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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: psychology (page 5 of 6)

Or Lay Myself Down By Sorrow’s Side

2 August 2005 / / 0 Comments

With all my books 2500 miles away, I’m left without the ability to write substantively about Rameau’s Nephew (weird!) and Robert Walser’s The Robber (which, incidentally, has given me the toughest time of finishing it of any short book since Notes from Underground). So I figured I’d loosen the reins a little and wander through the detritus in my head that I usually leave well-covered.

Genealogy of Metaphysics: what was it that caused the shift from the master dichotomy of real/unreal to the slave dichotomy of real/fake? The loss of authority/authenticity in young American authors (see Eggers, Foer) indicates a preoccupation with returning to an imagined time where every utterance was a statement of the real, as opposed to the supposed fakeness that surrounds us that everyone is fed up with. The term “irony,” which once signified a sophisticated sort of social satire that required a certain amount of intelligence to appreciate, has become to devalued to the point where it simply signifies insincerity, the positive referent not being a specific target but simply the mores of society. The “return to sincerity” movement folks are no better since they are acting the part of ignoring what they know to be ever-present: this inauthenticity. In the goal of people to return to a pre-Enlightenment, tradition-directed (to use David Riesmann’s term) society in which one’s words emerge organically from one’s position in society, they forget that this is not especially possible in the greater culture, which in turn speaks of their own disingenuousness. To continue with Riesmann’s terms, it is not legitimate to be fomenting a rebellion in ingenuousness when you are using borrowed terms; you remain other-directed. In Heidegger’s phrasing, they are as unthrown into the world as anyone, but this is the constituent state of post-Enlightenment modernity. Real/fake denotes a qualitative judgment once removed from the matters at hand, a tertiary quality once removed from color and twice removed from shape and form. Real/unreal merely judges ontology, which is to say, treats the former as a gestalt. In the slave irony mentality, the rise of Menippean satire stems from the lack of an authentic culture to critique. When people are divided between faux-authentic personae and a nascent state of mind, satire directed at the personae loses its teeth, as the personae have an impenetrable defense, namely that they are personae. Less-directed Menippean satire pursues the idea behind the real/fake culture itself by repeatedly invalidating it, making the effort more transcendent, but also leaving itself open to the charges that such satire is pointless. It is not pointless so much as it is easily made obsolescent, as it is internalized and melded into that which it satirized. It is built upon faster than any other genre.

A little too much Kenneth Smith there, I think. Another route. There has been too much talk of the fragmentation and delinearization of personality. In the presence of a more global culture than ever before, placing more universal restrictions on the outlines of acceptable thought, why should we look at ourselves as fragmented, or “shattered” as one wag decided to put it? Only because there is a prejudice that a self constructed from bits and pieces of media dreams should somehow hold less integrity than one of the shared prejudices of a close-knit community. So we go “bowling alone”? The idea of the integrity of a mind (or of minds) being corrupted by distant, unresponsive influences is as illusional as the idea that these shared universals will eventually create a group mind on the order of the techno-utopians’ fabled singularity. Without wanting to fall into a trap of evolutionary psychology, the cognitive schema of the mind is probably far more static than people seem to imagine. Which makes those social schemas, of authenticity for example, all the more important, since they are firmly dynamic.

A little memory about times past. When I was 17 or 18, I heard existentialism called an adolescent philosophy. I thought, “How can something so fundamental, something that strips things down to bare reality, be termed adolescent?” But could I have expected myself to answer back when told “Existence prececes essence,” “Existence and essence of what?”, not being able to identify such words as properties rather than implied particulars? Freud’s achievement was in the clear artifice of his schema, rather than in the deceptively fundamentalist appearance of so much recently fashionable social thought. I was suckered like many others. Fiction writers and poets are always the most susceptible to amenable schemas. They are their lingua franca.

All right, that’s enough. I would never publish this if it were for posterity, but the idea of a Coming Attractions is more appealing if you don’t have to live with it in plain sight for the rest of your life.

Strawson on Consciousness

23 June 2005 / / 3 Comments

For those of us like me who can’t help wondering about the physical reality of subjective mental events, here’s a passage from the ever-excellent Galen Strawson, from a review of Antonio Damasio:

The standard formulation of the “mind-body problem” rests on a huge and wholly unjustified assumption (this assumption, in fact, is Descartes’s deepest error). It is not content with the obvious truth that matter and consciousness seem to us to be utterly heterogeneous things. It slides on to the claim that matter and consciousness are in fact utterly heterogeneous things, in such a way that it is mysterious how one could ever be the basis or “realization” of the other. It shifts from a harmless and true epistemological claim about how things seem to us to a mega-therial metaphysical claim about how things are in reality.Why? Why indeed? The root cause of the mistake is the unsupported assumption that current physics – or indeed ordinary experience, in its own modest but compelling way – gives us a pretty good fix on the fundamental nature of matter, and shows it to be utterly qualitatively unlike consciousness. It is only relative to this assumption that the existence of consciousness in a material world seems in any way mystifying, for there is nothing particularly puzzling about consciousness as it is in itself. We know just what it is like – or at least what certain forms of it are like. Consider an experience of blue or of giddiness. Consider it as it is in itself. You know what it is. So, if our best picture of matter makes it seem incomprehensible that matter should be the basis of (or simply be) conscious experience, all this shows is the inadequacy of our best picture of matter. Locke, Hume, Priestley, Kant and others were very clear about this, but few understand it today. Many now make Descartes’s deepest error, in fact, with far less justification than him – while condemning him for his errors.

It is not in any way anti-scientific to claim that we do not have a good fix on the fundamental nature of matter. Current physics instructs us daily in how foolish it is to assume that we do (while providing a magnificent theoretical framework in which to express and exploit a great deal of information about the behaviour of matter). It is widely agreed that the current “Standard Model” is unsatisfactory; the old quarrel between relativity theory and quantum mechanics remains unresolved; there is turmoil in general cosmology; and String Theory, after the “second superstring revolution”, is again pressing obscurely at the door.

The first problem of consciousness, then, the mind-body problem or qualia problem, is just a vivid proof of our ignorance of the nature of matter, and of the difficulty – seeming impossibility – of reconciling first-personal and impersonal data. There is no metaphysical mind-body problem, only an epistemological one.

I like this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the conclusion, which takes the most appealing aspects of several consciousness theories–Colin McGinn’s “new mysterianism” (that we are not set up to understand consciousness and never will), Gerald Edelman’s neurological theories (correlates exist, but only go so far in dealing with the problem), David Chalmers’ panpsychism (consciousness as a different kind of property), and John Searle’s anti-functionalism (consciousness as a material-specific property)–while avoiding many of their glaring defects and leaps of faith. Tossing out the metaphysical problem by dismissing it as based on faulty assumptions, and thereby dismissing all linguistic constructions thereof (so long to Kripke’s proof of dualism, e.g.), he leaves open an unbounded epistemological space that is on first glace far more counterintuitive, since it’s far easier to believe that mental and physical events are heterogeneous than homogeneous. And yet to envision an answer that encompasses a homogeneity of the physical and the mental without denying qualia or intuitions of “folk psychology,” intuitions which Daniel Dennett and the Churchlands have hardly managed to tear down successfully, is quite inspiring. For the anti-qualia gang have had the burden of denying the experience of qualia as well as qualia themselves, and thus the experience of the experience of qualia, etc., etc., and this infinite regress does not go down so easily.

Strawson’s approach reminds me of Stanislaw Lem in Golem XIV (read the entire text of Golem XIV), where his panopticon of a computer alludes to Wittgenstein’s unmooring of language while firmly binding an evolutionary etiology of such language:

If one who is thinking could perceive this horizon – his intellectual range – in the same way that he perceives the limits of his body, nothing like the antinomies of Intelligence could arise. And what in fact are those antinomies of Intelligence? They are the inability to distinguish between transcendence in fact and transcendence in illusion. The cause of these antinomies is language, for language, being a useful tool, is also a self-locking instrument – and at the same time a perfidious one, since it tells nothing about when it becomes a pitfall itself. It gives no indication! So you appeal from language to experience and enter well-known vicious circles, because then you get – what is familiar to philosophy – the throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. For thought may indeed transcend experience, but in such a flight it encounters a horizon of its own and gets trapped in it, though having no idea that this has happened!

Correspondence vs. Metaphysics

5 March 2005 / / 0 Comments

I.

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber has a dissection of the latest latest battle between Rorty and the analytics. I’m neither schooled in nor particularly concerned with the vagueness part of things, but I do feel strongly about the Kripke-derived school of essentialism and metaphysics, and Rorty’s original review uses vagueness as more of a arbitrarily chosen example than as a special case. I’m not certain why Rorty chose it, since the study of what is and is not a “heap” isn’t as bewildering to common sense as certain other thought experiments, such as this one:

Consider the following version of the PMC taken from the writings of the Stoic Chrysippus. A man named Dion undergoes the amputation of his left-foot. Assuming that he is identical to his body, we may then ask: what is the relationship between Dion, the amputee, whom we shall call &#x93Leon,&#x94 and &#x93Theon,&#x94 the erstwhile aggregate of all of Dion&#x92s body parts minus his left foot? Shall we say that it is Dion who is (has become) the amputee Leon, Theon having perished? Or is it Theon to whom Leon is identical, Dion having perished? A third option is that both survive the operation as the amputee. I believe that the third answer is the correct one.

Regardless of the greater implications that such study has on realism and philosophy of language, Brian points out that many of his colleagues have no interest in the larger issue. It seems undeniable to me that the issue is one of territory.

Some of the correspondents mention that Kripkean essentialism is a way to recover ground lost when Wittgenstein and then Quine attacked language correspondence, empiricism, and the analytic/synthetic distinction. This also seems undeniable in effect if not in intent. David Armstrong once said that he thought that in comparing early Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell (he had no interest in later Wittgenstein), he thought that Wittgenstein had gone in the wrong direction in emphasizing correspondence; Russell was the one who had it right metaphysically. My own biases prevent me from understanding this position; I stand by Wittgenstein’s critique of Russell’s weak correspondence theory. But it’s clear that Armstrong, and most likely many others, are concerned enough with what happens past correspondence that the issue itself is not especially important to them. Or, as Soames says of vagueness (among other things) in his response:

This enterprise is one of several in which analytic philosophers are forging ahead by replacing Rorty&#x92s metaphorical question — Are the sentences we use to describe the world maps of an independent reality?
— with more specific, nonmetaphorical questions on which real
progress can be made.

II.

But what is the definition of “real progress”? There’s no question that metaphysics has once again blossomed since Kripke, but aside from outliers like Davidson and Cavell, modern analytic work has had very little disciplinary overlap with other fields. As far as I can tell it has no interaction with its continental bete noir, nor much with literature these days.

One large area of overlap, however, is in the philosophy of mind, as neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists in artificial intelligence, and philosophers engage in long turf wars that often appear as though they’re talking past each other. Baumgartner and Payr’s Speaking Minds incisively portrays the dialogue of the deaf by giving each person their own chapter and letting the differences emerge. I disagree with the review at the above link when Cooper says:

Is it really necessary, for example, to include each interviewee’s description of the Turing test? Surely a singly quote from the original source (which is in any case included in a very useful glossary) would be sufficient.

I would argue that indeed it is, since the definitions vary! Daniel Dennett, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Weizenbaum, George Lakoff, Hubert Dreyfus, and John Searle all proceed from such wildly varying starting points that they hear the questions about building/simulating minds differently and respond in kind. The computer scientists and the neurologists have lower-level problems to solve and don’t want to be bothered with the hard stuff. Putnam and Dreyfus have bigger epistemological problems to solve before this piddling stuff. Dennett wants to define most of these problems of mind out of existence. Even where there appears to be overlap, then, it is commonly incidental.

Yet there has been real overlap between philosophy and cognitive science in ontology. Metaphysical ontological work has been very significant in the development of knowledge representation structures used in, for example, the CYC project, which has been building a large, general purpose repository of object relations and the like for over a decade. Brilliant people like John F. Sowa have worked tirelessly on such projects of ontological knowledge representation, and still I admit I’m skeptical that such rigorous semantics will yield as good results even as search engines do today. See Peter Norvig’s speech on this topic.

III.

Yet clearly the ontologies have produced research with practical application; yet Sowa and others seem to owe more to Russell and Peirce than they do to the current batch of researchers. This is not to say that vagueness could not be used in knowledge representation ontologies; I’m saying that much of the progress being made no longer appears to link back clearly to “specific, nonmetaphorical applications”–rather, certain particular philosophical questions (free will, the mind-body problem, identity over time, “grue”-ness) appear to be spawning out further work at a rate that does not seem to allow for the cohesion that Soames believes there to be. That these questions seem to be based on a set of shared assumptions quite particular to their field gives me reason to pause.

There is always, however, room for epistemology; it undercuts other fields in a way that metaphysics can’t. This won’t make a case for people studying it, but the realms that were explored by Peirce and Russell seem to have been picked up as much by Godel (in the area of math and logic) as any modern analytic. But the epistemological questions have remained squarely untouched.

Personal, if I didn’t believe that language-reality correspondence was inherently paradoxical, and that it was the fundamental basis for so many other areas of study–sociology, psychology, literature, law, organizational structure–I don’t know what other problem would take the place of the huge void it would leave in my head.

The Art of C.S. Peirce

26 November 2004 / / 0 Comments

This Public Address publishes a fascinating sketch by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Trigonometry, algebra, statistics, drawings of faces (the one at the bottom vaguely reminds me of Charles Crumb), retraced figure-eights…the impression I get is one of a man concerned with surfaces, from handwriting to hair.

TPA’s Jeff Ward observes:

Peirce&#x92s realism attempted to embrace both the constructions of the mind and the mind&#x92s interface with reality through perception. It seems notable to me that his semiology did not spring from psychology, but rather informed it.

Which seems exactly right to me. Peirce was far too exacting to allow generalizations about the disposition of the mind to influence a study of what was right out in the open.

John Barth on Calvino and Borges

1 June 2003 / / 0 Comments

wood s lot points to the Dalkey’s reprinting of “The Parallels!” Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges by John Barth, a bit of a unfocused celebration of both of them. Barth gives a slight edge to Calvino for his weightless sense of fantasy, which Borges lacks. I give the edge to Borges for super-high-calorie prose. I grow suspicious at metaphorical comparisons of this sort:

It seems to me that Borges’s narrative geometry, so to speak, is essentially Euclidean. He goes in for rhomboids, quincunxes, and chess logic; even his ubiquitous infinities are of a linear, “Euclidean” sort. In Calvino’s spirals and vertiginous recombinations I see a mischievous element of the non-Euclidean; he shared my admiration, for example, of Boccaccio’s invention of the character Dioneo in the Decameron: The narrative Dionysian wild card who exempts himself from the company’s rules and thus adds a lively element of (constrained) unpredictability to the narrative program.

I’m not certain what makes narrative geometry Euclidean versus Riemannian; if you really wanted to make the analogy, the shape it forms in my head is that Borges’s geometry is Riemannian and Calvino’s is Lobachevskian, which is to say that Borges gets myriad usages out of every single atom of his pieces, while Calvino is more expansive. Barth’s point only seems to be that Calvino was considerably more interested in metafictional conceits than Borges, which is true. With a few Lewis Carollesque exceptions (“Borges and I”), Borges was a narrative traditionalist and simply pressed the materials to maximum usage.

Barth makes one point in passing that bears some examination, which is that Calvino and Borges’s shops aren’t where you go for character:

Neither writer, for better or for worse, was a creator of memorable characters or a delineator of grand passions, although in a public conversation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1975, in answer to the question “What do you regard as the writer’s chief responsibility?” Borges unhesitatingly responded, “The creation of character.” A poignant response from a great writer who never really created any characters; even his unforgettable Funes the Memorious, as I have remarked elsewhere, is not so much a character as a pathological characteristic. And Calvino’s charming Qwfwq and Marco Polo and Marcovaldo and Mr. Palomar are archetypal narrative functionaries, nowise to be compared with the great pungent characters of narrative/dramatic literature.

Barth seems to undercut his case by mentioning the two of the most memorable characters in Borges’s repertoire, Funes and “The Secret Miracle”‘s writer-til-death Jaromir Hladik; are they only pathologies? Looking through Borges’s non-fiction, he pays little direct attention to the neuroses of the writers under examination (Swedenborg, Dunne, etc.). Instead, he dissects their belief systems logically and dispassionately, as though the shapes of their imaginations were the key to their souls rather than their “personality.” Likewise with characters: with Dante’s Ugolino (towards the end of the Inferno), Borges abandoned questions of motivation and even fact to locate him as an ambiguous creation intended for a particular effect. Borges isolates his subjects, creating an archipelago of intensely personal islets of private reason. Influences are felt but processed into unrecognizability (see “Kafka and His Precursors”).

From this follow his characters. Asterion of “The House of Asterion” may be a particular product of his unique circumstances, but he is no more pathological than Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. (And I think Asterion is more memorable.) What’s missing is the emphasis on a psychological character that represents an inner nature, rather than someone who is fully the product of his external circumstances or peculiar gifts. The main difference in Borges’s conception of characters is the lack of alternatives; there is hardly ever a sense of how a character could have been otherwise. Holding out that possibility, the chance that a character in Cervantes or Ariosto could suddenly have the veil drop from their eyes and see themselves as having trod an path based less in fate and more in personal flaws and neuroses.

But this difference seems to spring from a modern conception of psychology rather than any historical conception of character, and the history of fatalism far outweighs that of characters with the psychological depths to evince a simulacra of free will. From Heinrich von Kleist’s madmen and victims to Olaf Stapledon’s exemplars of fantastic conceits, contradiction and inner vexation have usually played a minor role. Borges does abstract the tradition further to remove nearly all arbitrary particulars, but to locate character in those particulars is self-defeating: the overlay is arbitrary.

The charge of characterlessness actually seems more substantiated in Calvino’s later work, where he is striving for aesthetic effect over narrative (moreso than Borges ever did), but that’s still discounting his earlier work, particularly the airy nobleman of The Baron in the Trees, who is as much a character as anyone in Ariosto.

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