Ray Brassier on Bergson

I have to say that while I disagree with Brassier simply because we are different kinds of naturalists, I share his respect for the sheer complexity and novelty of Bergson's ideas as found in books like Matter and Memory.   

(Mp3 audio download  +  .pdf handout)

Part Two |  Part Three  |  Part Four  | Part Five

Meillassoux and process theism

To create and destroy even becoming ...

Over the past few days I have been re-reading some texts in metaphysical theology by Quentin Meillassoux, especially his essay "Immanence of the World Beyond" and his dissertation The Divine Inexistence. I have come to the conclusion that Meillassoux's God has process -relational features as much as it does, ontologically and epistemologically, features similar to the God presented by both Caputo and Kearney. Similarly, these features are also found in German idealism, especially in Schelling and Hegel.  In this post I just want to jot down what I take to be the process-relational features of Meillassoux's God.  I can approach Caputo's and Kearney's process thought at another time.

In terms of the radical contingency behind Meillassoux's God, I am first struck by how it reminds me in some very qualified but important respects of Whitehead's and Hartshorne's process God.  I say this because while Meillassoux's God in total does not exist but someday *may*, it is his Hyperchaotic ground which seems to encompass many of the aspects of the di-polar process God's contingent or virtual pole as a sort of transcendental condition or "ground."  And while there certainly is a difference in how power is conceived (Meillassoux's version is an unbridled power and utterly absolute, independent; the process philosopher's power is relative and non-coercive), it is the ontological scheme of how that power forms a sort of transcendental creative condition  which makes me think of process thought.  This transcendental ground (the Hyper-chaos, and also the virtual) is also quite similar to what some of the German idealists were doing, especially Schelling with the "unruly ground" and the divine "Potenzen" (this even despite Meillassoux posing being and becoming against each other in correlationism: Schelling and Hegel are important influences for him as he has already admitted in interviews).  Add emphasis on the process by which the virtual real spontaneously creates, and again, thinking about Meillassoux's God in process terms seems to make more sense.  The concepts of creativity and novelty both arise from the pole of Meillassouxian contingency. And so Meillassoux and process thought seem to fit together, but so far only on one hobbling leg of contingency.

One must keep in mind the places in Meillassoux's philosophy where the actual pole seems to take on a crucial function, most particularly the arche-fossil, for example.  Here one may consider the arche-fossil, ancestrality, as the "objective immortality of the past" and the other side of Whiteheadian or process di-polarity.  This is readily provided by the actuality of the "great outdoors" and the individuated reals which communicate their mathematizable properties.  These artifacts do not require the human, but nevertheless propel inquirers along into future worlds (whether of matter, life, thought or justice).  Further, science and empirical thought are the guiding lights to consider these "preserved" actual occasions in their immortal temporal tomb.  Reason and mathematics, prized lights of Whitehead as well, offer their own services in discerning the material real as empirical condition.  And so here we have the other leg of di-polarity: the actual. 

What reinforces these two pieces of Meillassouxian "process" thought?  Answer: the virtual God.  Meillassoux is thus close enough to a process theologian who seems to be emphasizing the virtual or contingent pole and its power for ethical, and religious, redemption, alebit more than likely unbeknownst to him.  Why?  

Although a specific deity does not "exist" (yet) in Meillassoux's ontology, the divine inexistence nevertheless possesses a role of truly divine power warranting the name "God" (that non-deity whose power is involved with the creation of time itself). This virtual force whose function is divine and God-like - something whose appearance is to be hoped for so that s Fourth World of Justice may be come to pass - arises from within a necessary contingency and is thus is entirely "possible" even though it is beyond ontological possibility itself (it is virtual).  Give that, such a power truly must be a divine inexistence.

This virtual entity is able to embrace both poles of the divine life found in process theisms of whatever variety (Whitehead or Hartshorne).  

To conclude: the nature and importance of a necessary contingent ground (which equals a sort of divine or ultimate freedom), the place of empirical thought vis-a-vis the divine and speculation about it (pace Whitehead), and the hope for justice through the coming to be of a virtual God (pace Caputo, Kearney), one seems to find a being "to be" freed from its virtual prison as a sort of ontological being in process of adventing itself before the world. This being seems to have a distinct ontological integrity all of its own.  

If the Meillassouxian Hyper-chaos can destroy even becoming, in *its* own power, then I ask how why not regard such a ground as divine, as Godhead birthing a process or coming to be God? Regarding the real possible as ground for creative addition, an addition and power that is even "beyond" becoming is still included within the divine life as an aspect of the di-polar God (Whitehead himself speaks this way by making creativity the ultimate category of nature) ...  [I have Peircean Firstness, the "can-be" possible, in mind here as well].

This hyper-chaotic time is able to create and destroy even becoming, producing without reason fixity or movement, repetition or creation. That’s why I think that ultimately the matter of philosophy is not being or becoming, representation or reality, but a very special possibility, which is not a formal possible, but a real and dense possible, which I call the “peut-être”- the ‘may-be’.   

- Q. Meillassoux (Time without Becoming)

an appraisal of Whiteheadian nontheism (and why it is insufficient)

Article HERE: Lewis S. Ford, "An Appraisal of Whiteheadian nontheism". 

Alfred North Whitehead’s analysis of present immediacy in terms of a succession of acts of becoming, called “actual occasions,” focuses attention on the problem of subjectivity, particularly upon the way it originates anew in every moment.  In part this is understood in terms of creativity, the ceaseless activity whereby many past occasions are unified to form one actuality, itself in turn becoming one actuality among many for the superseding occasions.  But creativity by itself is simply blind activity, supplying the drive but not the focus for such convergence.  Without an ideal possibility for the process to aim at, there is no reason why creativity would not be just as divergent as convergent, achieving unity only accidentally if at all.  Subjectivity is not merely sheer activity, for the activity must be capable of unifying itself, and for this it must be purposive to some degree.  Whitehead therefore suggests that subjectivity is this purposive process of unification guided by that ideal possibility at which it aims.  This subjective aim must be derived from somewhere, from an actuality which is not anyone of the occasions of the past.  Since it is the ultimate source of all values, and hence properly worthy of worship, Whitehead calls this nontemporal actuality “God.”

in defense of relations

"No doubt as long as man and all other animals are viewed as independent creations, an effectual stop is put to our natural desire to investigate as far as possible the causes of Expression ..." -Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)

While at a conference recently I brought up the ethical value of prehending specifically animal expressions of interior life, but also of all life and possibly the inorganic as well.  Expression, aesthetic expression I should say, is the semiotic key of access to the infinite value and worth of all things, of the interior life of objects, or better put, what I would call dynamic singular agents.  

At the conference my goal was to introduce the panpsychist idea of extending "perspective" or "agency" (in place of something like "subjective" interior experience) to all things organic and non-organic.  My point was that there is something forever inaccessible about the withdrawing nature of a thing's interior life, its infinite value and worth, that nevertheless is aesthetically communicated through feeling and sensation; perhaps even through the emotions - in other words, a trace of the vanishing intensity which crystallized as a material emotional expression.  

Aesthetic feeling directed is a "sensate message" in its value-intensity: it is an aesthetic and semiotic communication to be prehended (and thus also a power).  This is all to say that the "perspective" of things may be felt not only in the persistence of a thing's own powering, but also as an expression communicated semiotically in a message that is to be felt.

Objects?

Darwin's quote is meant to indicate that when we see these expressions of interior life as being unrelated to others (entirely "independent" creations) we tend to mute rather than respect the very power and capacity of a living perspective to communicate its own experience of meaning to another. 

It is that power and capacity of a perspective to communicate its own interior life, to speak for itself to another, that is to be honored and cherished, along with its value and worth as a perspective persisting in its own right.  This is not to say that relatedness must always mean something for someone but only that there is a power whose own interior emanates a trace of the interior: perspective and agency signified and made known, only if partially so.  There is a value in "making known," expression is always two sided: at a minimum between agent and an agent's own self-making as a form of expression which individuates it.

To conclude: Communication, the making-known-of-meaning, seems to be a cosmic act, indicative of an interior intention that may have no other receiver than the universe itself.

God and the logic of worlds

 


I. Introduction to Modality and Possibility  

A. Modal Logic Introduced (download .pdf file) 

B. Introduction to Modality and Possibility (G. W. F. Leibniz and David Lewis)



II. How Modal Logic Enhances Theology 

A. In the second clip below, around 1:20, we find out how a logic of possible worlds can enhance theology.

III. Plantinga on Leibniz's best of all possible worlds argument




IV. Is God a necessary being (in all worlds)?  Or is God an absolutely contingent being that may be (now), but once is, must be?

V. Why this World?  Modal Realism and God

A. Would Multiple Universes Undermine God? Closer to Truth Program PBS (link to videos)

B. Why this World?  (Skeptic Magazine article)

C. Cosmology and Theology (Stanford Entry)

D. Are there Multiple Universes?

E. How Vast is the Cosmos?

VI. Charles Hartshorne: The Logic of Perfection 

A. Charles Hartshorne (Stanford entry)

B. Charles Hartshorne (Harvard Square)

C. Ontological Arguments (Stanford entry)

D. "Charles Hartshorne and the Ontological Argument" (Process Studies, Vol. 14, Number 1, Spring, 1984): 11-20.

E. Hartshorne's Modal Argument 

we have never been material (part 2)

This goes way, way beyond Cartesian dualism and the "how do you know that this isn't a dream" gimmick.  Contemporary science has some insights into something very strange indeed ...   

Closer to Truth - "Is this Universe a Simulation?" (Kurzweil)

Closer to Truth - "Is this Universe a Simulation?" (Minsky, Lanier, Rees, and others)

we have never been material

Blue Jungle - I'm Your Puppet 

In the article, "Scientists striving to put a human face on the robot generation" we read that,

The CONCEPT project monitors how people engage with and react to the ‘LightFace’ robot when given the task of teaching it the meaning of words and concepts, just as they might a young child.

The robot is capable of producing a range of subtle and naturalistic expressions thanks to its computer generated responses which are projected onto its ‘face’. 

And in the related article, "The Coming Artilect War" we read that,

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. This trend has been valid for over 40 years and is likely to continue until around 2020, by which time we will be able to place one bit of information on a single atom. These atom-bits will be able to switch their state (a 0 or a 1) in femtoseconds, which are quadrillionths (1015) times of a second. There are a trillion, trillion (1024) atoms in a handheld object, such as an apple, so potentially, the information processing capacity of such an object would be about 1040 bits per second. Compare this number with the estimated equivalent of the human brain, which is about 1016 bits per second, or a trillion, trillion times smaller. You'll begin to see why I believe that the rise of the artilect, a godlike intelligent machine, will be so disruptive later this century.

You may object that a massive bit-processing rate is only a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for generating hyper-intelligence. Agreed. What is also needed is the appropriate human brain-like neural circuitry, but this is coming too. Nanotechnology, or molecular scale engineering, is increasingly supplying the tools to decipher the secrets of human brain function. Today, thanks to Henri Markram's work in Switzerland, every neural connection is known in a single cortical column of a rat brain's cortex. (A rat has about a thousand such columns, each consisting of about 10,000 highly interconnected neurons, and the human brain contains about a million.)

This detailed connectivity knowledge has been put into supercomputers, so that computer-savvy neuroscientists can perform experiments in a computer, that is, conduct "e-neuroscience." So a supercomputer will be able to perform the same functions as a rat's cortical column, but a million times faster--at electronic speeds compared to the rat's chemical speeds. Following Moore's Law, the whole rat brain will be thus simulated within a decade, and the human brain a decade or two later...Imagine a world in which the cyborgs become increasingly prevalent....[for example] A young mother who has just given birth may choose to add a grain of artilectual sand to her newly born baby's brain, converting it into an artilect. There is so much computing capacity in that grain of sand that she has effectively "killed" her baby. It is no longer human, but an artilect in human disguise. Imagine older parents watching their adult children becoming cyborgs, so that their children are no longer human. 

I've often wondered about this theory: if the super-human intelligences were powerful enough, could they, through the direct manipulation and control of atoms via quantum computing, copy, determine and control reality itself (the physical workings of the universe on the subatomic level, this including the flow of "time" as constituted by the position of physical particles in space-time) - and, if the same super-human intelligences were benevolent enough, then could it be a possibility that they may travel back in time and "digitally copy" bit by bit each and every single experience that ever occurred responsible for human "history," making an exact duplicate reality - an effective "copy" universe - available to be replayed again and again for the enjoyment of the very experiencers copied?  Every life that ever lived would be replicated.  Every event duplicated - all experiences ever known to exist would be digitally scanned as an electronic current replicate, available in storage for "replay."  (The thesis being that "to be" is better than to "never have been at all.")

Moreover, could these intelligences "upload" the copied experiences of any human being - any thing - that ever "lived" (now transferred as 0's and 1's into the realm of the circuit) to be replayed again and again, in effect eliminating "death" (life being the experience of virtual experience in eternal recurrence)?  How, being played on a loop that copy of one's so-called and merely apparent chemical life, might one be able to tell the difference between material physical atoms switching on and off in their chemical circuits and the now digitally playing 0's and 1's switching on and off as electronic currents in that super-intelligent "brain"?  

Could it be that we are all electronic agents of current running in a program, housed in some supercomputer on a ship out in space, aeons in the "future," light-years away from the now dead earth, we 0's and 1's virtually subsisting?  Were our material bodies rescued and converted up into the eternity of silicon and electricity so that we may forever cherish the very life of organic experience that we once had, with the fear of death being only a virtual possibility - one which serves only to provide the illusion that there is an end, this in order to give a required contrast so that we value "life" as we live it?

"4.3 Simulation in Virtual Reality. We exist merely or marginally in someone’s or something’s simulation, in an artificial sensory construction that is an imitation of what reality might be but is not; for example, a Matrix-like world in which all perceptions are fed directly into the human nervous system (“brains in vats”) or into our disembodied consciousness. Alternatively, we exist as processes generated by pure software running  inside cosmic quantum supercomputers." SKEPTIC Vol 13. No. 2 (2007): 37.

Thus, we never have been material ... 

Caputo on Meillassoux Reading Group - Post 7

  Audio HERE.  Apologies to those looking for my realism and nominalism post.  I have a bad habit of pressing the 'publish' button when I should be pressing the 'save' one instead. I have been working on that post for two or three days and just can't get a version of it that I like enough to keep online for very long.  Have been tweaking things here and there, experimenting and so forth.

metaphysics of the infinite

Speculum Criticum has an interesting post up HERE concerning Badiou's mathematization of nature.  Meillassoux in similar vein states that the mathematizable properties or powers of a thing is the thing essentially and as it is "most real" apart from the human.  The criticism is that this is a "Pythagoric snare" - that one makes a mistake when

contingent aspects of mathematical models are used to reach cosmological or ontological conclusions.

In conversations that I had awhile back with a colleague of mine - his name was Keith and he was a pretty fervent atheist - but he was also a mathematician from whom I learned much - he would always question my own "Pythagoric snare" in the sense that I read Deleuze, but also Peirce, in order to mathematically reach cosmological and ontological conclusions regarding God.  The center of my mathematical considerations was and still is to this today the metaphysics of infinity, especially as one might take deity to be of an infinite nature, eternal or without limit, and so forth.  Being an atheist Keith was always skeptical of this, but I always did enjoy our conversations.

black bear

Late evening hike in Cherry Valley, PA - right before we saw a bear in this swamp.

darkness

Wastelands of Iowa en route to Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin.