To Act Means to Think, Jamming, 13/04/2018

Some more notes reflecting on Deleuze’s broad ideas. This time about politics, activism. Particularly the relationship between theory and practice.

Gilles Deleuze’s politics operated in a marxist tradition, or at least a tradition of social, political, and economic critique that began with the work of Marx. He was far from an orthodox marxist – anyone in the marxist tradition worth reading is never an orthodox marxist.

Economic, political, technological, and ecological circumstances are too different from Marx’s own time and place to be uncritical about his own theories and social science concepts. But the relationship between theory and practice – between philosophy and politics – is a recurring question in the tradition.

Above, an act of practice to change the world, impossible without the
theories and thinking that guides them.

Marx himself put the relationship of theory and practice at the forefront of his work. Philosophically speaking, it was one of the most reaction-inspired parts of his thinking – his need, as the saying goes, to stand Hegel on his feet instead of his head.

One of Marx’s most tweet-worthy sayings was about the theory-practice relationship. From the Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

So you’d think someone working in the marxist tradition would follow a strict separation of theory and practice. Interpreting and understanding the world is separate from changing the world.

But of course, it’s not that simple. Not in Marx’s own work and certainly not in Deleuze’s. Most of Deleuze’s energy was spent crafting philosophical concepts. He attended his fair share of protests and demonstrations, and regularly advocated for greater social justice in western Europe during his lifetime. But first and foremost, he was a writer and thinker.

Theory and practice exist in a feedback loop. You can’t have a sensible or even coherent theory if it isn’t developed through understanding the world, and doesn’t include a purpose of helping you understand the world. Theory is a guide for practical action, because the most wise practical action is driven by theory.

Theory without input from practice is intellectual masturbation. Practice without input from theory is flailing your arms like a crazy person. The problems of practice need theoretical work to come up with solutions. Theory has no order or direction without application in practice.

A Continuous World of So Many, A History Boy, 13/02/2018

One of the most important insights a person should have in the 21st century if you want to settle yourself, and give yourself come perspective, is this – Accept the continuity between humanity and other species.

Now, I’m not just talking about human-ape proximity. Though I am. All too often we forget how close we are to primates, how similar they are to us. All too often, we know how close we are to primates, and acknowledge it in the worst way. All too typical of us, I should say.

Seeing the continuity of your own life with that of an orangutan
isn't all that hard – they're laughing, silly, joyful, and quietly
experience such an enlightened wisdom of knowing that a loving,
silly, joyful life is the best one for creatures like us.
They're what we aspire to be.

The continuity I’m talking about today has much earlier roots, and much deeper in our bodies. Literally and figuratively.

I spent quite a few years studying philosophy of mind, and one reason I walked away from that as a major research focus was frustration – Frustration that so many researchers ignored the obvious answer to so many of their problems.

So many discussions I had and papers I read about the “hard problem” of consciousness fell to dust to me as I accepted that the human mind is a perceptual field. Our thoughts aren’t just in our heads. Our brains and nervous system develop through environmental interaction. They continue to function through complex feedback loops that we’ve been refining for our entire lives.

Henri Bergson was on to a similar way of thinking. He just expressed it in a totally different way.

The tragedy of Bergson is that he so radically misapplied true and valid philosophical principles of becoming. In the most notorious* example from his work – No Henri, the cause of life getting more complicated isn’t a force of life energy constantly struggling against the inertia of matter’s torpor.

* And simplest to explain.

But yes, large amounts of matter interacting in complex systems that constantly generate energy – say, from giant balls of gas falling in on themselves until they become nuclear fusion furnaces that can be stable for billions of years – tend to become more complex over time.

Here's the life story behind that set of links. At 21, mystified why Chalmers
thought consciousness was a hard problem at all. At 22, puzzled why Putnam
even had to argue that meaning was more than thoughts or neuronal flickers.
At 23, Merleau-Ponty gave me a wonderful vocabulary to let me walk away
from Chalmers’ limited point of view. At 24, learning the biological ground
of that wonderful vocab from Varela. At 25, learning the power and ubiquity
of life and memory to grow, refine, and develop a creature thanks to Allen
and Hofstatder. If you let the problems be your guide, you’ll figure them
out. Don’t specialize too early.

Bergson’s ideas are much more useful today – better applicable to the current state of human science, where we understand that complexity really is everywhere. And his concepts of what consciousness is, and what its roots are, matter today too.

Think about Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness – that a scientific understanding of consciousness will never help us understand the experience of consciousness. An essential premise of that concept is unspoken, but necessary for someone to arrive at that concept at all.

Consciousness is exclusively human, and only humans experience the world as a phenomenal sensory field. Absolutely untrue.

Everything that is capable of action in response to external stimuli – whose reaction to fields of force and affects in its environment – is conscious. That covers every organism. Humans have peculiarly complicated and complex perceptual fields, because we’ve refined our powers of communication and memory with language and technology.

But all those actions are mechanisms. They aren’t deterministic in the most strict sense, because organic responses are based on feedback loops – previous responses condition future responses. The feedback loop is the most rudimentary form of memory.

Even the simplest organisms perceive because their responses are actions – the movement of response itself originates internally and kicks off a feedback loop of the organism with its environment which couples them into a single dynamic field.

Add Bergson to the history I’ve strung together. Even if he might not have realized he’d become a member.

Our Lord of the Infinitely Revised, A History Boy, 03/01/2015

I had this job last year.

Now that 2015 has seriously started, I’ve begun work revising the chapter of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity that needs the most work of all (not counting the new introduction, which will start from scratch, or rather blank). Chapter five reunites the concept of autopoiesis (the only kind of body that can literally generate itself) from its foundational role in systems theory with its interpretation as conativity from the cybernetics / cognitive science / philosophy of mind tradition to form the essential core of an ecological conception of subjectivity.

Confused yet? Good. I just summarized a 14,000 word chapter in a single sentence. Of course it’s not going to be easy. When I worked full-time in the university sector, I could always tell that a colleague was going to bug me when he (and it was always he) would say that any complicated idea can be explained in a single sentence. No, the reason I need more than one sentence to explain an idea precisely is because it’s complicated.

One moment of bitterness about the academically closed-minded taken care of, chapter five did need the most work. Really, it’s received the most work already of any chapter in EEFH. 

(§5, the prototype)

The ideas in the chapter began as my master’s thesis, which explored the concept of autopoiesis in theories of mind in analytic philosophy as enactive or embodied. That investigation convinced me that the feedback loop, the essential movement of autopoietic processes, is the foundation of self-consciousness and any kind of subjectivity at all.

(§5, Draft I) 

I started writing the original draft of chapter five of my doctoral dissertation over Xmas of 2010. I tried from then until February 2011 for about 7000 words to connect this theory of subjectivity that I had developed to my chapters on environmental moral thinking and the core concepts of my ecological philosophy. Success was limited. It was basically a condensed version of my old thesis. I wasn’t nearly done, and I wasn’t nearly close to figuring out this connection.

While I was on vacation to my mother’s home in St. John’s, my laptop’s hard drive died and I lost the entire chapter. Every other chapter, already completed, was backed up on a small flash drive. This was actually quite a blessing, as my draft was terrible and deserved to disappear on a fried hard drive disk. 

Jerry Fodor's writing incensed me from
my first encounter, but I wasn't able to
say precisely why until I watched this
dialogue he had with scientist Elliott
Sober in reaction to Fodor's book on the
theory of natural selection. Fodor is the
most skilled craftsman of straw man
arguments in philosophy today. And no
one called him on it until 2010.

(§5, Draft II)

So I wrote a new chapter five in a hurry that combined a few core ideas from my old thesis with a polemic about Jerry Fodor’s compositional theory of mind from a paper I had written for one of my courses at McMaster. My supervisor quickly informed me that most of what I’d written were blind alleys, or diversions so deep into philosophy of mind and cognitive science debates that they were, at the most charitable, tangents distracting from the project’s major plot.

(§5, Draft III) 

Realizing that I actually had quite a lot of time left in my program to write my dissertation, I took my time with the next version of this chapter. By this point, my continuing research had given me a clear idea of where the following two chapters would take the inquiry, so I had a clear destination for the end of chapter five. With a clear endpoint, I had a clear focus. 

The chapter had four movements. First, I’d introduce the concept of the body self-generated from feedback loops in a historical context, describing how it was first developed in the cybernetics community. Then I’d discuss how it was treated in systems theory and my critiques of this conception.* Third, I’d introduce the concept in Arne Næss’ ecological philosophy of the self as a place and the critiques this idea received as being ridiculous.

* Reading I did after I completed the degree made me realize that my critique wasn’t entirely fair. I was criticizing an interpretation of the closure of a body made of feedback loops as being absolute, because it was based on a concept of affect that saw it as incapable of carrying information or meaning. Both I and some major figures in systems theory actually understand affects as able to do pretty much everything we want physical interactions to do. So this aspect of the chapter is getting seriously revised.

The chapter ended, and it will still end, with my interpretation of the autopoiesis concept showing how conceiving the self as a place actually makes sense. It just means you have to understand every body that exists, not as an isolated figure, but as a dynamic field of interactions with surrounding fields. 

What are confusing ideas and apparent contradictions when you conceive of physical bodies as discrete and stable entities make perfect sense when you think of existence as processual. 

(§5, Draft IV)

Really, all that’s left is the editing. A chapter that went through that many different approaches and revisions will still have a lot of detritus from all that change hanging off it. When I look at the manuscript, it really is true. Even aside from softening the tone of my critique of systems theory concepts, I still have a lot of redundant sentences and vague formulations to trash. And I really did write in the passive voice a little too much for comfort back then.