In a report of recent neuroimaging techniques, the lead scientist said the following – “our findings suggest that unconsciousness may be the increase of inhibitory assemblies across the brain’s cortex” (See here). The statement is taken to be supportive of a particular theory about consciousness put forward by Susan Greenfield, which may or may not be the case. Greenfields hypothesis seems, on the face of it, simply another form of modularity thesis about consciousness and although her metaphor of consciousness as a ‘dimmer’ switch rather than a binary state of on/off may be a good metaphor, it’s also rather obvious. Did anyone actually think consciousness was a simple state that one either ‘had’ or didn’t have? If they did, it seems rather absurd. That said, the neuroimaging work, in probing the dynamics of the brain as it rises and falls into consciousness, sounds fascinating. The spectral consciousness that begins to appear on the horizon as a result of increased levels of communication and signalling between neural assemblies in the brain doesn’t directly answer the central problem with any modularity concept when applied to the mind, rather than the brain, however – which is the question of how the parts become the appearance of a whole, the extent of what we might call the ‘holistic reality’ of the mind. There’s much interesting discussion of this problem, some of which is usefully summarised in Carruthers article ‘Moderately massive modularity’. In general Carruthers account of this holistic reality rests in the architecture sketched, in which language enables us to “build non-domain-specific conscious thinking out of modular components”. All of this is fascinating stuff and at some point I want to explore the details of this in more depth. For now, however, I want to pursue another thread, albeit in a kind of rambling ‘thinking out loud’ way. As is common on this blog these are notes for myself, part of the process of thinking through things.
What struck me as I read that phrase from Professor Pollard, the lead scientist on the neuroimaging work, was this idea that the increase of inhibitory processes is the ground of the unconscious.
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From the very beginnings of organised philosophical thought there has been a keen awareness of the problem of causality. In its most basic form this problem arises whenever the concept of freedom is considered. To be free is to be uncaused. This basic axiom has considerable implications. If we agree that ‘to be free is to be uncaused’ then it seems like we face two simple options as implications of this axiom. Either we deny that there is any such thing as freedom or we deny that cauality is universal. This simple axiom, that to be free is to be uncaused, produces a quite strange and difficult tension between these implications. On the one hand we might want to affirm freedom as real and present. In general we might want to go further and not only affirm the actual reality of freedom but also affirm it as something to be valued and retrieved in the face of its removal. On the other hand we want to affirm the capacity to know the world and the conection between the various facts of the world, connections of causality. Freedom breaks open the world, whilst causality constructs its’ connections and it would seem we want the strange mixture of freedom within a connected world. One of the basic responses to this type of tension has been to suggest that there are, in fact, two types of causes. Everything is thus connected through the concept of cause, but the connections are variable dependent on which of the two types of cause is in play. We thus reconcile freedom and cause by turning freedom into a type of causal force. Read the rest of this entry »
Philosophers no longer talk about God and if they do nobody listens. At the time of Leibniz and the Enlightenment the reverse was the case – philosophers always talked about God and if they didn’t then nobody listened. This, no doubt, was a hangover from the impregnation of Christianity that occurred in the middle ages, during which time the bastard child of philosophy and Christian apologetics is produced, what Heidegger would later call ‘onto-theology’. Being (the ontos) is spoken of within the framework of God. This is the butchery of philosophy by Augustine and Aquinas, the butchery of pagan thought by monotheistic madness. A language and framework that is in effect absent from the initial movements of Socrates and Plato comes to dominate any attempt to think. To think without God becomes, by the time of the Leibniz, almost impossible. At the same time, to think with God also becomes almost impossible. Thought is threatened by God since metaphysical abstractions now implicate God. The situation is analogous to artists under Stalin’s regime. To speak is to speak of God – or Stalin – and so to speak is to invoke danger and attention, not always a good idea.
At the heart of Leibniz is a peculiar pairing of two seemingly opposed ideas that produces a problem. On the one hand there is the idea that the world – Being – must have a necessity to the way it is. On the other hand there is the idea that God – the supreme Being – must be free and ultimately unconstrained by anything, including any necessities of mere matter. We can encounter this problem in the following way. Let us assume that God exists and has created the world, indeed all of Being. Let us also assume, following Leibniz for a while, that the world which exists is ‘the best possible world’. Now Leibniz wants to argue that the world is the best possible world because it must be the best possible world – it is not the best by accident but because only the best possible world could exist. Thus, if God created the world and it is the best possible world is it the best possible world because God created it or did God create it because it is the best possible world.
The problem is right here – was God forced by ‘some sort of necessity’ to create the world as it is because it is the best possible world that there could be? Did God have no choice over how the world is – or even that the world is? If this is the case, then God is powerless in the face of this necessity – nothing more than an empty origin.
The situation gets worse, however, if we try and say that the world is the best possible world because God created it. If God is free to create any world and the world that is created is the best possible world then we can ask why is this world better than any other? It must be because God chose between more than one option the best – but for it to be the best there must be some reason that can be given, it must be more than a more whim of God. God, then, becomes again subject to the reason behind the choice of one world over another and couldn’t have acted freely if he acted rationally since he would have had no choice. Alternatively the world is a mere whim and in that case it cannot be said to be in any real sense the best. Either the world has a necessity – in which case God is subject to that necessity – or it is a mere whim, in which case it might very well have been different, indeed it might still now be very different from the way we experience it. If the world is a whim of God we are left with the same problem of the Caliph’s vision1.
It’s not just Leibniz who works with this difficulty. In Descartes too we find the problem of why and how God relates to Being. If God is given complete freedom then what’s to stop him from having a huge joke at our expense? What prevents God from making the false seem true and the true seem false, from making the appearance radically different from the reality? If we respond, because God is good, then surely if God is good he would have created the best of all possible worlds and then we are back to the lack of freedom on the part of God. God is free and the world is possibly a joke or the world is necessarily the way it must be – the best – and thus God is no more and no less free in his creativity than the mathematician is in the production of a solution to a given problem.
1 Nicholas Rescher, following Bertrand Russell, poses the problem as a formal dilemma and as follows – ‘According to the Principle of Perfection [what I have been referring to here as 'the best of all possible worlds] God acts in the most perfect way possible with regard to the creation of the world, and he does so either necessarily or freely. If he does so necessarily his freedom is destroyed, and all that follows as a result of his perfection – i.e., everything that happens in the world – is necessary. If he does so freely, in accord with Leibniz’s principle, a sufficient reason must be adduced for this free act, and this in turn must be either free or necessitated. Thus an infinite regress is initiated.’ (Rescher, 1967: 43-44) Rescher’s formulation of the formal problem (that of an infinite regress) avoids the problem of the powers or forces at play in the inter-relation between the concepts of God and Necessity.
To call life itself just or unjust, to conceive life as samsara or suffering, is to judge life and to do so from outside life, from some position which is the ground of a judgement. To encounter life, respond to it, is inevitable and not all responses are equal, this much is inevitable. Too often, however, this encounter and response is thought of as a judgement. To not judge does not mean to not respond or that any response is as good as any other. There are different responses in life, different lives if you like – or different types of life. Life produces its own end, life drives itself to death but in the encounter with death there is another space of response, this time one that shows us the two fundamental ways of response, affirmation and negation, more life or never ending death.
How am I to think of life? The philosopher must ask this question. They must, moreover, continue to ask this question and to encounter the force of this question with responses – the philosopher must not simply ask an idle question but encounter the problem of the question, the problem the question arises from, responding with thought, with emotion, with passion, with action. Encounter and response constitute the activity of thought and living, though too often this dynamic to-and-fro is congealed, by the social, into regulated habits, pre-formed responses such as the response of the subject, ‘I think…’. Living is a poor name for the habits and habitats of the human. We are all, inevitably, products of the social, products of the inhuman and yet we are not inevitably condemned to remain nothing but product, commodity, object. It is not a matter of striving to become a subject since the subject is that which is subservient, the subject of the monarch. Rather it is a matter of striving for monarchy itself, becoming a crown within life but not a ruler, judge or controller. Crowned anarchy, this is the watchword, a monarch of creation, a singular moment that adds to the abundance of singular moments. In more traditional terms, this is the assumption of an imperative to autonomy, the self (auto) lawmaking (nomos) reality.
In a post on Marx’s dialectical method and Deleuze, Steven Shaviro makes the interesting claim that it is Deleuze’s pluralism that is transcendental. It is the theory of relations that Deleuze has which underpins his pluralism and this theory of relations, presumably, would be the place to look for a transcendental structure in the sense of a ‘condition of possibility’-type argument (Shaviro makes it explicit he’s referring to a Kantian transcendental when talking of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental pluralism). Indeed this is plainly the case for Shaviro, since the article begins from the differences and similarities between dialectics and Deleuzian thought in terms of their theory of relations. He suggests a strong commonality around this area of theory of relations, arguing that:
"There are definite commonalities. (1) Both the Hegelian/dialectical language of negativity, and the James/Bergson/Deleuze language of virtuality, insist that all those things that are omitted by the positivist cataloguing of atomistic facts are altogether real. (2) Both locate this reality by asserting that the relations between things are as real as the things themselves, and that ‘things’ don’t exist first, but only come to be through their multiple relations. (3) Both construct materialist (rather than idealist) accounts of these relations, of how they constitute the real, and of how they continually change (over time) the nature of what is real. (4) Both offer similar critiques of the tradition of bourgeois thought that leads from Descartes through the British empiricists and on to 20th century scientism and post-positivism. (numbers in brackets inserted)"
