2282 – #26 Philip Goff PHD – THE RISE OF PANPSYCHISM (chasing consciousness podcast)

“In this episode we have the important job of finding out what Panpsychism is all about, and why the philosophical position is gaining more and more traction in philosophy, but even with physicists and other scientists. The idea that consciousness is the fundamental nature of the physical world is by no means a new one, and it does seem to resolve some of the problems of how consciously experiencing lifeforms could have evolved out of non-conscious non-living material. But most materialists balk at the idea and consider it absolutely bonkers, for reasons we’ll find out as we attempt to pay respect to the criticisms of the position too.”

I will restrain from commenting in depth – since I am neither a philosopher of mind nor able to summarize or disentangle all the various positions presented in this talk by Philip Goff.

So here are some small and very inconsequential personal observations about panpsychism. Talking about or even debating panpsychism was a no-no for a long time and scientific materialism (matter and material electromagnetic processes is all there is) is till the dominant view. Speculative philosophers lying outside the major traditions of philosophy (analytical and continental) such as Alfred North Whitehead and his “philosophy of the organism”- you might say occupy a lateral or transversal position in the history of philosophy since his process philosophy rhymes with a panpsychist or panexperientialist (everything has or is some form of experience) view of fundamental reality. It is also interesting that he did not espouse such a view early on, but gradually after his (and Bertrand Russell’s) groundbreaking work on Principia Mathematica lead him into trouble (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem), he gradually arrived at panpsychism as a way out of the bifurcation of nature that had split reality in separate realms, each endowmed with different degrees of reality. Isabelle Stengers in her opus – Thinking with WhiteheadA Free and Wild Creation of Concepts begs to differ – she’s more interested in how ANW dodges the psyche – and the de-psychologizing – noting that like William James je didn’t affirm that electrons “think like we do”, nor did attribute to the actual occasion a “psychology”, a “subjectivity” or “emotions”. Thus he avoids making human intelligence or psychic powers inevitable privileging human experience, something that happens in the case of a tract ny Russian cosmist Tsiolkovsky “Panpsychism, or Everything feels”.

Caught as we were between the dry certitudes of scientific materialism (matter is all there is) and dualism (separation of questions relating to mind from matter or mind stuff being different from mind/brain stuff), we never even got to entertain a third possibility that seemed too outlandish or too quixotic. This third possibility arose at a specific juncture – with William James being familiar with both new advances in physiology as well as the new (at the time) theory of natural selection and evolutionary descent with modification opened up new and extincting venues that reshaped philosophical questions. Closer to us science came to re-cognize (there is that word again) that there are other minds, and that a mind is not so exotic or such an unique appendage and a privilege. Minds arouse not out of non minds but gradual process. Rudimentary fuzzy, mind-like characteristics abound. This contrasted strongly with a view usually supported by X-Risk thinking circles, one betting on the rarity of human minds and consciousness. Reflexive thinking is according to such a view is an island in a desert of cosmic mindlessness. Panpsychism is a view of plenty – of minding and mindful abundance. This was the weakness of that line of argument.

Do not expect a light-bulb Aha! moment of conscious experience. A more gradualistic explanation derived from biology, especially natural history paleontology and ethology makes us see quorum sensing not very different from nervous cells communicating between themselves. So there’s Emergentist Panpsychism, but also Rusellian Monism (of which Goff might be a proponent if I got that right – not what matter does but what matter is) and panprotopsychist, or say Cosmopsychist or Micropsychist varieties. Let a hundred panpsychisms bloom!

Some sort of agency maybe subtends any form of sentience or responsiveness. In order for minds to be natural we have to adopt an evolutionary, gradual (without gaps or sudden jumps) appearance of consciousness. Clearly this chips at our privileged developed reflexive consciousness. It even leads to even a few apparent paradoxes, such as life as a phenomenon being not primary but ulterior. So mind first and life second. In this frame mind is being a question of degree not of kind! To make it clear, this is a bit more radical than just saying that plants or so-called lower organisms (such as crustaceans to bees) exhibit sentience, this is about even particles exhibiting some form of rudimentary experiential quantum. A lot of this feels a question of language, of finding the proper descriptive level of talking about quantitative (mass, speed, etc) and qualitative qualities (the notorious qualia).

I was always wondering how panpsychism stands in regard to historical materialism or Marxism, and if – General Intellect – can be made to fit with explanations of a more pervasive kind, that puts sapience in perspective and encourage us towards more-than-human intellectual adventures or even seeing our own social being as part of the world, not just an add-on. In fact in the former East Bloc context where scientific materialism was the rule, particularly in Socialist Romania in my own case, the ‘intelligence of matter’ briefly made headlines as psychologist and neurologist Dumitru Constantin Dulcan published his book of essays Inteligenta Materiei (Intelligence of Matter, Editura Militara 1981). Even now it is really interesting to read the responses from various corners (including well-known mathematician Solomon Marcus). Still I wonder if there isn’t also a residue of mystical materialism a la Tsiolkovsky here.

Nuff said – panspychism (as Goff will prove!) has become again salonfähig as the Germans say it. You can talk about panpsychism not only at history of consciousness humanities departments, but also at laboratories and in a scientific context and I swear nobody will call you a nutcase, plain gaga or a fringy lunatic slightly sickish new-age or animist type. That odor that Nagel was calling “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”s is apparently gone. Perfect Proof to that is a considerable number of new videos, talks, debates, podcasts on YT and TW. What to choose? Well, I would go for the most passionate and ardent supporters – such as Philip Goff from the University of Durham. Important to add that there is also non-cognitivist position or rather a discognitivist position that try to decenter the brain or the central nervous system in order to get panpsyschism right and not try to priviledge (again) conscious experience or human cognition (for this check Steven Shaviro’s extraordinary book of essays). I think that such fine distinguishing lines (was what separates sentience from sapience? or what have substrate independence and simulation theory have to do with each other?). Another way to see this is by reading Science Fiction – and acknowledging that some of the most incredible ideas about sapient aliens and shipminds help us to think about consciousness too. The ‘Tentacle of Empathy’ seems to be everywhere these days. It also might be that ALL explanations of consciousness might sound crazy one way or another – this is the crazyist position of philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel.

Maybe this is the moment to observe that in the case of Tsiolkovsky, a ln avowed panpsychist akd pioneer of space travel. For me though, he’s basically a kind of militant ‘pansapientist’ monism – using a theory of the psyche (rational, intentional, reflexive, etc) that depreciates or dismisses other modes of thought as inferior. Recognizing that the world feels might not mean automatically that we’re more responsive or tuned to it. Stengers in her inspiring book Thinking with Whitehead from 2002 – in particular Entrée en Métaphysique Chapter explains why this is not the path taken by Whitehead (Tsiolkovsky is not mentioned but contrasting the two helps a lot). Tsiolkovsky recognizes that the universe is alive and feeling, but this not an opening for other ways of becoming or opening up the question to what os it like to he an atom, a body, a tissue etc. It leaves not much room for other modes of thought. We might call this a psychic or cognitive terraforming of the universe, something very close to the X Risk incentive to protect & spread human intelligence in the Cosmos and make sure it will use and unmake every other mind that doesn’t conform to the maximal potential for joyfulness. This gives rise to a sort of ultra-sapient chain of being with atomic adventures inside various organismic (a body, tissues, stones etc see below), and in each one (except if it inside the human) the full potential gets never achieved. Locked up in the unconsciousness and deep unthinking sleep of other lesser modes, they just await the consciousness light-bulb to raise them up to the level of human experience so that their limited notion of past and future can expand. This is what i understand from this fragment:

“In terms of mathematics, the entire universe is alive, but the power of its sensitivity is manifested in all its brilliance only among the higher animals. All atoms of matter feel in keeping with the environment. Finding itself in highly organized beings, atoms life their life and feel their pleasure and pain. If they find themselves in the inorganic world, they sleep, as it were, immersed in a deep state of unconsciousness, in nothingness.Even in a single animal, as they wander around its body, the atoms live the life now of the brain, now of the bones, hair, nails, epithelium, and so on. Meaning that atoms now think, now live like atoms imprisoned in stone, water, or air. Now they sleep, with no awareness of time; now they live for the moment, like the lower beings; now they are aware of the past and paint a picture of the future. The more organized the being, the farther this notion of future and past extends.”― Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Panpsychism

2236 – Magic and Science with Erik Davis on New Thinking Allowed (2023)

In order to get over the biographical and personal – I must confess that having Erik Davis as an untiring and generous guide through High Weirdness, esoterica, (techno)occulture, psychedelia, Californian counterculture, Cyberdellia, the 1970s – has helped me get around my late 80s Golden Bough or the 1990s brush with Noua Acropola (Theosophy), Mircea Eliade’s books on shamanism, or his Treaty on the History of Religions and Gilbert Durand’s Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, both published by Humanitas. I was never sure if I would ever be interested in that influx of paranormal and esoterica or how to qualify it. Interestingly on the continuum of the physical-mental pole (as Whitehead would say) – there was rationalism, Darwinism, and atheism through the thinking of Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins (yes!), Edward O. Wilson, Jared Diamond (more lastingly than the others) – Stephen Jay Gould. It has not been a tug of war, or a contest although ultimately the political stakes have been more important – the way conspirituality and post-truth has taken over and divided societies or the way the New Atheists have been somehow preparing the MRM or alt-right is part of this history. Rationality and anti-rationality have been always contested grounds – and recent text by John Bellamy Foster: the New Irrationalism IHMHO I can agree with in general, but at the same time cannot get over the feeling that it builds the same strawmen arguments as those hurled at so-called “cultural marxism” by the right-wingers. Another argument I have with John Bellamy Foster’s recent text is my doubt that pessimism and existential nihilism could be a catchall for what ails the current moment – while we could very well admit that untrammeled irrational (US-birthed) “positive thinking” made our situation direr than ever.

Never thought these two tendencies relevant, trying to see how they square off. How the unreason of witch-hunting atheism might end up locked in battle with some kind of spiritualist nativist revival, while it might have more in common with transphobic cishet religiosity. On my side it would be foolish to deny the importance of this background radiation (and I have at least been acknowledging this during a beer rant with a good friend in Timisoara). At the same time, I wish Erik Davis would have been there too. Even if I don’t find his interest in life after death, techno gnosticism, spiritualism, or astrology – as exciting as he does, I still think it important to keep track of conspiracies, dualism, of discarded beliefs at a time of scientific triumphalism, or revisit our metaphysical presuppositions, keep learning from the “sociology of science” when one discusses the most recent Silicon Valley fads (simulation theory) or crypto NFT based longevity seeking tech. I also appreciate his critical sensibility – the way he’s decrying the ideological fervor of Wikipedia editors, while at the same time recognizing how religious traditionalistic values are becoming untied from organized religion to weaponize the new right consensus that is quite irreligious. I also think he is bringing a more culturally aware understanding and historicity to a generally ahistorical scientific culture, finding plurality at paradigmatic turning points (such as Kepler’s indulgence with Plantonic forms) or recognition for the role fringe culture played as visionary avant-garde popularizing goofy, previously minoritarian views or mad ideas, that in the meantime have become quite accepted, bland and easily embraced by the ‘normies’.

It is really telling indeed that Bell’s Theorem (the three experimental tests of Bell’s inequalities) – and indeed how quantum entanglement and quantum information theory ceased to be SF. FTL has been abandoned, no magical spooky action at a distance – but strong correlations have has domesticated entanglement, making it less spectacular (that is the role of science!) and has been applied in cryptography and communication – areas where non-locality helped out. What Davis make clear that would have sounded like heresy or lacking any respectability 20 or 30 years ago (say panpsychism )- has garnered the right of being debatable and even scientifically probable, radiating in as many flavors and combinations. The same has happened with the spillover from the SF nerd/geek ghetto into the larger oceans of mass culture making some fairly undigestible and outlandish ideas gain traction, just because big-screen SF popularized them, got them across under the pen of atheist authors (and VC funding!), making them palatable to a less and less religious world.

With this philosophical and even newly earned scientific respectability, there comes a time to recognize the way (Erik D is good at this!) Consciousness Culture has been doing much of the groundwork for this slow acceptance of the neurodivergent and non-human minds. Ultimately I like Davis’s attraction for “naturalism” in all matters. For me any type of naturalism (or multinaturalism) is quite healthy and goes a long way, from (even non-Western) pre-scientific thinking, including forgotten philosophical inquiries by the German idealists and the experimentalism of Naturphilosophy (Schelling, Hegel, Fichte etc) to today’s speculative realists. I also appreciate all these discussion that circumvent the usual post-digital or cyber studies pitfalls or full automation fears about robotics and focus instead on how robotic one is AFTER mindful de-programming, or how mechanistic and bureaucratic some of the gaming experiences truly are as one keeps playing, or how even after awakening (or joining a cult!) one starts acting ever more routinized, almost like a remote “observer” exhibiting a more robotic self than ever before. In one word – highly recommended for a weekend hearing!

2099 – Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a 2022 American absurdist comedy-drama film written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as “Daniels” [Swiss Army Man]). The film stars Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

The plot follows a Chinese-American woman (Yeoh) being audited by the Internal Revenue Service who discovers that she must connect with parallel universe versions of herself to prevent a powerful being from causing the destruction of the multiverse. The film has been described as a “swirl of genre anarchy” and features elements of black comedy, science fiction, fantasy films, martial arts films, romance and animation.

Kwan and Scheinert researched the concept of the multiverse as far back as 2010, and began writing the screenplay as early as 2016. Originally written for Jackie Chan, the lead role was later reworked and offered to Yeoh.

The film features music composed by Son Lux, including collaborations with musicians Mitski, David Byrne, and André 3000. Critics lauded its imagination, direction, the performances of the cast, and its handling of themes such as existentialism, nihilism, and Asian American identity. (wiki)

Many thanks to Pnea Gabi for arranging and posting this here.

A confession: after enthusing about this movie before even watching it. I’ve joined the hype around it and it is really impossible to extricate from it. I owe it to those on TW that have made me aware of its existence either by posting its beautifully chaotic poster art or by giving intriguing detailed spoilers. A good movie is one that gets discussed a lot – not in the sense of the last SW or the last Obi-Wan pitting various camps against one another – but by the variety and plurality of its responses, cold or hot takes, perspectives and viewpoints. It’s about how it tends to reach, stimulate, agglutinate these views, working its way from body visceral cinema response to daily chit chat. I say “body” because Everything Everywhere combines everything typical of what Linda Williams identified as body genres (genre’s involving powerful almost, unavoidable bodily affective transformations): slapstick comedy, melodrama, horror, and even kinky (if predictable and worn out) porn antics.

First I am going to quote from Scott C Richmond’s paper ““Dude, that’s just wrong”: Mimesis, Identification, Jackass” for a fragment I hold dear because it finally recognizes something important in the Jackass movie opening scene with Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O willingly submitting to paper cuts (as you maybe remember Michelle Yeoh’s character taps into her other multiverse selves by doing the very same Jackass stunt). Scott Richmond calls it “critical stupidity” and reminds us how stupid it is to dismiss what would otherwise be “riotously stupid” scenes. One cannot but feel pulled by both the aversion and attraction to these ‘wrong’ acts. Words do not suffice when we’re living through something that can be at once radically social,and radically antisocial. Critical stupidity could be a way to confront what is “inarticulate and deeply human” or help us deal with “irreparable exposure to others”. Denying this we end only as dismissive contemporary media refusniks basically, falling back on the tired if refined certitudes of the pure intellect. Why not give importance and enter (tumble?) a terrain of intimate and consummate ‘wrongness’?!

Theory, for Scott Richmond (and cinema theory especially so) has to deal with the most hilariously stupid, decerebrated moments of today’s dominating media experiences (think Tiktok, YT challenges, alternate reality game etc. + their horrific counterparts such as right wing replacement thesis influenced shooter youths) :

Today we must feel as pressing, somehow, that there‘s something we don‘t yet know how to account for even (or especially) in the stupidest moments our media gives us. These moments may not seem to call for an accounting, on account of their stupidity. It has seemed to me for some time that our contemporary popular cinema has lost whatever faith it may once have had in articulateness or intelligence. It has placed its faith instead in a perceiving, affected, porous, and voluptuously and irreparably exposed body. This faith in the
body is not new, but it is both increasingly intensified, the object of an aesthetic elaboration, and newly endemic, ubiquitous in our contemporary media.

One may say it has been going on especially in the work of such directors as Cronenberg yet I think it’s more about Mo Lei Tau (see below). Going to jump here to a series of worthy reviews (I am sure there is many more out there in the critical multiverse of the net), before going fractal on Everything Everywhere with what came out of an intense exchange in Romanian with good friend/cinephile Felix Petrescu from electronic duo magicians Makunouchi Bento. We like to disagree and we also gave it a long (over +30 emails) tail, in my mind close to the ‘multiverse’ format of the film. The popularity of the multiverse genre (not just from Marvel’s Dr Strange and the Madness of Multiverse to indie production but also regarding string theory is a testament to the ‘multiverse is the new zombie’ TW. On one side I agree with this diagnosis, especially the one formulated by Thomas Murphy below. No mistery that under current franchise TINA (there is no alternative) – absolute permutability appears inevitable to today’s realism capitalist enchanted by multiverse theories. This diagnosis of the exhaustion of possibility is nowadays propped up by every movie discussing availabilities that are not there for a majority of people. What is one to make of multiverse theories & future contingent possible worlds beside most of these being cringe (in TM’s view):

👇🏾 🧵#mustread
– on the conservative-predictive & today's availability of multiverse theories in both superhero movies & physics (+comeback of metaphysics) – https://t.co/nkxU29z6Yx

— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) April 12, 2022

Thomas has got a clear point there and convergence culture offers overwhelming proof, but I am also pulled away by Guy Lardreau’s metaphysics of fiction here (further explored in a great post by Steven Shaviro). Fiction (for Lardreau’s philosophical fictions) may exist only when the real does not join the necessary. Leibnizian permutations do not exhaust possibilities or embrace some version of the anthropic principle, they do not start with our world as the best of all worlds, nor do they refuse the desolation of the actual world. These permutations do not turn away but in spite of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss caricature, which should be taken seriously (after G Lardreau) not just as a caricature of Leibniz, but a plunge into going beyond experience or failure of imagination into how bad and disastrous most of these worlds tendentially are, especially when one has to confront an incalculable number of world making. Secondly it’s also about the compossibility or such worlds (not just of effects but of worlds within worlds) – how much they can pack, how much micro/macro they carry along.

I start with Matt Donato’s excellent review of Detention directed by Joseph Kahn (2011) an unduly forgotten self-produced mad movie that was severely underappreciated but merits rediscovery under the fresh entry of 2020 Everything Everywhere. Twenty years after, Detention needs to be appreciated as a revolutionary, fractal, groundbreaking mad SF young adult cinematic experience. Detention paved the way for Daniel’s Everything Everywhere “celebratory chaotic energy”.Their experimentalism and innovation is a result of ‘post cinematic’ ways of directing music videos and both amply confirm how important it is to train yourself beyond the cinema. Detention was the first bulwark against the rising tide of toxic nostalgia cultural industries that are built on fan-servicing and self-confirmation loops. One cannot appreciate this movie if one ignores the other (ten yr later). Like Riley says: “The only way to change the past? Change the present.” “(By finally watching Detention.)”

Then the fine point made by reviewer Kyle Turner for WM magazine. Seen through the lense of queer theory and the history of ‘lower’ cultural form(s)” of slapstick and gross-out comedy” or of Jackie Chan’s (apparently before Michelle Yeoh, Daniels centered everything around J. Chan) dealing with the Asian (and later in his Hollywood movies with Asian American) maleness. The infamous ‘butt-plug scene’ becomes here a stumbling block to the whole comedic queering of masculinity and gender, a proof that this movie is far from perfect and trips over its own well-scripted & choreographed antics. The risk is that this ‘everything everywhere’ is not an elsewhere or elsewhen but very much limited to here and now (more akin to Zizek’s decaf reality point I guess).

Even Jacobin Eileen Jones endorsed Everything Everywhere as a “Rare Triumph” for marshaling Evelyn Wang as a multilateral  “ordinary person” faced with extraordinary pressures of today’s hustle culture world, facing the constant assault of capitalist disruption mantras or Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism while inventing her own “way of fighting”.

Then there is Mona Eltahawy’s review essay: the Menopause Multiverse – while I read this I felt the multiverse can really need more Michelle Yeoh’s and also (obviously!) if it is to explore the multiverse and not the retro-verse or a uni-mono-verse. The movie offers a valid critique of today’s society’s ageism as well (cultural products and movies mostly depicting or centered around young adults, adolescents, etc.). One cannot stick with the butt plug arche-jokes nor with a scene (since MTV) dominated by adolescent masculinity or superhero franchise multiplications and tired tropes. In her words: “Between crushing anxiety, hot flashes, red hot rage and brain fog, who does not want to beat the whole world up?”

GEOPOLITICS OF BIG TROUBLE

So here are a few personal notes, extracted from the email exchange. They aim to add a (forced?) geopolitical slant to Everything Everywhere that otherwise seems firmly embedded in the US Asian American histories. For the moment I would you to ignore the specificities of Asian American experience and representation in media, amply explored in Michelle H Huang’s excellent video essay Inhuman Figures: Robot Clones Aliens (which I covered in SFitze #3) that I urge u to watch. Somehow I see this movie as an impossible entanglement of China and the US, at a critical moment of their decoupling. This ‘divorce’ is harder and harder to assess because it feels mostly farcical and rhetorical. It feels like it is here and not here at the same time (at least in this worst ‘what if’ potential actualizations). In the face of (racially motivated) mass shootings, Asian hate crimes, anti-abortion legislation and the rising tide of ethno-politics (not just in the US), the US cultural avant-garde is trying to salvage multiculturalism against vociferous anti-immigration pushbacks, trying to avoid aligning itself with what sounds like the worst of Cold War McCarthyism (see for ex the FBI arrest of Chinese American physics professor Professor Xiaoxing Xi from Temple University in Philadelphia) or with echoes of Interment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Feels ‘multi-‘ verse is becoming popular when the ‘multi’- polar or ‘multi’- cultural is getting more and more unpopular. So in spite of multiverse exploding in cinemas (here I agree with Thomas Murphy) it seems almost to signal exactly the opposite – the failures of one version-, one- power, one- hegemon to rule them all. Everything Everywhere is about growing insecurities (in spite of all the security talk) and about saving the future by acting in the present and the dwindling ‘roles’ and opportunities for those un-aligned. One has to choose sides, and stick with any version, as economic, commercial, and technological competition btw the new blocs is gaining momentum. There is a feeling that at a moment when one cannot do without the other, everyone (especially in the West) is trying to prove that one can stake it out alone. It’s is not improbable that China would mirror that, and in the face of this US-China honeymoon cracking,  they have to stick with what they got, fly low and hope to toughen it out. No matter how derived, imperfect or remote, your own version of the US will have to do, even if this means just the victory of Disneyfication. Theme-parking the US can well happen in China without US approval. In a universe segregating from the multiverse, militarism has become acceptable, jingoism has become matter of fact and spying accusations, copyright wars, National Security State biceps flexing is the new normal. So, is it foolish to be longing for the multi-perspectival or to try and find (impossible?!) cross-overs?! Where can one build upon those interior ChinaTowns and madcap admixtures or revisit Big Trouble in Little China for all the sustenance one needs in Everything Nowhere times like these? Or maybe this is the one chance we have to welcome a last hysterical attempt (no canned laughter this time) that we might regain some measure of Sinophone or Sinophile acceptance when everyone seems to abhorr ‘verse’ jumping.

INSTITUTIONAL MOODS

Who’s afraid of Taxation? One of the major questions that Everything Everywhere raised was why the scene at the IRS with IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre (played Godzilla style by an incredible Jamie Lee Curtis)? Nobody in the above-linked reviews discusses or mentions this “IRS audit” scene beyond the ensuing martial arts battles or antics. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something there. I am tempted to quetion this universal acclaim at the fears & hates of a bare knuckles encounter with an IRS inspector (no matter if you are in Germany or Romania or US). Tax declarations produce a lot of pain. Still, for me this alignment feels disingenous (like that other US inherent evil: bureaucracies, Big Government, anything that smacks of redistribution or regulatory government bodies). Naturally, nobody is going to believe a bunch of millionaires at Davos this year protesting with “Tax Us More” signs. What is the position of the IRS baddie in pop culture, comics, movies?  Doesn’t seem to be a fixture in pop culture – and there are countless examples of US libertarian bias against both taxation and goverment agencies. Cults are gothic pop, even a reccurent haunt of the youthful republic since its inception (think Brockden Brown’s Wieland or later or Hubbard’s Scientology), and only be declaring yourself a religion (or a corporation) one might hope to escape the reach of the IRS. IRS is probably the closest you can come to a nightmare of US right-wing survivalist thinking, their worst enemy within, the Commies at home in Washington DC that prey on the ‘average citizen’, small and middle income family businesses and skins them alive for the last nickel. Family businesses, supposed ‘mom and pops’ shops are also becoming what Melinda Cooper identified as the underpinning of an unlikely alliance: that btw social conservative values & extreme market liberalism. There is one comics example I recently discovered – DC comics Lobo Death and Taxes 1996 4 vol (check especially Tax Death of the Universe) which (of course) treats the IRS as the most horrendous institution in the universe. In a system that favors tax evasions and tax heavens for the rich and where corporations pay close to no taxes, the small entrepreneur makes for a perfect victim, so audits and taxes (think laundromat owner) make for a lot of chagrin and laughs.

Of course, there are worlds where the IRS and its inspectors can be your friends (even lovers), and this is what I like about how Everything Everywhere takes on the trope of the monstrous showdown. It is also one in which the worst of the worst is not what one expects. The worst anti-climatic showdowns are bureaucratic the movie seems to tell us, and no superhero is yet a match for that. In a sense ‘verse- jumping’ also has a bureaucratic component – one has to do the unexpecte, make a request in the system. This has multicultural parallels, especially with that Chinese fictional meta-text Journey to the West – where the heaven bureaucracy is akin to the earthly, so everything is tied to filling a form – even for establishing the amount of rain. There is much hate for the IRS, but few have managed to make it a central part of the action or transform it into an arena of cosmic proportions.

ANIMATEDNESS EVERYWHERE

Everything Everywhere is also an important piece of what Deborah Levitt calls the “Animatic Apparatus” and the way it foregrounds different styles of animation (from CGI, stop-motion, motion graphics, VFX to hand-drawn animated children’s doodles styles) is a proof that we truly live at a time when animation has become a dominant medium of our times. It is also a movie that even if controlled and intentionally done – throws everything at you and does not resort to Netflix segmentation, parcellation or niche-building. No garbage separation but everything all at once.  “[A] brand new world of allatonceness.” announced for McLuhan (quoted by Shaviro – McLuhan 176; McLuhan and Fiore 63) the realm of electronic media. The allatonceness present in the movie’s very title signals this synchronicity of processes happening all at the same time, as opposed to the serial (cinematic?) mechanical Gutenberg’s printing press or Ford’s assembly line. We get a sense that every Evelyn Quan Wang is doing her own thing – even if the focus seems to be just on one at the same time, with the exception when her own image cracks – and seems to split or fan out like the traces of movement in the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey.

Animatedness redefines what is “biological life” or that there are multiple routes to intelligent life or consciousness (or rather sentient life). There is a lot of talk about what are ‘good’ special effects or outstanding cgi nowdays, how does something unnatural feel ‘natural’ or how does the CGi history of a particular film director stand up to the scrutiny of fans. As we are becoming more versed in spotting the limits of unilateral FX (one might say “intrinsic limitations and inevitable breakdowns”) like the ‘third eye’ debate surrounding Sam Raimi’s last Dr Strange, FX can enliven or animate ‘dead’ stones, or even put googly eyes on eveything (including Michelle Yeoh’s ‘third eye’). Arguably it is FX and animation that make ‘multiverse’ or many-world theories more available or more popular than ever in video-clips, movies and countless other media. Animation traces the multiple forking paths and other ‘evolutionary’ outcomes along cinematic alternate universe. Otherwise the ‘hot-dog fingers’ (with both reference to Kubrick’s savannah opening scene in the A Space Odysee) would not be so inherently cartoonish and relatable. Cartoons since the early days of cinema have been showing off their independence, showing us their wobbly, elastic spastic members and fat (middle) fingers! They show off their carriers as neither evolutionary ‘fit’ nor ‘unfit’. Walter Benjamin has been attracted to the non-human aspect of animations and how such animated images have allowed non-human form gain wider acceptance, even if later he also sensed the dangers associated with this ‘everything everywhere’ modularity or malleability.

As prehensile fingers are transformed into a non-prehensile mess, the defining feature of the human species and its close primate relatives becomes an embarassment and a burden (and yes primates do not hold the monopoly on that, since there is a lot of other species with prehensile members – such as Chameleons or even caterpillars). The contingency of a world with a species having (just) five fingers or that happened to have hot dog fingers becomes apparent. Animation is not only a tool for fun but also helps us explore a more vast evolutionary phase space. CGI animations are actually the closest we have to reconstructing possible life on other exo-world & other planets, or extinct worlds from the deep past. At the same time, this animatedness also defines the felt pressures on our daily working life, where low pay & overtime has become the rule, a world where one feels pulled apart like an elastic cartoon by all the demands of productivity, efficiency and multitasking. In a cosmic and metaphysic sense, the ‘animatic apparatus’ also helps us conceive our current world around us as too responsive, too panpsychically unruly, too agential and full to the brim with much more eyes than we care to count or look into.

MO LEI TAU TRIBUTE

There is perhaps also a brash tribute (maybe a bit wistful) to that absurdist genre of action-comedy pioneered in Hong Kong – mo lei tau, the one that I also grew up with in Romania being fed on badly translated but so good. I cannot unsee those superbly choreographed and edited HK action comedy movies. Mo lei tau is unsurpassed by any other comedy genre in the west imho. I think one should never ignore this Diasporic dimension of Everything Everywhere that goes beyond the usual Asian American references, especially one that is open to an influx of different expressions coming from the ‘Asian Tiger economies’ (winks at Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan) and mainland China. Especially Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer, All For the Winner, Flirting Scholar and much more) masterpieces in the footsteps of Jackie Chan, Samo Hung and Chow Yun-fat, or even farther back to Hui Brothers trio from the HK 1970s. Mei lei tau comes from Cantonese phrase of mo lei tau gau which literally means ‘cannot differentiate btw head and tail’, or usually translated as ‘coming from nowhere’ or ‘makes no sense’. The neo-dadaism of this slapstick genre is mostly lost to the West since it involves a lot of verbiage and quick turns of phrases. Mo Lei Tau became intrinsic to Hong Kong popular culture and its socio-political background, being a harbor for mainland immigrants and also developing a new vernacular with its own verve and style, a style that would go against linguistic conventions and would be steeped in localism and cant.

imdb   /   rt

2067 – THE BUDDHA AND I: INDIAN INFLUENCE ON ISLAMIC AND EUROPEAN THOUGHT / History of Philosophy without any gaps (series of podcasts)

Here’s an incredibly – well invaluable resource (for me as a non-professional interested in philosophy and its twists & turns) that I recently discovered. It is a collaboration of researchers from two institutions: King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.

I suggest starting with the episodes on the Indian influence on Islamic and European thought as an introduction to this entire section and I will detail below why I think one should start here at the end rather than at the beginning. Even if one does not have any interests in philosophy or any prior knowledge in the Western tradition of philosophical thought – from this eps one can at least gather how stunted this reception of Indian philosophy was (and partially still is) in the West.

For good or for worse (Theofil Simenschy, M Eliade) Romanian intelligentsia has shown along the years a certain appetite for Indian philosophy, so there is a lot of various translations – even pulp and trashy ones, adapted versions and pocket versions. All this is proof of a widespread interest in extra European philosophical traditions and a diversified pop cultural exchange btw India & Romania. At the same time one should not profess any innocence in regards to this Indophilia, and regard with a certain suspicion all claims about a Romanian-Indian continuum, especially in view of the usual right-wing nativist or aryanist tendencies. That said, before 1989 and after as well, so-called anti-sectarian perspectives where banishes, a position maintained by the majority Romanian orthodox church. This is a tendency to discredit evert hing associated with Indian practices or yogic knowledge. Gurus or anything close to New Age religions is regarded as potentially harmful or condemned as ‘perversions’. Not saying there are no exceptions to the rule, yet suffice to say, nodaways in Romania (as elsewhere) – there is a thoroughly hyper-commercialized mindfulness industry catering to the needsof those afflicted by generalized burnout under capitalism. I consider quite fruitful thw para-academic come & go tracing such pop cultural influences and there’s much interest in exploring weird deviations & non orthodox practices. My bes example is Bogdan Lyphkhanu – poet friend and also a consummate collector and investigator of such spiritual Romanian- Indian (and also Spiritualist, Taoist, Tantric, Occult, including unclassifiable etc) hybrids.

For various reasons, I abstain from discussing Islamicate – Indian philosophy relations. Many Islamic authors, since the very beginning, have drawn parallels btw Sufi Islamic mystical traditions and Indian philosophical schools. Importantly, many Western impressions on Indian philosophy are much indebted to previous Persian or Arab translations (listen to this podcast).

I am ignoring this at the moment to focus on the plethora of sometimes very specialized knowledge and updates commentaries on Indian (or specifically Buddhist/Jainist sources here), sources relevant to the current debates animating much of today’s mind philosophy (mind body dualism/hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism/pancosmism, eliminativism etc).

These podcasts are definite proof that we have moved away from the various misinterpretations. A that seem in retrospect quite rudimentary, completely biased and misinformed, never able to grasp the diversity of Indian philosophical schools or engage with the conclusions of their main representatives (their historical debates, the diversity of their examples, multiplicity of perspectives, a rich and evolving conceptual vocabulary and most of all their sheer diversity). The Western reception is biased from the beginning. No matter where it hails from, we get the sense we’re being served an impoverished and caricatural version of it. Beyond the mind philosophy relevance discussed above – there is also a new interest for the idealist resources of Indian philosophy as today’s idealist philosophy gathers pace or even with those attempts to seek out a bridge between the continental and the analytic Western philosophy. There are countless other aspects including those offering a new appreciation of Indian epistemology (in the Buddhist philosophy) and so on.

With the possible exception of Gottfried W. Leibniz, almost all mentioned in this podcast (Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc) show a combination of either uncritical admiration or outright disdain for Indian philosophy (particularly its cosmology or cosmogony as in the example with the elephant sitting on top of the turtle). If they were very attentive in their analysis of ultimate questions about experience, perception, truth and limits of knowledge, or avidly debating current scientific worldviews, western philosophers were less careful about other traditions, throwing around careless generalizations. Sadly they almos constantly ignore actually existing ‘Indian philosophy’, and make their statements based on hearsay or by taking Indian philosophy as a unified stock, a single corpus, a monolithic non differentiated block. One should first recognize if possible these initial widespread positions held by practitioners of Western philosophy, so that one can appreciate its further refinement or even complete revision of what we thought we knew about Indian philosophy.

That being said – this is just just an entry point, so pls consider listening the whole section from 43 Buddhist and Jains (or earlier) to 62 Kit Patrick. Each eps has short and up-to-date Bibliography on the subjects being discussed for those interested.

listen here:

THE BUDDHA AND I: INDIAN INFLUENCE ON ISLAMIC AND EUROPEAN THOUGHT

2027 -The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan (book 2017)

I very recently (this year) discovered the following study and this discovery has made me very happy – indeed it has brought me back full circle to other pursuits I have followed these last years. It has been a daunting but also incredibly satisfying and slow-moving adventure to unravel Whitehead’s organic philosophy year by year. I have read ANW in German, English and Romanian and I am grateful to these translators and editors and popularizers of his works. I am thankful for all those that have listened to and communicated on the margins my continuing yet uneven advances – Gabi, Julia, Nae, Felix, Akira, amongst others. This post deals only in its end section with the above mentioned book in trying to add more context to A N Whitehead’s process philosophy and panpsychism. In the end I point out why I think The Outward Mind adds (for me) a few important missing ingredients that allow for much larger historical width.

check the original on Goodreads blog

Historical Gradient

There is a sense A N Whitehead is always historically aware of the philosophical precedents of what he coins ‘organic philosophy’ (be is Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza or Hume and Kant) authors he mentions repeatedly and often quotes, even as he makes clear one has to read them against their own conclusions and their (later) systematized traditions.
Whitehead makes sure he can always rescue and scavenge significant bits – odd turns of phrases that he transforms into something significant against the intentions of their authors. He picks up on strange discontinuities, missteps or non-systematic intuitions in the well known works of all these named predecessors which are not actually his direct predecessors in fact, nor is he a direct succesor. In Science in the Modern World (1925) he jumps directly to a phrase from the founder of scientific method – Francis Bacon(1561 – 1626). These remote references are indirectly shaping up his own organic philosophy almost by what they are not saying, and only because he makes something else out of them and spells out what they could have said but aren’t saying.
He takes great care that he carefully weaves his own elaborate metaphysical reconstructions in a patient way, twisting and upgrading a jagged intellectual continuum. ANW almost always appreciates the unorganized side of major thinkers, appreciates their incipient striving and lacunae more than what they would have ever admit.
He picks as important – certain odd tidbits or whatever did not make it into the ‘final draft’ or settled into a recognizable and canonical Tractatus. With this patient, only slightly pedantic nit-picking, ANW makes sure that he and us (his possible readers) are in constant contact with others and kept involved with their inherited list of ideas developed under a very different and disjunct historical period (somehow detached fron his or his immediate predecessors). The impact of several Western authors is felt at a distance and without their accord, it feels. The result is that what does not get mentioned or lies outside of their conclusion – feels much more important.

He is hailed as the only modern philosopher that has developed with insistence and detail the most complex metaphysical project to date – responsive to the most relevant scientific theories of his day (relativity theory and quantum mechanics).
I am wondering about the atmosphere that has shaped such interests – the “penumbral” historical background that sustained and nurtured ANW’s mature metaphysics – outside the range of names he dutifully mentions in his key books (Process & Reality or Science and the Modern World, etc) and the philosophical idiom he uses.

One of the best things in reading him is that one is not dragged down by genuflection in front of such a heavyweight philosophical inheritance (or lack of reading all these fundamental texts). No jungle of footnotes, nor lengthy, winded polemics.
His polemics (if they exist) are not so much with authors, but with certain aporias of Western thinking. His engagement is a long shot wrestling with meta-theories of mindmatter or directions of research. Even when he is always mentioning what organic philosophy is not, he skips dense webs of references – and this is an integral part of his low profile tone and no name-dropping style.

Yet I am left with all these residual questions – of why Aesthetics is the philosophia prima for him? How come there is this easy (and surprisingly contemporary) involvement with en-minding matter or the building blocks of reality? Why is mind or experience so central to his cosmology? Why does he find this en-minding of matter as fundamental to our understanding the most recent theories of physics? These are important questions and I am always feeling a nuub in relation to ANW – but somehow they are related to him.

What I appreciate is his evolutionary and bottom-up or rather the bottom is tbe new up perspective. Where does his non-anthropocentrism or his physiological interest stem from?
Another unusual convergence allows him to share these preoccupations with various philosophers of mind. Whiteheadian panpsychism (the most developed modern panpsychism we have probably) needs engagement whatever they might say. Yet it is very rare that he ever gets a mention in recent books on the subject of consciousness or the ‘hard problem of consciousness (apart from William Seager or David Ray Griffin). The same thing happens with other authors – Galen Strawson, whose mentalistic physicalism comes close to Whitehead (but rarely mentions him) reviewing a book (Philip Goff’s -Galileo’s Error) by fellow panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff and chiding them over not mentioning a larger and more complete list of processors beside Arthur Eddington and Betrand Russell. A list that according to Galen Strawson should perforce include: W K Clifford, CA Strong and Durant Drake.

It is almost as if this amnesia about Whitehead helps their own project along and keeps them free of what Thomas Nagel has called (in 1986): “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”.
What I am trying to say is that everyone is allowed to have favorite genealogies or mention his own chosen predecessors, yet when it concerns panpsychism – the ‘pan’ is historically eliminativist, always tends to choose certain authors over others.
Whitehead’s is a difficult inheritance. One can get lost mired in his verbiage or become outright dismissive of his entire metaphysical edifice. If mentioning him one might risk attracting the wrong attention, loose face, loose readers, respectability etc what do I know – it seems.
What if one’s own carefully thought-out theories of mind would get doomed by mentioning him repeatedly or giving him due credit. Maybe it is the usual academic risk or careful tip-toeing , a normal fear of being convicted as guilty by association or of being treated as (dangerously) ‘speculative’ or even (damning) humbug.

I will pick up on A. Nagel’s (pejorative) mention of the “metaphysical laboratory” and its slight air of slight superiority. Yes, maybe it is good to cut straight to the chase, yet I consider the problem exactly the opposite. It is not a problem of clear-cutting, but of allowing more largesse. Otherwise, everything feels like miraculous birth – and we might miss a certain underlying commonality or an impetus from a completly different set of theories.
In fact, I do miss this laboratory feeling, that there was a certain vaguely related but varied and diverse range of authors that could have prepared A N Whitehead’s arguments at a distance and up close.
I think that his particular and quite original approach suffers from this lack of historical density or having a wider range of domains (outside the strictly philosophical) to chose from. A dialogue that is not primarily even between philosophers and so does not enter the canonic mind philosophy list.

For me Whitehead is the tip of an unseen iceberg of largely ignored or only alluded to free speculation anchored in embodied research. It smells of a long term involvement with mindmatter, enlivened materialism, transmissible, diffuse and active affect, “sensuous knowledge” (like in Adorno or Ranciere). Instead of ignoring the body and objects it sees them as affecting and being affected, prolonging scientific and artistic interests with low-end organisms and non-human emotions. Let’s say this could range from Darwin’s letting his kids play music to worms or feeding carnivorous plants in his hothouse or William James’s (he gets ample mention in Whitehead) interest in empiricism, physiology, embodiment, nervous tissues and a graded/gradual evolutionary view of mind.

Whitehead is eminently a dispositional thinker even if when he talks about the intrinsic nature of things – because he puts you in a certain mood, and partakes of a certain disposition (perspective) of inquiring mind towards the possibility of other minds existing inside yet also outside the preferred bipedal cranial boxes.
Consider this: in order to make you sensitive to certain things that would have left you indifferent, he takes on the perspective of an elementary particle (also recently discovered) electron – what is it like to be an electron? Does this sound so different from Einstein trying to imagine what it is like to be traveling like a photon on his bike?
Yet this ability of inhabiting the elementary should point us towards non-scarcity in regard to AWN complex ideas since his own system does this on a regular basis. It searches for this granularity, this gradient – something that is not miraculous, exceptional, nothing special but usual, ‘mere’ and primary.
Consciousness or higher-level faculties of the mind are not isolated, insular or put on a pedestal. They are just a special case out of a much more varied non-special, available readiness for experiencing of the world by the world. He is very keen on making sure that we accept this pervasiveness of mind and explore under-explored semi conscious avenues of feeling and becoming.

Let’s apply this pervasive gradient-thinking approach to his own system, as a system that is being nourished by other domains. It interested with the new, becose it is growing out of or exploding the bounds of a much larger epochal context (in tune with his cosmic epochs there is this larger missing history).

What I felt was missing from both Whitehead’s account of his own ideas as well as from others mentioning their own Whiteheadian engagements is this relevant and disconsidered (till now) historical background noise. I appreciate this dim largely experimental aesthetic background radiation because it puts things in contrast and proves to be a laboratory of philosophical ideas & stimulants.

Here I place this recently discovered wonderful study – with a role in filling in these gaps. This book by Benjamin Morgan is called The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature.
Again, Benjamin M does not mention ANW directly, because ANW is somehow outside of the scope of this historical study of experimental and materialistic aesthetics, but at the same time, ANW is one of those that have enjoyed and absorbed & engaged with a lot of what The Outward Mind aims to be about.
This book, I think, reconstructs a missing historical Gedankenkollectiv that offers many other gradations, graded ways in which the late Victorian era (I get more and more convinced this is so) has transmitted disparate and conflicting(even paradoxical) interests with developments from the physical sciences, mathematics etc or concerns with the naturalization of mental processes. Heidegger for me is a key philosopher and contemporary of ANW that somehow willingly obscures this Victorian background noise. He is closer to the Critical Idiom in his refusal to engage with these scientific pursuits, since he often openly disparaged technology and science. In a sense his own anti-scientific stance manages to produce a tabula rasa in regard to all these previously very rich cross-overs and intellectual climates that (according to Benjamin Morgan) characterized experimental or laboratory aesthetics in both Germany (since Helmholtz) and Great Britain (US and France and other places?!). Looking fwd to reading this book.

Benjamin Morgan Introduction sums up numerous such cases in order to show us that there was much more appetite from the 1850s on for this sort of hybrid preoccupations that seem to dwindle afterward or get lost with the two cultures split (arts vs sciences). This externalization of mind, this en-minding of matter, or the generalization of the feeling process across the vastness of a newly discovered universe is very similar to what Whitehead is keeping alive and reinforcing with new ardor. All these necessarily fresh additions have been osmotically traveling across the scientific membrane into art theory. One such example is the lecture “What Patterns Do to Us” by Scottish art theorist Clementina “Kit” Caroline Anstruther-Thomson (1857–1921).

2004 – Discognition: Fabulations and Fictions of Sentience by Steven Shaviro (book, 2016)

there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book

I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.

I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.

First here is a draft Intro to his 2016 book Discognition

Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one.
Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument.
What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm.
Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference.
The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.

In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless).
We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such.
He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath.
To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:

Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.