it? Got me. Confused, maybe? Incoherent. Given its evolutionary youth, perhaps this is what we should expect.

As someone, I think, pointed out in the comments, the thumbnail 'explanation' of transparency I provided earlier has been around a long time. All I'm adding is a different conceptual spin, and suggesting that the blindness that enables the brain to open up a window on the world within itself, also mandates many other things, the frame for a 'self' among them.

Encapsulation Theory, you might say, attempts to explore what happens when the skin of things is constitutively confused for the meat. (You could imagine an 'encapsulation account' of say, mathematics, moral reasoning – pretty much anything). It is an attempt to correlate the peculiarities of experience with the structural and developmental facts of our blind brains. Why is today always the first day of the rest of my life? Why is it always somehow the same now, the same here, even though it is most definitely not the same now or the same here? Because a corresponding temporal oblivion accompanies the visual oblivion that encloses our visual field. Because the conscious brain hangs in temporal oblivion, the result of an information environment it has no access to. Because, in a strange sense, we're bubbles without an outside.

So, IF consciousness is the product of neural reflexivity, the brain tracking itself, then, because of blindness and encapsulation, we should expect it to run into difficulty placing itself in its environments, for one. Since the brain cannot see itself as another object in the environment, it has to see itself as something else–like a soul, mind, Dasein, transcendental ego, and so on.

We should also expect it to have difficulty relating itself to its environments. Given the complexity of its inner environment, its relative evolutionary youth, and so on, there is no way it can use the machinery it uses to track causal transactions in its outer environment to track itself–or other brains for that matter. Heuristic kluges are all the conscious brain possesses, things such as purpose, morality, aboutness, and so on. Since these kluges are its cognitive baseline, they are literally what it means to 'comprehend' (to enjoy the feeling of understanding) whether they are in any sense 'accurate' or not. Since these kluges turn on the actual machinery of our environmental interaction, they will always appear 'adequate,' no matter how they distort they actual processes. Since these heuristic kluges exhaust the conscious brain's access to its own inner workings, they will always seem the 'most real,' and therefore the primary explananda.

Because of all this, and since these heuristic kluges are just that, heuristic kluges, the conscious brain will be perpetually mystified, even moreso as it begins thoroughly decoding the causal complexities of its external environments. Some conscious brains will affirm the priority of the heuristic kluge (everything has a purpose), while others will affirm the priority of the causal environment (like, shit just happens, dude), and still others will continually attempt to reconcile the two (enter Dennett).

We should expect, in other words, something like the philosophy of mind. What is more, we should expect that any extra-terrestrial intelligence will also have its own philosophy of mind, with its own debates regarding its own heuristic kluges, which may or may not resemble our own.

High on the long list of Books-I-Want-to-Write, is an SF piece where the aliens possess genuinely alien categories of consciousness. Imagine a species who evolved to 'own' their behavioural outputs not with the 'feeling of willing' as we did, but with something different, a 'feeling of accompanying' say. Imagine something like 'morpose,' a category that fuses purposiveness and propriety/morality. Or how about a consciousness that experiences its environment under the rubric of from instead of about, so that the witness catches a glimpse from the murderer, rather than of…

The list goes on and on. Playing the philosophy game might be like eating paint-chips, but you have to admit, there's something to be said for barfing art…

Aphorsim of the Day I: Perception is simply introspection with strategic agnosia.

Aphorism of the Day II: What does the brain look like when viewed from within? The world.

Another philosophical eye-crosser alert. I find all this stuff embarrassing for some reason. Evidence of my crackpotitude, perhaps…

In order to linguistically communicate with other brains, the brain needs to first track its own processing, then condense and translate it into a linear code. I see experience as a kind of translational possibility space, where everything that can be spoken about is 'rendered' for possible translation into speech–this is the working hypothesis I've used for years now, anyway. Consciousness as the staging area for dynamic data compression and linguistic transmission. Given the opportunistic vagaries of evolution, it has doubtless been yoked to many other uses, but I see this as the primary developmental engine of consciousness, you might say. This has been my guiding fable.

For some reason, the hominid brain developed a secondary brain, a neural fifth column, to infiltrate and monitor the most reproductively pertinent functions of the original. So I am interested in neural reflexivity: Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas and Godel, Escher, and Bach, which I read with avid excitment in the late 80′s, have undoubtedly influenced me in innumerable ways. But I know when Strange Loops came out I was very excited to see where his musings had led him, but actually never bothered purchasing the thing after thumbing through it at the book store. 

For me, the seminal question was one of what we might expect when a brain that has been successfully tracking its environments over millions of years begins, in a relatively wholesale fashion, tracking itself. This is what led me to the Blind Brain Hypothesis: the idea that the structure of experience is the result of a brain that is structurally and developmentally unable to see itself as another brain in its environment. Why each brain, although part of the environment it tracks, comprises a kind of environmental blindspot–and why it finds it so difficult to reconcile its third-person and first-person versions of itself (or why there is a mind-body problem). I came up with a number of things: process asymmetry, the way growing more circuits to track existing circuits simply adds to the amount of untracked circuitry; evolutionary youth, the way these new circuits lack the hundred million plus year pedigree of the circuits used to track external environments; evolutionary serendipity, the way these circuits had to earn their keep across the caprice of environmental change; positional invariability, the way the brain is hardwired to its internal environment, and so cannot sample it the way it can its external. There's others that I can't remember…

And a lot of interesting things seemed to fall out of these musings: the possibility, for instance, that intentionality could be structurally and developmentally mandated such that we could assume that any ETI we encounter possesses its own version of it. Or the interesting possibility of multiple awarenesses inhabiting the same brain, each, perhaps, as convinced as the others that they are the sole owner/operator.

Encapsulation Theory, which I have in no way explained, arose from this as well.

But time is short, so it'll have to wait for my next (eye-crossing) post.

Aphorism of the Day: A pet theory is a lot like a pet cat, except that it never dies, always purrs, and craps all over your imagination instead of in the conceptual litter box.

The whole Dennett thing has me back in a philosophical frame of mind. For those of you interested only in my narrative (as opposed to my theoretical) fictions, I'm afraid this might be another eye-crosser.

I've been thinking how I never asked Dennett the question I wanted to ask him. Instead, I asked about the rise of 'neuromarketing' and how the problem of 'creeping manipulation' might compare to the problem of 'creeping exculpation' (where lawyers, educators, and the like use neuroscience to make 'diminished capacity' arguments to deflect responsibility) he talked about in his presentation. His answer, which was simply a kind of caveat emptor, was so bad that it spawned a couple of other questions far more critical and biting than my own.

What I wanted to ask him about was how he could say we simply 'are' our brains when we experience only a fraction of them. The follow up question I wanted to ask was how he thought this 'fractional identity' conditions conscious experience. This all ties into a pet theory of mine: that the apparent structure of conscious experience is more a product of what the brain lacks than what it possesses. That much of what we experience, in other words, possesses no NCC's, neural correlates of consciousness.

The example I always come back to is the way the visual field is both finite and unbounded. The way sight simply trails away into a kind of absolute absence. This, I think, is an obvious structural feature of visual awareness that obviously possesses no NCC's, no neural circuits that generate the experience of 'trailing into absence.' It simply comes with the structural territory. Those little swatches of brain tissue called retinas simply feed forward what they can: the absence of any further information is experientially expressed, in visual awareness, as the absent oblivion that rings our periphery.

Now what I think, vainglorious fool that I am, is that most of the more perplexing features of conscious experience can be 'explained' – or at least understood - via this analogy, in the way the various 'information horizons' of the various neural systems behind consciousness 'encapsulate' and so profoundly structure various experiences. Transparency, for instance, the way we see through our experience, so that we see trees and cars and so on rather than seeing trees and cars and so on causing us to see trees and cars, is an easy one. The information horizons of those regions responsible for conscious experience do not encompass anything more than the 'products' of perceptual processing – so the world comes to us as 'given,' rather than as a neural construct.

But it also offers possible 'explanations' of more difficult things, such as self-identity and the now. It's always 'now,' no matter how much time passes, because our temporal awareness is encapsulated much the same way our visual awareness is. While our brains have no difficulty discriminating times within our 'temporal field,' the time of the field itself cannot be discriminated, and so seems to hang in timelessness. The neural circuits responsible for temporal discrimination fall outside of temporal discrimination. Sure, we have a variety of subsystems (such as those involved in memory and narrative) that allow us to stitch our momentary 'specious presents' into a greater timeframe, personal histories and whatnot, the same way we have a variety of subsystems that allow us to cobble our momentary visual fields into visual world. But the primary experience of timelessness, the abiding identity of the now, always characterizes the experience in the first instance. The same way we can't see 'seeing,' we literally can't time 'timing,' and so find ourselves hanging in a kind of timeless oblivion while the world rushes about us (within us). The present is literally an artifact of an inability, one grounded in structural and evolutionary constraints placed on our brain.

So many explanatory possibilities fall out of this 'Encapsulation Theory' that I don't know where to begin. For instance, I think it actually offers an explanation of perspective: what it is, why we have it, as well as why things become so bewildering as soon as it attempts to 'gain perspective' on itself. Believe it or not, I actually think I've stumbled across a possible, quasi-naturalistic explanation of paradox.

The primary problem with this pet theory of mine, however, is simply that so many other amateurs have pet theories of their own, it's pretty much impossible to get any experts (who all happen to be pursuing their pet theories) to relinquish the time and effort required to grasp its Gestalt, the global sense-making that makes it so compelling to me.

That said, as much as I think it satisfies the theoretical virtues of simplicity, fecundity, and explanatory scope, I still refuse to believe the thing. It's consequences are nothing short of catastrophic. It really does render us nothing more than absurd fictions.

So I had the privilege of seeing Dan Dennett speak for the first time. It's nice to discover than an author you've followed your entire adult life possesses genuine charisma. The presentation, which was entitled "My Brain Made Me Do It" was as much a comedy act as a philosophical discursus. The auditorium was packed, but thanks to my friend Nandita, I enjoyed everything from the second row.

His argument was that all the neuroscientists making alarmist claims regarding volition and freedom were being socially irresponsible in addition to getting the philosophy wrong. He cited a recent study where college students became more inclined to cheat after reading that responsibility is an illusion, the suggestion being that a post-responsibility society wouldn't be much of a society at all. Then he basically repeated several of the arguments he made in Elbow Room years back, and more recently in Freedom Evolves.

Dennett is an exceedingly slippery thinker. Depending on the frame of reference you take to him, he'll sound like an eliminitivist (someone who thinks all our psychological categories are so mistaken that we need to replace them wholesale) one minute, then an intentional realist (someone who thinks our psychological categories are generally right on the button) the next.

He's also brilliant at expressing his ideas: reading him, I often find myself nodding and nodding, thinking that it all sounds so obvious, only to screw my face up in confusion while I'm making a coffee several moments later.

But he's neither an eliminitivist nor an intentional realist. He's a kind of Quinenan pragmatist. He doesn't care so much whether intentionality is real, as he cares whether its useful–and there's no denying the latter. It simply doesn't pay to consider others as machines, even though that's what they are. What does pay, is taking what he calls the 'intentional stance,' treating things and others as agents, as a kind of cognitive shorthand, a way to successfully manipulate and interact with monstrously complicated systems. For all intents and purposes, the 'metaphysical reality' of the intentional is beside the point (do you smell the circularity here?).

So when it comes to the issue of free will, he argues in numerous ways that we have the only free will that matters, so allowing him to preserve all the concepts further down the implicative foodchain. So for instance, it makes no sense to say "my brain made me do it" because we are our brains. We're literally just saying that we did something.

Of course, the problem is that 'we' are just a small part of our brains.

Dennett is after a kind of 'semantic compatibilism': he wants to find ways to make our old psychological vocabulary fit with the findings of cognitive neuroscience, and so preserve the institutions raised upon the former. Over the years, he has waged an ingenious guerrilla campaign of equivocation. So with free will for instance, he takes our 'common sense' understanding, shows how it's so ridiculous that it can't be the 'free will' we want, then redefine into something that gives us all the things we really want, even if we didn't realize as much in the first place. If you say, "No, that's not what I wanted," he just shrugs his shoulders and says, "Well, good luck with your magic. I'm quite fine, thank you."

For me, the traditional philosophical debates about determinism are now beside the point. The problem is the chasm that seems to be opening between the world we experience versus the world we know, thanks to the accumulating horror that is science. More and more, the intuitions of the former jar against the findings of the latter. Dennett seems to assume that our intuitions turn on our concepts: if we could just get clear on our concepts, then the conflict between our experience and our knowledge would simply dissappear. Personally, I think the situation is muddier: that our concepts turn on our intuitions turn on our concepts turn on… and so on. In the particular case of free will, I think the intuitions drive the concepts more than vice versa.

So, for instance, I think the intuition that tells me my sense of willing is behind my actions, rather than something that happens to accompany them (as the research suggests), is damn near universal. I find the notion that my sense of willing could be selectively shut down out and out terrifying. And I would suggest that the reason so many people intellectually agree with Dennett, only to suffer a subsequent experiential revolt, is a result of 'mandated intuitions' like this.

I think we are hardwired to believe in magic of various kinds, and that an immense amount of specialized training is required to get us believing otherwise. Far too much for Dennett's prescriptive conceptual approach to even begin commanding the kind of consensus he needs to justify–let alone realize–his social project.

Like I say in the Afterword to Neuropath: what Dennett is doing is like telling us at the funeral of our beloved Gramma Mildred to simply begin calling our dog 'Mildred.' When we object, he just shrugs and reminds us that the dog was Gramma Mildred all along anyway…

But he never quite explains the body in the coffin next to him.