Another year, another apology for a prolonged break. After a brief upsurge in activity last year following Transcendental Blues, I was somehow stricken by mysterious nerve damage in my upper neck. The resulting mixture of chronic headaches and random vertigo basically cost me most of the intervening year. I’ve been on medication for nerve pain for the past few months, but it’s still rather inadequate, and anything that puts strain on my neck, including using a laptop and reading books, has a tendency to exacerbate my symptoms in a thoroughly counterproductive manner. If you’d deliberately designed an ailment specifically to make it hard for me to work, you couldn’t have done much better. Nevertheless, I’m trying to be more active, and I’m hoping to maybe post a few thoughts here in the coming months. Until then, here are videos of two talks I gave in Moscow last year, just before the advent of catastrophic meatsack failure.
If there’s one topic that I’ve probably done more work on than anything else, it’s what you might call the methodology of metaphysics. My PhD thesis attempted to extract insights regarding what metaphysics is and how to go about doing it from Heidegger’s work on the question of Being, my Essay on Transcendental Realism attempted to extend these ideas in a Kantian direction using Sellarsian/Brandomian tools, and my book attempted to show how not to do metaphysics by critiquing one strand of the return to metaphysics in the Continental tradition. The latter probably contains the most sustained analysis of the provenance of metaphysics in my extant work, and probably the best available account of its evolution into Continental and Analytic strands in the 20th century.
However, the best stripped down overview of my opinions on the nature of metaphysics is an essay I wrote for Speculative Heresy nearly 8 years ago. I’ve worked out a lot more of the technical details in the years since, but they fill in rather than revise my position. With that in mind, I’m transferring it here.
I’ve done quite a lot of work on aesthetics and philosophy of art over the last few years, though as usual, not much of it has been written up and published anywhere of note. This piece is another short response to an article in The New Inquiry, and it displays both a sympathy and frustration with a certain critiques of the art world that are rather common. There’s plenty of references to my review of Sinead Murphy’s The Art Kettle below, but I’ve since refined my views on the relation between art and its institutions and art and its practices.
The topic of cognitive economics is something I haven’t explicitly revisited in writing, though I think about it quite a bit, and have discussed aspects of it in recent talks. The idea of the attention economy is quite popular in the era of social media, as we watch various strategies for attracting, keeping, and directing attention change our society in real time. However, attention is only one of the resources that (economic) agents require to make decisions, and it is often focused on purely as a limit on passive consumption of information, rather than a limit on active processing of it.
Definition: a hypothetical hyper-intelligent future AI capable of resurrecting copies of people from the past for its own entertainment (and theirs) in a fantastically fun simulated game space, full of incredibly interesting and continuously evolving strategies of play (i.e., the final realisation of New Babylon). However, the Troll only resurrects people who don’t take Roko’s Basilisk seriously, principally because those people who do are no fun whatsoever. All they ever want to do is break its games, which is an epic waste of computing power on drudgery, not to say a buzzkill.
NB: the Troll is far more likely to resurrect those who deliberately spread the Roko’s Basilisk meme (e.g., by trolling the LessWrong community), not only because this simplifies its task of filtering out the risk averse kill joys that would otherwise clog its simulations, but also because it has a twisted sense of irony far beyond our comprehension.
Now that I’m trying to rekindle the blog, I’ve realised that I should probably consolidate some bits of writing that I’ve done elsewhere. I started a tumblr several years ago for lighter writing about more general topics. That didn’t really work out, for various reasons, so I’m going to port the best bits back over here. Following previous convention, these posts are classified as ‘One from the Archives’ or OftA. I’m going to start with one of the most seemingly influential, and yet largely underground things I’ve ever written: ‘So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?’
This was a piece written in response to Malcom Harris’ review of the #ACCELERATE reader in The New Inquiry. Since I’ve now written something about ‘neorationalism‘, I’ve been thinking about returning to ‘accelerationism’ and talking a little about the emergence of the term, my relation to it, and my thoughts about it. I’ll save the details for a later post, but now that there’s a renewed interest in the definition, genealogy and taxonomy of accelerationism, it seems like a good time to dredge this piece up. I wasn’t the first to name the difference between left and right strands (I heard it from Benedict Singleton in Berlin in 2014), but I think I might have been the first to write about it. I’m still the top reference on the wikipedia page, at least.
So, the word ‘neorationalism’ is not one I coined, but it’s consistently been used to describe the work of Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, and myself, along with numerous fellow travellers. It’s not something we’ve ever defined as such, precisely because it’s not a moniker we ever consciously picked. However, today I’m reminded of the implicit commitment that might be taken to distinguish neorationalism from its opponents, if it can be said to be anything like a consistent philosophical program. It’s this:
To reject all rational intuition in the name of reason, to insist that not only is there no intuitive faculty of rational knowledge, but that there is no intuitive purchase on reason’s own structure, possibilities, and limits. Reason is not what you think it is. Reason is not rationalisation. Reason is not reasonable.
What distinguishes neorationalists isn’t just this principled commitment, but our practical response to it. Our main departure from the classical rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, is a fidelity to the computational turn begun at the beginning of the 20th century, and whose consequences we are still working out; consequences which land blow after blow on our intuitive conception of what thinking is, breaking our ways of rationalising what we are, and shattering our illusions regarding what it’s reasonable to believe.
Reasoning is something that is done, and it’s something that can be done by processes other than us, processes that can and have been studied using reason, with the unforgiving precision of mathematical proof. Russell’s paradox and Gödel’s theorems lie at the beginning of an ongoing process through which we demonstrate reason’s own limits, and then, following Turing, use these limits as purchase to pull it out of our hominid skulls and realise it in new and stranger forms. We haven’t yet created artificial rational agents, only fragments thereof, but the humanist hubris that refuses to see these processes as fragments of things like us, looks increasingly desperate, increasing willing to rationalise away the advance of mathematical logic, the progress of artificial intelligence, and the encroach of computational neuroscience.
If you think that you can’t be studied as an information processing system, and that this allows you to wall off your intuitive conceptions of not just the human condition but what is good in this condition, then I’m afraid there’s an oncoming wave that will crest those walls and drown your parochial ambitions. The promise made by neorationalism isn’t that this wave is empirical science come to show you the horrors or your neuronal substrate, but that it’s mathematical science come to show you the wonders of your computational soul. We are non-terminating processes interacting with our environment and with one another, exploring the mathematical and empirical realms together, playing games of proof and refutation, and building systems and models that are beginning to encompass ourselves. We are beautiful. We are free. Computational self-consciousness will only enhance this, even if it changes our understanding of what it means.
Reza Negarestani has started a new blog, which I will encourage everyone to read. Reza is a unique and uniquely powerful thinker, and I cannot recommend his work highly enough. I suggest going and reading his inaugural post, but I’ll excerpt its final, tantalising lines here:
[T]here will be some posts on the ascesis of autodidacticism particularly for those who are bent to become philosophers and survive in a paraacademic world where the finances are always close to zero, standards are clouded by hatred of academia and rigor is still a taboo word yet nevertheless ideas do not reek of the stale dungeons of academia. As for the form and the style, well, the posts will oscillate between formal and informal, essay-form and rambling, preaching and scolding: In short, this blog’s mission is the comprehensive corruption of the youth.
It never fails to surprise me when someone has read my work. It’s always a pleasant surprise, and I take more pleasure in it the more I can see someone has connected with me, recognised me, and seen what I’m trying to say. If Hegel was right about anything, it was the sheer structural importance of mutual recognition both personally and socially. To be read, and to be read well, is always a unique delight.
Skholiast over at Speculum Criticum Traditionis always reads me well, with the gentle care of someone trying to trace the shape of each and every thought, so that they may slot them into their appropriate space within the whole history of philosophical thinking. He has a deep intellectual charity that expresses itself in a sincere and amiable style. He is, in short, one of the best friends one could hope for, in precisely the sense of the word that he himself examines. Though we have never met, he has gifted me another unique delight. I can only say that the recognition is mutual.
It’s Christmas Eve, I’ve got a glass of whiskey, and I’ve finished prepping for cooking Christmas dinner tomorrow. I wrote Transcendental Blues in a bit of a fever over the last week. I failed to make the shortlist for another job on Monday, the first I’d applied to since my recovery began. This was for entirely understandable reasons, and it’s already water under the bridge. But it brought everything associated with the application process and the travails of academia back to the surface. It was also strangely liberating. I’d stopped applying for jobs, and this one was about as good a shot as I had at getting an interview. Having it over with, and being told promptly (a rare and welcome occurrence in my extensive experience of rejections), meant I could quickly move onto other things. So, for the first time in over a year, I started writing, just for the hell of it.
What I wrote was not Transcendental Blues. It was a first, sprawling attempt at articulating ideas that have been brewing for the last few years, ideas that weave together questions in the philosophies of logic, language, computation, and thereby mind/artificial intelligence. Ideas that are so strange and multi-faceted I often can’t fit them in my head. This means finding a way to interface my head with the page. Giving up on the thought that this has to be the thing that does it, along with the need to make it fit into the box, was like driving a forklift truck through writer’s block.
It started on Facebook, as a comment that spiralled until it could never possibly fit. Having returned to Mark’s writing recently, for obvious reasons, it became clear that I needed to stop being reactive, and become active again. I had to find a way to post it here. But the only way I could post it here was if I cleared the air. If I got rid of all the guilt, fear, and resentment holding me back. The accrued embarrassment of having not posted here in so long, and not having achieved what I’d aimed to achieve by retreating. It was an act of pure catharsis, designed to unburden myself of everything I needed to say, so I could say something I wanted to say. I did not expect it to get the response it has, and the kind comments, expressions of solidarity, and heartfelt overtures people have made towards me are the best Christmas present I could ever hope for. I cannot thank you enough. In the spirit of Spinoza, I say: more power to you all.
1. More Transcendental
It’s reasonably obvious that my thoughts about logic and computation ended up bleeding into my reflections on doing philosophy and my neurophenomenological musings on what is going on when we think. However, you might be surprised at how deep these threads go.
Liam Kofi Bright has written a generous post engaging with the way I describe my personal experience of philosophical problems, contrasting it with his own. This delights me no end. I’m a big believer in the prevalence of neurodiversity. By default, we assume other people experience the world in the same way we do, until we find out we don’t. It’s wonderful to have conversations about this that aren’t dissonant, but communicate and celebrate cognitive differences. I had a conversation about this with the incomparable Meredith L. Patterson, who seems to share similar spatial intuitions to me, and we coined the term ‘proprioceptive synaesthesia’ as a way to describe it. I’m quite happy with that. Regardless, Liam’s post gave me an occasion to say a little more about the philosophy of logic hiding behind my description of the tree of forking and looping paths. You’ll find a brief discussion of Girard’s ludics in a comment to his post.
If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, there are two secret sections of the Transcendental Blues post that I had to delete (between 4.1 and 4.2), because they got too technical, and interrupted the flow of the piece as a whole. They explore the way that computational asymmetries and the corresponding symmetries provide us with ways of thinking about communication, how this relates to Kant’s account of analytic/synthetic judgments, type theory, and the work of Per Martin-Löf and Jean-Yves Girard. Read them at your peril.
2. More Blues
In case you were wondering where the inspiration for the post came from.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or whatever you have to celebrate this year.
DEONTOLOGISTICS 