Angry PostHumanism II: The Continuity of All Life, No Matter How Different, Research Time, 28/11/2014

Continued from last post . . . Cary Wolfe’s “Event-Machine” essay is published again in his What Is Posthumanism? collection, in a slightly expanded form from the version I first read in Emergence and Embodiment, which came out the year before. It’s my favourite kind of expansion, which changes the title a little (to “Meaning and Event”), and adds some paragraphs and deletes others at different points throughout. So you don’t just get the original essay with an extra section, but the more detailed work of reconsidering some aspects of the argument and updating it. 

Part of what he’s updating it with, aside from some improvements to the expression and the order of some of the arguments, is attempting to link the essays together. Very few collections of previously published essays do that, and as a result, they’re often quite repetitive, as essays originally published in different journals years apart will be smashed in a book within a few pages of each other. And reading through marginally different iterations of the same introductory conceptual material can get damn annoying sometimes. 

Although Wolfe sometimes refers to the same texts in different articles, and even sometimes the same quotes from the same texts (I’m thinking about a particular line from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Eating Well”), the context of each occurrence is different enough to make it land on a reader differently each time. 

Really, just coming to grips with the fact of our ecological
evolution must adjust you to your continuity with animals.
Any process as slow as humanity's evolution, while involving
thresholds, can only be continuous.

Derrida’s “Eating Well” is his engagement with the ethics and morals of animal rights and vegetarianism, and his conclusion amounts practically to the same brand of not-quite-quietism that most of his ethical engagements end in (unendability, that is). There are several essays in this book about the question of human continuity with non-human animals, an issue that conventional transhumanism usually ignores in its gleaming visions of a humanity that is ultimately stripped of all that could be called organic. It makes for a wonderfully multifaceted critique of all conceptions of humanity that radically separate us from all other forms of life and ecologies.

This makes Wolfe’s essays on the human conception of ourselves regarding animals a welcome addition to the Ecophilosophy manuscript. Because he frames their inclusion in the book using a conception of post-humanism, the new introduction to the manuscript would explicitly link the ecological and geo-historical continuity of humanity to all other life on Earth now and throughout the distant past to the planet’s beginning. 

Wolfe is also very good at calling up the ethical squishiness of our mainstream conceptions of the animal in the context of his own inquiry. I could tell that an essay called “Language, Representation, and Species” originally appeared as a direct attack on Daniel Dennett’s conception of mind, and used the actual mental complexity of animals to expose that Dennett’s concept of mind just begged the question of what exactly mind is. 

Basically, Dennett’s argument that the human mind is special because its self-consciousness (that only we can think reflexively, experiencing our own experience) is unique depends on having postulated at the beginning that non-human animals can’t think reflexively. He doesn’t prove that non-human animals are deficient in this way. He just presumes it, and argues for it in a way that makes it feel like a conclusion, when it’s been a premise all along. So I’d like to thank Cary Wolfe for finally putting a finger on why I’ve felt so iffy about Dennett’s ideas ever since I first encountered them late in my undergrad.

So there is no categorical separation between humanity and the rest of the organic world.* Once we’ve established this continuity, we end up in a very difficult spot. A lot of the moral distinctions that allow us to treat animals so poorly (medical and scientific testing, factory farming and industrial slaughterhouse practices) depend on the premise that they can only think in a fundamentally inferior way.

* Thinking in terms of this radical duality also commits the blindness of collapsing all the differences among non-human species of organism into a single category and treating them as if they were all a single type of thing, organisms-that-are-not-human. 

Recognizing the continuity now introduces the ethical issue that moral dialogue with non-humans is possible where all participants are moral agents. Standing on a moral platform, if not in strict moral equivalence or sameness because of our important physical and epistemic differences in kind, means that we have to take our cruelty to animals in a profoundly serious sense. It’s more than just immoral because humans are bad when they’re cruel. A non-human’s cries, when we think authentically in terms of our natural continuity, should touch our soul. To be continued . . .

Free Will: Leaving the Tradition Behind, A History Boy, 26/09/2013

Introductory philosophy classes face a pretty hard sell for the discipline. Because of the usual way universities allocate budgets, philosophy programs have to attract enough majors to keep a reasonable share of their university’s money.* My old department is facing the short end of this stick right now. In the face of a trimming overall budget for the university, the philosophy department at McMaster is staring down some cuts, which is a damn shame, because it’s a quality department that’s being kept from firing on all its cylinders. 

* I happen to think that the most productive way to develop an undergraduate philosophy curriculum is through more service courses that integrate philosophical perspectives and techniques with other disciplines. In an era where immediate practical application of their education is foremost on students’ minds (as it would be, given what most people sacrifice for their degrees), philosophy sometimes has to reach out of its more abstract comfort zone and provide people with diverse critical thinking skills. Learning how to be of service to multiple other disciplines would also, I think, be a great asset for creative philosophical research.

Of course, leaving aside critiques of the outdated and unfortunate method of allocating budget shares to university departments by major instead of overall service to the university’s programs, there is the question of attracting majors. An often-used tool is to generate nerdy enthusiasm, getting people excited enough about the discipline’s material to want to learn more. And one of the standard methods of doing this is hooking people with the perennial problems of philosophy, the questions that don’t ever seem to go away. Does God exist? Is there such thing as a soul? Is free will possible?**

** I sometimes see this term written as freewill, a single word. And it annoys the crap out of me.

What amuses me about this well-worn technique is that I was never that interested in these problems, though I specifically want to talk about free will today. As I’ve studied other areas of philosophy, especially scientific principles, the various conceptions of what a law of nature would be, and the nature of causation, free will almost seems like a pseudo-problem. It sounds like a serious problem, but when you actually examine all the ideas involved, it actually isn’t anything worth worrying about. 

I read an article on Slate Wednesday morning that got me thinking about this. The author’s point was basically that whether there could be free will wasn’t really a problem. The problem is usually stated in the discipline of philosophy in terms of causation: if an action is caused, then it isn’t free; because no human action is free from cause, then there is no such thing as free will. This is based on a conception of causality as strongly deterministic. A cause, on this conception, utterly determines its effect. 

The article’s writer, Roy Baumeister, points out how silly this is. His own argument is that as systems grow more complex over time, they develop new ways of acting which essentially constitute human freedom. Yes, everything is made of matter, and elementary particles move according to the laws of physics,*** but these laws describe very simple actions, and the determinations of these simple actions don’t apply to the more complex dynamics of movement that emerge from them. By the time we arrive at the peculiar kind of complexity of humans with their cultural ways of living, the human organism has developed the ability to move in ways that practically amount to everything that the traditional methods of pure metaphysics ask of free will. And if it develops its personality and trades a complex chain of favours for political advancement like a free human, then it’s free.

A funny story involving Daniel Dennett. My friend K used
to work at a marina in Newfoundland where apparently
Dennett used to go sailing with reasonable frequency.

*** Of course, the mathematics describing activity at the fundamental levels of matter and energy are statistical, a matter not of strict determination but of probabilities, likelihoods, and tendencies. This is further evidence that some arguments in philosophy seriously need to catch up with discoveries in other disciplines that have impact for our concerns. I have even met philosophers, actual people with PhDs in the discipline, who believe that the scientific concept of emergence is nonsense. I won't name names, just express my thankfulness that there aren't very many of them, and hope that it won't be long until such people no longer exist.

This is essentially Daniel Dennett’s argument for the evolution of freedom, dressed in language better suited to journalism than giant books of technical philosophy. And perhaps philosophy could learn something from journalistic style; at a minimum, it sells better. Dennett, of course, has many more nuanced concepts involved in his argument. Freedom Evolves is a 400-page book. What I read yesterday morning was a 1000-word article. 

But I’ve never actually read Freedom Evolves in detail. I vaguely remember taking a course that had a short excerpt from it in our readings, but that’s about it. When it comes to Dennett scholarship, I’ve read more of his essays and books on philosophy of mind (I do recommend Consciousness Explained; not strongly, but recommended) when I was working on my MA and during the first year or so of my doctorate. 

I was simply never really that interested in the problem of free will, having suspected from my first encounter with it that it didn’t really add up to much. I had a feeling that freedom as a question was kind of immaterial. I think I always held an attitude basically akin to Dennett’s since before I even discovered philosophy in the first place. And nothing I subsequently discovered in philosophy could convince me otherwise. 

I’m not entirely sure what that says about philosophy. Or about me. Oh well.