August 28, 2004
Adventures in Solipsism
1.Boy in the Bubble
Solipsism is distinguished equally by its troubling, insidious persuasiveness and its essential resistance to both proof and disproof. Its only refutation is pragmatic - not to think about it. A certain type of solipsism was a constant thought throughout my childhood. I was always troubled by the thought that my perception could be counterfeit in its entirety, that I might be the subject of a cruel experiment, or the player of a sophisticated videogame whose memory of the outside world had been temporarily disabled whilst playing.
I remember distinctly my picture of how the system would work, which was worked out with a Kantian (avant la lettre, of course, I wasn't that psychotic as a child) dedication to transcendental deduction: I was inside a perfectly spherical 'shell', upon which the supposed 'outside world' was back-projected. Every movement I made was intercepted and processed, and the appropriate transformations made to the 'world' to keep the homeostatic consistency of the illusion. I could never escape, although I could signal that I was no mere dupe by speaking to or acknowledging the presence of those who might be running the experiment - so sometimes I'd wave or say hi to them, just to show them I wasn't fooled... (eleutheria points out that my position here is similar to the hapless plumber who, having no doubt seen the reality TV shows that use hidden cameras to catch out shirking, incompetent and cheating tradesmen, was shown on one of them making a show of his sardonic, knowing gestures in random directions to obviate such embarassment, but nonetheless going on to carry out the usual iniquities on camera! i.e. If you don't dedicate your life to paranoia, you're not doing it properly.)
When I actually learned of the world 'solipsism' (respect to A Level Philosophy!) it was probably the first indication I'd had in my life that earth culture might have anything important to say to me...From then on, my implicit philosophical position has been a faith in the capability of description and analysis and suspicion of any ineffable, unsayable element. Although it's true that I had already had a revelation before this, in discovering the technological concept of Virtual Reality (which as far as I know still remains at its most powerful as a concept, as opposed to its always-disappointing realisations). Kantianism and VR are pretty much the same program, after all.
2.Decaffeinated Motoring
I had to have our car towed into the garage a while back because the clutch transmission had failed. Now I'd already taken the car into the garage twice complaining that the clutch had suddenly started to 'feel' softer. This is quite obviously the kind of thing that has mechanics rolling their eyes and bitching over teabreak. Unless there's some actual problem that stops the car from moving, they find it hard to take you seriously. The increasingly-popular credo of preventive medicine has yet to reach the world of automechanics.
But obviously I knew far better than them that a problem was ('quite liderally mate') afoot. When you drive a car, you cometabolise with the machine; for every action you perform, you expect a certain reaction; you know the response curves of each of the instruments you use. It really is an extraordinary feat of cyborgism, the car-and-driver assemblage (and it's true that petropunk would in fact be a more 'realistic' SF genre than either steam- or cyber-punk). The feedback loops are so tight that you can carry on a conversation, several trains of thought, listen to the radio, and still drive safely - and most people do (from the perspective of a top-down view of the mind/self/cognition, the amount of road deaths is inexplicably low). So if the discipline of automechanics were in any financial need of developing new strategies, which it manifestly isn't, they should listen attentively to the syntonic complaints of sensitive motorists.
I left off some time ago, in commenting k-punk's traffic-in-london post, just as I was about to coin 'decaffeinated motoring' (with a nod to Zizek). This phrase would mark the difference between older, mechanical-plus-electrical vehicles, and newer (post-80s) cars where electronics are given reign over important parts of the car, like transmission, gearing, and braking. Now it's true to say that some of these systems are supposed to make the cars safer, but I find this tendency of electronics to intervene in the car-driver feedback loop disturbing and dangerous.
The role of these steering/braking systems is to anticipate what the driver is going to do, and do it more smoothly/effectively. In effect they counteract the imperfections of the human part of the car-driver assemblage that cause lurches, unruly swerves, and general discomfort for passengers. But insofar as this counteraction, this ironing-out, is imperfect, it gives rise to a queasy feeling, which I provisionally call 'transcendental nausea'. It's a visceral counterpart to the annoying sense I get with sophisticated movie CGI, where something is so very close to being realistic that the remaining gap just destroys all illusions of reality and makes the creatures seem irritatingly unreal. If the monsters are made out of plasticine, but made well, I can accept it more easily; likewise if I slide across the seat whilst travelling round a corner, or get jerked back and forward whilst accelerating or braking, that's OK, it makes sense to my body. But this being cosseted and controlled by systems which aspire to be an exact counterweight to physical reality is nauseating.
These mechanisms are not purely negative; there are also positive touches that are _added_, that go to make up the 'feel' of a car. There are laboratories full of researchers who used to drive cars around test tracks, paying meticulous attention to how each corner, each braking, each gear change felt. And then went back to the engineers, told them which pieces of the system to tweak and how. Now I've no doubt there's someone in the backseat with them, sliding virtual sliders and dials on their laptop screen, making the car magically heavy and light, nippy and solid, ballsy and feeble, at will. Total modulation, chromaticism: not a car but a _car-experience-synthesizer_.
Ultimately, then, the role of these intervening mechanisms is to counteract and nullify all external forces, so as to then build them up again as required. The car becomes an entertainment system, a videogame; would it surprise us if within a few years the finely-sampled characteristics of different types of cars which are used in games like Gran Turismo, were actually applied in real vehicles? Slot in the cartridge for whatever car you feel like driving today - Rolls, Bentley, Ferrari. On the screen in front of you, you see a view of the road pre-processed to take out all insignificant stimuli. This would be the automobile equivalent of the universal turing machine: a car capable of simulating all cars. There isn't much further to take the internal combustion engine. New body shapes, comfier seats, paranoia-dampening safety features, it can't go on forever. The future is in entertainment, transcendental climate-control. And this, unlike the mechanical age, is about disconnection, to a sociopathic degree, rather than the mad connection to mechanical contraptions that was dangerous, foolhardy, but ultimately libidinizing rather than prophylactic (which presumably returns us to Zizek's original point).
This reinforces the image of cars as self-enhancing machines; what could be more individual, more reinforcing of the impermeable self, than this machine which in its highest form, would even sublate or cancel the physical joy of movement, in order to serve up a perfectly controlled simulation of it? Like the artificial beach in Japan where swimmers paddle furiously to stay in place amidst the electronically-generated waves, they are technologies of stasis, solipsist-pods, dedicated to controlled experience. (for years Virilio has studied in detail this technological Aufhebung).
The danger is that the electronic and digital are of a different order to the mechanical. Not simply more complex, even by orders of magnitude. Of a different order because of a dependence on code; an electronic system depends on certain of its parts being interpreted by certain other of its parts according to a preset semiotic system _to which the user is not privy_. Obviously this means they are non-tamperable - and non-fixable even for most mechanics, who will simply bin the black box and stick a new one in. (Don't think they don't break, because every car mechanic will tell you that the more electronic gadgets in a car, the more visits it makes to their ramp). So, do you really want the nonorganic symbiotic transmission between your brain, your arms, the steering wheel, the steering column, the gears, and the wheels, to be articulated into many pieces, with little animated paperclips in the interstices saying 'You look like you're trying to turn left, would you like some help with that?'
I'm not at all blind to the beauty of the digital, nor do I deny that there is a similar symbiosis, in certain circumstances to be had with computers. But it's only the insane logic of 'product development' that would have us interfere with a coupling that works so well that it's transformed the world. When crash really _means_ crash, I think I'd rather stick with brute mechanism (like Will Smith in I, Robot ;).
3.No Windows
(1714) Leibniz introduces the word 'monad' for the ultimate 'simple substances' of the universe. Each of these 'souls', says Leibniz, is a mirror of the entire universe; if you will, a spherical lens that projects into its centre a perfect image of everything that is without it. Faced with the apparent logical impossibility of monads influencing each other (because of their absolute individuality and substantiality), and yet with the puzzling evidence that things do indeed seem to happen, Leibniz posited a God who simultaneously beamed information into each of the monads to make it seem _as if_ they were interacting. The 'differentiation within that which changes', within each monad, is driven from inside, is a matter of the monad's perception, of its focal image of the universe, which is now shown to be merely apparent. The whole universe has become a simulation - a Parmenidean LCD screen where the illusion of change is imparted by the sequential illumination of seperate, noncommunicating elements. 'The System of pre-established harmony' : A beautiful, wondrous, but profoundly paranoid philosophy, which traps us inside our souls with no hope of escape. When Leibniz makes use of Hippocrates' saying of the body of an animal that 'all things conspire', do we not see a sinister side to this supposed conspiracy, a return of the evil demons that haunted Descartes? The most elegant, understated threat of this oppressive imprisonment, this eternal internment within a crystal globe is Leibniz's phrase : 'Monads have no windows, by which anything could come in or go out.'
4.Hollow Earth
(1692) Halley suggests that the changes in directionality of the earths magnetic field could only be explained by the existence of a multiple magnetic field. 'Halley came to believe that the Earth was hollow and within it was a second sphere with another field. In fact, to account for all the variations in the field, Halley finally proposed that the Earth was composed of some four spheres, each nested inside another.'
(1770) Mathematician Leonard Euler (co-creator, with Leibniz, of calculus, but also leader of an 'anti-monad' academic movement which had the aim of discrediting Leibniz's philosophy) states that "mathematically the Earth has to be hollow" - specifically, a single hollow sphere containing a sun 600 miles wide within which was to be found a civilization far more advanced than we earthlings.
(1818) On 10th April all members of congress receive a letter from Jno. Cleves Symnes, captain (retd) Ohio Infantry: 'To the whole world : I declare that the Earth is hollow and habitable in the interior. It contains several solid, concentric spheres, placed one inside the other.'
(c1919) A german airman, held prisoner in france, somehow comes across pamphlets ('The Sword of Fire!') that extol the teachings of the short-lived american sect of Koreshism. Alone, in near-darkness, he begins to absorb the dark vision of Cyrus Reed Tead, who himself had been enlightened (or benighted) whilst meditating on the Book of Isiah in his chemical laboratory. This man, was to become an evangelist for the theory of the Hollow Earth, a theory that turns our normal terran perceptions inside-out. The Earth is a sphere. But we do not live on its surface. Through the force of solar radiations, we adhere to the _inside_ of a spherical cavity hollowed out from an infinite universe of impermeable rock. All round us, there is nothing but rock. In the centre of the cavity is our 'sky', the root of our religions, our dreams. It is a globe of blue gas, a vacuum containing a phantom universe.
(1932) Herr Bender, and his theory, become popular with officers of the German Admiralty and Air Force High Command.
(1942) 'To a nation of primitive, unhappy and mystically-minded people anything strange seemed admissible, especially if it were something as comprehensible and consoling as the idea of a hollow earth. Hitler and his cronies, who were men of the 'people' and hostile to any kind of intellectualism, were no doubt more inclined to accept the ideas of a man like Bender than the theories of an Einstein which revealed a universe of infinite complexity which demanded an infinitely delicate approach. Bender's world was apparently as mad as Einstein's; but represented a more elementary form of madness.'
Is it really true that in April 1942 A Dr Heinz Fisher (k-punk alert!) led an Expedition to the Baltic Island of Rugen, for the purpose of pulsing radar waves into the sky? Unknown to most of the scientists present on the expedition, the aim was to confirm that the signals would travel through the cavity and be picked up accordingly, bounced from the other side of the earth, back through the miniscule phantom universe.
'To their amazement, the radar remained fixed in the same position for several days. It was then that they learned the reason: Hitler had forme the idea that the Earth is not convex but concave. We are not living on the outside of a globe, but inside it. Our position is comparable to that of flies walking about inside a round bowl. The object of the expedition was to demonstrate this truth scientifically.'
(1943) Amazing Stories receives a letter containing what purports to be elements of the alphabet of an antediluvian civilization. The letter comes from an 'S. Shaver', Richard Sharpe Shaver. Retrieved from the wastepaper basket by legendary editor-in-chief Ray Palmer, the letter is printed. Readers demand to know the source of this apparently proto-atlantean dictionary. Answer comes in a letter from the author 'Mutan Mion', who claims to be one of a race of immortal demigods who, before the Atlantean catacylsm, had colonised the surface and interior of Lemuria (now Earth)
After being genetically attacked by the changing chemical structure of the sun, the Lemurians retreated deep into the earth, from which Mion now sends Palmer his detailed treatises.
The Lemurians, with their unimaginably advanced technology, yet turned sour by their sojourn beneath the earth, are focusing 'deleterious rays' on surface-dwelling humans- including the unfortunate Shaver.
A crane operator and body-shop welder, Shaver's stories abound with proto-PhilipKDickian turns of phrase out of a parallel-universe rustbelt: tradenames, machine part contractions and acronyms: The attacking Lemurians with their deleterious rays are 'detrimental robots' or 'deros', and their rays are combated by the beneficial 'telaug-rays' of the 'integrative robots' or 'teros'. (Shaver doesn't detail exactly how the rays enter his body, but one gets the feeling that Judge Schreber haunts the scene.)
The next letter comes from prison where Shaver, 'blindly urged into the subtle energy of the telepathy machines...a well-intentioned human being, had been brought, by those potent rays in the hands of evil idiots in earth's hidden caverns!'. A clear case of paranoid delusion, surely?
5.Inconclusion
No conclusion (I've concluded that this long-mulled post will never quite make sense), only the resonance of these crazy, outdated, insane, paranoid notions with our current Self-enforcing technologies.
'The Hohl Welt Lehre, which considered humanity to be the only intelligence in the universe, which reduced that universe to the dimensions of the earth and gave men the sensation of being enfolded, enclosed and protected, like a foetus in the womb, satisfied certain aspirations of an unhappy people, thrown back on themselves and full of pride and resentment against the outside world.'
[Biblio:
Leibniz 'Monadology' , 'Metaphysical Consequences of the Principle of Reason';
Jim Schnabel, 'Dark White';
Pauwels & Bergier (=the occult Deleuze & Guattari!) 'Dawn of the Magicians'
this site ('UNmuseum'! k-punk/hyperstition alert!)
]
Posted by robin at 04:17 PM