I’m in a rush as I have to get cooking for my dinner guests coming over tonight, but I thought I would draw attention to this post. Deontologist has written a post on my thesis that things like fictional entities exist. It appears that I’ve really irritated or provoked him with this thesis and discussion is getting to the point now where there are little jabs here and there, but perhaps it can still go somewhere. Where I, being the ontological slut that I am, wish to remain indiscriminate as to what is and is not, advocating what Pete nicely refers to as a “generic ontology”, Pet wishes to draw a strong distinction between what he calls “pseudo-existence” and “existence”. Clearly the ontic principle forbids me from making this move. If a difference is made then, within the framework of my ontology, I am necessarily committed to the existence or being of that difference.
read on!
However, while I am committed to the thesis that all differences are equal with respect to being, I certainly am not committed to the thesis that all beings are equal in terms of their intensity, subsistence, and so on. All of this has gotten me thinking once again about Latour’s Irreductions, which can be found in the second half of The Pasteurization of France. It would be terrific to see others read this work as it is so rich and provocative in the execution of its thesis. Over at Grundledung, Tom has been writing some critical commentary on it here and here. I am certainly not in agreement with all that Latour claims here, but it is nonetheless, I believe, one of the great works of object-oriented ontology from the relationist camp.
At any rate, Deontologist’s or Pete’s criticisms have gotten me thinking once again about Latour’s criteria for the real. Latour writes:
1.1.5.1 The Real is not one thing among others but gradients of resistance.
1.1.5.2 There is no difference between the “real” and the “unreal”, the “real” and the “possible”, the “real” and the “imaginary.” Rather, there are all the differences experienced between those that resist for long and those that do not, those that resist courageously and those that do not, those that know how to ally or isolate themselves and those that do not.
1.1.5.3 No force can, as it is oftenn put, “know reality,” other than through the difference it creates in resisting others.
Now, there are important differences here between my own position and Latour’s, but I am nonetheless sympathetic to his claims. For me the criteria of existence lies in difference. Even if an entity does not produce a difference on another entity, so long as it produces differences (in an empty void say), I hold that it exists or is. In this regard, I cannot follow Latour in treating resistance as the criteria for reality, as whether or not an entity shares a relation to another entity is irrelevant to whether it is within the framework of my ontology. For Latour, by contrast, entities are completely exhausted in the differences they produce on other entities. Latour, along with Whitehead (under one reading anyway) and perhaps Deleuze, falls in the relationist camp of object-oriented ontology. Latour’s entities are, like Peirce’s pragmatic principle, the sum of effects they produce on other entities.
Nonetheless, I do think Latour’s principle of resistance is useful within the framework of the discussion I’ve been having with Pete. Rather than distinguishing physical entities and fictional entities along the lines of existence and pseudo-existence, we can instead talk about the gradients of resistance these entities exercise. Like a cloud or a morning mist, fictional entities present a very low degree of resistance with respect to another entity. By contrast, a rock produces a very high degree of resistance. An important caveat here is that this sorting has a lot to do with scales and speeds. Water presents a very high gradient of resistance to an object falling from on high. Skin presents a strong gradient of resistance to a dull pencil point, but to the microscopic mite it is a labyrinth of caverns easily navigated and traversed. A fiction has a very low gradient of resistance in terms of how easily it can be manipulated or how plastic it is, but a symbolic institution and a myth have very high gradients of resistance, replicating themselves all throughout the world and a group of people. Rather than drawing an arbitrary ontological distinction between pseudo-existence and existence that creates all sorts of endless problems, the notion of gradients of existence allows for a generic ontology that is nonetheless able to make important distinctions among differences ontologically rather than epistemically. It also allows us to see how things like fictions, myths, and signs contribute to assemblages and the organization of assemblages. Anyway, I’m off to cook.
Larval Subjects . 
August 29, 2009 at 12:52 am
An ontological slut indeed. But what’s worse than your ontological promiscuity, in my view, is the fact that you refuse to use an epistemological prophylactic. No wonder, then, that you’re riddled with STDs (= sophistically transmitted dogmas) ;-)
August 29, 2009 at 2:54 am
Interesting post and blog, I just ended up here by chance, luckly.
I completelly disagree with the existing of a pseudo-existing thing. That is bullshit, I knoiw that an ontology has more information than the meaning of things, it also has real facts, inference rules, relation among stuff, but you can consider that meaning is also in it so among the tons of theories about that subject I like:
1. Constructivism: We try to make sense of the world by making use of constructs, which are perceptual categories that we use when evaluating things.
2. Framing: A frame is the combination of beliefs, values, attitudes, mental models, and so on which we use to perceive a situation. We effectively look through this frame in the way we would look through tinted spectacles. The frame significantly effects how we infer meaning and hence understand the situation.
You can check several others at
http://singyourownlullaby.blogspot.com/2009/07/meaning-theories.html
August 29, 2009 at 5:57 am
great post.
a similar notion came across today at the train stop: considering the aggregate track that is walked upon, the seats that are sat upon, and the ‘difference’ that a late train creates upon those physical realities as opposed to an on-time train – in terms of use, perception, and situatedness. yet, in turn, the ‘difference’ of a late train can be affected by the later states bearing positive or negative resistance.
so, leading to a flux (es ta malista) or a compression?
August 29, 2009 at 7:13 am
I hope my jabs are seen as more playful than anything. It is all meant in good spirit. I do have a lot of respect for you and OOO, because you are unabashed about doing metaphysics, and asking tough metaphysical questions, about mereology, essence, relations, and so on. I just happen to have certain substantive disagreements (methodological and otherwise). I do hope this can continue. I am certainly benefitting from ‘sparring’ as it were. But if you tire of it, I entirely understand.
Also, I wouldn’t call you an ontological slut, per se. I thought you might prefer the term ‘ontological liberal’ to my ‘ontological conservative’, given the other democratically slanted terminology you are deploying.
Thinking of this in terms of ‘resistance’ is a really good way of looking at it. My point about what distinguishes pseudo-entities is that they don’t offer the kind of ‘constraint’ upon our thought and talk about them that real entities do. This could equally be thought of in terms of ‘resistance’.
An interesting metaphor would be that thinking about any object is like pulling upon a rope attached to it. The object exerts a resistance on the other end. I the case of pseudo-objects, we sometimes feel resistance, we just don’t realise that we’re not pulling on an object, but that there’s another guy on the other side pulling back, or even that we’re part of an interconnected network of ropes that people are tugging on from all directions, without anything in the middle.
Now, the pulling itself, what generates the pseudo-resistance, is perfectly real, and what it consists in is _independent_ of us in the properly formal sense, even if it is _composed_ of us in an ontological sense (a different form of dependence). We can potentially give a description about how it is that the discussions about ‘Harry Potter’ function, and there might even be interesting new entities required to describe it properly, but ‘Harry Potter’ himself isn’t part of it, even though he’s what all the actors are aiming at.
August 29, 2009 at 9:38 am
I’ll have to read Latour to get a better picture of your overall thrust here (currently waiting for ‘We Have Never Been Modern To Arrive), but I’d like to point something (at risk of butting in) out about your’s and deontologist’s (pretty fascinating!) debate.
Your point seems to be that as Harry Potter makes a difference he should be treated as a really existing, albeit a fictional, object. But, for Deontologist, he has only pseudo-existence. Now, I think the impasse here obviously has to do with the presuppositions in play – ones which neither party are about to give up any time soon! Deontologist has his own concept of pre-ontological understanding as normativity whilst your criterion for what exists has to do with whatever makes a difference. The divide here is deeper than just the status of fictional entities.
Well as you both probably know all this I just wish to point out that for progress to be made one or both of you would have to do substantial damage to your current outlooks. It would probably be most productive to discuss separately each of your reasons for getting to where you have in ontology.
A historical aside: the status of fictional entities always seems to get people intellectually riled, just check out Russell on Meinong in ‘On Denoting’!
August 29, 2009 at 11:50 pm
“…in natural sciences, being and not-being are empirically found to contrapose through a unique, sharp difference, which is easy to grasp though hard to formulate.
“This unique, sharp difference is not a difference of distinctions but one in antepredicative enactment, e.g. in the brute fact of precisely such and such a finite existentiality being, or, instead, not being.
Each one of our dead loved persons is, or is not – just as every living finite existentiality is, or is not and, thus, life is a big surprise.
Yet this lack of degrees of being makes an unusual discovery in Pythagoric-Parmenidean-Platonic ambiences; if at all happening there, it is usually an amazing discovery for the incumbent.
Therefore the fundamental deformation consists in presenting “being” as a predication, consequently presenting everything as the result of a set of distinctions, or distinctions held as the principle of everything – thus cloaking what “to be” or “not to be” means.
In that view, an ultimate formula makes reality to be, and, when considering a hundred dollar bill at the bottom of ones’ pocket, what exists there does not differ from a c-note exhaustively well crafted in imagination, since actuality, whether extramental or intramental, is always deemed an ungraspable, intangible addition, thus superfluous or, at most, a negligible contingency.
That is the classical example, on the “exhaustivity” of whose imaginary crafting we should return.
Nonetheless, somewhat down in the chain of these descriptive misrepresentations, the circumstance of having presented “being” as a predication yields another, well-known distortion of reality, namely the pretense that relations enjoy ontic consistency independently of their relata (“relata” are the things that a relation bring into interrelatedness). It is a classical philosophical doctrine, ironically self-entitled “realism” in the misconception that reality is indeed so….(Mario Crcco, Palindrome.
Predication is not sufficient to enact actuality.
Another way of looking at being and ‘existence’ is by way of Deely’s discussion of the question “When a child dies, in what sense is the child’s parent a parent?…(in ‘Basics of Semiotics). This question concerns the ontological status of ‘relations.’ Sometimes ‘physical’ (extr amental) sometimes only existing in awareness ‘objective’, sometimes both…
Just to complicate things Angels of course were considered to be extra-mental. Now of course no-one would consider angelic beings to exist indep of awareness.
In fact the terms objective and subjective have flipped – subjective being used to be that which existed indep of thought. And Objective was what was known..
And then there are those things like tectonics that drift from fictional to physical. There is a difference in their ‘actuality.’
August 29, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I rather want to embrace the “ontological slut” appellation. The slut is indiscriminate, which is one of the virtues of OOO.
Yet, sluttiness also implies slovenliness, which isn’t right either. Omnivorousness, perhaps, so we have another O-word, although that’s far too viandesque, a problem given our kindred in animal studies.
Ontological Harlotism, maybe, or Ontological Flooziness. Still not quite right, but anyway.
August 30, 2009 at 4:47 pm
“A fiction has a very low gradient of resistance in terms of how easily it can be manipulated or how plastic it is, but a symbolic institution and a myth have very high gradients of resistance, replicating themselves all throughout the world and a group of people.” I feel that the form of expression here instills problems. By “gradient,” I assume you/Latour are using the image of a mathematical derivative. Such math representations depend upon abstract and idealized representation of variables: in short they see themselves as non-things representing the essence of the things they represent while they themselves eschew their ontic character. To use them — from where? how? according to what standard? By what fulcrum? — as the metric for thingness seems to map the ontic back into its representation and make a self-satisfied fiction the goal of becoming. Indeed, this has been much of what the West has done, but it seems at odds with some of your desiderata.
August 30, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Existential sluts:
Been browsing Etienne Gilson’s ‘Being and some Philosophers.’ A dense historical study by a devout Thomist, but with some nice turns of phrase:
‘In Kant’s own words: “By whatever and by however many predicates I may think a thing (even in completely determining it) nothing is really added to it, I add that the thing exists.” In short actual existence cannot be represented by, nor in, a concept.’
‘Let us call this remarkable character of conceptual knowledge “existential neutrality.” The fact that our concepts are existentially neutral has exercised a deep and continuous influence on the development of philosophy….
‘From the fact that existence is not includable in our concepts, it immed follows that, to the the full extent that it is made up of concepts, philosophical speculation itself is existentially neutral. It will therefore remain identically the same whether its concepts exist or not. The relation of a thus understood philosophy to reality will be practically the same as that of the mental multiplication by ten of our bank account to the amount of cash which we can actually draw from the bank.’ (Gilson, Being and some Philosophers, p.4).
As you may well know G. Bateson gives the example not doing something which makes a difference e.g. not returning your tax form alerts the tax office. Not doing something is still doing something…
August 31, 2009 at 12:10 am
Gilson might very well have come up with the most perfect title for a philosophy book ever conceived. I’m quite fond of his work, actually.
August 31, 2009 at 8:28 am
Yes, Gilson was obviously a v. serious fellow but suffered from what Deely calls ‘cyclopean thomism.’ He was only interested in the ‘really real’ substance…
He never accepted that John of St Thomas (John Poinsot) could have initiated a semiotic that transcends idealism or realism. What comes ‘first’ in phil is not this or that ‘actual’ thing but the being of experience which is like deleuze’s and avicenna’s sense/being – univocal. It it from this that the distinctions mind-dep, mind-indep arise.
I am thinking that what we would need to be careful about is the ‘objects’ that we think exist without humans or other existentialities – the possum outside or the mouse inside.
“Human understanding must account first of all and in the final analysis for the objectively real, not just for the physically real, and not just for what the prejudices of a given time label as ‘real.’
‘Reality’ is not the physically given, is the semiosic total of which physical being forms a part. The Mississipi River physically is not the boundary between Iowa and Illinois, but it is so objectively [as known].
Ronald Reagan physically is not President of the United States, but he is so objectively.” (Deely, ‘Semiotic as Framework and Directionn, in Frontiers in Semiotics, 1986.
‘Unmindful entities are not integral: the wholeness of such and such a kilogram of sugar or – to use Heidegger’s example – the wholeness of the Earth’s Moon, eventuate only in their observers’ mental representations, or in a integrative level of nature (the fields) where the Moon and the sugar no longer keep a particularity.
Exception are the discrete increments in field excitation modes (“elementary particles”) that, independently of the physicists’ multiple mental representations purported to allude to them, occur as wholes with extramental intactness. (Mario Crocco, Palindrome).
We talk about (parliament of things) mountains or rocks or rivers and many other ‘things’ – are we so sure that they exist apart from our distinctions? Where does the mountain begin – rocks are the exposed crust of the earth’s surface – but even then they are are ontologically one. When is the earth’s ‘surface’ no longer the surface.
In the concl to What is Phil? D@G invoke Ruyer’s ‘absolute forms’ (like the brain for Ruyer) which are not aggregates (a la leibniz?).
Wouldn’t an OOO have to acknowledge the distinction between aggregates (a sand dune or cloud) and an existentiality – that stingray over there – or Aristotle studying the ray?
September 2, 2009 at 5:20 pm
>I am thinking that what we would need to be
>careful about is the ‘objects’ that we think
>exist without humans or other
>existentialities – the possum outside or the
>mouse inside.
This is precisely the point I’ve been trying to make elsewhere (which is also partly why I’m still rather perplexed at the desire to place OOO in opposition to “correlationism” except perhaps as a stylistic device.) It seems to me nearly all the versions of ontology being presented here depend heavily on either a subject or a community of subjects — I like the idea of a “gradient of resistance” because it explicitly invokes the idea of Being having some role to play, but this doesn’t change the observer-dependence of the definition of “object”. There is always a dependence on observer to define the object, even if the object may exist in some sense independently of any single subject.
It doesn’t seem to me that most modern “correlationists” would actually disagree with any of that?
September 2, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Mitsu,
I kinda feel that this discussion has exhausted itself and made all the points that it’s capable of making. First, OOO is critical of correlationist approaches in that they tend to focus too heavily on the subject-object relation, restricting inquiry to questions of how subjects perceive objects to the detriment of the role that other objects play in various constellations or assemblages both in our own social world and in the natural world. As a result of this obsessive focus on how subjects perceive/create objects and thereby have no access to the true being of objects. As I argued in my post on the Alethetics of Rhetoric, ways of talking about the world conceal to the same degree that they reveal. If we’re focused on the relation of subjects to objects, we’re ignoring all the dynamics, for example, of ecosystems and how they function. Similarly, if we’re placing all our emphasis on how humans create norms and political institutions, we end up ignoring the role that the factory and the birth control pill played in shifting collective attitudes about the place of women in society from the period between WWII to the 60s. Correlationism becomes a hindrance in analyzing these sorts of phenomena.
Second, you have repeatedly argued that being is nothing like we experience it, treating being as some entangled whole that subjects then carve up into “objects”. I believe I have already shown that this position, while certainly popular, is incoherent and inconsistent because it treats subjects as an exception to its own principle. But subjects are themselves unified objects. Why should we exempt them from your ontological principle such that the subject is the agency by which all other objects are carved up? Moreover, you seem to continuously suggest that the world described by quantum mechanics is “true reality” whereas everything else is a human creation. This is an odd thesis. Why should the quantum world be the real world and objects at different levels of scale such as planets and stars be illusions carved out by humans.
Third, not all relations are relations between a subject and an object, yet correlationism implicitly argues that all talk of objects must include a reference to the human or to subjects. In addition to humans relating to objects there are objects that relate to objects without the intervention of humans. The lonely rock on the top of a mountain that has never been witnessed by any human interacts just fine with other rocks without the intervention of humans.
Fourth, the endless point that observers play a role in the differences that an object manifests to the observer reveals its hot air and overstatement when we compare it to other relationships. I find it unlikely that you would claim that all iron must be a correlate of oxygen because the presence of oxygen causes iron to oxidize or rust. When oxygen enters into a relationship with iron a difference is indeed produced. But it would be an odd logical leap that would lead us to the conclusion that there is no reality or nature of iron independent of oxygen. The correlationist is claiming the equivalent thesis with their remarks about observer dependence. Additionally, it is inaccurate to speak of observer dependence in physics. It is not a subject that is selecting quantum states or treating a particle as a position or wave. It is an interaction between the instruments and the quantum beings, whatever they might be. That is, it is itself a relation among objects.
Finally, if you’re going to engage in discussion you should at least represent the person you’re talking to accurately. When I evoked the idea of “gradients of resistence” I nowhere made reference to observers. The thesis about gradients of resistance is a causal thesis, not a thesis about observers. The earth presents very little resistance to the neutrino, just as a window presents very little resistance to photons of light. Neutrinos and photons pass right through these things. As a result, there is very little in the way of gradients of resistance. By contrast, a windy plain presents a very high gradient of resistance for a growing tree, such that the tree grows in a bent and gnarled way, taking the path of least resistance, and effectively becoming “petrified wind”. However, over and above an of these concrete points, the correlationist position is simply uninteresting. It has been the dominant philosophical position in every major branch of philosophy for the last two hundred years. It pervades every discussion of epistemology, social and political thought, ontology, and ethics. It is the spontaneous common sense of both philosophy and our culture as a whole. It is a tradition and line of inquiry that has exhausted its possibilities and that has done all that it is capable of doing. At this point it is important to retain the most valuable insights of this tradition, just as Kant retained the most valuable insights of the British empiricists and the rationalists, but it is time to move on and pose new questions, develop new concepts, and deal with new issues.
September 2, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Okay, it may be that we will be unable to further discuss this subject, but I do want to say that it seems to me the main difficulty is not that we’ve “exhausted” the discussion, but that you haven’t understood what I am saying in full, perhaps because I’ve been insufficiently clear. I’ve already addressed many of the points you make above, though you haven’t responded to that, and much of what you say about my position is not, in fact, what I actually have been saying at all.
But I’ll make one more effort here, to see if it’s possible to make some progress.
Regarding your first point, I’ve already agreed with the general idea that there’s something to be gained from looking at the ecosystem perspective. So we are in agreement there. Where we disagree is how one ought to bring that perspective into play in philosophical discourse.
On your second point, I am not saying that Being is nothing like we experience it; I’m simply saying there’s no reason to assume that the ontological categories we create in fact correlate to categories “out there” when one removes the operation of the subject. Of course I believe there’s some relationship between the whole system (subject, object, observation) and the world, but I don’t think it is reasonable to call this a correlation between the object of our discourse and a “real” object “out there”.
But more importantly I’d like to respond to this: “I believe I have already shown that this position, while certainly popular, is incoherent and inconsistent because it treats subjects as an exception to its own principle.” This is simply not correct — I am not, in fact, treating subjects in this way, and I replied to this point in an earlier comment of mine. My point of view is neither incoherent nor inconsistent here. The view I have is that the subject is NOT a “unified object”, and in fact it is not possible to separate out the subject from the act of observation and the object, except in approximate terms. In other words, I am not taking up the view that the *human* subject is primary, but that information processing loops in general involve carving up reality in some way or other. I don’t privilege the human subject per se. If you think I’m exempting the subject from this picture then I’m not being sufficiently clear in presenting my point of view.
>you seem to continuously suggest that the
>world described by quantum mechanics is
>“true reality” whereas everything else is
>a human creation
I’m not sure where you get this idea! I absolutely do not believe this, it would be an entirely silly notion that would contradict everything I’ve been saying. Quantum mechanics is merely one theory or picture of the world among many, quite obviously. I merely bring in quantum mechanics as an example to illustrate how strange the world can be — far more strange than I believe you realize (see below).
>not all relations are relations between
>a subject and an object
Of course, which again comes back to the first point, where I was saying I agree with you. However, this observation isn’t in contradiction to what I’ve been arguing.
>it is inaccurate to speak of observer
>dependence in physics. It is not a subject
>that is selecting quantum states or
>treating a particle as a position or wave.
>It is an interaction between the
>instruments and the quantum beings,
>whatever they might be. That is, it
>is itself a relation among objects.
This is not correct; I’m not sure how else to put it. There are quite a few interpretations of quantum mechanics (including two of the most dominant, the Everett Interpretation and the Copenhagen Interpretation) in which your statement is simply false. It is one of the strangest things about quantum mechanics that some of the most straightforward interpretations in fact DO involve the observer or subject very crucially. In those two interpretations the subject holds a special place, and it is not simply a matter of interaction between objects (such as instruments and particles). Why this might be is a very hard problem in the interpretation of physics which has not been solved completely, although there have been attempts to solve it I believe none of them are yet complete.
>gradients of resistance is a causal thesis
Yes, I know, of course. Again, you’re misinterpreting my remarks, perhaps because I was insufficiently clear.
September 2, 2009 at 11:57 pm
I’ll just say one more thing, though I’m not sure if this will help: it seems to me in some of the interchange we’ve been having (and I actually have really found much of what you say very cogent and to the point, except for your last comment, above) you have been trying to identify my position with a “correlationist” view (at least a view with which you’re familiar), but my view is, as I’ve said before, quite different from the “correlationist” view as you have characterized it, and it includes ideas which you haven’t touched upon in your remarks. I’ve raised several points which you haven’t addressed at all; in particular my idea of what a “subject” is is quite different from the admittedly incoherent notion of some sort of transcendental or pure subject (which I agree is incoherent, but that’s not my position at all). I do hope we are able to continue the conversation because I think you’re quite an interesting thinker, but perhaps there are limits to discourse.
September 3, 2009 at 12:36 am
I suppose one thing I might add is to try to explain where I’m coming from on a higher level. The basic idea I have is that philosophy is about thinking about what would be true for all possible worlds, or at least all possible worlds that might reasonably be said to correlate with our human experience. It’s possible, therefore, that the classical picture of the world, with rocks being rocks, and mountains being mountains, etc., is in fact the way the “real world” is structured (setting aside QM for the moment). For example, suppose we were creatures living inside a giant computer simulation; one could imagine such creatures would exist in that simulation and any number of possible sets of laws of physics could exist, and so forth, and these creatures may never be able to determine that they are in fact in such a simulation (unless the computer were to have some sort of breakdown or glitches).
However, it is also quite possible that the world as described by quantum mechanics is closer to the “real” world, and furthermore it’s possible that the world has an even more radical structure, where space, time, physical objects, and so on, are all dependent on information processing loops and have no other “objective” reality.
We can’t know for sure which of these worlds is “our” world.
The question is, what is plausible? How can philosophy help us to think about our ideas about the world?
If you start to talk about objects as though they “correspond” to things in the real world without the operation of a subject — that might turn out to be reasonable. It might be right. But, it’s also possible that this view is wrong, that in fact objects are quite different from our idea about them, and they depend on the topology of information processing loops. Again: it’s important to distinguish between an information processing loop and a subject — I do not believe there is a “thing” called a “subject” that “perceives” and carves up reality. I think it’s more sensible to talk of information loops which in some sense carve up reality, and these loops can crisscross. This is actually a very different picture.
In all possible worlds that contain some degree of plausibility (i.e., it’s not just a solipsistic dream), information loops it seems to me would be likely to be required. I think of information loops of some kind or another, therefore, to be likely be necessary (in the sense that Kant thought space and time were necessary for consciousness — I think space and time could be said to be natural corrolaries of information loops).
The reason I resist your ontology is just that it would tend to privilege certain models of the world and make other quite possible models far less obvious. In other words, your ontology would suggest that the world has to be structured in a particular way, where there’s some degree of correspondence between your ontology and the real world, independent of subjects. I am saying that might be true but it might not, and I prefer, when thinking about philosophy, to restrict myself to ideas which are likely to be true for all (reasonable) possible worlds.
September 3, 2009 at 12:52 am
Mitsu,
Yes, I’m aware that you do not advocate the existence of a transcendental subject. Nonetheless, it is a logical requirement of your position and in stark contradiction to your claims about how the world gets informationally processed. Additionally, your view of the subject is not in stark contrast to the correlationist position. Kant, for example, distinguishes between the transcendental unity of apperception and the empirical subject or that subject as we experience himself. He is quite clear that in relation to ourselves we have no privileged knowledge. Your thesis is a variant of this two hundred year old thesis. Part of the problem in this discussion is that you’re arguing with an opponent that you have created in your own mind, rather than my actual position. In short, like Don Quixote, you are tilting at windmills and in a rather rude manner purporting to inform me of something that I am not already aware of. The saving grace here is that your behavior performatively enacts your own claims about information processing, as you appear to have a very difficult time accurately representing the positions to which you claim to be responding to. Thus, for example, you write:
Since you have written this in response to me, I assume you are suggesting that I advocate this thesis. Never have I argued such a thesis and nowhere have I suggested that anything I’m talking about when I evoke the title of realism has anything to do with a correspondence between our categories and a world out there. That is the position of representational realism, which I have taken great pains to both debunk and distance myself from. I even referenced you to my post entitled “Re-Cicrulating Reference”. You claimed that you read it, but given the fact that you responded with two lengthy posts within ten minutes claiming to have read both “Re-Circulating Reference” and “The Alethetics of Rhetoric”, both of which are themselves lengthy posts, and given the content of your subsequent remarks, I am highly skeptical as to whether you read either post. If you had read these posts you wouldn’t be making these arguments as you would see that nothing in my position advocates what you claim to be responding to.
First point: My realist thesis is not an epistemological thesis, but an ontological thesis. You perpetually elide this difference, treating these issues as issues of knowledge and representation, whereas I am not making a claim about representation and knowledge. My thesis is a thesis about what is, not what we can know. We can make the ontological claim that to be is to produce differences, without knowing anything about the entities presenting these differences or being able to mirror them like an object in a mirror.
Second point: Had you read the Re-Circulating Reference thesis, you would be aware that I do not advocate a correspondence theory of truth and knowledge. Yet a correspondence theory of truth and knowledge is what you’re arguing against. This is a bit like asking the Prime Minister of Japan why he chose to send American troops to Iraq. The Prime Minister would look at you rather quizzically and wonder why you have addressed such a question to him or why you are criticizing him for decisions that he had no role in making. Nowhere have I argued the thesis that knowledge represents objects as they are in themselves and I have ontological not epistemological reasons for this. At any rate, since you appear to need the Cliff Notes, the Re-Circulating Reference post is a post about how information takes place, the operations by which the object is transformed in the process of inquiry, and therefore about the manner in which it is changed. It carefully goes through a series of steps among a group of investigators and how they organize and transform the phenomenon they’re working with to produce their knowledge. There is no thesis about a “glassy essence” reflecting the world but a whole series of mediations that transform stimuli into information within a network.
Third Point: If I do not advocate the correspondence theory of truth or knowledge, then this is because as a correlary of the ontic principle, I advance the principle of translation. In our “discussion”, I have cited this principle on a number of occasions, yet oddly you seem to gloss over it or miss it whenever I do. The principle of translation states that there is no transportation of a difference without a translation of that difference. In short, when an entity makes a difference on another entity, the second entity transforms the content of that difference that it is receiving. The plant, for example, translates photons of sunlight into sugars. It does not “grasp” sunlight as sunlight but makes sunlight into something different. Now, if you took the trouble to think through this thesis rather than continuing to ramble about observer-dependence, you would see that this thesis covers everything you’re claiming about observer-dependence in ontological terms. That is, if I find your rants about observer dependence uninteresting and far from being any sort of revelation, then this is because my ontology already has this thesis built into it from the very outset. The crucial difference here is that where you see this process of translation as something unique to the subject-object relation, I treat it as a general phenomenon covering relations between any objects, regardless of whether humans are involved. Thus I am compelled to say, tell me something I don’t already know.
Fourth point: You talk about our ontological categories as opposed to the being of beings in the world. Although you clearly do not realize it, this is yet another example of your assumptions about the nature of the subject and its relation to the world that I have already criticized. You seem to believe that there is some world for humans called the “in here” or interiority that is somehow supposed to match up with the “out there”. Yet “our” ontological categories are not simply a product of our making. To the same degree that humans translate the world they receive in being perturbed by it, humans are translated by the world they interact with such that we cannot talk about things coming strictly from us. We are always already situated within being and there can be no strict distinction between the humanly fabricated and the world. Just as the qualities of a grape are not simply a result of its DNA but are a product of how it translates the differences and synthesizes the specific soil the grape is planted in, the weather conditions for that growing season, the other plants growing in that region, and the insects, light, and air conditions, categories are not simply a product of human minds or of culture, but are the result of very complicated and intricate networks that extend well beyond the human such that we cannot talk of something coming simply from the human. The entire opposition you purport to draw between subject and object here breaks down and is already based on a highly abstract and crude intellectual schema.
Now you can continue to tell me that I’ve simply misinterpreted you, that I haven’t understood, etc., all the while telling me what I’m already aware of, or you can take the mental leap of seeing that the position I am outlining here differs from the epistemological rut of representational realism, that I’m not particularly concerned with the issue of whether or not our minds mirror objects as they are in themselves insofar as translation is already a generalized feature of all inter-object relations in my ontology, and that as far as I’m concerned the epistemological question is resolved simply by us poor humans being able to consistently provoke certain differences in the objects we interact with regardless of whether the objects we interact with in any way resemble the way we experience them or our theories depict them. Yes, I’ve read Kuhn, Feyerabend, and other similar philosophers of science that talk about theory ladenness and paradigms, etc. Yes, yes, yes. That all goes without saying, yet oddly you keep saying these things. You wonder why I refer to this position as a realism rather than an anti-realism or a correlationism? Because again, I take difference and translation to be generalizable features of objects regardless of whether humans are involved and therefore see no particular reason to talk about debates that have already been settled for decades within philosophy, the social sciences, and the physical sciences.
September 3, 2009 at 12:58 am
Hangs head and sighs in response to your latest post. Yes Mitsu, I’m familiar with all these points. You do realize that the way you’re behaving here is the equivalent of explaining relativity theory and the basics of quantum mechanics to a physicist that works at CERN. The points you are making are standard and familiar arguments in every undergraduate and graduate curriculum in philosophy. This is a deep lack of etiquette or a lack of awareness of your audience and surroundings. At any rate, for the fifteenth time, my claims are not in the epistemological register and are not claims made in defense of a representational realism. Let’s leave the discussion here as I’m quickly losing patience at being lectured to about trivial and well known things and being told I haven’t understood when I neither advocate the position you’re arguing against nor accept the anti-realism you’re defending. In short, sometimes a critique is not a failure to understand but a genuine disagreement.
September 3, 2009 at 1:16 am
>Nonetheless, it is a logical requirement of your position and in
>stark contradiction to your claims about how the world gets informationally
>processed.
But this isn’t true at all. Again, one can pose a simple thought experiment in which the ground of Being is just a computer simulation of creatures, as I mentioned before. These simulated creatures could interact with their simulated world and generate all sorts of represenations of that simulated world. These representations could be said, in an approximate sense, to be the operation of them as “subjects” carving up their simulated world, but the subjects I would say are spread out in space and time and dependent on the whole set of information loops in the simulation for their representational references to even make sense. All I am saying is the ontologies that arise in these simulated creatures’ “minds” would depend a great deal on the structure of the information loop flows, and the way they divided up their world would depend on that as well. At no point must I posit any sort of reified subject or transcendental subject.
>Had you read the Re-Circulating Reference thesis, you would be aware that
>I do not advocate a correspondence theory of truth and knowledge.
Yes, I know! That’s why I’ve been so puzzled by some of your responses to my remarks. I understood you to be arguing against a correspondence theory. However, later, you’re saying that when I say that ontological categories depend on subjects or communities of subjects, I am saying something that contradicts your own views, and you talk about things like rocks interacting with rocks on a mountainside as an example. But for that example to actually work, it seems to me you have to advocate some sort of correspondence theory. As I said before, it’s quite possible that while there may be some sort of radical ground of Being that is outside the subject, it may well be that the rock doesn’t actually interact with the rock on the mountainside unless there are subjects or life forms of some kind to interact with them. (Again, I am not saying this is necessarily the case but it is a possible physical theory about the world).
>The principle of translation states that there is no transportation of a difference
>without a translation of that difference. In short, when an entity makes
>a difference on another entity, the second entity transforms the content of tha
>difference that it is receiving. The plant, for example, translates photons of
>sunlight into sugars. It does not “grasp” sunlight as sunlight but
>makes sunlight into something different. Now, if you took the trouble
>to think through this thesis rather than continuing to ramble about observer-dependence,
>you would see that this thesis covers everything you’re claiming about observer-dependence
>in ontological terms.
Of course, I understand this is your view. The problem I have is with your assumption that one can think of this in terms of objects translating differences emitted by other objects. While I believe this may be said to be approximately true, I don’t believe it can generally be said to be strictly the case. What I am saying is that a possible world includes the possibility that objects cannot be said to strictly exist at all except in relation to semi-closed information loops.
>You seem to believe that there is some world for humans called the “in here” or
>interiority that is somehow supposed to match up with the “out there”.
This is not true; I’m simply speaking loosely because that’s the nature of language. What I really believe is that the representations are features of the entire holistic set of information processing loops and patterns, including the part of the world one might call “the observer” and the part of the world one might call “the observed” (but again I don’t believe one can strictly make this distinction).
>not a failure to understand but a
>genuine disagreement
I apologize if I’m going over elementary points with you; I really have no idea what ideas are obvious to you and what aren’t, as philosophy is not my main field. I’m trying to understand why it is you’re responding to some of my posts with what appear to be non-sequiturs; so I’m simply trying various possibilities and addressing them one at a time.
For example, I had assumed until recently that you weren’t advocating a naive realism; yet some of your objections to my posts (as noted above) seem to only make sense if you are concerned about correspondence in some sense. I realize now that the central problem isn’t correspondence but rather the notion of *object* which I would argue requires a certain commitment to a subset of possible models of the world. There are models, as I said before, where objects (at least as we understand them: plants, people, rocks) really are dependent on the information loops (as implied by Everett and Copenhagen).
September 3, 2009 at 1:29 am
Mitsu,
Absolutely not. We need know nothing about what is going on for the rock or how it is translating the differences of another rock to make the rather simple claim that if there is an interaction there is a translation. The interaction of our own bodies with the world about it is ground enough for this generalization. I would recommend that you say what you mean if language is an issue. You might as well drop your talk of “observers”, which generally generates, both at the unconscious level of the person using the term and in the listener, a whole host of subject-centered and humanistic connotations. Moreover, you seemed to miss the point of my initial argument about the contradiction inherent in your position. You rhetorically had asked “how do we know there are objects at all in the world and that observers don’t just ‘cut them out’ of some fluid fabric or chora?” I pointed out that in your scheme there is at least one object in the world, namely the holistic information processing loop that does the cutting of everything else within this fabric of being. Where there is at least one, there is no longer any reason to conclude that being itself is some sort of holistic fabric, but rather granting this minimal instance is ground enough for granting other instances of a nonhuman sort.
September 3, 2009 at 1:32 am
Just to finally clarify from a physics perspective: when I say there are possible models of the world in which rocks are dependent on information loops, I mean: without the topology of information loops, what you might have in “reality” could be a superposition of every position of every particle in the universe in every possible location and interaction. I.e., no rock there in any sense. And it’s possible that when we “look at the mountain” in the act of that looking we’re in some sense creating the mountain, the rocks, the history of all the rocks interacting with other rocks, etc., back in time (again, I’m speaking loosely as though there were a subject observing this, but in reality I mean a confluence of complex information feedback loops, without positing any sort of pointlike singular subject).
September 3, 2009 at 1:37 am
>I pointed out that in your scheme there is
>at least one object in the world, namely
>the holistic information processing loop
>that does the cutting of everything else
>within this fabric of being.
Yes, we are in agreement! I am NOT asserting that it makes no sense to presume there is some structure to the universe, to the ground of being. Of course I believe it does make sense to posit this, and as I said before one can even speculate about its structure (spin lattices, etc.) So I am absolutely NOT denying the possibility of speculation about non-human structures, physics, etc.
I am really only saying that all conventional objects (rocks, bodies, etc.) may well be strictly independent on some sort of information processing loop of some kind (which some have called subject dependence). It doesn’t seem to me that what you’ve written elsewhere would contradict this possibility.
September 3, 2009 at 1:38 am
Sorry I meant to say may be strictly dependent on some sort of information processing loop. I don’t deny that your general picture of transforms is very evocative and covers a lot of ground, just that the notion of “object” (at least when talking about conventional objects) may be more perception-dependent than I think you might assume.
September 3, 2009 at 2:05 am
Finally, in your zeal to talk about information processing or observers as they relate to the world, you seem to miss a very basic pragmatic point about how this focus affects concrete inquiry. Allow me to present an analogy to illustrate the point. Suppose you are a football coach and all you ever talk about with your players is defense. Another coach comes along and points out that while defense is important, there is much more to the game of football. The first coach, in a bit of angry bluster, filled, as Lewis Carroll would say, with frumiosity, responds “why are you ignoring defense! Don’t you see that defense is important?” The second coach looks at the first coach quizzically, wondering if he heard him right, and later remembers this conversation after the first coach has lost every game of the season. The problem with the first coach is not that he is wrong about the importance of defense in the game of football, but that he has centered all discussion around defense to the detriment of everything else. This is the central problem with anti-realism and correlationism. In centering everything around the information-processing/world relation, it insures that inquiry will be focused on all those contributions of the information processing. It ends up ignoring all those nonhuman actors or agents that play a significant contribution to why various things become organized in the way that they do.
Returning to my earlier example of the factory during WWII, the birth control pill, and shifts in how gender relations came to be organized in the sixties, the first point to note is that neither the pill, nor the factory are human agents. They are nonhuman actors in a complex assemblage. To be sure, both the factory and the pill are made by humans, however they are not simple vehicles of human intentions and aims. For example, the builders of the factory have to grapple with all sorts of nonhuman environmental conditions and materials in the construction of that factory. These nonhuman factors contribute just as much to the design the final factory takes on as the intentions and plans of humans. If you have done genuine laboratory work in physics– and not simply repeated experiments for a class –then you are familiar with the role that engineering problems play in the experiment and the production of the differences the scientists are interested in. It is never simply a question of theories in the minds of physicists, of information processing, concepts, or human categories. There is all sorts of engineering that takes place that plays a crucial role and that cannot be reduced to those theories, concepts, categories, or information process. Don’t forget here the allegory of the two coaches. I am not claiming that the theories, information processing, concepts, or human categories are irrelevant. I am claiming that are one factor among others.
The question at hand is that of why the feminist movement erupted during the sixties. Let us imagine, to amuse ourselves, that Twin Mitsu the correlationist in a parallel universe were to tackle this question. What sort of answer would Twin-Mitsu-the-Correlationist give us? Twin-Mitsu-the-Correlationist would tell us a story about how information-processing systems impose certain categories and roles on human bodies, assigning them certain places within society and that these information processing-structures had changed. No doubt Twin-Mitsu would give us all sorts of interesting anecdotes to illustrate us of his thesis and show us that this monumental social change in how women thought about themselves and how society thought about the place of women was a result in a shift in holistic information-processing systems. He would not be entirely wrong. But ultimately his explanation would be a failure because it was based on a tautology. It would say something to the effect that “information-processing changed because information-processing changed.” It would be an elaborate tautology, full of all sorts of intermediary qualifications and bells and whistles, but at the end of the day it would still be a tautology.
Along comes Twin-Levi the onticologist. He thinks he has a better explanation, that both integrates the information-processing thesis and gives a mechanism to account for why that shift took place. First he notes that during WWII men were drafted to go off to war in the Pacific and Europe. Twin-Levi then notes that in order for war to be waged, fatigues are needed, bullets, tanks, bombs, guns, etc., etc., etc.. In addition to this he notes that these things must be produced. The problem is that all of the men who ordinarily worked in the factories are away at war. Only the women are left. So it is the women who do the production.
The first point to note, before proceeding, is that the factory is not designed for the purpose of emancipating women. It is designed for the purpose of making guns, tanks, bombs, and planes. The second point to note, before proceeding, is that if we remain focused on information processing or observer world relations, we will very likely miss this point because we will be focused on how humans conceive things, not how certain things afforded other possibilities in an aleatory fashion that was never intended.
In entering the factory, the women now glimpsed a new possibility for themselves and for the organization of society. They did not have to be homemakers, teachers, or secretaries, but could be workers. Moreover, they were now capable, no required, to maintain their own household finances and make purchasing decisions. A new subjectivity begins to emerge in relation to nonhuman actors (the factory). However, Twin-Levi’s story is not yet complete. All of this took place during the 30s and the 40s, yet the feminist movement unfolds in the 60s. Why this delayed result?
The men come home from war, beset by war trauma, crippled in many instances, suffering from alcoholism and drug abuse in many instances as a result of what they’ve seen. The men and women have lived in two different temporalities. The women have lived in a different time, the time of the factory, where they are now workers that are sovereigns over the household. The men who left for war at a young age have carried the pre-war period in their minds like a turtle carries its shell, still thinking in terms of women’s work versus men’s work, homemakers versus breadwinners. The men return home and kick the women out of the factories, forcing them to return home to care for the hearth. However, as often happens when men and women get together critterly love takes place and young critters come along. About fifty percent of these young critters are girls. They witness the frustration of their mothers and the discontent of their home life. Lo and behold, when do we begin to see the women’s movement begin in earnest? About twenty years later when these children of “the greatest generation” are reaching maturity and adulthood. The daughters said “hell no, it’s not going to be that way for us, mom showed us that there’s another way”, and I suspect the boys and girls alike witnessed a lot of discontent in the family struggle as a ripple of the war and shifting labor relations.
Additionally a new nonhuman actor has emerged on the scene: the birth control pill. Now, when my mother first entered the workforce her first boss was highly resistant to hiring her because “you’re just going to find some man, get pregnant, and want leave, special hours or take off together. Why waste such a great job on you?” He actually required her to take the pill in front of him every day so that he could insure that she wasn’t going to take all that investment of time and money in training her away from a “more well deserving man”. Nonetheless, the pill changed things significantly. Now women had reproductive control of their bodies, and this played a significant role in assisting women in both controlling their own destiny and debunking the masculinist argument that men are more deserving of certain jobs than women because men don’t get pregnant and run off to take care of kids.
Now, note the difference between Twin-Levi’s story and Twin-Mitsu’s story. Twin-Levi’s story does not reject the claims about information processing, but rather than simply presenting the relation is one of an information-processor regarding the world according to its own categories, structures, patterns, and so on, Twin-Levi’s story includes a variety of human and nonhuman actors in an assemblage that generates the new social structure. It is a story that includes factories, wars, bombs, household finances, spending power, sons and daughters, war traumas, birth control pills, the factories that produced the pills, the research leading to the pill, the distribution of the pill, narratives about the place of men and women, social categories, water coolers where young women are forced to take the pill in front of their bosses, and so on. This is not simply a question of good ecological analysis, but goes straight to the heart of OOO and its particular approach to the world. What OOO objects to above all is the manner in which all of this becomes invisible under the highly simplistic observer-observed correlate and the exclusive focus on that relation. Where the anti-realist focuses almost exclusively on this correlate such that it can only say that such a social change took place and not why or how, OOO advocates a complex assemblage or network of nonhuman and human actors in a collective where agency cannot be attributed to any one of these factors.
September 3, 2009 at 2:09 am
As a speculative realist I’m actually inclined to accept the actuality of possible worlds. I can’t prove it, of course, but insofar as OOO is ontologically promiscuous, it’s position is the more entities in the pluriverse, the better. As for rocks, I’m not committed to the thesis that rocks are anything like we experience them. All I need is some agency producing rock-like differences as to whether the differences this entity– call it a Blooble –produces in anything else is like the Blooble itself, is entirely irrelevant to the ontological point. The sugars produced by the plant in photosynthesis are nothing like the sunlight the plant uses to produce these sugars. This is simply trivially true about every object in the pluriverse.
September 3, 2009 at 2:37 am
I completely agree (and have from the beginning) with your point vis a vis ecologies. I’ve often argued from this point of view. A great example is the washing machine. My wife once worked on a project involving the history of the washing machine, and I was surprised to discover that, while it had been invented in the late 19th Century, it didn’t actually get into widespread use until the 40’s or so. Prior to the washing machine, it was literally a near full time job simply washing clothes. Typically, of course, it was the wife who, unless the family were rich enough to have servants, would do the laundry.
During the war, of course, many women went into the workforce and the washing machine became in use to a much greater degree. After men came back from the war, and into the 50’s, the pattern of women staying at home persisted for quite a while. But there was no longer a compelling reason for one parent to always stay at home. It took a whole generation, however, of using the washing machine before people started to go — why is it that wives have to stay at home again?
I recall seeing a little promo film made in the 50’s with a husband calling his wife on a videophone asking her what’s for dinner. The wife says “roast beef” and pushes a button, a la the Jetsons. No one who made the film stopped to think — if all the wife has to do is push a button, why does she have to stay at home?
So of course I totally agree with your point there, as a stylistic reason to talk about non-human agency, as you put it.
I have no problem, in other words, talking about non-human relations, non-human causes, relations, etc.
However, I just don’t see why you want to deny that *dividing the world* into a particular set of ontological categories, objects, etc., should be thought to be independent of human beings. To say that the division of the world into parts is dependent on information feedback loops isn’t to claim that there are no forces or relations that can be said to happen outside of the subject. These are two entirely different claims, it seems to me, which can be separated.
September 3, 2009 at 2:40 am
Sorry, again, I meant to type “dependent” instead of “independent”, above, of course…
September 3, 2009 at 2:41 am
very interesting conversation, you two.
i think the coach analogy would be more clear if the coach mentioned was a defensive coach, who practices with his squad on a field separate from the offensive and who retires to the bathroom during offensive action during a game, but, sometimes after his return from the bathroom, his team has scored a certain amount of points, and he does not know how or why.
does the idea of the process of translation act as the necessary filter for us, humans, as object(s) – much as it would for any other object – with which, being accepted as possibly occurring, the problem of information processing isn’t as significant?
September 3, 2009 at 2:46 am
(I hasten to add that by “dividing the world” I don’t literally mean that our representations cut the real world into pieces… just speaking colloquially. I think your idea of transforms makes plenty of sense, here. I am merely objecting to the word “object” as a primary term in your language. Perhaps this is just a matter of semantics.)
September 3, 2009 at 3:14 am
Dillon,
Humans are one object among others so the points about translation apply for humans every bit as much as they apply to any other object. Actually, my imagined coach would be a head coach. In other words, the whole point is that he is a horribly one-sided coach that focuses on one dimension of the game to the detriment of all others.
September 3, 2009 at 3:27 am
does every possible individual translation occur after information is processed, or does the translation itself make possible information processing?
September 3, 2009 at 3:42 am
Dillon,
I draw a distinction between stimulus and information. In my view, there’s no such thing as pre-existent information. Rather, every instance of information is system-specific. Consequently, systems constitute their own information by translating the stimulus or difference of another object into an informational structure. I’m not sure what you’re asking about when you refer to every possible individual translation. It seems to me that no object translates the stimulus in all the informative possibilities open to it. However, this question will depend on the types of systems we’re talking about. There are objects that have very limited degrees of freedom where translation is concerned. Others seem to have the ability to entertain a variety of different translations and then choose among them.
September 3, 2009 at 3:44 am
The point I’ve been trying to make is that if you do not accept the divisibility of subject and object, then you have to say that the information processing loops could include, potentially, in some sense the entire universe, could be influenced by forces far beyond what people ordinarily call the “subject”, and thus it makes perfect sense to talk about agency beyond the subject in such a view.
I mean, even in the simple case, the computer simulated world with computer simulated beings: the ontologies for the beings within that computer simulation, it seems to me, could be said to be radically dependent on the information processing loops without claiming that there are no forces outside of the supposed “subjects” that can act on these subjects.
In the end it comes down to a stylistic problem again: thinking about objects as though they are independent entities stylistically makes it harder for us to see the possibility that we can radically restructure our paradigms and see not only differently structured objects but different objects entirely, with different apparent relations and forces, and so forth. It seems to me it’s important to keep that in view even while we acknowledge forces beyond the subjective in history, politics, the environment, and so forth.
September 3, 2009 at 4:02 am
hello–thank you
rereading my last post after reading your last reply triggered a memory of the socratic recollection, and the issue of translation – specifically, translating a language and the necessity of some prior knowledge, or information; but, in the relevant case, does the system supply that that information, continuously? or, should the possibility of prior knowledge and the existence of a possible comparison, to create a judgment, be considered?
September 3, 2009 at 5:08 am
Dillon,
The answer to that question is going to depend on the sort of system under examination. The idea is as follows (I’m drawing this from autopoietic theory and systems theory): Systems are selectively sensitive to their world. There are, for example, events that take place in the world that a particular object is completely indifferent to and that slide across it like water off the back of a duck. For example, humans cannot see infrared light and therefore light in this spectrum does not perturb the human perceptual system. In the case of those elements that a system is open to, the perturbation selects a system state that then constitutes the perturbation or stimulus as information or a difference that makes a difference. The manner in which stimuli shift from being mere stimuli to being information will depend on the internal organization of the system. Thus, for example, the media system is organized around a particular code that has all sorts of subprograms. Kennedy dies. That’s a perturbation or stimuli for the media system. The death of Kennedy now selects a state within the media system. All sorts of reports ensue talking about his past accomplishments, his relationship to other Kennedy’s, the impact his death will have on healthcare reform, and so on. This stimuli is transformed into a thousand different bits of information going all the way to media stories about how the death of Kennedy has been reported. The death of Kennedy rather than, say, my friend John, has the capacity to become information in the media system because of who he is, the history of the Kennedy’s in American politics, current events, and so on. My friend John, sadly, is just another Joe. He might register in a very limited way in the media system when he dies, but only as a very brief byline in the obituaries.
Compare this to your evening cooking. First, you are led to cook because of a stimuli in your body that is then processed into information in the form “I’m hungry”. At this point a subprogram comes into play. As you chop garlic to make your pasta, the rest of the world falls away. For example, you probably don’t notice the flowers that sit upon your counter-top. In other words, a number of potential stimuli are “filtered out” while others are brought into relief.
The nature of the system being perturbed makes a big difference in the possibilities presiding over information. Rocks, for example, can only be perturbed in very limited ways. Moreover, past system states disappear after they’ve been completed. Rocks don’t learn. No matter how much I shout at the rock it never seems to learn how to use the toilet. By contrast, when we talk about animals, social systems, and cognitive systems, these systems appear to retain past system states in such a way that they have the capacity to modify their own endo-structure, thereby generating surprising responses to stimuli.
September 5, 2009 at 6:57 am
Just a small note. Maturana argues that the notion of ‘information’ transfer or coding do not correspond to any partic process taking place in a cell as an autopoietic system:
Maturana, 1983, ‘On the misuse of the notion of information in biology: comments on “all things are full of gods”‘ (Journal of Social and biological structures 6: 155-8).
Also his biology of cognition is based on the assumption that all living systems are ‘cognitive’ in maintaining their autopoiesis. Not all living systems generate surprising responses – they do not escape the limits of turing machines.
See Mario Crocco, ‘Palindrome’ on the web for more on this fascinating topic!
September 5, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Paul,
Could you expand on what you’re getting at here. I’m not sure I follow or understand.
September 6, 2009 at 11:14 am
Yes, the note is to small! I wasn’t even sure about posting this comment – still getting used to the commenting style. It’s probably not that important…
I am interested in this topic and certainly don’t want to waste time but I thought I saw a certain slipping between systems theory and autopoiesis in the last comment.
One can take concepts and use them differently but Maturana specifically rejects the concept of information in autopoiesis.
For Maturana and Varela, notions such as ‘universal grammar’ or ‘signals’ or information exist in the descriptive realm of an observer, but do not refer to actual processes taking place in the interaction between an organism and its medium. They argue that signs in the domain of living organisms presuppose an emitter, receiver, (a message ‘transmitted’ between them), and interpretation, (coding decoding); thus the notion of a sign or message exists in a systems exterior, descriptive realm in language. That is to say, it is this that needs to be explained. Who determines the accuracy of the message? Of course an observer is necessary for any description, but notions pertaining to the descriptive realm itself such as signs, coding, information, are not valid when imported into the phenomenal domain of the structural dynamics of the nervous system.
To recapitulate: for Maturana the term information, (the transmission of a message from point A to point B), even in the strictly technical sense of coding, emission, reception, decoding, (that is: divested of meaning or signification), does not apply in the biology of living systems because the initial conditions (A) and the so called end point (B) don’t exist as fixed entities but are continually subjected to structural modification. These notions exist in a descriptive realm in language but only to describe fixed systems, e.g. telecommunications.
Furthermore, the metaphorical sense of information (as meaning) is also descriptive and requires an evaluation made by an observer in language from a point of view exterior to the system, (interacting organisms), in question. Maturana argues that these notions pressuppose an organisational and structural complimentarity, if not identity between systems, that would make the stability of the signal connoted by the term information, (or signal), possible.
In engineered systems such as in telecommunications and computer design the structure/organisation complimentarity is designed by a human agent. In biological systems this, of course, is not the case. Any structure/organisation complimentarity that exists between organisms would arise in evolution through a history of consensual interactions, (epigenesis). Information theories as well as signifier theories in linguistic science are descriptive of certain domains but never explanatory. They do not provide a generative mechanism for the observed regularities of behaviour between organisms.
In biological systems such a situation is the result of phylogenic and ontogenic histories of interactions in which the selective mutual triggering of structural changes with the conservation of the mutual structural coupling (mutual adaptation) of the involved organisms (or systems) is the mechanism for its origin. Informational descriptions do not grasp this.
For Maturana, language must arise as a result of something that does not require denotation. Denotation requires consensus and for him it is the process of structural coupling which generates a consensual domain of interactions. He argues that language is connotative, orienting the orientee within his cognitive domain, (i.e. domain of adequate or effective behaviour) . Thus, there is no transmission of information between organisms except in a metadomain as an a posteriori commentary made by an observer.
Maturana’s own ontology of observing is an extreme ‘radical constructivism.’ He is now involved with private ‘cultural biology’ school in Santiago http://www.matriztica.cl/
For M. in language, worlds are brought forth with others, (objects arise in our cognitive domain), through recursive coordinations of actions which obscure the acts they coordinate. Reality arises in language as an explanation of the distinction between self and non-self in the praxis of living of the observer.
‘Nature, the world, society, science, religion, the physical space, atoms, molecules, trees, … , indeed all things are cognitive entities, explanations of the praxis or happening of living of the observer … . Every thing is human responsibility’ (Maturana, ‘Ontology of Observing,’ 1990, p.51).
Well that’s far too much already. Excuse me! I wanted to say something about ‘animals’ and ‘surprising responses’ but maybe that should wait.
The issue here is whether a distinction is made between empsyched and non-empsyched animals. But I’ve already gone on far too long for a ‘comment.’
Just browsing Illich’s ‘The Rivers North of the Future: the testament of Ivan Illich.’ He came to dislike Bateson/systems theory.
‘I am not a system…nor fully absorbable by that which can be analyzed by systems analysis. Systems analysis would explain love, charity, as a feedback….
One might question whether systems theory has lost the ‘individual finite existentiality.’?