Not School Digest Jan 2013: A Bonus Quasisode

0:07 Mark: Hi, this is Mark from the Partially Examined Life. This is, again, not a regular episode. If you are new to this podcast, don't listen to this first. What you're going to get here is not one long, coherent discussion, but clips of four different discussions. I'm on one of them. Dylan Casey, one of our regular podcasters, is on one of the others. The other two feature no regular Partially Examined Life podcasters at all. However, all these took place as part of what we call the Not School section of our site. Any of you can go to partiallyexaminedlife.com Sign up to become a member, which costs $5 a month or $50 for the year, and you'll get access to the full recordings of these discussions and ones that have happened in past months and future months.

You can also sign up right now to participate in study groups for February. Now, some of these involve making a recording like this. Many don't. In fact, many members of these groups aren't on these recordings. So you by no means have to put yourself out like that. In fact, the fact that this is a member site means you can feel free to express yourself, no matter how clueless you feel. I don't think we've had one incidence of somebody actually being rude to somebody else on the site so far, which shows that $5 is apparently a sufficient entry fee to keep out the trolls that plague so much of the rest of the Internet.

What you're going to hear here is first, our Gilles Deleuze group talking about A Thousand Plateaus, which we've been reading since Not School kicked off in October. For February, we're going to be shifting to a different book, what Is Philosophy? Which is tentatively what's going to be covered in an upcoming Pel episode. So you hear about 10 minutes of that and you're going to hear a group that Dylan Casey, our resident physicist, led on Emergence, discussing an article by P.W. anderson. And we'll have two five minute clips from two different discussions from the ongoing Philosophy of Mind group about John Searle's book A Brief Introduction.

And finally, we hear another segment from our Philosophy and Literature group on Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. We're posting these quasi episodes as bonus content. It's not slowing down the production of regular PEL episodes at all. Since this is a new thing we're doing, we'd love to hear what you think. Go to partiallyexaminelife.com, join the discussion on this and any other topic you see up there.

2:00 Unknown speaker: This is Dan McKay in Minneapolis this

is Paul calling in from the UK. Okay.

Ryan, Mitch, representing Philadelphia.

All right, so supposedly we've gotten to the end of chapter three. I thought maybe we could say a little bit about all of chapter three. Is this pretend lecture or a debate between these? I guess a lot of them are. Have reference to historical personages that I'm not getting. Is that right?

2:21 Mark: Or are they all made up names?

2:23 Unknown speaker: Well, it's partially fiction. The Professor Challenger from Conan Doyle is one of his books.

Yes.

And then he's making all sorts of references. It reminds me of Ulysses by James Joyce. I couldn't understand what the hell he was talking about throughout that.

So what I liked about in there was that they acknowledge at one point, one of the objectors said, like, what is this theory about? Like, what sphere is this actually supposed to apply to? Like they're anticipating the fact that they are confusing the reader and they're being pretty flagrant about this. That this whole thing is like a jazz composition. That in any given chapter they take an idea and they just groove on it wherever it may lead. Which makes it then very surprising to me when they start bringing in seeming actual facts from geology and things like, no, no, this was not an improvisational effort. This was.

It was. It was like atonal music. Instead, it's like, where the hell is the key?

I think it's pretty funny that they mention leaving the classroom as the chapter goes on. You're left with like three people.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

And so they're addressing the overall question in situating this and figuring out how to read this to me was, what kind of account is this supposed to be? They start out the whole thing in the introduction as if they're just saying like, here's what kind of book this is. But that ends up being the launching point for their entire system that they're saying, you might think a book is this pre planned thing where we wrote an outline and then we packaged this stuff in. But really it is organic in a way that, oh, hey, everything ends up being organic in this way.

And you think about using the book as the original illustration. Worked pretty well for me because when you write a book, I mean, it's not original inspirational stuff coming to the page. It's almost like all the stuff that's gone in your ears has gotten churned around a little and it's getting spurred out again. So the book is a cultural. It's an assemblage is what they say. Assemblage is just a lot of stuff stuffed together.

Right.

I think that kind of goes along with the whole post structural philosophy. So everything has a trace. Derrida talks about it, and Deleuze and Guattari also kind of represent that. And in chapter one, they also talk about, you know, how William Burroughs used to cut up and paste things to make a story, you know, so. And that's what we're getting in our history as man. And Foucault also brought that in, too.

I think the Burroughs example is quite nice because it's a sense of literally taking two separate books or two separate halves of a page and sticking them together. And then you go, hey, that's a new thing. That actually is quite a nice metaphor, perhaps, in some ways, of how when you first start writing something, that's actually how you write. You're just taking a complete chunk of ideas and going, right, let's put it together and see how it works. And it's like it's much more of an experiment than a neatly structured work.

Right.

And there's also the idea that there's no true origin. You can never find a real origin of anything because it's already there.

Right.

Which kind of then formulates the basis of the rhizome, which.

Right, right.

Let's go ahead and sketch out what that means. Exactly. So instead of something, you know, a field of knowledge, say, so he's starting with a book and generalizing to cultural products and sort of the structure of culture that a hierarchical model is not going to be, right, where you have these sort of static layers and you could think of types of literature and then fiction within it, and then this individual work is within fiction. And that, you know, that that whole thing is highly misleading even within a book. It doesn't capture the lines of influence between various works, that it's not just that your work is going to be influenced by the ones right next to it. In fact, the way that the mind works is it brings in stuff from all sorts of places, ends up getting synthesized. So instead of talk about a tree or a hierarchy, we get this rhizomal image. So what's that about?

I guess a nice way to start would be just by taking what they say about rhizome. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles. And when I first came across this kind of idea when I was doing my master's, it was presented initially as kind of a, if you want to think about it in the most simplistic term, as an endless Kind of labyrinth. A labyrinth that doesn't have a beginning, doesn't have an end, but it's just a flat plane of interconnected things.

Sure.

And then there's the idea that even if you would cut one of the stems of the rhizome that it would just grow again and sprout more. So rhizome is a basis in like a plant. That's how I was explained to it. It's like roots, but they're spreading sideways instead of vertically.

Yeah, there's this. I think it's a misrepresentation that this book is all political in its sense. I'm getting more of overall philosophy, ontology, epistemology kind of thing going on here. Psychology, it's all over the place. They have this passage where they're talking about a book is about how it's constructed as much as what is in it. Reading this I was like, what the hell are they talking about a book so much for.

And well, it's just the first example that launches things and then it can be generalized. Right. Because this is. You're holding this concrete thing in your hand and you're wondering, you know, how should I understand this book? So that's a good place as anywhere to start elaborating the whole larger point. So even right there we get this, that, you know, he wants to. They want to collapse these traditional distinctions like between form and content. That. That's a useful distinction, but it's not absolute in the way that somebody like Aristotle would set out, which I sort of see him and his view of the concentric crystal spheres that form the universe and things like that is really the model of what they're arguing against here.

This on the other hand, is a more pragmatic version, like we saw in William James or Pirsig or many other folks, that even the most concrete, eternal seeming concepts like mathematics are man made. And so they have a history, they have connections with other things.

I kept thinking about how they're going to fall into contextualism, that nothing is concrete. But I got the impression that there are some things that they consider kind of arboreal that are important, that create a structure to build around. There's some rigidity in a rhizome.

Yeah. I think that's when they start talking about the molar and molecular content versus expression. That's when that starts to get wish washy.

It's like trying to create a sculpture out of Jello.

Right.

So that's one of the things to ease into here, is this again, they're all sort of variations on form versus content and expression versus expressed is one pole of that. It makes sense to me in the very beginning of the book, how you can't just look at the form of this. This is a philosophical novel versus the content, the ideas we're putting forward, that the way that the book was created in some way determines the content with any book. And in this book, self consciously so. So that, you know, the fact that you can supposedly read the chapters in any order, there are these plateaus of ideas that you can get into that has. This jazz character that I was describing is entirely a matter of the way in which these two guys wrote this

9:38 Mark: together at the same time.

9:40 Unknown speaker: There's an introduction and a conclusion. So, yeah, take it for what it is. Right?

Yeah. I get the impression it's more like atonal or abstract art. That artist has a conception, creates something using materials, and then the viewer brings their own experience into it and creates a. Their own kind of structure. That it's the interplay between the two, a kind of a dynamic relationship, organic. It's kind of Heideggerian with this whole things disclose themselves to you. I got this whole kind of existence precedes essence kind of thing going on in this.

I think one thing that is interesting as Ryan, you brought up the connection to post structuralism. And I think arguably, as well as postmodernism, what we've kind of been talking about is this idea of destructuring the traditional order of how you would write a book. You kind of start with an introduction and you go through step by step. And I think that what they want to do is they want to deconstruct that and they're railing against that. I think what they're actually doing in some parts of this is whilst some of parts of it are very seriously philosophical, they're making quite serious points.

They are. At the same time, they're being quite screwy with the reader and they're kind of saying, oh, look, we're going to say this, and then give you an example of something and you think, okay, that's a nice example. And then you get another example and you get another example and you kind of. It gets to a point where you're like, okay, I understand what you're saying, and you actually become more confused because

you had so many examples.

But I think a passage that would perhaps neatly tie up what we were saying about how the book relates to the rhizome is when about page 11, they say the same applies to the book and the world Contrary to a deep rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world. There is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world. The book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world affects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world, if it is capable, if it can.

And I think that we were saying a minute ago about this idea that you don't have a book and then you have the world. The moment you start writing something, the moment you start creating it is in it. So it's going against this idea that philosophy can stand up to and comment on something when actually it's coming right from the center of these ideas.

Right.

That's a great point to add that it's not even just that the world and all of all the various influences that have gone into us are then getting on the page, but it's also in the way the book itself then relates to the reader, as Daniel was saying. And it's not that this, I think he thinks more than any other book is inviting you to come up with your own interpretation. It's not abstract in that way. Like they're really, really specific and really arguing against certain point. Like you have certain view of sub. A certain. I don't think they're trying to be unclear, but at the same time they're acknowledging that rhizomal connections with, you know, that once it's put out there, that it's part of the world.

Yeah, they're not parodying anything so much as making a pastiche of it. They want to make a serious point, but.

Yeah, exactly.

They want to go, look, you know, we're going to mess about with it, which. Ryan, I know that you brought up Ulysses earlier and I think that is a nice kind of fictional example of what they're doing here. They're going, look, this is a serious point, but actually we're going to mess about and not give the reader what they expect.

12:59 Mark: Next up is Dylan Casey, leading what has since morphed into the Topics in Philosophy and Physics group. The article they discussed was by the Nobel prize winning physicist P.W. anderson. It's called More Is Different Broken Symmetry and the Hierarchical Nature of Science from 1972. It's all about emergence, by which I mean the idea that properties at a higher level of observation, like the biological, cannot be deduced by knowing properties from some more fundamental level like the physical. This topic comes up a lot in discussions of consciousness, but According to Dylan here, if you're to use emergence to talk about consciousness, you can't have consciousness be the only example you can come up with of emergence. You should be able to talk about it in other scientific contexts.

13:35 Dylan: Hey, this is Dylan. I proposed the group because I had read this paper a while ago and had done some thinking about this reductionist question and thought it would be a nice topic of conversation. And this particular paper is a pretty famous paper in the question of emergence and especially from thinking about it scientifically. And P.W. anderson, I don't know if you guys know about anything about him. He won a Nobel Prize in solid state physics and he was also a huge detractor of the Superconducting Super Collider when it was being proposed in the the 90s and being built and then being scuttled eventually. And you can see a lot of that just held true for him from the very beginning of having a kind of animosity towards claims of fundamentality by particle physics.

14:25 Unknown speaker: Definitely.

14:26 Dylan: So just for my own sake, where do you guys come at this from?

14:30 Unknown speaker: This is Ernie. So I guess I'm one of these. I used to be one of these particle physicists that P.W. anderson despised. I actually graduated the year that they killed the SSC and wisely decided to not go into particle physics.

This is Casey. I'm still in graduate school working with quantum optics. So none of the high energy, more fundamental stuff.

Okay, Bill here. My background is computer programming.

14:55 Dylan: How about you, Evan? Where do you come at this from?

14:57 Unknown speaker: Professionally I'm an electrical engineer. I've always been interested in reading, I think probably more scientific things than philosophical things. But these, not school groups have been great.

15:10 Dylan: This is great. This is one of the things we had talked about for a long time between Seth and Wes and Mark and I. This sort of having forums and ability to talk with other people about readings and things. And it's been really cool to see how successful it is. So this is a short paper and there's a lot of ways we could go about it. So I had done some work on quantum field theory a few years ago and thinking about philosophical foundations of that. And part of the direction I ended up going with that was thinking about emergence. And I read a number of the papers in the collection that this is included in.

You know, obviously it was Originally published in 72 and the theme of symmetry and broken symmetry and emergence are nicely intertwined and a reasonable case, I think, for trying to think about the authenticity of emergence. A lot of cases of emergence end up Being very complicated cases like consciousness or sociology and stuff like that in which you see it. But you're sort of left with the question, well, is that really emergence or just a complicated case of something that would be perfectly accounted for in a normal reductionist manner? And the typical claim with consciousness by a lot of people is that, well, you just can't do it.

And I like the idea of trying to examine physical cases where you would see something like emergent properties coming about and trying to really articulate what would be the sign of them and what is the landscape wrapped around them. And Anderson doesn't explicitly go directly into bringing up emergence exactly, but he wants to go against the grain and talk about fundamentality, essentially saying that things that scales and higher orders of complexity are equally fundamental. And he means that really strongly that the very properties being explored at these higher levels of complexity and scale are genuinely not entailed by the lower level reductions.

And he doesn't deny the reduction. I think he would agree that there's a kind of containment there, but not an implication. The way he phrases it is the reduction does not imply construction. I find that just a really pregnant and interesting thing to think through. And I think it's a nice formulation of the problem. And he picks some really specific examples. And for me, I think that in the end, if you're going to really buy emergence or something like his claim, reduction doesn't imply construction, you're going to have to see it in physical systems.

17:56 Unknown speaker: I mostly follow along with that. But to me, emergence and construction are two different things. Right? Because it's one thing to say that the structure of an ice crystal emerges from the properties of H2O. It's another thing to say we built an ice rink. The ice rink is decomposable into its components, but that's more of an explicitly designed or constructed system. And so certainly reduction doesn't imply construction. But it also seems that reduction doesn't imply even emergence, if that makes sense. I'm not sure exactly if I'm phrasing it the right way.

18:28 Dylan: It sounds like you're saying that reduction doesn't imply emergence, as you would want to say, is a stronger claim than reduction not implying construction, unless he's doing

18:37 Unknown speaker: construction in a slightly different way than I typically think of it.

So I think he's definitely making this strong claim, right? Because he says something like it's an intellectual one way street, so everyone agrees we can make the reduction to elementary particles from wherever we start in the universe, that's fine. But the difficult Thing is building backup. I think this is what he means by construction is building backup things with demonstrably more complex behavior than spin properties or charge properties or something like that. And I don't feel like he ever really gives any evidence to say that this is an impossible task. He certainly makes a strong case for it, saying that it is much more convenient. Once we get to a sufficiently high level of broken symmetry within the context that we were originally working.

Right.

Then it's sometimes more useful to switch to a more abstract level of new concepts and work from there. And we'll be able to predict more useful behavior in our systems from that level, as opposed to trying to explain everything in terms of elementary particles. I just don't know that it's actually any evidence that one could not derive these properties given a sufficient amount of time and computing power.

The one area I would love to see this question attacked from is the area of information theory, which he touches on in a few places. I really liked that perspective, that at different levels of the system, there are different kinds of information available that literally don't exist at other levels.

Sure.

And it seems like one could possibly come up with a meaningful mathematical model of, you know, what it means to be a different level and what it means to be emergent. And maybe somebody has.

Yeah. I'd like to say something about what Casey was saying about him not providing any proof at one place. He's talking about, well, I guess I'll just read it. That starts. The basic reason why this result would have been difficult to derive is an important one for our further thinking. If the nucleus is sufficiently small, there's no real way to define its shape rigorously. So I started looking at this because I didn't really understand it. I Wikipedia. I found out that Newton and others were. There's a problem that hasn't been solved that you can't predict the effects of gravity on three or more bodies. Do you know what I'm talking about?

21:04 Dylan: It's called the three body problem.

21:06 Unknown speaker: Right.

It seems like you may be getting at that. And if you can't even predict what three bodies are going to do in a system, that seems fairly good proof there to me that you can't predict from a constituent system what a larger system is going to, how it's going to behave.

My inclination there is to take that as proof of the fact that our models are approximators that are not perfect. This also comes out in the example where he's talking about the inversion of the ammonia molecule.

Right.

The state of the system is always described as superposition of two orientations, each of which has a dipole, even though the whole state itself. As far as we can see, that's true. It's true in that the model that we use to describe these systems does not allow a dipole to exist because of the superposition property. However, we see them there, right? So we know that our model is at best an approximation. And similarly with the many body problem, maybe it's just a case that our math isn't good enough yet.

Actually, the three body problem is a slightly different case, although it's an interesting one. In that case, we have a model that can make exact predictions given exact inputs. The two body problem resolves very elegantly down to the one body problem. The three body problem can't be reduced to a simpler problem mathematically, so you can only simulate it, you know, the painful way. And it's chaotic in the sense that small errors in the input create exponentially large errors in the output. So you can't predict it, but you can still do calculations with any reasonable degree of accuracy, with an unreasonable degree of effort.

That's different than the case where the theory itself breaks down. It just means it's impractical to predict beyond a certain point. Not that the theory doesn't work at all. And a lot of the many body problems he talks about where you go into infinity. In theory, the model works, but it's just technically infeasible to calculate at that large scale. The thing that actually makes this interesting is at some point things become relatively simple. Like when you bunch enough water molecules together, they act like a liquid, and you can model them as a continuous liquid rather than a bazillion little molecules.

And so you can come up with really useful laws about viscosity and drag and wetness and things like that, which have interesting properties which are infeasible to calculate even in any theoretical sense, but are still determined by Coulomb's law. And so the theory doesn't break down, but our predictability breaks down.

23:33 Dylan: That's exact. One of the questions that Anderson's bringing up. It'd be interesting to hear him talk about something like viscosity or wetness as whether or not that is an emergent property or a constructed property that doesn't follow by reduction. I would take him to say something like Coulomb's law does not entail wetness. And he readily admits that you have all the constraints. Energy is conserved and you have even stronger constraint, like basic quantum mechanics and electricity, magnetism and stuff, but that those are not sufficient to constrain all the kinds of properties.

I wonder if for him that it even matters, that it would simply be a calculational problem. But certainly is the kind of thing that he's pointing to here that we lose calculability. You know, you're not going to use quantum field theory for quarks and leptons in order to talk about the wetness of water, even more so than even quantum mechanics to do so.

24:33 Unknown speaker: Exactly.

And what's interesting to point out, and you and I know this, but it's not necessarily obvious to people, is that when we talk about elementary particles, that's all in scare quotes. It's not like particle physics is really fundamental and everything's made up of atoms and molecules. Those are made of smaller things, which are probably made of smaller things. And we can pick at it and say this is fundamental for the other stuff above it. But in some sense you're always. I wonder if he's partly getting at that. You're kind of arbitrarily picking what you consider fundamental based on what you care about. The arrogance of particle physicists has been tempered in the last few decades by realizing we actually don't know what's going on below that.

This is Evan Gould. What follows is 10 minutes of discussion between Philosophy of Mind group members Stephen, Daniel, Bill, Alan, Curry and I. We read John Searle's A Brief introduction. The first five minutes or so was recorded on January 2, after we had read about half of the book. The last five minutes was recorded on January 17 when we had all finished. The subject matter that I've chosen to present is us grappling with Searle's conception of mind as being completely causally related to the physical, denying both substance dualism and property dualism, yet maintaining separate ontological descriptive categories versus metaphysically distinct categories.

I hope that this small piece of our discussion serves as an effective endorsement of pel citizenship. It's a great way to meet people the world over that share an interest in some pretty esoteric topics. I mean, who else are you going to talk about this stuff with? Plus, it's cheap, Cheaper than water even. Anyway, I hope you enjoy what follows. I think we need to talk about Searle's distinction between first person ontologies and third person ontologies. That seems to be where everybody stumbled.

Yeah, and it seems to be basically the crux of his whole formulation, isn't it?

Right. I mean, he's certainly not claiming to be a dualist. He's not claiming to be a Materialist in that he doesn't deny the existence of mind. Similarly, he's not an eliminativist.

Right.

He's not trying to get rid of the phenomenon, but explain it based on physicalism. I would think at this point that he would be a physicalist. That's how I would describe him.

Yeah. It was difficult to tell at times because he kind of critiqued a lot of that, too. Didn't he at one point call it biological naturalism? Or is that.

Yes, he did label his own view that way.

Okay, I'll use his own label then.

Yeah. I think he saw physicalism as sort of like reductionism, you know, materialistic reductionism, which he does not subscribe to.

Well, he subscribes to what he calls causal reduction, but not ontological reduction.

Right. So we're back to the two ontologies thing. The way I understood that was just simply a subjective ontology, which we all know what that is. It's just the experience of experiencing things. So that would be the subjective ontology. The other ontology, I guess it would be an objective ontology, would be things existing. Everything that's not us, I suppose, the way I understood it.

Yeah. I mean, we certainly can't go as far as to say that he's asserting ontologically separate realms. He says it specifically. But then we have to sort of downgrade our prior definitions of ontologies to something like emergent facts based on physical

nature and surface features. He uses for us quite a lot. I do struggle with that a little.

Yeah. Does he talk about wetness? Like, say, we can say that this first person ontology comes out of the aggregate in the same way that a surface feature such as wetness or hardness.

Yeah.

So he talks about solidity and liquidity, I think. And he talks about how in both those cases you can have a causal reduction in that you can explain the cause of the phenomenon basically by the molecular structure and chemical and electromagnetic interaction. And he says in those cases you can also make an ontological reduction. He says that in the case of consciousness, you can make the causal reduction, but you cannot make the ontological reduction.

Well, you can correct me if you remember differently, but he talks about reductionism being used to eliminate a phenomenon by explaining it away.

Yes. So he draws a distinction between things that are an illusion and things that are real. So he talks about a sunset. You can eliminate that by just talking about the rotation of the earth. He says that in the case of consciousness, you can't do that because consciousness is real. A sunset is not real. I Find that a little arbitrary, frankly.

I did too. That particular example really threw me for a long time because I just don't see how that gets rid of the sunset.

So he says, but don't reductions get rid of the reduced phenomenon by showing it is really something else? No. And this leads to the second confusion in the notion of reduction. We need to distinguish between those reductions that are eliminative and those that are not eliminative. Reductions show that the reduced phenomena did not really exist. Thus the reduction of sunsets to the Earth's rotation is limitative because it shows that the sunset was a mere appearance. But the reduction of solidity is not in any way eliminative because it does not show that the objects do not really resist other objects.

For example, you cannot do an eliminative reduction on something that really exists. He's drawing a distinction between a real phenomenon and something that is an illusion. I think he's suggesting that something is solid because it really is, and a sunset is not a real thing, therefore it really isn't. And I frankly struggle with that. What fundamentally is the difference between his position of consciousness being ontologically irreducible and a property dualist?

I can't tell that there's any difference at all, frankly.

Okay.

There is a paper online by Searle

called why I am Not a Property Dualist.

So he addresses the question, but from

having skimmed it very briefly, I suspect that it may rely on a rather contentious definition of property dualism.

Well, I haven't seen that paper, but what I was thinking, maybe the difference is the emergence theory versus the panpsychic type thing, where a property dualist would say that matter has a proto mental properties at the low levels, while an emergence person would say that it comes into existence at certain levels of complexity. And so he could have his first person ontology as something that emerges.

Our first conversation had a lot to do with Searle's distinction between first person ontologies and third person ontologies. I'll just say that the other night I was trying to make myself a biological naturalist versus a property dualist, and I thought I got myself there, but now I'm not so sure. Has anybody else sort of grasped what he may have been getting at in denying property dualism? We did the Chalmers book last month or November, and that's what I'm taking as my example of property dualism. And I'm trying to think of what is in that that Searle is denying or won't accept.

And I thought I got myself there as far as like Considering consciousness as an emergent property, still obviously causally reducible to the physical. I kind of thought that, well, there's the distinction. If he wants to consider consciousness as an emergent property, then we don't have to posit a proto atomistic, experiential, qualitative, proto mental quality or anything to the world. It's possible that this is just what happens as we exist in the certain fields that we exist in gravitational and electromagnetic and nuclear forces. And what happens when you get a complex organism, then you have this emergent property.

Does that get us away from having to posit property dualism?

Fundamentally, if you don't believe in God, then you're not a property dualist. And that's what he's militating against. Fundamentally, property dualism has a fundamental component in the ideology that the non physical parts of this world have an ontology that is separate from the physical things that are in this world. And he's saying, absolutely not, because my consciousness is existent in the neurobiology of my body. So there's no possible way that it can have a separate physical and a separate metaphysical ontology. And by metaphysical I mean non physical ontology.

And that's what he's saying, that's why he doesn't consider himself a property dualist is because he doesn't believe in the existence of the metaphysical without the physical. He's not saying that one leads hierarchically to the other. He's just saying that they don't ever exist without each other. And if you're a property dualist, then you have to fundamentally say that you accept the existence of the ideology of consciousness as separate from the physical reality. And I tended to agree with him that no, I don't think that my, the epiphenomenal thing that I'm experiencing is separate than the phenomenal thing that I'm experiencing.

No, not at all. They're different for sure. They have separate epistemologies maybe, but they are ontologically inseparable. And that's the difference. That's why he separates from the property dualists and says I'm not going to make that ontological claim.

I guess I think of Searle primarily as a philosopher of language. In the lectures I was listening to the other day, he said he feels like he's on vacation when he's doing philosophy of mind, because philosophy of language he considers to be so much harder. I guess that kind of colors my take on his whole take. And kind of like Curry was saying a second ago, I think the language has a lot to do with just how it forms the whole concept. It seems to me that, like, his whole thing is he's ready to get over dualism. And he's pissed off at that because it's been this huge disaster in the history of philosophy.

But he thinks that there's still a baby in that bathwater that keeps him from coming around to a completely physicalist kind of account, and that that baby is basically the ontology that these guys have when they want to describe the whole thing in this kind of scientific language, they're leaving out that subjective account. And he thinks that that is a significant thing. And it seems like, to me, like, almost the primary objection is that you can't talk about it in that language. And it's not so much like it's this totally separate thing, but more that it's this feature that just can't be described from that perspective.

And for me, like, that's where the language comes into it. Shaping the thought, shaping the concepts. That's a really good point. It's an interesting point from his perspective. The property dualist thing, though, I don't know that that's not him just making that one subtle play so that he falls into his own camp rather than somebody else's.

35:54 Mark: Next we've got a section from the discussion by the ongoing fiction group about Italo Calvino's collection of short stories, Cosmicomics. Now, this is a pretty trippy book. Each chapter leads off with a little blurb summing up some scientific or mathematical fact. And then the subsequent story is sort of a fabulous depiction of one or more characters dramatically living something like the consequences of this fact. So this clip starts off with Jordan Payne, Nathan Hanks, and Nick Story talking about the story. How much shall we bet? And I'll just read the quote that they start talking about.

That chapter leaves off with this paragraph. The logic of cybernetics applied to the history of the universe is in the process of demonstrating how the galaxies, the solar system, the Earth, cellular life could not help but be born. According to cybernetics, the universe is formed by a series of feedbacks, positive and negative at first, through the force of gravity that concentrates masses of hydrogen in the primitive cloud, then through nuclear force and centrifugal force, which are balanced with the first. From the moment that the process is set in motion, it can only follow the logic of this chain.

So after a little discussion of that, most of what they talk about here is the story right before that called the Aquatic uncle, and it's got lots of spoilers for that story, but don't worry about it. I should say that unlike the other clips here, the entire discussion is freely available on YouTube.

37:09 Unknown speaker: For this, the italic parts that are the preface to all the stories. It talks about logic. For me, the story kind of worked that way as a device that this thing happened this. And then of course, with that was this. And by the end, you have regular people almost. So it's just sort of this literature as this sort of logic of cause and effect or something.

He says that if you apply the logic of cybernetics, then you get a universe that can't help but be born the way that it is. And he says it can only follow the logic of this chain. But then what I think he elaborates on is that while this is true, there's many more unlogical possibilities in the imagination of his guesses and the bets that he places and that he can imagine all these different scenarios taking place. And that's where he's foiled, you know, that try to anticipate whatever faculty that is, you know, existing in the universe. We have an imagination. We can use it, make bets that part is flawed. Where the universe itself, as an objective thing to everybody in general is going to be a logical, objective thing. That's always going to happen.

In a lot of the stories, including this one, there's a sort of moment of. Well, the character can be sort of. Before the universe becomes more complex. Like the universe is sort of contained in his imagination, right? You know, like all the forms are there in potential as potential thing, right? And there's. It's like that in the spiral, too. At the beginning of the spiral, when he says something like, he's sort of nostalgic for the time when he was just a mollusk and before, you know, evolution got too complicated because back then everything was, you know, about to happen or could still happen.

Here's what it's like when you're young. All evolution lies before you. Every road is open to you. And at the same time, you can enjoy the fact that being there on a rock, flat moles, cold, damp and happy. If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterward. If you think of how having one form excludes other forms of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped. Well, I don't mind saying life is beautiful in those days. And there's a moment similar to that in how much Shall We Bet? Where he says, I like the universe when it was young because events only happened one at a time.

Like there was an atom one day and it was simple. But in the future, when he starts losing all the bets, he doesn't like that as much because it's just too complicated. Right. And also it's. Since the thing is our things have already happened. They sort of excluded other possibilities. Right. So he likes the beginning of things. But that's when all the possibilities are before him and they're in his imagination and they're beautiful and unformed and that kind of thing.

Expand on that. In the Aquatic uncle, where the uncle complains about the land. He says the lands had emerged as a limited phenomenon. They were going to just to disappear as they had cropped up. This is on 78. He says our life is in the midst of all this. Would have to face constant transformations in the course of which whole races would disappear. The only survivors would be those who were prepared to change the basis of their existence so radically that the reasons why living was beautiful would be completely overwhelmed and forgotten.

Yeah, you can really start to read these stories as this examination of potentials and the sort of grand potentiality of the universe. And what happens when something starts trying to interpret that, you know, it already starts limiting itself by thinking about it.

Is there one where he doubts that there was ever space before anything to that maybe space never existed like empty space. That that was just a fiction of our imagination. I felt like there was one.

Is that the form of space?

It's a sign in space. And they talk about after all the signs have been making themselves up. And there was this just a thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space. Since there was no longer any way to establish a point of reference. The galaxy went on turning. But I could no longer count the revolutions. Any point could be the point of departure. Any sign heaped up with the others could be mine. But discovering it would have served no purpose. Because it was clear that independent of signs, space didn't exist and perhaps had never existed.

What do you think that means you

guys were talking about earlier with the man on the moon being outside of a context of relationship that there's nothing to count as space without a countable thing.

I guess I just took that as the there's nothing outside language idea.

Right?

There's nothing you can talk about anyway outside of the sign system.

On the forum post Paul had mentioned that he read this and thought of Baudrillard, the simulacra. Right. It's just there's like this building of signs. It's like how do you get back to whatever the pure Thing is.

Yeah.

I was thinking about this as we've been talking, how these are kind of pointed as like a modern creation myth. The sort of consequence of other things that happened with the creation of other things. Like for us to be able to see color, we can no longer see just black and white. And in order for the moon to be where it is now, like, there's all these other things that are lost. So you close off one thing to see the other, but then there's no longer the other thing. The possibilities have been whittled away.

Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why there's that sort of turn of nostalgia through the book. Like, I want to go back to a simpler time, but there's also like. But we can't do that.

Right.

You can't actually go back. You have to keep evolving. And there is something good about evolving too. Right. I mean, ultimately, this character is sort of enraptured with the transformations he undergoes. He loves it. He's interested in it, and he loves that part of it. And I think also, like in the Aquatic uncle, you see that. That attitude too, like, let's just go back to the sea. And that whole story seemed to me kind of like a little joke about traditional conservative people.

Right.

Who don't want to evolve. I mean, that's actually a phrase we use.

Yeah.

The more we're talking about, and that seems like a huge thing. And you're always losing or you're scared of evolving, but there always is that desire to move forward. But yet it seems not super condemning, the not wanting to move forward, that it's like an innate thing, but you still should progress even though you're going to lose these things. I don't know. That seems like a real conflict here.

I mean, in the Aquatic Uncle, I feel like he came down on the side of staying to the sea. I mean, his argument was that evolution, with all of its grand forms on land, is messy and violent and there's a loss of life, that those that stayed in the sea are able to keep contained, that they're able to. I keep going back to this idea of meditating, that we're removing yourself from the constant flux and transformation is somehow enabling you to understand what's actually going on in life, like what life is. And the uncle thinks that by staying there and being unchanging and having a life that's perpetually the same is more valuable than having many kinds of life at the expense of the species that will be destructed to get to the higher kind of life above it, which it feeds on.

I guess. I. I read it that he's sort of sympathetic with that idea, with the uncle's position, but that ultimately he thinks you have to move forward even though with all this loss, like you just have to keep going anyway.

Or maybe that it's just inevitable. I just think of a lot of the story, you know, like you were reading the piece that ends a sign in space is that. I don't know, he just kind of had to accept it because it's going to happen. That it's all going to be just superimposed and coagulated. General thickness of signs.

Yeah.

The woman in the aquatic uncle is higher than him in the form game, I guess. I think she's a deer and he's something like a lizard or something that can spend time in the water and also a land. And she's this galloping, you know, free roaming thing. But she goes back to the ocean. I mean, she is able to turn away from it even though the tension in their relationship was that she's more beautiful and more highly evolved and made for land in a way that he's not. And he's worried about that, is really embarrassed by his super under evolved uncle and doesn't even want them to meet and is embarrassed at the ideas.

But then she becomes enraptured with them. And I think what he sees as this high evolution she inhabits and is able to understand, is it all that it's cracked up to be that there's something truer about just living a kind of experienced life without focusing too much on the kind of form that that life has? And this is all from Qfwfq's perspective. He thinks that she's beautiful and that the kind of form that she has must just be the best. But she doesn't feel that way.

Yeah, well, he says it was a hard blow for me, but after all, what could I do about it? I went on my way in the midst of the world's transformation, being transformed myself every now and then. Among many of the forms of living beings that I encountered, one who was somebody more than I was. He even says one who announced the future.

Yeah, no, I was just about to read that passage too. But if you keep going. He says that he admires the people who are somebody. And I guess the way his uncle is somebody is that he see that he holds on to a past beyond all return. Right. He occasionally met people like that. On his journey. He encountered another who bore witness to pass beyond all return a Dinosaur who had survived in the beginning of the Cenozoic, or else a crocodile. Part of the past. Part of the past that had discovered a way to remain immobile throughout the centuries.

Right.

They all had something, I know, that made them somehow superior to me. Sublime. Something that made me, compared to them, mediocre. And yet I wouldn't have traded places with any of them, you know, so there's that special thing. There's that special aura of the past. Some people can hold on to that, and that is respectable. But from Qfwfq's perspective, he loves the transformations. He'd rather be going forward or evolving.

Yeah.

It's hard not to be him constantly losing out in each of these stories, losing the girl of his dreams, you know, because in that one, he says, you know, I didn't feel secure without her. And poor guys just abandoned left and right.

Yeah.

It seems like there's losses in every story. He always loses the girl when he goes on to the next transformation or whatever. But he also. It seems like there are a lot of, like, very hopeful, optimistic passages about how some things persist. Right. In, like the dinosaur story where he talks about even after the dinosaurs have passed from rumor to joke to myth, and you've forgotten all about the dinosaurs. Somehow. Dinosaurs and all of their experience still shape maybe an unconscious level how we. Or how organisms see the world. Right. In their. Maybe their darkest fears, or. So they're still. In some ways, they are kind of immortal. Even though we lose them, they sort of get ejected from the science system or whatever. Yeah.

I think that's why I thought they seemed like the modern creation myth, because there was accounting for those things, that there is loss, but you get to gain something as well and preserve something.

I think, too, like you. You don't completely lose the dinosaurs. We still have the dinosaurs in some weird way, according to.

Yeah.

They're laid in the structure of what came after them.

Yeah.

Right, right. I mean, on the level of DNA, too. Right. I mean, we share so much DNA with our. Our ancestors, too.

Right.

There's sort of. It's sort of a memory.

Yeah, absolutely.

Memory bank.

Yeah.

That seems like a pretty good place to start wrapping it up. Right.

It was really beautifully written.

Yeah. The way he marries the cosmic and the poetic. You never land in, like, the realm of pure poetry or pure science. It's like a really beautiful mix of the two that elevates both, I thought.

Absolutely. And I think also I read a lot of this sort of postmodern and magical realist literature and a lot of it is so grim and bleak. And even though this passage is not without its bleak moments, I think ultimately, you know, you have these really hopeful notes throughout, but it's not sappy or sentimental or anything. It's genuine hopefulness and humor. And I really responded to that. On top of all the cool little philosophical puzzles.

Yeah, great book.

Great book.

Yeah, it's just a really powerful book. And from liking science so much and reading it, it gets so dry and it's spiritless after a while. And to see it kind of taken up like this is just, it was really, really fun.

49:13 Mark: All right, folks, that's it. If you want to hear the rest of these discussions, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com, sign up to be a Citizen and there's just hours and hours of bonus content now awaiting you. Plus you'll be able to participate in all the new groups. Looking at the proposals posted right now for next month, I see Seth Paskin is going to be leading one on Heidegger. I've proposed one on aesthetics, philosophy of art. There's one on Karl Marx's Das Kapital, the very intro friendly. What is philosophy group? Looks like it's going to be reading Tom Paine's Common Sense.

There's a proposal for an ongoing ethics group. Wes has just started leading one on Jacques Lacan. There's a continuing one on Maurice Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. There's one that I'm going to participate in, which is actually just watching a bunch of videos by Rick Roderick on continental figures like Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marcuse, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard. And we're still in the middle of the proposal period, so I expect a number of other options to go up there. Or you could join right now and go propose something yourself.

And as February approaches, I'll post an updated list of what's been proposed.

50:13 Unknown speaker: Good night, everybody.