Speculations IV, June 2013 Is Now Online

The new, June 2013, issue of Speculations (IV) is now available online, and is free as always under its Creative Commons license. Below is the Table of Contents and a brief section of the first full essay.

Speculations IV, June 2013, ISBN: 978-0615797861

If philosophy begins in wonder, then where does it end? What is its end? Aristotle said that while it begins in wondrous questioning, it ends with “the better state” of attaining answers, like an itch we get rid of with a good scratch or a childhood disease that, once gotten over, never returns. How depressing! Why can’t a good question continue being questionable or, in a more literal translation of the German, “question-worthy?” As Heidegger puts it, “philosophical questions are in principle never settled as if some day one could set them aside.” Couldn’t we learn from questions without trying to settle them, resolve ourselves to not resolving them? Couldn’t wisdom be found in reconciling ourselves to its perpetual love, and never its possession? Wittgenstein once wrote that “a philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about,’” which was the symptom of the deep confusion that constituted philosophy for him. But Heidegger loved wandering aimlessly in the woods, following Holzwege or paths that lead nowhere, stumbling onto dead-ends which could also be clearings.

--Lee Braver, "On Not Settling the Issue of Realism"

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• Purchase print edition HERE.

--TABLE OF CONTENTS--

Editorial Introduction

PART I: REFLECTIONS

On Not Settling the Issue of Realism
Lee Braver

Politics and Speculative Realism
Levi R. Bryant

The Current State of Speculative Realism
Graham Harman

Weird Reading
Eileen A. Joy

A Very Dangerous Supplement: Speculative Realism, Academic Blogging, and the Future of Philosophy
Adam Kotsko

Speculative Realism: Interim Report with Just a Few Caveats
Christopher Norris

The Future of an Illusion
Jon Roffe

Realism and Representation: On the Ontological Turn
Daniel Sacilotto

PART II: PROPOSALS

"The World is an Egg": Realism, Mathematics, and the Thresholds of Difference
Jeffrey A. Bell

Ontological Commitments
Manuel DeLanda

The Meaning of "Existence" and the Contingency of Sense
Markus Gabriel

Post-Deconstructive Realism: It's About Time
Peter Gratton

Points of Forced Freedom: Eleven (More) Theses on Materialism
Adrian Johnston

Realism and the Infinite
Paul M. Livingston

How to Behave Like a Non-Philosopher, or, Speculative Versus Revisionary Metaphysics
John Mullarkey

"The Horror of Darkness": Toward an Unhuman Phenomenology
Dylan Trigg

Karen Barad - Agential Realism

I recently stumbled upon Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), a book that explicates her theory of agential realism within the wider field of "New Materialism."

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

I am new to her work and her theory, so of course I went to Wikipedia, where I found a brief explanation of her work, but not as much as I had hoped to find. She is primarily known as a feminist theorist, although her PhD was in theoretical physics (Stony Brook University). "Her dissertation presented computational methods for quantifying properties of fermions and quarks in the framework of lattice gauge theory." Currently, she is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz.

Here is the definition of her theory of Agential Realism from Wikipedia:

Agential Realism

According to Barad's theory of agential realism, the world is made up of phenomena, which are "the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies". Intra-action, a neologism introduced by Barad, signals an important challenge to individualist metaphysics. For Barad, things or objects do not precede their interaction, rather, 'objects' emerge through particular intra-actions. Thus, apparatuses, which produce phenomena are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans (as in actor-network theory), rather they are the condition of possibility of 'humans' and 'non-humans', not merely as ideational concepts, but in their materiality. Apparatuses are 'material-discursive' in that they produce determinate meanings and material beings while simultaneously excluding the production of others. What it means to matter is therefore always material-discursive. Barad takes her inspiration from physicist Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum physics. Barad's agential realism is at once an epistemology (theory of knowing), an ontology (theory of being), and an ethics. Barad coins the term onto-epistemology. Because specific practices of mattering have ethical consequences, excluding other kinds of mattering, onto-epistemological practices are always in turn onto-ethico-epistemological.

Much of Barad's scholarly work has revolved around her concept of "agential realism," and her theories hold importance for many academic fields, including science studies, STS (Science, Technology, and Society), feminist technoscience, philosophy of science, feminist theory, and, of course, physics. In addition to Bohr, her work draws a great deal on the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, as demonstrated in her influential article in the feminist journal differences, "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality." Barad's training is actually in theoretical physics, and her 2007 book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, includes a chapter that contains an original discovery in theoretical physics, which is largely unheard of in books that are usually categorized as 'gender studies' or 'cultural theory' books. In this book, Barad also argues that 'agential realism,' is useful to the analysis of literature, social inequalities, and many other things. This claim is based on the fact that Barad's agential realism is a way of understanding the politics, ethics, and agencies of any act of observation, and indeed any kind of knowledge practice. According to Barad, the deeply connected way that everything is entangled with everything else means that any act of observation makes a "cut" between what is included and excluded from what is being considered. Nothing is inherently separate from anything else, but separations are temporarily enacted so one can examine something long enough to gain knowledge about it. This view of knowledge provides a framework for thinking about how culture and habits of thought can make some things visible and other things easier to ignore or to never see. For this reason, according to Barad, agential realism is useful for any kind of feminist analysis, even if the connection to science is not apparent.

Barad's framework makes several other arguments, and some of them are part of larger trends in fields such as science studies and feminist technoscience (all can be found in her 2007 book, Meeting the Universe Halfway):

• She defines agency as a relationship and not as something that one "has."
• The scientist is always part of the apparatus, and one needs to understand that in order to make scientific work more accurate and more rigorous. This differs from the view that political critiques of science seek to undermine the credibility of science; instead, Barad argues that this kind of critique actually makes for better, more credible science.
• She argues that politics and ethical issues are always part of scientific work, and only are made to seem separate by specific historical circumstances that encourage people to fail to see those connections. She uses the example of the ethics of developing nuclear weapons to argue this point, by claiming that the ethics and politics are part of how such weapons were developed and understood, and therefore part of science, and not merely of the "philosophy of science" or the "ethics of science." This differs from the usual view that one can strive for a politics-free, bias-less science.
• Nevertheless, she argues against moral relativism, which, according to Barad, uses science's "human" aspects as an excuse to treat all knowledge, and all ethical frameworks, as equally false. She uses Michael Frayn's play, Copenhagen, as an example of the kind of moral relativism that she finds problematic.
• She also rejects the idea that science is "only" a language game or set of fictions produced only by human constructions and concepts. Although the scientist is part of the "intra-action" of the experiment, humans (and their cultural constructs) do not have complete control over everything that happens. Barad expresses this point by saying, in Getting Real, that although scientists shape knowledge about the universe, you can't ignore the way the universe "kicks back."

These points on science, agency, ethics, and knowledge reveal that Barad's work is similar to the projects of other science studies scholars such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Andrew Pickering, and Evelyn Fox Keller.

One of the key points (in my brief readings): "Barad's agential realism is at once an epistemology (theory of knowing), an ontology (theory of being), and an ethics. Barad coins the term onto-epistemology. Because specific practices of mattering have ethical consequences, excluding other kinds of mattering, onto-epistemological practices are always in turn onto-ethico-epistemological."

Additional Online Resources:

Some of Barad's essays are available online, linked from her faculty page at UC Santa Cruz.

• "Nature's Queer Performativity (the authorized version)," in Kvinder, Køn og forskning/ Women, Gender and Research (Copenhagen, 2012), No. 1-2, pp. 25-53.
• “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” in Derrida Today (Nov 2010), vol. 3, no. 2 : pp. 240-268, edited by Nicole Anderson and Peter Steves, 2010
• "Erasers and Erasures: Pinch's Unfortunate 'Uncertainty Principle'," in Social Studies of Science, vol. 41, no. 3, Spring 2011 
• “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, Spring 2003
• “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction,” in Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, edited by Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Press, 1996

Cynthia Bateman's Obstinate Obscurity blog offered a two-part post on agential realism:

• Notes on Agential Realism Part I: Basic Definitions
• Notes on Agential Realism Part II: Material-Discursive Practices and the Limitations of Language

In New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (freely available at the link), there is a lengthy interview with Karen Barad on her philosophy (pgs. 48-70).

Paul Leonardi's article comparing agential realism and critical realism is freely available from SSRN: Theoretical Foundations for the Study of Sociomateriality (2013).

Peta Hinton's The Quantum Dance and the World's 'Extraordinary Liveliness': Refiguring Corporeal Ethics in Karen Barad's Agential Realism is also freely available online.

Peter, at Xenogenesis, reviewed Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway back in 2011 - Becoming Brittlestar, Becoming Agential.

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Finally, Marietta Radomska has an essay online called Towards a Posthuman Collective: Ontology, Epistemology and Ethics that discusses Barad's theory a bit.

Ken Wilber - Response to Critical Theory in Defense of Integral Theory

Apparently the long drought of new writing from integral philosopher Ken Wilber has come to an end, which can only mean his health has improved considerably - that alone is great news. He says he has completed Sex, Karma, Creativity, which is volume 2 of the Kosmos Trilogy, first volume being Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1996).

These pieces are two long endnotes, and one excerpt, written "in response to recent articles on Critical Theory and Integral Theory, and, while appreciating certain aspects of Critical Theory, come out strongly in favor of Integral Theory." As Bruce Alderman mentions in his post about these new excerpts, Wilber likely means "critical realism" in his title, which is a very different thing than critical theory.

For clarity, critical realism "highlights a mind-dependent aspect of the world, which reaches to understand (and comes to understanding of) the mind independent world." Wilber's main point here, with which I disagree, is that CR in hardly integral because he denies the role of consciousness in the evolution of the universe - he describes the CR position as "ripping consciousness out of the Kosmos and leaving “the real” to be merely a denuded “ontology”."

What fails to be mentioned here is that we can combine CR philosophy - the idea that there is an ontologically "real" universe out there, the mind independent world - with the fields of emergence and complex adaptive systems, thereby removing the anthropocentric necessity of consciousness being an organizing principle of the universe.

RESPONSE TO CRITICAL THEORY IN DEFENSE OF INTEGRAL THEORY

January 17th, 2013

The following are two long endnotes, and one excerpt, from my recently finished book, Sex, Karma, Creativity, which is volume 2 of the Kosmos Trilogy, whose first volume is Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. They were written, in part, in response to recent articles on Critical Theory and Integral Theory, and, while appreciating certain aspects of Critical Theory, come out strongly in favor of Integral Theory. –Ken Wilber

Chapter “Individual and Social,” endnote 4:

[1] 4. Integral Theory (IT) and Critical Realism (CR) share many items in common, but there are some deep differences as well. To begin with, Critical Realism separates epistemology and ontology, and makes ontology the level of the “real”; whereas, for Integral Theory, epistemology and ontology cannot so be fragmented and fractured, but rather are two correlative dimensions of every Whole occasion (part of the tetra-dimension of every holon). Realism maintains that there are ontological realities that are not dependent upon humans or human theories—including much of the level of the “real”—including items such as atoms, molecules, cells, etc.—and IT agrees, with one important difference: IT is panpsychic (a term I’m not fond of, preferring “pan‑interiorist,” meaning all beings have interiors or proto-consciousness, a la Whitehead, Peirce, Leibnitz, etc.)—to wit, atoms do not depend upon being known by humans, but they do depend upon being known by each other. The “prehension” aspect of atoms (proto-knowing, proto-feeling, proto-consciousness) helps to co-enact the being or ontology aspect of the atoms for each other—their own epistemology and ontology are thus inseparable and co-creative. The atom’s prehension is part of its very ontology (and vice versa), and as each atom prehends its predecessor, it is instrumental in bringing it forth or enacting it, just as its own being will depend in part on being prehended/known/included by its own successor. If, for the moment, we leave Quantum Mechanics out of the picture (see below), none of this depends on humans for its existence or being, and yet the atom’s prehension-feeling-knowing is an intrinsic part of this level of the “real.” Consciousness is not something that can be sucked out of being to leave an awareness-free “ontology” lying around waiting to be known by some other sentient being; consciousness, rather, goes all the way down, and forms part of the intrinsic awareness and intrinsic creativity of each ontological being or holon. Whitehead’s “ultimate category”—namely, “the creative advance into novelty”—is part of the prehension of each and every being in existence, and the creative-part cannot be ripped from the being‑part without severe violence. To postulate the most fundamental level of reality as merely ontology—being without knowing or consciousness or creativity—is basically a 1st-tier move that shatters the Wholeness of this and every real occasion.

Likewise, spiritual transcendence (Eros) reaches all the way down as well. In IT’s neoWhiteheadian view, each new moment comes to be as a subject (with all 4 quadrants), and it prehends (tetra-prehends) its predecessor, which is now an object (in all 4 quadrants) for this new subject. The new subject “transcends and includes” the old subject (now as object), and thus they mutually co-create each other: the old subject that is now object and is included in the new subject helps shape the new subject itself, by the simple fact of being included in it, actually embraced by it, and thus to some degree determining it. Likewise, the new subject, in including the old subject, is instrumental in bringing it forth or enacting it, co-creating its very being as a new object as it does so—and the new subject then adds its own degree of creativity, consciousness, or novelty, and thus actually co-creates a new being in the very act of prehensive unification. This “transcend and include” goes all the way down to the smallest micro‑subatomic particles, and all way through the actual meso developmental levels (where, as Kegan puts it for human development, “the subject of one level becomes the object of the subject of the next”—which is the meso view of Whitehead’s prehension—namely, that “the subject of this moment becomes the object of the subject of the next”—but acting now on a larger, higher, more complex, more conscious level), and all the way to the macro practices of meditation, where transcendence is the overall goal and occurs through the objectification of state-stages from gross to subtle to causal to True Self to ultimate Spirit (with each state-stage transcending and including its predecessor—the subject of one becoming the object of the next). This Eros (which certainly can be viewed as spiritual) is a primary driver of evolution itself, starting all the way back with the Big Bang and all the way through to ultimate Enlightenment. As Erich Jantsch put it, evolution is “self-organization through self-transcendence,” and that “transcend and include” is the very form of the moment-to-moment unfolding of reality.

Further, what CR describes as “real”—or “the intransitive level”—is actually and mostly turquoise reality. This is not the same “real” that is found at the red level, the amber level, the orange level, the green level, or the indigo level. If CR described what it meant by “ontology” to someone at red, they would flatly disagree, with CR’s version of ontology being “over their heads.” In fact, what most sophisticated thinkers today call “ontology” is actually the turquoise level of being-consciousness—and not as a mere description, but a real ontic-epistemic structure of the universe. These levels of being-consciousness are not just levels of a human being, but levels of the Kosmos itself (and those different levels are different worlds!). So I am certainly not saying that this “turquoise reality” or ontology isn’t real, only that it is inseparable from the prehensive-knowing-consciousness of the turquoise level of being-consciousness itself. There is no way around this—precisely because of panpsychism (such as subscribed to by Leibnitz, Whitehead, or Peirce). The turquoise level looks at the atomic level, the molecular level, the cellular biological level, etc., and concludes they have a reality in and of themselves—an ontology—but not only is it describing those levels as what they look like from turquoise—even if we ignore that part—they are overlooking the prehensive-consciousness-knowing dimension of the atoms, molecules, and cells themselves, an epistemic dimension that co-creates the ontic dimension with the being aspect of those holons (and vice versa)—again, epistemology and ontology are two different dimensions of the same Wholeness of the real occasion, and cannot be fragmented without genuine violence to the Kosmos.

Thus, for example, take molecules during the magic era. “Molecules” did not “ex-ist” (meaning, “stand out”) anywhere in the magic world—there was nothing in the consciousness of individuals at magic that corresponded with “molecules.” But we moderns—we at turquoise—assume that the molecules existed nonetheless—if they didn’t ex-ist, they did what we might call subsist (I agree). This is similar to CR’s transitive (ex-ist) and intransitive (subsist)—with one major exception: as noted, IT is panpsychic—epistemology and ontology—consciousness and being—cannot be torn asunder. What we call “pre-human ontology” is actually a pre-human sentient holon’s epistemic-ontic Wholeness, and not merely a disembodied, floating, “view-from-nowhere” ontology. A molecule’s prehension-knowing-proto-feeling is an inseparable part of its being-ontological makeup at the molecular level, and both are necessary to co-create each other. Ignoring prehension (and consciousness) just leaves ontology-being for the molecule, and epistemology-consciousness is just given to humans (or higher mammals), not to all sentient beings—they only get being, not knowing. But if a human consciousness-knowing is not involved in co-creating the ontology of atoms, molecules, or cells, their own consciousness-prehension is involved, all the way down (a la Peirce and Whitehead).

Further, when we actually get down to explaining what this subsistence reality is—the “real”—it changes with each new structure (red, amber, orange, green, etc.). What we glibly call “atoms” ex-ist at orange; those become sub-subatomic particles at green (mesons, bosons, gluons, etc.); those become 8-fold-way quarks at teal; those become 11-dimensional strings at turquoise. We can’t say what the atomic level is except from some structure of being-consciousness, and each structure discloses a new ontology, a new world. (That ontology is there, is real, but is co-created by the prehensive holons at that level.) Again, this is not to reduce ontology to epistemology, but rather claim they are complementary aspects of the same Whole occasion. (In short, I disagree with both Kant and Bhaskar—or I agree with them both, depending on how you look at it.)

This reminds me of Varela and Maturana’s brilliant analysis of the world (the “reality”) of a frog. Prior to Varela and Maturana, most biologists followed some form of eco-systems theory and described the reality of the frog as existing in various systems of nature. But Varela and Maturana pointed out that that was actually what the frog’s reality looked like from the scientist’s point of view, but not from the frog’s. The frog’s “view from within” (zone #1) consisted only of various patches of color and motion, smells and sounds; it did not have the cognitive capacity to stand outside itself and picture the entire system of which it was a part—only the scientist did that (using zone #8). Reality, for the frog, was the immediate view from zone #1, and the best the scientist could do was attempt to capture that using zone #5—a 3p x 1-p x 3p—namely, the objective scientist, while studying an objective organism (3p), attempts to take the organism’s “view from within” or “biological phenomenology” (1-p)—two phrases Varela often used. Varela pointed out that this “view from within” was not the actual 1st-person view of the frog itself that the scientist is directly observing (that would be the frog’s zone #1), but the exterior version of the frog’s inner view (or zone #5; i.e., the view from the inside of the UR, not the inside of the UL). The point is that the frog enacts its own reality—its own epistemology or consciousness brings forth and co-creates its own ontology or world (the closest to which the scientist can get is zone #5)—and the scientist himself likewise enacts, or can enact, his own view of the frog’s reality, which many scientists believe is generally a systems view (#zone 8), but more truthfully is a zone #5 version. But in both cases, the being and knowing are two dimensions of the same actual occasion, whatever it is. But merely using a systems view is a deeply anthropocentric view of the frog’s real world, and claiming to know the frog’s actual world (zone #1) by using the scientist’s tools (zone #8) does grave violence to the frog’s actual interior.

Thus, according to IT, the level of the “real” described by CR doesn’t exist as CR describes it. Rather, in IT’s view, in actuality it is either the product of both the prehensive-feeling-knowing plus holonic-being-isness of each of the holons at the particular level of the real being described (e.g., quarks, atoms, molecules, genetics) and their relations—all of which are tetra-enacted and tetra-evolved; and/or it is the result of the way the world emerges and is tetra-enacted at and from a particular level of consciousness-being (e.g., turquoise) of the scientist. In the latter case, the real is not created by its mere description by the particular level of consciousness-being, but rather actually emerges as a level of the real with the emergence of the deep structures of the particular level of being-consciousness. (Again, these levels of being-consciousness are not just levels of human beings but levels of the real Kosmos.) These levels of being-consciousness (red, amber, orange, green, turquoise, et.) are not different interpretations of a one, single, pregiven reality or world, but are themselves actually different worlds in deep structure (an infrared world, a red world, an amber world, an orange world, a green world, a turquoise world, etc., each of which is composed of Nature’s or Kosmic habits tetra-created by the sentient holons at those levels, as are atomic, molecular, cellular, etc. worlds).

The deep structures of these worlds are the nondual epistemic-ontic Whole occasions, but this doesn’t prevent them from being fallible when it comes to humans’ attempts at disclosing and discovering and describing the real characteristics of the Whole; i.e., the surface epistemic-ontic approaches are fallible (which is one of the reasons that multiple methodologies—epistemologies that co-enact and co-create correlative ontologies—and vice versa)—are so important: the more methodologies used, the likelier the deeper Wholeness (the deeper unity of being-consciousness) will be accurately disclosed and enacted in more of its dimensions.

These deep features of the real are—a la Peirce—not eternal pregiven realities of a one world, but Nature’s habits that have been engraved in the universe through the interaction of semiotic-sentient beings (that go all the way down—including quarks and atoms—which is why there are proto-conscious-feeling-knowing beings present from the start to actually create habits—they are living and conscious beings capable of forming habits!—instead of prehension-free ontologies that have no living choices, and thus must blindly obey laws, something both Peirce and I, among others, find unintelligible. Further, according to Peirce, it is the fact that each semiotic being—all the way down—has in its tripartite makeup an interpretant that means the holon’s being is determined in part by interpretation, all the way down—and this, he says, is “inescapable”).

Which brings us to another point. Originally, CR was created as a way to explain and justify the results of scientific experiments (as Karl Popper asked, paraphrasing, “How is it that science actually works? It works because there is a real ontology that can rebuff it”). But it is not clear at all that the types of realities disclosed by science and scientific experiments are the same ones that work with morals, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and introspection, to name a few of the multiple methodologies that exist out there and address different object domains and zones. To claim that only scientific experiments give “real” results is perilously close to scientism, and simply adding other disciplines on top of science is actually to reduce those dimensions to merely scientific methodology itself. Reducing all dimensions to science certainly strikes me as being far from an integral move. I am much more satisfied with the (at least) 8 fundamental methodologies that disclose different object domains (and whose injunctions or paradigms enact or bring forth or co-create those various domains, which, again, are not just lying around out there waiting to be stumbled on by a scientific methodology—that belief is what Sellars calls “the myth of the given.”)

(More recently, Bhaskar has introduced spiritual realities and consciousness into his scheme. But dumping consciousness on top of an ontological scheme that was developed without it is, well, cheating. The whole scheme has to be done over, using consciousness as an intrinsic part of the scheme from the very beginning, and not simply importing it after the scheme has been developed without it. The chances that the scheme will have anything real to do with actual consciousness is slim indeed, as consciousness becomes a dues ex machina to the main frame.)

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least briefly mention the claims made on behalf of Quantum Mechanics (QM), which has, if nothing else, been taken as the most successfully precise scientific model ever invented (one estimate put it at a million times more precise than Newtonian physics). The central concern of QM centers around what is called the “collapse of the wave packet” (which means, simplistically, this: around 1925-6, both Heisenberg and Schroedinger came up with a set of mathematical equations describing the existence of a subatomic particle. Heisenberg’s was a complicated S‑matrix equation, and Schroedinger’s a simpler calculus wave. They were quickly shown to be interchangeable in results, and thus Schroedinger’s wave equation, being the simpler of the two, soon became the standard form of QM—“the collapse of the wave packet” refers to the collapse of Schroedinger’s wave equation version). Max Planck (who had introduced the quantum revolution in 1905 by suggesting that energy does not come in a continuum but rather exists in discrete packets or quanta) noticed that if you take the square of the results of the Schroedinger equation, you would get the probability of the specific location (and/or a set of other characteristics) of the particle in question (but you get only two characteristics at a time—and—the catch—the more you find of one, the less you can find of the other). The results of this inability to determine both variables was able to be put in a precise form as what became famously known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which basically brought an end to strict causality in the physical sciences (and presumably removed “causality” from the Realists level of the “real”). But the real kicker came from the fact that, prior to actually measuring the particle to gain some information about it, the particle existed only as a probability—you literally couldn’t say it existed or it didn’t exist. Moreover, the type of measurement that you performed on the particle determined the type of being that you actually evoked—different measuring methods gave you different beings with different qualities. This lead John Wheeler to say that we lived in a “participatory-observation” universe. QM has now been found applicable in scales from the very smallest to the very largest, as well as in brain interactions, biology, etc., and remains, for what it does, “the most successful physical theory of all time.”

What is remarkable about this theory is how firmly it unites epistemology and ontology—the two, in fact, co-evoke each other. A different epistemology brings forth a different ontology, and a different ontology will correlate with a specific and different epistemology—each of them, as it were, bringing forth the correlative dimension (or co-creating it).

I don’t want to over-emphasize the role of QM in Integral Theory. I do want to point out, however, that—starting with Karl Popper—the role of science in CR has been pervasive, but science has been changing in profound ways that CR seems not to have kept up with. If ever there was a case of “means of knowing” governing in many ways “modes of being,” QM is it, undeniably. And given that QM is the most successful physical theory in history, one’s “ontology” should probably line up with it.

I might mention that it’s not just the existence of the 4 quadrants that is important—many theorists include the 4 quadrants—but rather their being 4 different dimensions of the same occasion, moment to moment, that is distinctive with IT. The 4 quadrants, further, go all the way down, and this means that consciousness itself goes all the way down, as in intrinsic part of the very fabric of the Kosmos itself. This is what sets Integral Theory apart from so many other theories. Aspects of consciousness—which itself is primarily an opening or clearing in which subjective and objective phenomena can emerge—include:

—creativity (as part of the very opening in which newness and novelty can appear, and the means by which it can appear)

—an automatic epistemic-prehension of the preceding moment (which co-creates or helps bring forth the being or ontology of the present moment—its being “grasped” is what brings it forth, and its being prehended by an interpretant, a la Peirce, is what gives the unavoidable interpretive twist to its being)

—while, at the same time, the include part (of transcend and include) means the previous moment, once subject but now object of the new subject, is included or literally taken into the being of the new subject, thus altering the new subject’s very being or ontology in the specific act of inclusion—again, epistemology-consciousness and holonic-being are co-creative and co-determining as two aspects of the Whole real occasion. Sucking epistemic-consciousness-feeling out of the holon, leaving only its dead and denuded being or ontology is effectively to kill the being in question, and anthropocentrically to transfer all the epistemic-knowing-feeling-consciousness dimensions to humans alone, who then propose theories about this denuded level of being that they call “the real.” This is tragic.

—also, as regards the “include” part of “transcend and include”—while the transcend part is Eros, or Spirit-in-action (or Spirit-in-self-organization), and is injecting Spiritual creativity into every moment (thus making evolution “self-organization through self-transcendence,” as Erich Jantsch put it)—while that is happening, the include part is taking care of those aspects generally known as “causality” and induction. If the degree of creativity or novelty in a holon-being is extremely small (as with, say, a quark), then the previous moment’s including component will be by far the strongest determinant of the new subject, and the new subject will seem completely deterministic (having little creativity to counter the causality). But Whitehead points out that no being’s creativity is absolutely zero, only vanishingly small, and thus strict determinism or strict causality doesn’t exist (the same as maintained by QM). Further, the higher on the Great Nest that a holon appears, the more novelty and creativity it possesses—so a physicist can predict where Uranus will be, more or less, a 1000 years from now, but no biologist can tell you where my dog will be 1 minute from now. But for those holon-beings with little creativity, the “transcend and include” mechanics accounts for an answer to Hume’s critique of both causality and induction (i.e., accounts for their existence, even as both become less and less the higher the degree of development and evolution).

I do want to repeat that there is much in CR that I appreciate. I particularly appreciate having an ally against the relativism of extreme postmodernism (even if, alas, I still find problems in how CR goes about doing this, by ripping consciousness out of the Kosmos and leaving “the real” to be merely a denuded “ontology”). But its heart is in the right place, one might say, and Bhaskar himself is a truly extraordinary human being, and everything a philosopher should be, in my humble opinion (it reminds me, somewhat grandiosely, I guess, of what Habermas said about Foucault after their famous meeting—“He’s a real philosopher”—praise indeed from Habermas). The funny thing is, several theorists have pointed out how CR and IT can be brought into general (and even quite close) agreement, with a few fundamental changes: me, accept ontology as “the real”; and CR, accepting epistemic-ontic as correlative dimensions of the same actual Wholeness of sentient holons going all the way down. As I read CR, I keep seeing it subtly—very subtly—reducing everything to ultimate anchorage in the essentially prehension-free Right-Hand quadrants (and I’m sure CR sees IT as subtly reducing everything to the Left-Hand quadrants). But my position is, and remains, that all 4 quadrants are equally real, equally present, tetra-enacting, and tetra-evolving, and anything less than that (along with levels, lines, states, and types, fulcrums and switch-points, Integral Methodological Pluralism, and Integral Post-Metaphysics) can scarcely be called “integral.”

Read the other two excerpts, beginning here.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Ontology of the Flesh

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. He was a central figure in French philosophical circles, being close friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Merleau-Ponty was also one of the central 20th century philosophers to bring the body back into the equation of experience and consciousness, rejecting the dualism that had reigned since Descartes. His work sought to demonstrate "a corporeity of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body," offering a counter to Descartes.

This is a section from the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Merleau-Ponty and his philosophy, written by Bernard Flynn.

Citation:
Flynn, Bernard, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Ontology Of The Flesh

Let us now return to our discussion of Merleau-Ponty's ontology. The guiding thread that we had been following was his critique of transcendental philosophy, particularly the notion of subjectivity that is implied in this philosophical project. In The Visible and the Invisible this critique is deepen and further developed. One could argue that, historically, the project of transcendental philosophy begins as a refutation of skepticism. By taking this stance, we begin by putting ourselves on the side of the negative. Like Stanley Cavell, Merleau-Ponty sees that the skeptic radically transforms the ordinary meaning of the question, “Do I know that?” Extending this question to everything changes its meaning. Merleau-Ponty claims that philosophy elects certain beings' “sensations, representations, thoughts, consciousness, or even a deceiving being--in order to separate itself from all being” (VI, 107). He argues that the radical skeptic borrows something from our experience, absolutizes it, then in his quest for complete certainty, he uses it to terrorize our experience of ‘inherence in the world’, an experience that Merleau-Ponty, in The Visible and the Invisible, calls “perceptual faith.” Those who would begin philosophy by attempting to refute skepticism must also agree with the skeptic's rejection of our inherence in Being; they do so in the name of establishing absolute evidence which would deliver us from our contingent insertion into Being. Merleau-Ponty sees this ‘desire to be delivered from contingency’ operative in critical philosophy's effort to “undo our natural pact with the world in order to remake it.” Its attempt to follow backward the path taken by the ‘subject who has constituted the object’ in order to arrive at the unity of subjectivity. It does so in a manner similar to the way one could walk indifferently in either direction from Notre Dame to the Etoile, or from the Etoile to Notre Dame.

It is Merleau-Ponty's contention that it is not possible to achieve this return to subjectivity. Reflection is always secondary, that is, it must recognize itself as founded on a pre-reflective experience of Being that cannot be assimilated, employing the felicitous phrase of Adorno, “without remainder.” This reflection which must always be mindful of its own situated character is what Merleau-Ponty names “hyper-reflection.” This sort of reflection is expressed in an excellent manner by a line of Kafka, cited by Lefort in his Preface to The Visible and the Invisible, “that things present themselves to him not by their roots, but by some point or another situated towards the middle of them” (VI, xvvi). Merleau-Ponty evokes our ineluctable inherence in Being as evidence that Husserl's project of free variation, while being useful, was not able to accomplish what Husserl desired of it. Free variation was Husserl's way to move from the register of ‘fact’ to that of ‘essence’. One begins with a real factual experience, then by means of free variation one transforms it in imagination up to the point where it is no longer an object of the same type. At this point, Husserl claims that we intuit its essential structure.

Merleau-Ponty agrees that we can vary our experience in imagination, that we can move from the real to the virtual, that is, we can give ourselves leeway. However, we cannot “complete” the circuit by which the real would become simply a variant of the possible. He writes, “On the contrary, it is the possible worlds and possible things that are variants and doubles of the actual world and of actual beings” (VI, 112). It is the ineluctability of our inherence in the world that forecloses both the attempt to move from the fact to the essential structure and the project of completing the phenomenological reduction.

In the last chapter of the never completed The Visible and the Invisible entitled “The Intertwining–the Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty begins to give a positive elaboration of the ontological position to which he has been led. In a number of respects, his last work distances itself from certain central notions in the phenomenological tradition. Nonetheless, in one respect it is mindful of Husserl's injunction, “Return to the things themselves.” Merleau-Ponty wishes to begin in a dimension of experience which has not been “worked over, that offers us, all at once, pell-mell, both subject and object--both existence and essence--and, hence, gives philosophy resources to redefine them” (VI, 130). When Merleau-Ponty speaks of “perceptual faith” his notion of faith is perhaps the very opposite of the agonized Kierkegaardian “leap of faith.” It is a faith the commitment of which has ‘always already’ been made, a faith which subtends the avowal of responsibility by which personal identity is formed. Perceptual faith is a faith that I am in no danger of losing, except in the philosophical interpretation of it which portrays it as knowledge. This chapter on what Merleau-Ponty calls the Chiasm is a continuation of his study of perception, however, at first viewing it may not appear as such. In the Phenomenology of Perception, he insisted upon making a distinction between operative intentionality and act intentionality, but in The Visible and the Invisible this distinction is deepened in such a way that the concept of intentionality itself is thrown into question. In his critical reflections on Sartre, which due to spatial constraints we have not been able to develop here, Merleau-Ponty said that for a subject defined as For-itself, as consciousness of itself, passivity could have no meaning. He argues that, defined as such, consciousness could not but be sovereign.

In his late thought, Merleau-Ponty poses the question whether a consciousness, defined as intentional, is adequate to think a notion of perception viewed as the self-revelation of the sense of a world in and through a being which is itself a part of the world, flesh of its flesh, a world which “... is much more than the correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation of its own sovereign existence” (VI, 131). For him, to see is not to pose a thing as the object pole, much less a noema (Husserl), of my act of seeing. Rather seeing is being drawn into a dimension of Being, a tissue of sensible being to which the perceiving body is not foreign. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the perception of the color ‘red’ as not merely the awareness of a quality belonging to an object. He claims that for an experience ‘prior to being worked over’, it is an encounter with “a punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of rooftops; the flags of gatekeepers and of the revolution; of certain terrains near Aix or Madagascar. It is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, the robes of professors, bishops and advocates general...and its red is literally not the same if it appears in one constellation or in another … . A certain red is also a fossil, drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds” (VI, 132). When seeing, I do not hold an object at the terminus of my gaze, rather I am delivered over to a field of the sensible which is structured in terms of the “difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or visibility” (VI, 132).

When we turn in the direction of the seer, we do not discover a transcendental ego but a being who is itself of the sensible, a being which “knows it before knowing it”(VI, 133). The sensate body possesses “an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis” (VI, 135). If I wish to feel the cloth of a coat that I am about to purchase, it will not suffice if I pound it with my fists or quickly wisk my hand over it. Rather it must be touched as it wishes to be touched and for this my body needs no instruction. Like the cloth, my hand is a part of the tangible world; between it and the rest of the tangible world there exists a “relationship by principle” (VI, 133). My hand which touches the things is itself subject to being touched. “Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves in the universe that they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it” (VI, 133).

Merleau-Ponty writes, “it is not different for vision.” He argues that it is essential that the seer itself must be visible, that is, seeable; he refers to the body as an “exemplar sensible” being both sensate and sensible. As in the case with touching, there is a pre-possession of the vision by the visible, and vice versa. The body, being itself visible, uses its being to participate in the being of the visible world. Rather than speaking of the act of seeing, one ought to speak of a “visibility, sometimes wondering, sometimes reassembled” (VI, 138). What Merleau-Ponty calls “flesh” is the generality of the sensible, “an anonymity innate to myself” (VI, 133). We see that there is a progression of Merleau-Ponty's ontology which moves from the notion of Gestalt in The Structure of Behavior, to the notion of ‘the one’ (the on) that is the ‘subject’of perception in the Phenomenology of Perception, then to the notion of the Flesh in The Visible and the Invisible. The flesh is neither some sort of ethereal matter nor is it a life force that runs through everything. Rather it is a notion which is formed in order to express the intertwining of the sensate and the sensible, their intertwining and their reversibility. It is this notion of reversibility that most directly problemetizes the concept of intentionality, since rather than having the model of act and object, one has the image of a fold, and of the body as the place of this fold by which the sensible reveals itself.

We see that this notion of intertwining does not only concern the relationship between the sensible and the sensate, between the body and the world. It also orchestrates the relationship between the visible and the invisible. As Merleau-Ponty undercuts, or if one prefers deconstructs, the opposition between subject and object, he also wishes to do the same for the opposition between the visible and the invisible, the sensible and the ideal. We have seen this project already operating in The Structure of Behavior, where he viewed the human order, which is to say the order of symbolic behavior, as a sublation of both physical and vital structures. Also in The Visible and the Invisible he searchs for an “infrastructure” of thought in the body. This infrastructure is located in the body's non-coincidence with itself. In his reflection on the touching-touched , he has shown that my hand, my eye, my voice is both touching, seeing and speaking, and at the same time tangible, visible and audible. However, between these two dimensions there is a non-coincidence; I never, at the same instance, experience my hand as touching and as touched. He writes, “Either my right hand really passes over to the rank of the touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted, or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it” (VI, 148).

There is a divergence (écart) which short-circuits the body's immanence with itself and creates an internal fissure in the visible, thereby generating differentiation rather than identity. There is, Merleau-Ponty says, a sort of reflection that the body effects on itself. Six pages before this incompleted text breaks off, he tells us that we have reached the “most difficult point,” that is, “the bond between flesh and idea, and the internal armature which [it] manifests and which it conceals” (VI, 149). The invisible, the idea, is not the contrary of the visible, it is the invisible of the visible. Merleau-Ponty evokes Proust's notion of the “little phrase” in the musical piece, which in Remembrance of Things Past signify Swann's love for Odette, as an instance of a meaning that cannot be extracted from its sensible incarnation but which, nonethelesss, is itself not strictly speaking sensible. Permit me to use another example. Harry Matthews, in my opinion a very important American writer, when he finished his undergraduate studies at Harvard University went to live in Paris where he has lived for the past 40 years or so. He is obviously completely fluent in French, but he writes in English. At a public lecture, someone asked if he ever thought of writing in French. His answer was a definite “no” because he said that to write in French, as he does in English, it would have been necessary to have attended high school in France. In the context, it was clear that he did not mean that there were certain expressions that French school children use that he does not know. Rather he meant that he did not have a sense of the sensible infrastructure which underlies forms of popular speech, like Proust's ‘little phrases’ which cannot be abstracted from their context. As Merleau-Ponty claims that there is “an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axis, its depth, its dimensions.”

There are meanings that can be abstracted from the sensible body but not from “another, less heavy, more transparent, body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language, and thereby [they] would be emancipated, but not freed, from every condition” (VI, 153). Language is a more diaphanous body, but body nonetheless, which is capable of sedimentation, of forming a world which, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, houses the speaker. The notion of “the invisible of the visible” continues the theme of a logos of the perceived world that we discovered in the Phenomenology of Perception, along with the theme of silence significance (pre-linguistic meaning), a silence which is not the contrary of language. In 1961 Merleau-Ponty's own voice fell silent. But insofar as it provokes speech, it was a silence which was not the contrary of language.

John Searle - Freedom and Neurobiology - Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power

This short 2004 book by noted philosopher John Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power, appears to be freely available online. I have included the first few paragraphs from the Introduction, which provide a little background on the book's origin in a lecture series he gave in France in 2001.

The table of contents:

INTRODUCTION
Philosophy and the Basic Facts
1

CHAPTER ONE
Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology
37

CHAPTER TWO
Social Ontology and Political Power
79

Index
111

INTRODUCTION
Philosophy and the Basic Facts

This book has had an unusual publication history, and in this introduction I am going to explain its history and attempt to locate its two chapters within the larger research project of which they are a part.

In late Spring of 2001, I gave a series of lectures at the Sorbonne, one a large public lecture in French on the general topic of language and political power, and some presentations in English to smaller groups, ranging from lectures to seminar discussions, under various auspices and on topics ranging from the freedom of the will to the semiotics of wine tasting. I was asked if I would allow two of these presentations, the lecture I had given in French on political power and one of the lectures in English on the problem of free will, to be published in France. I agreed, on the natural supposition that the two lectures would appear in a journal, or some such venue. To my surprise, my editor, Patrick Savidan, published the two lectures as a rather elegant, though small, book in French called Liberté et neurobiologie. I knew nothing of the publication plans until a boxful of books arrived at my home in Berkeley. It is the first time in my life that I published a book I did not know that I had written. Savidan did an excellent job translating the English lecture into French, and I was immensely helped in the preparation of the French text of the other lecture by Anne Hénault and especially by Natalie van Bockstaele.

Just as I was surprised by the publication of the French book I was equally surprised by swift publications of translations of the book from the French into German and Spanish, and, subsequently, Italian and Chinese. By coincidence, the publication in Germany came out while a great public debate was going on there about the status of free will, and the possibility of genuine free will, given contemporary neurobiology. In Germany, the book received several reviews, some quite negative, in daily newspapers of the sort that do not normally review philosophical works.

After all of this, I was approached by Columbia University Press with the proposal to produce an “English translation.” I had the original English texts on which the viva voce lectures in Paris were based, so it was not necessary to translate the French text. Furthermore, in the intervening years, I had revised “Language and Power,” and this revised version, called “Social Ontology and Political Power,” is presented here, because it comes closer to my current views than does the original 2001 text.

The two lectures published here, one about the problem of free will and neurobiology and the other about language, social ontology and political power, do not appear to have any connection with each other. And at one level, the level of authorial intent, they really do not have any connection. It would never have occurred to me while I was preparing them that they would one day be published together. However, they are both parts of a much larger philosophical enterprise and it is worth explaining that enterprise, as it will deepen the reader’s understanding of what I am trying to do in these lectures. Because I discuss some important philosophical issues in a rather brief and compressed fashion in what follows, I will provide references to some of the works in which I have discussed these same issues at greater length.

Bookforum Omnivore - Pirate Radical Philosophy

In yesterday's issue of Bookforum's Omnivore link collections, they offered another of their frequent philosophy themed links. Some good stuff, as always, but some not so good as well.

Pirate radical philosophy

Jul 16 2012
9:00AM

• From Cosmos and History, a special issue on the future of philosophy. 
• Carlo Salzani (Monash): The Notion of Life in the Work of Agamben. 
• From Radical Philosophy, Gary Hall on pirate radical philosophy; and what’s left of biopolitics? A review essay. 
• A review of Introduction to Antiphilosophy by Boris Groys (and more and more). 
• Paul Taylor draws upon his first-hand experience of giving a public talk with Slavoj Zizek to show how the media's worst tendencies risk being adopted by audiences who should know better (and part 2). 
• A review of The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology by Simon Critchley (and more). 
• Against all ends: Liam Sprod on Hauntology, Aesthetics, Ontology. 
• A review of Anti-Nietzsche by Malcolm Bull. 
• From The New Inquiry, Adam Kotsko on Quentin Meillassoux and the Crackpot Sublime. 
• From NDPR, a review of Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben by Timothy C. Campbell; a review of Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought by John McCumber; and a review of After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations.

The Democracy of Matter: A Networkological Approach

These were two recent posts from Networkologies (online home of Christopher Vitale, Assistant Professor, Media and Critical/Visual Studies, Pratt Institute) on the "Democracy of Matter."

He was inspired by a post from enemyindustry (Flat Ontology II: a worry about emergence) to offer a proof (sort of, in a metaphorical way) that emergence is possible through the interplay of differentiation, where multiplicity is a norm and the potential for divergence is high, and specialization, where small specialized clusters can decide for the whole -- and the exemplar he gives in the 2nd post is the brain.

This is what democracy and difference look like when combined together. This is what is known as complexity.

And . . . .

What brains do best is adapt, and they skirt right in between specialization and flexibility, by means of a higher level of democracy. For in the type of democracty we see in brains, it is not so much that everyone votes in terms of which direction the vortex as a whole should go, and which particular water molecule decides to do this, but rather, which particular cluster of brain cells gets to determine the decision made by the whole brain.

Great, though slightly geeky, posts for those interested in philosophy.

Emergence, or the Democracy of Matter: A Networkological Approach, Part I

What is emergence? Without question, in the sciences, this term has been essential. But what would a philosophical concept of emergence entail? David Roden has a really great, smart post up at enemyindustry about emergence. It asks all the right questions about emergence (a key term in my networkologies project), and brings to light several concerns about this term that I think need to be addressed before it’s philosophically useful.

Firstly, the philosophical import of the concept of emergence, as described by figures like Manuel Delanda, for example, is, as David rightly states, that emergence allows for the construction of what many have called a ‘flat ontology.’ This term, as used by Deleuze, Delanda, and Bryant, has slightly different meanings for each. I’d like to argue that an ontology should not be fully flat, lest it be univocal (Badiou’s take on Deleuze), rather, it should be ‘flat yet thick’, not a one, but a oneand, without a transcendent, but with space for a wide variety of potential transcendentals (which is closer to what Deleuze describes himself). I think Guatarri does a great job of this, as shown in a text like Machinic Unconscious, and further developed in Thousand Plateaus.

I agree with David: weak emergence is not enough. That is, most scientists describe emergence as non-predictable behavior, in which a series of micro-agents produce macro events which cannot be deduced from the rules which govern the micro-agents. But this approach implies that emergence depends upon the limits of the knowledge thereof. Is there a more ontologically useful concept of emergence, one which does not rope human knowledge and it’s limits into the mix?

I think so. And I agree with David – without this, no flat ontology, no workable assemblage theory. A lot rides on this. But where to start?

A Networkological Theory of Emergence: First, the Issue of Levels

Emergence, firstly, depends on the notion of level. This notion is implicit in any discussion of emergence. But who gets to determine macro, meso, and micro? From a networkological perspective, this is all relative to the ‘network of reference’ employed to ‘know’ an entity. This network of reference can be employed by anything, from an electron to a human.

Read the whole post.

Complexity, or the Democracy of Matter, Part II: A Networkological Approach

Complexity: Why Brains Beat Vortexes

But are brains more democratic than vortexes? Certainly they are more complex, and the question is getting at precisely what this distinction means. In a vortex of water molecules, all the molecules that compose the vortex are exactly the same. That is, while there’s macro and micro levels, beyond this, there’s no long term structure. And this is why as soon as metastable energetic conditions vanish, the vortex collapses.

Brains, on the other hand, make sure that they have a continually meta-stable supply of energy, by means of the support structure commonly called a body, which eats food, etc. But this means that the brain must also support the body in question, they don’t just exist ‘in vats’, so to speak. Unlike vortexes, bodies are specialized for the environments in which they were evolved. And brains are full of specializations as well, and specialization implies differentiation and limitation.

Brains are specialized in highly specific ways, however. What brains do best is adapt, and they skirt right in between specialization and flexibility, by means of a higher level of democracy. For in the type of democracty we see in brains, it is not so much that everyone votes in terms of which direction the vortex as a whole should go, and which particular water molecule decides to do this, but rather, which particular cluster of brain cells gets to determine the decision made by the whole brain. Of course, this happens at many levels of scale, and this is what is so wonderful about emergence, the fact that it opens up many quasi-levels of scale in between the macro in the process of emerging and the micros from which it is composed. Each cascades up and down until equilibrium is reestablished.

This is what deep, complex democracy looks like, and the brain is the model.

Read the whole post.

Tags: Emergence, Democracy of Matter, A Networkological Approach, emergence, brain, complexity, Philosophy, brain, complexity, Christopher Vitale, flat ontology, enemyindustry, Deleuze, Guatarri, Thousand Plateaus