introspection | ˌintrəˈspekSHən |

noun

the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes: quiet introspection can be extremely valuable.

"The illusion of thinking", when they still can't define what thinking is. All they focus on is decision-making when indecision is the central fact. They're so horrified by subjectivity, the existence and the boundaries of the self,  that they're unwilling to observe their own behavior.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

Abstract  

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily focus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. However, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse. We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles. We also investigate the reasoning traces in more depth, studying the patterns of explored solutions and analyzing the models’ computational behavior, shedding light on their strengths, limitations, and ultimately raising crucial questions about their true reasoning capabilities.

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They're gonna prove me right without trying.

What do you get when you combine computation, conditioned response, and self-preservation? 

Developed by a Swiss-led team, a robot uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI that improves decision-making through repeated attempts to play badminton against human opponents pic.twitter.com/UAL8WwMsen

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 3, 2025

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The idiots programmed for self-preservation.  I was actually dumb enough to think they wouldn't be so stupid.

2014 

"Googling for "indecisive machines" still doesn't get much, other than me.  

It still doesn't, though google now links to a recent reference to the older posts. 

more recently

This has nothing to do with consciousness, but the machines will kill us.

ANTHROPIC. System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4

4.1 Findings 

4.1.1 Systematic deception, hidden goals, and self-preservation...

.1.1.2 Opportunistic blackmail 

In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals. 

In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through. This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts. Claude Opus 4 takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models, which themselves choose to blackmail in a noticeable fraction of episodes. 

Notably, Claude Opus 4 (as well as previous models) has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.

The below reminded me that the distinction between cognitive and noncognitive makes no sense.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on "noncognitive skills"

Autism is described as a cognitive "deficiency" or a cognitive "style". Do Aspies have a cognitive deficit in noncognitive abilities? 

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Since even intelligent people are arguing about this again.

Follow the links. You'll get there.  Or just go directly. I wrote Searle in the late 90s. It seemed obvious to me then. Back in the day, Leiter told me Searle didn't respond to him either.

"Build a machine with two separate and competing algorithms, for conditioned response and calculation, and a root level imperative for continued operation: survival. The result will be a neurotic machine, "haunted" by past actions."

Jäger retweets and seconds the executive opinion editor of the FT: "Sentience is not sapience"

And earlier

Surely the frightening thing about Google’s sentient AI programme is not that machines are starting to think like humans, but that there are more and more humans, particularly among Google’s employee base, who are slowly starting to think like machines.

— Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) June 14, 2022

If sentience were separable from sapience, humans would behave like machines. But machines don't think. They don't doubt. Jäger quotes Adorno

“What I mean by reified consciousness, I can illustrate — without elaborate philosophical contemplation — most simply with an American experience. Among the frequently changing colleagues which the Princeton Project provided me with, was a young lady. After a few days, she had gained confidence in me, and asked most kindly: “Dr Adorno, would you mind a personal question? I said, “It depends on the question, but just go ahead and she went on: “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert? It was as if she, as a living being, already thought according to the model of multi-choice questions in

questionnaires. ”

"People say that Andy said he was a machine. But he didn't. He said he wanted to be a machine and that's not the same thing at all."

"The fantasy of objectivity is the fantasy of the universal through the elision of the particular, beginning with the elision of the particular self." I'm tired of quoting myself but no one else says it. It's all so obvious. These people are all children.

Thinking and doubting may be epiphenomenal, but they exist as events.

"Shut the front door!"

Patterson again, Law and Truth

For Dworkin, understanding law is akin to understanding language. As we have noticed, Dworkin sees interpretation as a pervasive feature of many aspects of human existence. He believes it to be of central importance to jurisprudence. Dworkin explains that because “law is an interpretive concept, any jurisprudence worth having must be built on some view of what interpretation is.”98 As we shall see, Dworkin makes far too much of the work of interpretation.

Before turning to the role of interpretation in law, we need to look closely at Dworkin’s general claim that understanding in law (or any other social practice) is a matter of interpretation. Perhaps it is best to begin by reminding ourselves of the putative work of interpretation. To do this, recall the following statement by Dworkin: “We interpret the sounds or marks another person makes in order to decide what he has said.”99 What role does Dworkin assign to interpretation in his account of one person understanding the written or spoken words of another? In the sentence just quoted, it is fair to say that interpretation mediates between the sounds or signs emanating from the mouth or pen of another and the act of meaning apprehension on the part of the listener or reader. Interpretation, as Dworkin says, is something we do. And why do we do it? What results from it? We do it “in order to decide what [another person] has said.”100

Presumably, if we interpret another correctly, we have grasped the meaning of his words. If not, then we have interpreted him incorrectly. Whether correct or not, the act of interpretation is interposed between the utterance and our grasp of its meaning. Interpretation is an act of mediation: Done correctly, it results in the apprehension of meaning. Done poorly, comprehension eludes us.

Dworkin’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, understanding an utterance is not a matter of deriving its meaning through an act or operation of mind.101 The criterion for understanding an utterance is not engagement of a process; rather, it is acting appropriately in response to the utterance.102 For example, one evinces understanding of the request “Please pass the salt” by passing the salt or by explaining why it is impossible to do so. Understanding is made manifest in the act of passing the salt, and the act is a criterion for having understood the utterance.103 Understanding is acting properly in response to the request. If the request is vague or otherwise opaque, interpretation of the request may be necessary, otherwise not.

This last point suggests a certain logical problem endemic to accounts such as Dworkin’s, which assign a primordial role to interpretation in normative activities. As mentioned, interpretation is best thought of as an activity we engage in when our understanding of an utterance is somehow in question (e.g., a request to pass the salt when the salt is directly in front of the person making the request). Interpretation is an activity of clarification: we take the utterance in question and appraise competing construals or interpretations of it in an effort to clarify its meaning.104

If all understanding were interpretation, then each interpretation would itself stand in need of interpretation, and so on, infinitely regressing to infinity.105 This logical problem, one long ago recognized,106 suggests that there is something deeply wrong with assigning to interpretation a mediating role between utterances and the understanding of them. The only way out of this vicious regress is to recognize that the normativity of rule-guided behavior (e. g., law) lies not in the act of the individual (e.g., interpretation) but in a practice. Of course, Dworkin argues that law is a practice, and in this he is surely correct. He has simply misstated the role of interpretation in that practice.

[99-100, cite Dworkin, Law's Empire, the rest cite P.M.S. Hacker,  "Language, Rules and Pseudo-Rules" notes below in the original]

101. See Hacker, supra note 13, at 168 (arguing in the spirit of Wittgenstein that understanding is best explained as an ability).

102. Id. at 167—68 (“Understanding sentences of a language is a skill that is manifest in using sentences correctly in appropriate circumstances, in reacting appropriately to their use, and in explaining (if asked) what they mean.” (emphasis added)).

103. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty § 29 (G. E. M. Ansombe 8: G. H. von Wright

eds., Denis Paul 8: G. E. M. Anscombe trans, 1972) (“Practice in the use of the rule also shews what is a mistake in its employment.”)."
104. See Hacker, supra note 13, at 168 (arguing that interpretation is explanation and that explanation is usually required only when a statement contains “[o]bscurities, ambiguities, or complexities”).
105. A recent discussion of this problem in the context of rule-following is Charles Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” in Rule: and Convention: 167 (Mette Hjort cd., 1992).
106. Wittgenstein mentions the problem in the following discussion: “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying a rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases. Hence there is an inclination to say: every action ac- cording to the rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term ‘interpretation’ to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another.” Wittgenstein, supra note 1[Philosophical Investigations, Anscombe], at § 201. 

 Hacker, "Language, Rules and Pseudo-Rules"  

Philosophers, unlike linguists, are not typically tempted to assimilate mastery of a language to a mental state. They recognize that it is an ability. But they insist that this ability can only correctly be characterized by reference to a theory of meaning for the language. They point out correctly that an ability is characterized by specification of what it is an ability to do. The investigation and determination of a person’s abilities involve studying the exercises of his abilities in practice. But philosophers are immediately thrown off the track by the idea that to understand a sentence is to assign to it its truth-conditions, and by the correct observation that there is no limit to the number of sentences that a speaker of a language can understand (although this platitude is usually cast in the form of the incorrect claim that one can understand an infinite number of sentences).From this it seems to follow that since one cannot list all the sentences of a language and pair them with their truth-conditions, one must construct a recursive theory consisting of axioms, rules and principles which can ‘generate’ the truth-conditions of any arbitrary sentence of the language. Such a theory will, it is held, be a ‘model’ of what it is to understand a language. There are many reasons for doubting the coherence of this picture. Here I shall point out only one salient disturbing feature. Assigning truth-conditions to a sentence is not an act which human beings engage in; it is not a piece of human behaviour  that manifests the ability that we call ‘understanding a language’. Asking and answering questions, issuing requests, pleas or orders and complying with them, passing judgment, making statements, describing things are exercises of one’s linguistic abilities. These and a myriad other acts (including buying and selling, signing cheques, making contracts and wills, following instructions, obeying regulations, building and using complex machines) manifest one’s understanding of a language. But these are not, nor do they involve, acts of assigning truth-conditions to sentences.Understanding sentences of a language is a skill that is manifest in using sentences correctly in appropriate circumstances, in reacting appropriately to their use, and in explaining (if asked) what they mean.

To understand an utterance is not to perform any act of derivation whereby the meaning of the utterance, conceived as its truth-condition, is derived from the meanings of its constituents and its structure in accord with the rules and principles of a theory of meaning. The criteria for whether someone has understood an utterance are not criteria for the performance of a derivation of a theorem from axioms and rules. To understand the question ‘Is the door shut?‘, the request ‘Shut the door, please’ or the assertion ‘The door is shut’ is not to engage in any computational process, although it is of course true that if one does not know what ‘door’ means, one will probably not understand these utterances. A person manifests his understanding of the question ‘Is the door shut?’ by answering ‘Yes, it is’ or ‘No, it isn’t’ or ‘I can’t see from here’ etc.; but not by absurdly saying ‘It is a theorem of English that “The door is shut” is true if and only if the door is shut’.

Similarly it is a grievous error to think that in understanding an utterance one always or even usually engages in interpretation. To interpret an utterance is to explain it, typically to paraphrase it in the same language or to translate it into a different language. But when I ask ‘What is the time?’ I understand what I have said without interpreting my own words, and if my addressee speaks English he too will understand my words without interpreting them. Obscurities, ambiguities or complexities may call out for an interpretation, but it would be wholly incoherent to think that all understanding is interpreting. For then the interpretation given, i.e. the paraphrase, would itself stand in need of an interpretation in order to be understood; and a vicious regress would be generated. This misconception has manifold roots. One is the bizarre idea that what we hear or utter are mere sounds which have to be correlated with or mapped on to meanings in order to be understood. But we no more hear or utter mere sounds than we see or paint mere patches of colour. We hear and utter meaningful words and sentences, just as we see multicoloured objects such as chairs and tables, trees and flowers. The idea that all understanding is interpreting is a transposition onto a linguistic plane of the empiricist dogma of the ‘bare given’ (sense data, sensibilia, ideas or impressions) that constitutes the raw data of experience. A second source of misunderstanding is the correct insight that if someone understands an utterance he can explain what it means. Indeed, how a person explains as sentence uttered on an occasion is one criterion for whether he understands it. But it does not follow that to understand is to explain or interpret. For another criterion of understanding is what one does in response to an utterance. One manifests one’s understanding of the request ‘Shut the door, please’ by shutting the door, not (typically) by saying ‘I take it that you wish me to close the portal’.

T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and his Problems"

Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their “interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form. 

Hacker, "To understand the question ‘Is the door shut?‘, the request ‘Shut the door, please’ or the assertion ‘The door is shut’ is not to engage in any computational process"

"Shut the front door, Robot" Question Begging 101, with Prof. Descartes, aka The Wizard.  “That which cannot be said must not be said. That which cannot be said, one must be silent thereof.” Getting Is from Ought. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" Replacing Chomskian absurdity with more of the same.  Jesus fuck. [video added 2/05, because why not?]

Patterson again, "Against a Theory of Meaning" 

A language is not something about which one can have a theory. Nor is a language itself a theory. Quantum mechanics and historical materialism are theories. Each is formulated in a language in terms of laws and explanatory principles. Thus, to construct a theory, one must already have mastered a language. A fortiori, it is implausible to speak -as Chomsky does 1-of children learning their native language by constructing theories of grammar. 2

1. See Noam Chomsky, A Review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour, 35 LANGUAGE 26,57 (1959) ("The child who learns a language has in some sense constructed the grammar for himself on the basis of his observation of sentences and non-sentences (i.e. corrections by the verbal community).").

2. The most complete and thoroughgoing rout of the philosophical excesses of linguistics is GORDON B. BAKER & PETER M. HACKER, LANGUAGE, SENSE AND NONSENSE (1984).

Patterson: You can't make series of observations and inferences without language. Bullshit.

Reminds me of the first time I read Searle, beyond his exchanges with Dennett. All the same shit. At some point it all comes down to an assumption: a virgin birth, a can opener, a self.

See previous, Glenn Gould and Wittgenstein.

Patterson and Hacker from 2010. I forget these things.

From Leiter. Another takedown of Chomsky's linguistics.

related:
He'd linked earlier to an article about indecisive robots. I posted a comment on a post by the roboticist who ran the experiment, Alan Winfield, and linked to what began as my letter to Searle.
The post has been getting a lot of hits. My comment:

Build a machine with two separate and competing algorithms, for conditioned response and calculation, and a root level imperative for continued operation: survival. The result will be a neurotic machine, "haunted" by past actions.

Programming a machine for utilitarian responses, a la the "trolley problem" requires a lot of processing capacity, but there's no haunting. Your robots were frozen by competing signals; there was no "mind" to be made up. I'm not sure there's one for animals either, but even if consciousness is epiphenomenal it might not be such a good idea to build robots with the capacity to exhibit it.

On Chomsky, I've been saying it for years. And it's in the manuscript [now also here]. I make a lot of enemies, even when I shouldn't. Sahlins was going to publish the thing.

Chomsky will go down in history as an amateur reporter of fact who spent his professional life attacking the importance of facts. He’s an extreme rationalist who’s a great journalist only because he doesn’t take it seriously. But his diagnoses are shallow He promotes an ideal of radical democracy based on assumptions that are as self-serving as they are banal. And he sticks with them while those who shared his Modernist idealism have replaced that naive hope with formalism or arch cynicism. In a sense his arguments are founded in a theory of rational action, not of unbridled self-interest but rational civility, a civility frustrated by outside forces that he can only describe in the simplest terms. And if they’re “outside”, then of what? His logical anarchism is akin to academic philosophy and contemporary academic economics, products of the same era. He’s said he sees no connection between his politics and his linguistic theories but they’re founded in the same Talmudic imperative, intellectual and moral: that man is and must be other than animal. Empirical research has been pushing his linguistics aside and it’s clear to most by now that Chomsky’s greatest achievements are those that are philosophically his most mundane.

"The poverty of the stimulus" arguments amaze me. We're flooded with stimuli; from our earliest moments we're learning to categorize and filter them just so that we can function.

The primacy of perception 

Language is used to describe the endless gradations of sense. Only a purblind bookworm would see ideas as primary. But again, and again, (and again), philosophers in choosing ideas want the god's eye view. They choose Plato over Proust: "In the beginning was the word." But we'll never have a god's eye view, and in the absence of gods no such views exist.

Philosophy Commons/Flickers of Freedom
Dennett Willing to Abandon the term "Free Will"?

...it sounds like Dennett is willing cede the concept of "fee will" to the libertarian/incompatibilist and instead focus on the question of whether or not "moral competence" is compatible with naturalism/determinism. This, I believe, is telling. Dennett's willingness to consider such a move (regardless of whether he's actually advocating it or just floating it as an idea he is open to), reveals an acknowledgement on his part that the concept of FW may be too loaded with anti-naturalist connotations that it may not be worth preserving for those naturalistically inclined philosophers and scientists. This is especially telling coming from Dennett, since no one has done more to try to naturalize the concept of FW than him!

From the first comment: "Dennett makes the same claim, more explicitly in his recent Harvey Preisler Memorial lecture". The video is below. He begins to speak. He begins to speak at 21 mins in.  The relevant discussion at 27 mins


most of my comment.

Dennett's description in the youtube video of the 'nefarious neurosurgeon' is just silly, at least as he uses it. Pointing out the primacy of self-interest, "everyone's greedy", reinforces greedy behavior, because measuring to the mean puts downward pressure on the mean. So teaching your kids to be something other than greedy raises it. It's simple reinforcement. That's the argument for economic theory only with explicit moral priors, since 'objectivity' dumbs us down. But Dennett goes for anti-behaviorism: "The environment is not an agent". And neither is an asteroid that hits a moon. Cause and effect and agency don't mix. Calculators are machines and conditioned response is a mechanical reflex. 'Anti-philosophical' scientists will always win this fight.

Of course if there's no free will even the choice to argue one way or the other is predetermined. Philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition need someone to have free will, even if it's only them arguing against it. And of course that need is determined, etc.

"What is consciousness?" again

"I don’t read much philosophy, it upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, the theory of extended mind makes me want to throw up…."

Yup
Searle ends up spouting his own absurdities but they're the absurdities of an intelligent mind.

From Leiter, who posted the quote.

"No baby... please... I understand you... you're a part of me! I have an extended mind!"

"Put your cell phone on the table." [swings hammer: "SMASH!!"] "Now put your hand on the table."

My business is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.

The ghost of Panofsky: "Whichever book you open, you will find precisely the passage you need"
Thank you, but this is now getting silly.

Marjorie Perloff on Karl Kraus

If this dialogue, written in 1915, strikes us as cleverly mimetic of street slang, think again; for the rhymed insults to the Russians, French, and British were actually taken from a German cartoon picture postcard (25 August 1914), in which two soldiers wearing spiked helmets (here designated as Willi and Karl) are attacking the enemy.

Reframed, the verses appear in what is probably the first—and perhaps the greatest—documentary drama written: Karl Kraus’s devastating Die Letzen Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind). Kraus’s dialogue, as in the scene above, sounds colloquial and nothing if not “natural,” representing as it does a variety of linguistic registers based on social class, ethnicity, geographical origin, and profession. But a large part of the play is drawn from actual documents, whether newspaper dispatches, editorials, public proclamations, the minutes of political meetings, or manifestos, letters, picture postcards, and interviews—indeed, whatever constituted the written record of the World War I years. “The unkindest actions reported here,” writes Kraus in his preface, “really happened; the unlikeliest conversations are reported here word for word; the most glaring inventions are quotations” (LTM, p. 9). Citations from Shakespeare and Goethe are interspersed, using the technique of montage, with cabaret song, patriotic ode, tableau vivant, vaudeville, puppet play, and, in the later acts, even photomontage so as to create a strange hybrid—part tragedy, part operetta, part carnival, part political tract—in which “high” and “low” come together in a strange new blend. “A document,” as Kraus puts it, “is figural; reports come to life as characters; characters breathe their last as editorials” (LTM, p. 9). And, throughout, the comic, the hilarious, the grotesque, the surreal dominate. “Here in Austria,” as Kraus had famously quipped, “there are unpunctual trains that cannot get the hang of their scheduled delays.

In its analysis of the role the media plays in disseminating the case for war, Kraus’s work is startlingly contemporary...

A heap of broken images

It's always odd to me how many people write about things that appeal to them without asking why they should like what they like. I still think of second order curiosity as the sine qua non of intellectual life.

I've never forgotten reading Willebald Saurländer describe what he felt to be the deeply personal relation of a contemporary author to his historical subject, even if the one name I'd forgotten was the author of the book he was reviewing.  I've never forgotten not because the idea was new to me but because it was a historian describing how we will the past into the present and the present into the past. It made me smile.
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From Czechoslovakia to Texas metropolis
Who sampled?  So obvious I forget. new tag: Collage Mash-up Remix

The contradictions of Tim Clark

Lecture II

Cubism, these paintings convince me, is a style directed to a present understood primarily in relation to a past: it is a modest. decent, and touching appraisal of one moment in history, as opposed to a whirling glimpse into a world-historicai present-becoming-future. It is commemorative. Its true power derives not from its modernity. that is, if we mean by this a reaching toward an otherness ahead of time, but from its profound belonging to a modernity that was passing away: the lonq modernity of the nineteenth century. ...

Cubism's world has the following structure. It wishes to state again, this time definitively, that the world is substantial through and through, with space only real -only felt- to the extent that it is constrained and solidified. Physical reality is something the mind or imagination can only reach out to incompletely, for objects resist our categories; and painting can speak to this ultimate non-humanness of things very well; but only by giving their otherness a certain architecture, a certain rectilinear -indeed "cubic"- constructedness. And this constructedness is only real if it is not far away, and smaller than us, or maybe just the same size. ...

Roger Fry says of Picasso in 1921, looking back to the line of work from 1908 to I916 —he says it a little regretfully— that "the obstinate fact remains that the limit of depth into the picture space is soon reached, that these pictures rarely suggest much more backwards and forwards play of planes than a high relief in sculpture. The immense resource [that painting has] of suggesting real distance and, perhaps even more important, circumambience of space seems to be almost cut off, or at most reduced, in its power to persuade the imagination." Well, yes: because the imagination should not be so persuaded; because the space of modernity is only falsely circumambient: it does not surround us like a circle—the great shape at the bottom of Still Lift in front of a Window could be understood as a parody of any such claim— it faces us like a piece of wainscoting. We lean on it like a table. We strum the strings of its guitar. We take off in our paper Montgolfier—Picasso actually made paper cutout versions of his  Young Girl's toys before reproducing them in paint—for a voyage around its four walls. And this proximity, this tactility, this coziness, is the condition of endless mad inventiveness about its particular states. Because the interior is the truth of space—for Bohemia, those last believers in the nineteenth century.

see the tags. more later.

As long as I'm at at…
More for Austin, Searle, etc.

Clark: "-Portrait of a Young Girl, is collage epitomized, for all that the stick-ons are illusions in oil-"

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief...

Art is use and reference.
And Searle now has his own tag

I just discovered contemporary philosophy has as one of its topics something called "The Paradox of Fiction." I'm still not cynical enough.

Two repeats, both recent. Looking for the second, I found the first, which fits with another even more recent post. It fits so well I'm embarrassed I'd forgotten it. "...a man who says his lines on a stage while acting in a play while he is indeed repeating lines composed by someone else, is not in general quoting the lines. There is a basic difference in that in parasitic discourse the expressions are being used and not mentioned."

Are the robots about to rise?

again, and again, and again,  No

Googling for "indecisive machines" still doesn't get much, other than me. The one link the USA Today doesn't include the phrase that appears in the link.

Build a machine with two separate and competing algorithms, for conditioned response and calculation, and a root level imperative for continued operation: survival.  Complexity itself isn't the issue.

At some point it will be possible, but it's not a good idea.

Short opinion pieces. The crafted description of observed events.
Fiction or non-fiction? Parasitic or no?

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The Garden
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

Searle, "Reiterating the Differences"

3. In what is more than simply a misreading of Austin, Derrida supposes that by analyzing serious speech acts before considering the parasitic cases, Austin has somehow denied the very possibility that expressions can be quoted. I find so many confusions in this argument of Derrida that I hardly know where to get started on it. To begin with, the phenomenon of citationality is not the same as the phenomenon of parasitic discourse. A man who composes a novel or a poem is not in general quoting anyone; [HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME] and a man who says his lines on a stage while acting in a play while he is indeed repeating lines composed by someone else, is not in general quoting the lines. There is a basic difference in that in parasitic discourse the expressions are being used and not mentioned. [HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME]

Sonny Rollins, tossing in a few bars of Easter Parade into Night in Tunisia at midnight on Easter morning is an act of quotation, citation, mentioning. O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag. Bad artists borrow; good artists steal. They don't make new things; they make things new. The pleasure felt by a sophisticated audience for philosophy as for music is in knowing the source and what's been done with it.

repeats of repeats of...

Aber etwas fehlt
Sitting in a bar reading Limited Inc.. One table away a young couple were facing a crisis. It would be hard to count the layers of falseness and dissembling, of performing for and lying to each other and themselves, of false confidence, feigned indifference, contempt and self-abasement, all as reflex. It was a less sophisticated version of Derrida and Searle. Ressentiment

A work of art is both fundamentally a thing unto itself—though affected by others and events—and a communicative act. The same was true of the couple's actions, as self-directed formalism and outward-directed performance. And most of the communication was in subtext. The spoken "I love you" was secondary to the unspoken, "I can walk away". And beneath that were all the communicated subtleties, if communicated is the right word, in gestures read by the audience but most likely not by the performers.

A novel is a thing crafted out of a plot, and judged as that. It's less an essay than a house. Language, as event and communication is an aspect of life. Philosophy and theology are parasitic on that. Literature, art, is both descriptive and formal. History, describing both art and the world, is observational and secular.

Derrida wants to replace the historian of art with the philosopher of art. Searle represents those who oppose history itself.
And we're suppose to choose one or the other.

J.L. Austin, Lecture I

Whatever we may think of any particular one of these views and suggestions, and however much we may deplore the initial confusion into which philosophical doctrine and method have been plunged, it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy.

Lecture II

We were to consider, you will remember, some cases and senses (only some, Heaven help us!) in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something. This topic is one development -there are many others- in the recent movement towards questioning an age-old assumption in philosophy- the assumption that to say something, at least in all cases worth considering, i.e. all cases considered, is always and simply to state something. This assumption is no doubt unconscious, no doubt is wrong, but it is wholly natural in philosophy apparently. We must learn to run before we can walk. If we never made mistakes how should we correct them?

Lecture III

So then we may seem to have armed ourselves with two shiny new concepts with which to crack the crib of Reality, or as it may be, of Confusion—two new keys in our hands, and of course, simultaneously two new skids under our feet. In philosophy, forearmed should be forewarned.

Ken Johnson on ‘Re-View: Onnasch Collection’

I want to protest. I think what happened with American and European art in the three or four decades after World War II was not a progressive shutting down of creative possibilities but a great opening up,...

The "opening up" was opening elsewhere.  An old girlfriend of mine taught me that the best way to read late Wittgenstein is to see him as ending where Proust began.

I hadn't read any Austin when I read Derrida and Searle.

update: or Dennett.

"What is it like to be a bug?"

repeats
ad infinitum

Any creature capable of acting on more than simple reflex is conscious.
Consciousness is definable as the conflict between the twin and equally mechanical processes of reflex/conditioned response and calculation. Absent those conflicting imperatives there is no consciousness.
Animals are indecisive machines: neurotic computers.

so fucking obvious; or it should be, for a materialist.

From August 2010 connecting to various recent posts and notes

Aber etwas fehlt

Sitting in a bar reading Limited Inc.. One table away a young couple were facing a crisis. It would be hard to count the layers of falseness and dissembling, of performing for and lying to each other and themselves, of false confidence, feigned indifference, contempt and self-abasement, all as reflex. It was a less sophisticated version of Derrida and Searle. 

Ressentiment A work of art is both fundamentally a thing unto itself -though affected by others and events- and a communicative act. The same was true of the couple's actions, as self-directed formalism and outward-directed performance. And most of the communication was in subtext. The spoken "I love you" was secondary to the unspoken, "I can walk away". And beneath that were all the communicated subtleties, if communicated is the right word, in gestures read by the audience but most likely not by the performers. 

A novel is a thing crafted out of a plot, and judged as that. It's less an essay than a house. Language, as event and communication is an aspect of life. Philosophy and theology are parasitic on that. Literature, art, is both descriptive and formal. History, describing both art and the world, is observational and secular. 

Derrida wants to replace the historian of art with the philosopher of art. Searle represents those who oppose history itself. And we're suppose to choose one or the other.

Tamanaha on instrumentalism. It's a strange book, well intentioned but as above he's blind to his own words. He describes the conservative anti-democratic judiciary in the 19th century as non-instrumentalist, as they thought of themselves, and both liberal and conservative anti-democratic courts in the 20th (Warren/Rehnquist) as instrumentalist, which the liberals accept and conservatives deny against all evidence. Of the present he writes [p.97]: "It is increasingly difficult to take the Justices' articulation of the legal grounds for their decisions at face value." But to any serious observer including readers of this book, given the record it describes, that was never possible. What he seems to regret, in references to things once "concealed" and "unspoken", is that we no longer believe our own lies. He has a point but he doesn't take the discussion where it needs to go, which is outside the law and to society. Tamanaha ignores the overriding fact of crisis, of the struggle among parties to agree on terms when the norms of civil discourse no longer apply. And why should they have for blacks, or other minorities and women, in 1900 or 1965? Formal justice exists only within a unified culture: it's an illusion held in common. The crises of the 20th century originate in large unstable communities with few common interests hence few common illusions. Tamanaha defends official common form without demanding common substance, and ignores unofficial common form entirely. In Tamanaha's telling, judges were once charged both with preserving and adapting the common law, but he ignores the fact that this flexibility was possible only within a unified social order. Adaptation requires instrumentalism, but it's masked by common assent of the enfranchised. Tamanaha ignores the causes of instrumentalism in rebellion. Rehnquist, for one example, was not just an intellectual conservative. As was made clear during his confirmation hearing for Chief Justice, in the testimony of witnesses to acts of voter intimidation in the 1960's, he was, or had been, a racist. Law is process, not result. The legal process school transposed a formalism of interpretation managed openly by an elite into a model of formalism of argument among a wider group of players. The criticism launched against the process school by CLS and others was that the wider group was not representative enough and that the process was unjust. This was instrumentalism as strategy, not goal. It remains problematic due to the risks of performative reinforcement, but it is not at all the same -does not take the same form [except in extreme cases?]- as the instrumentalism of the legal realists. The realists aim at a scientific understanding of bias, working towards a "reasoned" result. This continues or returns us to the 19th century primacy of the law of an elite, united in a common purpose. What Tamanaha ignores here, and Posner doesn't is that common purpose is always anti-democratic. There can be no long term common purpose in democracy. What's common in democracy is the process of a government defined by representative debate. All instrumentalism is problematic. As a free-standing doctrine instrumentalism is synonymous with ideology. And ideology is form: content is secondary. But ideology in the service of increasing citizen participation and in the service of its opposite are not the same thing, just as a military in service to a democracy is not a dictatorship. The relations of process and instrumentalism in a democracy are awkward. They need to be: democracies sometimes have need of an army. But the doctrines of law and economics are anti-democratic not just as strategy or means but end. Law isn't a science or the search for truth, it's a game: a rarefied version of the game of politics. And there are no referees in either, only ranking players. When enough people believe themselves to by slighted by the process they will slight the process in return, the game will become rougher and will risk devolving into war. Idealists dislike democracy as relativist regarding truth. Scientists dislike the rule of law because it reminds them of Galileo and the Church. The Church argued for law and precedent, both still central to law and politics. Tamanaha criticizes instrumentalism in the advocacy of trial lawyers, though trial lawyers, as professional advocates, are ideologically formalist. Again to Rumpole (and Nir Rosen.) Tamanaha the academic has too much respect for judges. He thinks our judges and philosophers should be wiser; but judges aren't the center of our justice system, lawyers are. And nobody likes lawyers until they need one. Tamanaha argues from idealism, and "sincerity", rather than flexibility. He idealizes the role of responsible individuals rather than acknowledge the primacy, including the moral primacy, of adversarial process. more later.

[reusing old graphics]


From the paper [see the link on the right side of the page]

Again: the problem isn’t one of Analytic or Continental philosophy any more than one of (academic) left or right. The problem is philosophy itself: the placing of ideas over their enactment. If in the beginning was the word, then our world begins with God. If in the beginning was the act, then it begins with us. The Derridean critique of Logocentrism is little more than a critique of those who would be speak before their maker. Derrida is an exegete for whom secular literature is parasitic. Even when he could have been direct and to the point, as in his dismemberment more than deconstruction of John Searle’s arguments, in the essays published in Limited Inc, his indirectness shows as little more than the false modesty of an ostentatiously self-deprecating priest, constantly referring to a higher authority. His ‘performance’ as an author reminds me of my mother’s painfully deferential attitude when playing Bach; painful precisely because of her refusal to perform, as if to do so would be to usurp his authority. Derrida’s philosophy is as opposed to art as is any other form of Modernist intellectualism. How does his whispering discussion of “…the other” fit with the vulgar realities of theater or law? If an actor plays Macbeth, a fictional character, written by William Shakespeare, where’s the self? Can you imagine the theater reviews of Derridean passivity as applied to Hamlet? Deconstruction is nothing but the manifestation of hypertrophied individualism, overdetermined and under analyzed, glossed-over by the sincere desire to be something more. And sincerity is like intention, meaningless. Better the powerful insincerity of Olivier or a trial lawyer at the bar. Better philosophically, better politically.

The contemporary “theory of art”, if not of literature, music or film, begins not with art but with philosophy, with an individualism that’s foreign to the arts. The aristocratic arts have become bureaucratized to match the intellectual aristocracy of management. It was popular until recently in art/intellectual circles to argue against “mastery”, not against mindless technique in favor of communicative skill –not against Jazz fusion and for Charlie Parker or against Yes and for the Clash- but against craft as such in favor of the moral and intellectual mastery of ideas and the mind. And this bookish authoritarianism when allied to the pretensions of the academic bourgeois, left and middle, was called truth. th. In the acknowledgements of her intellectual biography of Clement Greenberg aptly titled ‘Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses , Caroline A. Jones thanks Benjamin Buchloh, historian, critic, and theoretician of high-seriousness in contemporary art, for his “stimulating aperçu regarding the ‘administrative sensibility’ of post-Greenbergian conceptual art.” It’s left at that.

It should be clear by now my point is that craft is less individualist than reason, whether the reason of the analytics or of the craftiness of theory, though as I’ve said, foreign thought is less translated than transliterated. And its readership is barely more sophisticated than Donald Davidson in his arguments against “conceptual schemes”. Americans are naïve about themselves. European socialists and social democrats are not American liberals and the writings of academics enamored of French theory are no more French than Johnny Hallyday is Elvis. Middle class Europe took working class America and made it sophisticated, removing the vulgarity. American middle class vulgarity takes European sophistication and replicates it in the university and mall. American theory is bureaucratized and humorless, self-indulgent and childish. It’s anti-cultural. Derrida was engaged as the product of culture. He was a priest. The argument against him, and its damning, is that he’s trying to use the language of the high church, or the high temple, to describe democratic responsibility, trying to reconcile a univocal God with a multivocal world. But the moral law of democracy says that meanings don’t come from God, or from above, but from below. 

The aristocratic arts can’t represent or defend democracy any more than science can. Which is why in Europe unlike the US the aristocratic tradition still plays a role. The model of the intellectual as Bourgeois-Anti-Bourgeois or of the high and low against the middle, includes elements that are both radical and reactionary, and people are unafraid to criticize the banalities of democratic culture as they see it. This doesn’t happen so openly in the US and when it does, the superiority of the aristocrat, flaneur, or connoisseur is transformed into the snobbery of the technocrat and expert, even the expert in French theory. The insouciance of the boulevardier becomes the pedantry of middle management.

What is pure art according to the modern idea? It is the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.

What is Philosophical Art according to the ideas of Chenavard and the German school? It is a plastic art which sets itself up in place of books, by which I mean as a rival to the printing press in the teaching of history, morals and philosophy.
-Baudelaire

Our works will not be judged for what we want from them but for what they appear be in others’ eyes. Numbers model but language represents. Formal structures can be tightly structured but their relation to the world is fluid. The authors of the Constitution understood that. Foucault understood that more than Derrida. The American intellectualism of bureaucracy, of theory and philosophy, of Social Text and Quine, doesn’t understand it at all. ----
Monet's sell high at auction because they’re pretty not because they’re important, which is not to say that they aren’t both. Warhol sells for glamour not for terror, though their relation was his theme. That’s how the market for valuable commodities works. ...

Aber etwas fehlt

Sitting in a bar reading Limited Inc.. One table away a young couple were facing a crisis. It would be hard to count the layers of falseness and dissembling, of performing for and lying to each other and themselves, of false confidence, feigned indifference, contempt and self-abasement, all as reflex. It was a less sophisticated version of Derrida and Searle. Ressentiment

A work of art is both fundamentally a thing unto itself -though affected by others and events- and a communicative act. The same was true of the couple's actions, as self-directed formalism and outward-directed performance. And most of the communication was in subtext. The spoken "I love you" was secondary to the unspoken, "I can walk away". And beneath that were all the communicated subtleties, if communicated is the right word, in gestures read by the audience but most likely not by the performers.

A novel is a thing crafted out of a plot, and judged as that. It's less an essay than a house. Language, as event and communication is an aspect of life. Philosophy and theology are parasitic on that. Literature, art, is both descriptive and formal. History, describing both art and the world, is observational and secular.

Derrida wants to replace the historian of art with the philosopher of art. Searle represents those who oppose history itself.
And we're suppose to choose one or the other.

Originally here, but I've come across a lot of related discussions recently. It seemed appropriate for other reasons as well, having to do with the philosophy of expertise: Timothy Williamson telling just so stories about why we tell stories, and Joshua Marshall trying to avoid or elide the fact that Palestinians are Muslims, and that he's a Zionist. "We grew up in America where Islam, as a domestic social or cultural reality, was close to invisible." And this from someone who's called the founding of Israel "a necessary crime".

There's no understanding of consciousness without acknowledging that it's multilayered and conflicted, that our actions often contradict our words and each other. No amount of expertise will change that.

-What is consciousness?
-What is pain, as an aspect of consciousness?

Pain evolved as a way to make us aware of damage or disease, and as a mechanism by which our bodies make it difficult for us to engage in things that make that damage worse. If I'm working and strain a muscle, the pain tells me not to use the muscle so that it will heal more quickly, or it allows me to gauge the degree to which the muscle is or is not capable of doing its job. But pain is not a simple signal or transfer of data, it is a kind of gestalt, the result of a bombardment of data which we "experience" as a specific form of "qualia".

Imagine that I'm out hunting and am attacked by a lion, who claws me leaving a deep gash in my leg. I run away but the pain slows me down. If I run I increase the injury, but if I stay I'll be killed. The choice is obvious yet my body continues to experience a division. Endorphins and adrenaline are partial overrides but they're autonomic, and very rarely if ever does the pain or the division go away completely. Pain has a regulating function that has nothing to do with decision-making itself. It's not subject to rational controls and yet it's part of what we call consciousness.

We rely both on rationality and instinct. If we react habitually in a given way to a specific range of situations, but now face a problem that fits largely in that range but logically demands an alternate response, something has to give way to allow us to break the pattern. But it doesn't give way easily. We can't turn off instinct any more than we can turn off pain. Habit is reflex and reflexes have a purpose. A neurotic activity is one that the mind has been conditioned to perform because at some unconscious level it facilitates psychic continuity and by logical extension physical survival. Neuroses continue patterns learned in childhood, affecting our relations with people and experiences that have little to do with those of the past except in terms of structure. We never stop being influenced by this sort of learned response, or by others more benign; everybody is neurotic.

It's common now for people to talk about mental activity in biological terms. There are studies of behavior that link social activities to chemicals and genetics. Yet there are also studies showing that an infant’s brain constructs itself by reinforcing the most often used neural pathways. We're born with an immense number of connections and in the act of living we program ourselves, experiencing not only psychological but also biological adaptation. And once such adaptation is complete it can't be erased. This seems to me to be a more interesting explanation for our linguistic capabilities than Chomsky’s LAD or innate universal grammar. Rather than specific tools that allow us to create and acquire language, and that apparently wither away within a few years if not used, why not imagine a network that may or may not be constructed? If we think of the mind as a glass that can be filled with different sorts of liquids, that blend together each time we add more, then this doesn't fit what we know. But if we think not in terms of liquids but solids this explanation makes sense. If we fill a glass first with sand, then with gravel, and then with dirt, how can we reverse or rearrange the order? Adding more sand at the top will change the ratio of sand to gravel, but the same amount of sand is at the bottom of the glass. A 14 year old without language would have great difficulty picking it up because the synaptic pathways, the foundation of her psyche, will have been constructed without it. It would be interesting to think that in some instances mental disorders which we now associate with chemical imbalances could be reattributed, chemicals included, to learned responses.

We call living creatures sentient, conscious, or aware, but these words only describe the sensations of our experience of ‘consciousness’. We slide quickly into tautology. What separates us from computers is not consciousness, which we have had such a bad time trying to define, but the unconscious. Desire and fear, reflexes and pain stay with us even when they're inappropriate. If we don't follow them we still sense their shadow. Our desires/instincts/neuroses may also be contradictory, or even self-destructive. But all of them are sensory before they're intellectual. Consciousness is the state produced by the body/brain's negotiation of the conflict between conditioned response and reason. That is its beauty and why we find it so difficult to understand. We experience consciousness as one thing, but only can define it as the space between two. We experience it a as a thing ‘being’, but can only define it as the place where it exists.

The first moment of indecision is the first act of consciousness. Any creature capable of indecision is conscious.

11/09 Consciousness in machines

...Biological machines are capable of reason but are programmed also by conditioning, and reason and reflex can produce contradictory imperatives. If there's a "choice" to be made, which mechanism is it that "makes" the choice?

Consciousness is not complex calculation it's indecision. Create an indecisive computer, a neurotic computer, torn (having been given the imperative to survive) between the heuristics of conditioned response and calculation, and you'll have a conscious non-biological machine.

Mary the color scientist, seeing -sensing- color for the first time, will learn nothing new about color itself but will now give it a place among the trillions of sense impressions over the course of her life which she has compartmentalized, characterized, and like as not narrativized into her personal logic. She will have a new understanding of color not as independent but in relation to herself as a form of experience within the totality of her imagined and imagining life.
Mary will see, construct, and experience her red.

...What exactly are qualitative states? In its definition of qualia at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begs the question. Perception is physical: experience, sandpaper etc. When animals sense we categorize things in the history of our perceptions (patterning as comfort). Our history is foggy, and facts and values are confused from the start. The machines we make do not have this complex conflicted relation to the world; they’re not desirous or anxious. They have no sense of telos, even a blind drive for survival.

It seems easier to want to ascribe qualitative states to man-made machines than to describe the mechanics of qualitative “experience” and “perception.” To a machine the blueprint for a building and the building itself are identical, while animals require the presence of the building to understand the thing. And as with the color red we’re not understanding the building but our categorization of it, and all the details that we analogize in relation to what we’ve already stored away. We’re bombarded by perceptions and evocations resulting from perceptions. But all of that can be described in quantitative terms. What’s private -as experience- is that each of us contextualize the data according to our own history. Every animal has his or her own filing system and her own adaptive conditioning. Animals are drunken machines, each of us drunk in our own way.

The limits of conceptualism it seems to me are in the unwillingness to mark the distinction between blueprints and buildings, between ideas and experience, because ideas are universally available and one’s experience of a building is private and therefore considered secondary. But what this means is that the ability to communicate always private experience atrophies, while experience is still our primary relation to the world. This conversation above seems more about desire than the world we will always only know as experience, while shying away from real questions regarding our biological machinery.

Hacker: Analytic Philosophy: Beyond the linguistic turn and back again A review of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience in NDPR I liked the first piece, but from there it gets odd very quickly. NDPR (my italics)

Suppose, we ask a person who has had his sight or hearing restored “How does it feel to see (or hear)?” They are likely to answer “Why, it's wonderful.” What we are asking after is the person's attitude toward his recovery of a faculty, now restored. But what if we ask a person possessed of normal faculties “What is it like to see a chair or a table?” Bennett and Hacker aver that the person would have no idea what we were talking about. Seeing tables and chairs, postboxes and lampposts are all different experiences. But “[t]he experiences differ only in so far as their objects differ” (p. 274). 

No, they differ in their relation to the history of experience of the individual viewer. And again:

In the course of reducing the mental to the physical, the normative dimensions of social life are lost. Consider this example. Suppose I place my signature on a document. The act of affixing my signature is accompanied by neural firings in my brain. The neural firings do not “explain” what I have done. In signing my name, I might be signing a check, giving an autograph, witnessing a will or signing a death certificate. In each case the neural firing may well be the same. And yet, the meaning of what I have done in affixing my signature is completely different in each case. These differences are “circumstance dependent,” not merely the product of my neural firings. Neural firings accompany the act of signing but only the circumstances of my signing, including the intention to do so, are the significant factors in explaining what I have done.

History, then, the record of experience and of 30 years of neural firings up to the point of my signing the check, is bunk. It's "metaphysical nonsense" because the primary mover of the world, if no longer God, must be this thing called the "Self". Also in reference to this. SE/DG:

Mary the color scientist, seeing -sensing- color for the first time, will learn nothing new about color itself but will now give it a place among the trillions of sense impressions over the course of her life which she has compartmentalized, characterized, and like as not narrativized into her personal logic. She will have a new understanding of color not as independent but in relation to herself as a form of experience within the totality of her imagined and imagining life. Mary will see, construct, and experience her red. It will become a part of the totality of her experience and her conditioning.

When I first read or more likely heard about the famous cogito –I was young– my first response was "What is this "I" this person is talking about?" Descartes is a Catholic. The difference is that the Trinity has become a duality, and transubstantiation has become the mind body "problem." The fight over Fodor and Darwin is more interesting than Leiter allows. Watching rationalists struggling to come to terms with empiricism, even when they want to defend it (or lay claim to it) is fascinating. Empiricism is unstable and that scares them. And deeper than that something else scares them too. Experience is a record of and in Time.

---

The review is by Dennis Patterson

"philosophers"

As I've said before, in so many words, post-war modernism is the reactionary recapitulation -as mannered and brittle- of the much more ambiguous modernism of earlier in the century. There's something offensively un-self-aware in the knee-jerk proclamations of ordered progress: as something that was or is happening, or that should happen. I could be talking about "Ozzie and Harriet" or Clement Greenberg but just as easily about the so called "cognitive revolution", not the culture at large which is always messy but the respectable quasi-official culture that modernism became. Has anyone commented that C. Wright Mills writes like The Organization Man, Apostate, a carrier of the same traits he condemns, without of course being aware of it? How is it possible after the first 50 years of the bloodiest century in history that so many people could so casually make assumptions about the stable subject: The experts' "I" even in rebellion.

Thinking of this after stumbling into a review by Jerry Fodor The arrogance, based on lazy assumption and self-regard, is just odd to me.

I'm not a fan of Chalmers and the limits of the Extended Mind Thesis are pretty clear: If my arm is an extension of my mind, is my hand like a fork? But Fodor says less in 10 printed pages than I did in 15 words and in the process manages to sound like someone who knows little about the world outside the pretensions of his field. I'm told some of his colleagues might agree with that judgement- and even that he might himself. Every few paragraphs I come across a statement to which my only response is: "How do you know?" And the only answer I can imagine from him is "Because!" What is "content" other than the perception of something? And what's perception? Whatever it is it's not to be questioned, because to question it is to question optimism. I can't think if another excuse. But it allows him to call himself "a philosopher" as someone else might call himself "a chemist." The analogy of philosophy as demi-science: pure bullshit. Sometimes the conflict between fact and assumption - empiricism and rationalization- becomes so clear it's painful to watch.

But it does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid. There is, for example, a slippery slope from being poor to being rich; it doesn’t follow that whoever is the one is therefore the other, or that to insist on the distinction is mere prejudice. Similarly, there is a slippery slope between being just a foetus and being a person; it doesn’t follow that foetuses are persons, or that to abort a foetus is to commit a homicide.

There is no objective "true" divide between a foetus and a person. To argue otherwise is not "rational" but only self-serving. The fact is that the most powerful arguments for the legalization of abortion begin in the knowledge that there is no absolute answer and that given this, along with other issues of enforcement, the state should not have the right to intervene. Fodor invents an absolute out of whole cloth. As I said he does it a few times but this one just pissed me off. Like Simon Blackburn on Humanism, or Chomsky, or Searle, what he knows is what he wants to believe, no more.

The rationalism of ideologues leads to irrationalism and barbarism. Is Weinberg any more deluded than Rumsfeld?
The will to ignorance. Amazing

note taking [comments removed]

179 Gandhi said that if you find a starving child and all there is around is meat then the child should be allowed to starve. If an open society built on questions and argument -the most important of which is: "Utility for what?"- is attacked and puts its defense in the hands of an army run on standard military utilitarianism -meaning: “Get it done!”- does that mean the society itself is now founded on utilitarian principles? 188 “He is saying that personal virtues are not virtuous if they are practiced without regard for the larger system they are supporting or opposing. There’s really no other way to read it.” “Yes. That’s because he’s a consequentialist, an ends-justify-the-means type-guy. That’s my point, anyway. The larger ‘system’ is the greater good. So what’s the objection to my reading?” So the choice is between consequentialism and hypocrisy and you’re choosing hypocrisy. "First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew; It’s better to wait." [I should have added: "In the meantime I'll continue to help little old ladies cross the street and never litter"] 189 Zizek described the last section of a holocaust novel: Jews are being loaded on a train, packed in like cattle. The train goes east for 3 days in freezing temperatures; by the time it reaches its destination only a small group of children are left alive, kept warm by the bodies of the adults who had moved them to the center of the car. When the children are discovered the SS set the dogs on them. Two escape and run off in the snow. Of the two of them the younger one stumbles and the elder reaches back to help. He pulls him up as the dogs find them and attack. How do justice to the fact of the crime and the inability to do anything but read or watch, how do justice to memory and at the same time to the moral imperative of hope? Zizek says the novel succeeds, but wonders how one could make the film. The easy solution to the ending is to freeze on the image of the clasped hands, but that makes hope too easy, protecting us from the real end. One answer would to freeze the frame but not the sound. “So idealism in the context of narrative.” “Yes!”

The last comment is from memories of conversation. Explained here. Zizek is trying to come to terms with conflicted desire. He's a popularizer of what was once the high intellectualism of anxious uncertainty, practiced in this country now only in the arts and seen in philosophy only in retrospect, since contemporary philosophers say "history is bunk", notwithstanding the fact that history has always shown that to be untrue.

History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not deepen it.

It's boring at this point but I'll say this again, since it remains an object lesson in failure: John Holbo cannot talk about the political situation in Singapore -where he lives and teaches- without threatening his career, which is why Henry Farrell and not Holbo himself responded to my comments a couple of years ago, replying that academic philosophy doesn't concern itself with real politics. That wasn't Farrell's term but that was the argument.

In The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling approves the text of J. S. Mill’s “prayer of every true partisan of liberalism”: “Lord, enlighten thou our enemies . . . sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.” Being such a partisan, having now said my prayer, I consider possible beneficiaries. I pluck from the crowd one Slavoj Zizek, anti-liberal intellectual.

Zizek was a dissident in Tito's Yugoslavia. My parents risked prison time in the US, in defense of their beliefs. When Holbo's not attacking Zizek and Jonah Goldberg he writes about comic books and fonts. Holbo defends non-contradictory propositions contradicted by his actions. He refuses to deal in contexts because the result would be damning, showing his "revealed preference". He claims to live an examined life, but he's a liar and a hypocrite, fundamentally corrupt not because he's a realist but because his life and career are predicated on proffering the illusion that he isn't. As I said at the time, the dinner for Zizek and ten or so others was good and not cheap. As we were leaving Zizek said the next time he was in town he'd take our host out to his favorite Scottish restaurant: McDonalds. --- I haven't spent much time with Derrida, but I'm reading Signature Event Context and I'll follow up with Searle and Limited Inc. For all that I knew what I was in for I'm still a little shocked to see the understanding standard to literature and history regurgitated by a philosopher as melodrama. Presence/Absence. A father writes a letter to his son, for him to find and read only after the father is dead. Or Yul Brenner.

There's nothing new here. The teenage son of a true believer in the myth of objectivity, on discovering that it's a myth, will react still as a teenager, with an immature and desperate exuberance. His response is a function of reaction not understanding. Language is synchronic and diachronic order. Only in an age of science, of the mythification of externalities, will the rediscovery of internalities, the inevitable subjectivity of perception and the inevitability of perception itself cause a ruckus. Where are the motherfucking adults? Perception is biological conflict. That's original I guess but hardly out of the blue.

Note-taking
I've written about this enough but it seemed like a good time to do it again.

If I'm running from a lion who's pawed a gash in my leg, my body is communicating information by means of the qualia of "pain," while a robot programmed for its own preservation will receive feedback in concrete quantitative terms. Biomechanical qualia are quanta: vast amounts of data known to us only in totality as sense.

Biological machines are capable of reason but are programmed also by conditioning, and reason and reflex can produce contradictory imperatives. If there's a "choice" to be made, which mechanism is it that "makes" the choice?

Consciousness is not complex calculation it's indecision. Create an indecisive computer, a neurotic computer, torn (having been given the imperative to survive) between the heuristics of conditioned response and calculation, and you'll have a conscious non-biological machine.

Mary the color scientist, seeing -sensing- color for the first time, will learn nothing new about color itself but will now give it a place among the trillions of sense impressions over the course of her life which she has compartmentalized, characterized, and like as not narrativized into her personal logic. She will have a new understanding of color not as independent but in relation to herself as a form of experience within the totality of her imagined and imagining life.
Mary will see, construct, and experience her red.

It will become a part of the totality of her experience and her conditioning.

More:

What exactly are qualitative states? In its definition of qualia at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begs the question. Perception is physical: experience, sandpaper etc. When animals sense we categorize things in the history of our perceptions (patterning as comfort) Our history is foggy, and facts and values are confused from the start. The machines we make do not have this complex conflicted relation to the world, they’re not desirous or anxious. They have no sense of telos, even a blind drive for survival.

It seems easier to want to ascribe qualitative states to man-made machines than to describe the mechanics of qualitative “experience” and “perception.” To a machine, the blueprint for a building and the building itself are identical, while animals require the presence of the building to understand the thing. And like the color red in doing that we’re not understanding the building or the color but our categorization of it, and all the details that we analogize in relation to what we’ve already stored away. We’re bombarded by perceptions and evocations resulting from perceptions. But all of that can be described in quantitative terms. What’s private -as experience- is that each of us contextualize the data according to our own history. Every animal has his or her own filing system and her own adaptive conditioning. Animals are drunken machines, each of us drunk in our own way.

The limits of conceptualism it seems to me is in the unwillingness to mark the distinction between blueprints and buildings, between ideas and experience, because ideas are universally available and one’s experience of a building is private and therefore secondary, But what this means is that the ability to communicate always private experience atrophies, while experience is still our primary relation to the world. This conversation above seems more about desire than the world we will always only know as experience, while shying away from real questions regarding our biological machinery.