Ultramaterialism

The word "ultramaterialism" has been rattling around my brain for a few weeks. I came up with this while trying to characterize the worldview of a certain class of thinker, exemplified by Minsky, Dennett, and most recently Gary Drescher in his recent book Good and Real. These people could all be called materialists or naturalists, but in some sense their mission seems to be pushing the materialist view farther than it has gone before. Minsky was one of the inventors of AI and his late work has been devoted to finding ways of breaking down minds into networks of small machines. Dennett has applied philosophical analysis to consciousness and free will, and Drescher's work in a way synthesizes the philosophical rigor and problem space of Dennett with the technical rigor of an MIT-trained engineer.

Drescher's book, which I'm still digesting, might epitiomize this tendency. In his strict mechanist worldview, there are essentially no selves, no freedom of action. The flow of time is itself illusory (we're really just embedded in an unchanging spacetime), and hence your life is not only deterministic, it's already happened.

Strictly speaking ultramaterialism is just the same as naturalism, which seems to be growing as a movement among non-academics as an "applied philosophy". So it may not make sense to introduce this a new term. But the connotation of ultramaterialism is different. Naturalism sounds rather nice and innocuous -- we think nature is rather pretty and friendly, made out of trees and scenic vistas (although this is a recent development in human history). But hardcore materialism is actually a rather disturbing philosophy. It has at least the possibility of being deeply anti-humanistic, since it holds no privileged position for persons, and doesn't believe in autonomy or moral agency.

This is not to say that the ultramaterialists are antihumanistic, or bad people. On the contrary, they are all seem like pretty decent folks, and they are making sincere efforts to preserve human values in the face of the rather pitiless mechanical universe they are exploring. But to some extent their decency is independent of their scientific thinking -- it's ungrounded, or emerges from somewhere other than their philosophy. Drescher tries to derive ethics from his pure materialism -- I don't know if he succeeds, haven't processed that part of his book yet.

The problem I see with ultramaterialism is not that it is wrong, but that it is too impractical. Say Drescher's scheme to derive morality is successful -- will it have anything to say to practical everyday ethical decisions? What about answering questions such as the morality of abortion and end-of-life decisions, which hinge on rights and what exactly counts as a person? I don't really expect that a pure materialist philosophy can say much to these questions, although I'm prepared to be proven wrong. But even if it can, it's too much work to derive ethics from complex utilitarian calculations, as opposed to the alternative of taking them from cultural institutions (like religion). Culture is a bundle of evolved heuristics, and most people, even bright people, are forced to rely on their culture for both moral principles and factual matters -- they can't really take the time to figure everything out for themselves.

While I'm not religious myself I think I can appreciate the fear that religious people get when presented with the materialist worldview, which cheerfully undermines both tradition and intuition, leaving only machinery behind. Drescher has taken on the task of reconstructing ethics in a mechanical universe, but to believe him you have to follow a fairly complicated chain of reasoning. Not only that, you have to trust that other people will follow the same reasoning, a scary and dubious prospect.

That's why I prefer my term to naturalism -- it makes it clearer that there is something radical going on here, something disturbing. I doubt it will catch on.

Scientism, Naturalism, and Ismism.

So the proprietor of Secondhand Smoke has discovered the Center for Inquiry and accused it of the sin of scientism. This refers to the practice of science exceeding its proper bounds of rational empirical inquiry and straying into the areas of metaphysics and ethics.

My reaction to this was, why not embrace the term? There needs to be some name for all this activity that is not itself science but is based on science -- the active promotion of reason, secularism, crusading against nonsense, trying to figure out how science changes ethics and morality, scientists writing popular books on the meaning of it all, bioethics questions like what constitutes a person...scientism didn't sound too bad as a term. The Center for Inquiry was new to me but it seems linked to (and similar in style to) the output of other earnestly secular groups. Which is to say, they are keeping a flame of reason burning but organized religion doesn't really have too much to worry about in terms of charismatic competition.

The next day I discovered a bracing new term -- naturalism. This movement, which is based in Boston, seems to be an attempt to construct a materialist philosophy with a postive slant (as opposed to atheism, which is defined by what it is against). They have some very interesting positions on what a strongly materialist view implies. For instance, compassion -- if every human behavior has material causes then you can't judge anybody very harshly:

The causal view: From a naturalistic perspective, there are no causally privileged agents, nothing that causes without being caused in turn. Human beings act the way they do because of the various influences that shape them, whether these be biological or social, genetic or environmental....

Responsibility and morality: From a naturalistic perspective, behavior arises out of the interaction between individuals and their environment, not from a freely willing self that produces behavior independently of causal connections (see above). Therefore individuals don’t bear ultimate originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause....

The source of value: Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator, values derive from human desires and preferences, not supernatural absolutes. To the extent that there is a shared human nature, values are common across cultures and thus objective, but to the extent cultures differ, so might values. Although values do not have a supernatural foundation, we cannot escape having them, since they constitute us as motivated creatures.

And this page on death looks pretty interesting as well.

All well and good. I was particularly excited to learn from a review on their site that Gary Drescher, a very smart guy who I know from back in the day at MIT, has published a new book, Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics, which looks like a thorough investigation of metaphysical naturalism from a physicalist and computationalist perspective. I'll have to read this, BUT -- my intuition is that none of these secular belief systems are going to do much to displace religion.

Why? Religion and naturalism are competing for roughly the same ecological niche in the human meme system -- that is, a foundational explanation for existence. But they emphasize very different areas. Religion provides answers in areas (morality, the soul, the afterlife, ultimate purpose) that are evolved to match the needs of the human psyche. Naturalism tries to address these but requires a good deal of intellectual effort and as such is only going to appeal to a small minority of people. Religion is natural, science is not.

My own tactic may be labelled anti-ismism: give up on the quest/desire for a single foundation system of understanding. Accept religion as an alternative way of knowing and find ways to interpret it that don't conflict with science. Seems right to me, but then I miss out on all the bitter fights between theists and atheists, and now even more bitter ones between hardcore and softcore atheists. Isn't anyone going to stand up for fanatical anti-fanaticism?

Atheism beyond the villiage

Interesting survey of a bunch of books on atheism. I love this quote, 'cause I love The God Machine:

Watching "This Week in God" on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, we are, it might seem, witnessing the culmination of a historical progression, from Robert Ingersoll, the great nineteenth-century public unbeliever, to Clarence Darrow, who in the 1920s and '30s would debate a rabbi, priest, and minister during a single evening.

I am occasionally against the sort of "villiage atheism" promulgated by people I mostly admire and agree with, such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. It seems too simpleminded for me, and also strategically unwise, since religion won't be argued away by any amount of scientific evidence. This article puts the struggles between these scientists and creationists in historical context.

Atheism tries to take the place of faith but it just doesn't work, for most people. And it has some unpleasant characteristics of its own, which I think stem from its unavoidable tendency to assume the shape of a religion, despite its best efforts. Think of atheism as a sort of drug that is trying to block the religion neuroreceptor in the brain. It has to take the shape of a religion without having the effects. This is only partially successful, and atheism despite its efforts tends to assume some of the negative attributes of a religion, namely fundamentalism and zealotry.

Atheism has a complex relationship to optimism:

Classical atheists tended to be optimistic about the world's future, and their imaginations were indeed stirred by science and technology and the potential for human progress. Rejecting religion often coincided with placing hope in reason, education, democracy, and/or socialism, and those who did so were stirred by visions of a more humane, happier world organized according to human needs. Looking expectantly to the secular and social future meant rejecting the religious counsel of pessimism about our lot on earth.

It's safe to say that the future didn't turn out as anyone expected. Scientific and technological progress has been relentless, but its promises of liberation have gone flat. Few still believe that their children's world will be better than theirs. We live after Marxism, after progress, after the Holocaust—and few imaginations are stirred, few hopes raised by our world's long-range tendencies. Indeed, the opposite is happening as terrorism becomes the West's main preoccupation. In countries like the United States, Britain, and France, there has been a turning away from improving societies and toward improving the self.

On this terrain, it is no surprise that belief in God has been revived, ... At stake, then, is far more than a conflict between belief and disbelief, but the kind of world in which a religious or a secular worldview flourishes. Where secular hope is in the ascendancy, as during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it seems as if the belief in human capacity and the here and now will be strong; where fear and pessimism increase, as they have so far in the twenty-first century, humans may increasingly look to God, to their souls, and to a future beyond this life.

It's interesting that the secular materialist optimists have more or less given up on the problems of the world and instead invented their own kind of nerdvana-based religion, in which the singularity will confer godhood on us and/or our machines. A rather literal interpretation of Voltaire's "If God does not exist it would be necessary to invent him". But

Of the books reviewed, the only one I've read is Sam Harris' The End of Faith, of which I had a similar opinion as Aronson:

What is most striking after reading Baggini is Harris's own zealotry. Harris makes no effort to understand believers, be they moderate or fundamentalist; most serious in a book claiming a practical political mission of uniting "us" against "them" is his total lack of interest in any historical understanding.

on the other hand:

Harris, for all his negative energy, provides a potentially rich idea about mysticism, as cultivated in Eastern religions, as a "rational enterprise." In Buddhism, he argues, reaching beyond the self has been carefully and closely described and need not be left to faith but may be empirically studied.

I tend to agree. Buddhism is definitely the religious belief system most compatible with a scientific materialist worldview. But I'm dubious that it will have much market impact on theistic religions, which seem to give the people what they want.

Personally I'm leaning towards Yoism, the first open-source religion, which I learned about 10 minutes ago. Or maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Emancipate Yourself

It's Pesach, time to think about what the hell freedom might mean. For my shul's Social Action Committee, I put together a flyer about modern-day slavery. An odd project for me, I don't usually write things for the collective voice, let alone a prayer. Most of the text was cobbled together from activist sites, but I added some of my own language and tightened it up.

When the committee was discussing this, there was some tension between people who wanted to focus on literal slavery (which is quite real but rather remote from the daily life of most of us), and those who wanted to connect it to wage slavery, "mental slavery", people close at hand with various physical or social disabilities that limited their scope of action. I was in the former camp, if only for reasons of focus. But now I'm not so sure I was right. What is the purpose of religion, the thing it can do that nothing else can do, if not to point a way to individual freedom, a concept that makes no sense from a materialist point of view? And where else can it start but with an individual unshackling themselves from various unseen, internal, insidious forms of self-enslavement?

My relation to religion is complex and I have trouble articulating my feelings about it...but among its functions, it seems to be an institutional home for a wide variety of values, ideas, activities, etc that are central to life and don't have any other place to live. Freedom is one of them. It collapses to nothing in the secular world, or at best to a sort of market-based form of choice, where freedom consists of the ability to buy granola or Wheaties, drive a Ford or a Lexus, where you are as free as your bank balance permits. Yet obviously freedom is important, too important to not have a way to talk about it.

We are, objectively, material creatures whose behavior is just as ruled by the causal structure of our nervous systems and the environment as a beetle, just as much caused by physics as the waves in the ocean. Freedom makes no sense, and that's why we need religion in order to think about it.

Yom Kippur and Escape from Language

My relationship with Jewishness is untainted by any feelings of ideological obligation. That is to say, I belong to this people and community (sort of, more or less), I participate in their rituals (very occasionally), I share some deep values (not necessarily the obvious and articulated ones), but I will be damned if it will determine how I think. Like any other body of learning, I treat it as a resource that I will make use of as I see fit, not a framework that I have to fit myself into. 

This sounds both a bit naive and a bit like bragging, but I’m just trying to be accurate about how things are with me. I’ve never been able to comfortably wear an ideological or identity. In a way it’s annoying that I am a radical non-joiner. Some people manage to make themselves nice lives out of being Jewish, or being an anarchist, or scholar, or activist, or whatever. I resist being anything. I suppose even that becomes an identity eventually.

“I decided I’d rather starve and live on the edges of nowhere than do anything at all, than become anything labeled.” – Bukowski (a saint of illegibility)

Given that I’m not a counterculture hero or anything close, but rather a middle-class guy with a family to support, I do in fact have a quite labeled work identity (and resume and LinkedIn profile and all the rest). It’s a real enough aspect of me; I don’t mind (much) inhabiting the role and selling it on the marketplace. But a holy day is a point where I can step back from it and place it in its proper perspective. Taking off from work is just a superficial aspect; it is taking a day off from the everyday structural illusions of the world, the better to put them in their proper place.

There’s a lot of talk about the soul this time of year – how to purify it, is it going to be inscribed in the Book of Life, etc. Like a good materialist with cognitive science training, I am deeply dubious about the very concept. Yet someone or thing is being dubious, no? If nothing else, language and grammar force an identity to come into being.

Yom Kippur begins with the Kol Nidrei, an odd bit of legalistic performative Aramaic that has the emotional force of prayer, and an interesting and controversial history that I was unaware of until recently. It is a release from vows, and has been interpreted by anti-semites to mean that Jews can’t be trusted.

It refers to vows assumed by an individual for himself alone, where no other persons or interests are involved. Though the context makes it perfectly obvious that no vows or obligations towards others are implied, there have been many who were misled into believing that by means of this formula all their vows and oaths are annulled. – Philip Birbaum via Wikipedia

Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the reconstructionist movement, tried to get rid of it but failed. The emotional force of it and its connection to the ritual proved too strong; and for many Jews it is the most moving and holy ceremony of the calendar.

My own interpretation, which is no doubt overly influenced by my own particular obsessions, is that the Kol Nidrei is a fundamental and irreplaceable counterweight to the usual Jewish obsessions with language and law. It is not so much a release from vows as a release from language, a temporary ritual acknowledgement that for all our word-worship, words are an imperfect and inadequate tool to face reality and life, and most of all the sacred. Like many other religious and meditative practices, the Kol Nidre is a form of language whose function is to move beyond language.

Speaking for Nature

Awhile back I made the point that social construction is not arbitrary -- that is, when people talk about the social construction of knowledge, they don't generally mean that in such a way as to imply that knowledge can be just anything at all -- a point which seems to elude many participants in the science wars. Also, I commented on the Climategate affair, noting that it was a pretty good example of the Latourian view of science -- exposing the messy human processes by which scientific knowledge is made. Well, I have Bruno Latour right here and he agrees with me on both counts:

What I found so ironic in the hysterical reactions of scientists and the press [to Climategate] was the almost complete agreement of opponents and proponents of the anthropogenic origin of climate change. They all seem to share the same idealistic view of Science (capital S): "If it slowly composed, it cannot be true" said the skeptics; "If we reveal how it is composed, said the proponents, it will be discussed, thus disputable, thus it cannot be true either!". After about thirty years of work in science studies, it is more than embarrassing to see that scientists had no better epistemology to rebut their adversaries. They kept using the old opposition between what is constructed and what is not constructed, instead of the slight but crucial difference between what is well and what is badly constructed (or composed).

from An attempt at writing a "Compositionist Manifesto" (pdf)

And, in the first chapter of his book Pandora's Hope, he pokes fun at those who seem to doubt that he believes in reality:

Has reality truly become something that people have to believe in, I wondered, the answer to a serious question asked in a hushed and embarrased tone? Is reality something like God, the topic of a confession reached after a long and initimate discussion? Are there people on earth who don't believe in reality? ... I could not get over the strangeness of the question...If science studies has achieved anything, I thought, surely it has added reality to science, not withdrawn any from it. Instead of the stuffed scientists hanging on the walls of the armchair philosophers of science of the past, we have portrayed lively characters, immersed in their laboratories, full of passion, loaded with instruments, steeped in know-how, closely connected to a larger and more vibrant milieu.

I am kind of smitten with Latour lately, not sure why. He seems to have gone from anthropological studies of science that gleefully undermined naive notions of realism, to philosophizing on a much grander scale, where he attempts to undo the whole structure of modernity and undo mistakes that he traces all the way back to Socrates. And for a French philosopher, he's engaging, and usually quite comprehensible, although sometimes the abstractions veer off into the ether. Unlike many cultural theorists, it seems like he's trying to be clear rather than obfuscatory; he even includes a helpful glossary of his technical terms in the back pages of Pandora's Hope. But I can't quite figure out if he is useful, if these radical reconceptualizations have any implications or applications to how science and/or democracy is done.

One of his goals (as far as I understand it) is extending politics all the way down to the supposedly inanimate world of objects. Or more precisely (and this is exactly the kind of subtlety that confuses his critics), he wants to reveal the existing politics that inhere in our view of nature and society and the relations between them. Science, as it is while it is being constructed, is a set of networks that connect people, institutions, representations, and objects. These networks are often in political contention until one emerges as the victor and we now have Sicentific Knowledge with a capital letter. The connection to objects (aka "nature" or "reality") is crucial, of course, and it distinguishes science from mere politics. Social construction of science is not culture making up arbitrary stories; it's a way to let nature speak, to enter into discourse and society.

But Latour goes beyond this. He's not willing to let science take the role of spokesman for nature (which reduces nature itself to an inarticulate and lifeless thing), but wants nature and objects to not only speak for themselves, but act for themselves. Hence his idea of actants to describe the various human and non-human entities that form networks of knowledge and influence. The BRAF gene (eg) is just as much an actor, with goals and interests of its own, as the scientists to work to uncover its functions.

This sounds a bit crazy, but less so on reflection. From the strict materialist viewpoint, there are no actors and actions, just a seamless web of strictly deterministic causality. The stories we tell about each other involving selves, beliefs, intentions, choices, and actions, are just so many useful fictions imposed over this clockwork reality. Given that, why is it any less legitimate to extend these stories to what we normally think of as the inanimate?

For the record, these issues have been obsessing me for awhile. A section of my long-ago dissertation (ostensibly about educational programming environments) dealt with the conceptual underpinnings of animacy and its role in computation. I've moved on professionally to other things but the ideas won't leave me alone, hence this blog.

New #1 favorite wingnut: Gagdad Bob

Finally, I present my new favorite right-wing lunatic. My criteria for this coveted spot is someone who hates everything I stand for, but isn't a complete moron, and has something reasonably fresh to say. Not too easy to find. Mencius Moldbug has occupied that slot for awhile, but he's gotten rather repetitive. So the new dude is "Gagdad Bob", a logorrheic devotee of Tarot and James Joyce, apparently some kind of psychotherapist(!) who projects projection, among other nifty mental feats:

It is the unrepentant spiritual terrorism of the left that frightens us.... Progressivism is the expression of thanatos the "death instinct." It is perverse, sadistic, and authoritarian. Which is why, of course, they project these things into conservatives.

To which this is the only proper response.

Before descending into the abyss of antagonism, let me mention the stuff on his blog that I sort of like: the larger portion of it is devoted to a kind of whacked-out metaphysical speculation, for which he has invented his own system of metaphors, symbols, and puns. This is the sort of thing, like continental philosophy, that I can sometimes enjoy, because despite it being foreign to my own way of thinking it almost makes sense; I enjoy the mental exercise of trying to understand what the hell it's all about. And there are occasional resonances with my own fumbling attempts at spiritual thinking, even though I'm coming at it from a very different starting point.

So half the contents of his blog is this somewhat amusing foray into amateur theocomedy, and the rest is hate-filled rants against people like me -- "the psycho-spiritual left". Some examples:

Here he spews rabid, mostly groundless fulminations against Obama:

You will see the false love -- the hate -- behind the Obama phenomenon should he lose the election, for in every denizen of Blue Meanies, police are making plans for violence. In fact, they are also planning for violence should he prevail. But that violence is only a prelude to the violence to come.

If there's been an apology or retraction for this failed prediction, I've missed it. Of course there has been threats of violence since the election, but it's all from the lunatic right.

Back to the Emperor. Among other things, the Emperor is the symbol of divine authority on earth. He is not a replacement of divine authority, but its horizontal prolongation. And along these lines, perhaps the most important point is that, as UF writes, "God governs the world by authority, and not by force. If this were not so, there would be neither freedom nor law in the world."

This automatically excludes Obama from being a legitimate ruler, in that the left is all about governing by force. He will not "lure" you toward the good by his intrinsic authority, but compel you to "share" and "spread around" the fruits of your labor with his purely earthly power. And that's all it is. His profound lack of understanding of Christian doctrine is too well documented to discuss here.

I like that bit about how "the left is all about governing by force". Uh-huh, and the right is all about governing by -- what exactly? pure love? This is nothing more than another attempt to delegitimize Obama's election on no grounds whatsoever, an effort which permeates the wingnutosphere. Obama by definition can't be legitimate, can't have any authentic spiritual power, because he lacks understanding of Christian doctrine. (I wonder where the idea that "spreading wealth around" is un-Christian -- seems to me Jesus was quite in favor of it, ie in Matthew 25:34-43 and many other passages. But no doubt my understanding of Christian doctrine is even more deficient than Obama's).

And specious explanations of politics:

As we just witnessed with President Bush, a leader who fails to resonate in this unconscious manner simply will not be perceived as effective, no matter how competent he is. From even before day one of his presidency, Bush was unable to use language in such a way as to bind up the anxiety and hatred of liberals. First, just as it is difficult for the non-evil to understand the evil, it's also difficult (at least without training) for the non-crazy to truly understand the crazy. On top of that, Bush never appreciated the level of liberal bitterness and resentment over Al Gore's unsuccessful attempt to exploit the judicial system to steal the presidency to which liberals were entitled.

Yes, Bush's failure was an inability to communicate, so his effectiveness and competence was not appreciated. There is actually someone on the planet who believes this! And please note that this alleged psychologist is perfectly willing to diagnose the liberal half of the country as crazy. Here's another half-baked psychological diagnoses of "the left":

leftism is by definition a perpetual rebellion against these principles -- against the Real. Thus, it is de facto the maninfestation of a spiritual illness, often rooted in a psychological one.

His hatred of the left is paired with an equally virulent hatred of materialism and science:

Here again, this is why the materialist can neither know reality nor love, since he does not recognize the absolute reality of subjects. Rather, the subject is simply a side effect of matter, and matter is obviously "one," which is an inverted doctrine of spiritual oneness. This material oneness is the false unity that inspires the left. It is why "what's yours is mine," and why Obama's conscience (such as it is) is untroubled by taking what belongs to you and and Joe and "spreading it around." Yes, Obama loves us. But like nature, he loves us ruthlessly.

Another major element is anti-Darwinism supported by age-old bad arguments, laced with of half-digested trendy notions like catastrophe theory and autpoesis:

Let's not kid ourselves. We really only have two choices. Either this cosmos is in fact grand -- not to mention, beautiful, awesome, sacred and numinous -- or our genes, for reasons we cannot know, randomly mutated in such a way that we imagine that such entirely chimerical things as grandeur and beauty exist...Obviously, on any strict Darwinian view, "beauty" cannot objectively exist.

And FTW, how Obama is...the Antichrist! Well, no, Bob is not that literal-minded a religious whackjob, so he's going to cutesy it up when he accuses Obama of being in league with Satan:

First of all, let's get this out of the way at the outset. Are we calling Obama the antichrist?

Yes, of course.

No, wait -- let's not engage in ad obomanem. Let's just say an embodiment of the antichristic principle. Please, let's discuss this in terms of abstract cosmic principles, without getting personal. No need to demonize someone just because he's an instrument of satan. Besides, he's just the vehicle, not the driver. The surfer, not the wave.

Now, what do we mean by "antichrist?" I would say that, as Christ is Word-made-flesh, the realm of the antichristic would analogously represent the "lower principle" made flesh -- the instantiation, as it were, of the energies of the Fall.

I'm trying to figure out the horrid fascination this site exerts on me...it's not like the normal wingnuts, who for the most part are just hateful cretins. This guy is a smart, funny, occasionally insightful, hateful non-cretin. That's not a combination you see everyday. We share some likes (Joyce, Rahsaan Roland Kirk) and dislikes (Deepak Chopra, Bill Maher). In some respects he's the worst kind of douchebag: the kind who doesn't realize he's a douchebag, but instead believes he has some kind of privileged line to the almighty (actually, it's not so surprising that he's a psychotherapist). Yet I kind of like his stuff. I may have to order his book.

The Internet was invented for me to get access to this kind of weirdo.

“God” ≡ God

Three of my intellectual heroes these days, in roughly decreasing order of respectability: Bruno Latour, Christopher Alexander, and Alan Moore. If I squint I can even detect a common project or thread that unites them. For one thing, all seem vaguely disreputable from the standpoint of mainstream thought. In actual fact, all three of these people would likely be pretty welcome in technology circles; and both Latour and Alexander have keynoted major tech conferences. But part of their attraction is a certain outlaw quality that success has not eliminated.

For the other thing: they are all, in different ways, struggling towards the spiritual (for lack of a better term). Latour writes on ecotheology, Alexander is determined to undo materialist metaphysics in favor of something rigorously old-fashioned and hylozoic, and Moore – well, I’ll get to him. This spiritual bent is somehow linked closely to the disreputable qualities. At least in the eyes of the MIT-trained-nerdy-atheist aspect of myself. They beckon to me from outside prison walls that I seem to have erected for myself.

Latour and Alexander I’ve written about previously; Moore is a more recent object of obsession. He is, of course, pretty well-known at this point as the most accomplished writer in the comic book format (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentleman). What I didn’t know until recently was that he had declared himself to be a Magician, in roughly the Aleister Crowley sense, and was getting seriously into all sorts of mystical shit. In fact he’s written about this widely and you can find stuff on the net; his series Promethea is pretty much a catalog of various mystical systems in graphical form. While this sort of thing is not really my thing, I can at least respect that it is neither crazy or lamebrained or even supernatural. Here is a rough statement of the core of his stance as I understand it, from an interview in The Believer (emphasis added):

Actually, art and magic are pretty much synonymous. …The central art of enchantment is weaving a web of words around somebody… When that enchantment is the creation of gods and the creation of mythology, or the kind in the practice of magic, what I believe one is essentially doing is creating metafictions. It’s creating fictions that are so complex and so self-referential that for all practical intents and purposes they almost seem to be alive. That would be one of my definitions of what a god might be. …It is a concept that has become so complex, sophisticated, and so self-referential that it appears to be aware of itself….If gods and entities are conceptual creatures, which I believe they are self-evidently, then the concept of a god is a god.

This is more or less exactly the same idea I was groping towards a few years back. Given my background and biases, I’m inclined to think of god-concepts in more quasi-mathematical terms, whereas Moore thinks in quasi-linguistic terms, but I think we are pointing in the same general direction. The title of this post is my attempt to condense the idea down to a sort of formal notation, because that’s what I do.

This way of looking at things seems so simple and obvious and at least partially right that I can’t believe it’s all that original (with either Moore or me). Yet I can’t find much prior art. Perhaps it isn’t really satisfying to most people who want to know one way or the other if there is a referent on the other end of the symbol. Maybe people’s concept of concept is not rich enough to encompass these kind of complex, quasi-autonomous structures. Concepts are insubstantial; gods if they are not mere fiction have some effects in the world. We are used to thinking of symbols as dead things on paper; but the more primal oral form of language was always alive, always closely connected to the real-time human activity of a speaker. The causal powers of words in the old days was immediate and obvious.

But we are getting more experience even in our advanced writing-based culture, with complex symbol systems that are immaterial and yet have effects in the world. That is what software is, after all. Gods are pieces of cultural software, powerful enough to erect cathedrals, start wars, bind together communities. Like software, they are living texts, actualized fictions.

[update:

Another doctrine that might sound profoundly anti-rational is that God’s holy four-letter name, the Tetragrammaton, is identical with God Himself. Unlike other names that merely point to the signified, when the unnamable Absolute becomes known to the created beings by a name, that name itself becomes the personal God of religion, ’Elohey Is ́ra’el. When the Jews received the Torah at Mount Sinai, they experienced a synesthetic vision, in which the sounds of the commandments were seen as flying letters, made of pure light...during their synesthetic experience, the Jews actually saw God as identical to His name. Therefore, it is permitted to bow before the letters of the Tetragrammaton, because they are God, in an esoteric sense, and not just a visual representation of Divinity, which Judaism forbids. 

From Between Enlightenment and Romanticism: Computational Kabbalah of Rabbi Pinchas Elijah Hurwitz, Yoel Matveyev, talking about an 18th century encyclopedia assembled by Hurwitz ]

Firing up the Emotion Machine

Marvin Minsky has passed on, to use a phrasing I feel pretty confident that he՚d dislike. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, so according to him there is nothing to pass on, no spirit to live on beyond the body. Let՚s just say his machinery gradually broke down, as they all do, and eventually ceased to function. He՚s rumored to have signed up for cryogenic preservation, for what that՚s worth, so there is the possibility of the machinery coming back into operating condition at some time in the future.

But whatever spirit animated him does live on, in the hacker culture that grew up around MIT and has since kind of taken over the world. Many people built that culture, but Marvin was at the core of the restless inquisitiveness, pragmatism, skepticism, and general disrespect of established institutions that characterizes it.

Everyone else who embodied this spirit gave their own twist to it, and perhaps Marvin՚s own special version is now lost until the digital resurrection. It almost doesn՚t matter. Marvin I think was somewhat disappointed, even bitter, in his later years, because the field he founded wasn՚t taking his ideas as seriously as he felt they deserved, and was going in directions he viewed as unpromising. If I could have had a last conversation with him, and felt presumptuous, I would tell him not to worry about any of that. The important part of who he was made it out into the world, embodied in the vast number of people he influenced.

And Marvin՚s own words and works live on. There՚s a collection of 150 or so video clips of him holding forth on the history of AI, his personal story, and the intellectual milieu he lived in and generated. His daughter Margaret assembled a beautiful web presentation of his paper Music, Mind, and Meaning. There is plenty of Marvin left in the world.

Marvin was brilliant in numerous ways, an accomplished inventor, mathematician, and musician aside from the work on artificial intelligence he is best known for. But his big trick was to face squarely the mechanical nature of the human mind and not be alarmed by it. Indeed, he found it rather delightful and intriguing. This put him at odds with standard-issue humanists, which suited him just fine. But Marvin himself was not in any way inhuman, far from it. He was an extremely warm and welcoming individual, and always willing to engage with anyone՚s open mind.

He was I suppose a reductionist, but to label him that is to reduce his own complicated way of thought to a single-word slogan. And that was one kind of reduction he did not practice. His other big trick was to know that there is no one big trick to the mind, that single-idea solutions like logic or bayesianism are insufficient, and that building a mind requires the complex orchestration of multiple mechanisms. Society of Mind was itself structured as a cooperating network of very specific ideas for mechanisms, making the form match its content. He was an extreme fox on the Isaiah Berlinfox/hedgehog scale (while John McCarthy, a co-founder of AI who was more fond of logical formalism, might be his counterpart hedgehog). So he tried to take intractable concepts like selves and consciousness and “reduce” them to a complex interaction between mechanisms:

“The idea that there is a central I that has experience is a typical case of taking a common sense concept and not realizing that it has no good technical counterpart, but it has 20 or 30 different meanings and you keep switching from one to the other without even knowing it, so it all seems like one thing…Consciousness seems very mysterious and unphysical if you don՚t know how it works, like when Houdini or Penn and Teller make an elephant disappear, then you say “this is not physical, it՚s impossible”. When you know how the magic trick works, the sense of wonder goes away, although you still might remember how it puzzled you once.”

His life could be seen as a battle against the idea that understanding how something worked in any way diminished it.

It was truly a privilege and a gift to learn from him. I was far from an ideal student, and went off in directions he didn՚t really approve of. I was consumed by the specifics of the notion of “agent” that he developed – a subpart of the mind with its own machinery, goals, and ability to act – and tried to understand exactly what agency consisted of, what it meant, how it was deployed as a metaphor in technical talk in general. When Marvin wrote a a follow-up book, the The Emotion Machine, he decided to drop the agent language in favor of the more neutral “resources”. I guess he was unhappy at how people inferred from the agent metaphor that these components were full-fledged minds with sophisticated reasoning and representations of their own, in which case the theory didn՚t really explain anything.

This may have been sound tactics but I think it was a strategic mistake. The question of what agency is and what machinery could underlie it is important, and lack of good ways to think about it is responsible for some of the confusion in current discourse around the idea of superempowered artificial intelligences.

Marvin was a mathematician (albeit a very nonstandard one) and mathematicians have the job of pulling eternal truths into the temporal processes of life, cognition, and scholarship. Computation itself – an idea that he helped define – is also a way of connecting the timeless and the temporal. His time to be active has come to an end, and you can look back on his life and see how he was a creature of his time, how he learned from the great minds of an earlier time, and how he passed on his knowledge to the generations that followed. All of whom had their own visions, colored by their own times, yet retaining and transmitting some fragments of what was learned from their teacher.

Time marches on and cuts us all down eventually, but some part of us is timeless. Not godlike or soullike, Marvin wouldn՚t have any of that, but perhaps there is some quasimathematical pattern that our mechanisms embody and that precedes us, outlives us, and connects us.

[More people remember Marvin. My own mentions of him over the years, here and on Ribbonfarm.]

Counting the Omer: Malkuth (Kingdom, Matter)

Here's where shit gets real, where the spiritual connects with the realm of matter. So to the materialist (ie, me, most of the time), this is the only realm that actually exists. I am in Malkuth, looking up. Or out. Or something.

Due primarily to the neo-platonic influences in the Kabbalah, Malkuth also is typically seen as a locus of evil, since the real materialized world can never measure up to the ideal. Anything coarse enough to actually exist has to be imperfect, hence distinct from the good, hence evil. This has to be one of the major bad ideas of all time, responsible for so much denial of reality and denial of the flesh and concomitant misery. Nonetheless, my assumption is that such a powerful idea must have an element of truth to it, or it would not be so persistent and pervasive, and reflected in so many things. For example, look at occupational status -- the more your job involves dealing with the physical on a day-to-day basis, the lower status it is, broadly speaking. It's interesting that there are exceptions to this general rule, such as surgeons and sculptors, and cooks at a high enough level. And you can look at the Maker cultural movement as an attempt to further elevate the status of the material. But in general people who push matter around for a living are beneath those who push words and symbols around. At this very moment I have people doing construction on my house, and while I have nothing but respect for their craft, the status differences are there and hard to ignore, although we try to do that here in the US.

Matter is also identified with the female (look at the etymology). It is receptive. In the Omer it represents an endpoint, the point where the Jews received the law at Sinai. That's another picture of the materialization of spirit. The Torah has an almost idolatrous place in Jewish life as a result, it is paraded around at services so that the community can touch it (of course idolatry is forbidden in the Torah itself). It's very strange, when you think about it, but apparent self-contradiction is just part of the religion game, all oppositions get reconciled in the infinite. Or something. God materializes into the law which materializes into scrolls which we can see and touch and read. Judaism itself has materialized itself around this particular document and practices, and old and strange thing, a community and set of practices which draw me in despite myself. I can't defend it, and I don't really have to. Judaism doesn't proselytize, it's not a belief system, it's the original community of practice. I find myself at the margins of it (and many others), drawn in a bit, repulsed a bit, trying to find a balance.

Malkuth is also identified with speech and expression, it is the locus where the inexpressible divine energy crystallizes as mere words. OK, not "mere" words, but words that somehow reflect authentic presence, that carry the holy fire. In today's world, where the written word is insanely abundant, where everyone's words are instantly uploaded, indexed, chopped up, and linked to ads by the trillions, it is hard to imagine what the earlier relationship with words was like -- before the internet, before printing, before mass literacy. It is strange that ancient attitudes and practices have survived the turmoil and inventiveness of the millenia, but there it is. "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Hylozoism

[updated below]

is my vocabulary word for today (via). It's one of those things I feel I ought to have known many years ago. Wikipedia says:

Hylozoism is the philosophical conjecture that all or some material things possess life, or that all life is inseparable from matter.

I was unusually moved to make some Wikipedia edits, and added two of my favorite intellectual weirdos to the list of contemporary hylozoics:

Architect Christopher Alexander has put forth a theory of the living universe, where life is viewed as a pervasive patterning that extends to what is normally considered non-living things, notably buildings. He wrote a four-volume work called The Nature of Order which explicates this theory in detail.

Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, based in the sociology of science, treats non-living things as active agents and thus bears some resemblance to hylozoism. This work has spawned a movement called Object-oriented philosophy which promotes the idea of a "democracy of objects".

And I see animism has a homepage.

I find myself attracted and repelled by these ideas; partly out of intellectual naughtiness -- they are very much not in the spirit of the nerdy materialist culture I was educated in. On the other hand, they aren't that far apart either -- you can see both strands of thought (mechanistic AI style and squishy panpsychic California style) intermingle over the years, for instance at the historical Macy conferences.

And of course, I'm a victim of the same tendency I criticized in this post on the Singulatarians. For some reason, everybody thinks its very important to get metaphysics straight, to know for certain whether mind or matter or life or god or whatever is the ultimate foundation of reality. On my better days I know this is a dumb question, dumb because unanswerable, and the question itself is just a reflection of the limited metaphors we use to construct our models of the universe. Perhaps the real foundation of the universe is status, and the real reason we are so eager to fight for our particular metaphysics is so that the intellectual tribe we identify with (eg, physicists, anthropologists, theologians...) can thump its chest and declare itself more important than the rest.

[update: this earlier post is on related themes...which I realize now probably falls under the rubric scientific romanticism. Here's no less a light than Freeman Dyson:

Is it possible that we are now entering a new Romantic Age, extending over the first half of the twenty-first century, with the technological billionaires of today playing roles similar to the enlightened aristocrats of the eighteenth century? ... a new Age of Wonder would be a shift backward in the culture of science, from organizations to individuals, from professionals to amateurs, from programs of research to works of art...If the new Romantic Age is real, it will be centered on biology and computers, as the old one was centered on chemistry and poetry.

]

Counting the Omer: Yesod (Foundation, Righteousness)

It's getting harder and harder to write something sensible about this stuff. But I press on, Shavuot is in sight. I promise at the end I will write something that explains/justifies for my alarmed readers why I am spending time on this nonsense.

Yesod is the sephira near but not quite at the bottom of the tree of life, a kind of gathering point for all the energies present in the other sephirot before they trickle down to reality, which is next week's subject. (Oddly enough my work involves a form of flux analysis in metabolic networks). It's identified with the "procreative organ" as the books so delicately put it. What does righteousness have to do with it? Well, the very first commandment was to be fruitful and multiply. Jews are obligated to make more Jews. The tzadik is the foundation of the world.

That's a very strange thought to my ususal materialist self. If righteousness and persons are anything at all, they aren't the foundation of the world but a late, epiphenomenal, accidental sort of thing. But maybe not. Maybe the universe was inevitably directed towards making entities that could perceive it (via anthropic selection if nothing else), and maybe such entities had to have a moral sense baked into their foundations, maybe it's an inevitable and necessary a part of intelligence. I can almost see that.

Also odd to me is the confluence of (pro)creation and righteousness. I tend to view creation as an amoral, wild sort of activity, whether it is influenced by the divine or not, it proceeds by its own rules and not some external law. But again, maybe not. Again, going back to the earliest parts of the Torah, the message is that God not only created the world but pronounced it good. And when I create something, I generally have some idea of goodness in mind that guides me. So maybe it's not so strange, maybe my ideas about creativity have been infected by a pernicious romanticism or something.

A fleeting idea of a sort of metaphysical Darwinian process: that which exists is good, what is good exists, and what exists is that which is capable of propagating itself, of procreating, of having its form persist and replicate across space and time. A tzadik is one who combines the moral, physical, spiritual, biological, and I-don't-know-what-other forms of this process into one handy human-shaped container.

Alright, that's enough of the acid flashbacks for now, got to walk the dog and take out the garbage here on planet Earth.

[and, let me just note, that while "what exists is good" may have some sort of truth in a visionary sense, that kind of thought doesn't survive for an instant once critical thought from the merely human perspective is applied to it. From that vantage, all sorts of existing things are manifestly not-so-good, from the Holocaust to polio to global warming to mundane everyday problems (we just had to have all of the heating ducts in our house replaced because they had originally been installed by incompetents and have been mostly eaten into by the local wildlife...) to all the individual tragedies of life (another suicide on the railroad tracks I ride to work on last night). The pollyanish, best-of-all-possible-worlds kind of attitude that sometimes accompanies religion is one of the major turnoffs/obstacles for me. But at least I can catch a glimpse of where it's coming from.]

Speaking of that: last week we touched on a line from the Torah that resonates with the above. Abraham tries to talk God out of destroying Sodom and Gommorrah and says "shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?" (Genesis 18:25). I was somewhat embarrassed that I recognized this from Alan Moore's Watchmen comic, but no matter. It's rather startling, in that we see a human teaching morality to God, chiding him even. There's a major part of the Jewish character rooted in that, a more familiar one than this mystical stuff, which seems linked with an unquestioning acceptance. Also contrast with Christian theology which has a whole branch dedicated to explaining away God's shitty behavior.

[[Update: Stumbled on this passage just after writing about my personal duct problems above:

Yesod means "foundation", and the sephira represents the hidden infrastructure whereby the emanations from the remainder of the Tree are transmitted to the sephira Malkhut. Just as a large building has its air-conditioning ducts, service tunnels, conduits, electrical wiring, hot and cold water pipes, attic spaces, lift shafts, winding rooms, storage tanks, and a telephone exchange, so does the Creation; the external, visible world of phenomenal reality rests (metaphorically speaking) upon a hidden foundation of occult machinery.

]]

What's on my mind

Messing around with some computational language tools, I generated this list of words which are more frequent on this blog relative to a standard corpus (some misspellings removed), in order from most overused. Many of these are unsurprising, but I had no idea I used "cannot" more than is normal. Or "parasitical", which is more worrying.

cannot simpleminded parasitical excoriate delegitimize kvetching temperamentally treacly politcs cosmopolitans authoritarians twitter rightwingers inexpert constructivists constructionists entertainingly clathrate undesireable frenzies mystifies wastefulness repurpose gintis wobblies kunstler turmoils bukovsky bankrolls laitin smidgeon sociopaths scienceblogs cleavon oddsmaker vegetating reifying situationists doper yecs popularizer nobels cultish solidary arduino militarist prolixity congealing proft larded atran nixonian seatmate appeaser rationalists leftish libertarianism literalist materialist vitalism rejoinders schuon fusty facebook torahs arduously hugeness universalizing tinkerers factuality autoworkers parasitize rationalist dominionism physicalist incarnating idiocies axiomatically ferreted gourevitch glaringly symbiote averagely incisively shitheads skimped netzach appall metonymic onrush chokehold halldor churchy scampers starkest agentive dalliances emet mistimed ceasefires hallucinated reimagined overplaying bioethicist copleston disempower flippancy oversimplifies outrageousness indvidual ginned douchebags explicates plumbs mencius metaphysically schelling foregrounding polarizes outlives subtexts acquiesces nostrums undescribable malkuth marketeer analagous preeminently remediable flamers slipperiness bunraku proles burkean peaceniks materialists unaccountably athwart mcworld petraeus romanticizing unnamable huffpo ineffectually commonsensical interoperating empathizing wingnut supplicants hypostasis inchoate obama transhumanists fulminate affordance nonviolently geneological gashed mussed chuppah charnel felin reconstructionism verbalizing tegmark crabbed armys shalizi dehumanization hoohah vannevar copyable bungler unlikeliest preindustrial legitimated downscale fugs bilin slavering egomania naveh determinedly oligarchies chasten reappropriated bekki taleb bioethicists valdis ultraconservative wahabi straussian rewatch anthropomorphism ecstasies libertarians ruination exceptionalism vacillate overreach forthrightness informationally bushites rottenness biomorphic parceled twittering sorley parapsychological irreligious statists maddeningly selfing militarists bushite infuriates deconstructionist dallying harrows glutted worths misplacement engross jewishness hearkens girdled zombified prohibitionist braf sniggering positivists prostrating doomy schmaltzy yesod hewing philosophize doomsayers unconcern conflate jibes misappropriate convulse constructionist relabeled cavalierly mesmeric phantasms atrophied nattering reductionist personhood asocial placating incuding amorality incontestable weida greybeard inescapably scrabbling foreordained puthoff antiabortion commandeering iphone reinterpreting fudges minsky spluttering obsessional explicating rovian subdues ascription graeber counterargument plops

Now I'm playing the Burroughs-ish game of trying to find meaning in this shredded language. "physicalist incarnating idiocies axiomatically" sounds applicable to a number of discussions I've been having lately.

The Pull of the Man

So I՚m not going to Burning Man this year, for various lame reasons. But I feel myself pulled towards it nonetheless, in a weird way that is not exactly wanting in the normal sense. I guess I do want to go again, but I՚m not completely sure why – sure, it՚s a hell of a fun party, but I՚m not that much of a party person. The art is spectactular, but art is not usually capable of motivating me to travel so far from the comforts of home. The political aspect of it – the gifting economy, the sense of collectively building a workable temporary utopia – has a lot of appeal, but it՚s hard to see what it has to do with the power structures of the default world, and politics without real stakes is an unredeemable waste of time. There are a ton of interesting weirdos to meet there, but those connections too don՚t seem to travel back into the default world. I certainly had some worthwhile and unique experiences, but for the most part felt kind of out of it – too old, too asocial, too square, too intellectual, and without access to the right kinds of creative power that would enable me to go beyond spectator status. And it really is not a place for spectators.

Yet still I feel oddly drawn towards it, and I probably can՚t adequately convey the nature of that oddness. After all, it is not so odd to want to go to Burning Man. I assume I am pulled in by forces that are similarly acting on all the 80,000 or so people who are there, as well as those like me who are just dreaming of it. But what is the nature of those forces? They are no doubt various and ill-defined, yet somehow they have sustained the event for 30 years, an incredible length of time for a something like this to persist.

One of my kids asked me the other day about the Grateful Dead concerts I went to in my youth – what did I actually do there? He seemed to be after a deeper answer than “go nuts and have fun” – probably he takes me more seriously than I do myself. And truly, that answer isn՚t satisfactory even to me. I was looking for something larger then that, although I couldn՚t say exactly what. And it՚s not just me, everybody goes to concerts and other happenings or public events because they fill deep and usually unarticulated emotional needs – for meaning, for community, for beauty, for access to the sorts of things that tend to get left out of life under late capitalism.

There is a ritual nature to these events. A ritual, broadly speaking, exists any time humans come together around some shared focus of attention. Every random concert or performance has something of the ritual about it, but Burning Man is more explicit about its ritual structure, from its physical layout to its practices. Black Rock City is arranged in concentric circles, surrounding a mostly empty circle of desert, and directly in the center the Man himself.

There are some other centers of attraction in the layout, such as a cafe/community center ( a center for talks, small-scale performnances of the hippie arts and the like, and one of the very few places you can spend money). Another is the Temple, which is more for silent contemplation and connection to the higher powers. These two and centers and the main center, the Man himself, are laid out on a central axis.

I have to admit I spent an awful lot of time at the Temple during my one burn – that wouldn՚t have been my conscious choice, there were plenty more fun or interesting places to be than that, but that is where I felt myself pulled. The Man and the Temple are both burned towards the end of the Burning Man week, which determines the temporal side of the large-scale structure of the Burning Man ritual. And, of course, it has the nature of a sacrifice.

Sarah Perry recently published a useful summary of some functionalist approaches to ritual. Such theories are all very well and I՚ve spun them myself, but they are kind of mechanistic and feel external to the phenomenon they are trying to describe. They can explain from an evolutionary standpoint why rituals exist, but they can՚t convey what they are like. Yes, people may perform sacrificial rituals in order to signal commitment and gain status – but that is probably not what they are thinking and feeling while they are doing it. If they are, it isn՚t working – something designed to be directed at lofty communal goals is being perverted into base, greedy, individualistic goals.

And who knows, maybe the vast majority of religious display is infected with this sort of egotistic hypocrisy, but I can՚t believe that it all is. Perhaps I am naive, but it seems to me that people are often quite sincere in their displays of religious enthusiasm – that is, they actually want to participate, they want to be directed at something outside of and higher than their usual concerns, and they are drawn into the ritual based on its nature and their own, not by external compulsions or calculations. Since people are not naturally going to stop engaging in egotistic calculations, part of an effective ritual is that it breaks down individuality. This condition is both terrifying and desirable, and this contradiction underlies some of the weird dynamics of ritual and religion.

It is this desire for transcendence that strikes me as somewhat mysterious, at least in my own case. This mysterious attraction appears to be spiritual in nature. I really hate to use that word, my self-image rejects it. It՚s embarrassing to find myself longing for spiritual experience, to want to be in the sort of place and state of mind in which the individual ego gives way, where the infinite contacts the finite, where the ineffable expresses itself. Such desires don՚t fit in with my self-conception as a realist, pragmatist, materialist, member in good standing of the techno-intelligentsia, and general competent adult.

Maybe It՚s not the spirituality that is embarassing – after all this is California in the 21st century, and everyone is permitted, if not actively encouraged, to engage in all manner of practices. No, it is the longing that is vaguely shameful – at my age, I should just go after what I want, or give it up, all this mooning after the impossible-to-get seems juvenile, especially in the land of do-as-you-please.

But I don՚t think my feelings and reactions are anything out of the ordinary. I may be more conscious of them than normal people, for a variety of reasons, but that doesn՚t make them special. So I conjecture that rituals are structured in such a way as to focus people՚s attention and desire onto something transcendent, that is, something not quite real in the ordinary sense, and thus not really attainable. Longing is built-in to the structure of the sacred.

And if something shameful adheres to the notion of longing, at least a ritual allows people to do it collectively, to align their longings with that of others. Individual longing may be a puerile waste of time; collective longing defines a culture.

[My earlier trip report and an alternative, less weighty view of the nature of the event.]

What cannot be said

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.
What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

-- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The idea of apophatic theology has gotten some play in blogs recently, mostly due to a book by Karen Armstrong defending the idea, and some leading uncompromising atheist scientist flamers have attacked her. I'm not sure I see why. Apophaticism by design does not make any positive statements about God or anything else, thus it cannot conflict with science. You'd think that would satisfy the militants, but no, they will not rest until anything even vaguely smacking of religion is razed to the ground.

Not me! I have a mystical streak and a contrarian streak, so this form of enlightenment through negation appeals to me. I see Jerry Coyne is having a contest to name those atheists who like me are less than thoroughly hardcore. I think I like "placatheist" the best of his candidates so far.

One good argument for apophatic theology is to look at what happens when douchebags and pinheads think they have a line on God and "the Absolute". Apparently He's not only American, but a wingnut Republican as well. I think the wingers have (in embryonic form) something of a new religion, in which the saints are the founding fathers and Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is playing Joan of Arc. In keeping with the apophatic approach I am not very comfortable giving attributes to God and I can be pretty sure that he doesn't pick sides in US electoral contests, nor does he have some special affinity for people born in North America.

The obnoxiousness of the noisy religious right is a large part of what drives intelligent people to atheism, but I think it's a tactical error. There is generally a hidden metaphysical core at the heart of most political belief systems, and the left needs to be more explicit about it. There is a vague correspondence between the apophatic demand for silence about metaphysics and the liberal walling-off of religious arguments from the public sphere. But it's not clear that apophatic religion can compete with the more primitive forms as a political organizing tool.

If you can't say anything about that-which-we-usually-call-God but probably deserves a more mystagogic name like "the One" or "the Absolute", what can you do with it? Contemplate it silently I suppose. Keep it in mind as a reality underlying the visible world. Or, you can just deny that the concept has any meaning or utility at all as the hardcore atheists do, but that is boring and philistine. Or you can make meta-level statements about your inability to say anything about it itself. This is what Wittgenstein and others do. A great deal end up being said about that of which we cannot speak.

I'm in the business of effing the ineffable.
-- Alan Watts

Why I, like others, am compelled to issue words on this topic which demands silence, I cannot say. Call it a nagging dissatisfaction with the standard stories. Neither the materialist nor the standard religious pictures of the world make much sense to me, so I'm trying to construct my own. The loudmouths for God or for atheism strike me as team players, which I am not. Universal skepticism is more my thing. Even the existence of an apophatic tradition makes me suspicious; I wouldn't want to accidentally be part of a movement.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
-- Samuel Beckett

Links to the tradition:

• Maimonides advocated an apophatic approach.
• Apophatic theology and neoplatonism.
• Apophasis as a literary genre

Crazyism

The most sensible philosophy paper I've read in awhile is about crazyism -- roughly, the idea that any seriously worked-out metaphysics of mind must violate some tenet of common-sense and thus appear "crazy". Or in other words, our minds are not capable of understanding their own fundamental nature. This is The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind by Eric Schwitzgebel.

Schwitzgebel argues by going through an elaborate and exhaustive taxonomy of Philosophy of Mind theories -- materialism, dualism, idealism, etc, showing that each in some way is both bizarre, ie it violates common sense in some way -- and dubious -- ie, it is not compelling enough to be accepted as true despite its oddity. The combination of these two qualities equals crazy in his terminology. The second clause about dubiosity is there to distinguish metaphysical craziness from scientific theories that, while bizarre enough, have evidence or something else compelling behind them. Eg, quantum mechanics is merely bizarre, because its strangeness can be supported by demonstration and experiment, while the many-worlds interpretation of qm is full-on crazy.

For instance, Schwitzgebel tries to demonstrate that a consistent materialism must grant consciousness to collective entities:

It would be bizarre to suppose that the United States has a stream of conscious experience distinct from the conscious experiences of the people who compose it...Yet it’s unclear by what materialist standard the United States lacks consciousness. Nations, it would seem, represent and self-represent. They respond (semi-) intelligently and self- protectively, in a coordinated way, to opportunities and threats. They gather, store, and manipulate information. They show skillful attunement to environmental inputs in warring and spying on each other. Their subparts (people and subgroups of people) are massively informationally interconnected and mutually dependent, including in incredibly fancy self-regulating feedback loops. These are the kinds of capacities and structures that materialists typically regard as the heart of mentality.

Crazyism is inevitable, he says, because of the manifest inadequacy of common sense in dealing with metaphysics. "Something bizarre must be true about the mind, but which bizarre propositions are the true ones, we are in no good position to know." Crazyism is apparently an extension and partial one-upping of mysterianism, the idea that some phenomena (consciousness) are simply inexplicable due to the limitations of our minds. Mysterians are mostly naturalists, while Schwitzgebel is willing to entertain stranger ideas, and indeed believes one has to.

Common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. Contradictions thus inevitably flow from it, and no coherent metaphysical system can respect it all. Although ordinary common sense serves us fairly well in practical maneuvers throughthe social and physical world, common sense has proven an unreliable guide in cosmology and probability theory and microphysics and neuroscience and macroeconomics and evolutionary biology and structural engineering and medicine and topology. If metaphysics more closely resembles items in the second class than in the first, as it seems to, we might excusably doubt the dependability of common sense as a guide to metaphysics.

After living with this idea for awhile, the more sense it makes to me. The contrary position, that the universe is knowable by common sense down to its foundations, seems simplistic, arrogant, and counter to experience. And Schwitzgebel, in his clever attempts to apply reason at the point where reason breaks down, seems almost Godelian.

[Schwitzgebel has a blog, The Splintered Mind]