The Biology Blog’s post on shadow biospheres intrigued me in part because I’ve been reading Charles Sanders Peirce, for whom semiosis is writ large (and small) throughout all things. Musing philosophically about the search for life on other planets, the author, cyoungbull, writes, “Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we may not be able to distinguish it from the natural background.” For Peirce, signs of life are everywhere. Indeed, signs are everywhere, as are meanings, at least for those equipped to bear them. Just as for Whitehead it’s experience all the way down, for Peirce it’s semiosis all the way down. (There are other parallels between Whitehead and Peirce; more on those in a future post.) Whether we can read them or not is the question — a question made all the more poignant when they destroy homes and topple buildings, as in Haiti recently or Chile this morning.
The Bioblog piece links to an Astrobiology article on the signatures of shadow biospheres and to an old Nature article by chaophilic scientists and SF writers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, which includes the following (entertaining) list of “canonical answers” to Enrico Fermi’s 1950 question “if intelligent aliens exist, why aren’t they here?”:
□ There are no aliens, and there never have been. Humanity is unique in the Universe.
□ There have been plenty of aliens, but civilizations only moderately more advanced than ours always blow themselves up in nuclear wars.
□ The lifespan of an alien civilization is only a few million years. They visited us ten million years ago, and will turn up again in ten million years’ time, but there is nobody around right at the moment.
□ Aliens exist, but interstellar travel is impossible because of relativistic limits on the speed of light, or because living creatures cannot survive it.
□ Aliens exist, but are not interested in interstellar travel.
□ Aliens exist and have interstellar travel, but they are not interested in contacting us.
□ Aliens exist, but galactic law forbids any contact with us because we are too primitive or violent.
□ Some aliens see it as their duty to eliminate all other forms of life that come to their attention. Any technological civilization will develop radio and TV, attract their attention, and be eliminated. They are on their way now. [Earthquake-causing aliens, anyone? Extraterrestrial black magicians? -ai]
□ They are here already (the preferred answer on the Internet’s UFO pages).
Cohen and Stewart rephrase the question so that it’s not about intelligence, but about “extelligence.” As they point out, “intelligence not so different from our own can be found in the great apes, cetaceans and the octopus. Pigs are excellent at video games, parrots have a surprisingly good grasp of linguistics, and even sticklebacks and mantis shrimps can solve problems.” (I didn’t know about the pigs.) Extelligence, on the other hand, is “the contextual analogue of individual intelligence. Humanity’s assumption of global dominance is a tale of extelligence: language, permanent archives of information such as books, and communication in all its technological forms.”
The radical xenobiologist’s answer to Fermi’s challenge is that our imagination is too limited to even conceive of the possible forms of intelligent, or extelligent, alienness: we’re not quite sure what to look for. Fermi’s last possibility, that “they are here already,” leaves room for several variations, as it raises the question of what it means to be “here already.” Where exactly is “here”? Even in a universe perfused with signs, as Peirce would have it, no single entity is capable of reading all the signs that are “here,” since each resides in its own umwelt of legibilities, its own sub-universe of affordances and effectivities (to use J. J. Gibson’s relational terms for what a thing perceives and what it can do in response; where Gibson is focusing on perception/action, Peirce’s triadic philosophy insists that meaning is their synthesis, their “thirdness”). These umwelts can expand, and early-21st-century-technology-equipped humans have expanded theirs (ours) dramatically. But then there are still, for instance, the bacterial superorganisms that Lynn Margulis has studied and written about, and which New Scientist calls the “real Avatar” — “extraterrestrial seas” of communicative life, as Stefan Helmreich describes them.
And there are events, singularities, that call for interpretation. Whales attacking. Or the whole biogeophysical system striking violently, triggering an inevitable search for meaning. Why this place? Why now? Why us? Has nature gone askew? (And everyday life hits do that as well.)
For the Bioblog author, part of the problem of recognizing alien in/ex/telligence is that “as a civilization advances they begin to use the available electromagnetic spectrum for communication more fully and efficiently until ultimately their radiative emissions are indistinguishable from blackbody radiation.” That sounds a bit like one might describe Margulis’s/Helmreich’s seas, and Peirce’s ocean of semiosis: as a civilization advances, there comes to be too much signing going on, too much meaning-making, to the point that if we were to fully open up to another extelligent civilization’s sea of communicative intelligence — as we’re incrementally moving toward with our ability to read radiation waves across light-years of space — it would all be indistinguishable from the thermal “blackbody” background: it would all melt into white noise. We wouldn’t be able to see the signals for the noise.
Or maybe this is just the kind of thought one would have as our own mediasphere multiplies over and through itself in infinite directions. As Robert Corrington, who has developed an ecstatic naturalist ontotheology out of Peircian semiotics, writes: “world semiosis is the Bacchanalian revel in which each sign moves between death and transfiguration and attains some scope for itself within the innumerable intersections of its life” (p. 41). In the Bacchanalian revel that is the internet, how long does each sign live for? If signs “hunger for participation in innumerable orders of relevance” (p. 67), at what point do the signs come to saturate the available orders such that what emerges is an oceanic din in which the signs no longer reach (or create) their interpretants, and so in which the signs are no longer signs, no longer information, just noise? (For Peirce a thing is only a sign when it comes to mean something for someone. A sign relation requires the sign-vehicle, or representamen, the object to which it refers, and the interpretant, which is the meaning it generates in and for someone.)
Perhaps what’s missing in such a saturated semiosphere is space, territory for the signs to spread themselves out against, to smear themselves over, context against which they can shimmer and make themselves felt in a way that enters into their observers’ life-worlds surrounded by a spaciousness that renders them legible, meaningful, assimilable. For those who live outside the internet, for instance, and outside of the global economy, what we do here (online) may be just noise — just as they barely register here. Perhaps the first step to finding alien in/ex/telligence may be to step out of our own electronic umwelt and into one of those places where the world’s other humanity lives (as Bob Neuwirth does in Shadow Cities and Mike Davis in Planet of Slums). Or to step, with Brian Goodwin and Jesper Hoffmeyer (or one of Thoreau’s better descendants) into nature.
And then there are these big quaking signs that come along, all too often these days (as in Chile this morning), that bring all these things (the other humanity, the shadow nature) together in one fell swoop, in one signal transmission. Big signs seeking big interpretants. Leaving big tears in their wake.
What does this alienness, this altarity, mean? What do signs like these indicate? Have we even begun to make sense of our very own shadow biosphere?
for Peirce it was semiosis all the way down: see ‘the grand vision’ in Deely’s ‘New Beginnings.’ But it may not be that easy. The semiosis Peirce/Deely outline below the threshold of empsyched beings is ‘virtual’. It requires a mind to bring it into being…
all this is totally at odds with 000 – where minds don’t really matter. Flatness.
But, Paul, are not the bacteria in my gut also “empsyched”? I prefer to think about anticipatory systems rather than observers and minds..
I tried this morning to start reading Crocco’s “Palindrome” again. My first reaction (last year) was that there’s nothing more formalistic and artificial than a palindrome staring narcissistically into its own mirror!
Still, Crocco’s quote about “reciprocal functionalization, in which each of both realities uses for its own ends the reality that uses it as a means” seems close to what OOO is trying to get at with “flat ontology”. Most everyone except LS, Bhaskar and DeLanda seem to have a problem with this word “flat”.
As for OOP, Harman’s objective tensions, semiotic junctions, and eidetic radiations, with “ten possible links” seems to be getting closer to Peirce all the time! (see doctorzamelek’s 2009-11-12 posts) Wish I had more time to compare L’OQ to Peirce’s 10-fold classification of signs (see 1903’s “Nomencalture and Divisions of Triadic Relations” in EP2..)
Hi Mark. It’s always about definitions.
If you’re a ‘pansychist’ yes, bacteria are ’empsyched’ (Aristotle’s term).
But it will depend on how you define mind. At the beginning of Mario Crocco’s Palindrome there is a good definition (for that tradition). And also Mariela Szirko’s knol on consciousness:
http://knol.google.com/k/consciousness-definition-and-concept#
I also should have distinguished Graham Harman’s thesis from LS. Harman’s thesis is specifically not flat (not all objects are the same).
I did mention this a few times on LS’ blog (which I no longer comment on or read). ‘Real beings’ (like rocks) have direct contact with their ‘sensuous objects’ – but as far as I can understand Harman’s thesis no contact with each other at all.
This seems to be based on maintaining some kind of Heideggerian principle about concealment (there is a being always hidden from us?). I think I would need to see ‘the quadruple object’ to really understand graham’s position. It’s interesting how he takes up Zubiri who is so opposed to all this. Of course it’s cute to say that you don’t mind annoying disciples (which I’m not) but like Zubiri I don’t see why a ‘shove’ doesn’t get by with efficient causation and needs some special causation which stupid childish science has not hear of (Harman’s approach in ‘On Vicarious causality).
For Crocco and Kalevi Kull there is a causal break in semiosis and only empsyched beings can initiate the causal series producing semiosis:
‘The signs’ causal efficiency exhausts itself in generating sensible
notices in the observer. Then the observer interprets the sign and starts any new causal series, not determined
by the sign itself but by the hermeneusis of this sign that the observer carried out.’ (crocco).
‘I entirely agree that the area of semiosis is bordered with a break in causation. But it requires a careful analysis to find out where this break really happens.
What I’m saying is that Prigogine attempted to describe how and where the break in causation can take place, whereas it seems that this was not problem for Peirce.
The basic assumption of synechism (of continuity of everything) evades the possibility of the break. So to say, Peirce studied the world as if it were entirely semiosic, without a region that could be completely non-semiosic. One cannot find in Peirce the causality-break about which Mario is talking about.’ (Kalevi Kull, email).
I wan’t ramble on. Wouldn’t want to be accused of plugging my book, or spamming, or ‘arguing from authority’, as was the case recently on LS.
I do use a lot of quotes but it’s useful in commment sections. I’m not trying to write a blog…just contribute and point to some material. I try and make a point of including a link or url.
I forgot to say that for the Argentine/German tradition to be empsyched requires a certain ‘electroneurobiological organ’ = brain. Thus, dogs are mindful but ticks and trees and computers not so. They are reactive systems that do not initiate new causal series…(for some traditions)…
best wishes.
Ps. I say all this as an interested hobbyist.
Paul, Mark – I’m enjoying this dialogue… And it just struck me that we might interact with philosophies according to their own ontologies (and ours, of course, as well). If a philosophical system claims the world is made up of objects, but that these objects rub up against each other, contact each other directly, maybe exchanging properties or, at some extreme, fusing together into new objects, then it’s fair to directly engage with that philosophy and do what one will with it. On the other hand, if a philosophy (like Harman’s) claims that objects never touch each other directly, but always retain their own concealed essence, perhaps this can be taken as an appeal to allow his philosophy to retain and develop its own essence. OOP in its own secured space, something else in another.
I’ve moved, over time, from a more Bakhtianian position – that ideas/theories have their own essential sanctity, conditions that birthed them and in which they make utmost sense, but that life calls them into dialogue with others, a dialogue that risks their self-stability and that challenges them to a direct and radical engagement with others – to a more Deleuzian one of endless becoming-other, where the conditions are preserved only as a virtuality with the process of becoming always moving forward ceaselessly no matter what. And that the mutation into newness is not a bad thing at all; on the contrary, it’s good, and there’s really nothing to cling to anyway (and no need for top ten lists and overrated philosopher lists and all that; though I don’t really abide by that rule myself…).
But at the same time, I find the Harmanian position attractive. To develop a full-fledged philosophy, one requires a laboratory (what was it Latour said – ‘give me a laboratory and I will raise the world’?), which means a certain protected space, a secured biosphere within which a natural evolutionary development can unfold for a while before that philosophy is dished out to the wolves, the meteors and comets of open (critical) space. Perhaps the philosophy blogosphere is too much like that outer space, full of comets, asteroids, trolls, spammers, and whatnot… a good place for conversations about philosophies, but not necessarily the right place to grow the monster (as Bryant is trying to do) in the open street-facing window with observers and gawkers passing by every minute.
Peirce, on the other hand, is already a star in the sky, Saturn with its rings or Jupiter with its red spot. That planet makes for a much enriched constellation of forces to work with.
Paul – thanks for the contextualization of Crocco, Kull, et al.
Thanks, Paul. this “causal break in semiosis” for Crocco & Kull does seem quite different from the “Evolutionary Love” pansychism of Peirce. And Mariela Szirko’s concept of “Consciousness” seems very Whiteheadian, along with the distinctions between cognizance, semovience, and “cadacualtez (each existentiality or psyche’s intrinsic unbarterability)”. I’m thinking of how this is ‘violated’ by the Pandoran ‘grapevine’ in AVATAR..
Speaking of “dark signs.. & quakes”, I had an odd experience trying to watch AVATAR for the first time last weekend. The local art-house theater, within walking distance, was showing a Saturday matinee of AVATAR. Little did I realize it was part of some fly-by-night, entertainment-industry promotion for a day-long Oscar film-fest. These clowns had the second half of the film wound on the reels backward! After waiting an hour, I left in disgust, the last image being the escape flight of the mobile avatar lab while the Colonel gets intoxicated on tear gas trying to blow them out of the sky with his hand guns..
Anyway, listening to the chattering film-fest folks (” has better dialogue” than AVATAR!) and walking back through the deserted “town square”, crossing the foot-bridge back over the highway, gawking at the senseless traffic of people going nowhere, provided a mild psychic quake revealing the “weird life, shadow biosphere [and] dark signs” of an American populace that seems so horribly clueless about how close the US Military-Industrial Complex already is to the War Machine depicted in AVATAR. Worse, they have so little clue that another world is possible! (This is epitomized by Daniel Mendelsohn’s annoying 2010-03-25 NY REVIEW commentary on AVATAR, which I just read.) So I went home and was ‘enlightened’ reading KVOND and Dejan’s lengthy discussions from back in January.
Yes, Adrian, Corrington’s ECSTATIC NATURALISM is a bit too “onto-theological” (though maybe the Grantian wing of SR would dig its “archetypal potencies” ?) My copy contains a 2003-06 printed-off manifesto, “Unfolding / Enfolding: The Categorial Schema”, from Corrington’s former site (“The domain overlookinstitute.org may be for sale by its owner!”) all about the “modalities of the sacred”.
HP Lovecraft and JG Ballard seem to be everyone’s favorite antidotes to the allure of the sacred. I much prefer something like Greg Egan’s clever 2008 novel INCANDESCENCE (shades of IMMANENCE !) where we find a fascinating palindrome between humanoid conquerors of the galaxy and the insectoid guardians of the prohibited zone at the gallactic core. Like Pandora, all is not quite as it seems to be (in the weird life of this extreme shadow biosphere) to the high-tech Rationalist humanoids from the outside!
Also classics of Dark Vitalism are the novels of Linda Nagata, especially DECEPTION WELL (1997): “Information streamed in slow chemical currents through the dust, flashing occasionally into the electromagnetic spectrum astride erratic signals barely distinguishable from the static. Halfway down the sheltered Well, human lives burned in the warm infrared, oblivious of the whispered exchange… feedback reactions working on alien protocols encoded in the dust long ago” (337) — and VAST (1998): “Another tentacle emerged from another hole… With it came a new flood of charismata: Lot felt his own desire circling back to him, but stripped of its anguish, bearing the promise of a softer, vaster awareness that stroked his sensory tears in pops and crackles of blazing Communion… He heard stirrings of sentience all around him, whispering unintelligible phrases that he somehow understood to be a song of ecstatic union”, p378).
Hi there ,
I’ll be away for a few days in the urban jungle of orclund but just a couple of things:-
Deely certainly wanted to continue Peirce’s grand vision but I gather that he may have become less comfortable with this – he spends a consid amount of time in Tartu as a visiting scholar with Kalevi.
I’d love to visit Kalevi in estonia – he has a place in the country with lynx.
Btw, Tartu is where the german in the argentine/german tradition comes from (Christfried Jacob). In fact Kalevi is mentioned somewhere on the Argentine site:
http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/
Mario’s knol on cadacualtez:
http://knol.google.com/k/cadacualtez-or-why-one-is-not-another#
“This idea of mental contents as not inseparably belonging (“inhering”) to a particular psyche, existentiality, mind or soul is reflected in a notion of “consciousness” not seldom seen in modern textbooks in English: namely, “consciousness” as a natural element, fungible like gold or water, the different samples from which are to take, along some development, different shapes.
That widely known depiction is not the single one of its kind. Another portrayal points out that psyches are cadacualtic, that is to say that they are characterized on their cadacualtez: in other words that, before to start any development, psyches already differ among themselves. Things being so, no common “mental element” would exist. Reason is, that mental contents inhere (to a particular psyche and not to another). Hence they cannot be “disengaged” out of such a particular psyche and exhibited in a non-inhering condition, such as apples or rocks on a table; and no “mind dust”, after amassing itself into some conglomeration, could indifferently shape up one or another psyche, as it is thought in the views of numerous ancient thinkers, Stoic and other, William James (1842-1910), or Albert North Whitehead (1861-1947).’ (mario crocco, knol).
and yes, Pandora does, like many sc fi depictions and most theory, ignore cadacualtez. As mario notes, even a clone (just like a twin) is another person.
Anyway, avagudweekend.
Yes I was thinking about this when I saw avatar. I lot of sci-fi and theory is ‘blind to cadualtez’ (try googling that).
“And there is mario’s knol on cadualtez:http://knol.google.com/k/cadacualtez-or-why-one-is-not-another#There is no scientific doubt that psyches differ in regard to their mental contents. Yet, do they also differ intrinsically, before starting to distinguish knowledges, i.e. before beginning to learn? The question is important because, if they did not differ intrinsically, it would be possible to think that mind or psyche is a common material (“consciousness”), akin to water or gold, from which samples are taken that afterward adopt diverse shapes: gold may take the shape of a ring or a coin, water that of a drinking glass or a bottle, such a supposed “consciousness” that of this or that cognoscitive development – to put examples. This idea of mental contents as not inseparably belonging (“inhering”) to a particular psyche, existentiality, mind or soul is reflected in a notion of “consciousness” not seldom seen in modern textbooks in English: namely, “consciousness” as a natural element, fungible like gold or water, the different samples from which are to take, along some development, different shapes.
That widely known depiction is not the single one of its kind. Another portrayal points out that psyches are cadacualtic, that is to say that they are characterized on their cadacualtez: in other words that, before to start any development, psyches already differ among themselves. Things being so, no common “mental element” would exist. Reason is, that mental contents inhere (to a particular psyche and not to another). Hence they cannot be “disengaged” out of such a particular psyche and exhibited in a non-inhering condition, such as apples or rocks on a table; and no “mind dust”, after amassing itself into some conglomeration, could indifferently shape up one or another psyche, as it is thought in the views of numerous ancient thinkers, Stoic and other, William James (1842-1910), or Albert North Whitehead (1861-1947).”
Third time lucky – I’m away from home in sunny orclund.
Btw, the german in the argentine/german trad. came from Tartu, estonia. Where Kalevi works. I am led to understand that Deely may now be less enthusiastic about semiosis all the way down…
Thanks, Paul. cadACualtez works. I’m reluctant to go too much further off-topic here. Suffice it to say that Mariela Szirko’s and Mario Crocco’s ideas seem very important for issues of existential discreteness that are relevant for “weird life” and “shadow biospheres”, not to mention OOO/OOP.
But, I find both Szirko and Crocco difficult to read. Certainly your book would help. I’m definitely not convinced that anyone who denies some or all of their claims is guilty of monopsychism. Perhaps I’ll find some time to delve into this further over the weekend, since it’s certainly central to many of my own (amateur) speculations..
Yes, it’s partly a problem of English not being their first lang. (altho they do v. well). Mario speaks English perfectly.
The other thing is the relative unfamiliarity of their terms. Altho most of us our unfamiliar with neurobioloby, genetic epistemology (Piaget) etc.
I have been reading and rereading them for a decade…and had, a still have problems. The essays by Crocco and Szirko – on their website and published in ‘Ontology of Consciousnes’ are about half the length of the unpublished versions. And then there is the unpublished ‘Sensing’ and all the spanish material. I have tried to get them to publish more but they have no funding and the political and economic problems are huge. My book won’t help I mention them in the conclusion..For me, it is the most interesting unexplored territory (for those not familiar with it – which is most of us).
Anyway i’m glad you find something of interest. Christfried Jacob studied in Tartu before moving to B.A.. He would prob. have received a nobel except for anti-german sentiment.
I am having a little trouble posting. My book won’t help! I mention them in the conclusion.
They are diff to read partly cos of the unfamiliarity of the terms and also english is not their first lang. Altho they do pretty well!
I have been reading (and helping to edit) for 10yrs and still have problems. How many of us are familiar with neurobiology or genetic epistemology (piaget).
Christfried Jacob would prob have got a nobel if not for anti-german sentiment
Note the ref to Ortega in the quote below. Graham Harman recently characterized his phil as more Ortegan than Heidy.
‘THE DEFINITION OF PERSONS:
Thinking not defines the realities that do it. Thinking is just a self-determination of the object composition of their states, under semovient or reactive solicitations. Neither any catenation in such self-determining, nor such states as instantaneous intonated structuralities in nature, indicate the common pith of psychisms. Conative experiencing, as subjective, is existential. As existentiality common to all psychisms, conative experiencing is the non-predicative being personal, impersonally available to all persons (not “shared by” them, as it is not “the same” conative experiencing, that never appears stuff-like; instead, it is a plural or non-unique yet indistinguishable availability). Thus, albeit not fungible (because eclosional), existential issues make none difference amongst persons. It is thus silly to inquiry what it is like “to be” a cat: what is sound, is inquiring what it is like for an existentiality to avail of the availabilities of a cat: the ones common with any other psychism (e. g., conative experiencing) and the uncommon ones (as this loving human owner, or that impaired feline nervous system). To exist as a dog is equal to exist as a human, just like humans of different availabilities are all them coequal in their existence: controllers to controlled, victims to victimaries, engineers to the persons eclosed at any artificial noematic substrates they may eventually fabricate. Yet, as we saw, psychisms are found in nature reciprocally extrinsic, existentially disassociated and, constitutively, not taking part each in other. That is, psychisms are fundamentally discrete finitudes, disjunctive, each fully exterior to the others without any perichoresis or circumincession; consequently, isolable and separable, as each finds herself noticing different happenings and controlling different sets of availabilities. Thus, as primarily individual (= not secondarily parcellated, as fungible resources are, or unparcellated), the persons are found in nature constituted not only by their existential being (namely, by their non-predicative being finite conative and observer actualities), but also by their disjunct circumstances: yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, Ortega insisted. Apart of all Platonic hypostasizings of genera and species, in individual observers in nature their circumstantiation is not accidental but constitutive, because their existential condition of eclosed finitude, namely what it is like to be an observer, is equal for all psychisms. Thus, to be a whale or a bat not differs from being a turkey or a human: what changes is the availability, not the existential being.’ (Mario Crocco, ‘Sensing’).
Thanks for further info, Paul. I have actually been reading “Pallindrome” (very s l o w l y ) and have even partially digested it (after how many weeks ?) Might be able to say something intelligent over the weekend..
I’m pasting from an email from Mario Crocco. Note the ref to Zubiri and the AGNT’s distinction from his phil. Crocco met him a few times.
I think it’s interesting that that a virtually unknown tradition was exploring territory that is only know becoming known in a few small circles…But that does happen occasionally.
Mario Crocco:
“Maybe you can help me
to remember whether it was Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry
Finn who was so wonderfully
amazed when the latest
technology – a balloon flight – revealed to him that the united States does not differ in color,
as maps unfaithfully portray them. This important intuition (I fuzzingly credit it to Mark
Twain but may be mistaken)
is the essential point to
penetrate Zubiri’s anthropology as well as his difference with our tradition[theArgentine/German neurobiological tradition/AGNT] – and also the touchstone to probe Jung’s.
Don Xavier’s thought stemmed from the same cultural sources that our neurobiological tradition but he kept a greater
loyalty to the Peripatetic
view of minds as penetrable.
This on the Twain’s picture
is like to seeing the contiguous States as not essentially
different in certain feature
that prevents full exchanges,whether the map color or cadacualtez for minds. The issue in fact comes from certain
remarks by Aristotle in his
peri psyjees, but let me now
skip over it. Such penetrability allowed don Xavier to speak at
once of a crab’s and a dog’s
sentience, while in fact the
dog senses and the crab doesn’t.”
——-
I guess there’s enought there to mull over!
BTW,
You may have already noticed but you can also listen to Palindrome (see the AGNT website). The voice is yours truly…
OK, Paul, you’ve provoked me into barking too soon! This quote from don Mario condenses what I find utterly frustrating and suspect would also be a major turn-off to many of the readers of this blog:
“the dog senses and the crab doesn’t”.
WtF? In “Palindrome” the dummy was the poor oyster, just as it was in Dennett’s CONSCIOUNESS EXPLAINED! There’s much to be learned from Aristotle and neoplatonism, but I’m not going to tie myself into this Great Chain of Being. Even plants and viruses perform extensive semiotic serenades, responding accordingly, thus exhibiting a form of consciousness – not merely instruments of nature but using nature as their instrument.
BUT, burried beneath the Antarctic ice of this old-school primatocentrism, there’s some important ontological issues in Crocco (and Mariela Szirko). Even though minds are NOT Turing machines, natural computing (cf, Bruce MacLennan’s “Natural Computation and Non-Turing Models of Computation”, online) can be combined with biosemiotic approaches to account for what mind’s do, with no hard problem (IMHO – and I read all those Tucson Conference abstracts long ago).
Just today, a comment at LS pointed me toward Karen Barad’s “Queer Causation and the Ethics of Mattering”. Haven’t even begun reading this except to note that it’s utterly relevant to the discussion (since the title of the book in which Barad’s essay appears is QUEERING THE NON/HUMAN).
The other day I’d had it with “Palindrome” and was about to throw it into the hopeless pile. The next morning I woke with a dream revelation: the subconscious is truly far more clever than anything consciousness can come up with. While fast asleep in frog pajamas, I’d linked up Crocco’s eclosions with something I’d recalled from Tom Robbins ultra philosophical novel, JITTERBUG PERFUME, about how we constantly dream but ‘consciousness’ makes such a racket while we’re awake that we’re barely aware of it.
And, as a parting thought, for now, here’s a perfect Buddhist palindrome from that same novel: “I believe in everything, nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing, everything is sacred”.
KARL JASPERS FORUM
TA 15 (Muller)
Commentary 38
(to Herbert FJ Muller’s R12 ‘On Piaget’
and R13 ‘Experience emerges before matter’,
addressed to Mariela Szirko’s C32 and C34)
——————–
NEGLECT FOR CADACUALTEZ INSTALLS MATERIALISM:
HERBERT, NOT MARIELA, IS MATERIALIST
by Mariela Szirko
16 June 1999, posted 20 July 1999
11 years ago:
Mariela Szirko:
“The gist of materialism is fungibility. It consists in resorting to some paste, whether an eidetic, sensual, action-like, aethereal or condensate ‘material’, any portion of which may be indifferently taken to form realities.
Like in banks money articulates accounts, idealist materialism articulates ideas into persons while materialist materialism articulates less-subtle materials to the same effect. And likewise amiss.
Materialism is thus established once anybody takes anything to work as a material –namely, not mattering which portion of it is being taken — to build further realities. In particular, minds.
Why the mere taking of any resource as indifferently partitionable incurs in materialism? Does perchance it not matter if the resource posited as fungible is one (or a special combination) of essences, quidditates, Bose-Einstein condensates, atoms or dust? No, it does not matter.
This is so because, beyond any coarseness or subtleness of what is posited to work as a material, what is neglected is the irrepeatability of the singular result. Therefore, building a wall with bricks and mortar, and building a text with concepts and expressions, legitimately may be described materialistically, as an ‘in-formative alteration’.
But such a materialistic description is illegitimate to depict psychisms in full, because albeit Herbert and Mariela may ‘share’ some noema –say, ‘the’ sensation of a lazuline blue — never each of us will avail of the noema actually availed by the other. Because we are finite, this is so.”
Ok, maybe we should stop using Adrian’s blog!
People are ‘turned off’ depending on their theories.
There is a diff between ‘responding to’ and ‘reacting’ in this tradition.
One may exhibit a ‘form of consc’, the other not. The ‘swimming’ acellulars in Palindrome trap their food, but for that tradition they do not have ‘knowledge’ – or sense – but rather, ‘information’.
I don’t see this as a ‘primatocentrism’? No-one is claiming a special place for primates.
What the AGNT does, which Aristotle doesn’t, is make a distinction btwn living systems and empsyched living systems.
“For Aristotle, in view of his mentioned purpose, it was uninteresting
to detect if within the series of organisms animated by a vegetative sensitive
soul the individuals of some species included an existentiality circumstanced
to sense and move its body. This is the case of a dog, for instance.
Other organisms lack such an existentiality in charge of biological
functions, for example a starfish – or its common ancestors with the dog, if
Aristotle could have paid attention to them. These other organisms are constituted
purely in the hylozoic hiatus and operate in a purely reactive way:
they are unable to inaugurate innovative causal series semoviently, that is to say with decisions.”
I find this an interesting ‘theory’ based on a 100yr tradition. It’s not just Crocco’s ‘opinion’ – and it isn’t a primatocentrism. Kalevi Kull also sees some value in this distinction and he’s spent more time on biosemiotics than I ever will.
It really is always going to depend on the theory of mind/psyche that one holds and how far it extends – and on what grounds it is extended. Pretty much central to the hist of phil I suppose.
Anyway, I should get off this blog! Thanks, Adrian for the space –
Are there “empsyched” beings that are not primates? Of course beings with cortical white-matter extensions or whatnot are capable of more complex thought, but I ethically reject the idea that the resultant, willful, conscious decisions have some superior ethical or utilitarian advantage.
Allow me to quote from Karen Barad’s “Queer Causation and the Ethics of Mattering”:
“The point of challenging traditional epistemologies [of nature / culture, reactive / “empsyched”] is not merely to welcome females, slaves, children, animals and other disposessed Others (exiled from the land of knowers by Aristotle thousands of years ago) into the fold of knowers, but to better account for the ontology of knowing”.
Barad adds: “Brittlestars literally enact my agential realist ontoepistemological point about the entangled practices of knowing and being”.
For me, the distinction between “empsyched” and reactive in Crocco seems too dualistic. It’s a distraction, like Heidegger’s Nazism. The ideas about eclosion and fungibility – and especially Crocco’s cosmology – are much more important, I think!
But, Paul, our discussions here, and your efforts to bring these folks to a wider audience, are much appreciated. Best, Mark
Chickens…frogs, caecalians (limbless, burrowing, wormlike, amphibians) but not ticks or trees, however big.
I’m no expert – it’s a theory that requires an ‘electroneurobiological organ’ – however small – for sensing – to do with overlapping fields.
There is nothing ‘superior’ about it. that would be a judgement…
To ‘ethically’ reject something is not necessarily a path to understanding – your ethics may change.
James Lovelock thinks nuclear power is the only way to survive – do you ethically reject this and why? Moving deckchairs around on the Titanic as he puts it…?
The kind of psyche you ‘ethically’ want is ‘all the way down’…(and to talk about ‘animals’ is just too vague – as even Derrida says ‘one of man’s greatest stupidies’ – the animal in general (now trans. as ‘The animal that therefore I am.’:
http://www.fordhampress.com/detail.html?id=9780823227914
You still need a theory – why is the thermostat not ‘sensing’…maybe your non dualism requires that it displays a kind of consc? I’m sure there a folk out there who will see no diff btwn a thermostat and a person (whether human or not).
Another person who would turn many off (perhaps) is Humerto Maturana (a retired prof of biology – as you know):
‘Animals that do not live in language cannot be conscious or aware in the same mannner in which we are conscious or aware when we speak or our consciousness or awareness as languaging animals.
If we speak of body awareness as we refer to the operation of handling their bodies performed by non-languaging animals (as the self-cleaning of a wasp), then we also exhibit a comparable body awareness when we accommodate our position and movements to the circumstances of our interactions and relations, when we are not attending (in language) to our doings and we say afterwards that we acted unconsciously.
I claim that animals that do not live in language do all that they do as we do what we do unconsciously. And I claim that this is so because they do not have the operationality of language which makes self-consciousness possible.'(Maturana, Biol of Self Consc, 1995).
‘…and I can certainly affirm that, if there is such a paradise, it
surely is to be shared by nonhuman circumstanced existentialities.
Then the lamb will lie down with the lion, their lives and deaths
counting as martyrdom. Every mind, every circumstanced existentiality, is also ontically and ontologically constituted by value [this is hardly a distracting fascism] – even the mind unbarterably
composing a personal unity with the last caecilian body (limbless
burrowing wormlike amphibians) or regulating any other organism: or, in
other words, minds’ ontic consistency is an amorous condition. (Crocco, Palindrome).
In fact I would say, as a provocation that ls’s nominalistic (his term) 000 is much more fascist in making all objects ‘the same’ in there onticity. It is blind to cadacualtez. But honestly, I don’t believe that any of this will really make a difference. People tenacioulsy hang on to their theories…
One of the reasons I still read Harman is because I think he does actually have an open mind…
Bon voyage.
You can find my email on Stivale’s list thingy..,
Let’s leave Adrian alone!
Paul meet Mark, Mark meet Paul… Honestly, though, I’m delighted to have my post on alien signs become the occasion for such interesting discussion… And I’m glad to be urged to read Crocco, Szirko, et al, and to be reminded of others (like Barad, whose work I would most strongly recommend).
Re the question of empsychment: one way to think about this – which resonates with Paul’s Maturana quote and follows (different kinds of) indications in both Bergson and Bateson – is that consciousness is a reduction rather than an expansion, a greater selectivity of things to pay attention to when the automatic attending and responding isn’t working, or when there are too many things that an organism/object needs to attend to. This increases the window for error, but also makes learning possible.
Greater ’empsychment’ is neither better nor worse than lesser empsychment: it opens up opportunities for error and (a kind of) stupidity, but adds to the universe’s array of life/response strategies. Ultimately, as things reach a plateau – like that of the twenty-first century global humanity-altered biosphere – the multitude/level of heightened empsychment makes possible dramatic collective changes at a frightening order of magnitude: i.e., we can destroy or radically alter the whole planetary system, just as we can (though it would require getting smart pretty quickly) turn it into a quite different, negentropically oriented (sustainable, post-carbon) rearrangement.
There’s nothing inherently good or bad about our specifically human form of empsychment except to the extent that differentiation is a “good” (and to the extent that the human differentiation is more complexly-differential than others, which it generally may be, though it’s hard to measure this). It’s a destabilizer, but whether the possibilities opened up by its destabilization are actualized or not, or which direction they are actualized in, is an open question. I feel no particular need to deny humans a feeling of our own potential, and even the capacity to celebrate that potential (which can sometimes be a healthy thing). But getting carried away with that celebration can be blinding, and using it as a justification for stupidity has been all too common.
Mark and I have been living in the same virtual ecology for many many years. I always enjoy a chat.
BTW, I was in a gurdjieff group in Paris for a few years (30yrs ago) LOL.
It was interesting but definitely a kind of church. And some of the most arrogant people I’ve ever met – together with a few v. remarkable ones (like Madame de Dampierre). C’est la vie.
‘Certainly alligators, ducks, kangaroos or minds eclosed to most artificial substrates will not act on ethical motivations.
Non humans and often also humans act on impulse, on passions.
‘Controlling oneself is a matter of social breeding, a cultural issue, paleontologically recent, that the body and brain of many animals do not allow; or allow it only rudimentarily, as among dolphins and chimpanzees.
‘Yet, had those animal’s bodies and brains not been evolutionarily developed, you would not have developed your brain as needed to permit your society and culture; had this evolution not been nomical [regular/’lawful], you would not have your freedom uncoerced.
‘This we owe to the misery of irrational existences, besides the love and understanding that we often exchange with our domestic animals, horses and herds.
Yet foreign [other’s] dignity was always recognized step by step. Women, slaves, American natives, African anthropoids and any intelligent extraterrestrial organisms motivated learned discusions to ascertain if they indeed deserved complete respect.
‘Only recently did it became apparent that mindful animals are non-human persons, existentialites equal to us whose circumstances dissimilate their ontic consistency into mental contents different from those which our brains, adapted to another history, in turn dissimilate.’ (Crocco, ‘Long Palindrome’, unpublished).
Hasta la vista
Hi Everyone, I loved reading your conversation here. I learned new stuff and truly, this blog topic seems new to me..