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April 30, 2007
Speculative Realism s-r arc
Iain Hamilton Grant: nature philosophy
A claim:
- The form of a thought is not independent of its content
- The form ultimately derives from thought's content, its object: nature
- The study forms of thought in themselves (e.g. linguistics, brain science, sociology of knowledge) could be regarded as a dubious enterprise insofar as they abstract away content
- Universally valid forms of thought derive from the universe, so logic is physics
Suppose you are Goethe doing botanical studies. Through a long period of study of different flowering plants—and of particular plants in different states of development—through the use of the imagination to see plant forms related by a system of transformations—you allow the inherent logic of plant form to insinuate itself into your thinking. This gives you access to an idea of the plant that is objective in the sense of not belonging to you but to the plant itself. Appearing in thought is simply something that the plant does. (As a sideline perhaps, rather than as its day job.)
I think that there's a tension between saying that all structures of thought come from nature, and saying that a certain thought can be characterised as being objective by virtue of it taking its structure from its object's nature. In the latter case either thought is initially unnatural and can fail to obtain objectivity; or thought is initially objective but is prone to being denatured.
Many years ago I had an interest in John Lilly, a one-time NIMH researcher who invented the sensory deprivation tank (and so inspired the film Altered States, the source of my interest). I think he makes a good counter-example to this notion of objectivity. He pursued his investigation of the mind through naïve empiricism: self experimentation and self observation. He would spend hours in his tank, and then write up the resultant intense hallucinations. He progressed on to LSD, and then Ketamine. (I think it was around this point that he came to believe that he was a robot scientist sent back from the 25th century to observe 20th century human life.)
I remember reading an interview with Lilly in, I don't know, Omni or something. He was going on about the difference between ‘insanity’ and ‘outsanity’: where the latter is the consensual everyday world, and the former is the stuff in your (or rather his) head that it is difficult to talk about because it's so crazy. The reason I say that this is a counter-example is that this outcome looks largely determined by his method of investigation: a psychedelic cartesianism leading to mad dualism. In other words his thought was subjective in the sense of its content coming from its form, and not vice versa.
Perhaps the attempt to evacuate thought of content led to a cognitive equivalent video feedback, whereby the slightest remaining wisps of worldliness get amplified and mutated so that they seem to have a life of their own despite ultimately have an external source.
Graham Harman: Object-oriented philosophy
My initial curiosity was due a coincidence of words: Harman's is an object-oriented philosophy deriving from Heidegger's tool analysis. I thought I'd got the present-at-hand / ready-to-hand distinction through my thick skull. And a while back I was trying to think through the idea of Object Oriented Programming being Artificial Intelligence in drag, with both being based on a view of thought as the manipulation of representations of present at hand objects, leading to a suggestion that Rodney Brooks work in robotics and the emergence of agile software development (e.g. Extreme Programming) were parallel reactions. (I never got to the bottom of it.) I was worried that Harman might scramble what little I'd made of that all.
But, no, it wasn't anything like that.
There's the definition of an object: something which can be spoken of but that is not exhausted by what is said. (I think that was it. It now becomes clear why other people were taking notes.) It suggests that, e.g., if Boethius were right about music (that the theory is more perfect than the music itself) then music would fail to be an object. Come to think of it, if (big, up-front) object-oriented software design worked the way it was supposed to then objects would fail to be objects.
My mind's now gone rather blank, so I will make do with a couple of tangential remarks.
There was a claim that objects are distinguished by their qualities. There was an example given that, as real doubloons are different from imaginary doubloons, then they must differ in their qualities. There was a question as to how objects could be distinguished, since it was previously said that an object had an infinity of qualities. There was an answer that it was possible because there can be different sizes of infinity. This seemed needless and a bit random:
- To judge the cardinality of a set of qualities implies that this set can be comprehended, which contradicts what was said about an object not being exhausted by what can be said about it.
- To distinguish two objects only requires a single distinguishing quality to be found. It is identifying objects that surely becomes an infinite task, as it requires all the qualities. (cf Steven Vickers' geometric logic.)
And also there's the thing about index cards. Harman mentioned that is preparation he'd written the names of the four speakers on different cards, and formed different arrangements on his desk of groupings and contrasts. Also:
We now have five kinds of object […] five different types of relation […] three adjectives for what unfolds inside an object […] and three different kinds of noise […] a good initial model whose very strictness will smoke out those elements it might have overlooked.I'm just noticing; it might be nothing. Ward Cunningham; Raymond Lull. That's all I'm saying.
Posted by robin2 at April 30, 2007 11:12 PM