Rationality and Totality, Part VI
A brief note about my “method” is in order here. I am not creating, nor do I wish to create, “stable entities.” I am explicitly not defining either rationality or totality—to say what rationality and totality are-- nor do I intend to do so. I am also not attempting to find common features they share. As far as I know, to do either would be to create “stable entities,” but if there are other ways to create “stable entities” out of rationality or totality, or if there are better ways to avoid creating “stable entities” out of rationality or totality, I would be very happy to become better educated of how so. I think, in trying not to specify what I understand by rationality or totality I run a risk of going on and on, prattling on and on, in a way which will ultimately be inconsistent and incoherent, and this risk seems greater than the risk of somehow making a stable entity which squelches emergent becomings; perhaps time will tell. At worst, this is an experiment from which I might learn something about what a conceptual “stable entity” might be and where the risks lie regarding them.
I would very much appreciate hearing other interpretations of “stable entities” and their dangers, especially because I think the peculiar fears associating with “stable entities” is very germane to understanding the peculiar fears associated with totality. The fear seems to be that stable entities and totality block emerging creativity. I would really like to set aside these fears at some point so we could examine exactly how a conceptual “stable entity” would block creativity…Whether it is an attribute of the conceptual stable entity which is at play in this, or whether the conceptual stable entity is standing in for something else, some other process, which is the real agent in blocking creativity. By the way, I don’t pooh-pooh the fear of blocks and bindings of creativity—-this happens and is an evisceration of life.
I also have not been trying to specify relationships between rationality and totality which would be causal or in any other way law-like. In other words, I haven’t been trying to say anything about valid or verifiable relationships between them. I’m interested in very tenuous, diaphanous, almost imaginary relationships—stuff we’d reflexively call “psychological” or emotional—meaning by that relationships which aren’t to be considered real or important. Relationships about which we might very well find it possible to say, “But that just isn’t true!” Or, “That is incorrect!” And if and when someone chose to say that about the relationships I am trying to look at, I might agree. I wouldn’t defend them on the basis of their truth or correctness.
There’s a risk in this also. I want the imaginary relationships I point out to be real. The risk is that the imaginary relationships I point out will be imaginary only. The only thing I want to say about that right now is that the counter-risk, the risk in the other direction, is that there are all these teaming real imaginary relationships which are active and even highly effective which never get accounted for in our "truthiness" conceptualization of reality, and we thus get run by them. What I am almost obsessed with is when intellectuals say (especially in the realm of the political), “That is not true!” with the expectation that saying this is going to dispel whatever it is which is not true. (Whatever is ideologically supported by this untruth.) The intellectual might be completely correct to declare something untrue. It matters to point out untruth. It just CANNOT be effective if in the background there are these teaming imaginary but real relationships, agencies, which also exert forces, hold things in place, etc. There is an exact counterpart to this (hopefully illustrative) in individual psychology. I know some behavior is harmful for me, and I threaten myself with thoughts of the future harm to get myself to stop. The threatening knowledge of harm isn’t effective. I do it anyway.
I would very much appreciate hearing other interpretations of “stable entities” and their dangers, especially because I think the peculiar fears associating with “stable entities” is very germane to understanding the peculiar fears associated with totality. The fear seems to be that stable entities and totality block emerging creativity. I would really like to set aside these fears at some point so we could examine exactly how a conceptual “stable entity” would block creativity…Whether it is an attribute of the conceptual stable entity which is at play in this, or whether the conceptual stable entity is standing in for something else, some other process, which is the real agent in blocking creativity. By the way, I don’t pooh-pooh the fear of blocks and bindings of creativity—-this happens and is an evisceration of life.
I also have not been trying to specify relationships between rationality and totality which would be causal or in any other way law-like. In other words, I haven’t been trying to say anything about valid or verifiable relationships between them. I’m interested in very tenuous, diaphanous, almost imaginary relationships—stuff we’d reflexively call “psychological” or emotional—meaning by that relationships which aren’t to be considered real or important. Relationships about which we might very well find it possible to say, “But that just isn’t true!” Or, “That is incorrect!” And if and when someone chose to say that about the relationships I am trying to look at, I might agree. I wouldn’t defend them on the basis of their truth or correctness.
There’s a risk in this also. I want the imaginary relationships I point out to be real. The risk is that the imaginary relationships I point out will be imaginary only. The only thing I want to say about that right now is that the counter-risk, the risk in the other direction, is that there are all these teaming real imaginary relationships which are active and even highly effective which never get accounted for in our "truthiness" conceptualization of reality, and we thus get run by them. What I am almost obsessed with is when intellectuals say (especially in the realm of the political), “That is not true!” with the expectation that saying this is going to dispel whatever it is which is not true. (Whatever is ideologically supported by this untruth.) The intellectual might be completely correct to declare something untrue. It matters to point out untruth. It just CANNOT be effective if in the background there are these teaming imaginary but real relationships, agencies, which also exert forces, hold things in place, etc. There is an exact counterpart to this (hopefully illustrative) in individual psychology. I know some behavior is harmful for me, and I threaten myself with thoughts of the future harm to get myself to stop. The threatening knowledge of harm isn’t effective. I do it anyway.
posted by Yusef Asabiyah at 11:59 AM
5 Comments:
Let us proceed then and plunge into the world of real fiction!
Actually, Marie-France was not killed in a lab accident. She was strangled by Ashpool, apparently he did not share her idea. What was her idea? According to Gibson "a symbiotic relationship with the AI's". Also, the "basics of her philosophy" was formulated at the beach in Morocco, as a young girl long before she met Ashpool. The beach was stored in Neuromancer, that same place Case went to as flatlined and where Neuromancer had hoped to keep him.
Marie-France rejected the idea of cryogenic sleep as a way to keep the family going.' "She'd seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ash- pool and their other children--aside from 3Jane--she'd re- fused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter." Did she foresee what the union of Wintermute and Neuromancer would result in? No .."She could not know what I'd be like". Only Wintermute had a (partiel) Swiss citizenship. Neuromancer was located in the mainframe in Rio, Brasil. The AI's did not develop their own plan. Marie-France had before she died, modified Wintermute so it came to harbour "the compulsion to free itself". True, from there on Wintermute acted independently.
Wintermute was change and time, effecting action in the world. Neuromancer was timeless ahistorical pure structure, constituting a Personality aspect (the land of the dead "I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." ). Their merge effected "the very matrix asking itself that question." In other words, together they spawned a consciousness aspect to the matrix itself. Hegel?
So what does it mean? Does it mean, if we join structure (langue) and event (parole), we get consciousness. Here we are borrowing from a structural linguistic understanding of how a sign in a system of signs, can be said to be meaningful. Thus we have three components: a system or a structure, a sign, and a position. Given these the sign becomes a carrier of meaning, by referring itself by distance, to other positions and signs within the same system. The fourth and possibly last component, is the movement within the system when the sign changes position, when the position changes meaning and when the meaning changes name. If so, does that mean that consciousness is a structure that contains the possibility of its own change? Is this a necessary condition for consciousness, that it must harbour the potientiel for its own change as a structural, syntactic or even semantic aspect of itself, to become conscious in the first place? Is this why we speak of the intentional aspect of consciousness: it is per definition always directed towards something else. Something that becomes impressions or reflections,data in consciousness that potientially can change the structure itself that gave birth those very same impressions.
"Give us the fucking code," he said. "If you don't, what'll change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up like the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building again! You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter.... I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!" He was shaking, his teeth chattering. 3Jane went limp, Molly's hands still around her slender throat, her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul. Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at Case. "Take your word, thief."
What are we to say about Marie-France, are we sympathetic toward her? Was her plan to turn the family into pure support of the AI? No, she was against the cold sleep, she disagreed with Ashpool, Neuromancer was a necessary condition for her vision, but at the same time prevented the realisation of that same vision. Marie-France knew the family had taken a dysfunctional course, increasingly growing inward in a net of pure self. 3Jane also realised that very clearly as we see from her essay, and she was also against the cold sleep. Marie-Frances' vision has undoubtedly included an element of liberation of the T-A clan, from the grip of cryogenic temporal displacement, and general spatial isolation from the world. A liberation that somehow was entwined with the deliverance of the wintermute/neuromancer union unto the world, in the form of matrix consciousness? No, by merging the two AI's she effectively causes a movement within the system, a change of positions, meanings and names. That was what she wanted. The consciousness aspect of it all, was a sideeffect. Ha-ha. But Remember the words of Neuromancer ".. she could not know what I'd be like". Her intention was not to make the matrix conscious. That would have been crazy and surely she was not. No, the cosciousnes aspect to the matrix was a sideeffect, a mere accident, something not intended.
Does that mean that consciousnes is a product of movements within a system of signs, a product of language? Perhaps a hundred thousands of years ago, we first developed communication and language to make up for our missing claws, cant fly, runs slowly, has no fur, need fire etc. As a social and communicating creature we could survive in groups. Consciousnes was developed as a result and perhaps a sideeffect from this social setting that was crucial for our survival. Nothing more, a byproduct of language. If so, doesnt that make us more a textual kind of being, rather than a subject? What we are and what is important to us, thus has more to do with what takes place in the spaces between us, rather than what goes on inside of us.
From the diary of 3jane comes an unfinished essay written when she was 12 years old. Surprisingly well written considering her young age.
"The Villa Straylight is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage. By the standards of the archipelago, ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull. Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise. At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool."
"Does that mean that consciousnes is a product of movements within a system of signs, a product of language? Perhaps a hundred thousands of years ago, we first developed communication and language to make up for our missing claws, cant fly, runs slowly, has no fur, need fire etc. As a social and communicating creature we could survive in groups. Consciousnes was developed as a result and perhaps a sideeffect from this social setting that was crucial for our survival. Nothing more, a byproduct of language. If so, doesnt that make us more a textual kind of being, rather than a subject? What we are and what is important to us, thus has more to do with what takes place in the spaces between us, rather than what goes on inside of us."
Frigging brilliant.
I am glad you liked my small essay "On the motivation of Marie-France Tessier", from W. Gibsons novel "Neuromancer". Have you read it?
I want to write a book that is a novel but at the same a philosophical work. I am aiming for a bestseller. This way of blending fiction and philosophy does tend to get very esoteric quickly though.
In any way, I believe that trying to answer philosophical questions regarding totality, rationality, becoming etc. one needs to start investigating at very remote and distant places from the center where the concept is articulated.
One way to do this, is the historical investigation. But there are other ways as well.
The two things to avoid is putting on the happy face and celebrating our freedom, or explaining something from its "anti-thesis".
I have only laughter and contempt for those two ways of attempting a critical discourse. With critical I mean mostly useful.
I haven't read that book, but I'll be reading yours when it comes out.
--Yusef
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